The conference is titled: Understanding Life in a Changing Planet: 20+2 Years of Egenis, the Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences, and to be held at the Egenis Centre, University of Exeter from 17-19 April, 2024. Corey Bunce’s presentation (poster) is titled: Rethinking climate change adaptation by bringing Philosophy into dialogue with Social Sciences and Biology; Ludo Schoenmakers’ presentation (poster) is titled: Evolution at the Origins of Life

KLI Fellow Ludo Schoenmakers will give a talk at the conference Evolution at the Edges of Life: Origins, Artificial Systems, and the Conceptual Limits of Evolutionary Theory. This conference will be held at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study (IEA de Paris), from 22-23 April, 2024. Ludo’s talk is titled: Minimal Evolutionary Theory at the Origins of Life.

Barbara Fischer joined the KLI on the 1st of April as the Group Leader (Evolutionary Biology). She talks to Joyshree Chanam about her earlier time at the KLI as a post-doctoral fellow, and her current role at the institute.

Philipp Mitteroecker (University of Vienna, KLI), 2024-04-18 15:00 (CET). To join our colloquium please register with Zoom

The 5th Meeting of the Vienna Science Studies Laboratory was held yesterday afternoon in the cool ambience of Das Café in Vienna. The paper that was selected for this reading group’s discussion was Anderson, W., 2004. Natural histories of infectious disease: Ecological vision in twentieth-century biomedical science. Osiris, 19, pp.39-61.

We warmly welcome our new Postdoctoral Fellow Somya Mani to the KLI! Somya Mani is a theoretical biologist, and has studied evolutionary transitions in genetic, cellular and multicellular systems. She received her PhD from the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, India, where she studied the evolution of the eukaryotic cell through mathematical modeling. During her postdoctoral research at the Institute for Basic Science in South Korea, she began to build her research on developmental evolution, and also produced the first modeling framework for the study of de novo gene birth. In general, her work involves building mathematical models to capture evolution of biological systems using tools from physics and mathematics, particularly statistics and graph theory. (Click on title to continue...)

Guido Caniglia and Coleen Vogel win the GAIA Best Paper Award 2023 for their article “On being oriented. Strengthening transgressive orientations in transdisciplinary sustainability research through queer theory”. Abstract: “We move from a provocative analogy: that transdisciplinary sustainability researchers are to academia what queer people are to a heteronormative and sex/gender binary world. Both may experience disorientation and need to learn how to transgress established norms. Queer people and scholars have extensively dealt with (dis)orientation and celebrated transgression. We suggest that queer theory can help transdisciplinary sustainability researchers to raise questions that intensify the transgressive orientations of their work when contributing to just and equitable sustainability transformations.” (Click on title to continue...)

We are delighted to have KLI alumna Barbara Fischer join the KLI again, this time as Group Leader, Evolutionary Biology! Barbara is an evolutionary biologist and data scientist with a background in mathematics and theoretical biology. She studies phenotypic evolution using theoretical and empirical approaches. Her work centers on the classical problem of adaptation vs. constraint in evolution: Why are some traits easily adapted by evolution, while others are not, with particular focus on the evolution of birth in humans. Currently, Barbara is an Elise Richter fellow at the Unit of Theoretical Biology, Department of Evolutionary Biology of the University of Vienna, Austria. (Click on title to continue....)

Hans-Jörg RHEINBERGER (MPIWG, Berlin), 2024-04-09 15:00 (CET). To join our colloquium please register with Zoom

We warmly welcome our new Writing-up Fellow Franziska Reinhard to the KLI! Franziska is currently a PhD researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, University of Vienna. Her PhD project studies practices from origins-of-life research from a philosophy of science perspective, combining aspects of general philosophy science, philosophy of biology, and philosophy of the historical sciences. Franziska has completed a BA in Chemistry and Philosophy at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, and an MA in Logic and Philosophy of Science at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. (Click on title to continue...)

Laura MENATTI (KLI), 2024-04-04 15:00 (CET). To join our colloquium please register with Zoom

Isabella Sarto-Jackson discusses her book "The Making and Breaking of Minds" with Ricardo Lopes on The Dissenter, a popular YouTube channel. In her conversation with Ricardo, for the episode titled "Exploring the Influence of Social Interactions on the Human Mind," Isabella delves into various aspects of human psychology, environmental factors, niche construction, gene-culture coevolution, mechanisms, and limitations of neuroplasticity and more. (Click on title to read more!)

Jana SEMRAU (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (FAU) Erlangen-Nürnberg), 2024-03-25 15:00 (CET).

We are very happy to have our new Postdoctoral Fellow Olesya Bondareko at the KLI! Olesya has recently defended her PhD in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Her current research focuses on the integration between genomics and the social sciences including psychology, sociology, and social policy-oriented research. Olesya was born and grew up in Ukraine which continues to suffer from the Russian invasion. You can help Ukrainian medics save lives by donating to https://www.hospitallers.org.uk/ or https://www.leleka.care/. (Click on the title to know more about Olesya!)

What do authors of 'citation classics' feel about their papers? How did they come to write those famous papers and how did those papers affect their lives and careers? Are those findings still valid decades after their publication? Hari Sridhar's new website https://reflectionsonpaperspast.com features his interviews with authors of famous papers in Ecology, Evolution, Behaviour and Conservation, (154 interviews so far!) about back-stories of those papers and the authors' reflections on their impact, validity and relevance today, decades after their publication. (Click on title to read on!)

Save the dates!! Here's announcing the 2024 Spring-Summer Colloquium Series Our Spring-Summer colloquium series will feature our very own four post-docs of the 2022-2024 cohort – Laura Menatti, Hari Sridhar, Marina Knickel and Corey Bunce – along with talks by Brian McLoone (Department of Philosophy, Auburn University, USA), Jana Semrau (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany), Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany), Tudor Popescu (University of Padova, Italy), Juno Salazar Parreñas (Cornell University, USA), and Ievgeniia Ivanova (University of Stirling, UK). (Click on title to read more!!)

The Spring-Summer 2024 KLife Newsletter is here!! As always, there has been a flurry of activities at the KLI. We bring you news of successful collaborative efforts, new Fellows joining us, upcoming events to look forward to, and new publications. We hope you enjoy reading about these and more in this edition. (Click on the title to read more)

Guido Caniglia and Marina Knickel in the KLI team are excited to continue their work in the recently launched EU Horizon project PLUS Change. This project will develop strategies and decision-making processes to transform land use by prioritizing societal well-being, climate goals, and biodiversity conservation. (Click on title to read more)

Laura Menatti is invited to give a talk at the Institute for Practical Ethics, University of California San Diego, on the 14th of March. The talk is titled "Understanding the Current Health and Climate Crisis through the Concept of Salutogenesis" . For abstract and details, please read on.

The editors summarize issue 19(1)—which includes a thematic section on “Concepts of Agency”—out this month, with free reading links for articles.