• Quiz goes live after class
• Need to read reading before the quiz

Evolution of Cognition and Learning

<aside> ❓ How do learning and memory capabilities evolve?

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• How does evolution work?

Evolution

• Variation
• Selection
  • Fitness: the ability to reproduce
    • The animal that reproduces more has more offspring that survive → is fitter
  • Genotype: what you pass on
  • Phenotype: the selection that operates in the world (what you see)
    • Anatomy
      • Ex: Long neck
    • Physiology
      • Ability to do it
    • Behavior
      • If you had an animal that stood in place all day, that’s it
      • Mechanism to find food by moving around
    • Ex: the color of the moths’ wings
    • The phenotype that is adaptive to different environments are going to be pretty useful
      • Ex: Pandas only eat eucalyptus, so if that gets destroyed in an area, they’re fucked
• Ex: peppered moths
  • Evolved to become darker and darker in order to blend in with London’s walls
  • The birds that eat these moths couldn’t spot the darker moths, so the lighter ones died out and the darker ones survived
• Epigenetic variations
  • Genes being turned on and off throughout the body
  • Passed on through generations
  • As a result of experience, the genes expressed can change

What might cause a learning ability or cognitive capacity to evolve?

Ecological pressures select for specific learning abilities

Individual recognition

• Guillemots: evolved ability to recognize young
• Selection for things that perpetuate the genotype of the parent

Spatial Memory

• Clark’s Nutcracker
  • Master of remembering (where) food is
  • Caches its food in different locations and retrieving it at later times
• Clark’s Nutcrackers have a sublingual pouch that can hold many seeds (almost 100 pinyon pine seeds)