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It was first proposed by the philosopher John Searle in 1980 and is defined by two main theses: 1) all mental phenomena, ranging from pains, tickles, and itches to the most abstruse thoughts, are caused by lower-level neurobiological processes in the brain; and 2) mental phenomena are higher-level features of the brain.
Evolutionary psychologists consider Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection to be important to an understanding of psychology. [1] Natural selection occurs because individual organisms who are genetically better suited to the current environment leave more descendants, and their genes spread through the population, thus explaining why organisms fit their environments so closely. [1]
Edward H. Hagen writes in The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology that sociobiology is, despite the public controversy regarding the applications to humans, "one of the scientific triumphs of the twentieth century." "Sociobiology is now part of the core research and curriculum of virtually all biology departments, and it is a foundation of the ...
Darwinism subsequently referred to the specific concepts of natural selection, the Weismann barrier, or the central dogma of molecular biology. [2] Though the term usually refers strictly to biological evolution, creationists have appropriated it to refer to the origin of life or to cosmic evolution, that are distinct to biological evolution, [3] and therefore consider it to be the belief and ...
One naturalistic account of the representation relationship is the teleofunctionalist semantics of Fred Dretske. In his book Explaining Behavior, Dretske outlines a theory for how a component of a physical system can come to possess semantic content. This theory characterizes a relationship as representational when: one entity is a natural sign ...
The idea of an explicitly "organismic theory" dates at least back to the publication of Kurt Goldstein's The organism: A holistic approach to biology derived from pathological data in man in 1934. Organismic theories and the "organic" metaphor were inspired by organicist approaches in biology.
Thompson believes that is a mistake, because without the concept of design, it is easy for evolutionary theory to become a tautology. [5] [6] [7] Natural design is design-without-a-designer, in the same sense that natural selection is selection-without-a-selector.
In medical anthropology, naturalistic disease theories are those theories, present within a culture, which explain diseases and illnesses in impersonal terms.George Foster explains naturalistic disease theory as following an "equilibrium model" in which health results from ideal balances of well being appropriate to one's age, condition, and environment.