Books on the topic 'Modern and extended evolutionary synthesis'

The monograph reveals the key socio-economic problems of the innovation economy: its content as a knowledge economy and its role in evolutionary development; human capital (living intelligence) as the main resource of the innovation economy. Much attention is paid to the institutional support of innovation through a system of institutions and mutually beneficial contracts. The mixed mechanism of implementation of innovative activity as a synthesis of spontaneous market self-regulation and conscious public administration is shown. The result of the "social control" of society and the state is the coordination of the actions of economic entities and the ordering of economic processes. The most important institution of human society is the family as a strong power in the state. And the person himself with his knowledge, culture, ethics and morality is the main value of society. The main purpose of the family is to reproduce life and provide a person with everything necessary. The state as an institution manages a person's education and health, helps to change his lifestyle, strengthening humanity, ethics, morality and culture of life. The modern global economy remains a sphere of domination of market egoism. It is the market that performs the function of morality as a person and society as a whole. In the global economy, a person is not a representative of the people, but a representative of the system, a standard way of life. And he should live in communication based on respect for each other. It is concluded that today the main wealth of society is not material, but social wealth: the person himself with his knowledge, culture, ethics and morality is a living intellect; a family with the reproduction of life; immaterial knowledge that covers all types of work that cannot be calculated and paid, where the motive is the joy of free cooperation, free giving and community. In this "invisible economy" people mutually teach each other humanity and create a culture of joint thinking and living together. The State and society must preserve and increase the social wealth of human society. For students and postgraduates of economic and managerial specialties, as well as for anyone interested in this problem.

Modern thought is characterised, according to Bruno Latour, by a dichotomy of meaningful culture and unmeaning nature. Signs in the Dust uses medieval semiotics to develop a new theory of nature and culture that resists this familiar picture of things. Through readings of Thomas Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, and John Poinsot (John of St Thomas), it offers a semiotic analysis of human culture in both its anthropological breadth as an enterprise of creaturely sign-making and its theological height as a finite participation in the Trinity, which can be understood as an absolute ‘cultural nature’. Signs then extends this account of human culture backwards into the natural depth of biological and physical nature. It puts the biosemiotics of its medieval sources, along with Félix Ravaisson’s philosophy of habit, into dialogue with the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis in contemporary biology, to show that a cultural dimension is present through the whole order of nature and the whole of natural history. It also retrieves Aquinas’ doctrine of intentions in the medium to show how signification can be attributed in a diminished way to even inanimate nature. The phenomena of human culture are reconceived then not as breaks with a meaningless nature but instead as heightenings and deepenings of natural movements of meaning that long precede and far exceed us. Against the modern divorce of nature and culture, then, the argument of Signs in the Dust is that culture is natural and nature is cultural, through and through.

The received model of evolution sees all inherited features resulting from deterministic networks of interacting genes, implying that living systems are reducible to information in genetic programs. The model requires these programs and their associated phenotypes to have evolved by an isotropic search process occurring in gradual steps with no preferred morphological outcomes. The alternative is to recognize that clusters and aggregates of cells, the raw material of evolution, constitute middle-scale material systems. This implies the necessity of bringing the modern physics of mesoscale matter into the explanatory framework for the evolution of development. The relevant, often nonlinear, physical processes were mobilized at the inception of the phyla when their signature morphological outcomes first appeared and remain as efficient causes, albeit transformed, in present-day embryos. This physicogenetic perspective reengages with concepts of saltation, orthogenesis, and environment-induced plasticity long excluded from evolutionary theory.

