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Displaying entries 76 through 90 of 102 found.

Life's Corporeal Evolution Develops, Encodes and Organizes Itself: An Earthtwinian Genesis Synthesis

Delabays, Robin and Philippe Jacquod.. Route to Chaos and Unified Dynamical Framework of Multi-Species Ecosystems. arXiv:2503.16999.. One important result is that all observed population dynamics in multi-species ecosystems can be reproduced to a unified mathematical model. This current entry by University of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland, and University of Geneva system physicists is one more example of a scientific field such as theoretic environmental studies being able to reach a broad, cohesive veracity which can attribute its widely diverse phenomena to a ubiquitous, invariant source.

We investigate species-rich mathematical models of ecosystems. Here we emphasize the emergence of limit cycles due to the variability of interspecies interaction. which acquire a growing spectrum of frequencies. We find that consequent strange attractors maintain dynamical stability without species extinction. We give evidences that this route to chaos in ecosystems where predator-prey behavior dominates competition and mutualism. Overall, our work proposes a unifying framework, where a wide range of population dynamics emerge from a single model. (Abstract)

Moreno-Spiegelberg, Pablo, et al. How spatiotemporal dynamics can enhance ecosystem resilience.. PNAS. 122/11, 2025. P M-S and Damià Gomila, IFISC Campus Universitat de les Illes Balears, Spain and Max Rietkerk, Utrecht University, provide a latest quantification of how environmental stresses can spawn spontaneous advantageous responses and rearrangements. Novel, widespread understandings like this are then seen to provide guidance for effective mitigations.

In hard environmental conditions, vegetation self-organizes heterogeneous landscapes that increase ecosystem resilience. In this paper, we study plant species that accumulate toxins in the soil and generate complex spatiotemporal landscapes in traveling patterns where the toxin–plant interaction is globally reduced. Our results can predict regime shifts due to climate change and apply to a whole family of ecosystems with plant–soil interactions. (Significance)

Scesa, Paul, et al. Defensive polyketides produced by an abundant gastropod are candidate keystone molecules in estuarine ecology. Sciences Advances. 10/44, 2024. Fourteen bioecologists at the University of Utah, California State University, NIH, UC Davis and Occidental College including Patrick Krug proceed to identity a novel, deeper phase of ecosystem functional behaviors, akin to keystone organism species. See also A New, Chemical View of Ecosystems by Molly Herring in Quanta. (March 6, 2025) for an appreciation of this vital project. As a result, a wealth of new insights are being achieved to aid in our respect and maintenance.

Secondary metabolites often function as antipredator defenses, Herein, these “keystone molecules” are shown to affect community structure and ecosystem functions, but the broader effects of animal chemistry remain largely unexplored. We study polyketides biosynthesized by sea slugs in Northern Hemisphere estuaries. Such Alderene compounds appear to have unexpected cascading effects on processes ranging from bioturbation to reproduction of species which warrants greater attention by ecologists. (Excerpt)

Wiegand, Thorsten, et al. Latitudinal scaling of aggregation with abundance and coexistence in forests.. Nature. February 25, 2025. . Thirty-four ecologists mainly at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Leipzig and also in Sri Lanka, the USA, China and Thailand describe their latest bioregional studies which have a wider and deeper inclusion of whole scale arboreal phenomena such as animal seed dispersal and mycorrhizal associations.

The search for simple principles that underlie the spatial structure and dynamics of plant communities is a prime naturalist endeavor. Here we present a comprehensive analysis of 720 tree species and their consequences for species coexistence and find that species with low abundance tend to be more spatially aggregated with a latitudinal gradient that increases from tropical to temperate forests. Our approach opens up new avenues for the integration such observations and underscores the need to view spatial patterns at the neighbourhood scale along with multiple ecological processes.

