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This book begins the inquiry into the evolution of the collective sensitivities of life. Chapters trace the emergence and evolution of consciousness. Complex behaviors and the social imperatives of bacteria and other life forms during 3,000 million years of Earth history gave rise to mammalian cognition. Awareness and sensation led to astounding activities; millions of species incessantly interacted to form our planet’s complex conscious system. Our planetmates, all of them conscious to some degree, were joined only recently by us, the aggressive modern humans. From social bacteria to urban citizens, all living beings participate in community life. Nested inside families within communities inside ecosystems, each metabolizes, takes in matter, expends energy, and excretes. Each of the members of our own and other species, in groups with incessantly shifting alliances, receives and processes information. Mergers of radically different life forms with myriad purposes—the “chimeras” of the title—underlie dramatic metamorphosis and other positive evolutionary change. Since early bacteria avoided, produced, and eventually used oxygen, Earth’s sensory systems have expanded and complexified. The chapters in this book serve to put sensitive, sensible life in its cosmic context.

In the past few decades, sources of inspiration in the multidisciplinary field of cognitive science have widened. In addition to ongoing vital work in cognitive and affective neuroscience, important new work is being conducted at the intersection of psychology and the biological sciences in general. This book offers an overview of the cross-disciplinary integration of evolutionary and developmental approaches to cognition in light of these new contributions from the life sciences. This research has explored many cognitive abilities in a wide range of organisms and developmental stages, and results have revealed the nature and origin of many instances of the cognitive life of organisms. Each section of the book deals with a key domain of cognition: spatial cognition; the relationships among attention, perception, and learning; representations of numbers and economic values; and social cognition. Chapters discuss each topic from the perspectives of psychology and neuroscience, brain theory and modeling, evolutionary theory, ecology, genetics, and developmental science.

Charles Darwin famously concluded On the Origin of Species with a vision of “endless forms most beautiful” continually evolving. More than 150 years later, many evolutionary biologists see not endless forms but the same, or very similar, forms evolving repeatedly in many independent species lineages. A porpoise’s fishlike fins, for example, are not inherited from fish ancestors but are independently derived convergent traits. This book describes the ubiquity of the phenomenon of convergent evolution and connects it directly to the concept of evolutionary constraint—the idea that the number of evolutionary pathways available to life are not endless, but quite limited. Convergent evolution occurs on all levels, from tiny organic molecules to entire ecosystems of species. The author demonstrates its ubiquity in animals, both herbivore and carnivore; in plants; in ecosystems; in molecules, including DNA, proteins, and enzymes; and even in minds, describing problem-solving behavior and group behavior as the products of convergence. For each species example, he provides an abbreviated list of the major nodes in its phylogenetic classification, allowing the reader to see the evolutionary relationship of a group of species that have independently evolved a similar trait by convergent evolution. The author analyzes the role of functional and developmental constraints in producing convergent evolution, and considers the scientific and philosophical implications of convergent evolution for the predictability of the evolutionary process.

Over the past few decades, a growing body of research has emerged from a variety of disciplines to highlight the importance of cultural evolution in understanding human behavior. Wider application of these insights, however, has been hampered by traditional disciplinary boundaries. To remedy this, leading researchers from theoretical biology, developmental and cognitive psychology, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, religious studies, history, and economics come together in this volume to explore the central role of cultural evolution in different aspects of human endeavor. The contributors take as their guiding principle the idea that cultural evolution can provide an important integrating function across the various disciplines of the human sciences, as organic evolution does for biology. The benefits of adopting a cultural evolutionary perspective are demonstrated by contributions on social systems, technology, language, and religion. Topics covered include enforcement of norms in human groups, the neuroscience of technology, language diversity, and prosociality and religion. The contributors evaluate current research on cultural evolution and consider its broader theoretical and practical implications, synthesizing past and ongoing work and sketching a roadmap for future cross-disciplinary efforts. This book is published in the Strungmann Forum Reports Series.

“Scaffolding” is a concept that is becoming widely used across disciplines. This book investigates common threads in diverse applications of scaffolding, including theoretical biology, cognitive science, social theory, science and technology studies, and human development. Despite its widespread use, the concept of scaffolding is often given short shrift; the contributors to this volume, from a range of disciplines, offer a more fully developed analysis of scaffolding that highlights the role of temporal and temporary resources in development, broadly conceived, across concepts of culture, cognition, and evolution. The book emphasizes reproduction, repeated assembly of functional groups, and entrenchment of heterogeneous relations, parts, and processes as a complement to neo-Darwinism in the developmentalist tradition of conceptualizing evolutionary change. After describing an integration of theoretical perspectives that can accommodate different levels of analysis and connect various methodologies, the book discusses multilevel organization; differences (and reciprocality) between individuals and institutions as units of analysis; and perspectives on development that span brains, careers, corporations, and cultural cycles.

