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2 There is another area of biology which also is given a minimal role in most philosophical analyses of cognition: evolutionary biology. Minimally, evolution by variation and selective retention requires that complex cognitive mechanisms be adaptations of cognitive mechanisms of ancestral species. But due to limited interest in comparative psychology, we have little understanding of the cognitive systems of other currently existing species, and thus little insight into the cognitive abilities of ancestral species.

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6 E.g., that in visual processing, information specifying the location of an objection is processed independently of information specifying the identity of the object. See Kosslyn, S.A.Flynn, R.A.Amsterdam, J.B. and Wang, G. ‘Components of High-Level Vision: A Cognitive Neuroscience Analysis and Accounts of Neurological Syndromes,’ Cognition 34 (1990) 203-77CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

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20 Such existence proofs do not require computer simulation. In biochemistry researchers often try to mimic biological reaction in test tubes; Heinrich Wieland, for example, used a palladium model to simulate the behavior of biochemical enzymes and used this to argue on behalf of his claim that a dehydrogenase enzyme was the agent response for biological oxidations. See W. Bechtel and R.C. Richardson, Discovering Complexity, ch. 4.

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26 Popper, K.R.Objective Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1972)Google Scholar

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