Life’s Cerebral Cognizance Becomes More Complex, Smarter, Informed, Proactive, Self-Aware

, . Gattoni. Giacomo and Maria Antonietta Tosches. Constrained roads to complex brains. Science. 387/6735, 2025.. Science. 387/6735, 2025. Columbia University neuroscientists introduce at length three papers in this issue which provide the latest evidence for nature’s recurrent use of similar cerebral and cognitive structures and functions across Metazon species: Developmental origins and evolution of pallial cell types and structures in birds by Bastienne Zaremba, et al, Evolutionary convergence of sensory circuits in the pallium of amniotes by Eneritz Rueda-Alaña, et al and Enhancer-driven cell type comparison reveals similarities between the mammalian and bird pallium by Nikolai Hecker, et al. See also a science news review Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals by Yasemin Saplakoglu in Quanta (April 7, 2025) about these findings.

During life’s Earthly evolution, highly intelligent biological systems have emerged only a few times. Among vertebrates, mammals and birds can solve problems, use tools, and engage in elaborate social behaviors. These tasks involve the pallium, the brain region most implicated in cognition, which includes the neocortex in mammals. However, it is unclear whether complex brains evolved multiples times through similar or different mechanisms. In this issue, Zaremba et al, Hecker et al, and Rueda-Alaña et al) provide evidence for the convergent development and evolution of neurons and their connections in the bird and mammalian pallia. (Gattoni, Tosches)

Gattoni, Giacomo and Maria Tosches. Constrained roads to complex brains. Science. 387/6735, 2025. Columbia University neuroscientists introduce at length three papers in this issue which provide the latest evidence for nature’s recurrent use of similar cerebral and cognitive structures and functions across Metazon species: Developmental origins and evolution of pallial cell types and structures in birds by Bastienne Zaremba, et al, Evolutionary convergence of sensory circuits in the pallium of amniotes by Eneritz Rueda-Alaña, et al and Enhancer-driven cell type comparison reveals similarities between the mammalian and bird pallium by Nikolai Hecker, et al. See also a science news review Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals by Yasemin Saplakoglu in Quanta (April 7, 2025) of these findings.

During life’s Earthly evolution, highly intelligent biological systems have emerged only a few times. Among vertebrates, mammals and birds can solve problems, use tools, and engage in elaborate social behaviors. These tasks involve the pallium, the brain region most implicated in cognition, which includes the neocortex in mammals. However, it is unclear whether complex brains evolved multiples times through similar or different mechanisms. In this issue, Zaremba et al, Hecker et al, and Rueda-Alaña et al) provide evidence for the convergent development and evolution of neurons and their connections in the bird and mammalian pallia.

Bates, Timothy. Cognitive rationality is heritable and lies under general cognitive ability. Intelligence. 108/101895, 2025. In this Elsevier journal for cerebral capabilities, a senior Edinburgh psychologist seeks to clarify and sort various terminologies in this endeavor. See also Possible evidence for the Law of General Intelligence in honey bees in the 106/101856, 2024 issue. If one might take a Planatural PhiloSopher view, a long evolutionary emergent arrow of ever smarter, communal, knowledge becomes evident as it may just now reaches our Earthuman retrospective and potential self-realization.

ntelligence and rationality both predict optimal decision making. However, whether cognitive rationality (CR) and general cognitive ability (CA) are identical or reflect fundamentally distinct processes is still debated. Here, we report a twin study to distinguish the cognitive mechanisms involved in CR and CA.. Multivariate modelling of CA scales and CR indicated that CR was due to a latent g-factor, which itself was strongly heritable. We conclude that CR is not distinct from CA, but instead that the reflexive and reflective aspects of cognitive ability make CR a robust and efficient test of general cognitive ability. (Abstract)

One outcome of the integration of these concepts would be a wider understanding of the reflexive, contemplative, iterative, and agentic aspects of general cognitive ability, and the essential role these play in making intelligence the dynamic and cognitive engine which it is. Intelligence directly involves actively thinking through different possibilities, concept formation and debate among these possibilities as an intrinsic aspect of its function. (5)

Bettencourt, Luis, et al. Redefining Fitness: Evolution as a Dynamic Learning Process. arXiv:2503.09057. Into 2025, University of Chicago physicists and evolutionary biologists can add an array of further insights into how life’s boney and now brainy development can reveal its central, whole scale trajectory of advances via iterative stages of individual and communal accumulated knowledge.

