The dialectical underpinnings of multilevel selection Evolution isn’t flat: new levels arise through conflict and then reshape the very dynamics that brought them into being

CFP: Dialectics and Life (Marxism & Sciences, Issue 10) Main topics: organism–environment coupling, critical 4E cognition, social metabolism, dialectical approaches to modeling. Abstracts due 1 June 2026 👉 www.dialecticalsystems.eu/events/cfp-d...

Extending the evolutionary synthesis isn’t enough Rasmus Haukedal's new book calls for a truly dialectical biology: from autopoiesis to sympoiesis, from efficient causes to enablement, and an innovative take on plasticity, canalisation & habit. dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

Enaction meets dialectics! New paper out on how sensorimotor agency scales up to social normativity link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Materiality isn’t a backdrop to cognition, but one of its central conditions The upcoming workshop “Habits, Tools, and Material Environments” examines how cognition is socially distributed, ecologically embedded, and enacted through material engagement dialecticalsystems.eu/events/works...

40 years after The Dialectical Biologist, Richard Lewontin’s legacy still challenges how we think about life A new report revisits his intertwining of philosophy, biology, and Marxism—and how organisms are subjects of their own evolution www.dialecticalsystems.eu/contribution...

Very nice upcoming workshop at the Center for Philosophical Psychology (University of Antwerp) on how radical embodiment unfolds in complex, “wild” real-world environments. www.dialecticalsystems.eu/events/works...

Marx as a philosophical biologist? Chris Shambaugh on young Marx's account of organismal agency, its relation to human life to the critique of capitalism. www.dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

➡️New article out⬅️ @leonardobich.bsky.social and @lauramenatti.bsky.social argue that health is not about balance or stability, but about adapting and transforming in response to changing circumstances — the capacity for adaptive change. link.springer.com/journal/13752

How did regulation and agency arise before genes? Shirt-Ediss et al. model evolving protocell ecologies with the Araudia platform—showing how simple metabolic systems can “learn” to adapt to changing environments dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

How does life emerge from nonlife? New special issue of the Royal Transactions brings together leading thinkers on the origins of life—where chemistry meets information, and evolution unfolds through the “adjacent possible.” dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

📖 New Book Out Alvaro Moreno & Juli Peretó explore the major transitions in biological agency—from origins of life to metazoans—showing how agency drives the evolution of biological complexity www.dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

Dialectical Biology Today: Legacies of Richard Lewontin A hybrid conference bringing together voices old and new to revisit how The Dialectical Biologist still resonates, and reinvigorates, contemporary biology www.dialecticalsystems.eu/events/diale...

Dialectics meets the enactive approach! Join us for Dialectics and the Embodied Mind 📍 Univ. of Luxembourg | Sept 22–23 dialecticalsystems.eu/events/inter...

Inspiring work by Denis Walsh on organism/ environment dialectic, along side @jonothingeb.bsky.social and Stuart Newman ! #ISHPSSB2025 is such a treat !

Since its beginnings, the enactive approach has shown how autonomy is scaffolded across biological, sensorimotor, and social dimensions. This new video interview with Ezequiel Di Paolo tells the story in an accessible way: youtube.com/watch?v=y4Dz...

Integrating dialectical insights into cognitive science has driven advances in the enactive approach. This new paper opens a dialogue between enaction and Marxism, highlighting labor as a form of an ecological and distributed cognition link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Today we celebrate the new edition of Varela’s Principles of Biological Autonomy (1979) from MIT Press, with a new critical apparatus by Ezequiel Di Paolo & Evan Thompson, reconnecting Varela's legacy in cognitive science to his theoretical biology dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

Embodied & enactive approaches aren’t just about individual cognition — they’re about society. A new Mind & Society special issue brings enactivism into conversation with ethics, social theory & political philosophy. www.dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

Really excited to read the reprint of Varela’s Biological Autonomy annotated by @evanthompson.bsky.social. I really want to offer a special topics course focusing on it in an upcoming semester.

Collin Lucken & Elmo Feiten use the enactive concept of participatory sense-making to ground public science engagement, showing how core ideas from embodied cognition can scale beyond motor coordination to illuminate social cognition in practice www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Henry Potter and @wiringthebrain.bsky.social challenge reductive views in neuroscience by introducing richer, temporally extended notions of causality and arguing to re-center cognition and the organism as genuine causal agents in behavior onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The audio recording of our fantastic event with Kevin J. Mitchell and Anil Seth, FREE AGENTS: Did Evolution Give Us Free Will?, is now up on our website and Youtube Channel. Go take a listen now! www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVr-... @wiringthebrain.bsky.social @anilseth.bsky.social

The media circus on the slightly modified wolf mixed with the nonsensical hype of de-extinction only highlights the need to greatly shift how we talk about genes and genetic "information" in popular discourse. Oyama's groundbreaking book and Lewontin's prescient forward should be a starting point.

Information and data will never deliver creativity — Life, information, and the search for meaning New piece over at @iai.tv In which I quote Colwyn Trevarthen and David Bowie. iai.tv/articles/inf...