The evolutionary roots of human communication are difficult to trace, but recent comparative research suggests that the first key step in that evolutionary history may have been the establishment of basic communicative flexibility—the ability to vocalize freely combined with the capability to coordinate vocalization with communicative intent. The contributors to this book investigate how some species (particularly ancient hominids) broke free of the constraints of “fixed signals,” actions that were evolved to communicate but lack the flexibility of language—a newborn infant’s cry, for example, always signals distress and has a stereotypical form not modifiable by the crying baby. Fundamentally, they ask what communicative flexibility is and what evolutionary conditions can produce it. The accounts offered in these chapters are notable for taking the question of language origins farther back in evolutionary time than much previous work. Many contributors address the very earliest communicative break of the hominid line from the primate background; others examine the evolutionary origins of flexibility in, for example, birds and marine mammals. The book’s interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives illuminate issues that are at the cutting edge of recent research on this topic.

In the six decades since the publication of Julian Huxley’s Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, the spectacular empirical advances in the biological sciences have been accompanied by equally significant developments within the core theoretical framework of the discipline. As a result, evolutionary theory today includes concepts and even entire new fields that were not part of the foundational structure of the Modern Synthesis. In this book, sixteen evolutionary biologists and philosophers of science survey the conceptual changes that have emerged since Huxley’s landmark publication, not only in such traditional domains of evolutionary biology as quantitative genetics and paleontology but also in such new fields of research as genomics and EvoDevo. Most of the contributors accept many of the tenets of the classical framework but want to relax some of its assumptions and introduce significant conceptual augmentations of the basic Modern Synthesis structure—just as the architects of the Modern Synthesis themselves expanded and modulated previous versions of Darwinism. This continuing revision of a theoretical edifice, the foundations of which were laid in the middle of the nineteenth century—the reexamination of old ideas, proposals of new ones, and the synthesis of the most suitable—shows how science works, and how scientists have painstakingly built a solid set of explanations for what Darwin called the “grandeur” of life.

This book develops a novel account of the speed and extent of human evolutionary divergence from the great ape stock. It does not explain human uniqueness by positing a critical adaptive breakthrough (episodic memory; advanced theory of mind; planning and causal reasoning; language). Rather, it identifies a series of positive feedback loops between initially minor advances in social tolerance, ecological flexibility, cooperative foraging, social learning, and links the results of these feedback loops to the archaeological and anthropological record. The analysis is organised round a new model of the evolution of social learning — the evolved apprentice model — and its coevolutionary interaction with cooperation in foraging and reproduction. Social learning expands through the increasing organisation and enrichment of juvenile learning environments, not just through changes in the intrinsic architecture of human minds. Initially, and for millions of years, these organised social learning environments made it possible for humans to reliably transmit a few core skills, but without supporting the reliable and intergenerationally stable transmission of incremental improvements to those skills. Ultimately, though, enriched and somewhat larger social environments made cumulative cultural evolution possible. Cumulative cultural evolution — Tomasello`s Ratchet — depended on some adaptations for social learning, richly structured learning environments, and demographic critical mass. Critical mass matters, for small and scattered groups can easily lose complex skills through unlucky accident. Humans are so different from great apes in part because they have constructed such novel developmental and selective niches.

In recent years an interest in applying the principles of evolution to the study of culture emerged in the social sciences. Archaeologists and anthropologists reconsidered the role of innovation in particular, and have moved toward characterizing innovation in cultural systems not only as a product but also as an evolutionary process. This distinction was familiar to biology but new to the social sciences; cultural evolutionists from the nineteenth to the twentieth century had tended to see innovation as a preprogrammed change that occurred when a cultural group “needed” to overcome environmental problems. This book, from the perspective of a variety of disciplines—including anthropology, archaeology, evolutionary biology, philosophy, and psychology—offers different perspectives on cultural innovation. The book provides not only a range of views but also an integrated account, with the chapters offering an orderly progression of thought. The chapters consider innovation in biological terms, discussing epistemology, animal studies, systematics and phylogeny, phenotypic plasticity and evolvability, and evo-devo; they discuss modern insights into innovation, including simulation, the random-copying model, diffusion, and demographic analysis; and offer case studies of innovation from archaeological and ethnographic records, examining developmental, behavioral, and social patterns.

In 1995, John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry published their influential book The Major Transitions in Evolution. The “transitions” that Maynard Smith and Szathmáry chose to describe all constituted major changes in the kinds of organisms that existed but, most important, these events also transformed the evolutionary process itself. The evolution of new levels of biological organization, such as chromosomes, cells, multicelled organisms, and complex social groups radically changed the kinds of individuals natural selection could act upon. Many of these events also produced revolutionary changes in the process of inheritance, by expanding the range and fidelity of transmission, establishing new inheritance channels, and developing more open-ended sources of variation. Maynard Smith and Szathmáry had planned a major revision of their work, but the death of Maynard Smith in 2004 prevented this. In this volume, scholars (including Szathmáry himself) reconsider and extend the earlier book’s themes in light of recent developments in evolutionary biology. The chapters discuss different frameworks for understanding macroevolution, prokaryote evolution (the study of which has been aided by developments in molecular biology), and the complex evolution of multicellularity.

