Barrett H Clark
Department of Anthropology, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, 90095-1553, United States.
Behav Processes. 2019 Apr;161:87-93. doi: 10.1016/j.beproc.2018.04.019. Epub 2018 May 4.
In the evolution of cognition and behavior, a recurrent question concerns the degree to which any given aspect of the phenotype has been "selected for" or "specified," as opposed to arising as a byproduct of some other process. In some sense this is the key question for evolutionary theories of development that seek to connect ultimate evolutionary accounts to proximate developmental accounts of ontogeny. A popular solution to the specification problem is to invoke "emergence," in which phenotypes are co-constructed by many causes and cannot be reduced to any one of them. However, the concept of emergence, while appealing, can obscure sources of ultimate causation by leaving them unspecified. Here I explore the idea of selected emergence, in which phenotypic outcomes do emerge from a confluence of factors, some haphazard, but which include in part a history of selection, genetic and / or cultural, to produce phenotypic outcomes of that type. I discuss potential case studies of selected emergence, explore its empirical implications and provide suggestions for future research on the evolution of emergent outcomes.
在认知与行为的进化过程中，一个反复出现的问题涉及到表型的任何给定方面在多大程度上是被“选择的”或“特定的”，而不是作为其他某些过程的副产品出现。从某种意义上说，这是发展进化理论的关键问题，这些理论试图将最终的进化解释与个体发育的近因发展解释联系起来。解决特定性问题的一个流行方法是援引“涌现”，即表型由多种原因共同构建，不能归结为其中任何一个原因。然而，涌现的概念虽然有吸引力，但可能会因未明确最终因果关系的来源而使其模糊不清。在这里，我探讨“选择涌现”的概念，即表型结果确实源自多种因素的融合，有些是偶然的，但部分包括遗传和/或文化选择的历史，以产生那种类型的表型结果。我讨论了选择涌现的潜在案例研究，探讨其经验意义，并为未来关于涌现结果进化的研究提供建议。
