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= Cognitive Biology = From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

While cognitive science endeavors to explain human thought and the conscious mind, the work of cognitive biology is focused on the most fundamental process of cognition. In the past several decades, biologists have investigated cognition in organisms large and small, both plant and animal. “Mounting evidence suggests that even bacteria grapple with problems long familiar to cognitive scientists, including: integrating information from multiple sensory channels to marshal an effective response to fluctuating conditions; making decisions under conditions of uncertainty; communicating with conspecifics and others (honestly and deceptively); and coordinating collective behaviour to increase the chances of survival.” Without thinking or perceiving as humans would have it, an act of basic cognition is arguably a simple step-by-step process through which an organism senses a stimulus, then finds an appropriate response in its repertoire and enacts the response. However, the biological details of such basic cognition have neither been delineated for a great many species nor sufficiently generalized to stimulate further investigation. This lack of detail is due to the lack of a science dedicated to the task of elucidating the cognitive ability common to all biological organisms. That is to say, a science of cognitive biology has yet to be established. A prolegomena for such science was presented in 2007 and several authors have published their thoughts on the subject since the late 1970s. Yet as the following examples suggest, there is neither consensus on the theory nor widespread application in practice.

Cognitive biology aims to understand natural cognition as a biological function. It is based on the theoretical assumption that every organism—whether a single cell or multicellular—is continually engaged in systematic acts of cognition coupled with intentional behaviors, i.e., a sensorimotor dynamic. That is to say, if an organism can sense stimuli in its environment and respond accordingly, it is cognitive. Any explanation of how natural cognition may manifest in an organism is constrained by the biological conditions in which its species survives to evolve. And since by Darwinian theory the species of every organism is evolving from a common root, three further elements of cognitive biology seem obvious: (i) the study of cognition in one species of organism is useful, through contrast and comparison, to the study of another species’ cognitive abilities; (ii) it is useful to procede from organisms with simpler to those with more complex cognitive systems, and (iii) the greater the number and variety of species studied in this regard, the more we understand the nature of cognition.

Although the two terms are sometimes used synonymously, cognitive biology should not be confused with the biology of cognition in the sense that it is used by adherents to the Chilean School of Biology of Cognition. Also known as the Santiago School, the biology of cognition is based on the work of Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, who crafted the doctrine of autopoiesis. Their work began in 1970 while the first mention of cognitive biology by Brian Goodwin (discussed below) was in 1977 from a different perspective. Aside from these next several examples of usage, the concept of cognitive biology has several other meanings in circulation. These other meanings include two perspectives unique to their authors (Brian Goodwin and Ladislav Kováč) as well as a general categorical use. All will be discussed shortly.

University Seminar
A graduate seminar titled "Cognitive Biology" was presented by Professor William Bechtel in the autumn of 2013 by the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. The course description[ may serve to illustrate the use and meaning of the concept: “ Cognitive science has focused primarily on human cognitive activities. These include perceiving, remembering and learning, evaluating and deciding, planning actions, etc. But humans are not the only organisms that engage in these activities. Indeed, virtually all organisms need to be able to procure information both about their own condition and their environment and regulate their activities in ways appropriate to this information. In some cases species have developed distinctive ways of performing cognitive tasks. But in many cases these mechanisms have been conserved and modified in other species. This course will focus on a variety of organisms not usually considered in cognitive science such as bacteria, planaria, leeches, fruit flies, bees, birds and various rodents, asking about the sorts of cognitive activities these organisms perform, the mechanisms they employ to perform them, and what lessons about cognition more generally we might acquire from studying them. ”

