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Adult humans are characterized by low rates of intra-group physical aggression, relative to both human children and non-human animals. I propose that the suppression of physically aggressive tendencies has been achieved partly through the replacement of dominance hierarchies by prestige hierarchies, driven by indirect reciprocity and mediated by indirectly aggressive competition and linguistic transmission of reputations. Reviewing the developmental literature on indirect aggression and related constructs provides three pieces of evidence that evolutionarily old impulses towards physical aggression are gradually socialized into indirect aggression: (i) physical aggression falls in early childhood over the same age range during which indirect aggression increases; (ii) the same individuals engage in both physical and indirect aggression; and (iii) dominant individuals practice indirect aggression more frequently. Consideration of the developmental course of indirect aggression is complemented by analysis of similar developments in verbal behaviors that are not necessarily aggressive, namely tattling and gossip. Two developmental transitions in indirect aggression and related behaviors are postulated. The first occurs in early childhood as children become aware of norms against physical aggression. The second occurs in preadolescence with the development of increasingly covert forms of reputational competition, as children try to renegotiate their status within peer social networks.

The paper presents a very simple toy model that is simulated to experience some aspects related to what is it people want and need when related to the social happiness. By outlining some short discussions related to the distinguishing of what we call “want” and “need”, we see how both micro-social aspects may emerge the happiness as well as the urge to innovate and affinity to the collective creativity and social progress.

We discuss the way of hoax spreading as gossip and rumor throughout the social media, i.e.: Twitter, by observing an empirical case in Indonesia. We discuss the spreading factor of the gossip in the social media and see the epidemiology of the propagation hoax before and after the hoax being clarified in the conventional mass media. The discussions brought us to the open enrchiment analysis of the sociology of gossip and rumors within the online services like Twitter for future observation of human behavior.

Music, or in narrower sense, melodic contours of the aesthetically arranged pitches and the respective durations attracts our cognition since the beginning and now shaping the way we think in the complex life of culture. From evolutionary school of thoughts we could learn our perspective of seeing the musical diversity of folk songs in Indonesian archipelago by hypothesizing the aligning memes throughout the data sets. By regarding the memeplexes constructed from the the Zipf-Mandelbrot Law in melodic sequences and some mathematical characteristics of songs e.g.: gyration and spiraling effect, we construct evolutionary steps i.e.: genetic algorithm as tools for generating melodic sequences as an alternating computational methods to model the cognitive processes creating songs. While we build a melodic-contour generator, we present the enrichment on seeing the roles of limitless landscape of creativity and innovation guided by particular inspirations in the creation of work of art in general.

The scientific worldview is based on laws, which are supposed to be certain, objective, and independent of time and context. The narrative worldview found in literature, myth and religion, is based on stories, which relate the events experienced by a subject in a particular context with an uncertain outcome. This paper argues that the concept of “agent”, supported by the theories of evolution, cybernetics and complex adaptive systems, allows us to reconcile scientific and narrative perspectives. An agent follows a course of action through its environment with the aim of maximizing its fitness. Navigation along that course combines the strategies of regulation, exploitation and exploration, but needs to cope with often-unforeseen diversions. These can be positive (affordances, opportunities), negative (disturbances, dangers) or neutral (surprises). The resulting sequence of encounters and actions can be conceptualized as an adventure. Thus, the agent appears to play the role of the hero in a tale of challenge and mystery that is very similar to the "monomyth", the basic storyline that underlies all myths and fairy tales according to Campbell [1949]. This narrative dynamics is driven forward in particular by the alternation between prospect (the ability to foresee diversions) and mystery (the possibility of achieving an as yet absent prospect), two aspects of the environment that are particularly attractive to agents. This dynamics generalizes the scientific notion of a deterministic trajectory by introducing a variable “horizon of knowability”: the agent is never fully certain of its further course, but can anticipate depending on its degree of prospect.

