Nathalie Gontier

Time plays a central role in evolutionary theory. In this paper, we examine the language Darwin used to describe time in his work On the Origin of Species. We present the results of a computationally assisted lexical-semantic analysis of word frequencies, variations, and contextual meanings of time-related lexical items across the six editions of the Origin. Focusing on terms such as cycle, circle, chain, scale, line, tree (of life), progress, succession, and time, we analyse how Darwin represents temporality through recurrent patterns of usage. Our findings show that Darwin describes species as forming “chains of affinities” connected through “blood relationships,” which unfold as “successive” “lines of descent.” These expressions indicate a view of evolutionary change as a continuous process articulated through lineages of descent. Our analysis shows that, within this set of terms, tree of life plays only a minor, locally concentrated lexical role in the Origin. Darwin’s representation of evolutionary time is primarily structured through the vocabulary of succession, line, and chain, rather than through arboreal concepts or imagery. This lexical pattern suggests that, at the level of textual articulation, key aspects of evolutionary temporality are predominantly expressed through geological successions and genealogical lineages that would later be found in tree-based models in evolutionary biology.

Grounded in semiosis present throughout the living world, symbolism and the process of symbolization can be studied for how both evolve over time and space. Symbolism in human evolution underlies behavior, cognition, communication, language, social group formation, cultural worldviews, and the development of artifactual, artistic, and technological innovations. Human symbolism is not reducible to individual acts of creativity. Instead, symbolization is grounded in intersubjective and sociocultural group actions and practices that extend into material, conceptual, and virtual symbols and symbol systems expressive of we-intentionality. Most of all, human symbolism evolves, and it does so at the community level. Symbols are neither static nor uniform but dynamic and chimeric in space and time. Material, conceptual, and virtual symbolic evolution builds upon reticulate interactions between symbols and symbol users. These reticulate interactions underlie the learning, combination, blending, revision, rejection, expansion, innovation, enactment, and (re)interpretation of symbolic elements into spatiotemporal symbolic constructs. This chapter introduces the reader to evolutionary approaches to the study of human symbolic behavior as they are formulated in behavioral, neurocognitive, sociocultural, communicative, linguistic, and technological research fields, and introduces a 7E cognitive approach that recognizes cognition as embodied, embedded, enacted, extended, and as evolving extra-genetically by ensembles of individuals.

Scholars have so far developed five different approaches to studying language: the referential, social, informational, semantic-pragmatic, and evolutionary approach. These approaches are associated with varying schools of thought and different academic disciplines as they developed within intellectual history. The referential approach to language originated in ancient philosophies. The social approach to language was formulated during modernity. From the 19th century onward, these approaches were followed by the informational approach to language that developed in conjunction with the rise of the techno-sciences and mass communication systems; and the semantic-pragmatic approach to language which was an outgrowth of academic disciplines including linguistics, anthropology, sociology, the cognitive sciences, and analytical and continental philosophy. Contemporary language studies continue many of these research lines but surpass the scope of the older approaches by not only including but prioritizing an evolutionary approach to language. This entry briefly reviews the central tenets of these approaches and explains why language is best understood as an evolved form of community communication.

Symbiosis is a form of reticulate evolution that refers to ecological, physiological, and genomic associations between organisms from different species, resulting in interactions, bonds, coexistence, cohabitation, and partnerships. Symbiosis can lead to the emergence of new biological individuals, known as holobionts, that simultaneously function as new units and levels or life zones of evolution. When symbiosis becomes permanent and hereditary, it leads to symbiogenesis or evolution through symbiosis. This entry focuses on the history of the symbiosis theory. Symbiosis research emerged in the 18th century in both botany and zoology, driven by ecological studies of associations between different organisms. Ecological symbiosis research is intellectually rooted in the fields of natural philosophy and natural history. Like the theory of natural selection, theories of symbiosis were initially linked to sociocultural and political ideas about the organizational structure of society, as well as to debates on the nature and redistribution of “common goods” and the “division of labor” in the “economy of nature.” Symbiosis jargon, in part, drove the development of the biomedical and physiological sciences, where scholars commenced research on the influence microorganisms and viruses have on health and disease. Research on the evolutionary impact of symbiosis emerged in the late 19th century, following the discovery of intracellular symbiosis and its role in the origin of cellular structures. This helped pave the way for theories on symbiogenesis.

Symbiogenesis denotes host and/or symbiont evolution through long-term symbiosis. Studied and defined multiple times over in the early 20th century by independently working scholars, including Famintzin, Mereschkowski, Kozo-Polyansky, Wallin, and Lederberg, symbiogenesis was brought to the attention of contemporary evolutionary science from the 1960s onward through the comprehensive works of Lynn Margulis who defined symbiogenesis as “the origin of a new organ, metabolic pathway, behavior, tissue, or other feature as a result of long-term hereditary symbiosis, [. which] includes the process by which organelles of the eukaryotic cell evolved from ancient bacterial symbionts.” Symbiogenesis is today wellrecognized for underlying the evolution of mitochondria and chloroplasts, which are eukaryotic cell organelles that originated from bacteria that engaged in endosymbiotic relationships with some of the earliest nucleated cells, some 2 billion years ago. Not confined to that period in time, endosymbiosis, or the phenomenon where organisms live inside other organisms (endosymbionts live inside a host), is quite common amongst eukaryotic organisms that often carry varied microbial communities in their body cavities and, albeit to a lesser extent, inside specific cells (intracellular endosymbiosis). This entry details the events that led to the formulation and wider academic recognition of symbiogenesis theory, its opposition to certain tenets of the Neodarwinian synthesis, and its integration into the emerging Reticulate Evolution school. As such, this entry presents a historical account of what was once a marginal theory that has now become essential for understanding the evolution of life.

