Way back in the late 2000s, I was working in the philosophy department at the Australian National University. I had just finished my PhD, writing about levels of organisation in biology, and (with a lot of help) had scored a post-doc position in the same department. As as post-doc, I was expected provide some informal tuition in philosophy of biology to current PhD students. One afternoon, I was teaching a section on developmental systems theory. The gist of explaining why thinking of genomes as programs or instructions was misleading.
As I talked I realised just how unsatisfactory I found it all. It wasn’t that I thought genes were sufficient to give an explanation of xx. Rather, it was that the rejection of Rejecting the parity thesis. There seemed to be a marked difference between the roles of XXX and the other resources.
I had a background in programming, and what I knew about gene regulation closely resembled some common ways patterns At the same time, it seemed obvious that there was something crucial about self-organisation. But the arguments against genocentrism seemed pitch self-organisation as a contender against genes and natural selection. I wondered how they fitted together.
It is now some 20 years later, and I have been thinking about these ideas ever since, despite now working in a non-Academic job as data scientist. This website is my attempt to corral everything into one place.
I wanted to do two things. First, to present a clear argument. Second, rather than just argue for these ideas, I wanted to model them. Mostly, for my own satisfaction. As I don’t trust. Hard to reason about this. Bulid some tools to help reason about this. So much stuff goin on together.
The ideas on the website have been brewing in some form for over a decade.
Modeling Code
Python etc.
Who Am I
I am [Brett Calcott][brett], a philosopher of science and a software engineer. My research focuses on how complex biological organisation emerges from simple beginnings.
Acknowledgments
The germ of many of these ideas, and the initial models, were developed during postdoctoral positions at the KLI in Vienna, with Paul Griffiths at the University of Sydney, in Joshua Epstein’s group at Johns Hopkins Centre for Emergency Medicine, and at the Centre for Biology and Society, ASU with Manfred Laubichler. I’m grateful to these people and institutions, and to many others who supported me during my embryonic stages in philosophy. I’m especially indebted to Kim Sterelny, who kick-started my interest in these ideas, and supported my early academic career.
Citation
If you use or refer to material on this website, please cite it as:
Calcott, B. (2026). Minimal Epigenesis (Website version v2026.02.21-17-g5b98072-dirty). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18719054