The scientific worldview is based on laws, which are supposed to be certain, objective, and independent of time and context. The narrative worldview found in literature, myth and religion, is based on stories, which relate the events experienced by a subject in a particular context with an uncertain outcome. This paper argues that the concept of “agent”, supported by the theories of evolution, cybernetics and complex adaptive systems, allows us to reconcile scientific and narrative perspectives. An agent follows a course of action through its environment with the aim of maximizing its fitness. Navigation along that course combines the strategies of regulation, exploitation and exploration, but needs to cope with often-unforeseen diversions. These can be positive (affordances, opportunities), negative (disturbances, dangers) or neutral (surprises). The resulting sequence of encounters and actions can be conceptualized as an adventure. Thus, the agent appears to play the role of the hero in a tale of challenge and mystery that is very similar to the "monomyth", the basic storyline that underlies all myths and fairy tales according to Campbell [1949]. This narrative dynamics is driven forward in particular by the alternation between prospect (the ability to foresee diversions) and mystery (the possibility of achieving an as yet absent prospect), two aspects of the environment that are particularly attractive to agents. This dynamics generalizes the scientific notion of a deterministic trajectory by introducing a variable “horizon of knowability”: the agent is never fully certain of its further course, but can anticipate depending on its degree of prospect.

Presents the author's evolving views of the best current positions on certain core philosophical and psychological problems. These positions together suggest a skeptical or nihilist perspective modified by evolutionary psychology and contemporary philosophy that embraces our desire to live as best we can and the relative and psychological reality of values, free will and other phenomena while recognizing limitations on their foundations and our understanding. The below makes no claims to originality for most of the ideas expressed, drawing on a range of mostly unreferenced texts that will be familiar to philosophers and psychologists working in this area.

The paper draws issue on the evolutionary economics that open our mind on seeing economy as growing and living organism with any characters of robustness, self-organization, adaptation, and evolution. This has been recognized, as in global picture, we enter the phase in which information and knowledge acquisition rapidly plays a major role in economy. The discussions is presented by demonstrating some qualitative properties and theoretical explorations on long range historical economic growth and development and thus followed by some highlights on innovation, creativity and elaborations regarding to fitness landscapes incorporating memetics, as works related to social and cultural aspects of social system, while talking about economic system in general. The discussions depicts some important notions on market and product diversifications that have been the source of the economic growth in general.

The wide varieties of Indonesian textiles could reflect the varsity that has been living with the diversity of Indonesian ethnic groups. Meme as an evolutionary modeling technique promises some conjectures to capture the innovative process of the cultural objects production in the particular collective patterns acquainted can be regarded as fitness in the large evolutionary landscape of cultural life. We have presented the correlations between memeplexes that is transformed into distances has generated the phylomemetic tree, both among some samples from Indonesian textile handicrafts and batik, the designs that have been living through generations with Javanese people, the largest ethnic group in Indonesian archipelago. The memeplexes is extracted from the geometrical shape, i.e.: fractal dimensions and the histogram analysis of the employed colorization. We draw some interesting findings from the tree and open the future anthropological development that might catch the attention further observation.

From the works of mathematical properties of songs, we construct the phylomemetic trees of Indonesian ethnic and traditional songs. The memeplexes are then reflected by the used notes and respective durations as they exhibit the Zipf-Mandelbrot law, the gyration coefficient, “spiraling effects”, and the dynamic entropy shown in the structure of the songs. The cladistic techniques yielding phylomemetic tree shows widespread innovations of the songs sampled in the observation. This is however reflects the cultural evolutionary models for the innovations involve generations of people within ethnic groups. The paper ends with open discussions and conjectures for more detailed discussions related to each traditional songs as well as the properties of Indonesian people that are attached to heterogeneous ethnic groups that are continually swarming songs and in general, other aesthetic audible artifacts.

