Brain Heraldic Tinctures and Evolution Theory: A Sensational Turn of Events That Should Have Been Kept Secret

Recent years have witnessed an increased interest in the evolution of the human capacity for language. Such a project is necessarily interdisciplinary. However, that interdisciplinarity brings with it a risk: terms with a technical meaning in their own field are used wrongly or too loosely by those from other backgrounds. Unfortunately, this risk has been realized in the case of language evolution, where many of the terms of social evolution theory (reciprocal altruism, honest signaling, etc.) are incorrectly used in a way that suggests that certain key fundamentals have been misunderstood. In particular the distinction between proximate and ultimate explanations is often lost, with the result that several claims made by those interested in language evolution are epistemically incoherent. However, the correct application of social evolution theory provides simple, clear explanations of why language most likely evolved and how the signals used in language — words — remain cheap yet arbitrary.

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Constructor theory of life

Journal of The Royal Society Interface ◽

10.1098/rsif.2014.1226 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 12 (104) ◽

pp. 20141226 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Chiara Marletto

Keyword(s):

Natural Selection ◽

Evolutionary Theory ◽

Digital Information ◽

Evolution Theory ◽

Physical Processes ◽

Darwinian Theory ◽

Gene Replication ◽

Theory Of Information ◽

Living Organisms

Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory explains how the appearance of purposive design in the adaptations of living organisms can have come about without their intentionally being designed. The explanation relies crucially on the possibility of certain physical processes : mainly, gene replication and natural selection . In this paper, I show that for those processes to be possible without the design of biological adaptations being encoded in the laws of physics, those laws must have certain other properties. The theory of what these properties are is not part of evolution theory proper, yet without it the neo-Darwinian theory does not fully achieve its purpose of explaining the appearance of design. To this end, I apply constructor theory's new mode of explanation to express exactly within physics the appearance of design, no-design laws, and the logic of self-reproduction and natural selection. I conclude that self-reproduction, replication and natural selection are possible under no-design laws, the only non-trivial condition being that they allow digital information to be physically instantiated. This has an exact characterization in the constructor theory of information. I also show that under no-design laws an accurate replicator requires the existence of a ‘vehicle’ constituting, together with the replicator, a self-reproducer.

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