Chemical cognition: chemoconnectomics and convergent evolution of integrative systems in animals
Authors
Collection
Basal Cognition
In On the Origin of Species, Darwin speculated that living beings evolve by natural selection in both ‘corporeal and mental endowments’. Establishment of this proposition, he predicted, would provide “a new foundation” for scientific psychology. For a wide variety of reasons, psychologists, neuroscientists and ethologists from the middle of the 20th century until the present have been reluctant to pursue this hypothesis beyond animals with brains. This has begun to change in recent years with the multidisciplinary study of cognition in non-neural organisms called basal cognition, fueled by stunning discoveries in single-celled prokaryotes and eukaryotes, plants and fungi.
Basal cognition as a field was introduced in a special double issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B in March 2021. What the PhilTransB issues showed clearly is that, long before the appearance of neurons and nervous systems, evolution already had laid a solid foundation of capacities to enable organisms to become familiar with, value, exploit and evade features of their surroundings to further existential goals. These capacities (as characterized for centuries) include perception, memory, valuing/valence, decision making/problem solving, learning, anticipation, and communication.
This special basal cognition issue will introduce work that in future will help to connect the dots between the cognitively driven behavior of non-neural organisms and the behavior of animals with brains and nervous systems. Thirteen invited articles will present cutting edge work from leading and emerging researchers in a multiplicity of disciplines.
Please note that this Special Issue is for invited authors only. Contact the Guest Editors if you would like to discuss a proposal to this issue.
Editors
-
Pamela Lyon
University of Adelaide, Australia. Pamela is what used to be called a natural philosopher and today fits no category. Drawing on findings in a variety of disciplines, she works in the domain of theory and conceptual frameworks that guide scientific investigation—particularly, in the biology and evolution of cognition, from prokaryotes to humans. The emerging field of basal cognition grew out of her doctoral research and the international and Australian collaborations that grew up around it.
-
Ken Cheng
Macquarie University, Sydney Australia. Ken has collaborated with researchers around the world to understand the mechanistic, functional and evolutionary aspects of animal behavior in a range of species. Ken is especially interested in how animals process information, and his research has concentrated on how animals deal with spatial and temporal information.
