Nathalie Gontier - resources

Nathalie Gontier is a researcher interested in evolutionary epistemology. She has a background in both philosophy and anthropology. Her main research interests are philosophy of evolutionary biology - symbiogenesis, punctuated equilibrium and abiogenesis - evolutionary epistemology and the origin and evolution of language.

She's one of a small minority of researchers who actually understands the role of symbiosis in cultural evolution. Cultural evolution researchers are rare. Those who are up to speed with the significance of symbiosis are also uncommon. The intersection of these groups seems to be very small sometimes - but Nathalie is one of the researchers with a foot firmly in both groups.

Nathalie's home page is here.

Here papers on the topic are great. I particularly like her 2007 and 2012 pieces on "universal symbiogenesis". Here's a few of her papers:

Papers

• Gontier, Nathalie (2006) Evolutionary Epistemology. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  
• Gontier, Nathalie (2006) An epistemological inquiry into the ‘what is language’ question and the ‘what did language evolve for’ question. In: Cangelosi, A., Smith, A., & Smith, K. The evolution of language: proceedings of the 6th international conference (EVOLANG 6), pp. 107-114. London: World Scientific.
  
• Gontier, Nathalie (2006) Evolutionary epistemology and the origin and evolution of language – taking symbiogenesis seriously.
• Gontier, Nathalie (2007) Universal symbiogenesis: a genuine alternative to universal selectionist accounts.
• Gontier, Nathalie (2010) Darwin's legacy
• Gontier, Nathalie (2012) Introducing universal symbiogenesis