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PubMed1992

Is behavior analysis undergoing selection by consequences?

The legacy of B. F. Skinner's life is a natural science of behavior. The generality of its basic functional relations has led, by induction, to the unifying principle of selection by consequences, which accounts for morphological, behavioral, and cultural evolution. This principle both predicts and explains the observation that the science itself is becoming the object of differential selection in our culture. Public policy is increasingly being framed in terms of the effects of consequences on behavior, as illustrated by examples from education, economics, and politics. Survival of our culture may depend on our skill in managing this process.

Behavior Therapy↗
PubMed1997

Major "anastrophes" in the origin and early evolution of biological energy conversion.

The metabolism of living organisms has long been usefully divided into anabolism and catabolism. Anabolism is constructive, being concerned with the assembly of complex molecules, whereas catabolism is destructive in the sense that it involves the degradation of molecules. In addition to the well-known word catastrophe for sudden, drastic destruction and its consequences, it has been found practical to introduce in the evolutionary context the word "anastrophe" (an old greek word for turning back, in the opposite direction-from anastrephein, where ana = back and strephein = to turn) to cover sudden, drastic constructive events and their consequences. Mutations in genes and genomes giving selective advantage to an organism are typical anastrophic events. A single site mutation in a gene coding for a protein may be good, neutral or bad, or anastrophic, neutral or catastrophic, respectively, for the organism. The consequence of an anastrophic mutation may be a decisive first step on the long way to a new species, whereas a catastrophic mutation may lead to major cell damage or death. This example of the use of the anastrophe concept in biological evolution leads to the question about its applicability to other parts and paths of the cosmic evolutionary process, such as physical, chemical, social and cultural evolution. Here it will be mainly considered in connection with the energy conversion aspects of the chemical evolution leading to the origin of life and of the subsequent early biological evolution. More specifically, it will be attempted to describe possible major anastrophes in energy conversion both before and after the first occurrence of life on earth.

Animals↗
PubMed1985

The four questions of ethology.

Ethology is the biological study of behaviour and concerns itself with questions about the causes, functions, evolution and development of aspects of behaviour. These different questions are illustrated with examples from the study of bird song. This subject has had most impact on understanding of developmental issues, showing the intricate interplay between genes and environment during ontogeny. Work on the evolution of song has involved comparison between closely related species to see how their songs have changed since separation, but also the shorter term cultural evolution that occurs when song is passed from one animal to another by learning. Studies of function, while fraught with difficulties, have revealed that song can have a variety of advantages. As far as causes are concerned, some impressive discoveries have recently been made on the neural basis of song. The need for such work to be complemented by studies of behaviour at the level of the whole animal is stressed, and studies of song sequencing are used to illustrate this.

Animals↗
PubMed2005

The evolutionary language game: an orthogonal approach.

Evolutionary game dynamics have been proposed as a mathematical framework for the cultural evolution of language and more specifically the evolution of vocabulary. This article discusses a model that is mutually exclusive in its underlying principals with some previously suggested models. The model describes how individuals in a population culturally acquire a vocabulary by actively participating in the acquisition process instead of passively observing and communicate through peer-to-peer interactions instead of vertical parent-offspring relations. Concretely, a notion of social/cultural learning called the naming game is first abstracted using learning theory. This abstraction defines the required cultural transmission mechanism for an evolutionary process. Second, the derived transmission system is expressed in terms of the well-known selection-mutation model defined in the context of evolutionary dynamics. In this way, the analogy between social learning and evolution at the level of meaning-word associations is made explicit. Although only horizontal and oblique transmission structures will be considered, extensions to vertical structures over different genetic generations can easily be incorporated. We provide a number of simplified experiments to clarify our reasoning.

Biological Evolution↗
PubMed1992

Models of proximate and ultimate causation in psychology.

B. F. Skinner saw behavior as a product of three levels of evolution. J. R. Kantor and Gregory Bateson noted similar relations. This article describes and applies basic evolutionary concepts to each level: (a) phylogenic, (b) ontogenic, and (c) cultural evolution. Each level is analyzed in terms of (a) units of selection, (b) variety of units required for the selection process, (c) selection pressures, (d) interactions among levels, and (e) implications for understanding and predicting behavior. Distinguishing between models of proximate and ultimate causation, as in biology, may help clarify research problems posed by, and facilitate better communication among, psychologists.

