Related papers: On Fodor on Darwin on Evolution
Darwin's book, Origin of the Species has been a source of public controversy for more than hundred and fifty years. Court cases and mountains of words have not dispelled this controversy. In this paper, a quantitative approach using simple…
Although Darwinian models are rampant in the social sciences, social scientists do not face the problem that motivated Darwin's theory of natural selection: the problem of explaining how lineages evolve despite that any traits they acquire…
Simonton (2006) makes the unwarranted assumption that nonmonotonicity supports a Darwinian view of creativity. Darwin's theory of natural selection was motivated by a paradox that has no equivalent in creative thought: the paradox of how…
Darwin's hypothesis that all extant life forms are descendants of a last common ancestor cell and diversification of life forms results from gradual mutation plus natural selection represents a mainstream view that has influenced biology…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
For billions of years, evolution has been the driving force behind the development of life, including humans. Evolution endowed humans with high intelligence, which allowed us to become one of the most successful species on the planet.…
This article explains how natural selection works and how it has been inappropriately applied to the description of cultural change. It proposes an alternative evolutionary explanation for cultural evolution that describes it in terms of…
Darwin's theory of evolution is considered to be one of the greatest scientific gems in modern science. It not only gives us a description of how living things evolve, but also shows how a population evolves through time and also, why only…
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection does not predict long-term progress or advancement, nor does it provide a useful way to define or understand these concepts. Nevertheless, the history of life is marked by major trends that…
A tendency in biological theorizing is to formulate principles above or equal to Evolution by Variation and Selection of Darwin and Wallace. In this letter I analyze one such recent proposal which did so for the developmental ascendency. I…
This paper reviews and clarifies five misunderstandings about cultural evolution identified by Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson (2008). First, cultural representations are neither discrete nor continuous; they are distributed across neurons…
In this paper, we make a review on the concepts of rationality across several different fields, namely in economics, psychology and evolutionary biology and behavioural ecology. We review how processes like natural selection can help us…
The theory of natural selection has two forms. Deductive theory describes how populations change over time. One starts with an initial population and some rules for change. From those assumptions, one calculates the future state of the…
Culture evolves, not just in the trivial sense that cultures change over time, but also in the strong sense that such change is governed by Darwinian principles. Both biological and cultural evolution are essentially cumulative selection…
Species coexistence is one of the central themes in modern ecology. Coexistence is a prerequisite of biological diversity. However, the question arises how biodiversity can be reconciled with the statement of competition theory, which…
Mortality is an instrument of natural selection. Evolutionary motivated theories imply its irreversibility and life history dependence. This is inconsistent with mortality data for protected populations. Accurate analysis yields mortality…
George Williams defined an evolutionary unit as hereditary information for which the selection bias between competing units dominates the informational decay caused by imperfect transmission. In this article, I extend Williams' approach to…
An elementary biostatistical theory based on a selectivity-variability principle is proposed to address a question raised by Charles Darwin, namely, how one sex of a sexually dimorphic species might tend to evolve with greater variability…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
There is surely some truth to the notion that culture evolves, but the Darwinian view of culture is trivial. Gabora does two things in this paper. First, she levels a reasoned and devastating attack on the adequacy of a Darwinian theory of…