Can models of evolutionary transition clarify the debates over the Neolithic Revolution?

The 'Neolithic Revolution,' sometimes referred to as the emergence of agriculture at its earliest in the southern Levant, is the most significant shift in human history, shaping the world we live in today. Yet, after 100 years of study, its major cause, tempo (gradual or revolutionary), and impact of human intentionality remain disputed. Here, we examine the research potential of an evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI) to clarify this dramatic shift. Applying an ETI research perspective reveals how different causes and conditions lead to the same result, enabling a holistic view rather than a reduction of 'Neolithic' to 'agriculture,' or to one major climatic condition, inheritance system or standard evolutionary model, thus allowing us to clarify and bypass some of these heated, unresolved disputes. Additionally, unlike current archaeological emphasis on 'where,' 'when,' 'why' and 'how' questions, the ETI perspective offers a productive path for resolving a fundamental preliminary anomaly: why and how could the Neolithic lifeway evolve at all, given the selfish interest of individuals in a hunter-gatherer group? We do not intend to solve the shift to Neolithic lifeways, only to offer a fresh lens for examining it, emphasizing the relevance of tracking within and between group differences. This article is part of the theme issue 'Human socio-cultural evolution in light of evolutionary transitions'.

Human socio-cultural evolution in light of evolutionary transitions: introduction to the theme issue.

Human societies are no doubt complex. They are characterized by division of labour, multiple hierarchies, intricate communication networks and transport systems. These phenomena and others have led scholars to propose that human society may be, or may become, a new hierarchical level that may dominate the individual humans within it, similar to the relations between an organism and its cells, or an ant colony and its members. Recent discussions of the possibility of this major evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI) raise interesting and controversial questions that are explored in the present issue from four different complementary perspectives. (i) The general theory of ETIs. (ii) The unique aspects of cultural evolution. (iii) The evolutionary history and pre-history of humans. (iv) Specific routes of a possible human ETI. Each perspective uses different tools provided by different disciplines: biology, anthropology, cultural evolution, systems theory, psychology, economy, linguistics and philosophy of science. Altogether, this issue provides a broad and rich application of the notion of ETI to human past, present and perhaps also future evolution. It presents important case studies, new theoretical results and novel questions for future research. This article is part of the theme issue 'Human socio-cultural evolution in light of evolutionary transitions'.

Scaffolding individuality: coordination, cooperation, collaboration and community.

Processes of evolutionary transition (ET), becoming part of a new reproducing collective while losing the capacity of independent reproduction, seem difficult to track without circularity, since their features-units of selection, individuality, inheritance at multiple levels (MLS1, MLS2)-are products of one process. We describe ET in a non-circular way, noting kinds of interactions among community members necessary for such major transitions that are not instances of those same interactions within community members. Reproducing 'systems' tend to hybridize with environmental components, employing eco-devo scaffolding interactions forming communities. Communities are developmentally scaffolded systems of diverse members engaged in heterogeneous interactions. They may become individuals in their own right with the potential to evolve an inheritance system at the emergent community level. We argue for the explanatory benefits of treating 'individuality' as a special case of 'collectivity'. We characterize an idealized sequence of collective processes-coordination, cooperation and collaboration (3Cs)-which scaffolds transitions to new forms of collective individuality: communities. Hominid evolution and learning draw attention to developmental interactions driving both dimensions of ET: new 'levels of individuality' and inherited 'information systems'. Here, we outline a theoretical perspective that we suggest applies across a wide range of cases and scenarios. This article is part of the theme issue 'Human socio-cultural evolution in light of evolutionary transitions'.

Academic excellence and community relevance: Can we have it all?

Academic excellence, in its original meaning (areté), combines intellectual and moral merit, grounded in one's relevance to and impact on one's world. However, in the current era of limited time and high-stake competition, social relevance is pre-assumed to trade-off against scientific distinction. This paper is one long argument against such excellence-relevance trade-off. We first briefly describe the history of academic 'excellence' and argue it does not support the current use of the term nor vindicate a necessary community-academia trade-off. Second, we review the current game theory framework for addressing community-academia interactions. We argue that due to its pre-assumed trade-off, it often entrenches an unjust hierarchy between science and society, even when motivated by honest goodwill and ending with reciprocal "win-win" benefits. Given these difficulties, in the third section we present a practical alternative, a case study of "Town Square Academia", which operates in peripheral and heterogenic communities. We review its success and failures in the attempt to combine excellence with relevance, and argue for expanding such attempts. To conclude, given the importance of bridging the gap between science and society, even if scientific excellence only sometimes manages to unite with social and environmental relevance, it should all ways be attempted before rolled out.

Operationalizing evolutionary transitions in individuality.

Evolutionary transitions in individuality (hereafter, ETIs), such as the transition to multi-cellularity and the transition to social colonies, have been at the centre of evolutionary research, but only few attempts were made to systematically operationalize this concept. Here, we devise a set of four indicators intended to assess the change in complexity during ETIs: system size, inseparability, reproductive specialization and non-reproductive specialization. We then conduct a quantitative comparison across multiple taxa and ETIs. Our analysis reveals that inseparability has a crucial role in the process; it seems irreversible and may mark the point where a group of individuals becomes a new individual at a higher hierarchical level. Interestingly, we find that disparate groups demonstrate a similar pattern of progression along ETIs.

Science and Sentiment: Grinnell's Fact-Based Philosophy of Biodiversity Conservation.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the biologist Joseph Grinnell made a distinction between science and sentiment for producing fact-based generalizations on how to conserve biodiversity. We are inspired by Grinnellian science, which successfully produced a century-long impact on studying and conserving biodiversity that runs orthogonal to some familiar philosophical distinctions such as fact versus value, emotion versus reason and basic versus applied science. According to Grinnell, unlike sentiment-based generalizations, a fact-based generalization traces its diverse commitments and thus becomes tractable for its audience. We argue that foregrounding tractability better explains Grinnell's practice in the context of his time as well as in the context of current discourse among scientists over the political "biases" of biodiversity research and its problem of "reproducibility."

Gene expression and the concept of the phenotype.

While the definition of the 'genotype' has undergone dramatic changes in the transition from classical to molecular genetics, the definition of the 'phenotype' has remained for a long time within the classical framework. In addition, while the notion of the genotype has received significant attention from philosophers of biology, the notion of the phenotype has not. Recent developments in the technology of measuring gene-expression levels have made it possible to conceive of phenotypic traits in terms of levels of gene expression. We demonstrate that not only has this become possible but it has also become an actual practice. This suggests a significant change in our conception of the phenotype: as in the case of the 'genotype', phenotypes can now be conceived in quantitative and measurable terms on a comprehensive molecular level. We discuss in what sense gene expression profiles can be regarded as phenotypic traits and whether these traits are better described as a novel concept of phenotype or as an extension of the classical concept. We argue for an extension of the classical concept and call for an examination of the type of extension involved.