Qu'attend-on réellement en économie ou en sociologie d'un modèle d'évolution par sélection ? C'est essentiellement un mode irremplaçable de présentation pour la convergence d'un processus pour lequel on ne dispose pas d'un schéma déterministe. Il y a là un paradoxe si l'on considère que Darwin a constamment critiqué tous les schémas de convergence relatifs au vivant et n'a jamais proposé d'en fournir un équivalent. Le secret de ce paradoxe pourrait bien résider dans un appoint trop peu reconnu, mais bien présent, (...) du darwinisme : celui du premier schéma informationnel proposé pour la pensée des événements qui constituent une évolution.What is really the meaning of the manifold purposes the scientists ascribe to evolutionary patterns in social sciences ? Indeed the most plausible answer may be summarized by the idea of converging processes. If we consider the darwinian criticism about such converging processes, this answer is nevertheless paradoxical. We must therefore look for another point of view. I suggest that this informational conception of events is the actual implement we can find today in evolutionary patterns. (shrink)

Selection as a mode of causation is central to operant psychology. Response variation and selection by consequences corresponds to phenotypic variation, to differential survivability, and to reproduction of variants. In natural selection, genes code for phylogenic history but no analogous processes exists for coding behavioral history. Neuroscience suggests potential processes but the conceptual status of these events requires clarification.

Maynard Smith is right that one of the most striking features of contemporary biology is the ever-increasing prominence of the concept of information, along with related concepts like representation, programming, and coding. Maynard Smith is also right that this is surely a phenomenon which philosophers of science should examine closely. We should try to understand exactly what sorts of theoretical commitment are made when biological systems are described in these terms, and what connection there is between semantic descriptions in (...) biology and in other domains. (shrink)

Frank has recently argued for an information-theoretic interpretation of natural selection. This interpretation is based on the identification of a measure related to the Malthusian parameter (for population change) with the Jeffreys divergence between the present allelic distribution of the population and that distribution in the next generation. It is pointed out in this analysis that this identification only holds if the mean fitness of the population is a constant, that is, there is no selection. This problem is used (...) to argue for the superiority of the standard dynamical interpretation of natural selection over its information-theoretic counterpart. (shrink)

In Wason’s Selection Task, subjects: process information from the instructions and build a mental representation of the problem, then: select a course of action to solve the problem,under the constraints imposed by the instructions. We analyze both aspects as part of a constraint satisfaction problem without assuming Wason’s ‘logical’ solution to be the correct one. We show that outcome of step may induce mutually inconsistent constraints, causing subjects to select at step solutions that violate some of them. Our analysis (...) explains why inconsistent constraints are less likely disrupt non-abstract versions of the tasks, but unlike Bayesians does not posit different mechanisms in abstract and thematic variants. We then assess the logicality of the task, and conclude on cognitive tasks as coordination problems. (shrink)

It has been shown that, when observing an action, infants can rely on either outcome selection information (i.e., actions that express a choice between potential outcomes) or means selection information (i.e., actions that are causally efficient toward the outcome) in their goal attribution. However, no research has investigated the relationship between these two types of information when they are present simultaneously. In an experiment that addressed this question directly, we found that when outcome selection information could (...) disambiguate the goal of the action (e.g., the action is directed toward one of two potential targets), but means selection information could not (i.e., the action is not efficiently adjusted to the situational constraints), 7- and 9-month-old infants did not attribute a goal to an observed action. This finding suggests that means selection information takes primacy over outcome selection information. The early presence of this bias sheds light on the nature of the notion of goal in action understanding. (shrink)

High levels of threat and uncertainty characterize the onset of societal crises. Here, people are exposed to conflicting information in the media, including disinformation. Because individuals often base their news selection on pre-existing attitudes, the present study aims to examine selective exposure effects in the face of a crisis, and identify right-wing ideological, trust-, and science-related beliefs that might influence the selection and sharing of disinformation. A representative survey of German internet users (N = 1101) at the time (...) of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak showed a confirmation bias in crisis-related news selection and sharing. It revealed right-wing authoritarianism and political mistrust as significant predictors of disinformation selection. The influence of social dominance orientation, mistrust in politics, and perceived certainty of knowledge were significant for sharing disinformation. The present results extend previous knowledge about people’s (dis)information behavior in times of crisis, and shed light on groups particularly vulnerable to disinformation. (shrink)