University Workgroup
A workgroup using "Cognitive Biology" as its title is harbored by the philosophy department at the University of Adelaide in Australia. The group’s webpages, under the supervison of Dr. Pamela Lyon, offer an articulation of their operating concept: “Cognition is, first and foremost, a natural biological phenomenon — regardless of how the engineering of artificial intelligence proceeds. As such, it makes sense to approach cognition like other biological phenomena. This means first assuming a meaningful degree of continuity among different types of organisms—an assumption borne out more and more by comparative biology, especially genomics—studying simple model systems (e.g., microbes, worms, flies) to understand the basics, then scaling up to more complex examples, such as mammals and primates, including humans.” Members of the group study the biological literature on simple organisms (e.g., nematode) in regard to cognitive process and look for homologues in more complex organisms (e.g., crow) already well studied. This comparative approach is expected to yield simple cognitive concepts common to all organisms. “It is hoped a theoretically well-grounded toolkit of basic cognitive concepts will facilitate the use and discussion of research carried out in different fields to increase understanding of two foundational issues: what cognition is and what cognition does in the biological context.” The group’s choice of name, as they explain on a separate webpage, might have been ‘embodied cognition’ or ‘biological cognitive science.’ But the group chose ‘cognitive biology’ for the sake of (i) emphasis and (ii) method. For the sake of emphasis, (i) “We want to keep the focus on biology because for too long cognition was considered a function that could be almost entirely divorced from its physical instantiation, to the extent that whatever could be said of cognition almost by definition had to be applicable to both organisms and machines.” (ii) The method is to “assume (if only for the sake of enquiry) that cognition is a biological function similar to other biological functions—such as respiration, nutrient circulation, waste elimination, and so on.” The method supposes that the genesis of cognition is biological, i.e., the method is biogenic. The host of the group’s website has said elsewhere that cognitive biology requires a biogenic approach, having identified ten principles of biogenesis in an earlier work. The first four biogenic principles are quoted here to illustrate the depth at which the foundations have been set at the Adelaide school of cognitive biology: 1st: “Complex cognitive capacities have evolved from simpler forms of cognition. There is a continuous line of meaningful descent.” 2nd: “Cognition directly or indirectly modulates the physico-chemical-electrical processes that constitute an organism .” 3rd: “Cognition enables the establishment of reciprocal causal relations with an environment, leading to exchanges of matter and energy that are essential to the organism’s continued persistence, well-being or replication.” 4th: “Cognition relates to the (more or less) continuous assessment of system needs relative to prevailing circumstances, the potential for interaction, and whether the current interaction is working or not.”

Other Universities
As another example, the Department für Kognitionsbiologie (cognitive biology) at the University of Vienna declares in its mission statement a strong committment “to experimental evaluation of multiple, testable hypotheses” regarding cognition in terms of evolutionary and development history as well as adaptive function and mechanism, whether the mechanism is cognitive, neural, and/or hormonal. “The approach is strongly comparative: multiple species are studied, and compared within a rigorous phylogenetic framework, to understand the evolutionary history and adaptive function of cognitive mechanisms (‘cognitive phylogenetics’).” The website offers a sample of their work: “Social Cognition and the Evolution of Language: Constructing Cognitive Phylogenies.” A more restricted example can be found with the Cognitive Biology Group, Institute of Biology, Faculty of Science, Otto-von-Guericke University (OVGU) in Magdeburg, Germany. The group offers courses titled “Neurobiology of Consciousness” and “Cognitive Neurobiology.” Its website lists the papers generated from its lab work, focusing on the neural correlates of perceptual consequences and visual attention. The group’s current work is aimed at detailing a dynamic known as ‘multistable perception.’ The phenomenon, described in a sentence: “Certain visual displays are not perceived in a stable way but, from time to time and seemingly spontaneously, their appearance wavers and settles in a distinctly different form.” A final example of university commitment to cognitive biology can be found at Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia. There in the Faculty of Natural Sciences, the Bratislava Biocenter is presented as a consortium of research teams working in biomedical sciences. Their website lists the Center for Cognitive Biology @ Department of Biochemistry at the top of the page, followed by five lab groups, each @ a separate department of bioscience. The webpage for the Center for Cognitive Biology offers a link to Foundations of Cognitive Biology, a page that simply contains a quotation from a paper authored by Ladislav Kováč, the site’s founder: “Cognitive biology aims at a synthesis of data of various scientific disciplines within a single frame of conceiving life as epistemic unfolding of the universe (the epistemic principle). In accord with evolutionary epistemology, it considers biological evolution as a progressing process of accumulation of knowledge. The knowledge is embodied in constructions of organisms, and the structural complexity of those constructions which carry embodied knowledge corresponds to their epistemic complexity. In contrast to evolutionary epistemology, cognitive biology is based on the assumption that the molecular level is fundamental for cognition and adheres to a principle of minimal complexity, which stipulates that the most efficient way to study any trait of life is by studying it at the simplest level at which it occurs.” The list of Professor Kováč’s publications includes many in his native language which have not been translated, although well worth the effort. See more of Kováč’s cognitive biology discussed below.

