Autopoiesis and evolution: the role of organisms in natural drift

Genetic reductionism is increasingly seen as a severely limited approach to understanding living systems. The Neo-Darwinian explanatory framework tends to overlook the role of the organism for an understanding of development and evolution. In the current fast-changing theoretical landscape, the autopoietic approach provides conceptual distinctions and tools that may contribute to building an alternative framework. In this article, I examine the implications of the theories of autopoiesis and natural drift for an organism-centered view of evolution. By shifting the attention from genes to ontogenetic organism-niche configurations and their transformations over generations, this approach presents a compelling perspective on the role of organismal behavior in guiding phylogenetic drift.

Language contact and typological change: The case of Estonian revisited

The traditional hypothesis of a typological cycle from agglutination via fusion to isolation and back to agglutination, still invoked by many linguists (albeit with caveats and limitations), would imply a natural drift behind typological changes. Accordingly, such typological changes would typically result from internal developments (such as reductive sound changes), while etymological counter-currents (such as segmentable suffixes replacing earlier stem alternations) could rather be due to language contact. On the other hand, the agglutinative type seems to be stable and resistant to typological change especially in Northern Eurasia, and for the change towards a more fusional type, characteristic of some Finnic and Saami languages in the northwestern periphery of Uralic, a contact explanation might seem plausible. However, a closer scrutiny of Estonian, often mentioned as an example of typological change and characteristically impacted by Germanic, shows that in typological change, internal and external motivations intertwine and interact.

Rendezvous design in a cislunar near rectilinear Halo orbit

ABSTRACTIn the context of future human spaceflight exploration missions, Rendezvous and Docking (RVD) activities are critical for the assembly and maintenance of cislunar structures. The scope of this research is to investigate the specifics of orbits of interest for RVD in the cislunar realm and to propose novel strategies to safely perform these kinds of operations. This paper focuses on far rendezvous approaches and passively safe drift trajectories in the Ephemeris model. The goal is to exhibit phasing orbit requirements to ensure a safe far approach. Ephemeris representations of Near Rectilinear Halo Orbits (NRHOs) were derived using multiple-shooting and adaptive receding-horizon targeting algorithms. Simulations showed significant drift and overlapping properties for phasing and target orbits of interest, motivating the search for safe natural drift trajectories and using impact prediction strategies.

Arthur Schopenhauer and the Current Conception of the Origin of Species: What Did the Philosopher Anticipate?

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was deeply influenced by Plato and conceived each species as an Idea, whose shape is essentially and permanently predetermined. He rejected Lamarck’s proposal of organ’s use/disuse as a source of evolution, but he was close to the orthogenetic movement that developed after his death. The philosopher did not conceive biological individual variability as a source for evolution, mathematical population analysis, and gradual evolution; he even imagined an ultra-rapid saltatory model in “higher forms.” Moreover, he conceived a metaphysically based coupling among all phenomena which resembles the contemporary model of natural drift of evolution. Hence, Schopenhauer did not strictly anticipate Darwin’s model of natural selection. However, he expressed in his own words competition and struggle for life. The philosopher thus anticipated more the orthogenesis and natural drift and less the Darwinian’s mechanisms of evolution than what is generally alleged. His work is a valuable philosophical source in the contemporary search for a new synthesis in evolutionary thought.

Evolutionary Path Making and Natural Drift

This chapter demonstrates how unique histories of structural coupling can be understood from the vantage point of evolution. To this end, it provides a critique of the adaptationist view of evolution as a process of progressive fitness, and articulates an alternative view of evolution as natural drift. These unique histories of coupling, which enact incommensurable kinds of “color space,” should not be explained as optimal adaptations to different regularities in the world. Instead, they should be explained as the result of different histories of natural drift. Moreover, since organism and environment cannot be separated but are in fact codetermined in evolution as natural drift, the environmental regularities that one associates with these various color spaces must ultimately be specified in tandem with the perceptually guided activity of the animal.