The paper reports a possibilities of musical traditions of ancient civilization who built the sites discovered in Gunung Padang, West Java, Indonesia. Particular group of the stones in the megalithic site happens to have relatively high frequency that might have correspondence with standard western musical scale. From the samples recorded at the site, we do the power spectral analysis to have the dominant frequency within the audio and mapped the result to MIDI numbers. We showed that the obtained four notes interestingly have particular places in modern musical scale.

The paper introduces the organization concept of silaturahmi that widely used as an important concept to maintain a lot of community structures in Indonesia. One of the organization is alumni forum where alumni gathers and establishes an institutional organization. The concept of silaturahmi is demonstrated to build a network among alumni that has been spread world-wide by observing the clustered gathered in social clusters. The paper reports the small world topology emerged and discusses some interesting conjectures regarding to social institutions that is made upon the concept of silaturahmi.

The paper proposes a way to see melodic features in music/songs in the terms of “letters” constituting “words”, while in return investigating the fulfillment of Zipf-Mandelbrot Law in them. Some interesting findings are reported including some possible conjectures for classification of melodic and musical artifacts considering several aspects of culture. The paper ends with some discussions related to further directions, be it enrichment in musicology and the possible plan for musical generative art.

The paper brings two motivations to the theoretical explorations of social analysis. The first is to enrich the agent based computational sociology by incorporating the fuzzy set theory in to the computational modeling. This is conducted by showing the importance to include the fuzziness into artificial agent’s considerations and her way acquiring and articulate information. This is continued with the second motives to bring the Darwinian sexual selection theory – as it has been developed broadly in evolutionary psychology – into the analysis of social system including cultural analysis and other broad aspects of sociological fields. The two was combined in one computational model construction showing the fuzziness of mating choice, and how to have computational tools to explain broad fields of social realms. The paper ends with some opened further computer program development.

“Uner Tan Syndrome” consists of two main symptoms: quadrupedal gait and primitive cognitive abilities including language and conscious experience. To assess the central mechanisms involved in this syndrome, we performed MRI and PET scans on affected and unaffected individuals from both families. All affected individuals were also subjected to neurological examination. To assess the integrity of the peripheral and central vestibular system, Barany’s caloric test was applied to the affected individuals. Brain MRI and PET scans were performed on normal subjects (N = 7) and patients (N = 7). Right- and left-cerebral and cerebellar areas, including the vermial and callosal areas, were measured on the MRI scans using a computer cursor. Quadrupedal gait, mental retardation, dysartric speech, nystagmus, severe truncal ataxia, hyperreflexia, astasia and abasia were observed in the affected individuals from both families. Cerebellum and vermis were atrophic in the MRI and PET scans of the first family. In contrast, the brain MRI seemed to be normal in the MRI and PET scans of affected individuals from the second family. The caloric test revealed central vestibular damage in patients from the first family and peripheral vestibular damage in patients from the second family. The results suggest that “Uner Tan Syndrome”, discovered in two unrelated families, may be caused by peripheral or central vestibular damage resulting from different genetic defects. Cerebellar hypoplasia may not be a prerequisite for the emergence of this syndrome. Primitive mental abilities may be explained by damage within the vestibulo-cerebellar system, while the quadrupedal gait may be due to a genetic defect within the higher brain centers that suppress the atavistic brain networks controlling quadrupedal gait and helped in the emergence of the habitual bipedal gait during human evolution. This retarded development of human locomotion –devolution- may illuminate the brain mechanisms responsible for the transition from quadrupedality to bipedality in human evolution.

This article uses database, evolution and physics considerations to suggest how the mind stores and processes its data. Its innovations in its approach lie in:- A) The comparison between the capabilities of the mind to those of a modern relational database while conserving phenomenality. The strong functional similarity of the two systems leads to the conclusion that the mind may be profitably described as being a mental database. The need for material/mental bridging and addressing indexes is discussed. B) The consideration of what neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) between sensorimotor data and instrumented observation one can hope to obtain using current biophysics. It is deduced that what is seen using the various brain scanning methods reflects only that part of current activity transactions (e.g. visualizing) which update and interrogate the mind, but not the contents of the integrated mental database which constitutes the mind itself. This approach yields reasons why there is much neural activity in an area to which a conscious function is ascribed (e.g. the amygdala is associated with fear), yet there is no visible part of its activity which can be clearly identified as phenomenal. The concept is then situated in a Penrosian expanded physical environment, requiring evolutionary continuity, modularity and phenomenality.Several novel Darwinian advantages arising from the approach are described.

