Therefore We Are

Diving into the behavior of symbiotic organisms

A coral colony is a freak of nature.

Millions of tiny coral polyps form massive underwater reefs, but they couldn’t do it without their symbiotic algae partners and the bacteria and viruses that live among them.

Corals embody a host of conundrums for the scientific thinker. How do we define an individual “coral”? Where does one organism begin and another end? How do these creatures complicate our understanding of evolution, which traditionally views individual organisms as the unit of selection? What can corals teach us about other organisms where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts? Like, for example, humans.

“I just love weird things that break our common notions about biology,” says Assistant Professor of Philosophy Derek Skillings, grinning through his jungly beard.

Dr. Skillings is the lead investigator on a new three-year, $600,000 grant from the John Templeton Foundation for a project entitled, “The Emergence and Evolution of Goal-Directed Behavior in Collective Entities.” It is the largest grant ever received by UNCG’s Department of Philosophy

The grant is Skillings’ second from the Templeton Foundation. His first focused on understanding “the physiology, ecology, and evolution of holobiont systems.”  

Story highlights

UNCG researcher investigates goal-directed behavior in collective entities, like biofilms and corals – and scores the largest grant in the department of philosophy’s history.

  • Dr. Forgive Avorgbedor demonstrating the use of a Vicorder, a device to assess arterial stiffness on PhD student Favour Omondi while Esther Leerkes observes

The Team in “I”

“A holobiont is a term for a host organism and all of the things that live inside of it and on it,” explains Skillings, who also holds adjunct positions in biology and in geography, environment, and sustainability.

“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 coral and cows – are holobionts. From one perspective, a human is a unified organism. From another, we are 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. 

As with a coral reef, the complexity of the project requires different specialists. Skillings has assembled Dr. Ben Allen of Emmanuel College, Dr. Rory Smead of Northeastern University, and Dr. Patrick Forber of Tufts University to aid him in examining how collective entities like ant colonies, corals, or human societies, behave and evolve.

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.

Philosopher of biology

Like the creatures that fascinate him, Skillings defies easy classification. As a first-generation college student at a regional public university in Minnesota, he majored in biology, chemistry, and philosophy. As he approached graduation, he wasn’t sure which path he should take: biology or philosophy?

“I figured I could always do philosophy on the side,” he says of his initial choice. “It’s harder to do marine conservation genetics and coral reef biology out of my garage.”

He entered a PhD program at the University of Hawaii. As he explored deep-water reefs on month-long research cruises, Skillings grew more interested in philosophical questions about “biological individuality” and the “species problem” – how to distinguish between different types of organisms. He wound up with a master’s in philosophy along with his PhD. The next step was a PhD in Philosophy from the City University of New York.

Today Skillings considers himself primarily a philosopher of biology, whose experience with real-world field research and genetic analysis grounds his philosophical work.  

In addition to formal philosophical inquiry and mathematical modeling, the new grant will support a series of week-long events bringing more philosophers and biologists together to broaden the conversation.

Like an ocean research cruise, where scientists undertake a variety of simultaneous, diverse research projects with an all-hands-on-deck ethos, Skillings hopes the shop talks will be “serendipity generators.”

“When you bring people together like this, you make space available for cool things to happen. 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.”


Story by Chad Fogleman
Photography by David Lee Row

This project was made possible through the support of grant #63454 from the John Templeton Foundation. Founded in 1987, the foundation supports interdisciplinary research and catalyzes conversations that inspire awe and wonder.

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