Natural selection, replicators, and the downstream worlds of mind and society - John Tooby

Conférence de John Tooby dans le cadre des conférences et Prix Jean Nicod 2020 sur le thème "The Adaptationist Revolution and the Transformation of the Cognitive Sciences", cycle de quatre conférences.
Première Conférence
Natural selection, replicators, and the downstream worlds of mind and society - John Tooby
Lundi 17 septembre - 14h
École normale supérieure, Salle Dussane
45 rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris
Over recent decades, many researchers have realized that integrating the evolutionary sciences and information theory with the human sciences can offer a secure foundation out of which to crystalize a more unified and mutually illuminating network of interlocking disciplines. This encompassing framework also offers new directions and some surprising resolutions of long-standing problems in cognitive science and philosophy. The key to this framework lies in the recognition that replication is a physical process that imposes its own proprietary, alternative objective kind of physical order-replicative rather than thermodynamic order. Thus it provides objective frames of reference not susceptible to substantial relativist critiques. Natural selection is the only natural process capable of pushing living organization uphill against entropy, and the only source of this functional order. Hence, replicative order provides the only definition of order appropriate to predicting, explaining, and understanding the functional designs of organisms, including those of their cognitive systems. With a series of examples, we will explore the potential for replicative order to illuminate mind, behavior, and culture.