Other meanings
'Cognitive biology' first appeared in the literature as a paper with that title by Brian C. Goodwin in 1977. There and in several related publications Goodwin explained the advantage of cognitive biology in the context of his work on morphogenesis. He subsequently moved on to other issues of structure, form, and complexity with little further mention of cognitive biology. Goodwin’s articulation of cognitive biology was polemical, anti-materialist and anti-reductionist. Moreover, he aligned his work with Noam Chomsky’s linguistics and Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy—several currents of thought outside the mainstream. (Goodwin 1978) Aside from a pair of journal articles about the concept (Boden and Zaw, 1980), cognitive biology generated little attention in the biological community. Nor was there much mention of cognitive biology in Goodwin’s own subsequent publications. He moved on, through the 1980s and 90s, to develop structural biology (Goodwin 1981; Webster and Goodwin 1982) and mathematical models of biological phenomena (Goodwin, Kauffman, and Murray, 1993)—dynamics and emergent order—in terms of complexity theory (Goodwin and Saunders,1989). He also became embroiled in the long-term debate over the theory of evolution: for example, calling for the replacement of the evolutionary paradigm with a generative account (Goodwin 1984) centered on the developmental details of multicellular organisms. In Goodwin’s face-to-face and pen-to-pen confrontations with Richard Dawkins, he championed the organism over Dawkins’ selfish gene as the basic unit of life (Goodwin and Dawkins, 1995). Overall, Goodwin devoted his efforts to the development of a ‘new’ biology “in the form of an exact [mathematical] science of complex systems concerned with dynamics and emergent order.” (See p96 ff in Goodwin 1995 and Goodman 2009.) Meanwhile, Goodwin’s concept of a cognitive biology (in a processive framework following Whitehead), lacking an advocate over the decades since Goodwin’s initial presentation, has yet to gain widespread acceptance. None-the-less, all of Goodwin’s work subsequent to his 1977 call for a cognitive biology was congruent with his vision therein. Without an advocate, Goodwin’s concept of cognitive biology has yet to gain widespread acceptance. A brief look at his work is provided below. Aside from an essay regarding Goodwin’s conception by Margaret Boden in 1980, the next appearance of ‘cognitive biology’ as a phrase in the literature came in 1986 from a professor of biochemistry, Ladislav Kováč. His conception, based on natural principles grounded in bioenergetics and molecular biology, is discussed below. Kováč’s continued advocacy has had a greater influence in his homeland, Slovakia, than elsewhere partly because several of his most important papers were written and published only in Slovakian. The words ‘cognitive’ and ‘biology’ are also used together as the name of a category. The category of ‘cognitive biology’ has no fixed content but, rather, the content varies with the user. Several examples are given below, but only after the conceptions of Goodwin and Kováč are discussed.

Goodwin’s cognitive biology
A textbook for biology undergraduates, Analytical Physiology of Cells and Developing Organisms by Brian C. Goodwin, was published in 1976. The first six chapters described the mathematical, biochemical and molecular detail of cellular as well as developmental biology—i.e., every cellular process from metabolism to mitosis to morphogenesis in multicellular organisms. A concluding chapter balanced the analytical with the phenomenological, presenting the parts all together in co-operation as a whole organism. This seventh chapter was titled: “The organism as a cognitive and co-operative system.” In this chapter and several subsequent papers, including the eponymous “Cognitive Biology,” Goodwin described the organism as the ongoing process of a cognitive system and explains his reasoning toward such conclusion. Most importantly, during his study of morphogenesis Goodwin realized that the biological shapes (forms) and behaviors characteristic of a species are patterned according to simple rules that can not be reduced to chemistry, physics, or genetic material. As he put it: “These rules are not in the category of natural law, as the physicist tends to regard the law of gravitational attraction. They are rules which have been arrived at by the evolutionary process as a solution to the problem of reliably and repeatedly generating particular types of form. And they are of course inherited, passed on from generation to generation. “What sort of system is this which employs rules to generate useful structures and behaviour patterns and which can transmit the rules to its progeny? I have argued that such rules constitute knowledge and that a system which uses knowledge is a cognitive system (Goodwin, 1976a, 1977). This comes from an extension of an argument presented by Chomsky (1972) in a linguistic context.” Chomsky’s argument for linguistic competence, as Goodwin would have it, made the case for innate structures of the brain as elements of language learning, i.e. knowledge aquisition. Goodwin generalized to include every structure generated within an organism—i.e., a cognitive system—as knowledge based. Since every structure depends upon protein, the sequence for which is translated and transcripted from DNA by RNA to generate the protein, the knowledge is considered by Goodwin as stored in DNA in coded form and activated as each-and-every generated protein participates in the on-going process of the organism. Moreover, “[the proteins] function as tests of genetic hypotheses by revealing their meaning.” The knowledge with useful meaning gives “the possessor the competence to behave in a manner which contributes to its survival and reproduction (Goodwin, 1976a).” While such cognitive systems are compatible with the laws of physics and chemistry, they “can stabilize behaviour in physically and chemically improbable states by means of particular rules of action which they have embodied in parts of their own structure, such as catalysis of chemical reactions by enzymes so that relatively high rates of metabolic transformation can occur at low temperatures. By thus regulating their own activities through the imposition upon themselves of specific rules or constraints, biological systems have managed to discover and exploit an immense range of behavioural and morphological patterns.” In this fashion, “such a system transcends the rules of physics and chemistry” without breaking those rules. This way of thinking implies that the very process of evolution is cognitive and knowledge based. With such thought, Goodwin leads us to consider “the process of generating new organisms as a creative response to new opportunities which emerge from the on-going nexus of organic evolution. In order to make a full transition to the description of biology as a creative process, one needs a philosophy which takes the essence of being to be creative becoming and which is free of the positivistic and dualistic elements which permeate contemporary science.” At this juncture, Goodwin introduces the philosphy of organism articulated by Alfred North Whitehead in his Process and Reality. Strictly speaking, Goodwin’s presentation of cognitive biology moved with the influence of Whitehead from the scientific to the metaphysic. Practical minded biologists have had good reason to shy away from it. That, plus Goodwin’s own lack of promotion for his conception of cognitive biology (even as he pursued related if not similar themes over the subsequent three decades of his career ), insured the concept, at least his version of it, would never gain wide acceptance.