Scholarly opinions vary on what language is, how it evolved, and from where or what it evolved. Long considered uniquely human, today scholars argue for evolutionary continuity between human language and animal communication systems. But while it is generally recognized that language is an evolving communication system, scholars continue to debate from which species language evolved, and what behavioral and cognitive features are the precursors to human language. To understand the nature of protolanguage, some look for homologs in gene functionality, brain areas, or anatomical structures such as the supralaryngeal vocal tract; others point toward primates, their gestural, vocal, multimodal, and in later evolving hominins also their pantomimic communication systems; and still others draw parallels between the musicality that characterizes language and the pitch found in the numerous sounds produced by animals. Accordingly, protolanguage theories today are multiple and diverse, and protolanguages might have also been diverse. This special issue on Evolving (Proto)Language/s for Lingua bundles several of the protolanguage theories that were put forward at the sixth edition of the Ways to Protolanguage conference series, held at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, in 2019. Not aimed at surveying all the different ways there are to conceptualize, study, and model protolanguage/s, this issue provides interested readers with good overviews on the role played in current theorizing on protolanguage/s by (paleo)anthropology, genetics, physiology, developmental, evolutionary, ecological, and pragmatic research lines.

As an outcome of scientific thinking, evolutionary theories change in accordance with progress made. Here, we trace the evolution of evolutionary thought through seven different research schools that have arisen since the introduction of Darwin’s Origin of Species. These schools include Darwinism, the Modern Synthesis, Micro-, Meso-, and Macroevolution, Ecology, and Reticulate Evolution. The schools of Darwinism and the Modern Synthesis together lie at the foundation of the Neo-Darwinian paradigm. This paradigm has now expanded into the schools of Microevolution, Mesoevolution, and Macroevolution that respectively study how genes, organisms, and species evolve over time. The school of Ecology instead investigates how genes, organisms, and species interact with one another and with the physical environment in space. The Eco-Evo-Devo paradigm attempts to integrate the tenets of Ecology with those of Micro-, Meso-, and Macroevolutionary research. The Reticulate Evolution school studies non-selectionist mechanisms such as symbiosis, symbiogenesis, lateral gene transfer, infective heredity, and hybridization. This paper outlines the major research directions and points of controversies that arise between these distinct schools. It furthermore situates the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Third Way of Evolution along these schools. The call for an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis originated in the Mesoevolution school, while scholars active in the Third Way of Evolution movement are developing ways to recognize the important contributions made by all evolution schools.

The year 2009 has been a year of numerous commemorations of both scientific and non-scientific achievements that contributed to the advancement of human kind. Protestants celebrated the 500th anniversary of the birth of Calvin; literary critics celebrated the 200th anniversary of the poet Edgar Allan Poe; and the musical genius Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was also born 200 years ago. 2009 further marked the bicentennial of the birth of Louis Braille, the inventor of Braille; and Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, who founded the National Academy of Sciences. Pierre Curie, famous for his work on radioactivity that he conducted together with his wife Marie Curie, was born 150 ago; as was John Dewey, a philosopher and psychologist who is recognized as one of the founding fathers of both pragmatism as well as functional psychology. UNESCO and the International Astronomical Union dubbed 2009 the International Year of Astronomy. By doing so, astronomers celebrated the 400th anniversary of Galileo Galilei’s telescopic observations as well as the publication of Johannes Kepler’s Astronomia nova wherein he formulated the first two laws of planetary motion. 2009 also marked the last of a 3-year-long celebration of Planet Earth, another UNESCO-governed initiative. However, for evolutionary biologists and philosophers of science, 2009 will be largely remembered for its worldwide commemorations of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his magnum opus On the origin of species by means of natural selection. Footnote1 In order to pay tribute to Darwin’s major contribution to the advancement of evolutionary science, the International Union of Biological Sciences and the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science have called the year 2009 the Darwin Year. Given that so many scientific discoveries were commemorated, COPUS, the Coalition on the Public Understanding on Science, called out 2009 as the Year of Science, in the hope to pay equal tribute to both the field of biology as well as astronomy. 2009 was indeed a year of biology. Somewhat overshadowed by the big Darwin celebrations, smaller-scaled events were held to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique; and the 150th anniversary of the death of Alexander von Humboldt, the father of biogeography. In 1910, Constantin Mereschkowsky wrote his article on symbiogenesis entitled ‘The Theory of Two Plasmas as the Basis of Symbiogenesis, a New Study for the Origins of Organisms’. The article was published in the German Biologisches Zentralblatt, the journal that would later evolve into the current Theory in Biosciences. Somewhat forgotten, but equally important for the field of symbiogenesis, was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Pierre-Joseph Van Beneden, a Belgian paleontologist and zoologist famous for distinguishing parasitism from commensalism. Finally, Henry Bergson, known for inventing the currently rejected notion of élan vital, was born 150 years ago. In order to memorialize the important role these biologists played in the advancement of our understanding of the evolutionary process, a 2-day international conference was organized entitled: Evolution today and tomorrow, Darwin evaluated by contemporary evolutionary and philosophical theories. The conference was organized by The Centre for Philosophy of Science of the University of Lisbon (Portugal), in collaboration with the Centre for Environmental Biology of the same university, and the Lisbon Centre for Applied Psychology. The articles presented here are a spin-off of this conference. The current volumes contain the peer-reviewed articles of a selection of the plenary and invited speakers, as well as those of scholars who were additionally invited to contribute to the volumes.