Evolution is a process of optimal adaptation of biological populations to their living environments via the concept of fitness. Here, we show that this function by way of mapping population dynamics to Bayesian learning can provide a more suitable explanation. We show how probabilistic models of fitness can easily be construed and how their averages acquire meaning as information. The approach creates a bridge between population dynamics under selection, statistical learning theory, and emerging models of artificial intelligence. (Excerpt)

Peñaherrera-Aguirre, Mareo, et al. Possible evidence for the Law of General Intelligence in honeybees.. Intelligence. 106/101856, 2024. This mid 2020s entry by Animal and neurobiologists can now proceed to extend the General Cognitive Abilities measure from human psychology all the way back through life’s vectorial evolutionary development of sensory smarts to an early invertebrate domain. Looking forward, one might gain a sense of an ecosmic, participatory imperative to achieve its own self-description, witness and selection.

These findings by Finke, et al (Individual consistency in the learning abilities of honey bees, Animal Cognition, 2023) support hypotheses that GCA (general cognitive ability) influences covariation between cognitive measures in honeybees, and constitute the first formal demonstration of GCA in an invertebrate. It is argued that these GCA might be ubiquitous with respect to metazoans with organized nervous systems which have convergently evolved multiple times in independent phylogenies. These features are a key prediction of Christopher Chabris' “primordial” Law of General Intelligence (2014) and have now been identified in insect, avian, mammal, and fish taxa. (Abstract)

More broadly, a solid candidate taxon for exploring the possible existence of a discrete “primordial” GCA is the nematode and model organism Caenorhabditis elegans, which exhibits a minimally differentiated nervous system (a longitudinal nerve cord and ring, and both head and tail ganglia) and does possess a capacity for various forms of more primitive learning, (4)

Wikelski, Martin, et al. The Internet of Animals: Discovering the Collective Intelligence of Life on Earth.. Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2024. This unique volume by a special person makes the best case to date for an actual animal sensory, empathic, intelligent, communal repertoire across every species. As a way to study and prove this reality, his collegial group formed the International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space, or ICARUS, and this edition tells their story. Google the author, this team and the publisher for much more.

What do animals know that we don’t? How do elephants detect tsunamis before they happen? How do birds predict hurricanes? In The Internet of Animals, renowned scientist Martin Wikelski convincingly argues that animals possess a unique “sixth sense” that humans are only beginning to grasp. That’s what author Martin Wikelski and his team of scientists believe, and this book shares their story as they tag animals with tiny tracking devices, link their movements to The International Space Station, which then forms anetwork of information of animals communicating with each other and their environments.

Martin Wikelski is the director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. Previously, he was a research fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, assistant professor at the University of Illinois and associate professor at Princeton.

Miyagawa, Shigeru, et al. Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population 135 thousand years ago. Frontiers in Psychology.. March 11, 2025. In a newsworthy paper, MIT, University of São Paulo, Seikei University, Tokyo, American Museum of Natural History (Ian Tattersall), Institute for Comparative Genomics, NYC, University of Zurich, and University of Arizona archeolinguists report a more definitive timeline that is newly based on recovered ancient DNA genetic sequences at that time for the relative advent and spread of human languages.

Recent genome-level studies on the divergence of early Homo sapiens suggest that the population division within H. sapiens from the original stem occurred some 135 thousand years ago. While current evidence does not tell us exactly when language itself appeared, the genomic studies do allow a fairly accurate estimate of the time by which linguistic capacity must have been present in the modern human lineage. (Excerpt)

Dornbierer-Stuart, Joanna. The Origins of Language: An Introduction to Evolutionary Linguistics. Switzerland: Springer, 2024. A Birmingham City University, UK linguist provides an initial book-length study whose ten chapters proceed to gather and review many factors from ecologies to anatomical, social, gestural utterances and onto meaningful speech which trace and define our distinctive human articulations.