Since its origin in the early 20th century, the modern synthesis theory of evolution has grown to represent the orthodox view on the process of organic evolution. It is a powerful and successful theory. Its defining features include the prominence it accords to genes in the explanation of development and inheritance, and the role of natural selection as the cause of adaptation. Since the advent of the 21st century, however, the modern synthesis has been subject to repeated and sustained challenges. In the last two decades, evolutionary biology has witnessed unprecedented growth in the understanding of those processes that underwrite the development of organisms and the inheritance of characters. The empirical advances usher in challenges to the conceptual foundations of evolutionary theory. Many current commentators charge that the new biology of the 21st century calls for a revision, extension, or wholesale rejection of the modern synthesis theory of evolution. Defenders of the modern synthesis maintain that the theory can accommodate the exciting new advances in biology, without forfeiting its central precepts. The original essays collected in this volume—by evolutionary biologists, philosophers of science, and historians of biology—survey and assess the various challenges to the modern synthesis arising from the new biology of the 21st century. Taken together, the essays cover a spectrum of views, from those that contend that the modern synthesis can rise to the challenges of the new biology, with little or no revision required, to those that call for the abandonment of the modern synthesis.

The modern evolutionary synthesis arose out of the conjunction of the Mendelian theory of inheritance and the neo-Darwinian theory of population change early in the 20th century.1 In the nearly 100 years since its inception, the modern evolutionary synthesis has grown to encompass practically all fields of comparative biology—ecology, ethology, paleontology, systematics, cell biology, physiology, genetics, development. Theodosius Dobzhansky’s dictum—“nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” (...

Considering challenges to the modern synthesis (MS), this chapter reconstructs an explanatory scheme proper to the MS. It contrasts it with the explanatory scheme proper to some alternatives to the MS. It considers which empirical facts should compel us to adopt the alternative scheme, or stand with the MS, or consider a weakly attenuated form of its explanatory scheme. Hence the last section focuses on the form of variation: Given that many findings are accumulating concerning the not purely random nature of variation, it asks which specific patterns of variation would be likely to support an alternative explanatory scheme. It argues that neither biased variation nor random genotypic variation is likely to vindicate a specific explanatory scheme.

This study provides a stimulating critique of contemporary evolutionary thought, analyzing the Modern Synthesis first developed by Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ernst Mayr, and George Gaylord Simpson. The author argues that although only genes and organisms are taken as historic "individuals" in conventional theory, species, higher taxa, and ecological entities such as populations and communities should also be construed as individuals--an approach that yields the ecological and genealogical hierarchies that interact to produce evolution. This clearly stated, controversial work will provoke much debate among evolutionary biologists, systematists, paleontologists, and ecologists, as well as a wide range of educated lay readers.

Evolutionary theory has long been influenced by modern synthesis thinking, which focuses on the theoretical primacy of genes and the fractionation of evolution into four discrete, quasi-independent processes: (i) inheritance, (ii) development, (iii) mutation, and (iv) natural selection. Recent challenges to modern synthesis orthodoxy, leveled at the fractionation of evolution and the attendant theoretical privilege accorded to genes, are driven by empirical advances in the understanding of inheritance and development. This article argues that inheritance holism, the idea that the contribution of genes to the pattern of inheritance cannot generally be differentiated from the contribution of extragenetic causes, invalidates the modern synthesis conception of inheritance as the transmission of replicants. Moreover, recent empirical understandings of development erode the fractionated view of evolution, which has misconstrued the role of natural selection. Development not only involves inheritance and the generation of novelties but is the source of the adaptive bias in evolution.

Cognitive Film and Media Ethics provides a grounding in the use of cognitive science to address key questions in film, television, and screen media ethics. This book extends prior works in cognitive media studies to answer normative and ethically prescriptive questions: what could make media morally good or bad, and what, then, are the respective responsibilities of media producers and consumers? Moss-Wellington makes a primary claim that normative propositions are a kind of rigor, in that they force media theorists to draw more active ought conclusions from descriptive is arguments. Cognitive Film and Media Ethics presents the rigors of normative reasoning, cognitive science, and consequentialist ethics as complementary, arguing that each seeks progressive elaboration on its own models of causality, and causal projections are crucial for any reflection on our moral responsibilities in the world. A hermeneutics of “ethical cognitivism” is applied in the latter half of the book, with each essay addressing a different case study in film, television, news, and social media: cinema that sets out to inspire moral dissonance in the viewer, satirical and humorous depictions of family drama in film and television, the politics of the romantic comedy, formal aspects of screen media bullying in an era dubbed the “television renaissance,” and contemporary problems in the conflation of news and social media. Cognitive Film and Media Ethics synthesizes current research in social psychology, anthropology, memory studies, emotion and cognition, personality and media selection, and evolutionary biology, integrating wide-ranging concepts from the various disciplines that make up cognitive theory to provide new vantages on the applied ethics of film and screen media.

