http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImY9Xw-af_o&watch_response

Hi again Matt,

I think in this video you get at the core issue that distinguish your ideas from mainstream sciences. Even if your argument seems to imply that your infroming yourself from the recent sciences, in fact, I believe you're returning to an antique mythological paradigm by metaphorically anthropomorphizing particules since you're refering to intentionnal causality as explanations for natural phenomenon.

3 Things :

1-Attribution of intentions can be viewed as the results of an evolved Theory of Mind (or Folk Psychology) faculty of our brain that impute mental states to middle-size non-mecanical moving objects for predicting their behaviors.

2- The history of science since Antiquity is grossly the story of remplacing explanations that refers to intentional causality (e.g. Zeus's anger caused the thunderstorm, God's will explain the multitude of species) by neo-mecanical(dynamical)explanations. For me the paradigm shift you're advocating do result from a will to increase our understanding of life but a reactionary obstination motivate by the fact that phenomenological consciouness is not yet explainded by science. Yes, our world is full of intentionnality (attributed by us) but this phenomenal counsciousness is an evolved functions that regulate behavior for optimizing inclusive fitnees not a a-perspectival truth-seeking faculty.

3- You support this weird reactionnary move by saying that modern quantum physics is not Newton physics. But quantum physics is in no way attributing intentions to particules, quite the contrary, quantum physic is actually named quantum MECANICS. Furthermore, I believe these quantum effects that motivate your attribution of intentionnality to particules are happening mainly to level of organisation of the scale of nanometers. (Yes, there are exceptions when we reach extremely low or high level of energy e.g. superconductivit or superfluidity) So, I believe that dynamical systems are still pertinent for explaining interractions happening at the level of organism, or at the level of neurons. For the moment, I don't know any kinds of molecular or neurological account of the dynamics of the brain that need to refer to some nano-level quantum effect ( I believe Penrose theory of counciouness is not a well accepted view). Again, most of brain scientists view the brain as a dynamical system.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/07/evolution_of_hormone_signaling.php

• Cooption. Add this one to your list of synonyms. First there was the term "preadaptation" with its unfortunate teleological implications; then Gould & Vrba coined the better term "exaptation"; nowadays the magic word you hear most used by developmental biologists is "cooption." The idea here is that modules get coopted, or used in novel circumstances, to generate new functional and morpholical properties.
• Life History Transitions (LHTs) and Life History Evolution (LHE). One of the hot topics in evo-devo is a conceptual move, to stop regarding adult forms as the target of evolution and instead regard species more holistically, as the sum of all of their stages of development. A tick, for instance, is more than just the nasty parasite that sucks your blood; it may also have distinct and amazingly complex life cycles in which it lives in different environments and has radically different feeding strategies, and we have to take all of them into account in understanding their evolution. Arthur's Biased Embryos and Evolution is an excellent primer on the importance of life history evolution.
• Model Systems. As a guy who works with a model system, the zebrafish, the evo-devo argument against them always makes me a little uncomfortable, because they are largely right. Model systems are great for plumbing deeply into the details of an organism, but the flaws are that model systems are rarely very representative (Danio is a weird little specialized fish, no doubt about it), and that you must at some point explore comparative aspects of their development if you want to discuss evolution.

The lesson the authors are trying to leave us with is that hormone signaling is a rich field to study within an evolutionary context, and that the pattern of hormone use tells us a great deal about origins and mechanisms of evolutionary novelties.

The Modular theory of mind proposed by evolutionary psychology holds that human brains (and, by extention, behavioral and mental traits) are composed of a number of specialized, domain-specific adaptations. That is, the brain is essentially a "Swiss Army knife", with specific tools designed by evolution to cope with specific problems. Theoretically and empirically, there are very good reasons for this.

1. The specificity of environmental problems in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness.( Devrait pas plutôt dire que : Diversity itself creates opportunities for specialization ?)

2. Successful behavioral/mental adaptation requires facultative responses.

3. The neurophysiology of human mental and behavior traits appears to be quite specific.

Modularity is not to be confused with a lack of a factor of general intelligence.

