It was a great pleasure to give a talk and participate in the Shapeshifters Symposium, Plasticity Here, There, and Everywhere, in Amsterdam at the end of May.
The Shapeshifters Symposium was a transdisciplinary two-day event that explored the concept of plasticity across academic domains and beyond.
My talk at the Shapeshifters symposium emphasised how organisms act purposefully and with intention. Stochasticity, or random variability, is harnessed by embedded systems from the cell to social and ecological arrangements to make creative decisions. Science has tended to focus on measurable material events, such as what, when, where and how, but has found the crucial question “why?” difficult. Yet, “why” matters in understanding living systems. Genes cannot tell us why. We need to understand the situational logic and motivation of organisms.
“We are not in our genes; our genes are in us.”
We look forward to further collaborations.