Whether it be designing treatments that selectively target pathological cells or identifying when species are at risk due to an ecological shift, throughout the life and behavioral sciences researchers are forced to grapple with how agent-environment dynamics lead to particular fates. What is it that ties state to fate? Are there organizing principles behind these mappings that could be leveraged to uncover potential interventions? What is it that separates a living system from its disintegration? All of these questions fall under the purview of viability theory, a broad and interdisciplinary endeavor focused on rigorously characterizing how the dynamics and limits of life interact.
Our core focuses within viability theory at Agora include the development and application of viability space decomposition (a theoretical framework that derives manifolds to separate states with distinct fate outcomes) and investigations into intrinsic viability (how the life-death boundary is generated as an emergent phenomenon). We build our theories to account for the fundamentally multi-scale nature of agential dynamics, flexibly combining the influences of physiological, behavioral, and environmental variables, with the last of these even including couplings with other agents. This allows us to analyze a variety of systems, ranging from cells and ecological communities.
Investigators
Connor McShaffrey, Indiana University Bloomington (cmcshaffrey@agorabiology.com)
Eden Forbes, University of Vermont (ejforbes@agorabiology.com)
Collaborators
Randall Beer, Indiana University Bloomington
Eran Agmon, University of Connecticut Health
Relevant Publications
McShaffrey, C., & Beer, R. D. (2026). Viability Space Decomposition: A geometric partition of survival outcomes in single-and multi-agent systems. arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.16753. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.16753
McShaffrey, C., Agmon, E., & Beer, R. D. (2026). Matters of life and death in computational cell biology. npj Systems Biology and Applications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41540-026-00718-y
Forbes, E. J., & McShaffrey, C. (2026). Analyzing minimum viable populations in deterministic community models using viability space decomposition. bioRxiv, 2026-05. https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.05.19.726018
Beer, R. D., McShaffrey, C., & Gaul, T. M. (2024, July). Deriving the intrinsic viability constraint of an emergent individual from first principles. In Artificial Life Conference Proceedings 36. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.1162/isal_a_00739
McShaffrey, C., & Beer, R. D. (2025, October). Shaking up viability space: Stochasticity and survival in the transient. In Artificial Life Conference Proceedings 37. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.1162/ISAL.a.898