title: The ``Semantics'' of Evolution: Trajectories and Trade-offs in Design Space and Niche Space. creator: Sloman, A. subject: Animal Behavior subject: Animal Cognition subject: Behavioral Biology subject: Evolution subject: Primatology subject: Cognitive Psychology subject: Computational Neuroscience subject: Artificial Intelligence subject: Machine Learning subject: Machine Vision subject: Neural Nets subject: Robotics subject: Developmental Psychology subject: Evolutionary Psychology subject: Epistemology subject: Metaphysics subject: Philosophy of Mind subject: Philosophy of Science description: This paper attempts to characterise a unifying overview of the practice of software engineers, AI designers, developers of evolutionary forms of computation, designers of adaptive systems, etc. The topic overlaps with theoretical biology, developmental psychology and perhaps some aspects of social theory. Just as much of theoretical computer science follows the lead of engineering intuitions and tries to formalise them, there are also some important emerging high level cross disciplinary ideas about natural information processing architectures and evolutionary mechanisms and that can perhaps be unified and formalised in the future. There is some speculation about the evolution of human cognitive architectures and consciousness. publisher: Springer-Verlach date: 1998 type: Conference Paper type: NonPeerReviewed format: application/postscript identifier: http://cogprints.org/716/2/Sloman_iberamia.ps identifier: Sloman, A. (1998) The ``Semantics'' of Evolution: Trajectories and Trade-offs in Design Space and Niche Space. [Conference Paper] (In Press) relation: http://cogprints.org/716/