Kováč’s cognitive biology
Ladislav Kováč's “Introduction to cognitive biology” (Kováč, 1986a) lists ten ‘Principles of Cognitive Biology.’ A closely related thirty page paper was published the following year: “Overview: Bioenergetics between chemistry, genetics and physics.” (Kováč, 1987). It reviewed (then) current fact and theory describing nature’s use of molecular structures and their energetic activities to power life and cognition. Over the following decades, Kováč elaborated, updated, and expanded these themes in frequent publications, including "Fundamental principles of cognitive biology" (Kováč, 2000), “Life, chemistry, and cognition” (Kováč, 2006a), "Information and Knowledge in Biology: Time for Reappraisal” (Kováč, 2007) and "Bioenergetics: A key to brain and mind" (Kováč, 2008). True to his training as a biochemist, Kováč considers the living organism as a chemical system and suggests that “biologists should keep in mind that life is written in the language of chemistry.” It is a language written in mass and energy. Chemical mass, i.e., atoms bonded together, provides the material basis of life. “Chemical energy, i.e., electromagnetic energy involved in rearrangement of electrons on the bonding orbitals of atoms, is the main energy of life.” Life uses only chemical reactions that naturally occur in the inanimate world, but this is not ordinary chemistry: “In  contrast to common chemical processes, which are scalar, biochemical processes are vectorial. Peter Mitchell, who was rewarded by a Nobel Prize for this discovery, is no less important for comprehension of terrestrial life than is Charles Darwin.” While discussing vectorial processes elsewhere, Kováč quotes Mitchell’s description of the phenomenon: “ ‘[V]ectorial metabolism is represented by a network of spatio-temporal pathways along which ligands (including solutes, ions, chemical groups, electrons, catalytic compounds and complexes) are conducted by articulated movements that occur in the direction of the thermodynamically natural escaping tendency, corresponding to the vectorial (or higher tensorial order) resultants of the thermodynamic and field-effect forces acting on the ligands.’ ”,

“Biochemical vectoriality resides in the nature and structure of proteins.” Working as enzymes along metabolic pathways, active elements in signal transduction, and transport through membrane pores, proteins perform all the work in the cell. During its assembly from amino acids encoded by a specific gene, a protein takes on an asymmetric shape with a particular flexibility and unique multifaceted profile of electromagnetic surfaces. The protein’s flex rate participates in the temporal organization and its asymmetric shape participates in the vectorial organization of the cell. A protein’s work typically involves its flexibility in the binding and subsequent release of its ligand. Such action is performed by the elementary unit in Kováč’s cognitive biology: “Proteins are the elementary epistemological units of life.” Both the existence and activity of a protein can be described in terms of bioenergetics, a science that regards the organism as an open thermodynamic system, exchanging matter and energy across a membrane with the environment. A chemical system in the lifeless environment reaches equilibrium and, in effect, stops dead as any energy generated by the system flies away useless in random directions (entropy). Cellular life began as an odd sort of chemical system, within a membraned enclosure, happened to capture energy and control its release, in effect using the ‘free energy’ to create well-ordered structure (enthalpy) within the membrane while exporting its own entropy, driving the system within the membrane far ahead of equilibrium. At the cellular level, the cell membrane serves as an exchange barrier by selectively controlling traffic to and from the environment through a system of passive osmotic pores, active transport proteins, and receptor proteins (i.e., sensors) embedded in the membrane. Kováč regards the membrane generally as a cognitive device and each protein in particular.