This book charts the mutual reconfiguration between scientific and social innovations in and around the molecular life sciences. Today’s biology is making visible what was once invisible. It parses life into new units of sense-making and reassembles them into new forms: from genes to clones, from embryonic stages to the building-blocks of synthetic biology. Yet, extracted from their scientific and social context and turned into mobile resources, technical and discursive alike, these new forms of life become not only visible but indeed “naked”: ready to assume an – illusory - essential status and thereby take on multiple values and meanings as they pass from labs to courts, from patent offices to parliaments – and back. Our goal is to cast a new gaze on these dramatic advances in the life sciences by probing their mutual interaction with equally dramatic re-configurations in the political texture of our societies. To this end, we focus on paradigmatic encounters between scientific and social ingenuity, from assisted reproduction through personalized medicine to genetic sports doping. We bring into relief surprising continuities as well as radical discontinuities between innovation and tradition. On this basis we then trace how, when social arrangements appear disrupted, advances in the life sciences combine with “human technologies”–the law, governance, and ethics– to stabilize or innovate social order. This brings us to conclude that the task of institutions in the molecular age is to enable pluralism by carving a legitimate space for experimentation with new forms of biological life as well as with new forms of social life. 

Public controversies over issues ranging from global warming to biotechnology have politicized scientific expertise and research. Some respond with calls to restore a golden age of value-free science. More promising efforts seek to democratize science. But what does that mean? Can it go beyond the typical focus on public participation? How do the politics of science challenge prevailing views of democracy? This book draws on science and technology studies, democratic theory, and the history of political thought to show why an adequate response to politicized science depends on rethinking both science and democracy. The author enlists such canonical and contemporary thinkers as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Dewey, and Latour to argue that the familiar dichotomy between politics and science reinforces a similar dichotomy between direct democracy and representative government. He then develops an alternative perspective based on the mutual shaping of participation and representation in both science and politics. Political representation requires scientific expertise, and scientific institutions may become sites of political representation. The author illustrates his argument with examples from expert advisory committees, bioethics councils, and lay forums. Different institutional venues, he shows, mediate different elements of democratic representation. If we understand democracy as an institutionally distributed process of collective representation, he argues, it becomes easier to see the politicization of science not as a threat to democracy but as an opportunity for it.

In 1809—the year of Charles Darwin's birth—Jean-Baptiste Lamarck published Philosophie zoologique, the first comprehensive and systematic theory of biological evolution. The Lamarckian approach emphasizes the generation of developmental variations; Darwinism stresses selection. Lamarck's ideas were eventually eclipsed by Darwinian concepts, especially after the emergence of the Modern Synthesis in the twentieth century. The different approaches—which can be seen as complementary rather than mutually exclusive—have important implications for the kinds of questions biologists ask and for the type of research they conduct. Lamarckism has been evolving—or, in Lamarckian terminology, transforming—since Philosophie zoologique's description of biological processes mediated by “subtle fluids.” The chapters in this book focus on new developments in biology that make Lamarck's ideas relevant not only to modern empirical and theoretical research but also to problems in the philosophy of biology. Chapters discuss the historical transformations of Lamarckism from the 1820s to the 1940s, and the different understandings of Lamarck and Lamarckism; the Modern Synthesis and its emphasis on Mendelian genetics; theoretical and experimental research on such “Lamarckian” topics as plasticity, soft (epigenetic) inheritance, and individuality; and the importance of a developmental approach to evolution in the philosophy of biology. The book shows the advantages of a “Lamarckian” perspective on evolution. Indeed, the development-oriented approach it presents is becoming central to current evolutionary studies—as can be seen in the burgeoning field of Evo-Devo.

The work performed by living systems ranges from photosynthesis to prodigious feats of computation and organization. This book explores the relationships between work and the study of work across many different levels of organization. By addressing how work gets done, and why, from the perspectives of a range of disciplines, including cell and evolutionary biology, neuroscience, psychology, electrical and computer engineering, and design, it sets out to establish an integrative approach to the study of work. Chapters introduce the biological work of producing energy in the cell; establish inherent tradeoffs between energy and information in neural systems; relate principles of integrated circuit manufacture to work in biological systems; explore the work of photosynthesis; investigate how work shapes organisms’ evolutionary niches; consider the human work of design; describe the effects of job satisfaction and dissatisfaction on work–life balance; and address the effects of environmental challenges (stress) on how humans and animals do work. Finally, chapters draw these studies together and point to future developments.