in the evolutionary debate, Stephen J. Gould's (1996) proposed name for functional features that arise as initially fortuitous dimensions to an adaptation, as an effect of orders not relevant to [..]

a process of exploration (1), leading to the development of strategies (2), which are assigned levels of confidence and probability of success (3). The development of a new skill creates a new possibi [..]

the idea that human behavior can be understood in terms of an attempt to maximize inclusive reproductive fitness. For a discussion, see the sociobiological fallacy page. Later versions of sociobiology [..]

the idea, first proposed by Fisher, that once certain traits become associated with mate value, sexual selection for these traits can go into runaway mode. Suppose that there is one gene that makes pe [..]

refers to explicit knowledge of the world that you have without any recollection of where or when you acquired it; for instance, you know flamingoes are pink, but probably not the situation in which y [..]

a method of enquiry that privileges deductive reasoning over sensory experience. In its extreme formulation epistemological rationalism is the belief that all the truths of physical science and even h [..]

Transcription is the process by which genetic information in DNA is converted into RNA, and reverse transcription, involving the enzyme reverse transcriptase, is the synthesis of complementary DNA fro [..]

the function a mechanism was designed to solve, by virtue of its past successes (Millikan 1984, 1993). A mechanism with a proper function need not fulfill that function, even on average. The proper fu [..]

of a cognitive module is "all the information that it is the module’s biological function to process" (Sperber 1994:52), loosely the set of problems it was designed to solve (see proper func [..]

the set of significant sounds in a language. English, for instance, has forty-four phonemes, about half of which are represented by individual letters in the alphabet.