What is Consciousness For? Lee Pierson and Monroe Trout Copyright © 2005 Abstract: The answer to the title question is, in a word, volition. Our hypothesis is that the ultimate adaptive function of consciousness is to make volitional movement possible. All conscious processes exist to subserve that ultimate function. Thus, we believe that all conscious organisms possess at least some volitional capability. Consciousness makes volitional attention possible; volitional attention, in turn, makes volitional movement possible. There is, as far as we know, no valid theoretical argument that consciousness is needed for any function other than volitional movement and no convincing empirical evidence that consciousness performs any other ultimate function. Consciousness, via volitional action, increases the likelihood that an organism will direct its attention, and ultimately its movements, to whatever is most important for its survival and reproduction.

Non-bizarre delusions are hypothesized to be psychological adaptations which evolved to mitigate the dangerous consequences of social failure. When humans lived in small, kin-based groups, delusions would have functioned to combat social failure by closely mimicking conditions, such as possession of important information, external threats, or illness, where fellow group members were likely to cooperate and provide assistance. If delusions are adaptations to social failure, then they should onset when an individual faces a serious social threat, they should function (in ancestral type environments) to elicit social benefits—at least in the short term—and they should cease when the social threat ceases, an hypothesis which is examined in the context of numerous published studies of Delusional Disorder (DD). Studies of the relationship between DD and life events, immigrant status, prison psychoses, and discrimination all indicate that social deficits play a significant etiological role. Cross-cultural data collected in traditional societies show that delusions can elicit social benefits. Finally, studies show that positive social variables are the most important predictors of remission of DD. A case can therefore be made that delusions are an effective adaptation to social failure.

Humans make mistakes in our decision-making and probability judgments. While the heuristics used for decision-making have been explained as adaptations that are both efficient and fast, the reasons why people deal with probabilities using the reported biases have not been clear. We will see that some of these biases can be understood as heuristics developed to explain a complex world when little information is available. That is, they approximate Bayesian inferences for situations more complex than the ones in laboratory experiments and in this sense might have appeared as an adaptation to those situations. When ideas as uncertainty and limited sample sizes are included in the problem, the correct probabilities are changed to values close to the observed behavior. These ideas will be used to explain the observed weight functions, the violations of coalescing and stochastic dominance reported in the literature.

Cellular phone is one of the most developing technological artifacts today. The evolution occurs through random innovation. Our effort is trying to view the evolution of this artifact from memetic’s point of view. By constructing a phylomemetic tree based on cellular phone memes to infer or estimate the evolutionary history and relationship among cellular phone. We adopt several methods, which are commonly used in constructing phylogenetic tree, they are UPGMA algorithm and Parsimony Maximum algorithm to construct cellphone phylomemetic tree. Therefore we compare with the innovation tree, which is based on serial number and their appearance time. From phylomemetic tree, we then analyze the process of a cellular phone innovation through looking out on the cellular phone type lies in the same cluster. The comparison of the simulation tree result shows a generally different branching pattern, giving a presumption that innovation in cellular phone is not really relating with their serial number, but occurs merely because of random mutation of allomeme design and competes with its technological development.

Recent empirical and theoretical work suggests that reputation was an important mediator of access to resources in ancestral human environments. Reputations were built and maintained by the collection, analysis, and dissemination of information about the actions and capabilities of group members-that is, by gossiping. Strategic gossiping would have been an excellent strategy for manipulating reputations and thereby competing effectively for resources and for cooperative relationships with group members who could best provide such resources. Coalitions (cliques) may have increased members' abilities to manipulate reputations by gossiping. Because, over evolutionary time, women may have experienced more within-group competition than men, and because female reputations may have been more vulnerable than male reputations to gossip, gossiping may have been a more important strategy for women than men. Consequently, women may have evolved specializations for gossiping alone and in coalitions. We develop and partially test this theory.

