Richard Boyle
Post-Doctoral Research Associate
- Earth System Modelling Group
- College of Life and Environmental Sciences
- University of Exeter
- Hatherly Laboratories
- Prince of Wales Road
- Exeter
- EX4 4PS
- UK
- +44 (0)1392 722633
Research Interests and Background
CV
BA Biological Sciences, Oxford 2002.
MRes Mathematical Biology, Royal Holloway University of London, 2004.
PhD Earth System Modelling, University of East Anglia, 2008.
My interests mostly relate to biogeochemistry and evolutionary theory:
■Gaia and natural selection, coevolution of life and the environment.
■Levels of selection, evolution of altruism.
■Major transitions in biogeochemistry during Earth history and how they relate to biological evolution
■Origin/definitions of life and quantifying the possibility of astrobiology.
I think that it would be useful to build ties between the population-level ‘information’-based properties of life (i.e. heritable variation causing differential survival), and the individual-level physiological properties (homeostasis, entropy production, hierarchical compartmentalisation, stability, control).
I have published work on altruism in extreme environments, and think that it is probable that the proliferation of the Ediacaran macrobiota (with implications for the subsequent cambrian explosion) , was directly driven by the planetary-scale glaciations that happened at this time – in short, that snowball Earth directly caused the evolution of primitive animals, by driving uniquely strong kin selection for intercellular cooperation. In general I think that useful perspectives on evolutionary trade-offs can be gained from looking to the dynamics of the abiotic environment and by thinking in a more physiologically explicit way.
I don’t like complicated models very much, and mostly use minimal proof-of-principle evolutionary models and simple box models for the geochemistry. At the moment I’m thinking about major changes in biogeochemistry and evolution at the end of the Proterozoic. This period is interesting because it seems to have concluded with the complete oxygenation of the ocean, loss of susceptibility to snowball Earth glaciations, colonisation of the land surface by life, prelude to the Cambrian explosion and subsequent origin of predation, and changes in the geochemical cycling of important elements like N, S, and perhaps P – all within a relatively short space of geologic time. The purpose of the current project is to determine what if any causal links explain this temporal overlap.