The origins and evolution of animal identity

Abstract

The Darwinian synthesis focuses on speciation as the leading edge of evolution. But species are poor candidates for natural kinds because they are always susceptible to giving rise to something new. Physicalist evolutionary developmental biology presents an alternative scenario in which broad differences between organismal types were ontologically and temporally prior to subtypes and species-level variants. The cell masses that first developed into the metazoans, or animals, for example, arose from unicellular antecedents by a set of molecular innovations that constituted the embryos of these organisms as an unprecedented form of matter-liquid and liquid crystalline tissues-and thus a natural kind. This novel material embodied a set of morphogenetic processes and motifs that laid the basis for subsequent animal evolution. With the addition of other molecular functionalities simple "basal" metazoan body plans (sponges, placozoans) engendered more complex diploblasts (cnidarians, ctenophores) and bilaterian triploblasts (arthropods, chordates, mollusks, and so forth). Self-organizing patterning processes arising within these integrated communities of cells produced segments, appendages, patterned skeletons and organs. Bioelectrical scaffolding effects and the standardizing effects of development from an egg transformed phylotypic forms into canalized, integrated individuals that exist in the biosphere as "natural purposes," causes and effects of themselves.

Agency in the Evolutionary Transition to Multicellularity

“…The emergence of a novel, multicellular, form of individuality or agency might be a gradual process based on its becoming a Darwinian unit of selection, and thus following a divergent evolutionary trajectory (a standard supposition in evolutionary theory). But a collection of cells also might become a novel agent relatively abruptly, as a consequence of becoming a new form of matter with altered inherencies (as described above) [23,24].…”

Mind the matter: Active matter, soft robotics, and the making of bio-inspired artificial intelligence

“…Here, we hope to cast doubt on the (un)happy divorce between material and cognitive processes by suggesting that looking toward recent developments in soft robotics (Man and Damasio, 2019 ; Blackiston et al, 2021 ; Bongard and Levin, 2021 ; Kaspar et al, 2021 ; Kriegman et al, 2021 ), active matter physics (Hanczyc and Ikegami, 2010 ; Needleman and Dogic, 2017 ; McGivern, 2020 ; Egbert, 2021 ), and basal cognition research (Lyon, 2006 , 2015 ; Van Duijn et al, 2006 ; Newman, 2016 , 2019 , 2020 , 2021 ; Levin, 2019 , 2020 ; Bechtel and Bich, 2021 ; Lyon et al, 2021 ) complicates any cleaving of cognition from its living, material context. In light of recent empirical advancements, we argue now is a good time to revisit our philosophical assumptions regarding the MR of the cognitive and suggest that a more promising path in the development of AR and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is to take the materiality of cognition more , not less, seriously—a position explicitly disallowed in standard philosophical positions on MR. Our argument thus consists of two interlocked moves: first, we identify a set of assumptions that structure the debate on MR and that generate strong intuitions regarding the mental-physical interaction that have historically discouraged taking the materiality of cognition seriously.…”