ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Processes and patterns of interaction as units of selection: An introduction to ITSNTS thinking.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 54 papers.
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54 citing papers in PubMed, 178 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Interactions at sea: on the microbiome life-cycle and biogeochemical processes.History and philosophy of the life sciences · 2025Article
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- Beyond the Second Law: Darwinian Evolution as a Tendency for Entropy Production to Increase.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
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- Chance and purpose in the evolution of biospheres.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Function, chance and purpose in the biosphere: a critical examination of the Darwinized Gaia hypothesis.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Darwinizing Gaia: conceptual approaches.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- The evolution of Gaia(s).Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
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- Persistence selection between simulated biogeochemical cycle variants for their distinct effects on the Earth system.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Many practicing biologists accept that nothing in their discipline makes sense except in the light of evolution, and that natural selection is evolution's principal sense-maker. But what natural selection actually is (a force or a statistical outcome, for example) and the levels of the biological hierarchy (genes, organisms, species, or even ecosystems) at which it operates directly are still actively disputed among philosophers and theoretical biologists. Most formulations of evolution by natural selection emphasize the differential reproduction of entities at one or the other of these levels. Some also recognize differential persistence, but in either case the focus is on lineages of material things: even species can be thought of as spatiotemporally restricted, if dispersed, physical beings. Few consider-as "units of selection" in their own right-the processes implemented by genes, cells, species, or communities. "It's the song not the singer" (ITSNTS) theory does that, also claiming that evolution by natural selection of processes is more easily understood and explained as differential persistence than as differential reproduction. ITSNTS was formulated as a response to the observation that the collective functions of microbial communities (the songs) are more stably conserved and ecologically relevant than are the taxa that implement them (the singers). It aims to serve as a useful corrective to claims that "holobionts" (microbes and their animal or plant hosts) are aggregate "units of selection," claims that often conflate meanings of that latter term. But ITSNS also seems broadly applicable, for example, to the evolution of global biogeochemical cycles and the definition of ecosystem function.
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