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  1. Intentional systems in cognitive ethology: The 'panglossian paradigm' defended.Daniel C. Dennett - 1983 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (3):343-90.
    Ethologists and others studying animal behavior in a spirit are in need of a descriptive language and method that are neither anachronistically bound by behaviorist scruples nor prematurely committed to particular Just such an interim descriptive method can be found in intentional system theory. The use of intentional system theory is illustrated with the case of the apparently communicative behavior of vervet monkeys. A way of using the theory to generate data - including usable, testable data - is sketched. The (...)
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  • Virtue signalling is virtuous.Neil Levy - 2020 - Synthese 198 (10):9545-9562.
    The accusation of virtue signalling is typically understood as a serious charge. Those accused usually respond by attempting to show that they are doing no such thing. In this paper, I argue that we ought to embrace the charge, rather than angrily reject it. I argue that this response can draw support from cognitive science, on the one hand, and from social epistemology on the other. I claim that we may appropriately concede that what we are doing is virtue signalling, (...)
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  • Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures.David M. Buss - 1989 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (1):1-14.
    Contemporary mate preferences can provide important clues to human reproductive history. Little is known about which characteristics people value in potential mates. Five predictions were made about sex differences in human mate preferences based on evolutionary conceptions of parental investment, sexual selection, human reproductive capacity, and sexual asymmetries regarding certainty of paternity versus maternity. The predictions centered on how each sex valued earning capacity, ambition— industriousness, youth, physical attractiveness, and chastity. Predictions were tested in data from 37 samples drawn from (...)
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  • Contrasting approaches to a theory of learning.Timothy D. Johnston - 1981 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4 (1):125-139.
    The general process view of learning, which guided research into learning for the first half of this century, has come under attack in recent years from several quarters. One form of criticism has come from proponents of the so-called biological boundaries approach to learning. These theorists have presented a variety of data showing that supposedly general laws of learning may in fact be limited in their applicability to different species and learning tasks, and they argue that the limitations are drawn (...)
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  • The evolution of misbelief.Ryan McKay & Daniel Dennett - 2009 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (6):493–510; discussion 510–61.
    From an evolutionary standpoint, a default presumption is that true beliefs are adaptive and misbeliefs maladaptive. But if humans are biologically engineered to appraise the world accurately and to form true beliefs, how are we to explain the routine exceptions to this rule? How can we account for mistaken beliefs, bizarre delusions, and instances of self-deception? We explore this question in some detail. We begin by articulating a distinction between two general types of misbelief: those resulting from a breakdown in (...)
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  • Categories, life, and thinking.Michael T. Ghiselin - 1981 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4 (2):269-283.
    Classifying is a fundamental operation in the acquisition of knowledge. Taxonomic theory can help students of cognition, evolutionary psychology, ethology, anatomy, and sociobiology to avoid serious mistakes, both practical and theoretical. More positively, it helps in generating hypotheses useful to a wide range of disciplines. Composite wholes, such as species and societies, are “individuals” in the logical sense, and should not be treated as if they were classes. A group of analogous features is a natural kind, but a group of (...)
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  • Précis of The evolution of human sexuality.Donald Symons - 1980 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (2):171-181.
    Patterns in the data on human sexuality support the hypothesis that the bases of sexual emotions are products of natural selection. Most generally, the universal existence of laws, rules, and gossip about sex, the pervasive interest in other people's sex lives, the widespread seeking of privacy for sexual intercourse, and the secrecy that normally permeates sexual conduct imply a history of reproductive competition. More specifically, the typical differences between men and women in sexual feelings can be explained most parsimoniously as (...)
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  • Précis of Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature.Philip Kitcher - 1987 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10 (1):61-71.
    The debate about the credentials of sociobiology has persisted because scholars have failed to distinguish the varieties of sociobiology and because too little attention has been paid to the details of the arguments that are supposed to support the provocative claims about human social behavior. I seek to remedy both deficiencies. After analysis of the relationships among different kinds of sociobiology and contemporary evolutionary theory, I attempt to show how some of the studies of the behavior of nonhuman animals meet (...)
