In human conscious experience, many features are present in combination: objects are presented through the senses, information from different sensory modalities is integrated, events are marked with value, and we have a sense of our own location and state. Which of these might come before others in plausible evolutionary trajectories, or do they form a tight package of correlated features that cannot readily be dissociated? I take a comparative approach to these questions, focusing on a distinction between sensory and evaluative aspects of experience and looking at the distribution of subjectivity-relevant features in a range of invertebrate animals.

Wright’s “adaptive landscape” has been influential in evolutionary thinking but controversial, especially because the landscape that organisms encounter is altered by the evolutionary process itself and the effects organisms have on their environments. Lewontin offered a mathematical heuristic describing the coupling of niche construction and adaptive evolution. Here, we propose a “dual landscape” model to view these relationships. Our model represents change as simultaneous movement on two landscapes, each a function of phenotype and environment. This model clarifies the evolutionary feedback generated by niche construction. We relate our model to Lewontin’s niche construction equations and illustrate it with three examples.

It is well known that informational theories of representation have trouble accounting for error. Informational semantics is a family of theories attempting a naturalistic, unashamedly reductive explanation of the semantic and intentional properties of thought and language. Most simply, the informational approach explains truth-conditional content in terms of causal, nomic, or simply regular correlation between a representation and a state of affairs. The central work is Dretske (1981), and the theory was largely developed at the University of Wisconsin by Fred Dretske, Dennis Stampe, and Berent Enc. Recently, informational semantics has roamed far beyond its Wisconsin home, and built a sizeable collection of followers. Converts include Jerry Fodor (1987), Robert Stalnaker (1984) and, less faithfully, Paul and Patricia Churchland (1983) and Hartry Field (1986). But for some years informational semantics has been hounded by a problem with error – the classic presentation is Fodor (1984) – and no other problem has hounded the theory so persistently.

Problems raised by complex life cycles for standard summaries of evolutionary processes, and for concepts of individuality in biology, are described. I then outline a framework that can be used to compare life cycles. This framework treats reproduction as a combination of production and recurrence and organizes life cycles according to the distribution of steps in which multiplication, bottlenecks, and sex occur. I also discuss fitness and its measurement in complex life cycles and consider some phenomena that raise complications and difficulties for my framework.

We present a dynamic model of the evolution of communication in a Lewis signaling game while systematically varying the degree of common interest between sender and receiver. We show that the level of common interest between sender and receiver is strongly predictive of the amount of information transferred between them. We also discuss a set of rare but interesting cases in which common interest is almost entirely absent, yet substantial information transfer persists in a “cheap talk” regime, and offer a diagnosis of how this may arise.

Drawing on models of communication due to Lewis and Skyrms, I contrast sender-receiver systems as they appear within and between organisms, and as they function in the bridging of space and time. Within the organism, memory can be seen as the sending of messages over time, communication between stages as opposed to spatial parts. Psychological memory and genetic memory are compared with respect to their relations to a sender-receiver model. Some puzzles about “genetic information” can be resolved by seeing the genome as a cell-level memory with no sender.

Mercier and Sperber (M&S) claim that the main function of reasoning is to generate support for conclusions derived unconsciously. An alternative account holds that reasoning has a deliberative function even though it is an internalized analogue of public discourse. We sketch this alternative and compare it with M&S's in the light of the empirical phenomena they discuss.

An interpretation of John Dewey's views about realism, science, and naturalistic philosophy is presented. Dewey should be seen as an unorthodox realist, with respect to both general metaphysical debates about realism and with respect to debates about the aims and achievements of science.

Hull et al. argue that information and replication are both essential ingredients in any selection process. But both information and replication are found in only some selection processes, and should not be included in abstract descriptions of selection intended to help researchers discover and describe selection processes in new domains.

I distinguish different versions of the “niche construction” idea. Some are primarily scientific, while others are more philosophical. Laland, Odling-Smee & Feldman's is mostly scientific, but given that fact, there are some changes they could make to their account. I also compare the target article to Lewontin's classic 1983 paper.

Maynard Smith is right that one of the most striking features of contemporary biology is the ever-increasing prominence of the concept of information, along with related concepts like representation, programming, and coding. Maynard Smith is also right that this is surely a phenomenon which philosophers of science should examine closely. We should try to understand exactly what sorts of theoretical commitment (if any) are made when biological systems are described in these terms, and what connection there is between semantic descriptions in biology and in other domains.

The role played by the concept of genetic coding in biology is discussed. I argue that this concept makes a real contribution to solving a specific problem in cell biology. But attempts to make the idea of genetic coding do theoretical work elsewhere in biology, and in philosophy of biology, are probably mistaken. In particular, the concept of genetic coding should not be used (as it often is) to express a distinction between the traits of whole organisms that are coded for in the genes and the traits that are not.