ontogeny

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..the environment cannot be viewed as merely a permissive or triggering factor in development; rather, it is a critical feature of developmental biology.

In 'higher' animals, such as humans, ontogeny can be understood as being made up of three, broad chronological phases: conception to puberty; puberty to maturity; and maturity to death. During the first phase, by developing awareness through practice and relationships the senses and the elementary skills of their application are acquired. Later developments then build recursively on these early acquisitions.

..what offspring inherit from parents is not simply genes, but a structured developmental system. This developmental system provides sources of both stability and variability, and the structure and interactions among components of an organism's developmental system are as causally informative to the development and transmission of phenotypic traits as are the strands of DNA contained within this system.

The sense we associate with the most is perhaps that of sight —feeling that we look out through our eyes. Yet nature only delivers its functional, cellular infrastructure, sight itself is constructed through nurture, from the experience of shade and colour, delivered through the environmental feedback mechanisms of early ontogenetic learning, a form of learning rooted deep in the early evolution of multicellular beings from the time that land plants first emerged.

Traditionally it has been assumed that fish orientation and migration were to a large extent hard-wired. But .. many fish species possess spatial as well as temporal memory and exert a behavioral flexibility reflecting their ability to learn during ontogeny . .. if we suppose that the cognitive capacities of modern fish species have not changed too much since ray-finned fish appeared, then advanced learning skills have been a part of life on Earth for more than 400 million years.

Lickliter and Honeycutt, in Developmental Dynamics: Toward a Biologically Plausible Evolutionary Psychology, 2003, p.828, Psychological Bulletin, American Psychological Association, Vol. 129, No. 6, pp.819-835.

Citing:— Griffiths, P. E., & Gray, R. D. (1994). Developmental systems and evolutionary explanation. Journal of Philosophy, 91, 277-304; Johnston, T. D. (1987). The persistence of dichotomies in the study of behavioral development. Developmental Review, 7, 149-182; Oyama, S. (1985). The ontogeny of information. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Oyama, S. (2000). Evolution's eye. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Richardson, K. (1998). The origins of human potential: Evolution, development and psychology. London: Routledge. West, M. J., & King, A. P. (1987). Settling nature and nurture into an ontogenetic niche. Developmental Psychobiology, 20, 549-562..

Bioemiosis proceeds through recognition — through current sense-data that a being perceives then being recognized by it; as being the same as, or belonging to the same class as, something the being has sensed or perceived before. This then is a recursive process, its first iteration (or 'base case') generating meaning by matching current sense-data and perceptions to those that have previously been recognized, recorded, embodied, and inherited.

Here embodiment refers to the biophysical expression of semiosis and to the semiosis that biophysical expression represents; and embodied cognition is then simply a description of biosemiosis.

NB. The definitions used here may vary considerably, both in degree and specificity, to those used elsewhere; nonetheless, they also overlap them considerably.

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ontogeny

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