A central principle of modern biology is that complex biological systems have no external designer. Only natural dynamics can explain the emergence and organization of the biological complexity that we see everywhere in nature. Such self-organized complexity can be found at any scale, from molecular cell-regulatory systems to diverse multi-species communities. Indeed, many biologists believe that biological systems are unique because they are “intrinsically and irreducibly multiscale”.  Consider the complexity of a multi-species community; it is a self-organizing system shaped by the combined activities of its species, with the information required for those activities stored at “lower levels” within genes. Both species-level and community-level activities can manifest external to them (e.g., changing the ecosystem), and thereby influence either the community dynamics or the evolution of individual species and genes. Indeed, such multi-level biological causality motivated the respected philosopher of science Evelyne Fox Keller to question the way that biologists use the concept of “the gene for...” to explain complex phenotypes, and she called on them to adapt their methods to explicitly address multi-scale systems.  Our research program is a response to Keller’s call from the perspective of evolutionary biology.

The individual research activities of the group are organized into two broad research programs, which reflect different levels of biological complexity and function. The first is focused on functional diversity at the gene and genome level, and the goal here is to study molecular evolutionary processes in the context of explicit changes in organism phenotype. The group is developing innovative modeling frameworks for gene and genome data.  The second focuses on the diversity of complex assemblages of species genomes ("metagenomes"), and the goal here is to model the structure and function of complex microbial communities (“microbiomes”).  We carry out empirical analysis of several real-world systems: healthy and disease human phenotypes; marine microbial systems in the Northwest Atlantic and the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea; toxic algal blooms in freshwater systems. Both programs are integrated within our work on theoretical questions about the evolutionary dynamics of multilevel selection and multi-species phenotypic adaptations.

See this site for more information about this research is contributing to "The Evolutionary Gaia Project":  https://www.evolutionarygaia.org/