Prediction in Selectionist Evolutionary Theory

Prediction in Selectionist Evolutionary Theory

Selectionist evolutionary theory has often been faulted for not making novel predictions that are surprising, risky, and correct. I argue that it in fact exhibits the theoretical virtue of predictive capacity in addition to two other virtues: explanatory unification and model fitting. Two case studies show the predictive capacity of selectionist evolutionary theory: parallel evolutionary change...

Evolutionary Psychology: Adaptationist, Selectionist, and Comparative

ion chosen to escape the locally and historically particular and thus to describe human (or other species') "nature." In other words, the entities and processes of central interest to psychologists are hypothesized biological adaptations. As Buss aptly stresses, evolution by selection is the only known process capable of producing such adaptations. It follows that keeping abreast of conceptual ...

A Selectionist Theory of Language Acquisition

This paper argues that developmental patterns in child language be taken seriously in computational models of language acquisition, and proposes a formal theory that meets this criterion. We first present developmental facts that are problematic for statistical learning approaches which assume no prior knowledge of grammar, and for traditional learnability models which assume the learner moves ...

History Independent Prediction in Evolutionary Game Theory*

research interests include evolution and learning in games and the economics of technological standardization. Abstract We survey three classes of models from evolutionary game theory which make history independent predictions: stochastic stability, stochastic stability with local interaction, and cheap talk. We argue that of the three, only local interaction models yield credible history indep...

On Evolutionary Ecology, Selectionist Archaeology, and Behavioral Archaeology