𝗕𝗲𝘆𝗼𝗻𝗱 𝗺𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘀𝗺: 𝗲𝘅𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝗮𝘂𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝗻𝗲𝘂𝗿𝗼𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 Neuroscience & Philosophy Salon: Join our discussion with @wiringthebrain.bsky.social Apr 11 at noon EST USA time. Here's the paper to get the discussion going: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... Everyone welcome but register ->

Adaptivity is central to life, yet conceptually homeless. While adaptation is tied to selection, adaptivity is an ongoing organismal process—rooted in metabolism, not just evolutionary causation www.dialecticalsystems.eu/contribution...

Happy to share that our SI in Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society B was accepted 😎 Hybrid Agencies - Crossing Borders between Biological and Artificial Worlds Co-Edited with Shaun Gallagher and Takashi Ikegami We have a fantastic line up of contributions coming up soon !

Can natural selection shape the ability to evolve? New study shows bacteria evolving mutations that speed up adaptation—suggesting mutations are not purely random but can be biased toward adaptive outcomes www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

CFP: Towards Comparative Philosophy of Science (Journal for General Philosophy of Science) Call for papers on comparative philosophy of science is out,, ed;: Simon Lohse and Karim Bschir. Submissions until 31 March 2025. philevents.org/event/show/1...

Is teleology really obsolete? This special issue explores how goal-directedness remains crucial in biology, mind, and society—despite its exile from analytic philosophy. link.springer.com/article/10.1... #Philosophy #Teleology

A new study delves into Heidegger’s early critique of Hegel, analysing their divergent views on time and ontology. By examining their distinct conceptions of temporality, the work clarifies the essential differences between their philosophical systems. www.dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

This new paper examines the concept of closure of constraints as a modeling tool. This interpretation clarifies the scope and applicability of biological autonomy, addressing common criticisms regarding the over-liberality of the framework www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

New OA paper by Charbel El-Hani et al. explores how living beings are individuated as causal systems via biological autonomy, with closure of constraints as a distinctively biological causal regime that defines system boundaries. 🔗 taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-...

Free Will in an Indeterministic Universe ahc.leeds.ac.uk/philosophy/e... - really looking forward to visiting University of Leeds on Friday to give this talk! If you're in the area, come along! 😊

If you're interested in theory in biology, please consider applying for this EMBO|FEBS Lecture Course "Emergence & Evolution of Multi-Level Regulatory Systems", organized by @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy, @nrepina.bsky.social, and James DiFrisco. meetings.embo.org/event/25-mul... #philsci #evobio

Don't forget to submit your abstract for the European Philosophy of Science Association Conference #EPSA25. The CfP is closing this Friday, 31st Jan. philsci.eu/EPSA25/CfP

Reintroduction... I'm a neuroscientist interested in emotion-motivation-cognition interactions. Interested in conceptual/foundational issues. I also wrote a book for general audience readers called The Entangled Brain that is open access at MIT Press. mitpress.mit.edu/978026254460... #neuroscience

CFA: 1st International Conference on Anticipatory Systems & Rosennean Complexity 📅 May 22-23, 2025 📍 National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City 📝 Abstract Deadline: Feb 28, 2025 📢 Notification: Mar 10, 2025 🌐 anticipation.philcomp.org

And we draw on analogies with energy-based models to show how situations visually captured by Waddington's landscape can formally arise from such dynamical networks

📝 CFA: Prospects for the Science of Enaction Special issue of Adaptive Behavior Deadline: January 27th www.dialecticalsystems.eu/events/cfa-s...

New paper by @leonardobich.bsky.social and Bill Bechtel reappraising the original notion of homeostasis, as developed by Bernard and Cannon, beyond the restricted interpretation conveyed to us by cybernetics doi.org/10.1017/psa....

@leonardobich.bsky.social offers a fresh take on organizational accounts in theoretical biology, tracing their evolution from cybernetics & systems theory to autopoiesis and closure of constraints, with a groundbreaking view on regulation & biological control www.cambridge.org/core/books/b...

We are doing this today at 11.30AM at UNED. If you are in Madrid, you can join us! UNED, Edificio de Humanidades, Sala B blogs.uned.es/metis/semina...

Great paper by Yogi Jaeger, Denis Walsh et al. A sweeping overview of the complex adaptive systems approach to organisms, arguing why their behavior & evolution defy computable models, while bridging open research issues in biology, cognitive science & AI frontiersin.org/journals/psy...

New paper on the role of nutritin in Claude Bernard's biological philosophy Nutrition as an "interfield" object that bridges physiology, organic chemistry, and levels of inquiry—from cell to organism link.springer.com/article/10.1...

🚨 Call open for a postdoc position on ecosystem individuation. I interdisciplinary project uniting IHPST (CNRS/Paris 1), Centre Cavaillès (ENS), and the Universities of São Paulo & Bahia 📅 Deadline: Dec 4th www.dialecticalsystems.eu/events/postd...

My recent talk about #health #environment #evidence at the Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh is now available to watch on YouTube! Watch it here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yskb... 🌐 Or check it out on my website: lauramenatti.weebly.com/news/new-tal...

New special issue just published in Ratio: "Purpose in Biology: New Directions" #philbio onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14679329...

Check out the latest post by Mathilde Tahar discussing her newly published book! She explores how Bergson's concept of creative evolution connects to contemporary developments in evolutionary theory dialecticalsystems.eu/contribution...