In the selectionist model of biological evolution proposed by Darwin and Wallace, Nature selects some variants (potentials) at the expense of others, depending on how well each functions in the contexts in which they have to function. These variants are the ones most likely to "happen again" in the next generation. In the selectionist model of brain function proposed by Edelman, the TNGS, in perceptual categorisation, the perceivable selects some variant neural events (potentials) at the expense of others. Selection involves the strengthening of synaptic connections between neurons in groups in maps, thereby increasing the probability that such configurations will fire again. These neural variants are the ones most likely to "happen again" in the next generation of neural firing in response to specific sensory detections of difference.
This model can be understood in terms of the grammatical concept of ergativity: each perceptual categorising process is actualised through a medium, a brain as neurological recognition system, and caused by an external agent, a domain that can be detected and categorised.[1]
Note, by the way, that this is in stark contrast to an understanding based on the grammatical concept of transitivity. On such a model, a categorising process carries through from an actor, an external domain, to a goal, a brain as neurological recognition system. That is to say, categories flow into brains from the outside. Edelman (1992) labels this position instructionism since it involves seeing categorisation as a process whereby the outside instructs the brain, and he opposes it to selectionism, pointing out that instructionism is Lamarckism applied to the brain.[2] In the Lamarckian model of biological evolution, properties flow from the world into genomes, such that acquired characteristics can be inherited by offspring. That is, a coded world acts directly on a specific genome and changes it.
There are probably many reasons why the instructionist/transitive model should have been previously favoured in modelling the brain. For example, it is more obviously recognisable from visual experience: we see that things move from one location to another.[3] Selectionism is more subtle, since it requires a generational timescale to observe the effects of selection in a visible domain. The view of human-as-agent may also have made the acceptance of the phenomenon-as-agent model less probable.
Footnotes:
[1] Phenomena make us sense: see, hear, smell, taste, feel (perception); phenomena make us feel (affect); phenomena make us think (cognition); phenomena make us want (desideration).
[2] Instructionism fails to explain, for example, why a patient of (Oliver) Sacks, ‘Virgil’, who receives sight for the first time at age 50 cannot make sense of what he sees.
[3] Cf Lakoff’s (1987) source-path-goal schema.