Practice a real question • free

Learn faster with bite‑sized practice that actually sticks.

StudyBits turns courses into short lessons + interactive questions. Try one below, then keep going with the full course.

Build your own course
Interactive
Answer, get feedback, and move on.
Personalized
Create courses tailored to your goals.
Track progress
Stay consistent with streaks + goals.
Try a sample question
Answer it, then continue the course

Report Issue

The answer does not look quite right, I don't see the correct answer.
The question does not make sense.
The question has a grammatical error.
One or more of the options is duplicate.
The description is incorrect or incomplete.
An image is missing.
Submit

Fill in the blanks

Fill in the key ideas: In a relative-fitness table, the genotype with the largest ww is the ____; when we write w=1sw=1-s, the symbol ss is the ____ against that genotype; and when comparing w_Aa=1hsw\_{Aa}=1-hs to w_AA=1w\_{AA}=1 and w_aa=1sw\_{aa}=1-s, the parameter hh describes the degree of ____ of allele A over a.

Course
Cognitive Evolution (Evolutionary Cognitive Science): Comparativ
8 units37 lessons
Topics
Evolutionary biologyCognitive scienceComparative psychology / animal cognitionBehavioral ecologyAnthropology (paleoanthropology and archaeology)Neuroscience (comparative and systems)
About this course

This course develops an integrative, research-oriented framework for explaining how and why cognitive abilities evolve across taxa, with special attention to humans. Core coverage includes evolutionary forces (selection, drift, mutation, constraint), adaptation vs exaptation, and Tinbergen’s four questions linking mechanism, development, function, and phylogeny. Methods emphasize comparative cognition task validity, phylogenetic comparative inference, and socio-ecological/behavioral-ecology models. Competing hypotheses (e.g., Social Brain, Machiavellian, Cultural Intelligence), gene–culture coevolution, and neuroscience/genetic evidence are evaluated alongside paleoanthropological and archaeological constraints. The course culminates in designing discriminative tests and synthesizing falsifiable evolutionary accounts.