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en-wikipedia-org-9284		Evolutionary epistemology - Wikipedia			.html	text/html	1817	282	41	Evolutionary epistemology refers to three distinct topics: (1) the biological evolution of cognitive mechanisms in animals and humans, (2) a theory that knowledge itself evolves by natural selection, and (3) the study of the historical discovery of new abstract entities such as abstract number or abstract value that necessarily precede the individual acquisition and usage of such abstractions. "Evolutionary epistemology" can also refer to a theory that applies the concepts of biological evolution to the growth of human knowledge, and argues that units of knowledge themselves, particularly scientific theories, evolve according to selection. One of the hallmarks of evolutionary epistemology is the notion that empirical testing alone does not justify the pragmatic value of scientific theories, but rather that social and methodological processes select those theories with the closest "fit" to a given problem. Popper gave its first comprehensive treatment in his 1970 article "Sketch of an Evolutionary Epistemology",[4] after Donald T.	./cache/en-wikipedia-org-9284.html	./txt/en-wikipedia-org-9284.txt