World’s Largest Project to Expand Our Understanding of Evolution

Dr. Richard Watson, University of Southampton (United Kingdom)

An international multi-disciplinary team that includes University of Southampton professor Richard Watson is engaged in the world’s largest project focused on expanding the theory of evolution with new viewpoints on relationships between genes, organisms, and environment.

The grant, entitled “Putting the extended evolutionary synthesis to the test”, is one of the largest to ever be awarded to evolutionary research. It funds 22 inter-linked projects in total – including theoretical development and empirical experiments – and supports a wide range of additional activities that will promote interaction and collaboration between institutions.

It is oriented around extended evolutionary synthesis, a new way of thinking about evolutionary biology that runs parallel to traditional thinking. “The main difference from traditional perspectives is that the extended evolutionary synthesis includes a greater set of causes of evolution,” says project leader and University of St. Andrews professor Kevin Laland. “This shifts the burden of explanation for adaptation and diversification away from a one-sided focus on natural selection and towards the constructive processes of development.”

Watson will direct two initiatives to broaden the understanding of both evolutionary developmental biology and evolutionary ecology feedbacks using theoretical computer science tools. “In computer science, these feedbacks are well understood in the framework of learning systems,” Watson says. His recent research characterizes the formal evolution-learning connections that enable results to be transferred from computer science to expand the understanding of biological evolution. “This work suggests that these feedbacks are not just ‘a complication’ but change the capabilities of Darwinian evolution; specifically, evolution is smarter than we realized,” Watson says.  Read the report.