A number of prominent modern evolutionists embraced ‘human nature’, signalling their commitment to the Modern Synthesis. Their claim is that for most of our evolutionary history, culture was of little importance, and that genes, not culture, controlled early development. More recently, cultural evolutionists have argued that culture and reason were present deep in the Homo lineage, and that the ability to learn socially develops in the first year of life. Thus, it is reasonable to think that genes and culture coevolved in the evolutionary past, and that they codevelop in infancy and childhood. Human nature theorists seek to deny this claim, while at the same time trying in various ways to make room for human culture and reason. I argue here that they are unsuccessful in their attempts.

This chapter begins by contrasting Spencer’s view of natural selection with Darwin’s understanding of its “paramount power.” Darwin’s interpretation contains seeds of a defining mark of the modern evolutionary synthesis: Adaptation is necessarily a consequence of natural selection working as a “creative” factor over multiple generations. The chapter distinguishes between several versions of the modern synthesis in order to argue that some are less at odds than others with the current turn toward development and in order to suggest that allowing ontogeny to be the generative locus of (much) selectable variation makes for more continuity between the developmentalist turn and the modern synthesis than is sometimes thought. Shifting “adaptation” from trans-generational populations to ontogenetically construed organisms is in tension with the modern evolutionary synthesis, but not as much as some believe.

While Darwinism has successfully resisted reduction to physics, the authors point out that it has from the outset developed and applied its core explanatory concept, natural selection, by borrowing models from dynamics, a branch of physics. The recent development of complex systems dynamics may afford Darwinism yet another occasion to expand its explanatory power. Darwinism's use of dynamical models has received insufficient attention from biologists, historians, and philosophers who have concentrated instead on how evolutionary biology has maintained its autonomy from physics. Yet, as Depew and Weber observe, it is only by recovering Darwin's own relationship to Newtonian models of systems dynamics, and genetical Darwinism's relationship to statistical mechanics and probability theory, that insight can be gained into how Darwinism can successfully meet the challenges it is currently facing. Drawing on recent scholarship in the history of biology, Depew and Weber bring the dynamical perspective to bear on a number of important episodes in the history of the Darwinian research tradition: Darwin's "Newtonian" Darwinism, the rise of "developmentalist" evolutionary theories and the eclipse of Darwinism at the turn of the century, Darwinism's struggles to incorporate genetics, its eventual regeneration in the modern evolutionary synthesis, challenges to that synthesis that have been posed in recent decades by molecular genetics, and recent proposals for meeting those challenges. Bradford Books imprint

Human communication has been largely influenced by the global popularization of social network sites such as Facebook over the past decade. From PCs to mobile phones, humans can now communicate in ways never before experienced during our history on Earth; moreover, sites like Facebook are providing a novel platform for engaging in female intrasexual competition. Through cyberbullying, selfies, and Facebook “stalking,” females are engaging in traditional strategies of intrasexual competition (i.e., self-promotion, rival derogation, mate manipulation, and competitor manipulation) in an evolutionarily novel social environment. This chapter examines what is new about social interactions that take place online and what is an artifact of our evolutionary heritage. Additionally, it argues that the self-promoting material that Facebook users post to the site is indicative of underlying fitness; therefore Facebook postings are an example of a modern-day extended phenotype.

