Sublime

Individual organisms are best thought of as adaptation-executers rather than as fitness-maximizers. —John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “The Psychological Foundations of Culture”

science, the tension between exploration and exploitation takes its most concrete form in a scenario called the “multi-armed bandit problem.”

My views are consistent with those who hold that moral instincts in individuals are genetic adaptations sometimes detectable even in non-human primates;1 that social norms are products of interactions between cultural evolution and genetic evolution;2 that natural selection can act at the level of the group and not just at the level of the individu

The fundamental error being made by Lamarck has the same logic as inductivism. Both assume that new knowledge (adaptations and scientific theories respectively) is somehow already present in experience, or can be derived mechanically from experience. But the truth is always that knowledge must be first conjectured and then tested.

the parsimony principle of using as simple an explanation as possible.

In order to make the case for evolution by natural selection, it was essential to establish that there was sufficient within-species heritable variability:

The fundamental error being made by Lamarck has the same logic as inductivism. Both assume that new knowledge (adaptations and scientific theories respectively) is somehow already present in experience, or can be derived mechanically from experience. But the truth is always that knowledge must be first conjectured and then tested. That is what Darw

Economically relevant information is discovered from experimentation, not deduced from a model.