Back in August, I wrote a fairly critical post about an outfit called Research Features (“Research Features: seems sketchy to me“). My main complaint was that they call themselves a magazine but seem to me to be closer to paid advertising:
What’s sketchy about this is that it’s self-promotion passing itself off as journalism.
Image from www.micropia.nl/en/discover/microbiology/volvox/
Micropia, the museum of microbes in Amsterdam, has a page devoted to Volvox:
Ponds and ditches are not only home to unicellular green algae, but also to multicellular forms.
Some ‘colonies’ are nothing more than a mass of single cells all doing exactly the same thing, but with the spherical volvox it’s a slightly different story. Here different cells have specialised and work together. All the cells are located on the outside of the sphere. There are cells with flagella (whip-like hairs) to help the colony move around and cells which are responsible for reproduction.
I have an interest with the philosophy of biology, but I’m a dilettante. My background is in evolutionary biology; I haven’t had a philosophy class since I was an undergrad at UCF. Nevertheless, if you study the so-called Major Transitions, you’re inevitably going to end up reading some philosophy. Topics such as multilevel selection, emergence, and the nature of biological individuality come up over and over again in this field, and philosophers of biology have made important contributions in all of them.
Among these, I find discussions of the nature of biological individuality fascinating, and I’ve written about it often here. Volvox and its relatives often come up in these discussions, and they have for a long time. A new edited volume, Nature Alive, continues this trend in a chapter by Lukasz Lamza (“Cells, organisms, colonies, communities–the fuzziness of individuality in modern biology”).
ResearchGate likes to send notifications when your papers are cited. If you’re signed up for Google Scholar alerts, you’ll already know about most of these, but I confess I usually follow the links anyway. I haven’t previously seen too many preprints reported on ResearchGate, but I don’t see any reason researchers shouldn’t do so. One thing I noticed, though, is that that there’s no link to the preprint!
The website for the Fifth International Volvox Conference (Volvox 2019) is live, with registration set to begin January, 2019:
