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372 days ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImY9Xw-af_o&watch_response Hi again Matt, I think in this video you get at the core issue that distinguish your ideas from mainstream sciences. Even if your argument seems to imply that your infroming yourself from the recent sciences, in fact, I believe you're returning to an antique mythological paradigm by metaphorically anthropomorphizing particules since you're refering to intentionnal causality as explanations for natural phenomenon. 3 Things : 1-Attribution of intentions can be viewed as the results of an evolved Theory of Mind (or Folk Psychology) faculty of our brain that impute mental states to middle-size non-mecanical moving objects for predicting their behaviors. 2- The history of science since Antiquity is grossly the story of remplacing explanations that refers to intentional causality (e.g. Zeus's anger caused the thunderstorm, God's will explain the multitude of species) by neo-mecanical(dynamical)explanations. For me the ...
393 days ago
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/07/evolution_of_hormone_signaling.php Cooption. Add this one to your list of synonyms. First there was the term "preadaptation" with its unfortunate teleological implications; then Gould & Vrba coined the better term "exaptation"; nowadays the magic word you hear most used by developmental biologists is "cooption." The idea here is that modules get coopted, or used in novel circumstances, to generate new functional and morpholical properties. Life History Transitions (LHTs) and Life History Evolution (LHE). One of the hot topics in evo-devo is a conceptual move, to stop regarding adult forms as the target of evolution and instead regard species more holistically, as the sum of all of their stages of development. A tick, for instance, is more than just the nasty parasite that sucks your blood; it may also have distinct and amazingly complex life cycles in which it lives in different environments ...
393 days ago
The Modular theory of mind proposed by evolutionary psychology holds that human brains (and, by extention, behavioral and mental traits) are composed of a number of specialized, domain-specific adaptations. That is, the brain is essentially a "Swiss Army knife", with specific tools designed by evolution to cope with specific problems. Theoretically and empirically, there are very good reasons for this. 1. The specificity of environmental problems in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness.( Devrait pas plutôt dire que : Diversity itself creates opportunities for specialization ?) 2. Successful behavioral/mental adaptation requires facultative responses. 3. The neurophysiology of human mental and behavior traits appears to be quite specific. Modularity is not to be confused with a lack of a factor of general intelligence.
393 days ago
Many of you have heard of the Ultimatum Game: The ultimatum game is an experimental economics game in which two parties interact anonymously and only once, so reciprocation is not an issue. The first player proposes how to divide a sum of money with the second party. If the second player rejects this division, neither gets anything. If the second accepts, the first gets his demand and the second gets the rest. In theory a "rational" player should accept whatever is offered when there isn't a repeated iteration. Reality is different . From The Economist: ...Those results recorded, Dr Burnham took saliva samples from all the students and compared the testosterone levels assessed from those samples with decisions made in the one-round game. As he describes in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, the responders who rejected a low final offer had an average testosterone level more than 50% higher than the average of those who accepted . Five of the ...
393 days ago
Certainly there are plenty of human universals. But there are plenty of non-universals. We are familiar with the Red Queen hypothesis in relation to our immune systems. This model arose in large part because of the necessity for constant evolution in the forever war with parasites. If humans are a cultural animal par excellence for whom the flexibility of their behavioral toolkit is essential, should it surprise us if frequency dependent evolutionary dynamics result in a large number of morphs constantly cycling? Perhaps H. sapiens is the Environment of evolutionary adaptedness of H. sapiens ?