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  • Culture and the evolution of human cooperation.Robert Boyd & Peter J. Richerson - unknown
    Receive free email alerts when new articles cite this article - sign up in the box at the top here right-hand corner of the article or click..
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  • How did morality evolve?William Irons - 1991 - Zygon 26 (1):49-89.
    This paper presents and criticizes. Alexander's evolutionary theory of morality (1987). Earlier research, on which Alexander's theory is based, is also reviewed. The propensity to create moral systems evolved because it allowed ancestral humans to limit conflict within cooperating groups and thus form larger groups, which were advantageous because of intense between-group competition. Alexander sees moral codes as contractual, and the primary criticism of his theory is that moral codes are not completely contractual but also coercive. Ways of evaluating Alexander's (...)
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  • On mechanisms of cultural evolution, and the evolution of language and the common law.Michael T. Ghiselin - 1982 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 5 (1):11-11.
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  • Social versus reproductive success: The central theoretical problem of human sociobiology.Daniel R. Vining - 1986 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 9 (1):167-187.
    The fundamental postulate of sociobiology is that individuals exploit favorable environments to increase their genetic representation in the next generation. The data on fertility differentials among contemporary humans are not cotvietent with this postulate. Given the importance ofHomo sapiensas an animal species in the natural world today, these data constitute particularly challenging and interesting problem for both human sociobiology and sociobiology as a whole.The first part of this paper reviews the evidence showing an inverse relationship between reproductive fitness and “endowment” (...)
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  • Security of infantile attachment as assessed in the “strange situation”: Its study and biological interpretation.Michael E. Lamb, Ross A. Thompson, William P. Gardner, Eric L. Charnov & David Estes - 1984 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7 (1):127-147.
    The Strange Situation procedure was developed by Ainsworth two decades agoas a means of assessing the security of infant-parent attachment. Users of the procedureclaim that it provides a way of determining whether the infant has developed species-appropriate adaptive behavior as a result of rearing in an evolutionary appropriate context, characterized by a sensitively responsive parent. Only when the parent behaves in the sensitive, species-appropriate fashion is the baby said to behave in the adaptive or secure fashion. Furthermore, when infants are (...)
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  • Lloyd Morgan's canon in evolutionary context.Michael T. Ghiselin - 1983 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (3):362-363.
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  • Elementary errors about evolution.Richard C. Lewontin - 1983 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (3):367-368.
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  • Mate selection: Economics and affection.Kim Wallen - 1989 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (1):37-38.
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  • A framework for the unification of the behavioral sciences.Herbert Gintis - 2007 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (1):1-16.
    The various behavioral disciplines model human behavior in distinct and incompatible ways. Yet, recent theoretical and empirical developments have created the conditions for rendering coherent the areas of overlap of the various behavioral disciplines. The analytical tools deployed in this task incorporate core principles from several behavioral disciplines. The proposed framework recognizes evolutionary theory, covering both genetic and cultural evolution, as the integrating principle of behavioral science. Moreover, if decision theory and game theory are broadened to encompass other-regarding preferences, they (...)
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  • How Biology Became Social and What It Means for Social Theory.Maurizio Meloni - 2014 - The Sociological Review 62:593-614.
    In this paper I first offer a systematic outline of a series of conceptual novelties in the life-sciences that have favoured, over the last three decades, the emergence of a more social view of biology. I focus in particular on three areas of investigation: (1) technical changes in evolutionary literature that have provoked a rethinking of the possibility of altruism, morality and prosocial behaviours in evolution; (2) changes in neuroscience, from an understanding of the brain as an isolated data processor (...)
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  • Cladistic classification and functional explanation.P. E. Griffiths - 1994 - Philosophy of Science 61 (2):206-227.
    I adopt a cladistic view of species, and explore the possibility that there exists an equally valuable cladistic view of organismic traits. This suggestion seems to run counter to the stress on functional views of biological traits in recent work in philosophy and psychology. I show how the tension between these two views can be defused with a multilevel view of biological explanation. Despite the attractions of this compromise, I conclude that we must reject it, and adopt an essentially cladistic (...)
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  • Pick your poison: Historicism, essentialism, and emergentism in the definition of species.Arthur L. Caplan - 1981 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4 (2):285-286.
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  • Organism-environment mutuality epistemics, and the concept of an ecological niche.Thomas R. Alley - 1985 - Synthese 65 (3):411 - 444.
    The concept of an ecological niche (econiche) has been used in a variety of ways, some of which are incompatible with a relational or functional interpretation of the term. This essay seeks to standardize usage by limiting the concept to functional relations between organisms and their surroundings, and to revise the concept to include epistemic relations. For most organisms, epistemics are a vital aspect of their functional relationships to their surroundings and, hence, a major determinant of their econiche. Rejecting the (...)
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  • Does play matter? Functional and evolutionary aspects of animal and human play.Peter K. Smith - 1982 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 5 (1):139-155.
    In this paper I suggest that play is a distinctive behavioural category whose adaptive significance calls for explanation. Play primarily affords juveniles practice toward the exercise of later skills. Its benefits exceed its costs when sufficient practice would otherwise be unlikely or unsafe, as is particularly true with physical skills and socially competitive ones. Manipulative play with objects is a byproduct of increased intelligence, specifically selected for only in a few advanced primates, notably the chimpanzee.The adaptiveness of play in pongid (...)
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  • Altruism.Stephen Stich, John M. Doris & Erica Roedder - 2010 - In John Doris (ed.), Moral Psychology Handbook. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    We begin, in section 2, with a brief sketch of a cluster of assumptions about human desires, beliefs, actions, and motivation that are widely shared by historical and contemporary authors on both sides in the debate. With this as background, we’ll be able to offer a more sharply focused account of the debate. In section 3, our focus will be on links between evolutionary theory and the egoism/altruism debate. There is a substantial literature employing evolutionary theory on each side of (...)
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  • Science as an international system.Arthur C. Danto - 1983 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (3):359-360.
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  • A better way to deal with selection.B. F. Skinner - 1983 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (3):377-378.
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  • The quest for optimality: A positive heuristic of science?Paul J. H. Schoemaker - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):205-215.
    This paper examines the strengths and weaknesses of one of science's most pervasive and flexible metaprinciples;optimalityis used to explain utility maximization in economics, least effort principles in physics, entropy in chemistry, and survival of the fittest in biology. Fermat's principle of least time involves both teleological and causal considerations, two distinct modes of explanation resting on poorly understood psychological primitives. The rationality heuristic in economics provides an example from social science of the potential biases arising from the extreme flexibility of (...)
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  • Philosophical aspects of the group selection controversy.John Cassidy - 1978 - Philosophy of Science 45 (4):575-594.
    This article is primarily a study of the group selection controversy, with special emphasis on the period from 1962 to the present, and the rise of inclusive fitness theory. Interest is focused on the relations between individual fitness theory and other fitness theories and on the methodological imperatives used in the controversy over the status of these theories. An appendix formalizes the notion of "assertive part" which is used in the informal discussion of the methodological imperatives elicited from the controversy.
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  • Group selection and methodological individualism: A criticism of Watkins.Edward Reed - 1978 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 29 (3):256-262.
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  • Human suicide: a biological perspective.Denys deCatanzaro - 1980 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (2):265-272.
    Human suicide presents a fundamental problem for the scientific analysis of behavior. This problem has been neither appreciated nor confronted by research and theory. Almost all other behavior exhibited by humans and nonhumans can be viewed as supporting the behaving organism's biological fitness and advancing the welfare of its genes. Yet suicide acts against these ends, and does so more directly and unequivocally than any other form of maladaptive behavior. Four heuristic models are presented here to account for suicide in (...)
