- Title
- From mechanisms to function: an integrated framework of animal innovation
- Creator
- Tebbich, Sabine; Griffin, Andrea S.; Peschl, Markus F.; Sterelny, Kim
- Relation
- ARC
- Relation
- Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Vol. 371, Issue 1690
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0195
- Publisher
- Royal Society Publishing
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2016
- Description
- Animal innovations range from the discovery of novel food types to the invention of completely novel behaviours. Innovations can give access to new opportunities, and thus enable innovating agents to invade and create novel niches. This in turn can pave the way for morphological adaptation and adaptive radiation. The mechanisms that make innovations possible are probably as diverse as the innovations themselves. So too are their evolutionary conse- quences. Perhaps because of this diversity, we lack a unifying framework that links mechanism to function. We propose a framework for animal innovation that describes the interactions between mechanism, fitness benefit and evolutionary significance, and which suggests an expanded range of experimental approaches. In doing so, we split innovation into factors (components and phases) that can be manipulated systematically, and which can be investigated both experimentally and with correlational studies. We apply this framework to a selection of cases, showing how it helps us ask more precise questions and design more revealing experiments.
- Subject
- innovation; behavioural innovation; play; evolution; taxonomic radiation; embodied cognition
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1322836
- Identifier
- uon:24667
- Identifier
- ISSN:0962-8436
- Rights
- © 2016 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
- Reviewed
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