Conceptual and modeling tools for non-paradigmatic evolutionary processes

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The principle of natural selection is standardly applied to distinct competing organisms, each of which is descended from one or more others. But these matters were not clear in the early evolution of life, or during the evolution of new levels of organisation, like multi-cellular organisms. They are also unclear when we look at the evolution of multi-species communities such as the human gut microbiome. There is a substantial philosophical literature on this problem, which sketches how ideas such as selection and heredity can be relaxed to apply more widely. This project seeks to develop these conceptual proposals, with the help of simple mathematical models, to the point where biologists could potentially test them experimentally.