The first comprehensive synthesis on development and evolution: it applies to all aspects of development, at all levels of organization and in all organisms, taking advantage of modern findings on behavior, genetics, endocrinology, molecular biology, evolutionary theory and phylogenetics to show the connections between developmental mechanisms and evolutionary change. This book solves key problems that have impeded a definitive synthesis in the past. It uses new concepts and specific examples to show how to relate environmentally sensitive development to the genetic theory of adaptive evolution and to explain major patterns of change. In this book development includes not only embryology and the ontogeny of morphology, sometimes portrayed inadequately as governed by "regulatory genes," but also behavioral development and physiological adaptation, where plasticity is mediated by genetically complex mechanisms like hormones and learning. The book shows how the universal qualities of phenotypes--modular organization and plasticity--facilitate both integration and change. Here you will learn why it is wrong to describe organisms as genetically programmed; why environmental induction is likely to be more important in evolution than random mutation; and why it is crucial to consider both selection and developmental mechanism in explanations of adaptive evolution. This book satisfies the need for a truly general book on development, plasticity and evolution that applies to living organisms in all of their life stages and environments. Using an immense compendium of examples on many kinds of organisms, from viruses and bacteria to higher plants and animals, it shows how the phenotype is reorganized during evolution to produce novelties, and how alternative phenotypes occupy a pivotal role as a phase of evolution that fosters diversification and speeds change. The arguments of this book call for a new view of the major themes of evolutionary biology, as shown in chapters on gradualism, homology, environmental induction, speciation, radiation, macroevolution, punctuation, and the maintenance of sex. No other treatment of development and evolution since Darwin's offers such a comprehensive and critical discussion of the relevant issues. Developmental Plasticity and Evolution is designed for biologists interested in the development and evolution of behavior, life-history patterns, ecology, physiology, morphology and speciation. It will also appeal to evolutionary paleontologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and teachers of general biology.

This chapter reappraises Waddington’s processual theory of epigenetics and examines its implications for contemporary evolutionary biology. It focuses in particular on the ontological difference between two conflicting assumptions that have been conflated in the recent debate over the nature of cryptic variability: a substance view that is consistent with the modern synthesis and construes variability as a preexisting pool of random genetic variation; and a processual view, which derives from Waddington’s conception of developmental canalization and understands variability as an epigenetic process. The chapter also discusses how these opposing interpretations fare in their capacity to explain the genetic assimilation of acquired characters.

Carnivorous plants have fascinated botanists, evolutionary biologists, ecologists, physiologists, developmental biologists, anatomists, horticulturalists, and the general public for centuries. Charles Darwin was the first scientist to demonstrate experimentally that some plants could actually attract, kill, digest, and absorb nutrients from insect prey; his book Insectivorous Plants (1875) remains a widely cited classic. Subsequent monographs by Lloyd (1942) and Juniper et al. (1989) summarized and synthesized available scientific data on these remarkable plants. Scientific investigations and understanding of carnivorous plants has evolved and changed dramatically in the nearly 30 years since Juniper et al’s Carnivorous Plants was published, and thousands of scientific papers on carnivorous plants have appeared in the academic literature. In putting together this fourth major work on the biology of carnivorous plants, Ellison and Adamec have assembled the world’s leading experts to provide a truly modern synthesis. The contributing authors examine every aspect of systematics, physiology, biochemistry, genomics, ecology, and evolution of what Darwin called ‘the most wonderful plants in the world,’ and describe the serious threats they now face from over-collection, poaching, habitat loss, and climatic change, which directly threaten their habitats and continued persistence in them. This accessible text is suitable for senior undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers in plant biology, ecology, and evolutionary biology. It will also be of relevance and use to horticulturalists and carnivorous plant enthusiasts.