Waters’s (2007) actual difference making and Weber’s (2013, 2017) biological normality approaches to causal selection have received many criticisms, some of which miss their target. Disagreement about whether Waters’s and Weber’s views succeed in providing criteria that uniquely singles out the gene as explanatorily significant in biology has led philosophers to overlook a prior problem. Before one can address whether Waters’s and Weber’s views successfully account for the explanatory significance of genes, one must ask whether either view satisfactorily meets the (...) necessary conditions for causal selection in the first place. An adequate defense of causal selection must meet two desiderata. First, there must be an explanatory property that sets some causes apart from others. Second, the property identified must be one that is recognized by biologists as relevant to their domain(s) of inquiry. I argue that both fall short of meeting the second condition. I demonstrate this by showing how many of the biological technologies crucial to experimentation do not fit either view very well. I offer a more adequate proposal that accommodates non-actual and artificial causal variables. A consequence of my view is the following: When analyzing the causal selection practices of biologists, philosophers should consider the explanatory targets relevant to a research program – including ones whose explanans must appeal to biological technologies. I then explain how this proposal can inform the existing debate between Weber (2017) and Griffiths et al. (2015). (shrink)

Hull et al. argue that information and replication are both essential ingredients in any selection process. But both information and replication are found in only some selection processes, and should not be included in abstract descriptions of selection intended to help researchers discover and describe selection processes in new domains.

An analysis of biological selection aimed at deriving a mechanism-independent definition removes Hull et al.'s obligatory requirement for replication of the carriers of information, under conditions, such as those obtaining in the nervous system, where the information content of a carrier can be modified without duplication by an amount controlled by the outcome of interactions with the environment.

A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation Hans Kamp. INTRODUCTION Two conceptions of meaning have dominated formal semantics of natural language. ...

Darwinian evolutionary theory has two key terms, variations and biological selection, which finally lead to survival of the fittest variant. With the rise of molecular genetics, variations were explained as results of error replications out of the genetic master templates. For more than half a century, it has been accepted that new genetic information is mostly derived from random error-based events. But the error replication narrative has problems explaining the sudden emergence of new species, new phenotypic traits, and genome (...) innovations as a sudden single event. Meanwhile, it is recognized that errors cannot explain the evolution of genetic information, genetic novelty, and complexity. Now, empirical evidence establishes the crucial role of non-random genetic content editors, such as viruses, diversity generating retroelements, and other RNA networks, to produce new genetic information, complex regulatory control, inheritance vectors, genetic identity, immunity, new sequence space, evolution of complex organisms, and evolutionary transitions. (shrink)

Prior work shows that the possibility of action to an object facilitates attentional deployment. We sought to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying this modulation of attention by examining ERPs to target objects that were either congruently or incongruently gripped for their use in the presence of a congruently or incongruently gripped distractor. Participants responded to the presence or absence of a target object matching a preceding action word with a distractor object presented in the opposite location. Participants were faster in (...) responding to congruently gripped targets compared to incongruently gripped targets. There was a reduced N2pc potential when the target was congruently gripped, and the distractor was incongruently gripped compared to the conditions where targets were incongruently gripped or when the distractor, as well as target, was congruently gripped. The N2pc results indicate that target selection is easier when action information is congruent with an object’s use. (shrink)

This commentary extends Hertwig & Ortmann's analysis by asking how stricter model selection conventions can facilitate the accumulation of information from experimental studies. In many cases researchers are currently motivated to summarize their data with ambiguous and/or multi parameter models. A “generality first” convention can help eliminate this problem.

Recently, several articles in the scholarly literature on medical ethics proclaim the need for “responsible scholarship” in the debate over the proper criteria for death, in which “responsible scholarship” is defined in terms of support for current neurological criteria for death. In a recent article, James M. DuBois is concerned that academic critiques of current death criteria create unnecessary doubt about the moral acceptability of organ donation, which may affect the public’s willingness to donate. Thus he calls for a closing (...) of the debate on current death criteria and for journal editors to publish only critiques that “substantially engage and advance the debate.” We argue that such positions as DuBois’ are a threat to responsible scholarship in medical ethics, especially scholarship that opposes popular stances, because it erodes academic freedom and the necessity of debate on an issue that is literally a matter of life and death, no matter what side a person defends. (shrink)

Information about the environment is captured in human biological systems on a variety of interacting levels – in distributions of genes, linguistic particulars, concepts, methods, theories, preferences, and overt behaviors. I investigate some of the basic principles which govern such a hierarchy by constructing a comparatively simple three-level selection model of bee foraging preferences and behaviors. The information-theoretic notion of ''''mutual information'''' is employed as a measure of efficiency in tracking a changing environment, and its appropriateness in (...) epistemological applications is discussed at some length. In particular, information accumulated in mid-level preference distributions exhibits suggestive properties for the purposes of naturalistic epistemology. It also appears that the novelty of scientific objects and representations and the rapidity of scientific change relative to genetic change need present no obstacle to the use of such models in explanations of scientific progress and the reliability of scientific judgement. (shrink)

