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Exaptation–A missing term in the science of form

In David L. Hull & Michael Ruse, The philosophy of biology. New York: Oxford University Press (1998)

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  1. Human landscapes: contributions to a pragmatist anthropology.Roberta Dreon - 2022 - Albany: SUNY Press.
    The first work to offer a comprehensive pragmatist anthropology focusing on sensibility, habits, and human experience as contingently yet irreversibly enlanguaged.
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  • Evolution, selection, and cognition: From learning to parameter setting in biology and in the study of language.Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini - 1989 - Cognition 31 (1):1-44.
    Most biologists and some cognitive scientists have independently reached the conclusion that there is no such thing as learning in the traditional “instructive‘ sense. This is, admittedly, a somewhat extreme thesis, but I defend it herein the light of data and theories jointly extracted from biology, especially from evolutionary theory and immunology, and from modern generative grammar. I also point out that the general demise of learning is uncontroversial in the biological sciences, while a similar consensus has not yet been (...)
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  • The evolution of multiple memory systems.David F. Sherry & Daniel L. Schacter - 1987 - Psychological Review 94 (4):439-454.
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  • The function of morality.Nicholas Smyth - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (5):1127-1144.
    What is the function of morality? On this question, something approaching a consensus has recently emerged. Impressed by developments in evolutionary theory, many philosophers now tell us that the function of morality is to reduce social tensions, and to thereby enable a society to efficiently promote the well-being of its members. In this paper, I subject this consensus to rigorous scrutiny, arguing that the functional hypothesis in question is not well supported. In particular, I attack the supposed evidential relation between (...)
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  • Adaptationism and the Logic of Research Questions: How to Think Clearly About Evolutionary Causes.Elisabeth A. Lloyd - 2015 - Biological Theory 10 (4):DOI: 10.1007/s13752-015-0214-2.
    This article discusses various dangers that accompany the supposedly benign methods in behavioral evoltutionary biology and evolutionary psychology that fall under the framework of "methodological adaptationism." A "Logic of Research Questions" is proposed that aids in clarifying the reasoning problems that arise due to the framework under critique. The live, and widely practiced, " evolutionary factors" framework is offered as the key comparison and alternative. The article goes beyond the traditional critique of Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin, to (...)
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  • Agential Teleosemantics.Tiago Rama - 2022 - Dissertation, Autonomous University of Barcelona
    The field of the philosophy of biology is flourishing in its aim to evaluate and rethink the view inherited from the previous century ---the Modern Synthesis. Different research areas and theories have come to the fore in the last decades in order to account for different biological phenomena that, in the first instance, fall beyond the explanatory scope of the Modern Synthesis. This thesis is anchored and motivated by this revolt in the philosophy of biology. -/- The central target in (...)
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  • Philosophy of Psychiatry.Jonathan Y. Tsou - 2021 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    Jonathan Y. Tsou examines and defends positions on central issues in philosophy of psychiatry. The positions defended assume a naturalistic and realist perspective and are framed against skeptical perspectives on biological psychiatry. Issues addressed include the reality of mental disorders; mechanistic and disease explanations of abnormal behavior; definitions of mental disorder; natural and artificial kinds in psychiatry; biological essentialism and the projectability of psychiatric categories; looping effects and the stability of mental disorders; psychiatric classification; and the validity of the DSM's (...)
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  • Without Good Reason: The Rationality Debate in Philosophy and Cognitive Science.Edward Stein - 1996 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press UK.
    Are humans rational? Various experiments performed over the last several decades have been interpreted as showing that humans are irrational we make significant and consistent errors in logical reasoning, probabilistic reasoning, similarity judgements, and risk-assessment, to name a few areas. But can these experiments establish human irrationality, or is it a conceptual truth that humans must be rational, as various philosophers have argued? In this book, Edward Stein offers a clear critical account of this debate about rationality in philosophy and (...)
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  • (1 other version)Function without purpose.Ron Amundson & George V. Lauder - 1994 - Biology and Philosophy 9 (4):443-469.
