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The #ETI2023 workshop has ended ! A week-long whirlwind of ideas, discussions, debates and chalk. Thank you to everyone involved: participants, staff, funders. It was wonderful to see so many viewpoints contrast and resonate. Stay tuned for more ETIs news in the near future !

[Extended deadline] Thank you to all that registered to the #ETI2023 workshop ! We will review the submitted abstracts and contact you by March 10th. In the meantime, we are extending the registration until March 8th 2023 on

Do you want to take part in the latest discussions about how individuals emerge in the living world ? Last day to apply for the #ETI2023 Research Workshop on Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality ! #experimental #evolution #philosophy #theory #biology

Organized by @Hammerschmidt_K @pierrickbourrat @RaineyLab @geeklhem with support from @MPI_EvolBio @arc_gov_au @MQPhilosophy @Project_Telos.

Last week to register for the #ETI2023 Workshop on ! Come join @RenskeVroomans @jordivangestel @etienne_rajon @simon_vanvliet @KostChristian @EvolTheoArne @peterlconlin @philippehune @elkobadelko @C4COMPUTATION @RaineyLab @RichardWatson90

Take a deep dive in Evolutionary transitions in individuality along with a diverse community of experimentalists, philosophers and modellers !.We welcome you for a research workshop on 22-26 May 2023 @MPI_EvolBio .Abstract submission until 22nd Feb, 2023.

Tomorrow in the "Microbial communities as units of selection" session at #EcologyMetz2022 (14h30) I will be talking theoretical and statistical methods for community selection experiments. There will be data viz, adaptive dynamics, and Bayesian networks. Rejoice ! #sfegfoe22

Check out our symposium "Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality beyond #fitness-based approaches" at #PSA2022 @PhilSciAssoc (Nov 12, 9 am). I will argue that the emergence of new levels of organization are all about the closure of new life cycles ! .

Tomorrow at the Paradox of the Organism (Revisited) conference hosted by @PattenLab & @arvidagren, I will be discussing the Ecological Scaffolding scenario for Evolutionary Transition in Individuality. Excited to share what those cryptic doodles mean !

RT @wc_ratcliff: Hey folks, if you are interested in reading our new book on the evolution of multicellularity, but you don't have a spare….

RT @compadreDB: New blog post: Introducing MatPopMod, a Python package for working with matrix population models ht….

RT @wc_ratcliff: One of the sustained rays of light over the last two years has been editing a book on the evolution of multicellularity wi….

Matrix population models just got easier to handle. Announcing the release of the matpopmod #python library compute common (and less common) descriptors, run simulations, draw nice plots, explore thousands of models from @compadreDB ! #demography #biomath

Overall, times when the new collective context "breaks" the ancestral constraints could be good markers of evolutionary transitions ! Intrigued ? Read and run #openscience 7/7.

. This leads to interesting fast-slow #dynamics. We applied this to published models such as ratcheting stabilization of multicellularity (Libby et al. 2016, @SFI_elibby, @peterlconlin, @evokerr and @wc_ratcliff), ecological scaffolding (Black et al. 2020, @andblack) . 6/7

. but evolutionary tradeoffs are not all set in stone and rare mutations, change in the environment or population structure can sometimes overcome them ! This produces #patterns that are hard to make sense of when focusing on fitness decoupling. 5/7

Usually what people mean when they talk about "fitness decoupling" is that there is some kind of #tradeoff between traits that differentially influence fitness under different conditions (timescale, or environment). 4/7

However, in the long run, particles and collectives grow at the same rate (provided the population reach a steady state, for the fans of #LinearAlgebra out there, they all grow proportionally to the dominant eigenvalue of the population projection matrix). 3/7

An influential view in the study of #EvolutionaryTransitions in individuality (ETI) is the idea of "fitness decoupling" often associated with the puzzling (at least to me) idea that particles "relinquish" their fitness to the benefit of the collective. 2/7