Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Cause and effect revisited

A review in Science talked about the problem of Mayr's model on causation. The distinction between proximate and ultimate causes is not clear for most cases in biology (or fields such as human cooperation and cultural evolution), so we need a paradigm shift because the fact that proximate mechanisms (how, short-term, intra-generation) contribute to the dynamics of selection (why, long-term, inter-generation).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

These already have à paradigm in systemecology. Where have yuo been????

The paradigm is shortly explained by pulses of every scale operate together, rebuilding resilience by storing and circulate matter, information and energy.

Yuo cannot explain anything with statistics because we operate in ordering phenomena.