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These additional EPMs are the by-product traits of a species’ evolutionary development (see spandrels), as well as the vestigial traits that no longer benefit the species’ fitness. It can be difficult to tell whether a trait is vestigial or not, so some literature is more lenient and refers to vestigial traits as adaptations, even though ...
The muscles connected to the ears of a human do not develop enough to have the same mobility allowed to monkeys. Arrows show the vestigial structure called Darwin's tubercle. In the context of human evolution, vestigiality involves those traits occurring in humans that have lost all or most of their original function through evolution. Although ...
Vestigial structures are often homologous to structures that are functioning normally in other species. Therefore, vestigial structures can be considered evidence for evolution, the process by which beneficial heritable traits arise in populations over an extended period of time. The existence of vestigial traits can be attributed to changes in ...
One of the tasks of evolutionary psychology is to identify which psychological traits are likely to be adaptations, byproducts or random variation. George C. Williams suggested that an "adaptation is a special and onerous concept that should only be used where it is really necessary."
A number of traits can vary as a result of shortening of the fetal development of a trait or by prolongation of the same. In such a case, a shift in the time a trait is allowed to develop before it is fixed can bring forth an ancestral phenotype. [5] Atavisms are often seen as evidence of evolution. [6]
Another possibility is that a trait may have been adaptive at some point in an organism's evolutionary history, but a change in habitats caused what used to be an adaptation to become unnecessary or even maladapted. Such adaptations are termed vestigial. Many organisms have vestigial organs, which are the remnants of fully functional structures ...
In psychology, trait theory (also called dispositional theory) is an approach to the study of human personality. Trait theorists are primarily interested in the measurement of traits , which can be defined as habitual patterns of behavior, thought , and emotion . [ 1 ]
It has been suggested that some behaviours might be homologous, based either on sharing across related taxa or on common origins of the behaviour in an individual's development; however, the notion of homologous behavior remains controversial, [44] largely because behavior is more prone to multiple realizability than other biological traits.