“The principles of cognition at the basic, molecular, level seem to apply to cognition at all other levels. Cellular cognition consists of the operation of a set of molecular sensors as modules, and the network of cellular cognitive devices constitutes cognition at the level of the individual organism.” Kováč includes DNA, as well as cell membrane and proteins, as cognitive devices. While the molecules responsible for gene transcription and translation have an obvious cognitive element, Kováč underlined the role of DNA in the generation of knowledge. Nucleic acid serves both as a ‘storage repository’ for well-tested working hypotheses and as a ‘hypothesis generator.’ In this Popperian view, the biological species, working through individuals, is something like a scientist: “New genes are novel hypotheses.” Darwin’s dictum of ‘descent with variation’ is given a Popperian extension: “Natural selection is the selection of hypotheses about the environment.” All together, a species’ genes store the knowledge aquired through experience over the generations, an “isomorphic image of the environment” insofar as each vital feature of the environment is mapped to the activity of a particular type of protein. “Each organism has its own species-specific world.” In Kováč’s perspective, a unit of knowledge is embodied at the molecular level as a specialized protein, expressed as a chemically bonded sequence of amino acid units from a stored species-specific sequence of chemically bonded deoxyribonucleic acid units. During a protein’s fabrication, the energy absorbed or released in chemical bonds is part of the bioenergetic overhead of the living system. Once it goes to work in the living cell as an enzyme, translocator, or receptor (sensor), the protein operates as a molecular engine that cyclically transforms a particular form of energy to accomplish specific mesoscopic work.

Energy is defined by physicists as the ability to do work. Kováč’s units of knowledge (i.e., proteins) know how to perform one or the other of two types of work in the living cell: ontic work and epistemic work. Constructive laboring (i.e., metabolism) with available materials to achieve the persistent existence (ontos) of the organism is ontic work. Such life-affirming labor is supported by epistemic work in the sensing, measuring, and recording of features recognized in the environment—both the external surround as well as internally. Epistemic work not only serves to locate resources, but also counters destructive effects of the environment “and, in the case of more knowledgeable systems, to anticipate them.” The range of knowledgeable systems extends from single-celled organisms to multi-cellular plants and animals, including humans. Kováč’s view of cognitive biology “considers biological evolution as a progressing process of accumulation of knowledge. The knowledge is embodied in constructions of organisms, and the structural complexity of those constructions which carry embodied knowledge corresponds to their epistemic complexity.” Presumably, the more knowledge accumulated the greater the epistemic complexity and evolutionary progress. As he remarked in his “Fundamental principles:” “A ‘bottom-up’ approach to epistemological problems, that encompasses molecular biology, has been called cognitive biology (Kováč 1986a). Owing to its ample use of concepts and reasoning of thermodynamics, it may be considered as an outgrowth of bioenergetics (Kováč 1986b, 1987). Some pioneering ideas have been formulated by Goodwin (1976). The main credit should be given to Hans Kuhn. For him, life from its very beginning, starting from self-copying nucleic acids, was an unceasing process of accumulation of knowledge (Kuhn 1972,1988).”

