Sentences with phrase «purposive behavior»

Perhaps we might see some familiar - looking actions — perhaps something resembling organismic, purposive behavior.

Evolutionary theory needs to take account of the interaction between short - term purposive behavior on the part of animals and the survival value of particular characteristics.

C. H. Waddington sees an interaction between the purposive behavior of animals and their environment that was inadequately recognized in more reductionistic interpretations of neo-Darwinism.

Teleologically structured activity is to be distinguished, however, from purposive behavior as genus is distinguished from species.

Not exact matches

The important point for Schwartz here is not simply that modified thoughts and behaviors permanently altered patterns of brain activity, but that such modifications resulted from, as he calls it, «mindful attention» — conscious and purposive thoughts or actions in which the agent adopts the stance of a detached observer.

So far I have argued three points: that persons engage in behavior patterns which can be characterized as purposive, i. e., as exhibiting a structure of aims, values, and methods of attainment; that individuals and institutions are interrelated, with each side influencing and being influenced by the purposes and activities of the other, although with neither being in any way reducible to or explicable solely in terms of the other; and that the institutional pole in this interaction shares with the individual as its opposite those characteristics that define its behavioral patterns as purposive.

In fact, all my anxieties run in the opposite direction: that, in order to affirm the uniqueness of humanity within organic nature, as well as the unique moral obligations it entails, we will reject all evidence of intentionality, reason, or affection in animals as something only apparently purposive, doing so by reference to the most egregiously vapid of philosophical naturalism's mystifications — «instinct» — and thereby opening the way to a mechanistic narrative that, as we have learned from an incessant torrent of biological and bioethical theory in recent decades, can be extended to human behavior as well.

So for the ethologist the question is, «How much, if any, of the animal's behavior is purposive and what is the relation of this behavior to the rest?»