Postdoctoral researcher
Theoretical Biology Group
Department of Evolutionary Genetics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Leipzig, Germany
Ph.D., Bergstrom Lab
Department of Biology
University of Washington
Seattle, WA
Research interests
The value of information in an uncertain environment. Desert annual plants live in a highly unpredictable environment; in some years there simply isn't enough rain to successfully germinate and reproduce. One strategy they use is called seed banking, in which only a fraction of viable seeds germinates in any given year. The remainder wait for another year, so a lineage can persist even in case of drought. This kind of random-choice strategy, known as bet-hedging, works well when it's impossible to predict drought years. Sometimes, however, environmental cues can help determine how likely a drought is. How could the seed best use the information those cues provide, and what's the adaptive value of doing so?
The evolution of meaning in animal communication. Animals communicate with each other in an enormous variety of ways, but do the signals they use have any meaning, in the sense that nouns in human language do? The famous predator-specific alarm calls of vervet monkeys are a particularly nice example: the way that individuals produce and respond to particular calls suggests that one call means leopard, one call means snake, and a third means eagle. In an evolutionary setting where one individual produces a signal and a second individual can react to that signal, how might the appearance of meaning emerge?
Publications
Adaptation in a changing environment: Phenotypic diversity in response to environmental uncertainty and information. (2008)
M. C. Donaldson-Matasci.
Dissertation, University of Washington.
[ pdf ]
Phenotypic diversity as an adaptation to environmental uncertainty. (2008)
M. C. Donaldson-Matasci, M. Lachmann and C. T. Bergstrom.
Evolutionary Ecology Research 10 (4): 493-515.
[ via EER ] [ pdf ]
The evolution of functionally referential meaning in a structured world. (2007)
M. C. Donaldson, M. Lachmann and C. T. Bergstrom.
Journal of Theoretical Biology 246 (2): 225-233.
[ doi:10.1016/j.jtbi.2006.12.031 ] [ pdf ]