Modularity: Understanding the Development and Evolution of Natural Complex Systems (Hardcover)

Description:

Modularity -- the attempt to understand systems as integrations of partially independent and interacting units -- is today a dominant theme in the life sciences, cognitive science, and computer science. The concept goes back at least implicitly to the Scientific (or Copernican) Revolution, and can be found behind later theories of phrenology, physiology, and genetics; moreover, art, engineering, and mathematics rely on modular design principles. This collection broadens the scientific discussion of modularity by bringing together experts from a variety of disciplines, including artificial life, cognitive science, economics, evolutionary computation, developmental and evolutionary biology, linguistics, mathematics, morphology, paleontology, physics, theoretical chemistry, philosophy, and the arts.

The contributors debate and compare the uses of modularity, discussing the different disciplinary contexts of "modular thinking" in general (including hierarchical organization, near-decomposability, quasi-independence, and recursion) or of more specialized concepts (including character complex, gene family, encapsulation, and mosaic evolution); what modules are, why and how they develop and evolve, and the implication for the research agenda in the disciplines involved; and how to bring about useful cross-disciplinary knowledge transfer on the topic. The book includes a foreword by the late Herbert A. Simon addressing the role of near-decomposability in understanding complex systems.

Werner Callebaut is Scientific Manager of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Vienna, and Professor of Philosophy at Limburg University, Belgium.

Diego Rasskin-Gutman is Research Associate at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and Honorary Professor in the Department of Biology, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain.

 

Series Forward	vii
	Forward by Herbert A. Simon	ix
	Preface	xv
I	INTRODUCTION	1
1	The Ubiquity of Modularity Werner Callebaut	3
II	EVO-DEVO: THE MAKING OF A MODULAR WORLD	29
2	Natural Selection and the Origin of Modules Günter P. Wagner, Jason Mezey and Raffaele Calabretta	33
3	Evolutionary Modules: Conceptual Analyses and Empirical Hypotheses Robert N. Brandon	51
4	Evolutionary Developmental Biology Meets Levels of Selection: Modular Integration or Competition, or Both? Rasmus G. Winther	61
5	Modularity in Evolution: Some Low-Level Questions Lee Altenberg	99
6	Evolutionary Lock-In and the Origin of Modularity in RNA Structure Lauren Ancel Meyers and Walter Fontana	129
7	Amphibian Variations: The Role of Modules in Mosaic Evolution Gerhard Schlosser	143
III	EVO-PATTERNS: WORKING TOWARD A GRAMMAR OF FORMS	181
8	The Remodularization of the Organism Daniel W. McShea and Carl Anderson	185
9	Modularity: Jumping Forms within Morphospace Diego Rasskin-Gutman	207
10	Morphological Modularity and Macroevolution: Conceptual and Empirical Aspects Gunther J. Eble	221
11	Hierarchical Integration of Modular Structures in the Evolution of Animal Skeletons Roger D.K. Thomas	239
12	Modularity in Art Slavik V. Jablan	259
13	Modularity at the Boundary Between Art and Science Angela D. Buscalioni, Alicia de la Iglesia, Rafael Delgado-Buscalioni and Anne Dejoan	283
IV	MODULARITY OF MIND AND CULTURE	305
14	Evolutionary Connectionism and Mind/Brain Modularity Raffaele Calabretta and Domenico Parisi	309
15	Modularity and Chunking Fernand Gobet	331
16	Modularity of Cognitive Organization: Why It Is so Appealing and Why It Is Wrong Boris M. Velichkovsky	353
17	Decomposability and Modularity of Economic Interactions Luigi Marengo, Corrado Pasquali and Marco Valente	383
18	The Natural Logic of Communicative Possibilities: Modularity and Presupposition D. Kimbrough Oller	409
	Contributors	435
	Index	437