There is not much fundamental difference between the picture of cognitive biology painted by Kováč and that of Brian Goodwin, especially when Kováč verges on the metaphysical: “Cognitive biology aims at a synthesis of data of various scientific disciplines within a single frame of conceiving life as epistemic unfolding of the universe (the epistemic principle).” In several papers Kováč credits Goodwin, including one for inventing the term ‘cognitive biology’ and for regarding “cognition as arising from the purposeful interaction of molecules.” Goodwin, however, is but one of many primary influences quoted and cited throughout Kováč’s many publications. For example on the page just quoted, Kováč credits Jacques Monod as “the first to propose that cognition can take place at the level of single molecules—specifically proteins” and explains Max Delbrück’s ‘principle of minimum complexity,’ insofar as it led Delbrück to study “cognition and behaviour using simple fungi (Phycomyces) as model organisms.” Most thinkers, thoughts, and domains of research relevant to the topic are mentioned and cited in Kováč’s detailed elaboration of cognitive biology—a synthesis—in papers published over the past several decades. The first decade of the 21st century began with this synthesis: “Cognitive biology has grown out of molecular biology, with an assumption that the elucidation of molecular recognition, of processing of molecular signals, of the organisation of gene networks, of protein computation may provide a clue for understanding higher cognitive processes.” Near the end of the decade, such thought led to this: “The brain consists of networks of neurons, and also of networks of extracellular chemicals. In turn, every single neuron consists of networks of proteins and networks of genes.”

Cognitive biology as a category
As a category, the content of cognitive biology varies somewhat with the user. If the content can only be recruited from cognitive science, then cognitive biology would seem limited to a selection of items in the main set of sciences included by the interdisciplinary concept—cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience, and cognitive anthropology. These six separate sciences were allied “to bridge the gap between brain and mind” with an interdisciplinary approach in the mid-1970s. Participating scientists were concerned only with human cognition. As it gained momentum, the growth of cognitive science in subsequent decades seemed to offer a big tent to a variety of researchers. Some, for example, considered evolutionary epistemology a fellow-traveler. Others appropriated the keyword, as for example Donald Griffin in 1978, when he advocated the establishment of cognitive ethology. Meanwhile, breakthroughs in molecular, cell, evolutionary, and developmental biology generated a cornucopia of data-based theory relevant to cognition. Categorical assignments were problematic. For example the decision to append cognitive to a body of biological research on neurons, e.g. the cognitive biology of neuroscience, is separate from the decision to put it in a category named cognitive sciences. No less difficult a decision needs be made—between the computational and constructivist approach to cognition, and the concomitant issue of simulated v. embodied cognitive models—before appending biology to a body of cognitive research, e.g. the cognitive science of artificial life. One solution is to consider cognitive biology only as a subset of cognitive science. For example, a major publisher’s website displays links to material in a dozen domains of major scientific endeavor. One of which is described thus: “Cognitive science is the study of how the mind works, addressing cognitive functions such as perception and action, memory and learning, reasoning and problem solving, decision-making and consciousness.” Upon its selection from the display, the Cognitive Science page offers in nearly alphabetical order these topics: Cognitive Biology, Computer Science, Economics, Linguistics, Psychology, Philosophy, and Neuroscience. Linked through that list of topics, upon its selection the Cognitive Biology page offers a selection of reviews and articles with biological content ranging from cognitive ethology through evolutionary epistemology; cognition and art; evo-devo and cognitive science; animal learning; genes and cognition; cognition and animal welfare; etc.

A different application of the cognitive biology category is manifest in the 2009 publication of papers presented at a three-day interdisciplinary workshop on “The New Cognitive Sciences” held at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research in 2006. The papers were listed under four headings, each representing a different domain of requisite cognitive ability: (i) space, (ii) qualities and objects, (iii) numbers and probabilities, and (iv) social entities. The workshop papers examined topics ranging from “Animals as Natural Geometers” and “Color Generalization by Birds” through “Evolutionary Biology of Limited Attention” and “A comparative Perspective on the Origin of Numerical Thinking” as well as “Neuroethology of Attention in Primates” and ten more with less colorful titles. “[O]n the last day of the workshop the participants agreed [that] the title ‘Cognitive Biology’ sounded like a potential candidate to capture the merging of the cognitive and the life sciences that the workshop aimed at representing.” Thus the publication of Tommasi, et al. (2009), Cognitive Biology: Evolutionary and Developmental Perspectives on Mind, Brain and Behavior. A final example of categorical use comes from an author’s introduction to his 2011 publication on the subject, Cognitive Biology: Dealing with Information from Bacteria to Minds. After discussing the differences between the cognitive and biological sciences, as well as the value of one to the other, the author concludes: “Thus, the object of this book should be considered as an attempt at building a new discipline, that of cognitive biology, which endeavors to bridge these two domains.” There follows a detailed methodology illustrated by examples in biology anchored by concepts from cybernetics (e.g., self-regulatory systems) and quantum information theory (regarding probabilistic changes of state) with an invitation "to consider system theory together with information theory as the formal tools that may ground biology and cognition as traditional mathematics grounds physics.”