Animal welfare science, performance metrics, and proxy failure.

In their target article, John et al. make a convincing case that there is a unified phenomenon behind the common finding that measures become worse targets over time. Here, we will apply their framework to the domain of animal welfare science and present a pragmatic solution to reduce its impact that might also be applicable in other domains.

Neural networks, AI, and the goals of modeling.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have found many useful applications in recent years. Of particular interest have been those instances where their successes imitate human cognition and many consider artificial intelligences to offer a lens for understanding human intelligence. Here, we criticize the underlying conflation between the predictive and explanatory power of DNNs by examining the goals of modeling.

Evolutionary mismatch and anomalies in the memory system.

In order to understand involuntary autobiographical memories and déjà vu experiences, we argue that it is important to take an evolutionary medicine perspective. Here, we propose that these memory anomalies can be understood as the outcomes of an inevitable design trade-off between type I and type II errors in memory processing.

The design space of human communication and the nonevolution of ideography.

Despite the once-common idea that a universal ideography would have numerous advantages, attempts to develop such ideographies have failed. Here, we make use of the biological idea of fitness landscapes to help us understand the nonevolution of such a universal ideographic code as well as how we might reach this potential global fitness peak in the design space.

Puritanical morality and the scaffolded evolution of self-control.

There is a puzzle in reconciling the widespread presence of puritanical norms condemning harmless pleasures with the theory that morality evolved to reap the benefits of cooperation. Here, we draw on the work of several philosophers to support the argument by Fitouchi et al. that these norms evolved to facilitate and scaffold self-control for the sake of cooperation.

Flesh Without Blood: The Public Health Benefits of Lab-Grown Meat.

Synthetic meat made from animal cells will transform how we eat. It will reduce suffering by eliminating the need to raise and slaughter animals. But it will also have big public health benefits if it becomes widely consumed. In this paper, we discuss how "clean meat" can reduce the risks associated with intensive animal farming, including antibiotic resistance, environmental pollution, and zoonotic viral diseases like influenza and coronavirus. Since the most common objection to clean meat is that some people find it "disgusting" or "unnatural," we explore the psychology of disgust to find possible counter-measures. We argue that the public health benefits of clean meat give us strong moral reasons to promote its development and consumption in a way that the public is likely to support. We end by depicting the change from farmed animals to clean meat as a collective action problem and suggest that social norms rather than coercive laws should be employed to solve the problem.

Polygenic scores and social science.

It is a hotly contested issue whether polygenic scores should play a major role in the social sciences. Here, we defend a methodologically pluralist stance in which sociogenomics should abandon its hype and recognize that it suffers from all the methodological difficulties of the social sciences, yet nevertheless maintain an optimistic stance toward a more cautious use.

Optimism about Measuring Animal Feelings.

While animal sentience research has flourished in the last decade, scepticism about our ability to accurately measure animal feelings has unfortunately remained fairly common. Here, we argue that evolutionary considerations about the functions of feelings will give us more reason for optimism and outline a method for how this might be achieved.

Hominin life history, pathological complexity, and the evolution of anxiety.

In order to address why the number of patients suffering from anxiety and depression are seemingly exploding in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) countries, it is sensible to look at the evolution of human fearfulness responses. Here, we draw on Veit's pathological complexity framework to advance Grossmann's goal of re-characterizing human fearfulness as an adaptive trait.

Social robots and the intentional stance.

Why is it that people simultaneously treat social robots as mere designed artefacts, yet show willingness to interact with them as if they were real agents? Here, we argue that Dennett's distinction between the intentional stance and the design stance can help us to resolve this puzzle, allowing us to further our understanding of social robots as interactive depictions.

Improving welfare assessment in aquaculture.