Evolutionary psychology claims biological inclinations for certain behaviors (e.g., a desire for more frequent sex and more sexual partners by males as compared to females), and the origin of these inclinations in natural selection. Jerry Fodor’s recent book, The Mind Doesn’t Work that Way (2000), grants the nativist case for such biological grounding but disputes the presumed certainty of its origin in natural selection. Nevertheless, there is today a consensus that at least some of the claims of evolutionary psychology are true, and their broad appeal suggests that many see them as easy insights into and possible license for some controversial behaviors. Evolutionary psychologists, on the other hand, caution that an origin in natural selection implies only an inclination for certain behaviors, and not that the behaviors will be true of all people, will lead to happiness or are morally correct. But such cautions can be as facile as the simplistic positions they are intended to counter. A biological basis implies tendencies to behaviors that will be pleasurable when engaged in, and that can be modified to an extent and at a psychic cost that is, at best, not fully understood. Also, while it is true that naturally selected behaviors are not necessarily moral, the implications of current evolutionary psychology cast doubt on any absolute foundation for morality at all, as well as suggesting limits on our ability to fully understand both ourselves and the universe around us. However, this does not mean that our (relative) values or apparent free will are any less real or important for us.

The article revisits the old controversy concerning the relation of the mother's brother and sister's son in patrilineal societies in the light both of anthropological criticisms of the very notion of kinship and of evolutionary and epidemiological approaches to culture. It argues that the ritualized patterns of behavior that had been discussed by Radcliffe-Brown, Goody and others are to be explained in terms of the interaction of a variety of factors, some local and historical, others pertaining to general human dispositions. In particular, an evolved disposition to favor relatives can contribute to the development and stabilization of these behaviors, not by directly generating them, but by making them particularly "catchy" and resilient. In this way, it is possible to recognize both that cultural representations and practices are specific to a community at a time in its history (rather than mere tokens of a general type), and that they are, in essential respects, grounded in the common evolved psychology of human beings.

The article revisits the old controversy concerning the relation of the mother's brother and sister's son in patrilineal societies in the light both of anthropological criticisms of the very notion of kinship and of evolutionary and epidemiological approaches to culture. It argues that the ritualized patterns of behavior that had been discussed by Radcliffe-Brown, Goody and others are to be explained in terms of the interaction of a variety of factors, some local and historical, others pertaining to general human dispositions. In particular, an evolved disposition to favor relatives can contribute to the development and stabilization of these behaviors, not by directly generating them, but by making them particularly "catchy" and resilient. In this way, it is possible to recognize both that cultural representations and practices are specific to a community at a time in its history (rather than mere tokens of a general type), and that they are, in essential respects, grounded in the common evolved psychology of human beings.

The central problem for pragmatics is that sentence meaning vastly underdetermines speaker’s meaning. The goal of pragmatics is to explain how the gap between sentence meaning and speaker’s meaning is bridged. This paper defends the broadly Gricean view that pragmatic interpretation is ultimately an exercise in mind-reading, involving the inferential attribution of intentions. We argue, however, that the interpretation process does not simply consist in applying general mind-reading abilities to a particular (communicative) domain. Rather, it involves a dedicated comprehension module, with its own special principles and mechanisms. We show how such a metacommunicative module might have evolved, and what principles and mechanisms it might contain.

