As is true for most other human inventions, the origin of the violin is unknown. What is known is that this popular and versatile instrument has notably changed over the course of several hundred years. At issue is whether those evolutionary changes in the construction of the violin are the result of premeditated, intelligent design or whether they arose through a trial-and-error process. Recent scientific evidence favors the latter account. Our perspective piece puts these recent empirical findings into a comprehensive selectionist framework. According to this view, the many things we do and make-like violins-arise from a process of variation and selection which accords with the law of effect. Contrary to popular opinion, there is neither mystique nor romance in this process; it is as fundamental and ubiquitous as the law of natural selection. As with the law of natural selection in the evolution of organisms, there is staunch resistance to the role of the law of effect in the evolution of human inventions. We conclude our piece by considering several objections to our perspective. (PsycINFO Database Record
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 15. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 08 July 2016.
All research outputs
#2,619,682
of 28,833,811 outputs
Outputs from Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition
#14
of 155 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#39,358
of 410,660 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition
#2
of 7 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 28,833,811 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 90th percentile: it's in the top 10% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 155 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 12.2. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 90% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 410,660 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 90% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 7 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has scored higher than 5 of them.
