• 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 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.

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.

...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.

In order to determine whether moving visual stimuli were sufficient to induce the emergence of direction-selective responses, the animals were exposed to two "training" stimuli consisting of grating patterns which drifted back and forth across the visual field perpendicular to the orientation of the grating in opposite directions. These stimuli were presented to the ferrets for 5 seconds at a time, with intervals of 10 seconds, for a period of 20 minutes. Subsequently, the activity of primary visual cortical neurons was observed whilst these stimuli were presented again.   

For the first 8-10 hours of visual stimulation after this motion training, no changes were observed in the functional properties of visual cortical neurons. Most neurons were highly responsive to the orientation of the stimuli, but their selectivity to the direction in which the stimuli moved was very weak. Later on, small groups of cells with a preference for one of the two training stimuli began to emerge. With time, these responses progressively increased, so that each group became highly tuned to one or the other training stimuli (see above figure). The number of neurons selective for each orientation was also found to increase with time.

To test whether it was the motion of the training stimuli that induced these changes in activity, the researchers flashed identical gratings in the ferrets' visual fields for brief periods of time. This "flash training" elicited responses in the same cortical neurons, but the responses did not increase with time. Gratings which moved in eight directions that differed from those in the training elicited little response or none at all. This confirmed that the observed emergence of orientation selectivity was indeed due to exposure to the training stimuli.

Closer examination of the responses of individual pyramidal neurons in layer 2/3 of the cortex revealed that the preferred direction of motion of each changed over time, so that it became more like the preferences of its neighbours. Prior to training, most of the cells exhibited uncertain or moderate orientation preferences. Upon presentation of the training stimuli, however, the responses of most neurons became more certain, and the neurons segregated into small domains with a preference for one direction or the other.

Other interesting functional changes were also observed. Some neurons maintained their initial moderate preference for one direction of movement and later increased their response to it, while others reversed their orientation preference during training. If, for example, a neuron was surrounded by cells with a preference for the opposite direction, it was likely to reverse its own preference so that it matched that of its neighbours. On the other hand, a neuron surrounded by others with the same preference was unlikely to change its own preference during training. This suggests that the functinal grouping of neurons occurs because of some kind of interaction between neighbouring cells during motion training.

Précis of Neuroconstructivism: How the Brain Constructs Cognition

“Conceptual semantics – the language of thought – must be distinct from language itself, or we would have nothing to go on when we debate what our words mean.” Pinker, The stuff of thought, p.4

That's where I differ with Pinker too. Two identical utterances can have different meaning whitout having to posit anything else then the neurological history of each words.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/36481.html

"One could argue that people like Leibniz and the others were able to come up with some good ideas because they weren't afraid to think metaphysically. In those days, metaphysics was still a respected discipline and considered as worthwhile as mathematics. It got the stuffing kicked out of it through much of the 20th century and became a byword for mystical, obscurantist thinking, but in recent decades it has been rehabilitated somewhat.

At bottom, anyone who asks questions like "Why does the universe seem to obey laws?" or "Why does mathematics work so well in modeling the physical universe?" is engaging in metaphysics. People like Newton and Leibniz were as well-equipped for this kind of thinking as anyone today, and so it is interesting to read and think about their metaphysics. Seventeenth-century chemistry may have been rudimentary, and of only historical interest today, but 17th-century philosophy is highly developed and still interesting to read."

Ponty stress something interresting about the unifying EGO : I see is work as an attempt to unify the 3 levels of consciousness/language, I was talking about (science,creativity and phenomenology) in a framework of culture and the historic and dialectic evolution of this culture. What it mean, for me, is that the EGO, is the evolved nervous system, in interraction whit the environnement, but precisely, in interraction with our evolving culture. So we may have an account of an embodied/situated/extended/evolved cognition but we still do not have a precise account of an emb/sit/ex/ev cultural evolution. And that what I think we should head on. Think about it, the virtuous hermeneutical circle of a 1st person account of science and a 3rd person account of conscience only make sense on a framework of cultural evolution, at least on the basis of a progression of ideas/beliefs/knowledge. Conscious experience = evolved cognition + learning mecanisms + culture ?