Animal Behaviour Group, Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour, McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S 4K1
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2017 Dec 5;372(1735). doi: 10.1098/rstb.2016.0427.
Animal life can be perceived as the selective use of information for maximizing survival and reproduction. All organisms including bacteria and protists rely on genetic networks to build and modulate sophisticated structures and biochemical mechanisms for perceiving information and responding to environmental changes. Animals, however, have gone through a series of innovations that dramatically increased their capacity to acquire, retain and act upon information. Multicellularity was associated with the evolution of the nervous system, which took over many tasks of internal communication and coordination. This paved the way for the evolution of learning, initially based on individual experience and later also via social interactions. The increased importance of social learning also led to the evolution of language in a single lineage. Individuals' ability to dramatically increase performance via learning may have led to an evolutionary cycle of increased lifespan and greater investment in cognitive abilities, as well as in the time necessary for the development and refinement of expertise. We still know little, however, about the evolutionary biology, genetics and neurobiological mechanisms that underlie such expertise and its development.This article is part of the themed issue 'Process and pattern in innovations from cells to societies'.
动物的生命活动可以被视为一种有选择性地利用信息以实现最大生存和繁殖的过程。所有生物，包括细菌和原生生物，都依赖于遗传网络来构建和调节复杂的结构和生化机制，以感知信息并对环境变化做出反应。然而，动物经历了一系列的创新，极大地提高了它们获取、保留和运用信息的能力。多细胞生物的出现与神经系统的进化有关，神经系统接管了许多内部通信和协调的任务。这为学习的进化铺平了道路，最初是基于个体经验，后来也通过社会互动。社会学习的重要性增加也导致了单一谱系中语言的进化。个体通过学习显著提高表现的能力可能导致了寿命延长和对认知能力以及发展和完善专业知识所需时间的更大投资的进化循环。然而，我们对支持这种专业知识及其发展的进化生物学、遗传学和神经生物学机制知之甚少。本文是“从细胞到社会的创新的过程和模式”主题专刊的一部分。
