HeyJaredReflections from Somewhere
My thoughts, recollections and provocations about music, sport (mostly football/soccer), photography, science and thinking about the everyday.
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- Sep 30, 2026
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Evolution of Mind(s) (opens the original)
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Memetics is perhaps the most well-known proposal for an evolutionary account of cultural change. Richard Dawkins (1976) first introduced the idea of memes as the cultural evolution correlate of genes but he also contemplated memes being more closely analogous to viruses. Daniel Dennett (1991, 1995) went all in on memetics as an account of cultural evolution and continued to support it until recently (See e.g. Dennett 2017). Memetics is a selectionist approach to cultural evolution (Lewens 2015,
Evolution of Mind(s) (opens the original)
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In this last post on adaptationism I continue the focus on selection but now turn my attention to alternate views of the end point of the selective process. Let’s first look at the idea of fixation of a trait in a population. As I noted in this post, we can model evolutionary change using models of gene frequency change. To make things simple, let’s focus on a trait, say leaping height in frogs. Now, let’s have two alternate alleles L and l and let’
Evolution of Mind(s) (opens the original)
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I mentioned life history and life history characters/traits in the previous post. Here I want to briefly expand on this idea and connect it with the discussion of selection. Selection acts on organisms as they are what reproduces and dies (Lewontin 1983, 1998). However, different life stages of organisms face different adaptive challenges. Frogs have three life stages but focusing on two, tadpole and adult frog, will make the point. Tadpoles are swimmers and have gi
Evolution of Mind(s) (opens the original)
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In discussion of the evolution of mind the term “adaptationism” is used in a number of ways. For example, for some, approaches to the evolution of mind that are adaptationist are thought to be suspect or inadequate just for that reason. So, what is adaptationism? Here’s Elliot Sober’s succinct version: “Most phenotypic traits in most populations can be explained by a model in which selection is described and nonselective processes are ignored” (Sober 2000a, p. 124). Put in this way, adaptationis
Evolution of Mind(s) (opens the original)
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In this post, I continue introducing evolutionary thinking and evolutionary tools. Here I add to the conceptual tools presented in my previous post. I introduce DNA and molecular evolution and distinguishh evolution from developmentDNA, molecular evolution and developmentThe discovery of the structure of DNA molecules ushered in an alternate way of thinking about genes guided by the molecular gene concept (Griffiths and Stotz 2013, pp. 42–44). Molecular genes are sequen
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