While global aquaculture is rapidly expanding, there remains little attention given to the assessment of animal welfare within aquacultural systems. It is crucial that animal welfare concerns are central in the development and implementation of aquaculture as if they are not prioritized early on, it becomes much more difficult to adapt in future. To this end, it is important to ensure the availability of high-quality welfare assessment schemes to evaluate the welfare of animals in aquaculture and promote and maintain high welfare standards. This paper will first discuss some of the current certification and assessment frameworks, highlighting the primary limitations that need to be addressed, before going on to describe the recommendations for a best-practice welfare assessment process for aquaculture; with the hope that these considerations can be taken on board and used to help improve welfare assessment for aquaculture and, ultimately, to ensure animals used in aquaculture have a higher level of welfare. Any aquacultural system should be assessed according to a suitable framework in order to be considered adequate for the welfare of the animals it contains, and thus to maintain social license to operate.

Positive Wild Animal Welfare.

With increasing attention given to wild animal welfare and ethics, it has become common to depict animals in the wild as existing in a state dominated by suffering. This assumption is now taken on board by many and frames much of the current discussion; but needs a more critical assessment, both theoretically and empirically. In this paper, we challenge the primary lines of evidence employed in support of wild animal suffering, to provide an alternative picture in which wild animals may often have lives that are far more positive than is commonly assumed. Nevertheless, while it is useful to have an alternative model to challenge unexamined assumptions, our real emphasis in this paper is the need for the development of effective methods for applying animal welfare science in the wild, including new means of data collection, the ability to determine the extent and scope of welfare challenges and opportunities, and their effects on welfare. Until such methods are developed, discussions of wild animal welfare cannot go beyond trading of intuitions, which as we show here can just as easily go in either direction.

The scaffolded evolution of human communication.

Heintz & Scott-Phillips provide a useful synthesis for constructing a bridge between work by both cognitive scientists and evolutionary biologists studying the diversity of human communication. Here, we aim to strengthen their bridge from the side of evolutionary biology, to argue that we can best understand ostensive communication as a scaffold for more complex forms of intentional expressions.

Developmental Programming, Evolution, and Animal Welfare: A Case for Evolutionary Veterinary Science.

The conditions animals experience during the early developmental stages of their lives can have critical ongoing effects on their future health, welfare, and proper development. In this paper we draw on evolutionary theory to improve our understanding of the processes of developmental programming, particularly Predictive Adaptive Responses (PAR) that serve to match offspring phenotype with predicted future environmental conditions. When these predictions fail, a mismatch occurs between offspring phenotype and the environment, which can have long-lasting health and welfare effects. Examples include metabolic diseases resulting from maternal nutrition and behavioral changes from maternal stress. An understanding of these processes and their evolutionary origins will help in identifying and providing appropriate developmental conditions to optimize offspring welfare. This serves as an example of the benefits of using evolutionary thinking within veterinary science and we suggest that in the same way that evolutionary medicine has helped our understanding of human health, the implementation of evolutionary veterinary science (EvoVetSci) could be a useful way forward for research in animal health and welfare.

On the evolutionary origins of the bifocal stance.

In this commentary we advance Jagiello et al.'s proposal by zooming in on the possible evolutionary origins of the "bifocal stance" that may have enabled a major transition in human cultural evolution, arguing that the evolution of the bifocal stance was driven by an explosion in cultural complexity arising from cooperative foraging, which led to a feedback loop between the ritual and instrumental stances.

Autism and the preference for imaginary worlds.

Dubourg and Baumard mention a potential role for the human drive to systemise as a factor motivating interest in imaginary worlds. Given that hyperexpression of this trait has been linked with autism (Baron-Cohen, , ), we think this raises interesting implications for how those on the autism spectrum may differ from the neurotypical population in their engagement with imaginary worlds.

Life, mind, agency: Why Markov blankets fail the test of evolution.

There has been much criticism of the idea that Friston's free-energy principle can unite the life and mind sciences. Here, we argue that perhaps the greatest problem for the totalizing ambitions of its proponents is a failure to recognize the importance of evolutionary dynamics and to provide a convincing adaptive story relating free-energy minimization to organismal fitness.