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  • Sexual strategies and social-class differences in fitness in modern industrial societies.Hillard Kaplan & Kim Hill - 1986 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 9 (1):198-201.
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  • Wealth, polygyny, and reproductive success.Richard Dawkins - 1986 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 9 (1):190-191.
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  • Proximate mechanisms and distal objectives.John Hartung - 1986 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 9 (1):196-196.
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  • The psychology of human mate preferences.Donald Symons - 1989 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (1):34-35.
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  • A fourth approach to the study of learning: Are “processes” really necessary?John C. Malone - 1981 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4 (1):151-152.
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  • Cognitive ethology: Theory or poetry?Jonathan Bennett - 1983 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (3):356-358.
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  • Intersocietal variation in the mate preferences of males and females.Norval D. Glenn - 1989 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (1):21-23.
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  • Mating preferences surveys: Ethnographic follow-up would be a good next step.William Irons - 1989 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (1):24-24.
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  • Homo sapiens: A good fit to theory, but posing some enigmas.Janet L. Leonard - 1989 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (1):26-27.
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  • The sociobiology of human mate preference: On testing evolutionary hypotheses.Nadav Nur - 1989 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (1):28-29.
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  • Missing link in mate preference studies: Reproduction.Brian A. Gladue - 1989 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (1):21-21.
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  • Darwinism versus neo-Darwinism in the study of human mate preferences.Michael T. Ghiselin - 1989 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (1):20-20.
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  • James Gibson's ecological revolution in psychology.Edward S. Reed & Rebecca K. Jones - 1979 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 9 (2):189-204.
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  • Mating behavior: Moves of mind or molecules?Helmuth Nyborg & Charlotte Boeggild - 1989 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (1):29-30.
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  • General process theory, ecology, and animal-human continuity: A cognitive perspective.Janet L. Lachman & Roy Lachman - 1981 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4 (1):149-150.
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  • Species as individuals: Logical, biological, and philosophical problems.Michael Ruse - 1981 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4 (2):299-300.
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  • Evolutionary theories of morality and the manipulative use of signals.Lee Cronk1 - 1994 - Zygon 29 (1):81-101.
    Several attempts have recently been made to explain moral systems and moral sentiments in light of evolutionary biological theory. It may be helpful to modify and extend this project with the help of a theory of communication developed by ethologists. The core of this approach is the idea that signals are best seen as attempts to manipulate others rather than as attempts to inform them. This addition helps to clarify some problematic areas in the evolutionary study of morals, and it (...)
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  • Steps toward an ethological science.Mark S. Seidenberg - 1983 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (3):377-377.
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  • Evolutionary causation: how proximate is ultimate?Richard E. Whalen - 1980 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (2):202-203.
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  • Altruism across disciplines: one word, multiple meanings.Christine Clavien & Michel Chapuisat - 2013 - Biology and Philosophy 28 (1):125-140.
    Altruism is a deep and complex phenomenon that is analysed by scholars of various disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, biology, evolutionary anthropology and experimental economics. Much confusion arises in current literature because the term altruism covers variable concepts and processes across disciplines. Here we investigate the sense given to altruism when used in different fields and argumentative contexts. We argue that four distinct but related concepts need to be distinguished: (a) psychological altruism , the genuine motivation to improve others’ interests and (...)
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  • Competition theory, evolution, and the concept of an ecological niche.Thomas R. Alley - 1982 - Acta Biotheoretica 31 (3):165-179.
    This article examines some of the main tenets of competition theory in light of the theory of evolution and the concept of an ecological niche. The principle of competitive exclusion and the related assumption that communities exist at competitive equilibrium - fundamental parts of many competition theories and models - may be violated if non-equilibrium conditions exist in natural communities or are incorporated into competition models. Furthermore, these two basic tenets of competition theory are not compatible with the theory of (...)
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