Evolution and the Levels of Lineage

这个生物学哲学项目致力于对血统的概念进行概念分析，血统大致是祖先的一条体面的路线，以及相关的概念。该项目专注于以下问题：什么是谱系，它们是如何嵌套的，以及这种等级组织是如何通过进化建立起来的。该项目涉及面广，影响深远。例如，在研究肠道微生物如何影响果蝇的交配偏好，以及影响我们视为选择单位的内容时，血统之间的相互作用是至关重要的；在考虑到北极熊和棕熊群体之间的杂交情况下，我们如何设想北极熊和棕熊何时会出现分歧；或者在我们操纵线粒体血统如何从一代人传给下一代的过程中，我们如何看待父母的血统。该项目的一个特别令人印象深刻的特点是它的跨学科重点。该项目包括定于2017年春季举行的跨学科研讨会--不和谐时代的物种。研讨会将通过外联活动直接与公众接触，包括将在盐湖城市中心公共图书馆举行的关于21世纪分类学的生物人文公共讲座系列活动。PI还将与犹他州美术馆和犹他州自然历史博物馆合作举办一场展览，展示艺术家与分类学家合作的作品，包括一场公开讲座。技术总结这项提案的中心目标是清楚地阐述一个“世系层次”的观点，描述该观点的核心承诺，并确定这些因素如何为研究人员提供信息并产生新的研究问题。生物谱系是按等级组织的，但由于各种进化的生物机制和过程，这些谱系的嵌套可能是“漏洞百出的”。检测这些不一致的模式为复杂的多层次进化解释提供了证据，并要求生物学家修改核心承诺(理论、概念、方法等)。世系视角的层次确定了生物学家在这些项目中利用的概念资源。它将扩展和巩固最近在微生物学、系统学、系统发生学、进化和种群遗传学等领域的工作。这个项目与最近的工作一致，要求采用历时方法，将生物学的核心器官视为进化的产物。例如，与其将生物层次作为背景假设，研究人员反而会问，为什么是这个层次，甚至根本就是一个层次？回答这些问题提供了进一步的资源和研究问题。

General Audience Summary This philosophy of biology project engages in conceptual analysis of the notion of a lineage, which is roughly a line of decent from ancestors, and related notions. The project focuses on questions of what lineages are, how they are nested, and how this hierarchical organization was built through evolution. The scope of the project is broad and the consequences far-reaching. How lineages interact across levels is centrally important, for example, in studying how gut microbes influence mate preference in fruit flies and impact what we treat as units of selection; in how we conceive of when polar and brown bears diverged, given the hybridization between those groups; or in how we think about parental lineages as we manipulate how mitochondrial lineages are transmitted from one human generation to the next. A particularly impressive feature of the project is its interdisciplinary focus. The project includes an interdisciplinary workshop, Species in the Age of Discordance, scheduled for spring 2017. The workshop will directly engage the public through outreach events including a Biohumanities Public Lecture Series event on taxonomy in the 21st century, which will be held at the downtown Salt Lake City Public Library. The PI will also coordinate with the Utah Museum of Fine Arts and the Natural History Museum of Utah on an exhibit featuring the work of artists collaborating with taxonomists, including a public lecture.Technical Summary The central aims of this proposal are to articulate a "levels of lineage" perspective, describe the core commitments of that perspective, and identify how these inform researchers and generate novel research questions. Biological lineages are hierarchically organized, but nesting of those lineages may be "leaky" due to a variety of evolved biological mechanisms and processes. Detecting these patterns of discordance provide evidence for a sophisticated multilevel account of evolution, and require biologists to revise core commitments (theoretical, conceptual, methodological, etc.). The levels of lineage perspective identifies the conceptual resources biologists draw on in these projects. It will extend and consolidate recent work in microbiology, systematics, phylogenetics, and evolutionary and population genetics, among other fields. This project aligns with recent work in demanding a diachronic approach by treating the core apparatus of biology as products of evolution. For example, rather than treating the biological hierarchy as a background assumption, researchers are instead prompted to ask, why this hierarchy, or even one at all? Answering these questions provides further resources and research questions.