James Thomas,Simon Kirby
James Thomas
We set out an account of how self-domestication plays a crucial role in the evolution of language. In doing so, we focus on the growing body of work that treats language structure as emerging from the process of cultural transmission. We ar...
Krist Vaesen,Wybo Houkes
Krist Vaesen
The consensus among cultural evolutionists seems to be that human cultural evolution is cumulative, which is commonly understood in the specific sense that cultural traits, especially technological traits, increase in complexity over genera...
In defence of biodiversity [0.03%]
保卫生物多样性
Joanna Burch-Brown,Alfred Archer
Joanna Burch-Brown
The concept of biodiversity has played a central role within conservation biology over the last thirty years. Precisely how it should be understood, however, is a matter of ongoing debate. In this paper we defend what we call a classic mult...
Bengt Autzen
Bengt Autzen
The paper offers a partial vindication of Sterelny's view on the role of error rates and reliability in his theory of decoupled representation based on modelling techniques borrowed from the biological literature on evolution in stochastic ...
Giulio Ongaro,Dave Ward
Giulio Ongaro
Placebos are commonly defined as ineffective treatments. They are treatments that lack a known mechanism linking their properties to the properties of the condition on which treatment aims to intervene. Given this, the fact that placebos ca...
The animal sensorimotor organization: a challenge for the environmental complexity thesis [0.03%]
动物感觉运动组织：对环境复杂性理论的挑战
Fred Keijzer,Argyris Arnellos
Fred Keijzer
Godfrey-Smith's environmental complexity thesis (ECT) is most often applied to multicellular animals and the complexity of their macroscopic environments to explain how cognition evolved. We think that the ECT may be less suited to explain ...
Andrew Buskell
Andrew Buskell
Concepts from cultural attractor theory are now used in domains far from their original home in anthropology and cultural evolution. Yet these concepts have not been consistently characterised. I here distinguish four ways in which the cult...
Structural representations: causally relevant and different from detectors [0.03%]
结构型表征：因果相关且不同于探测器
Paweł Gładziejewski,Marcin Miłkowski
Paweł Gładziejewski
This paper centers around the notion that internal, mental representations are grounded in structural similarity, i.e., that they are so-called S-representations. We show how S-representations may be causally relevant and argue that they ar...
John J Welch
John J Welch
There have been periodic claims that evolutionary biology needs urgent reform, and this article tries to account for the volume and persistence of this discontent. It is argued that a few inescapable properties of the field make it prone to...
The relativity of Darwinian populations and the ecology of endosymbiosis [0.03%]
达尔文种群的相对性与内共生生态学的关系
Adrian Stencel
Adrian Stencel
If there is a single discipline of science calling the basic concepts of biology into question, it is without doubt microbiology. Indeed, developments in microbiology have recently forced us to rethink such fundamental concepts as the organ...