EDU-Talk

EDU-Talk Listserve Intro:

At present (2026) we have roughly 120 publishing scholars on this listserve. Scholars on this listserve have a great diversity of academic backgrounds, yet all share an interest in discussing, exploring and critiquing evolutionary and developmental ("evo-devo") processes, in any living and nonliving autopoietic replicators, including universal, physical, chemical, biological, societal, technological, and digital systems. Evolutionary processes are creative, contingent, divergent, and unpredictable, especially in the long run, as Stephen Jay Gould and others have argued. Developmental processes, by contrast, are conservative, deterministic, convergent, and predictable, with respect to hierarchy emergence and the life cycle of the replicator. Seeking to understand the function and regulation of these two potentially fundamental processes in all adaptive replicators under selection is one key topic motivating our research, discussion and publication community. We also seek to understand the emergence of individual and collective agency and cognition in autopoetic systems, and how evolutionary and developmental processes contribute to both specific and general (all-context) environmental adaptiveness. We started as a community to explore Lee Smolin's model of Cosmological Natural Selection as an explanation for universal structure and function, and have expanded to include the study of autopoietic systems at all scales. We explore complexity research with humility and collegiality, and a sincere desire to find insights that can improve life on Earth today. To apply to join EDU-Talk, the Evo-Devo Universe scholarly discussion community on Google Groups, please complete the following brief questions and email them to list moderator Clement Vidal.

EDU-Talk Join Questions (these will be posted by the moderator as your New Member Introduction)

1. Name:
2. Email address (to be used on Google Groups):
3. City (or cities) and country (or countries) of residence:
4. Personal and/or professional websites (if any):
5. Education, experience, or affiliations relevant to EDU Themes or Questions (1 paragraph or more):
6. Research interests with respect to EDU Themes or Questions (1 paragraph or more):
7. Publications (peer-reviewed, trade, or other) related to EDU Themes or Questions. Please provide open access links where available.

Optional:

1. What are your 10 favorite books/papers? Why?
2. Do you have any initial advice or feedback to improve management of the community?
3. We would love to list you on our People page. If interested, please provide one short sentence describing your research, and your institutional affiliation(s) if any.

Thank you for your patience in allowing a few days for your submission to be processed. If accepted, you will receive a "Welcome to EDU-Talk" message in your email and a link to the Google group with posting instructions, threaded discussions and searchable archives. The (very brief is fine!) answers you provide in Questions 1-7 (plus favorite books/papers, optional) will be posted to the list by the moderator as your New Member Introduction. If not accepted, you will be informed by a list moderator. There are minimal scholarship and research relevancy requirements for list members.

We are particularly seeking cosmologists, physicists, chemists, theoretical and applied biologists, neuroscientists, cognitive and social scientists, computer scientists, technology scholars, philosophers, systems theorists, network scientists, complexity theorists, and other scholars interested in exploring and critiquing models, hypotheses, and questions relating to the evolutionary (or quasi-evolutionary) and developmental (or quasi-developmental) physical, informational, and computational processes in the universe and its subsystems. We explore systems any level of hierarchy, scale of analysis, and structural or functional domain. A particular area of interest is how networks manage creative-exploratory evolutionary and conservative-exploitative developmental processes in service to adaptiveness.

A Brief Note On Scope: The topics of non-naturalistic teleology, intelligent design, supernaturalism, theology, evolutionary studies in religious beliefs, and science and spirituality convergence are at present outside the scope of our community. Hypotheses of directionality (systemic trajectory), orthogenesis (systemic improvement), teleology (goals encoded in the universe as a system) and teleonomy (goals encoded in adaptive systems in our particular universe) may be discussed, but only from naturalistic, evolutionary or developmental perspectives, with the aim to find quantifiable, testable, and falsifiable models or hypotheses, or if not presently falsifiable, hypotheses that are demonstrably consilient with current science. Challenging topics in informational and computational complexity (intelligence, mind, consciousness, morality, culture) should strive to show relation to known or proposed structure and process in natural systems (physical, chemical, biological, cultural, technological), and to explore empirical/measurable/testable implications of the precepts. Please see Themes and Questions for any other questions about the scope of the EDU community, and EDU Talk Introduction and Posting Rules for general questions on posting to the list.

Privacy Notice: All personal information that is shared in the EDU-Talk community is confidential to the group. EDU-Talk follows the Chatham House Rule to encourage open discussion. You are free to publicly use any scholarly information discussed in EDU-Talk, but to encourage free discussion, neither the verbatim quotations of participants, nor the identity or affiliation of group members (attribution) may be disclosed outside the group without explicit consent. Thank you.