Book announcement: Landscapes of Collectivity in the Life Sciences
Edited by Snait B. Gissis, Ehud Lamm and Ayelet Shavit
Url: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/landscapes-collectivity-life-sciences
Many researchers and scholars in the life
sciences have become increasingly critical of the traditional
methodological focus on the individual. This volume counters such
methodological individualism by exploring recent and influential work in
the life sciences that utilizes notions of collectivity, sociality,
rich interactions, and emergent phenomena as essential explanatory tools
to handle numerous persistent scientific questions in the life
sciences. The contributors consider case studies of collectivity that
range from microorganisms to human consensus, discussing theoretical and
empirical challenges and the innovative methods and solutions
scientists have devised.
The contributors offer historical,
philosophical, and biological perspectives on collectivity, and describe
collective phenomena seen in insects, the immune system, communication,
and human collectivity, with examples ranging from cooperative
transport in the longhorn crazy ant to the evolution of autobiographical
memory. They examine ways of explaining collectivity, including case
studies and modeling approaches, and explore collectivity’s explanatory
power. They present a comprehensive look at a specific case of
collectivity: the Holobiont notion (the idea of a multi-species
collective, a host and diverse microorganisms) and the hologenome theory
(which posits that the holobiont and its hologenome are a unit of
adaption). The volume concludes with reflections on the work of the late
physicist Eshel Ben-Jacob, pioneer in the study of collective phenomena
in living systems.
Contributors
Oren Bader, John
Beatty, Dinah R. Davison, Daniel Dor, Ofer Feinerman, Raghavendra
Gadagkar, Scott F. Gilbert, Snait B. Gissis, Deborah M. Gordon, James
Griesemer, Zachariah I. Grochau-Wright, Erik R. Hanschen, Eva Jablonka,
Mohit Kumar Jolly, Anat Kolumbus, Ehud Lamm, Herbert Levine, Arnon Levy,
Xue-Fei Li, Elisabeth A. Lloyd, Yael Lubin, Eva Maria Luef, Ehud Meron,
Richard E. Michod, Samir Okasha, Simone Pika, Joan Roughgarden, Eugene Rosenberg, Ayelet Shavit, Yael Silver, Alfred I. Tauber, Ilana Zilber-Rosenberg