ArticleEcology and evolution2024
Individuality Through Ecology: Rethinking the Evolution of Complex Life From an Externalist Perspective.
Article in Ecology and evolution, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Top-Down Coercive Mechanisms and the Major Transitions in Evolution.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2025Review
- Stability of ecologically scaffolded traits during evolutionary transitions in individuality.Nature communications · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The evolution of complex life forms, exemplified by multicellular organisms, can be traced through a series of evolutionary transitions in individuality, beginning with the origin of life, followed by the emergence of the eukaryotic cell, and, among other transitions, culminating in the shift from unicellularity to multicellularity. Several attempts have been made to explain the origins of such transitions, many of which have been internalist (i.e., based largely on internal properties of ancestral entities). Here, we show how externalist perspectives can shed new light on questions pertaining to evolutionary transitions in individuality. We do this by presenting the ecological scaffolding framework in which properties of complex life forms arise from an external scaffold. Ultimately, we anticipate that progress will come from recognition of the importance of both the internalist and externalist modes of explanation. We illustrate this by considering an extension of the ecological scaffolding model in which cells modify the environment that later becomes the scaffold giving rise to multicellular individuality.
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.