Nothing in Cognitive Neuroscience Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution
Vilarroya Oliver, Óscar (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament de Psiquiatria i de Medicina Legal)

Data:	2021
Resum:	Evolutionary theory should be a fundamental guide for neuroscientists. This would seem a trivial statement, but I believe that taking it seriously is more complicated than it appears to be, as I argue in this article. Elsewhere, I proposed the notion of "bounded functionality" As a way to describe the constraints that should be considered when trying to understand the evolution of the brain. There are two bounded-functionality constraints that are essential to any evolution-minded approach to cognitive neuroscience. The first constraint, the bricoleur constraint, describes the evolutionary pressure for any adaptive solution to re-use any relevant resources available to the system before the selection situation appeared. The second constraint, the satisficing constraint, describes the fact that a trait only needs to behave more advantageously than its competitors in order to be selected. In this paper I describe how bounded-functionality can inform an evolutionary-minded approach to cognitive neuroscience. In order to do so, I resort to Nikolaas Tinbergen's four questions about how to understand behavior, namely: function, causation, development and evolution. The bottom line of assuming Tinbergen's questions is that any approach to cognitive neuroscience is intrinsically tentative, slow, and messy.
Ajuts:	Agencia Estatal de Investigación RTI2018-093952-B-I00
Nota:	Altres ajuts: This project has received funding from "la Caixa" Foundation (project code LCF/PR/HR19/52160001).
Drets:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Llengua:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Matèria:	Evolutionary constraints ; Neuroscientific theories ; Evolution of the brain
Publicat a:	NeuroSci, Vol. 2 Núm. 2 (2021) , p. 177, ISSN 2673-4087

DOI: 10.3390/neurosci2020013

16 p, 1.3 MB

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