Behavior analysis is properly part of evolutionary biology, because only evolutionary theory can explain the origins of behavior and because behavior analysis follows the same mode of explanation as evolutionary theory. The resemblance among operant shaping, cultural evolution, and genetic evolution appears clearly only in the light of a general concept of evolutionary process. Every evolutionary process consists of three elements: variation, recurrence, and selection. Evolutionarily significant variation occurs among substitutable variants within a pool. These variants are defined by differences in their environmental effects. Although the metaphor of copying characterizes recurrence in genetic evolution, replication is only one type of recurrence. In cultural and operant evolution, mechanisms like stimulus control and induction cause the recurrence of the variants. Selection occurs when recurrence is differential. Differences in environmental effects produce differences in recurrence, and those differences feed back to affect the composition of the pool of variants. This general view of evolutionary process clarifies the distinction between proximate and ultimate explanations of behavior. Genetic, cultural, and operant evolution all admit of this distinction, because they all distinguish advantageous mechanisms from a history of advantage. Proximate explanations deal with the ?expression? of variants, whereas ultimate explanations deal with the feedback from environmental effects to the frequencies of variants in the pool. The three evolutionary processes may be seen as nested: cultural evolution within genetic evolution, and operant evolution within cultural evolution. A complete understanding of human behavior requires constructing six types of explanation: proximate and ultimate explanations in all three processes.

This paper considers the structure and proximate mechanisms of personality in humans and other animals. Significant similarities were found between personality structures and mechanisms across species in at least two broad traits: Extraversion and Neuroticism. The factor space tapped by these personality dimensions is viewed as a general integrative framework for comparative and evolutionary studies of personality in humans and other animals. Most probably, the cross-species similarities between the most broad personality dimensions like Extraversion and Neuroticism as well as other Big Five factors reflect conservative evolution: constrains on evolution imposed by physiological, genetic and cognitive mechanisms. Lower-order factors, which are more species- and situation-specific, would be adaptive, reflecting correlated selection on and trade-offs between many traits.

Evolutionary approaches to parental care suggest that parents will not automatically invest in all offspring, and should reduce or eliminate investment in their children if the costs outweigh the benefits. Lack of paternal or social support will increase the costs born by mothers, whereas infant health problems will reduce the evolutionary benefits to be gained. Numerous studies support the correlation between postpartum depression (PPD) and lack of social support or indicators of possible infant health and development problems. PPD may be an adaptation that informs mothers that they are suffering or have suffered a fitness cost, that motivates them to reduce or eliminate investment in offspring under certain circumstances, and that may help them negotiate greater levels of investment from others. PPD also appears to be a good model for depression in general.

Buller recently posted a critique of evolutionary psychology (reproduced below). Although I disagree with many of his assertions, this is the most credible attempt to critique evolutionary psychology that I have encountered. Buller’s arguments regarding improper motivational inferences from evolutionary psychological explanations are largely correct--such inferences are indeed erroneous. Furthermore, the mistakes he identifies have been made by some prominent evolutionists including, apparently, W. D. Hamilton (Symons, personal communication). However, most evolutionary psychologists are not saying what he claims they are saying. Buller wishes to find evolutionary psychology trapped in Freudian quicksand so that he can rescue it. Instead, it is he who must hoist himself from the bog using the theoretical rigging created by evolutionary psychologists over the last two decades, including, most prominently, Don Symons, a primary target of his essay.

This paper is about how to give human-like powers to complete agents. For this the most important design choice concerns the overall architecture. Questions regarding detailed mechanisms, forms of representations, inference capabilities, knowledge etc. are best addressed in the context of a global architecture in which different design decisions need to be linked. Such a design would assemble various kinds of functionality into a complete coherent working system, in which there are many concurrent, partly independent, partly mutually supportive, partly potentially incompatible processes, addressing a multitude of issues on different time scales, including asynchronous, concurrent, motive generators. Designing human like agents is part of the more general problem of understanding design space, niche space and their interrelations, for, in the abstract, there is no one optimal design, as biological diversity on earth shows.

