Schedule – Cluster Meeting Agential Behavior and Plasticity in Evolution

Day 1
07.00-08.45 – Breakfast
8.45-9.00 – Welcome
9.00-9.30 – Tobias Uller (introduction day 1)
9.30-10.00 – Lisandro Milocco
10.00-10.30 – Coffee break
10.30-11.00 – Lucas Mathieu
11.00-11.45 – Richard Watson
12.00-13.00 – Lunch
13.00-13.45 – Hugh Desmond
13.45-14.45 – General discussion (guiding questions I & II)
14.45-15.15 – Coffee break
15.15-16.15 – General discussion (guiding questions I & II)
16.15- 17.00 – Commentators & Discussion
19.30 – Dinner
Day 2
07.00-08.45 – Breakfast
9.00-9.15 – Denis Walsh (introduction day 2)
9.15-10.00 – Thomas Reydon
10.00-10.30 – Coffee break
10.30-11.15 – Derek Skilling
11.15-12.00 – Richard Watson
12.00-13.00 – Lunch
13.00-15.00 – General discussion (guiding questions II & III)
15.00-15.30 – Coffee break
15.30-16.30 – Commentators & Discussion
16.45 – Return to Lund
20.00 – Dinner at Mat & Destillat
Guiding questions
I. Scientifically, we would want to know…
 What kind of evolutionary problems or phenomena benefit from an agential
perspective (e.g., adaptation, diversification, evolvability, novelty)?
 What approaches will be informative for understanding the evolutionary
consequences of organismal purposiveness? Are the ones we use today
sufficient?
 What other theories, methods and tools would be available?
 What are the empirical challenges – does thinking about organisms as
purposeful agents have any consequences for what kind of empirical research
that should be done, or how data should be interpreted?

II. To evaluate the potential for conceptual change, we want to know…

 What should a “good” notion or framework of agency be able to do?
 What are the challenges that stand in the way of achieving this framework?
 What could be strategies to overcome those challenges?
 Is an agential perspective compatible with conventional ways to study
evolution?
 Are proposals for an extended evolutionary synthesis fundamentally agential?

III. Some general problems are…

 How do biological entities with goals arise?
 What comes first – organismal agency or evolutionary organismality?
 What would be needed for agency and similar concepts to become established
scientific concepts?