Many aspects of human and animal behaviour require individuals to learn quickly how to classify the patterns they encounter. One might imagine that evolution by natural selection would result in neural systems emerging that are very good at learning things like this. Explicit simulations of the evolution of simple developmental neural systems confirm that such rational behaviour can indeed emerge quite easily. However, the same simulations also reveal that there are situations in which evolution seems to let the species down, and populations emerge that appear to perform rather irrationally. There are actually many reasons why this might happen. I shall present the results from a selection of my simulations that begin to explore the issues involved.
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