Our Apologies!

The following features are not available with your current Browser configuration

- page navigation - memorize search form information - display database popup information - adjust limits on search form
Skip Navigation

PsycNET®


  • PsycARTICLES:
  • Citation and Abstract
The Second Law of Thermodynamics Is the First Law of Psychology: Evolutionary Developmental Psychology and the Theory Of Tandem, Coordinated Inheritances: Comment on Lickliter and Honeycutt (2003).
Tooby, John; Cosmides, Leda; Barrett, H. Clark
Psychological Bulletin. Vol 129(6), Nov 2003, 858-865.
Organisms inherit a set of environmental regularities as well as genes, and these two inheritances repeatedly encounter each other across generations. This repetition drives natural selection to coordinate the interplay of stably replicated genes with stably persisting environmental regularities, so that this web of interactions produces the reliable development of a functionally organized design. Selection is the only known counterweight to the tendency of physical systems to lose rather than grow functional organization. This means that the individually unique and unpredictable factors in the web of developmental interactions are a disordering threat to normal development. Selection built anti-entropic mechanisms into organisms to orchestrate transactions with environments so that they have some chance of being organization-building and reproduction-enhancing rather than disordering. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)
  • Digital Object Identifier:
  • 10.1037/0033-2909.129.6.858
Note: Your library may have purchased access to this information through another service provider.