Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Theory

One central theme of my research is the conceptual foundation of evolutionary theory. Many of the concepts used in evolutionary biology have been tailored to particular organisms. I am interested in developing those concepts once they have been freed from the specificities of the organisms to which they have classically been applied. For instance, the concepts of fitness and heritability have been used primarily in the context of multicellular organisms, which often reproduce sexually. In several publications, I propose extensions of those concepts to other evolutionary contexts, such as settings where the entities of a population do not reproduce.