While enormous progress has been made in unraveling the proximate physiological mechanisms that account for anxiety, stress, and low mood, these states continue to give rise to considerable conceptual confusion. This is, in part, because proximate studies have neither been adequately distinguished from, nor integrated with, evolutionary explanations for the adaptive functions of anxiety, stress...

Explanations for suicide attacks abound. Yet the literature remains conceptually fragmented, with different authors focusing on different attitudes, incentive structures, values, psychological processes, strategic imperatives, and cultural, historical, and personal circumstances. Curiously, however, there have been few efforts to cast suicide bombing within the extensive evolutionary literature...

Residences located close to urban parks frequently sell at a premium. The increased home values represent a ‘capitalization’ of a park’s value to proximate homeowners and this phenomenon has been termed ‘the proximate principle’. The evolution of the principle from squares and gardens in small private estates to large park areas occurred with the development of Regent’s Park in London. The prox...

While enormous progress has been made in unraveling the proximate physiological mechanisms that account for anxiety, stress, and low mood, these states continue to give rise to considerable conceptual confusion. This is, in part, because proximate studies have neither been adequately distinguished from, nor integrated with, evolutionary explanations for the adaptive functions of anxiety, stress...

In the 2D point searching problem, our goal is to preprocess n points P = {p1, . . . , pn} in the plane so that, for an online sequence of query points q1, . . . qm, we can quickly determine which (if any) of the elements of P are equal to each query point qi. This problem can be solved in O(log n) time by mapping the problem down to one dimension. We present a data structure that is optimized ...

The term levels of analysis has been used in several ways: to distinguish between ultimate and proximate levels, to categorize different kinds of research questions and to differentiate levels of reductionism. Because questions regarding ultimate function and proximate mechanisms are logically distinct, I suggest that distinguishing between these two levels is the best use of the term. Integrat...

In recent years, a small group of animal behaviorists has been calling for a renewed focus on proximate mechanisms in the study of behavioral evolution (Kennedy, 1992; Stamps, 1991). These calls have been made to counter the current view, implicit in most contemporary analyses of animal behavior, that we can understand ultimate causation without worrying about the mechanistic details. As noted ...