Date and Time: June 7, Tuesday, 12:00 a.m.

Location: Carlos Santamaría Building, Room B14

Speaker: Argyris Arnellos

Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, (KLI) Klosterneuburg, Austria
e-­‐mail: argyris.arnellos@kli.ac.at

Title: The body complexity thesis: multicellular hurdles for animal cognition

Abstract: Animal – and thus multicellular (MC) – agents and their relation to a macroscopic environment composed of various media available for locomotion and recognizable objects are taken by many to be central to cognition. However, as I will claim, neither animals as (freely moving) MC organizations nor the macroscopic environment in which they act can be taken as a self-evident starting-point for the evolution of cognition. I will argue that the evolution of animal cognition as is exemplified in MC organisms that appeared during the Cambrian explosion requires a set of pre-adaptations that emerge in a complex body capable for sensing and moving in a macroscopic environment. Specifically, I will discuss how an epithelial organization and its properties can be cast as the key enabling factor for the emergence and evolution of the animal sensorimotor interaction, and also how a focus on the epithelial organization integrates animal sensing and moving with the physiology and development of its MC body; all essential features of the organizational basis of MC agents (Arnellos & Moreno, 2015; 2016).

The talk is partially based on recent work:

• Arnellos A, Moreno A (2015) Multicellular agency: an organizational view. Biology and Philosophy 30(3): 333-357. doi: 10.1007/s10539-015-9484-0 
• Arnellos A, Moreno A (2016) Integrating constitution and interaction in the transition from unicellular to multicellular organisms. In: Niklas K, Newman S (eds) Multicellularity: origins and evolution. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, pp 249-275