Knowledge Tree
fitness
Facts (23)
Sources
Evolutionary psychology - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org 8 facts
claimParental investment is defined as any parental expenditure, such as time or energy, that benefits an offspring at a cost to the parent's ability to invest in other components of fitness.
claimComponents of fitness include the well-being of existing offspring, the parents' future reproduction, and inclusive fitness through aid to kin.
claimSense organs evolve only when they improve an organism's fitness because building and maintaining these organs is metabolically expensive.
claimConsciousness is a trait that meets George Williams' criteria of species universality, complexity, and functionality, and it is a trait that apparently increases fitness.
claimOne hypothesis for the evolution of modularity is that it provided greater fitness and reduced connection costs compared to non-modular networks.
referenceJohn Beatty and Elisabeth Anne Lloyd defined the concept of 'Fitness' in the 1992 book 'Keywords in Evolutionary Biology'.
claimEvolutionary psychology is closely linked to sociobiology, but differs in its emphasis on domain-specific mechanisms, the relevance of measures of current fitness, the importance of mismatch theory, and a focus on psychology rather than behavior.
quoteMartin Daly and Margo Wilson stated in their 1999 book, 'The Truth about Cinderella: A Darwinian View of Parental Love': 'Evolutionary thinking led to the discovery of the most important risk factor for child homicide – the presence of a stepparent. Parental efforts and investments are valuable resources, and selection favors those parental psyches that allocate effort effectively to promote fitness. The adaptive problems that challenge parental decision-making include accurately identifying one's offspring, allocating resources among them with sensitivity to their needs and abilities, and converting parental investment into fitness increments.... Stepchildren were seldom or never so valuable to one's expected fitness as one's own offspring would be, and those parental psyches that were easily parasitized by just any appealing youngster must always have incurred a selective disadvantage.'
Complexity and the Evolution of Consciousness | Biological Theory link.springer.com Sep 14, 2022 5 facts
claimThe pathological complexity thesis asserts that the function of consciousness is to enable an agent to respond to pathological complexity, which is defined as the economic trade-off problem organisms face when pursuing the teleonomic goal of maximizing fitness.
claimIn behavioral ecology, the ultimate goal of organisms is reproduction, and fitness serves as the common currency for evaluating the importance of an organism's different needs.
claimNatural selection was constrained in developing proximate mechanistic utility functions for actions, resulting in functions that often do not map directly onto fitness but operate in analogous ways.
quoteMarian Dawkins stated: "Animals usually have more than one kind of danger to avoid. They have complex tradeoffs at all levels in order to minimize reductions of fitness in facing a wide range of threats. At different times of the day or year, or depending on external circumstances, they will reallocate priorities: For example, animals may depress or enhance their immune responses, increase or decrease their physiological “stress” responses, or find some stimuli more or less aversive."
claimBiological agents face a computational complexity problem, described as a Darwinian or economic trade-off, when managing challenges and opportunities throughout their life histories to maximize fitness.
Evolutionary Psychology | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy iep.utm.edu 5 facts
claimRichard Dawkins introduced the concept that evolution by natural selection is a substrate-neutral process that acts on a 'replicator,' defined as any heritable entity with variation in a population that is associated with different degrees of fitness.
claimA domain-general psychological architecture cannot guide behavior to promote fitness because there is no domain-general criterion of success or failure, as what counts as fit behavior differs from domain to domain.
claimAdaptive courses of action cannot be deduced or learned by general criteria because they depend on statistical relationships between environmental features, behavior, and fitness that emerge over many generations and are not observable during a single lifetime.
claimEvolutionary psychologists utilize adaptationist reasoning, a method derived from evolutionary biology that explains the presence of a trait by asserting it is an adaptation that enhanced the fitness of an organism's ancestors.
claimA trait is defined as an 'adaptation' if it was designed by natural selection to solve specific problems posed by the ancestral environment of a species, whereas a trait is defined as 'adaptive' if it currently enhances the bearer's fitness.
Resolving the evolutionary paradox of consciousness link.springer.com Apr 1, 2024 3 facts
claimAdaptations are defined as features that have arisen through natural selection because they helped organisms survive and pass on their genes by increasing their fitness.
claimThe author of 'Resolving the evolutionary paradox of consciousness' concludes that Mørch's (2017) phenomenal powers view cannot explain the adaptive-seeming correlations between sensations and fitness.
claimThe author of 'Resolving the evolutionary paradox of consciousness' asserts that none of the existing metaphysical perspectives on consciousness—including physicalism, dualism, and panpsychism—can easily explain the adaptive-seeming correlations between sensations and fitness via natural selection.
Psychedelics, Sociality, and Human Evolution frontiersin.org 2 facts
claimThe instrumentalization of psilocybin could have enhanced performance in domains such as cognition, sociality, communication, and social learning, potentially increasing the adaptability and fitness of human ancestors.
claimPsychedelics significantly modulate aspects of creativity and sociality, which could have enhanced adaptability and fitness in knowledge-using, socially interdependent lifeways, according to Girn et al. (2020) and Preller and Vollenweider (2019).