This book researches the question of how nineteenth-century Dutch Protestant theologians and thinkers met the challenges of the modernizing world around them. The aim is to show that theology was fundamentally transformed and reinvented in a variety of ways—in response to the process of modernization. The focus is on intellectual history, but broader social and political transformations such as pillarization are discussed too. In-depth studies of a small number of significant and influential Protestant thinkers analyse how they addressed specific modern transformation processes, such as political modernization, the pluralization of worldviews, and the emergence of critical historical scholarship. It will also become clear that their careers were deeply impacted by these transitions. These intellectuals dealt with various aspects of modernization in different ways. Enlightenment values were fiercely attacked by orthodox Pietists, but embraced by ‘modern’ theologians, who strove for a synthesis of religion and the new findings of scholarship (biblical criticism, evolutionary theory, anti-supernaturalism). Positions were not fixed and theologians had to work hard to maintain their intellectual integrity. The Jew Isaac da Costa converted to Christianity and fulminated against the Zeitgeist. Allard Pierson, who in his youth had been under the spell of Da Costa, resigned from his ministry and adopted an ‘agnostic’ stance. Abraham Kuyper modernized theology and politics by laying the foundations of ‘pillarization’ (the segmented social structures based on differences in religion and worldview) of Dutch society. Abraham Kuenen revolutionized the study of the Old Testament, and Protestant theologians made ground-breaking contributions to the emerging science of religion.

Computational linguistics is the scientific study of language from a computational perspective. It aims is to provide computational models of natural language processing (NLP) and incorporate them into practical applications such as speech synthesis, speech recognition, automatic translation and many others where automatic processing of language is required. The use of good linguistic resources is crucial for the development of computational linguistics systems. Real world applications need resources which systematize the way linguistic information is structured in a certain language. There is a continuous effort to increase the number of linguistic resources available for the linguistic and NLP Community. Most of the existing linguistic resources have been created for English, mainly because most modern approaches to computational lexical semantics emerged in the United States. This situation is changing over time and some of these projects have been subsequently extended to other languages; however, in all cases, much time and effort need to be invested in creating such resources. Because of this, one of the main purposes of this work is to investigate the possibility of extending these resources to other languages such as Spanish. In this work, we introduce some of the most important resources devoted to lexical semantics, such as WordNet or FrameNet, and those focusing on Spanish such as 3LB-LEX or Adesse. Of these, this project focuses on FrameNet. The project aims to document the range of semantic and syntactic combinatory possibilities of words in English. Words are grouped according to the different frames or situations evoked by their meaning. If we focus on a particular topic domain like medicine and we try to describe it in terms of FrameNet, we probably would obtain frames representing it like CURE, formed by words like cure.v, heal.v or palliative.a or MEDICAL CONDITIONS with lexical units such as arthritis.n, asphyxia.n or asthma.n. The purpose of this work is to develop an automatic means of selecting frames from a particular domain and to translate them into Spanish. As we have stated, we will focus on medicine. The selection of the medical frames will be corpus-based, that is, we will extract all the frames that are statistically significant from a representative corpus. We will discuss why using a corpus-based approach is a reliable and unbiased way of dealing with this task. We will present an automatic method for the selection of FrameNet frames and, in order to make sure that the results obtained are coherent, we will contrast them with a previous manual selection or benchmark. Outcomes will be analysed by using the F-score, a measure widely used in this type of applications. We obtained a 0.87 F-score according to our benchmark, which demonstrates the applicability of this type of automatic approaches. The second part of the book is devoted to the translation of this selection into Spanish. The translation will be made using EuroWordNet, a extension of the Princeton WordNet for some European languages. We will explore different ways to link the different units of our medical FrameNet selection to a certain WordNet synset or set of words that have similar meanings. Matching the frame units to a specific synset in EuroWordNet allows us both to translate them into Spanish and to add new terms provided by WordNet into FrameNet. The results show how translation can be done quite accurately (95.6%). We hope this work can add new insight into the field of natural language processing.