Behavior↗
PubMed1996

A moral history of the evolution of a caste of workers.

Using a dialectic method of philosophic inquiry, the actual ethical, legal, and social situation associated with genetic testing of beryllium-exposed workers in Department of Energy nuclear weapons facilities for markers of chronic beryllium disease is described. The cultural evolution of a caste system in a similar situation, and its social and biological implications, among uranium miners in the Erz Gebirge of Central Europe and on the Colorado Plateau of the United States, marked by suicide and lung disease, including cancer, is also described. The historically persistent social disease resulting from these situations. The Masada Syndrome, named from an analogous situation in biblical times, is characterized. Cultural intervention, a necessary condition for the ethical progression of the Human Genome Project, is outlined.

Berylliosis↗
PubMed2006

Changing cultural and social environments: implications for older East Asian women.

The world is aging and the trend is towards a global feminization of aging. In the Asia Pacific region, which already contains approximately 50% of the world's population over age 60, the number of older women exceeds that of older men in most countries. This article explores the changes that are occurring in East Asian social and cultural traditions for aging and discusses the implications of those changes for women who aged in that culture. In the traditional culture, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean families are influenced by values of family centrality and collective orientation to life that are mostly rooted in Confucian values and ethics. In those traditions, older women assume and maintain a valued status within the family and community through respected roles and productive contributions. However, various factors, such as migration to urban areas and demographic shifts, have precipitated modernization of these societies and alterations of traditional culture. These cultural shifts are relevant to the United States where, according to the 2000 U.S. Census, 71.0% of Asian and Pacific Islander-Americans over the age 65 are foreign-born. Immigration can prompt an immediate cultural shift and create a fast forward insight into the slower cultural evolution currently occurring in East Asian societies.

Aged↗
PubMed1998

Culture, social organization, and patterns of violence.

Traditional social theorizing holds that strong and cohesive family, community, and religious institutions rein in violence. However, in cultures where certain types of violence are condoned, this should not be true. Specifically, in the U.S. South and West, where culture-of-honor traditions persist, greater social organization should be associated with more violence. This pattern was confirmed in examinations of argument-related homicide rates (Study 1); mass consumption patterns for violence in entertainment, recreation, and vocational pursuits (Study 2); and voting patterns of political elites on gun control and national defense issues (Study 3). Across the 3 studies, social organization was associated with effects in the South and West opposite of what they were in the North. Implications for general theories of cultural evolution, suggesting a cycle in the way societies crystallize and change, are discussed.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1977

Towards a method for assessing social support systems.

Man is committed by his biological and cultural evolution to a social existence. While the social environment is the source of many stressors, it may also be protective. This latter function is called 'support'. Social bonds are to be found universally, but some cultural groups have the integrity of these bonds conspicuously endangered. The application of the affective component of the social network to psychiatry promises to be useful, but cannot progress further until an instrument is developed for assessing the support available to an individual. We have gone some way towards a method for assessing the components of primary group interaction. The task now is to determine if low social support, such as is seen in Western suburban wives, some migrant groups and some women in the Middle East and Asia, is causally related to some psychiatric disorders The principal appeal of this area is that we may be tapping something very fundamental about human social organisation, something which, unlike adversity, is subject to modification.

Community Psychiatry↗
PubMed2004

Psychiatric conditions in an evolutionary context.

Psychiatric conditions and the institutions and practices that modern society has evolved to handle them originated during the nineteenth century in Anglo European societies. They are products of a historically contingent and culture specific formulation of a class of social problems of behavior that came to the fore in relation to intellectual and political economic changes of those societies. However, such problems have a long ancestry. They are intrinsic to human species and the social and cultural systems that its members have evolved since their emergence. This article reviews intellectual quandaries raised by evolutionary study of psychiatric conditions, those of crossing the human/animal divide and crossing historically contingent cultures; and of framing history of psychiatry in terms of social and cultural evolution. The biological architecture underlying psychiatric conditions and the breakthroughs that indigenous psychiatry of different types of societies underwent in formulating signs and symptoms are discussed.

Cultural Characteristics↗
PubMed2003

The basis and relevance of emotional dignity.

