Conceptual and modeling tools for non-paradigmatic evolutionary processes

自然选择原则被标准地应用于不同的竞争生物，每一个生物都是由一个或多个其他生物进化而来。但是这些问题在生命的早期进化中，或者在新的组织水平的进化中，比如多细胞生物，都不清楚。当我们观察多物种群落（如人类肠道微生物群）的进化时，它们也不清楚。关于这个问题有大量的哲学文献，其中概述了如何放宽选择和遗传等思想以更广泛地应用。这个项目试图在简单的数学模型的帮助下，发展这些概念性的建议，使生物学家能够在实验上对它们进行潜在的测试。

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.