form of description, not of scattered facts but of the dynamic interrelations-the operating principlesfound in nature. Chomsky and his students have done this. Their aim has been to develop algorithms for specific languages, primarily English, that make explicit the series of computations that may account for the structure of sentences. The fact that these attempts have only been partially succ...

Familial transmission of mental illness is common. Recent studies in behavioral neuroscience and biological psychiatry reveal the importance of epigenetic mechanisms of transmission that center on the developmental consequences of variations in parental care. Studies with rats suggest that environmental adversity results in patterns of parent–offspring interactions that increase stress reactivi...

Genome-wide studies of bacterial epigenetics are now possible with current sequencing technologies.Epigenetic in pathogenic bacteria have demonstrated the importance DNA modification on expression genes involved important functions, such as pili formation and sporulation.Probiotics contain similar epigenetic systems which also likely regulate key cellular functions.Understanding phase variation...

Freud never used the term ‘Instinct’ to characterize human motivation despite continued misrepresentations and commentaries that claim otherwise. Instead he describes the process by which unconsciously enlisted variants emanate from their immediate, embodied sentient nature and evolve in both form and content to produce a robustly complex and overdetermined system of human development and socia...

As J. P. Spencer et al. (2009) argue, the theories of some developmental psychologists continue to be nativistic, even though nativism is an inherently nondevelopmental school of thought. Psychologists interested in development study the emergence of human characteristics—including predispositions—and are not content to simply catalogue competences that characterize human newborns; instead, the...

There is still much to learn about the variety of types of learning and development in nature and the genetic and epigenetic mechanisms responsible for that variety. This paper is one of a collection exploring ideas about how to characterise that variety and what AI researchers, including robot designers, can learn from it. This requires us to understand important features of the environment. S...

Open-ended exploration and learning in the real world is a major challenge of developmental robotics. Three properties of real-world sensorimotor spaces provide important conceptual and technical challenges: unlearnability, high dimensionality, and unboundedness. In this chapter, we argue that exploration in such spaces needs to be constrained and guided by several combined developmental mechan...

A new trend in Cognitive Science is the use of artificial agents and systems to investigate learning and development of complex organisms in natural environments. This work, in contrast with traditional AI work, takes into account principles of neural development, problems of embodiment, and complexities of the environment. Current and future promises and challenges for this approach are define...

Although biologists and philosophers of science generally agree that genes cannot determine the forms of biological and psychological traits, students, journalists, politicians, and other members of the general public nonetheless continue to embrace genetic determinism. This paper identifies some of the concerns typically raised by individuals when they first encounter the systems perspective t...

Cells defined as “cancer stem cells” because of a postulated ability to self-renew in a stem cell-like fashion and regenerate a tumor analogous to that of provenience upon transplantation have been described in a range of myeloid leukemia, breast, prostate, brain, colon and ovarian cancers. However, the precise origin of these cells remains an enigma. Surgical pathologists have suspected for de...