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Everything in neuroecology makes sense in the light of evolution: Response from Bolhuis and Macphail

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Explanation

We use the word ‘explain’ in the same way that Shettleworth did [3]. Sherry and Schacter's proposals [4] regarding the evolution of multiple memory systems might provide interesting clues, but by themselves they can of course never give us insight into the mechanisms of memory. This is the essential message of our critique, which Hampton et al. seem to have missed – function cannot explain mechanism. That is, functional (or evolutionary) speculation does not give us insight into the causes of

Natural selection

Indeed it is not controversial that brain and cognition are the outcome of an evolutionary process. However, as we say in our critique – and once again Hampton et al. do not seem to have grasped this main message – ‘questions of mechanism (such as neural mechanisms underlying behaviour) cannot be solved by functional considerations’. Hampton et al.'s statement that ‘evolution has shaped cognition’ is fundamentally flawed. Evolution is a process that, according to Darwin, works by means of

Multiple memories

Our statement concerning memory as a central system does not imply that we ‘question the existence of multiple memory systems generally’. We do not deny that there may be multiple memory systems, such as procedural and declarative memory. However, we agree that the text in Box 1 might give the impression that there is only one central memory process. We do not wish to suggest this, but actually this issue is not relevant to our critique. There may be multiple memory systems, but there is no

Looking for a function

Hampton et al. are mistaken when they suggest that ‘Bolhuis and Macphail seem to regard the fact that specific neuroecological hypotheses have been discarded or refined as a weakness’. On the contrary, we think that a good scientific hypothesis is one that can be falsified. The trouble with neuroecological hypotheses is that they are fundamentally flawed, as we tried to explain in our critique. That is, a neuroecological (i.e. functional/evolutionary) hypothesis is of little use when one wants

Evolution of brain and behaviour

The authors suggest that hippocampal enlargement ‘has been associated not only with food storing, (…) but also with migration in garden warblers, homing in pigeons, and with brood parasitism in cowbirds’. This nicely illustrates our point in the previous section, that it is a fruitless research effort to try and link an arbitrary neural parameter with memory. We completely agree with Hampton et al. that it is important to establish ‘the kinds of explanation that can be generated by a given

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