This essay employs Charles Peirce’s triadic semiotics in order to develop a biosemiotic theory of life that is capable of illuminating the function of information in living systems. Specifically, I argue that the relationship between biological information structures , selecting environments, and the adapted bodily processes of living organisms is aptly modelled by the irreducibly triadic relationship between Peirce’s sign, object, and interpretant, respectively. In each instance of information-based semiosis, the information structure is a complex informational (...) sign that represents the informational object ; and the bodily, behavioral, mental, or intellectual processes that are organized by the informational sign to more or less accurately interpret the present environment constitute a complex informational interpretant—a living, interpreting organism. The essay begins by discussing the precise sense in which this biosemiotic theory is based upon Charles Peirce’s semiotic theory. Next, the theory is developed at length in relation to genetic information structures. Finally, I present a brief outline of how the theory applies to neural and linguistic information structures. The essay concludes with a reflection upon the anti-reductionist implications of the theory. (shrink)

There are many ontologies of the world or of specific phenomena such as time, matter, space, and quantum mechanics1. However, ontologies of information are rather rare. One of the reasons behind this is that information is most frequently associated with communication and computing, and not with ‘the furniture of the world’. But what would be the nature of an ontology of information? For it to be of significant import it should be amenable to formalization in a logico-grammatical (...) formalism. A candidate ontology satisfying such a requirement can be found in some of the ideas of K. Turek, presented in this paper. Turek outlines the ontology of information conceived of as a part of nature, and provides the ‘missing link’ to the Z axiomatic set theory, offering a proposal for developing a formal ontology of information both in its philosophical and logicogrammatical representations. (shrink)

There are many ontologies of the world or of specific phenomena such as time, matter, space, and quantum mechanics1. However, ontologies of information are rather rare. One of the reasons behind this is that information is most frequently associated with communication and computing, and not with ‘the furniture of the world’. But what would be the nature of an ontology of information? For it to be of significant import it should be amenable to formalization in a logico-grammatical (...) formalism. A candidate ontology satisfying such a requirement can be found in some of the ideas of K. Turek, presented in this paper. Turek outlines the ontology of information conceived of as a part of nature, and provides the ‘missing link’ to the Z axiomatic set theory, offering a proposal for developing a formal ontology of information both in its philosophical and logicogrammatical representations. (shrink)

Research on cultural transmission among Americans has established a bias for transmitting stories that have disgusting elements. Conceived of as a cultural evolutionary force, this phenomenon is one type of emotional selection. In a series of online studies with Americans and Indians we investigate whether there are cultural differences in emotional selection, such that the transmission process favours different kinds of content in different countries. The first study found a bias for disgusting content among Americans but not among Indians. Four (...) subsequent studies focused on how country interacts with kind of emotional content in reactions to transmission of stories or information. Whereas Indian participants, compared to Americans, tended to be less interested in, and excited by, transmission of stories and news involving common disgust-elicitors, the opposite pattern held for transmission of happy surprises and good news. We discuss various possible explanations and implications. (shrink)

Internet users have access to a multitude of science-related information – on journalistic news sites but also on blogs with user-generated content. In this context, we investigated in two studies the factors which influence laypersons’ selective exposure. In an experiment with a collection of online news, parents were asked to search for information about the controversy surrounding violence in the media. Texts from high-reputation sources were clicked on more frequently – regardless of content –, whereas ratings by (...) others had limited effects. In a second experiment, the expertise and gender of blog authors as well as valence and number of ratings were varied. In this setting, texts from sources with positive ratings were read for longer. Results show that laypersons make use of credibility cues when deciding which articles to read. For online news sites, media reputation is most important, whereas in blogs, ratings are taken into account more frequently. (shrink)

This study examined whether the stability of highly relevant animate and inanimate information predicted encoding. Participants viewed audiovisual media and completed a change detection task of screenshots taken from the viewing session. The screenshots were either left as originally viewed or a factor was altered. The factors were all motivationally and story relevant. Half were part of an animal and half were part of other environmental information. This was crossed with whether the information was stable or fleeting (...) in the scene. Changes to animals were more recognized than inanimate information. Changes to fleeting inanimate information were better recognized than changes to stable inanimate information. These findings indicate potential for relevant change in environmental threat and opportunity is adaptively significant and likely to increase attention and encoding across animate and inanimate categories of information. (shrink)