    Philosophers of evolutionary biology favor the so-called etiological concept of function according to which the function of a trait is its evolutionary purpose, defined as the effect for which that trait was favored by natural selection. We term this the selected effect (SE) analysis of function. An alternative account of function was introduced by Robert Cummins in a non-evolutionary and non-purposive context. Cummins''s account has received attention but little support from philosophers of biology. This paper will show that a similar (...)
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  • Functions and mechanisms: a perspectivalist view.Carl F. Craver - 2013 - In Philippe Huneman, Functions: selection and mechanisms. Springer. pp. 133--158.
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  • On the evolution of language and generativity.Michael C. Corballis - 1992 - Cognition 44 (3):197-226.
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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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  • The Emotional Mind: the affective roots of culture and cognition.Stephen T. Asma & Rami Gabriel - 2019 - Harvard University Press.
    Tracing the leading role of emotions in the evolution of the mind, a philosopher and a psychologist pair up to reveal how thought and culture owe less to our faculty for reason than to our capacity to feel. Many accounts of the human mind concentrate on the brain’s computational power. Yet, in evolutionary terms, rational cognition emerged only the day before yesterday. For nearly 200 million years before humans developed a capacity to reason, the emotional centers of the brain were (...)
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  • The cognitive unconscious: An evolutionary perspective.Arthur S. Reber - 1992 - Consciousness and Cognition 1 (2):93-133.
    In recent decades it has become increasingly clear that a substantial amount of cognitive work goes on independent of consciousness. The research has been carried out largely under two rubrics, implicit learning and implicit memory. The former has been concerned primarily with the acquisition of knowledge independent of awareness and the latter with the manner in which memories not readily available to conscious recall or recognition play a role in behavior; collectively these operations comprise the essential functions of the cognitive (...)
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  • The Machine Conception of the Organism in Development and Evolution: A Critical Analysis.Daniel J. Nicholson - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 48:162-174.
    This article critically examines one of the most prevalent metaphors in modern biology, namely the machine conception of the organism (MCO). Although the fundamental differences between organisms and machines make the MCO an inadequate metaphor for conceptualizing living systems, many biologists and philosophers continue to draw upon the MCO or tacitly accept it as the standard model of the organism. This paper analyses the specific difficulties that arise when the MCO is invoked in the study of development and evolution. In (...)
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  • The function debate in philosophy.Arno Wouters - 2005 - Acta Biotheoretica 53 (2):123-151.
    This paper reviews the debate on the notion of biological function and on functional explanation as this takes place in philosophy. It describes the different perspectives, issues, intuitions, theories and arguments that have emerged. The author shows that the debate has been too heavily influenced by the concerns of a naturalistic philosophy of mind and argues that in order to improve our understanding of biology the attention should be shifted from the study of intuitions to the study of the actual (...)
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  • Fitness and function.D. M. Walsh - 1996 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 (4):553-574.
    According to historical theories of biological function, a trait's function is determined by natural selection in the past. I argue that, in addition to historical functions, ahistorical functions ought to be recognized. I propose a theory of biological function which accommodates both. The function of a trait is the way it contributes to fitness and fitness can only be determined relative to a selective regime. Therefore, the function of a trait can only be specified relative to a selective regime. Apart (...)
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  • The evolution of the language faculty: Clarifications and implications.W. Tecumseh Fitch, Marc D. Hauser & Noam Chomsky - 2005 - Cognition 97 (2):179-210.
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  • The historical turn in the study of adaptation.Paul E. Griffiths - 1996 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 (4):511-532.
    A number of philosophers and ‘evolutionary psychologists’ have argued that attacks on adaptationism in contemporary biology are misguided. These thinkers identify anti-adaptationism with advocacy of non-adaptive modes of explanation. They overlook the influence of anti-adaptationism in the development of more rigorous forms of adaptive explanation. Many biologists who reject adaptationism do not reject Darwinism. Instead, they have pioneered the contemporary historical turn in the study of adaptation. One real issue which remains unresolved amongst these methodological advances is the nature of (...)
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  • The biology and evolution of music: A comparative perspective.W. Tecumseh Fitch - 2006 - Cognition 100 (1):173-215.
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  • The mismeasure of machine: Synthetic biology and the trouble with engineering metaphors.Maarten Boudry & Massimo Pigliucci - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (4):660-668.
    The scientific study of living organisms is permeated by machine and design metaphors. Genes are thought of as the ‘‘blueprint’’ of an organism, organisms are ‘‘reverse engineered’’ to discover their functionality, and living cells are compared to biochemical factories, complete with assembly lines, transport systems, messenger circuits, etc. Although the notion of design is indispensable to think about adaptations, and engineering analogies have considerable heuristic value (e.g., optimality assumptions), we argue they are limited in several important respects. In particular, the (...)
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  • Consciousness and its function.David Rosenthal - 2008
    MS, under submission, derived from a Powerpoint presentation at a Conference on Consciousness, Memory, and Perception, in honor of Larry Weiskrantz, City University, London, September 15, 2006.
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  • Self-re-production and functionality.Gerhard Schlosser - 1998 - Synthese 116 (3):303-354.
    Function and teleology can be naturalized either by reference to systems with a particular type of organization or by reference to a particular kind of history. As functions are generally ascribed to states or traits according to their current role and regardless of their origin, etiological accounts are inappropriate. Here, I offer a systems-theoretical interpretation as a new version of an organizational account of functionality, which is more comprehensive than traditional cybernetic views and provides explicit criteria for empirically testable function (...)
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  • Précis of simple heuristics that make us Smart.Peter M. Todd & Gerd Gigerenzer - 2000 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (5):727-741.
    How can anyone be rational in a world where knowledge is limited, time is pressing, and deep thought is often an unattainable luxury? Traditional models of unbounded rationality and optimization in cognitive science, economics, and animal behavior have tended to view decision-makers as possessing supernatural powers of reason, limitless knowledge, and endless time. But understanding decisions in the real world requires a more psychologically plausible notion of bounded rationality. In Simple heuristics that make us smart (Gigerenzer et al. 1999), we (...)
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  • Is external memory memory? Biological memory and extended mind.Kourken Michaelian - 2012 - Consciousness and Cognition 21 (3):1154-1165.
    Clark and Chalmers claim that an external resource satisfying the following criteria counts as a memory: the agent has constant access to the resource; the information in the resource is directly available; retrieved information is automatically endorsed; information is stored as a consequence of past endorsement. Research on forgetting and metamemory shows that most of these criteria are not satisfied by biological memory, so they are inadequate. More psychologically realistic criteria generate a similar classification of standard putative external memories, but (...)
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  • The Temporal Orientation of Memory: It's Time for a Change of Direction.Stan Klein - 2013 - Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition 2:222-234.
    Common wisdom, philosophical analysis and psychological research share the view that memory is subjectively positioned toward the past: Specifically, memory enables one to become re-acquainted with the objects and events of his or her past. In this paper I call this assumption into question. As I hope to show, memory has been designed by natural selection not to relive the past, but rather to anticipate and plan for future contingencies -- a decidedly future-oriented mode of subjective temporality. This is not (...)
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  • A persistence enhancing propensity account of ecological function to explain ecosystem evolution.Antoine C. Dussault & Frédéric Bouchard - 2017 - Synthese 194 (4).
    We argue that ecology in general and biodiversity and ecosystem function research in particular need an understanding of functions which is both ahistorical and evolutionarily grounded. A natural candidate in this context is Bigelow and Pargetter’s evolutionary forward-looking account which, like the causal role account, assigns functions to parts of integrated systems regardless of their past history, but supplements this with an evolutionary dimension that relates functions to their bearers’ ability to thrive and perpetuate themselves. While Bigelow and Pargetter’s account (...)
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  • Beyond cognitive myopia: a patchwork approach to the concept of neural function.Philipp Haueis - 2018 - Synthese 195 (12):5373-5402.
