MEANINGS OF WORDS

Anyone involved in interdisciplinary research quickly discovers that words do not mean the same to all people. For some, a term is used in the colloquial sense, while for others it has one or more technical meanings. The word ‘fitness’ is a good example. For the person in the street it refers to physical health and well-being and for the sports physiologist it means something similar, but for the biologist it has a much more technical meaning to do with how likely it is that an individual's characteristics will appear in future generations. Further confusion can be generated by the extensive use of metaphors such as strategy, selection, conflict, design, imprinting, programming and reinforcement, which are borrowed from everyday language but are given technical meanings that sometimes differ from each other across different communities of scientists. In this chapter we attempt to clarify what we mean by the terms that we use throughout this book, and explain why we have chosen not to use some others. In our view this is essential, as much of the literature on development and its relationship to evolutionary process has been confused by misunderstandings that have arisen from alternative usages of the same words. As George Bernard Shaw put it, when talking about the English and the Americans: they are ‘two peoples separated by a common language’. Not all our scientific colleagues will agree with our terminology, but at least our meanings will be explicit.