Mingjun Zhang

Signaling games have been widely used as a powerful theoretical tool for investigating the propositional content of signals in the evolution of language and communication. Although significant progress has been made, information-theoretic approaches to content within the sender-receiver framework face what Jonathan Birch calls the “partition problem.” In this article, we address this problem by integrating signaling games with cost-based perception to model the internal state of an organism as it perceives objects in its environment. We propose a simple model that shows how an organism can spontaneously learn to partition external states in different ways through reinforcement learning, thereby offering a promising solution to the partition problem.

Charbonneau (2014) and Papale (2021) challenge the necessity of reproduction for evolution by natural selection (ENS) by contending that what really matter for ENS are memory and (re)generation at the population level, rather than lineage-forming reproduction at the local level. In this article, we critically evaluate their reproduction-independent accounts of ENS and defend the importance of lineage-forming reproduction in paradigmatic ENS on both empirical and theoretical grounds. We argue that none of the empirical cases they cite can be used as evidence to demonstrate the existence of paradigmatic ENS without lineage-forming reproduction, and adopting their reproduction-independent views would lead to an account of ENS that is both too liberal and too strict.

Empirical adaptationism is often said to be an empirical claim about nature, which concerns the overall relative causal importance of natural selection in evolution compared with other evolutionary factors. Philosophers and biologists who have tried to clarify the meaning of empirical adaptationism usually share, explicitly or implicitly, two assumptions: (1) Empirical adaptationism is an empirical claim that is scientifically testable; (2) testing empirical adaptationism is scientifically valuable. In this article, I challenge these two assumptions and argue that both are unwarranted given how empirical adaptationism is currently formulated. I identify a series of conceptual and methodological difficulties that makes testing empirical adaptationism in a biologically non-arbitrary way virtually impossible. Moreover, I show that those in favor of testing empirical adaptationism have yet to demonstrate the distinctive value and necessity of conducing such a test. My analysis of the case of empirical adaptationism also provides reasons for scientists to reconsider the value and necessity of engaging in scientific debates involving the notion of overall relative causal importance.