Seminar: Forging new evolutionary individuals

A central puzzle in the evolution of individuality is the origin of heredity. Egalitarian transitions integrate formerly independent replicators into a higher-level individual, but this requires the collective to reproduce faithfully. Whether such heredity can evolve as a consequence of selection, rather than being its precondition, has lacked experimental investigation. I will begin with an introduction to major evolutionary transitions thinking. I will then draw attention to a central problem that haunts all transitions — namely, the origin of Darwinian properties — and put forward an unconventional solution. During the central part of the talk I will describe the results of an experiment in which we scaffolded Darwinian properties on separate replicators and observed the de novo evolution of a new higher-level replicator. Evolution of the new individual occurred hand-in-glove with the emergence of heredity. I will conclude by drawing attention to conceptual issues relevant to thinking about co-evolution between humans and AI.

Paul Rainey studied at the University of Canterbury and from 1989 to 2005 he was based in the UK, primarily at the University of Oxford. He returned to New Zealand in 2003 as Chair of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Auckland and, in 2007, became a founding professor at the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study. Since 2017, he has been Director and Scientific Member of the Department of Microbial Population Biology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany. Paul Rainey is also a Professor at ESPCI Paris and retains an adjunct professorial position at NZIAS. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, a Member of EMBO, and an Honorary Professor at Christian Albrechts University in Kiel.

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