The theory of the organism-environment system starts with the proposition that in any functional sense organism and environment are inseparable and form only one unitary system. The organism cannot exist without the environment and the environment has descriptive properties only if it is connected to the organism. Although for practical purposes we do separate organism and environment, this common-sense starting point leads in psychological theory to problems which cannot be solved. Therefore, separation of organism and environment cannot be the basis of any scientific explanation of human behavior. The theory leads to a reinterpretation of basic problems in many fields of inquiry and makes possible the definition of mental phenomena without their reduction either to neural or biological activity or to separate mental functions. According to the theory, mental activity is activity of the whole organism-environment system, and the traditional psychological concepts describe only different aspects of organisation of this system. Therefore, mental activity cannot be separated from the nervous system, but the nervous system is only one part of the organism­environment system. This problem will be dealt with in detail in the second part of the article.

There is now a huge amount of interest in consciousness among scientists as well as philosophers, yet there is so much confusion and ambiguity in the claims and counter-claims that it is hard to tell whether any progress is being made. This ``position paper'' suggests that we can make progress by temporarily putting to one side questions about what consciousness is or which animals or machines have it or how it evolved. Instead we should focus on questions about the sorts of architectures that are possible for behaving systems and ask what sorts of capabilities, states and processes, might be supported by different sorts of architectures. We can then ask which organisms and machines have which sorts of architectures. This combines the standpoint of philosopher, biologist and engineer. If we can find a general theory of the variety of possible architectures (a characterisation of ``design space'') and the variety of environments, tasks and roles to which such architectures are well suited (a characterisation of ``niche space'') we may be able to use such a theory as a basis for formulating new more precisely defined concepts with which to articulate less ambiguous questions about the space of possible minds. For instance our initially ill-defined concept (``consciousness'') might split into a collection of more precisely defined concepts which can be used to ask unambiguous questions with definite answers. As a first step this paper explores a collection of conjectures regarding architectures and their evolution. In particular we explore architectures involving a combination of coexisting architectural levels including: (a) reactive mechanisms which evolved very early, (b) deliberative mechanisms which evolved later in response to pressures on information processing resources and (c) meta-management mechanisms that can explicitly inspect evaluate and modify some of the contents of various internal information structures. It is conjectured that in response to the needs of these layers, perceptual and action subsystems also developed layers, and also that an ``alarm'' system which initially existed only within the reactive layer may have become increasingly sophisticated and extensive as its inputs and outputs were linked to the newer layers. Processes involving the meta-management layer in the architecture could explain the origin of the notion of ``qualia''. Processes involving the ``alarm'' mechanism and mechanisms concerned with resource limits in the second and third layers gives us an explanation of three main forms of emotion, helping to account for some of the ambiguities which have bedevilled the study of emotion. Further theoretical and practical benefits may come from further work based on this design-based approach to consciousness. A deeper longer term implication is the possibility of a new science investigating laws governing possible trajectories in design space and niche space, as these form parts of high order feedback loops in the biosphere.

The evolution of language implies the parallel evolution of an ability to respond appropriately to signals (language understanding) and an ability to produce the appropriate signals in the appropriate circumstances (language production). When linguistic signals are produced to inform other individuals, individuals that respond appropriately to these signals may increase their reproductive chances but it is less clear what is the reproductive advantage for the languages producers. We present simulations in which populations of neural networks living in an environment evolve a simple language with an informative function. Signals are produced to help other individuals to categorize edible and poisonous mushrooms in order to decide whether to approach or avoid encountered mushrooms. Language production, while not under direct evolutionary pressure, evolves as a by-product of the independently evolving perceptual ability to categorize mushrooms.

Although Lykken & Tellegen (1996) have shown that the stable component of happiness or subjective well-being is strongly influenced by genetic factors, One needn't permit one's own or one's child's genetic steersman have his head. One can combat the "happiness thieves" (depression, fear, irritability) and one can achieve happiness increments through a varied diet of constructive activity.

