A rational model of human categorization behavior is presented that assumes that categorization reflects the derivation of optimal estimates of the probability of unseen features of objects. A Bayesian analysis is performed of what optimal estimations would be if categories formed a disjoint

Abstract: We describe Delusional Disorder-Jealous Type ("morbid jealousy") with the adaptationist perspective used by Darwinian psychiatrists and evolutionary psychologists to explain the relatively common existence and continued prevalence of mental disorders. We then apply the "

is puzzling, as it is not explicable in terms of changes in the energy budget. Existing explanations in the animal literature operate wholly at the proximate level of analysis and hence do not address this puzzle. In this paper, I offer an ultimate explanation for the periovulatory feeding nadir, arguing

Abstract Godfrey-Smith (2001) has distinguished three types of adaptationism. This article builds on his analysis, and revises it in places, by distinguishing seven varieties of adaptationism. This taxonomy allows us to clarify what is at stake in debates over adaptationism, and it also helps

of evidence of biases: biases are (a) heuristics, (b) error management effects, or (c) experimental artifacts. We conclude that much of the research on cognitive biases can be profitably reframed and understood in evolutionary terms. An adaptationist perspective suggests that the mind is remarkably well

Can sex-allocation theory account forthe sex ratios of malaria parasites? The sex ratios of many metazoans change in response to environmental cues, often as predicted by theory, providing some of the best evidence that adaptationist thinking actually works1. Now, Paul et al.2 have reported

decline. The current review updates Henry and Rendell’s 2007 meta-analysis, and examines cognitive reorganization as the result of reproductive experience from an adaptationist perspective. Investigations of pregnancy-induced cognitive change in human females may benefit by focusing on areas

ABSTRACT. The intimate knowledge that Inuit possess about the environment has figured prominently in North American Arctic research since at least the mid-1960s, when adherents of Julian Steward’s adaptationist perspective essentially displaced the acculturation paradigm that until then had

Abstract A deflationary perspective on theories of cultural evolution, in particular dual-inheritance theory, has recently been proposed by Lewens. On this ‘pop-culture’ analysis, dual-inheritance theorists apply population thinking to cultural phenomena, without claiming that cultural items evolve

As this foreword is written, at the dawn of the 21st Century, the cognitive sciences are in epistemological ferment. The exuberant optimism of the late 20th-Century adaptationist programme has, itself, started to fragment like the many fingers of a wave against the implacable shore of empirical