Research

Philosophy of Animal Minds

Brown, R. (2022). Mapping Out the Landscape: A Multi-dimensional Approach to Behavioral Innovation. Philosophy of Science, 89(5), 1176-1185.
Taylor, A. H., Bastos, A. P. M., Brown, R. L., Allen, C. (2022) "The signature-testing approach to mapping biological and artificial intelligences", Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 26(9): 738-750.
Brown, R.L. (2014) “Identifying behavioural novelty.” Biological Theory, 9(2): 135-148.
Brown, R.L. (2017) “Animal Traditions: what are they and why do they matter?” in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds (Kristin Andrews & Jacob Beck eds.). Routledge, pp. 362-371.

Philosophy of Biology

Maja Adamska, Rachael Brown, Xia Hua, Dan Noble, Ben Phillips, Kate Sanders, Lexing Xie (In final production stages) Evolutionary Science for a Changing World: A whitepaper prepared for the Australian Academy of Science, Australian Academy of Science (Co-lead author with Sanders)
Brown, R.L. (2023) "Structuralism and Selectionism: Friends or Foes?”, Seminars in Cell and Developmental Biology, S1084-9521(22)00061-1. 145: 13-21.
Brown, R.L. (2020) “Proximate-Ultimate Causation and Evo-Devo” in The Evolutionary Developmental Biology Reference Guide (Laura Nuño de la Rosa, Gerd B. Müller and Alan Love eds.). Springer.
Brown, R.L. (2015) “A clear-eyed defense of philosophy of biology.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 49: 63-65.
Brown, R.L. (2015) “Why development matters.” Biology & Philosophy, 30(6): 889-899.
Brown, R. L. (2014) “What evolvability really is.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 65(3): 549-572.
Brown, R. L. (2013) “Learning, evolvability and exploratory behaviour: Extending the evolutionary reach of learning.” Biology & Philosophy, 28(6): 933-955.
Brown, R.L. (2014) “Rethinking behavioural evolution,” in Entangled Life: Organism and Environment in the Biological and Social Sciences, Barker, Desjardins & Pearce (eds.). Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp 237-260.

Evolution of Cognition and Culture

Brown, R.L. (under review) Exorcising Fisher’s Ghost: Getting serious about gradualism in evolutionary psychology.
Pain R., Shipton, C & Brown R. L. (Eds.) Thematic Section on "Archaeology and Cognitive Evolution" of Biological Theory, 2023
Moore R., Brown, R.L. (Eds.) Special issue of Synthese on “Cultural Evolution of Social Cognition, Synthese, 2022
Brown, R.L. & Pain R. (2022) “No tinkering allowed: When the end-goal requires a highly specific or risky, and complex action sequence, expect ritualistic scaffolding" Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 45, e252.
Brown, R. L. (2021) “Is cultural evolution always fast? Challenging the idea that cognitive gadgets would be capable of rapid and adaptive evolution” Synthese. 199 (3), 8965-8989.
Pain, R. & Brown, R.L. (2020) “Mind the gap: A more evolutionarily plausible role for technical reasoning in cumulative technological culture” Synthese. .https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02894-8

Philosophy of Mind

Philosophy of Science

Brown, R.L, Lean C. H. and Weisberg, M. (in draft) Climate Adaptation as Evolvability
Lynch, K.E., Brown, R.L., Strasser, J. & Yeo, S. (2023) “A disanalogy with RCTs and its implications for second generation causal knowledge” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 46, E194.
Brown, R. L., Brusse C, Heubner B & Pain R. (2020) “Unification at the Cost of Realism and Precision” Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 43, e95.
Brown, R.L. (2017) “Not statistically significant, but still scientific” Animal Sentience, 16(14).

Other

K. McNamara, R. Brown, M. Elgar & T. Jones (2008) “Paternity costs from polyandry compensated by increased fecundity in the hide beetle.” Behavioural Ecology, 19: 433-440.