While children from about 18 months on can use a mirror to show self-recognition through the retrieval of a covertly placed mark from their forehead, Povinelli, Landau, and Perilloux (1996) showed that four- but not two-year-olds pass a similar surprise-mark test involving three-minute-old videos of themselves. The authors argued that this marks the emergence of what they called the "proper self". The current study (n=40) supported the claim for a developmental asynchrony by showing that three- and four-year-olds who fail the delayed video version of the surprise-mark task pass the mirror version. However, the same performance pattern was observed in an analogous task involving the introduction of an object in the room that was visible only on the video screen (surprise-object task). Surprise-mark and surprise-object tasks were positively correlated. Thus, young children’s problems seem to reflect general difficulties in reasoning from the unexpected information in the video to the current situation, rather than particular deficits in self-awareness.

Non-bizarre psychotic delusions are hypothesized to be psychological adaptations which evolved to mitigate the dangerous consequences of social exclusion and ostracism. When we lived in small, kin-based groups, delusions would have functioned to combat social exclusion by closely mimicking conditions, such as external threats or illness, where fellow group members were likely to cooperate and provide assistance. If delusions are adaptations to social exclusion, then they should onset when an individual faces a serious social threat, they should function (in ancestral type environments) to prevent exclusion-at least in the short term-and they should cease when the social threat ceases, an hypothesis which is examined in the context of numerous published studies of Delusional Disorder (DD).

This is a 5 page summary with three diagrams of the main objectives and some work in progress at the University of Birmingham Cognition and Affect project. involving: Professor Glyn Humphreys (School of Psychology), and Luc Beaudoin, Chris Paterson, Tim Read, Edmund Shing, Ian Wright, Ahmed El-Shafei, and (from October 1994) Chris Complin (research students). The project is concerned with "global" design requirements for coping simultaneously with coexisting but possibly unrelated goals, desires, preferences, intentions, and other kinds of motivators, all at different stages of processing. Our work builds on and extends seminal ideas of H.A.Simon (1967). We are exploring "broad and shallow" architectures combining varied capabilities most of which are not implemented in great depth. The poster summarises some ideas about management and meta-management processes, attention filtering, and the relevance to emotional states involved "perturbances", where there is partial loss of control of attention.

This article considers the role of mental time travel in human evolution. A central thesis is that other primates, although having memory and expectation, do not possess the same ability to live in the past or in the future. The first half of this paper argues that reconstructive access to the past (i.e. episodic memory) is dependent on other advanced cognitive capabilities (e.g. self-awareness and meta-representation) and focuses on the results of recent `theory of mind' research in order to evaluate the thesis. Mental simulation is the proposed underlying mechanism for the development of both mindreading and mental time travel. The second half contrasts flexible awareness of possible futures with other forms of `anticipatory behaviour' and reviews evidence about how far other primates may think ahead. The phylogenetic history of mental time travel and its adaptive and exaptive relationships to other features are discussed. Mental access to the fourth dimension is essential for many of the distinctive characteristics of our species. Appendix A: presents the results of a survey on animal foresight Appendix B: outlines an experimental paradigm for the investigation of future-need anticipation

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that it is possible to deduce the structure of human semantic memory by mathematically analyzing the environment which through evolution has shaped it. The theory arrived at is similar to the spreading-activation theories of Quillian, and Collins and Loftus, but it contrasts with the above in that it involves a rigidly restricted activation that employs two distinct types of linking and three distinct types of intersection search. These three types of intersection are then used to explain the facilitation of lexical decisions, the nature of polysemy, riddles, several production experiments by Loftus, as well as the effect of word order on meaning and paired-associate learning.

Lewis Thomas, in a previous issue of Discover magazine, had speculated on the sociobiological significance of the "fact" that telling a lie produces a "reproducible cascade" of physiological changes. In this response, I explain that this "fact' is a myth, the deeply entrenched myth of the lie detector. It is plausible to suppose that our ancestors evolved the ability to lie not long after acquiring the ability to talk, both of these talents having obvious adaptive qualities. They did not, however, evolve a Pinocchio's nose, an involuntary response or pattern of responses that is always shown when, and only when, a lie is being told or a deceptive answer given.