Many of you have heard of the Ultimatum Game:

The ultimatum game is an experimental economics game in which two parties interact anonymously and only once, so reciprocation is not an issue. The first player proposes how to divide a sum of money with the second party. If the second player rejects this division, neither gets anything. If the second accepts, the first gets his demand and the second gets the rest.

In theory a "rational" player should accept whatever is offered when there isn't a repeated iteration. Reality is different. From The Economist:

...Those results recorded, Dr Burnham took saliva samples from all the students and compared the testosterone levels assessed from those samples with decisions made in the one-round game.

As he describes in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, the responders who rejected a low final offer had an average testosterone level more than 50% higher than the average of those who accepted. Five of the seven men with the highest testosterone levels in the study rejected a $5 ultimate offer but only one of the 19 others made the same decision.

What does this tell us? That physiological variables which are under biological (and ultimately genetic) control can affect the typical behavior a given individual exhibits, and, that that behavior can vary despite the same inputs across the population. There isn't any one H. economicus, there are many different ways humans interact and their propensity for a particular strategy might be conditional upon biological parameters.

But of course this doesn't mean that a given individual practices a fixed strategy even for the same inputs over time, just as strategies are mixed throughout the population so they are often mixed over time for any given individual. There is both population level and temporal variation which must be taken into account here; the flat uniform world of older economic imaginations were painted in shades of gray despite the multi-colored nature of reality.

Additionally, as I have noted before, even genetically close groups which are culturally distinct can exhibit wildly different modal responses to these various experimental economic games. This suggests that variation is not just extant on the biological level (e.g., tracking testosterone variation within the population), but also on the cultural level as the social parameters shift and reshape the landscape of gene-environment interaction. In other words, the behavioral economic biases can be likened to norms of response of particular genotypes in various cultural environments. Though the median value may shift, the distribution remains the same (e.g., if a particular individual is high testosterone it is likely that their response to the ultimatum game in one iteration will always lay at one end of the distribution across cultures though the range and shape of the distributions may vary quite a bit).

Reality is complex. I'm alluding here to the interaction of genetic parameters with various cultural norms. Additionally, the current work in relation to various small scale societies where the "nominal" sums offered by economists is non-trivial implies that analogical reasoning plays a strong role in determining how the typical individual will respond. It seems that most peoples don't conceive of utility maximization, they simply resort to analogies with transactions in their conventional life which can be mapped onto the games they are being forced to play. So there are innate parameters that result in a central tendency as well as variation, but there are also cultural parameters which modulate the range and constrain the scale, and, these often express themselves general intelligence operating through analogical (as opposed to deductive) reasoning. This turns rationality into a whole new beast altogether, not only is it bounded, it is nearly eviscerated as we understand it.

But why this variation in the first place? First, I am implying that the conditional responses that an individual gives has an expectation which is determined in large part by their genetic inheritance. Imagine for example that the ratio of "aggressive" to "passive" responses in a given game that an individual gives over time as a ratio, and that this ratio is placed upon a graph. I suspect that in many cases you would generate some sort of normal distribution (you might have to transform it though). There would be a median modal ratio; there would be those rare players who engage in "fixed" strategies where they were invariant. In this way you can re-conceptualize the behaviors documented in experimental economics as continuous quantitative traits. We know from population genetic theory that such traits have not been subject to powerful directional selection for long periods of time. Otherwise, the underlying genetic variation would have been exhausted as one behavioral morph comes to dominate the population of strategies (the range of basal testosterone should be very small and predominantly environmental/non-heritable). The reality of polymorphism might imply that the "rationality landscape" (to borrow a term) is characterized by multiple optima. Balancing selective forces such as frequency dependence and environmental variation might also result perpetuation of the mix. Layered on top of this evolutionary biological level is the flux of cultural inputs which serves as the background environment in which the predispositions develop into lifelong typical strategies. We've come a long way from reciprocal altruism.

Certainly there are plenty of human universals. But there are plenty of non-universals. We are familiar with the Red Queen hypothesis in relation to our immune systems. This model arose in large part because of the necessity for constant evolution in the forever war with parasites. If humans are a cultural animal par excellence for whom the flexibility of their behavioral toolkit is essential, should it surprise us if frequency dependent evolutionary dynamics result in a large number of morphs constantly cycling? Perhaps H. sapiens is the Environment of evolutionary adaptedness of H. sapiens ?