    In this paper, I argue that looking at the concept of neural function through the lens of cognition alone risks cognitive myopia: it leads neuroscientists to focus only on mechanisms with cognitive functions that process behaviorally relevant information when conceptualizing “neural function”. Cognitive myopia tempts researchers to neglect neural mechanisms with noncognitive functions which do not process behaviorally relevant information but maintain and repair neural and other systems of the body. Cognitive myopia similarly affects philosophy of neuroscience because scholars overlook (...)
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  • Function and Teleology.Justin Garson - 2008 - In Sahorta Sarkar & Anya Plutynski, Companion to the Philosophy of Biology. Blackwell. pp. 525-549.
    This is a short overview of the biological functions debate in philosophy. While it was fairly comprehensive when it was written, my short book ​A Critical Overview of Biological Functions has largely supplanted it as a definitive and up-to-date overview of the debate, both because the book takes into account new developments since then, and because the length of the book allowed me to go into substantially more detail about existing views.
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  • Teleology then and now: The question of Kant’s relevance for contemporary controversies over function in biology.John Zammito - 2006 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37 (4):748-770.
    Kant -- drawing on his eighteenth-century predecessors -- provided a discerning and powerful characterization of what biologists had to explain in organic form. His difference from the rest is that he opined that was impossible to explain it. Its ’inscrutability’ was intrinsic. The third ’Critique’ essentially proposed the reduction of biology to a kind of prescientific descriptivism, doomed never to attain authentic scientificity. By contrast, for Locke, and ’a fortiori’ for Buffon and his followers, ’intrinsic purposiveness’ was a fact of (...)
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  • Beyond the Number Domain.Elizabeth M. Brannon Jessica F. Cantlon, Michael L. Platt - 2009 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13 (2):83.
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  • Making Knowledge in Synthetic Biology: Design Meets Kludge.Maureen A. O’Malley - 2009 - Biological Theory 4 (4):378-389.
    Synthetic biology is an umbrella term that covers a range of aims, approaches, and techniques. They are all brought together by common practices of analogizing, synthesizing, mechanicizing, and kludging. With a focus on kludging as the connection point between biology, engineering, and evolution, I show how synthetic biology’s successes depend on custom-built kludges and a creative, “make-it-work” attitude to the construction of biological systems. Such practices do not fit neatly, however, into synthetic biology’s celebration of rational design. Nor do they (...)
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  • Missing Concepts in Natural Selection Theory Reconstructions.Santiago Ginnobili - 2016 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 38 (3):1-33.
    The concept of fitness has generated a lot of discussion in philosophy of biology. There is, however, relative agreement about the need to distinguish at least two uses of the term: ecological fitness on the one hand, and population genetics fitness on the other. The goal of this paper is to give an explication of the concept of ecological fitness by providing a reconstruction of the theory of natural selection in which this concept was framed, that is, based on the (...)
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  • Evolving Concepts of Functional Localization.Joseph B. McCaffrey - 2023 - Philosophy Compass 18 (5):e12914.
    Functional localization is a central aim of cognitive neuroscience. But the nature and extent of functional localization in the human brain have been subjects of fierce theoretical debate since the 19th Century. In this essay, I first examine how concepts of functional localization have changed over time. I then analyze contemporary challenges to functional localization drawing from research on neural reuse, neural degeneracy, and the context-dependence of neural functions. I explore the consequences of these challenges for topics in philosophy of (...)
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  • Dehorning the Darwinian Dilemma for Normative Realism.Michael J. Deem - 2016 - Biology and Philosophy 31 (5):727-746.
    Normative realists tend to consider evolutionary debunking arguments as posing epistemological challenges to their view. By understanding Sharon Street’s ‘Darwinian dilemma’ argument in this way, they have overlooked and left unanswered her unique scientific challenge to normative realism. This paper counters Street’s scientific challenge and shows that normative realism is compatible with an evolutionary view of human evaluative judgment. After presenting several problems that her adaptive link account of evaluative judgments faces, I outline and defend an evolutionary byproduct perspective on (...)
