The phylogenetic distribution of traits--论文代写范文精选

类人猿的解耦表示社会信息,鉴于社会生活的广泛认知，这个评估的证据和分离的表示是一个进化后期,高度发达的能力。灵长类动物被认为人类认知能力比猴子明显更先进。下面的paper代写范文进行细述。

Abstract
Sterelny gives many examples of detection-system behavior across a wide range of phyla, including bacteria (p. 14), plants (p. 14), arthropods, including cockroaches (p. 14), fireflies (p. 15) and spiders (p. 18), and vertebrates, including fish (p. 18) and birds (p. 18). In addition he characterizes Artificial Life/Artificial Intelligence situated agents as detection agents. He gives fewer examples of robust tracking, but the examples include arthropods (bee navigation, pp. 23-24), and vertebrates (Reed warbler detection of cuckoo eggs, p. 17, and Piping plover broken wing display, p. 27). 

This is consistent with the idea that robust tracking is more phylogenetically restricted than detection-system behavior. With regard to evidence for decoupled representation, Sterelny considers navigation, tool use and ecological knowledge, and social cognition. A so-called ‘cognitive map’, or representation of the environment used for navigation, would be an example of a decoupled representation because the map can be used to guide more than one kind of behavior. In contrast, a so-called ‘route-based’ method of navigating doesn’t (at least on the face of it) use decoupled representations, because getting from point A to point B is represented in terms of specific behaviors. Sterelny finds no clear evidence for the use of cognitive maps in navigation, although he says that rats appear to show intelligent use of spatial information (p. 45). 

With regard to the use of tools, he claims that most animals appear not to have decoupled representations of tools (p. 48), meaning that they only discover that tools can produce particular outcomes by trial and error, rather than by means of insight into the causal properties of tools. He does however consider suggestive evidence that crows show some understanding of tools (p. 48). Similarly, he finds no unequivocal evidence for decoupled representation of ecological resource information. On the other hand he thinks it likely that great apes have decoupled representations of social information (pp. 52, 76), given the extensive cognitive demands of social life (pp. 53-76). This assessment of the evidence is consistent with the 2a → 2b → 3b model, and with idea that decoupled representation is a late evolved, highly advanced capacity. The association with great apes puts it in the right territory to be the basis for the evolution of human beliefs, because amongst primates apes have been considered to have human-like cognitive abilities distinctly more advanced than monkeys (e.g. Byrne 2000).

The explanation for this distribution 
The key issue in applying the theory is determining the main factors that contribute to translucency. Sterelny points out that transparency can be achieved through adaptation, as organisms become tuned to their environment (p. 21). He identifies two main sources of translucency: ecological generalization, which involves exposure to a wider range of environmental conditions (pp. 23-4), and hostile interactions. He gives greater weight to hostility because other animals actively try to deceive and defeat (pp. 24-5), whereas the inanimate and non-hostile biological world is indifferent to the animal, and in some cases even cooperative (p. 25). This analysis helps explain the pattern of evidence above if we assume that much of the animal world is specialized rather than generalized.5 We would then expect most animals to use detection-based behavior control, and see robust tracking only among those whose adaptive strategy revolves around adaptability, or in other words, coping with environmental variability. But other animals will be tend to be more variable than the physical environment, and it’s plausible that the complex competitive social worlds of the great apes are particularly difficult to ‘read’. Since translucency will be high, these are circumstances where the theory says we should find decoupled representation. 

The connection between decoupled representation and beliefs 
No direct, explicit argument is given linking decoupled representation to beliefs, but in light of the conceptual and empirical structure of the account we can identify some bases for the association. Humans show substantially greater behavioral flexibility than other animals, and human beliefs can play a role in guiding indefinitely varied behavior. Conversely, in general, non-human animals are relatively inflexible, and we might suppose that an important part of the explanation for this is that their representations aren’t able to guide behavior flexibly. Given these points, the suggestion that decoupled representation – representation that contributes to multiple behaviors – is ‘belief-like’ looks reasonable. The general idea that human cognition is in some way decoupled from the environment certainly matches many intuitions; for instance, Dreyfus (2007) and McDowell (2007) disagree on many points, but they agree that animals are captivated by their environments, whilst humans in contrast are free in the sense that they can step back and reflect.

The evolution of preferences 
Figure 4 depicts schematically the two stages in Sterelny’s account of the evolution of motivation. Drives compete with each other to control behavior, and being nonrepresentational they control behavior ‘directly’ rather than through a cognitively mediated process. Each drive imposes a distinct pattern on sensory-behavior relations, amplifying some kinds of responsiveness and inhibiting others. In contrast, preferences influence behavior control based on representations of outcome value, and they are subject to cognitive revaluation (p. 92). Thus, with preference-based motivation novel things and behaviors can be assigned and reassigned motivational value based on cognitive assessment of circumstances.

He offers two main sources of support for this view. The first is a theoretical argument based on transparency: because animals are internally co-adapted we can expect that internal signaling will evolve towards transparency (pp. 80-81), and as a result drivebased motivation is likely to be a more reliable means of keeping behavior in line with value than are preferences (p. 85). Sterelny argues that drives are only inadequate if one or more of the following conditions are met: (i) the animal’s behavioral repertoire includes many possible options, (ii) a wide range of resources is needed, which are hard to encompass with a repertoire of built-in drives, (iii) summation mechanisms for determining which drive controls behavior don't produce good results, and (iv) the sensory profile of resources doesn't stay stable over evolutionary time (pp. 92-94). He evidently believes that these conditions don’t hold for most animals. It might have been expected that Sterelny would formulate these conditions in relation to translucency, as suggested in figure 4, but the connection is left unclear.

Buttressing the idea that conditions (i) - (iv) are rare is a skeptical analysis of Dickinson and Balleine’s (2000) claim to have shown preferences in rats, discussed in detail in section 4.3 below. If Dickinson and Balleine were right that rats have preferences this would throw into doubt the empirical picture described in section 2.2.1.2 above. The apparent rarity of decoupled representation would seem to indicate that for most animal behavior directly cueing off perceptual stimuli is an effective form of behavior control. If this is the case there would seem to be no need for preferences. Decoupled representations are only needed when individual perceptual discriminations are insufficient to determine which behavior should be performed, and this would seem to be the same conditions in which preferences gain adaptive value. That is, flexible valuation is only needed when a given stimulus doesn’t have a fixed implication for behavior control. So decoupled representation and preferences should arise in roughly the same circumstances, and indeed, we might think that decoupled representation would be the representational substrate for preferences. In rejecting Dickinson and Balleine’s putative finding Sterelny thus removes what is potentially a significant anomaly.

As with decoupled representation, Sterelny doesn’t provide a direct, explicit argument linking his conception of preference to human desires. The requirement that preferences be subject to flexible cognitive valuation doesn’t appear to be true for many cases commonly thought of as desires; the desire for chocolate or heroin may be suppressed on given occasions, such that the options ‘eat chocolate’ or ‘take heroin’ are subject to cognitive valuation on particular occasions, but the dispositional desires for chocolate or heroin may be resistant to cognitive revaluation. This might be the kind of thing that Sterelny has in mind with the claim that the transition to preferences in humans is incomplete. Clearly, though, some human desires involve cognitive valuation, and the flexibility of human agency depends on this. Intuitively, humans take decisions: that is, decide on particular actions taking into account structured features of the situation. This essentially involves cognitive valuation, because the value of the options is assigned at the point of choice based on the structured relations. Focusing on cognitive valuation may thus be a useful approximation for getting at key features of human motivation.7(论文代写)

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