In this commentary, I highlight the importance of a proper discussion of the pragmatic implications of John Doris's paradigm for allocation of personal responsibility proposed in his new book Talking to Our Selves. By employing some classic concepts of the American common law tradition, I discuss why Doris's valuational understanding of agency fails to provide an adequate framework for moral responsibility, social accountability, and legal liability.

The existence of specific polymorphisms in genes of key hormones of the energy homeostasis network that have been shown to predispose to obesity and the so-called metabolic syndrome provides further biological support for the proposed insurance hypothesis. In a broader sense, such polymorphisms can be understood as biological imprints of an evolutionarily successful minimax strategy employed by ancient Homo sapiens subpopulations in a one-player game against nature.

In self-adapting dynamical systems, a significant improvement in the signaling flow among agents constitutes one of the most powerful triggering events for the emergence of new complex behaviors. Ackermann and colleagues' comprehensive phylogenetic analysis of the brain structures involved in acoustic communication provides further evidence of the essential role which speech, as a breakthrough signaling resource, has played in the evolutionary development of human cognition viewed from the standpoint of complex adaptive system analysis.

The theoretical concepts developed in the target article, in which the author proposes a new paradigm of cultural evolution based not on the individuals' characteristics, but rather on more global collective properties described as “group-traits” (which emerge when a group of individuals exhibit both differentiation and organization), may have a broader scientific impact that transcend the boundaries of social and evolutionary psychology, paving the way for the emergence of macro-neuroeconomics and social evolutionary game theory.

Although the proposed Selfish Goal Theory constitutes a major theoretical tour de force for addressing the issue of inconsistencies in human actions and the role of motivational goals in behavior, as it is based on an unproven biological paradigm (Dawkins's selfish gene theory) and overemphasizes the role of unconscious processes in decision making, it provides a questionable model of the underlying psychological structure of human agency.

By integrating the classic psychological principles of ancient art of memory (AAOM) with the most recent paradigms in cognitive neuroscience (i.e., the concepts of hodotopic organization and nonlinear dynamics of brain neural networks), Llewellyn provides an up-to-date model of the complex psychological relationships between memory, imagination, and dreams in accordance with current state-of-the-art principles in neuroscience.