Rainier Moreno-Lacalle’s Reviews > Without Miracles: Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian Revolution > Status Update

...teachers cannot transmit knowledge to their students by instruction, since teachers can only utter words. If the words are already familiar, students can learn nothing from them.

Exaptation is an important conceptual tool in understanding the evolution of biological structures and behaviors, but it alone cannot account for the continued evolution of adapted complexity.

From the amoeba to Einstein, the growth of knowledge is always the same; we try to solve our problems, and to obtain, by a process of elimination, something approaching adequacy in our tentative solutions.
-Karl Popper

Reorganization is a process akin to rewiring or microprogramming a computer so that those operations it can perform are changed. Reorganization alters behavior but does not produce specific behaviors. It changes the parameters of the behavior, not the content.
-Powers

Our categories and forms of perception, fixed prior to individual experience, are adapted to the external world for exactly the same reasons as the hoof of the horse is already adapted to the ground of the steppe before the horse is born and the fin of the fish is adapted to the water before the fish hatches.
-Konrad Lorenz

adaptation, the evolutionary process through which adaptedly complex structures and behaviors are progressively fine-tuned by natural selection with no marked change in the structure's or behavior's function, from exaptation, through which structures and behaviors originally selected fro one function become involved in another, possibly quite unrelated, function.

The appreciation of the immune system's ability to adapt to a changing environment of novel antigens led to the instruction-dependent template theory of antibody formation in which the environment (in the form of antigens) somehow transmitted instructions for the formation of close-fitting antibodies to the B lymphocytes.