The paper is a preliminary examination of the origin and role of psychological perception or "feeling" of dignity in human beings. Following Ayala's naturalistic account of morality, a sense of emotional dignity is seen as an outcome of processes of natural selection, cultural evolution, and above all a need for social inclusion. It is suggested that the existence of emotional dignity as part of a human species-related continuum provides an explanation of why we treat those in a persistent vegetative state, the severely and hopelessly mentally impaired, the senile demented, cadavers and archaeological remains with dignity and respect. For older Europeans, dissonance between physical and mental abilities, unfamiliarity with social and cultural changes and relative proximity to death may influence their emotional dignity and hence vulnerability.

Aged↗
PubMed1994

Post-therapeutic evolution of serum chlamydial antibody titers in women with acute salpingitis and tubal infertility.

OBJECTIVE: To determine if serologic data and, more particularly, antichlamydial immunoglobulin (Ig) M can be used for diagnosis of current chlamydial intrapelvic gynecologic infection. DESIGN: Forty-two women with acute salpingitis (group A), 131 women with tubal factor infertility (group B), and 98 pregnant women (control group C) were studied. SETTING: Hôpital Jean Rostand, Sèvres (patients), Laboratories Magenta and Eylau, Paris (serology), Institut Pasteur, Paris (cultures). INTERVENTIONS: Study groups: endocervical/urethral swabs, pelvic samples; serologic study before and after treatment. CONTROL GROUP: Serologic study. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Serum samples were collected from each patient initially and 6 to 9 weeks later; additionally, two to five sequential sera were obtained from 22 (group A) and 25 (group B) patients with positive cultures, evolutive serology, or positive antichlamydial IgM. Sera were tested for antichlamydial IgG by a microimmunofluorescence assay using Chlamydia trachomatis elementary bodies and for IgA and IgM by whole inclusion-fluorescent assay. RESULTS: Before treatment, there was a correlation between the presence of antichlamydial IgM and positive cervical and/or intrapelvic chlamydia cultures. After treatment, antichlamydial IgM, when initially positive, rapidly disappeared in most subjects; its persistence after 4 months was significantly associated with tubal sequelae in group A patients and persistence of positive intrapelvic chlamydial cultures in group B women. CONCLUSION: Serologic analysis of women with acute salpingitis or tubal infertility, including antichlamydial IgM, may aid both in the before treatment diagnosis of chlamydial infection and in the follow-up evaluation.

Acute Disease↗
PubMed1999

Emergence of homeostasis and "noise imprinting" in an evolution model.

Homeostasis, the creation of a stabilized internal milieu, is ubiquitous in biological evolution, despite the entropic cost of excluding noise information from a region. The advantages of stability seem self evident, but the alternatives are not so clear. This issue was studied by means of numerical experiments on a simple evolution model: a population of Boolean network "organisms" selected for performance of a curve-fitting task while subjected to noise. During evolution, noise sensitivity increased with fitness. Noise exclusion evolved spontaneously, but only if the noise was sufficiently unpredictable. Noise that was limited to one or a few stereotyped patterns caused symmetry breaking that prevented noise exclusion. Instead, the organisms incorporated the noise into their function at little cost in ultimate fitness and became totally noise dependent. This "noise imprinting" suggests caution when interpreting apparent adaptations seen in nature. If the noise was totally random from generation to generation, noise exclusion evolved reliably and irreversibly, but if the noise was correlated over several generations, maladaptive selection of noise-dependent traits could reverse noise exclusion, with catastrophic effect on population fitness. Noise entering the selection process rather than the organism had a different effect: adaptive evolution was totally abolished above a critical noise amplitude, in a manner resembling a thermodynamic phase transition. Evolutionary adaptation to noise involves the creation of a subsystem screened from noise information but increasingly vulnerable to its effects. Similar considerations may apply to information channeling in human cultural evolution.

Algorithms↗
PubMed1999

[Morphogenesis of neuronal systems in tissue culture repeats the evolution of simpler nervous systems].

