"UNCG philosopher of biology Dr. Derek Skillings is the lead investigator on a new, three-year, $600,000 grant from the John Templeton Foundation for a study of the emergence and evolution of goal-directed behavior in collective entities.
“A holobiont is a term for a host organism and all of the things that live inside of it and on it,” says Skillings, who is an assistant professor of philosophy at UNCG with adjunct positions in biology and geography, environment, and sustainability.
Examples of collective entities include simple biofilms and massive coral reefs.
“We used to think these weird things like corals, lichens, and maybe certain insects, which are amalgamations of symbioses, were the exception in nature. But now we are realizing no, actually, it’s probably everything. Everything is a holobiont.”
Skillings points to the bacteria in our guts and on our skin, even the mitochondria in our cells, as evidence that humans – like corals and cows – are holobionts. From one perspective, a human is a unified organism. From another, each of us is an ecosystem unto ourselves.
These concepts can impact how we think about human diet and health, a major focus of the first grant, as well as how we understand biological and ecological systems for conservation.
The research team includes Dr. Ben Allen of Emmanuel College, Dr. Rory Smead of Northeastern University, and Dr. Patrick Forber of Tufts University.
Allen is a mathematician who creates models to predict how cooperative behavior develops in groups. Smead is a philosopher who specializes in game theory and agent-based models derived from economics. Forber is a philosopher of biology who, together with Smead, has studied how spiteful behavior may have evolved in humans to foster group cooperation over time.
“We’ve found there is a really cool, similar set of problems between cooperative behavior in single populations and these multi-species interactions we find in holobionts,” Skillings says.
In addition to formal philosophical inquiry and mathematical modeling, the new grant will support a series of weeklong events bringing more philosophers and biologists together to broaden the conversation.
“When you bring people together like this, you make space available for cool things to happen,” says Skillings. “Not only do you come up with solutions you hadn’t imagined, but you also come up with problems you didn’t even know existed.""
This grant, which is the largest ever awarded to UNCG’s Department of Philosophy, is Skillings’ second from the Templeton Foundation. His first focused on understanding the physiology, ecology, and evolution of holobiont systems.
This project was made possible through the support of grant #63454 from the John Templeton Foundation. Founded in 1987, the John Templeton Foundation supports interdisciplinary research and catalyzes conversations that inspire awe and wonder. "