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Informal biology is a core domain, but its construction needs experience
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 1998
Abstract
Although humans are endowed with domain-specific constraints for acquiring informal biology, its construction requires considerable experience with living things and their cultural representations. Less experienced adults may not know what constitutes generic species, and young children may rely on personification rather than category-based inference. Atran's postulate of the living-kind module that promptly produces universal folk taxonomy does not seem tenable.
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- © 1998 Cambridge University Press
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