James and Evolution

James was an evolutionary thinker who was critical of evolutionism; this chapter is an attempt to explain this strange state of affairs. In the first section, I will sketch James’s reaction to evolutionary ideas in the 1860s, especially those of Darwin: although he showed great interest, he stopped short of active endorsement. I will spend the bulk of the rest of the chapter detailing James’s response to the work of Herbert Spencer, seen at the time as the most important philosopher of evolution. James argued against Spencer’s evolutionism in the 1870s, but from the perspective of a broader naturalism. According to James, Spencer ignored important mental phenomena, in particular subjective interests and selective attention. Finally, I will briefly discuss how James deployed evolutionary ideas in his later writings on ethics and pragmatism. Although James opposed—often on scientific grounds—much of the philosophical work inspired by evolution, his philosophy was nevertheless built on its own evolutionary foundation.

Understanding the origin of number sense: a review of fish studies

The ability to use quantitative information is thought to be adaptive in a wide range of ecological contexts. For nearly a century, the numerical abilities of mammals and birds have been extensively studied using a variety of approaches. However, in the last two decades, there has been increasing interest in investigating the numerical abilities of teleosts (i.e. a large group of ray-finned fish), mainly due to the practical advantages of using fish species as models in laboratory research. Here, we review the current state of the art in this field. In the first part, we highlight some potential ecological functions of numerical abilities in fish and summarize the existing literature that demonstrates numerical abilities in different fish species. In many cases, surprising similarities have been reported among the numerical performance of mammals, birds and fish, raising the question as to whether vertebrates' numerical systems have been inherited from a common ancestor. In the second part, we will focus on what we still need to investigate, specifically the research fields in which the use of fish would be particularly beneficial, such as the genetic bases of numerical abilities, the development of these abilities and the evolutionary foundation of vertebrate number sense. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The origins of numerical abilities’.

Characterization of the MAPK Gene Family and PbrMAPK13 Response to Hormone and Temperature Stresses via Different Expression Pattern in Pyrus ×bretschneideri Pollen

Mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) cascades are universal signal-transduction modules, but the available information is limited in pear (Pyrus). In this study, 87 MAPK genes were identified from five Rosaceae species: chinese white pear (Pyrus ×bretschneideri cv. Dangshansuli), peach (Prunus persica), apple (Malus domestica), strawberry (Fragaria vesca), and plum (Prunus mume), 23 of which came from chinese white pear, designated as PbrMAPK. Based on the phylogenetic analysis and the architectures of conserved protein motifs of these gene sequences, MAPK family genes of five Rosaceae species were classified into two primary types (I and II) or four groups (Classes A–D). We have indicated that both segment and tandem duplications significantly contributed to the expansion of the MAPK family in Rosaceae by analysis of genomic evolution. In chinese white pear pollen, the expression analysis revealed that all PbrMAPKs could respond to temperature stresses (high/low temperature) and phytohormones, except PbrMAPK8 and PbrMAPK19 that displayed lower expressions, which suggested that PbrMAPKs play pivotal roles in signal-transduction pathways. In addition, we determined that PbrMAPK13 is located in the nucleus and plasma membranes. The lengths of pollen tubes became shorter when PbrMAPK13 was silenced by antisense oligonucleotide transfection. Our results provided an evolutionary foundation and functional characterization for MAPK gene families in chinese white pear and other plant species so as to elucidate their biological roles.

The Evolution of Strategic Sophistication

This paper investigates the evolutionary foundation for our ability to attribute preferences to others, an ability that is central to conventional game theory. We argue here that learning others' preferences allows individuals to efficiently modify their behavior in strategic environments with a persistent element of novelty. Agents with the ability to learn have a sharp, unambiguous advantage over those who are less sophisticated because the former agents extrapolate to novel circumstances information about opponents' preferences that was learned previously. This advantage holds even with a suitably small cost to reflect the additional cognitive complexity involved. (JEL C73, D11, D83)

On the challenges and mechanisms of embodied decisions

Neurophysiological studies of decision-making have focused primarily on elucidating the mechanisms of classic economic decisions, for which the relevant variables are the values of expected outcomes and action is simply the means of reporting the selected choice. By contrast, here we focus on the particular challenges of embodied decision-making faced by animals interacting with their environment in real time. In such scenarios, the choices themselves as well as their relative costs and benefits are defined by the momentary geometry of the immediate environment and change continuously during ongoing activity. To deal with the demands of embodied activity, animals require an architecture in which the sensorimotor specification of potential actions, their valuation, selection and even execution can all take place in parallel. Here, we review behavioural and neurophysiological data supporting a proposed brain architecture for dealing with such scenarios, which we argue set the evolutionary foundation for the organization of the mammalian brain.

Overconfidence and Diversification

Experimental evidence suggests that people tend to be overconfident in the sense that they overestimate the accuracy of their private information. In this paper, we show that risk-averse principals might prefer overconfident agents in various strategic interactions because these agents help diversify the aggregate risk. This may help understanding why successful analysts and entrepreneurs tend to be overconfident. In addition, a different interpretation of the model presents a novel evolutionary foundation for overconfidence, and explains various stylized facts about this bias. (JEL D81, D82)

The reformulation of emotional security theory: The role of children's social defense in developmental psychopathology

Although children's security in the context of the interparental relationship has been identified as a key explanatory mechanism in pathways between family discord and child psychopathology, little is known about the inner workings of emotional security as a goal system. Thus, the objective of this paper is to describe how our reformulation of emotional security theory within an ethological and evolutionary framework may advance the characterization of the architecture and operation of emotional security and, in the process, cultivate sustainable growing points in developmental psychopathology. The first section of the paper describes how children's security in the interparental relationship is organized around a distinctive behavioral system designed to defend against interpersonal threat. Building on this evolutionary foundation for emotional security, the paper offers an innovative taxonomy for identifying qualitatively different ways children try to preserve their security and its innovative implications for more precisely informing understanding of the mechanisms in pathways between family and developmental precursors and children's trajectories of mental health. In the final section, the paper highlights the potential of the reformulation of emotional security theory to stimulate new generations of research on understanding how children defend against social threats in ecologies beyond the interparental dyad, including both familial and extrafamilial settings.