Self-Organization as a New Paradigm in Evolutionary Biology From Theory to Applied Cases in the Tree of Life

Anne Dambricourt Malassé (PhD 1987 in paleoanthropology, Accreditation to Supervise Research 2011) is born in 1959 at Neuilly-sur-Seine (France). She is researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and attached to the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), Paris, since 1990. The research center is housed by the Institute of Human Paleontology, a Foundation Albert 1st Prince of Monaco (1910). Her research has been focusing more than 30 years to the evolution of the face and the skull base in the human lineage. She has put in light their morphodynamic links in relation to the neural crest cell migration, the bending of the chondrocranium and the straightening of the neural tube, i.e. the verticalization of the cranio-caudal axis. This new approach opened human paleontology to the sciences of complexity and nonlinear dynamic systems, the mathematical modelling of unstable systems and the homeotic genes. Her dynamical and geometrical approach wasstrongly supported by René Thom (Fields Medal) and has important repercussions in dento-maxillo-facial orthopedics and posturology. She has been teaching since 1990 at the postgraduate level (NMNH, René Descartes University, Aix-Marseille University) and has supervised more than 40 predoctoral (French DEA) and doctoral theses. Since 2007, she has conducted seminars in prehistory and paleoanthropology at the Doctoral School of NMNH. More than 20 years of fieldworks in Pakistan then in India, have led her to the discovery of the oldest human activities in Asia, in the Indian Sub-himalayan piedmonts (butchery and stone tools making activities dated to 2.8 Ma). She is currently leading the program “Siwaliks” with two Research Units of the CNRS, the “Natural history of prehistoric Man” laboratory, NMNH  and the “Geosciences” laboratory of Paris-Saclay University. She has initiated and co-founded the association FREHOPS, “Research Federation on Human Evolution, Osteopathy and Posture to Serve Health”.