Comparison of simpler nervous systems of invertebrates and plexiganglionic systems cultivated in tissue culture was conducted for the first time. Their principal resemblance was discovered. By following up the kinetics of neuronal behaviour in culture similarity between mechanisms underlying the evolution of simpler nervous systems and processes of self assembly of neuronal systems was revealed. In both cases isolated nerve cells are replaced by primitive (archaic) nervous plexus that, in turn, becomes a plexiganglionic neuronal system. Final individual architecture of ganglia and mechanisms of formation of nerve ganglia and trunks coincide. Highly specialized unipolar neurons transform into archaic unipolar cells and display signs of chemotaxis. Resemblance of stages and mechanisms of the formation of all elementary nervous systems and neuronal systems in culture is explained by integrity of the neuron properties (adhesion and mobility of neuron bodies, extrusion and retraction of their processes and autotomy of nerve endings). Similar neuron potentialities in evolution and tissue culture underly the abundance of parallelisms between nervous systems in animals of unrelated phyla. In this aspect a possibility appeared to formulate another biogenetic postulate concerning general mechanisms of neurogenesis: morphogenesis of plexiganglionic neuronal systems in tissue culture represents fast and simplified repetition of the evolution of elementary nervous system of invertebrates.

Animals↗
PubMed2026

Listening forward: emerging roles of bioacoustics in ecology, evolution, and conservation.

Bioacoustics is increasingly shifting from a mostly descriptive pursuit to one that can anticipate ecological change. Recent innovations-from autonomous recording units and edge-computing sensors to speech-inspired feature extraction and machine-learning techniques like transfer learning, unsupervised discovery, and explainable AI-are transforming the study of animal communication. These advances let us work at scales previously difficult to imagine. Automated species recognition, individual identification, and even tracking cultural evolution over decades are now within reach. Entire ecosystem soundscapes can be mapped with unprecedented resolution. Looking ahead, global listening networks, adaptive acoustic indices, and live biodiversity dashboards seem increasingly realistic. We may soon build digital models that simulate communication networks under future scenarios. Closer integration with genomics, physiology, and robotics could link vocal traits to their genetic, physiological, and ecological drivers. Challenges remain, including data governance, acoustic privacy, and equitable access to the planet's sonic heritage. Bioacoustics may be on the way to becoming a predictive, integrative science - one particularly well suited to monitoring, interpreting, and helping safeguard life's communication systems in a rapidly changing world.

Animals↗
PubMed2005

"Protoplasm...is soft wax in our hands": Paul Kammerer and the art of biological transformation.

Paul Kammerer's career ended in scandal in 1926 over tampering with his evidence for "Lamarckian" evolution--the infamous midwife toad. But although Kammerer's conclusions proved false, his evidence was probably genuine. In any case his arguments were not simply for Lamarckism and against Darwinism, as the theories are understood today. If we look beyond the scandal, the Kammerer story shows us a great deal about early 20th-century biology: the range of new ideas about heredity and variation, competing theories of biological and cultural evolution and their applications in eugenics, new kinds of laboratories and professional roles for biologists, and changing standards for documenting experimental results.

Adaptation, Physiological↗
PubMed1983

Changes in Photosystem II Account for the Circadian Rhythm in Photosynthesis in Gonyaulax polyedra.

Cell-free extracts that show activity in photosynthetic electron flow have been prepared from the unicellular dinoflagellate, Gonyaulax polyedra. Electron flow, as O(2) uptake, was measured through both photo-system I and II from water to methyl viologen, through photosystem I alone from reduced 2,6-dichlorophenol indophenol to methyl viologen which does not include the plastoquinone pool or from duroquinol to methyl viologen which includes the plastoquinone pool. Electron flow principally through photosystem II was measured from water to diaminodurene and ferricyanide, as O(2) evolution. Cultures of Gonyaulax were grown on a 12-hour light:12 hour dark cycle to late log phase, then transferred to constant light at the beginning of a light period. After 3 days, measurements of electron flow were made at the maximum and minimum of the photosynthetic rhythm, as determined from measurements of the rhythm of bioluminescence. Photosynthesis was also measured in whole cells, either as (14)C fixation or O(2) evolution. Electron flow through both photosystems and through photosystem II alone were clearly rhythmic, while electron flow through photosystem I, including or excluding the plastoquinone pool, was constant with time in the circadian cycle. Thus, only changes in photosystem II account for the photosynthesis rhythm in Gonyaulax.

Journal Article↗