Parsimony, Evolution, and Animal Pain

Parsimony and Models of Animal Minds

Dennett’s (1971, 1987) ideas about the intentional stance have elicited different reactions from philosophers and scientists. Philosophers have focused on Dennett’s alleged anti-realism about the mental while scientists have focused on his three-way distinction among zero-order, first-order, and second-order intentionality. For most philosophers, anti-realism (at least concerning the mental sta...

Parsimony with General Character Evolution

The questions of how to test hypotheses of character evolution, and incorporate character evolution into phylogenetic analysis are considered in this thesis. When a character transformation series is not linear, it is usually decoded into a set of binary characters by various binary coding methods. The disadvantages of such an approach have been discussed extensively in the literature. We propo...

Evolution and animal welfare.

Animal welfare is a topic often thought to reside outside mainstream biology. The complexity of the methods used to assess welfare (such as health, physiology, immunological state, and behavior) require an understanding of a wide range of biological phenomena. Furthermore, the "welfare" of an animal provides a framework in which a diversity of its responses can be understood as fitness-enhancin...

Defining and Assessing Animal Pain

The detection and assessment of pain in animals is crucial to improving their welfare in a variety of contexts in which humans are ethically or legally bound to do so. Thus clear standards to judge whether pain is likely to occur in any animal species is vital to inform whether to alleviate pain or to drive the refinement of procedures to reduce invasiveness, thereby minimizing pain. We define ...

20 Deciphering Animal Pain