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  • Cultural Exaptation and Cultural Neural Reuse: A Mechanism for the Emergence of Modern Culture and Behavior.Francesco D’Errico & Ivan Colagè - 2018 - Biological Theory 13 (4):213-227.
    On the basis of recent advancements in both neuroscience and archaeology, we propose a plausible biocultural mechanism at the basis of cultural evolution. The proposed mechanism, which relies on the notions of cultural exaptation and cultural neural reuse, may account for the asynchronous, discontinuous, and patchy emergence of innovations around the globe. Cultural exaptation refers to the reuse of previously devised cultural features for new purposes. Cultural neural reuse refers to cases in which exposure to cultural practices induces the formation, (...)
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  • Pandemic Leadership: Sex Differences and Their Evolutionary–Developmental Origins.Severi Luoto & Marco Antonio Correa Varella - 2021 - Frontiers in Psychology 12:633862.
    The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a global societal, economic, and social upheaval unseen in living memory. There have been substantial cross-national differences in the kinds of policies implemented by political decision-makers to prevent the spread of the virus, to test the population, and to manage infected patients. Among other factors, these policies vary with politicians’ sex: early findings indicate that, on average, female leaders seem more focused on minimizing direct human suffering caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, while male leaders implement (...)
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  • Who Got What Wrong? Fodor and Piattelli on Darwin: Guiding Principles and Explanatory Models in Natural Selection.José Díez & Pablo Lorenzano - 2013 - Erkenntnis 78 (5):1143-1175.
    The purpose of this paper is to defend, contra Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini (F&PP), that the theory of natural selection (NS) is a perfectly bona fide empirical unified explanatory theory. F&PP claim there is nothing non-truistic, counterfactual-supporting, of an “adaptive” character and common to different explanations of trait evolution. In his debate with Fodor, and in other works, Sober defends NS but claims that, compared with classical mechanics (CM) and other standard theories, NS is peculiar in that its explanatory models are (...)
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  • What are the levels and mechanisms/processes of language evolution?Nathalie Gontier - 2017 - Language Sciences 1 (63):12-43.
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  • Proper function and recent selection.Peter H. Schwartz - 1999 - Philosophy of Science 66 (3):210-222.
    "Modern History" versions of the etiological theory claim that in order for a trait X to have the proper function F, individuals with X must have been recently favored by natural selection for doing F (Godfrey-Smith 1994; Griffiths 1992, 1993). For many traits with prototypical proper functions, however, such recent selection may not have occurred: traits may have been maintained due to lack of variation or due to selection for other effects. I examine this flaw in Modern History accounts and (...)
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  • Semiotic Fitting and the Nativeness of Community.Kalevi Kull - 2020 - Biosemiotics 13 (1):9-19.
    The concept of ‘semiotic fitting’ is what we provide as a model for the description and analysis of the diversity dynamics and nativeness in semiotic systems. One of its sources is the concept of ‘ecological fitting’ which was introduced by Daniel Janzen as the mechanism for the explanation of diversity in tropical ecosystems and which has been shown to work widely over the communities of various types. As different from the neo-Darwinian concept of fitness that describes reproductive success, ‘fitting’ describes (...)
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  • Massive redeployment, exaptation, and the functional integration of cognitive operations.Michael L. Anderson - 2007 - Synthese 159 (3):329 - 345.
    Abstract: The massive redeployment hypothesis (MRH) is a theory about the functional topography of the human brain, offering a middle course between strict localization on the one hand, and holism on the other. Central to MRH is the claim that cognitive evolution proceeded in a way analogous to component reuse in software engineering, whereby existing components-originally developed to serve some specific purpose-were used for new purposes and combined to support new capacities, without disrupting their participation in existing programs. If the (...)
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  • The active role of behaviour in evolution.Patrick Bateson - 2004 - Biology and Philosophy 19 (2):283-298.
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  • A Functionalist Manifesto: Goal-Related Emotions From an Evolutionary Perspective.Heather C. Lench, Shane W. Bench, Kathleen E. Darbor & Melody Moore - 2015 - Emotion Review 7 (1):90-98.
