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Introduction
Published in Eve K. Boyle, Vondel S. E. Mahon, Rui Diogo, Handbook of Muscle Variations and Anomalies in Humans, 2022
Eve K. Boyle, Vondel S. E. Mahon, Rui Diogo
Some authors suggest that cases in which complex structures are formed early in “normal” ontogeny but later become lost/indistinct during development (so-called “hidden variation”), may allow organisms to have greater ontogenetic potential early in development. If faced with external perturbations (e.g., climate change, habitat occupied by new species), evolution can use that potential (adaptive plasticity: e.g., West-Eberhard 2003). However, authors such as Gould (1977, 2002) and Alberch (1989) suggested that these cases support instead a “constrained” (internalist) rather than an “adaptationist” (externalist) view of evolution. This is because it is not likely that the persistence of some muscles in later developmental stages of karyotypically abnormal humans is due to natural selection and adaptive evolution. This corresponds with the idea defended by Galis and Metz (2007: 415–416): “without denying the evolutionary importance of phenotypic plasticity and genetic assimilation, we think that for the generation of macro-evolutionary novelties the evidence for the impact of hidden variation is limited” (see also Levinton 2001).
Ethics Biology: Are There Ethical Genomes?
Published in Howard Winet, Ethics for Bioengineering Scientists, 2021
According to Spencer, humans were akin to other animals and should be allowed to compete naturally—within the constraints of civilized behavior—to determine who is most fit. Evolutionary psychologists’ discovery of evidence for a naturally inherited moral/ethical tendency raises the expectation that all humans will express the genotype. A geneticist would challenge this assumption as adaptationism. A modern laissez-faire advocate would claim this evidence makes regulation of industry and business unnatural. As we shall see later, Social Darwinism has not disappeared (Hofstadter 1944).
ENTRIES A–Z
Published in Philip Winn, Dictionary of Biological Psychology, 2003
Adaptationist model that specifies which FORAGING behaviours would be optimal. Optimal foraging models assume that the reproductive fitness (see NATURAL SELECTION) of the forager increases linearly with foraging efficiency. The optimal forager maximizes its rate of food energy intake. Foraging models have primarily studied two basic foraging problems: which prey items to consume and when to leave a patch. Field and labaroatory studies with birds, mammals and insects are generally in accordance with qualitative rather than quantitative predictions of optimality models. The need to minimize predation risk, to fulfil specific nutritional needs and CONSPECIFIC competition may constrain the forager from optimality.
Coloniality and perspectivism in psychology: from damnation to ecosophical care relations
Published in International Review of Psychiatry, 2020
Reading Michel Foucault (1977, 1979, 2000) and Figueiredo (1994) we observe that, as a modern discipline, psychology is inseparable—as heiress and constituent—of modernity’s philosophical anthropology framework that underlies human sciences in general. For this reason, it’s constructed according to a background of conceptions about the subject and its relations with others and the world. This set of notions embrace different arrangements, which range from the distinction between subject and nature in the seventeenth century to the Christian vision of humanity’s constitution and destiny in the eighteenth. From positivist canons that mark psychology’s institution as autonomous science, to the adaptationist demands that dictate its spread across the globe, including its association with physiological and neurological bases for living organisms that would, eventually, reach the point where it makes room for the neoliberal clamour for resilience that we experiment today. Resilience would primarily refer to a physical quality that describes the capability of a strained body to recover its size or shape after an extraneous event. However, it has been currently taken to mean as synonymous with perseverance and firmness.
Precopulatory Sexual Cannibalism and Other Accidents: Evolution, Material Trans Theory, and Natural Law
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2018
Although atheist sociobiologists and Catholic natural law philosophers may seem unlikely bunkmates, there is actually a mystical coincidentia in their background assumptions. For both camps, the universe is best understood as a fundamentally rational system that produces perfectly harmonious structures. This irony has been pointed out by critics of sociobiology such as the atheist palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould. Gould narrated, for instance, how adaptationist sociobiologists, who view every element of an organism as harmonized toward a particular goal, resemble the discredited Alfred Russel Wallace school of evolutionism. Wallace’s acolytes “viewed each bit of morphology,” Gould (1980) wrote, each function of an organ, each behavior as an adaptation, a product of selection leading to a “better” organism. They held a deep belief in nature’s “rightness,” in the exquisite fit of all creatures to their environments. In a curious sense, they almost reintroduced the creationist notion of natural harmony by substituting an omnipotent force of natural selection for a benevolent deity [p. 50].