November 13, 2010
by peter.taylor
0 comments
Heterogeneous construction is a variant of the idea of intersecting processes, which, in turn, is an attempt to discipline without suppressing the unruliness of complexity. The concept of heterogeneous construction can be illustrated by reference to the previous post on … Continue reading
November 12, 2010
by peter.taylor
0 comments
A line of research from England, initiated by the sociologists Brown and Harris in the late 1960s, has investigated how severe events and difficulties during people’s life course influence the onset of mental and physical illnesses (Harris 2000). This work … Continue reading
October 10, 2010
by peter.taylor
0 comments
How does this happen? How often does this happen? might be a response to the earlier post citing Waddington’s experiments, in which variation that originated as an appropriate response to environmental circumstances became more or less fixed over time in a … Continue reading
September 27, 2010
by peter.taylor
3 Comments
An example of the contribution of developmental and ecological flexibility to the evolutionary origin of characters (see previous post) involves barn owls recently migrated to Malaysian oil palm plantations. Lenton (1983) describes the owls fifteen years after the first pair bred … Continue reading
September 26, 2010
by peter.taylor
3 Comments
The last post identified special conditions that increase the chances of natural selection (carefully construed) serving as an explanation of the historical change in the frequency of one character. From a knowledge of biology, we should agree that these special … Continue reading