The Nature-Nurture controversy has been with us since it was first outlined by Plato and Aristotle. Nobody likes it anymore. All reasonable scholars today agree that genes and environment interact to determine complex cognitive outcomes. So why does the controversy persist? First, it persists because it has practical implications that cannot be postponed (i.e., what can we do to avoid bad outcomes and insure better ones?), a state of emergency that sometimes tempts scholars to stake out claims they cannot defend. Second, the controversy persists because we lack a precise, testable theory of the process by which genes and environment interact. In the absence of a better theory, innateness is often confused with (1) domain specificity (Outcome X is so peculiar that it must be innate), (2) species specificity (we are the only species who do X, so X must lie in the human genome), (3) localization (Outcome X is mediated by a particular part of the brain, so X must be innate), and (4) learnability (we cannot figure out how X could be learned, so X must be innate). We believe that an explicit and plausible theory of interaction is now around the corner, and that many of the classic maneuvers to defend or attack innateness will soon disappear. In the interim, some serious errors can be avoided if we keep these confounded issues apart. That is the major goal of this paper, i.e., not to attack innateness but to clarify what

The term “aphasia ” refers to acute or chronic impairment of language, an acquired condition that is most often associated with damage to the left side of the brain, usually due to trauma or stroke. We have known about the link between left-hemisphere damage and language loss for more than a century (Goodglass, 1993). For almost as long, we have also known that the lesion/symptom correlations observed in adults do not appear to hold for very young children (Basser, 1962; Lenneberg, 1967). In fact, in the absence of other complications, infants with congenital damage to one side of the brain (left or right) usually go on to acquire language abilities that are well within the normal range (Eisele & Aram, 1995; Feldman, Holland, & Janosky, 1992; Vargha-Khadem, Isaacs, & Muter,

One possible explanation for the substantial organismal differences between humans and chimpanzees is that there have been changes in gene regulation. Given what is known about transcription factor binding sites, this motivates the following probability question: given a 1000 nucleotide region in our genome, how long does it take for a specified six to nine letter word to appear in that region in some individual? Stone and Wray [Mol. Biol. Evol. 18 (2001) 1764–1770] computed 5,950 years as the answer for six letter words. Here, we will show that for words of length 6, the average waiting time is 100,000 years, while for words of length 8, the waiting time has mean 375,000 years when there is a 7 out of 8 letter match in the population consensus sequence (an event of probability roughly 5/16) and has mean 650 million years when there is not. Fortunately, in biological reality, the match to the target word does not have to be perfect for binding to occur. If we model this by saying that a 7 out of 8 letter match is good enough, the mean reduces to about 60,000 years. 1. Introduction. At

The Nature-Nurture controversy has been with us since it was first outlined by Plato and Aristotle. Nobody likes it anymore. All reasonable scholars today agree that genes and environment interact to determine complex cognitive outcomes. So why does the controversy persist? First, it persists because it has practical implications that cannot be postponed (i.e., what can we do to avoid bad outcomes and insure better ones?), a state of emergency that sometimes tempts scholars to stake out claims they cannot defend. Second, the controversy persists because we lack a precise, testable theory of the process by which genes and environment interact. In the absence of a better theory, innateness is often confused with (1) domain specificity (Outcome X is so peculiar that it must be

Environmental and evolutionary biologists have recently benefited from advances in experimental design and statistical analysis for complex gene expression microarray experiments. The high-throughput time course experiment highlights gene function by uncovering functionally similar responses across varied experimental conditions. Since these time-dependent responses can be compared across phylogenetic branches, we argue that the extension to multi-factor designs incorporating closely related species adds an evolutionary context to the analysis as well as being of considerable interest in its own right. Motivated by time course gene expression experiments conducted over multiple strains of yeast, we propose a mixed effects model based clustering method that preserves the factor information contained in time and in species. The result is a partitioning of the common, homologous genome into functional groupings cross-tabulated by their response in different species and annotated by their mean effects and

Evolutionary changes of developmental mechanisms in the absence of cell lineage alterations during vulva formation in the Diplogastridae (Nematoda)

this paper should be addressed to S. L. Williams, Language Research Center, 3401 Panthersville Road, GA 30034, U.S.A. 301 S. WILLIAMS et al. on the object and with the object as though the object was an animate being. The ape is also expected to know that it must imitate the actions of the caretaker actions that during the demonstration are directed toward the caretaker herself. The ape needs both to imitate what it sees and also to understand the intent of the speaker. A dog cannot achieve such an understanding, but apes often can (Hayes, as can young children (Bates et al., making it difficult to determine whether correct responses with such contexts are based upon language comprehension per se or upon extralinguistic cues. Of course, it is often impractical, with apes and children alike, to demand that language comprehension be context-free before one recognizes that it is occurring. To ensure the very process of language acquisition, the parent or caregiver must have some understanding of a young child's or ape's level of comprehension even as they start to comprehend. The beginning of language comprehension in children can be observed between months of age (Bates, 1993). Throughout this time, an adult may not always be aware of the degree to which he or she is monitoring a child's development of comprehension, but nonetheless the caregiver has a relatively good understanding of what the child can comprehend; and she or he will direct communications to the child accordingly (e.g. Bates, 1993). Given that context does influence this process, we looked at the comprehension of spoken English sentences in a pair of bonobos (Pan paniscus). To date, three bonobos and one common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) have demonstrated a capacity to understand speech and graphic sy...

in press, Cognition Against a background of recent progress in developmental neuroscience, some of which has been taken as challenging to the modularity hypothesis of Fodor (1983), this article contrasts two competing conceptions of modularity: sui generis modularity, according to which modules are treated as independent neurocognitive entities that owe nothing to one another, and descent-with-modification modularity, according to which current cognitive modules are understood to be shaped by evolutionary changes from ancestral cognitive modules. I argue that sui generis modularity is incompatible with a range of data, from the co-occurrence of deficits to the patterns of activation in neuroimaging studies, but that that same range of data is compatible with descent-with-modification modularity. Furthermore, I argue that the latter conception of modularity may have important implications for the practice and conception of fields such as developmental disorders and linguistics. 1

Functional diversification of sonic hedgehog paralog enhancers identified by phylogenomic reconstruction

Comparative analysis indicates regulatory neofunctionalization of