Dose dupla dos Seminários Novos e Velhos Saberes
Em colaboração com o Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ensino, Filosofia e História da Ciência, e do Projeto Inomep/Pronex, os Seminários Novos e Velhos Saberes, anunciam duas palestras para o dia 10 de abril.
Pela manhã, 10h00, teremos a palestra “The ecology of social evolution: empirical studies on social spiders and a general theoretical framework“, com Drª. Leticia Avilés, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canadá.
Resumo – The immense diversity of ecologies and life histories characteristic of group-living organisms has long challenged our ability to find a common explanation to the problem of sociality. Using social spiders as a case study, research in my lab has shown that group living and cooperation arise as a result of an interaction between intrinsic features of the organisms and the environments in which they live. In the case of the spiders, we show that the geographic distribution of social and subsocial species in the genus Anelosimus likely reflects an interaction between their dense tri-dimensional webs and gradients in insect size, predation, and precipitation that correlate with elevation and latitude. More generally, I use a simple theoretical framework and four commonly discussed scenarios for the evolution of sociality to show that group living and cooperation should arise when organisms with particular intrinsic characteristics face external opportunities or challenges that single individuals cannot meet. I argue that it is neither life history nor ecology alone, but an interaction of the two, that explains why some organisms live in groups and others do not.
Pela tarde, 14h00, segue-se a palestra de Dr. Alvaro Moreno,
Ways of Multicellularity: the emergence of collectively organized individuals
Resumo – In this talk I will analyze which are the organizational conditions underlying the emergence of multicelular (MC) organisms. More specifically, I shall propose a general theoretical scheme according to which a MC organism is an ensemble of cells that can effectively regulate its own development through collective (metacellular) mechanisms of control of cell differentiation and cell division processes. This theoretical result derives from the detailed study of the ontogenetic development of three very different MC systems and, in particular, of their corresponding cell-to-cell signaling networks. The case study supports that a specific type of functional integration among the cells of a MC ensemble (namely, a regulatory control system consisting in several inter-cellular mechanisms that modulate epigenesis and whose operation gets decoupled from the intra-cellular metabolic machinery), is required for it to qualify as a proper organism. I argue why a MC system exhibiting this type of functionally differentiated and integrated developmental organization becomes a self-determining collective entity and, therefore, should be considered as a second-order autonomous system.
Finally, I shall argue that the transition from unicellular systems to MC ones raises a conceptual challenge for understanding agency. We compare different examples of MC systems, from colonies to fully integrated organisms, showing apparent forms of collective agency and discuss whether each of these cases corresponds to a true form of MC agency. We shall distinguish between a ‘constitutive’ and an ‘interactive’ level of functional complexity, and analyze how they are related en each case. I will argue that true MC agency happens only when the integration between the constitutive processes leading to an integrated MC identity are functionally entangled with the interactive processes and that this causal entanglement is the result of the nature of the developmental organization, which implies that behavior and development have the same organizational basis.
