Evolution, Development and Complexity

Georgi Georgiev, a director of the Evo Devo Universe research community, is a Full Professor of Physics at Assumption College and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA. His interests are in applying first principles from Physics to explain the continuous self-organization and evolution in Complex Systems very far away from Thermodynamic Equilibrium. His approach is to use variational principles as drivers for progressive development of structure in those systems. He has proposed to use the efficiency of physical action as a measure for the degree of organization.John M. Smart, a director and co-founder of the Evo Devo Universe research community, is a Lecturer in Foresight at the Naval Postgraduate School (Monterey, CA), and President of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, a nonprofit promoting improved scientific understanding and technical management of processes of accelerating change. He is author of Introduction to Foresight (2018), the book precis Evo Devo Universe? (2008) and the journal article Transcension hypothesis (2012). Claudio L. Flores Martinez, a director of the Evo Devo Universe research community, is a PhD student at the University of Hamburg with a background in molecular biosciences and developmental biology (B.Sc. and M.Sc. from the University of Heidelberg). His expertise is covering areas in theoretical biology with a focus on major transitions across organizational levels of bio-complexity, the origin of life, genome evolution, convergence, top-down causation, philosophy of science, cognition, neuroscience, complex adaptive systems, technological innovation and biomimetics. He is running his own innovation consultancy for biomimetic systems design and knowledge engineering.Michael E. Price, a director of the Evo Devo Universe research community, is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Brunel University London. He has a BA from Duke University and a PhD from the UC Santa Barbara Center for Evolutionary Psychology. His research interests focused initially on biological evolutionary psychology (especially, morality and human nature), but have expanded more recently to include universal Darwinism (the creative potential of Darwinian selection, across natural domains), and the evolution of religiosity.