    Functional theories posit that emotions are elicited by particular goal-related situations that represented adaptive problems and that emotions are evolved features of coordinated responses to those situations. Yet little theory or research has addressed the evolutionary aspects of these theories. We apply five criteria that can be used to judge whether features are adaptations. There is evidence that sadness, anger, and anxiety relate to unique changes in physiology, cognition, and behavior, those changes are correlated, situations that give rise to emotions (...)
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  • Relations of homology between higher cognitive emotions and basic emotions.Jason A. Clark - 2010 - Biology and Philosophy 25 (1):75-94.
    In the last 10 years, several authors including Griffiths and Matthen have employed classificatory principles from biology to argue for a radical revision in the way that we individuate psychological traits. Arguing that the fundamental basis for classification of traits in biology is that of ‘homology’ (similarity due to common descent) rather than ‘analogy’, or ‘shared function’, and that psychological traits are a special case of biological traits, they maintain that psychological categories should be individuated primarily by relations of homology (...)
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  • Biological constraints as norms in evolution.Mathilde Tahar - 2022 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 44 (1):1-21.
    Biology seems to present local and transitory regularities rather than immutable laws. To account for these historically constituted regularities and to distinguish them from mathematical invariants, Montévil and Mossio (Journal of Theoretical Biology 372:179–191, 2015) have proposed to speak of constraints. In this article we analyse the causal power of these constraints in the evolution of biodiversity, i.e., their positivity, but also the modality of their action on the directions taken by evolution. We argue that to fully account for the (...)
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  • The language faculty that wasn't: a usage-based account of natural language recursion.Morten H. Christiansen & Nick Chater - 2015 - Frontiers in Psychology 6:150920.
    In the generative tradition, the language faculty has been shrinking—perhaps to include only the mechanism of recursion. This paper argues that even this view of the language faculty is too expansive. We first argue that a language faculty is difficult to reconcile with evolutionary considerations. We then focus on recursion as a detailed case study, arguing that our ability to process recursive structure does not rely on recursion as a property of the grammar, but instead emerges gradually by piggybacking on (...)
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  • Evo-Devo as a Trading Zone.Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther - 2014 - In Alan C. Love, Conceptual Change in Biology: Scientific and Philosophical Perspectives on Evolution and Development. Berlin: Springer Verlag, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science.
    Evo-Devo exhibits a plurality of scientific “cultures” of practice and theory. When are the cultures acting—individually or collectively—in ways that actually move research forward, empirically, theoretically, and ethically? When do they become imperialistic, in the sense of excluding and subordinating other cultures? This chapter identifies six cultures – three /styles/ (mathematical modeling, mechanism, and history) and three /paradigms/ (adaptationism, structuralism, and cladism). The key assumptions standing behind, under, or within each of these cultures are explored. Characterizing the internal structure of (...)
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  • Evolution of Natural Agents: Preservation, Advance, and Emergence of Functional Information.Alexei A. Sharov - 2016 - Biosemiotics 9 (1):103-120.
    Biological evolution is often viewed narrowly as a change of morphology or allele frequency in a sequence of generations. Here I pursue an alternative informational concept of evolution, as preservation, advance, and emergence of functional information in natural agents. Functional information is a network of signs that are used by agents to preserve and regulate their functions. Functional information is preserved in evolution via complex interplay of copying and construction processes: the digital components are copied, whereas interpreting subagents together with (...)
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  • Naturalizing Models: New Perspectives in a Peircean Key.Alin Olteanu, Cary Campbell & Sebastian Feil - 2020 - Biosemiotics 13 (2):179-197.
    This paper reconsiders semiotic modelling in light of recent scholarship on Charles Peirce, particularly regarding his concept of proposition. Conceived in the vein of Peirce’s phenomenological categories as well as of his taxonomy of signs, semiotic modelling has mostly been thought of as ascending from simple, basic sign types to complex ones. This constitutes the backbone of most currently accepted semiotic modelling theories and entails the further acceptance of an unexamined a priori coherence between complexity of cognition and complexity of (...)
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