The many meanings of “cost” and “benefit:” biological altruism, biological agency, and the identification of social behaviours

Woodford, Peter J.

doi:10.1007/s10539-018-9667-6

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 32 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…While there have been multiple, often conflicting, proposed characterizations of agency (e.g., [8,[10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]), we will assume for our analysis that a biological framing of agency consists of six independent properties:…”

Section: Agency At the Cellular And Organismal Levelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agency in the Evolutionary Transition to Multicellularity

Newman,

Benítez,

Bhat

et al. 2024

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This review discusses concepts of how agency, defined here as organism-initiated behavior (both species-characteristic and individually idiosyncratic), was aligned at the cellular and integrated in the multicellular levels during evolution. We consider agency in relation to the autonomy and purposiveness of cells and multicellular organisms. While the agency of cells in extant multicellular forms (and inferred in single-cell antecedents) is assumed in our analysis, we do not speculate on its origins. We attempt to discern the role of agency in the generation of form and function in social bacteria and amoebae, and we speculate on how these phenomena may relate to the emergence of phenotypically complex organisms. For the latter question, we explore the processes leading to morphological and functional enablements in metazoans and how these might change the character of organismal agency during evolution. We also consider how transitions between multicellular agency and unicellular agency (and back again) may characterize and drive the formation of cancers. We relate this problem to the philosophical discourse on dispositional causality and discuss experimental approaches to identifying genuine agency against a background of physically mediated directionality and evolved program-like behaviors of organisms. Lastly, we discuss the possible uses of mathematical representations of incompletely specified dynamical systems in the characterization of autonomy and agency.

show abstract

Section: Agency At the Cellular And Organismal Levelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agency in the Evolutionary Transition to Multicellularity

Newman,

Benítez,

Bhat

et al. 2024

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Altruistic behaviour, in particular, has been usefully defined as behaviour in which an actor pays a cost to its direct, lifetime net fitness and a recipient gains a benefit to its direct, lifetime net fitness [10]. Of course, important questions remain about how to define and measure costs and benefits to fitness, and whether or not these are best thought of as properties measurable in individual organisms, or rather at the level of populations or genes, but these concepts nonetheless define the nature of social behaviours and the puzzles they present [11,12]. The existence and maintenance of apparently costly forms of helping behaviour was of course something that Darwin puzzled over, and for a long time, it remained poorly understood until William Hamilton's recognition of the importance of relatedness between the actor and the recipient and his mathematical formalization of this insight in Hamilton's rule.…”

Section: The Themed Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%