Sentence examples for proximal explanation from inspiring English sources

For example, one's eating the doughnut might be explained by one's desire for rich foods (a relatively proximal explanation), but it also might be explained as the product of the evolutionary pressures that produced such desires (a relatively ultimate explanation).

This study, therefore, provides us with a proximal explanation for the low substitution rate of plant mtDNA, namely the existence of efficient recombination-associated DNA repair activity.

A proximal explanation might be that the biochemical mechanism of peptide loading, as mentioned in the paragraph above, leads to this relationship.

These two items required what Mayr (1991) referred to as proximal explanations rather than evolutionary or ultimate (teleological, theistic) explanations.

While "ultimate" is frequently used to label organic evolutionary explanations (because they contrast with proximal explanations that invoke only intrinsic properties of an organism), recent work suggests the possibility that culture might provide relatively more ultimate explanations of some evolved traits.

While proximal explanations of homophily suggest that it is a positive association with a particular set of traits that make a similar person more likeable (Byrne, 1971; Kaplan & Anderson, 1973), here we relate homophily to social networks and communities.

However, beyond the proximal explanations of this phenomenon there is an increasing interest in the evolutionary conditions that favor immunological memory (broadly understood as the memory of previous pathogen infections) [ 12- 21].

The current result opens the possibility of understanding homophily from an evolutionary perspective, as a phenomenon that relates to our inherent tendencies towards social behaviour and group categorisation, and moves away from the proximal explanations that have been used to explain homophily in the past.

These individuals recognized the difference between problems (a) taking place over many generations and requiring evolutionary explanations and (b) those occurring within a generation and requiring what may be termed proximal biological explanations (e.g., function, physiology; see Kampourakis and Zogza 2009).

The distinction between a proximal and ultimate explanation is one that indicates relative distance of the explanans from the explanandum.

In the discussion we analysed the results of these five tests and try to give proximal and historical explanations to the position of soil ecology within ecology.