ReviewCellular and molecular life sciences : CMLS2023
Darwin's agential materials: evolutionary implications of multiscale competency in developmental biology.
Review in Cellular and molecular life sciences : CMLS, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed.
- Review
- Guided Adaptive Diffusion: An Evolutionary Framework for Multimodal Atomistic Structure Prediction.Journal of chemical information and modeling · 2026Article
- A Biomarker Out of Context: Understanding High p-tau217 in the Developing Brain.Molecular neurobiology · 2026Review
- Heuristically Adaptive Diffusion-Model Evolutionary Strategy.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Mind Everywhere: A Framework for Conceptualizing Goal-Directedness in Biology and Other Domains-Part Two.Biological theory · 2026Article
- Mind Everywhere: A Framework for Conceptualizing Goal-Directedness in Biology and Other Domains-Part One.Biological theory · 2026Article
- De-anthropomorphizing the mind: life as a cognitive spectrum in a unified framework for biological minds.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2026Article
- When prediction fails: a computational complexity view of stress.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2026Article
- Chemical organizations as a conceptual tool: from synthetic biology to interdisciplinary systems and back.Frontiers in bioengineering and biotechnology · 2026Article
- Aging as a Loss of Goal-Directedness: An Evolutionary Simulation and Analysis Unifying Regeneration with Anatomical Rejuvenation.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Harnessing the analog computing power of regulatory networks with the Regulatory Network Machine.iScience · 2025Article
- Basal Xenobot transcriptomics reveals changes and novel control modality in cells freed from organismal influence.Communications biology · 2025Article
- The Reasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics in the Biological Sciences.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- The Multiscale Wisdom of the Body: Collective Intelligence as a Tractable Interface for Next-Generation Biomedicine.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2025Review
- AI-driven automated discovery tools reveal diverse behavioral competencies of biological networks.eLife · 2025Article
- Identification of brain-like complex information architectures in embryonic tissue ofCommunicative & integrative biology · 2025Article
- Open problems in synthetic multicellularity.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2024Article
- Multicellular adaptation to electrophysiological perturbations analyzed by deterministic and stochastic bioelectrical models.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Stress sharing as cognitive glue for collective intelligences: A computational model of stress as a coordinator for morphogenesis.Biochemical and biophysical research communications · 2024Article
- Making Neurobots and Chimerical Ctenophores.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
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Abstract
A critical aspect of evolution is the layer of developmental physiology that operates between the genotype and the anatomical phenotype. While much work has addressed the evolution of developmental mechanisms and the evolvability of specific genetic architectures with emergent complexity, one aspect has not been sufficiently explored: the implications of morphogenetic problem-solving competencies for the evolutionary process itself. The cells that evolution works with are not passive components: rather, they have numerous capabilities for behavior because they derive from ancestral unicellular organisms with rich repertoires. In multicellular organisms, these capabilities must be tamed, and can be exploited, by the evolutionary process. Specifically, biological structures have a multiscale competency architecture where cells, tissues, and organs exhibit regulative plasticity-the ability to adjust to perturbations such as external injury or internal modifications and still accomplish specific adaptive tasks across metabolic, transcriptional, physiological, and anatomical problem spaces. Here, I review examples illustrating how physiological circuits guiding cellular collective behavior impart computational properties to the agential material that serves as substrate for the evolutionary process. I then explore the ways in which the collective intelligence of cells during morphogenesis affect evolution, providing a new perspective on the evolutionary search process. This key feature of the physiological software of life helps explain the remarkable speed and robustness of biological evolution, and sheds new light on the relationship between genomes and functional anatomical phenotypes.
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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 OpenQuestion graph.