Cloning, Branching Patterns, the Major Transitions of Evolution, & Other writings

Sample: "What does language do? Or, what does culture do? Language and culture are non-genetic mechanisms for increasing the number of qualities across individuals, and language and culture also increase the capacity for intraspecific assortative mating across individuals in the human species (by increasing the number of dissimilarities and categories of similarities across individuals in the human species). It is interesting to consider functional analogies amongst animals and plants: Birdsong and feather colors in bird species, and the colors and shapes of angiosperm flowering plant species play similar functions in these species, i.e., they increase the number and differentiation of characteristics across individual organisms, thus increasing the capacity for assortative mating across individual organisms in bird species (intraspecific assortative mating), and increasing the capacity for assortative mating across angiosperm species and insect, bee, and bird species (interspecific assortative mating).""