This book offers an introduction to the multidisciplinary subject of evolutionary linguistics which seeks to explain the biological origins of language and its subsequent occasion in humans. Some six million years ago, hominids in East Africa started to thrive in the drier environment of the East African Rift System. Influenced by a more complex social organisation, communication signals became diverse and dependent on memory and learning mechanisms makes language a biological, social, cultural and cognitive phenomenon all at once. The book uniquely introduces and covers this novel. insightful perspective. (Book)

This chapter looks at the various environmental conditions that led to language. It is concerned with geological timescales and changes in the physical environment that led to anatomical, physiological and neural adaptations in Homo. These, in turn, initiated an immense increase in cognitive capacities that favoured the development of language. The chapter starts with tectonics and climate and goes on to their effects on the body, vocal tract and brains of early humans. (How the Physical Environment Shaped Language)

Our Earthuman Ascent: A Major Evolutionary Transition in Twindividuality

Dautriche, Isabelle & Emmanuel Chemla.. Evidence for compositional abilities in one-year-old infants.. Communications Psychology. 3/37, 2025. Aix-Marseille University and École Normale Supérieure neuroresearchers reveal the presence of innate abilities one year olds to begin to achieve advanced linguistic skill. A precocious pedia sapiens seems to be foreordained to be able to read the world and compose literary discourses.

Compositionality is a means of constructing complex objects through the combination of simpler elements. Here, we propose that the underlying processes can often be reduced to a general mechanism of function application. Accordingly, we explore the origins of compositional language and at an earlier stage in the representations and thoughts in young infants. Infants correctly composed simple noun-verb sentences at 14 months, facial expressions with objects at 12 months, and mental physical transformations at 10 months. This offers evidence for function application, the essence of compositionality, in infancy, as emerging well before and the occasion of complex language.

Bryant, Katherine, et al. Connectivity profile and function of uniquely human cortical areas.. Journal of Neuroscience.. March 17, 2025. Eight neuroscientists posted at Oxford University, Université Aix-Marseille, Brain and Behavior Research Centre, Jülich, Germany, University of Nottingham, Radboud University, and Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf provide a sophisticated imaging analysis to discern just what cerebral qualities separate and distinguish our homo sapience. A main difference seems to concern the locales and degrees of neural network connectivities.

Determining the brain specializations unique to humans requires comparative anatomical information from other primates. Human (Homo sapiens) (m/f), chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) (f), and rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) (m/f) white matter atlases were used to describe the cortical grey matter in terms of connectivity with white matter tracts. We identified human-unique profiles in temporal and parietal cortices, and hominid-unique organization in prefrontal cortex. Functional decoding revealed human-unique hotspots correlated with language processing and social cognition. These findings emphasize the importance of temporal and parietal cortical evolution in shaping our sapient abilities.

While current theories on human brain uniqueness focus on changes to prefrontal areas, our findings support a two-step evolutionary process, in which changes in prefrontal cortex organization emerge prior to changes in temporal areas. Unlike global connectivity or gross anatomical approaches, an informed comparative connectivity makes it possible to reveal major changes in fiber systems underlying a variety of cognitive functions that have changed in a stepwise manner in the great ape and human lineages. (17)

Tononi, Giulio, et al. Consciousness or pseudo-consciousness? A clash of two paradigms.. Nature Neuroscience. March 10, 2025. Twenty-two psychologists mainly at the University of Wisconsin including Larissa Albantakis and Christof Koch restate and affirm the well thought-through, widely-studied case since 2008 for their Integrated Information Theory conceptual explanations. The entry is accompanied by A science of consciousness beyond pseudo-science and pseudo-consciousness by Alex Gomez-Marin and Anil Seth in the same issue, which altogether provide an extensive review and preview of such endeavors as our Earthumanity may awaken to her/his own self and so be able to find a similarly sentient ecosmic genesis. See also Dissociating Artificial Intelligence from Artificial Consciousnes by this Wisconsin group at arXiv:2412.04571 for more insights.

Integrated information theory (IIT) starts from consciousness, which is subjective, and accounts for its presence and quality in objective, testable terms. Attempts to label as ‘pseudoscientific’ a theory distinguished by decades of conceptual, mathematical, and empirical developments expose a crisis in the dominant computational-functionalist paradigm, which is challenged by IIT’s consciousness-first paradigm. (Tononi)

The scientific study of consciousness was sanctioned as an orthodox field of study only three decades ago. Since then, a variety of prominent theories have flourished, including integrated information theory, which has been recently accused of being pseudoscience by more than 100 academics. Here we critically assess this charge and offer thoughts to elevate the clash into positive lessons for our field. (Seth)

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