THIS paper requires a preliminary apology. It is written in Spain, and as the writer is taking a very minor part in the defence of Madrid he is unable to consult many works of reference. Readers to whom practice is as important as theory will excuse any inadequacy in citations.
Evolution
Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. It occurs when evolutionary processes such as genetic drift and natural selection act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations. The process of evolution has given rise to biodiversity at every level of biological organisation.
The Scientist Who Scrambled Darwin’s Tree of Life (Published 2018)
How the microbiologist Carl Woese fundamentally changed the way we think about evolution and the origins of life.
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution is a 1902 collection of anthropological essays by Russian naturalist and anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin. The essays, initially published in the English periodical The Nineteenth Century between 1890 and 1896, explore the role of mutually beneficial cooperation and reciprocity in the animal kingdom and human societies both past and present. It is an argument against theories of social Darwinism that emphasize competition and survival of the fittest, and against the romantic depictions by writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who thought that cooperation was motivated by universal love. Instead, Kropotkin argues that mutual aid has pragmatic advantages for the survival of human and animal communities and, along with the conscience, has been promoted through natural selection.
Maximum power in evolution, ecology and economics
Ludwig Boltzmann suggested that natural selection was fundamentally a struggle among organisms for available energy. Alfred Lotka argued that organisms that capture and use more energy than their competition will have a selective advantage in the evolutionary process, i.e. the Darwinian notion of evolution was based on a fundamental, generalized energy principle. He extended this general principle from the energetics of a single organism or species to the energetics of entire energy pathways through ecosystems. Howard Odum and Richard Pinkerton, building on Lotka, extended this concept to ‘The maximum power principle’ and applied it to many biological and physical systems including human economies. We examine this history and how these ideas relate to concepts from other disciplines including philosophy. But there has been considerable confusion in understanding and applying these concepts which we attempt to resolve while providing various examples from routine life and discussing some unresolved issues. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Thermodynamics 2.0: Bridging the natural and social sciences (Part 2)’.
Darwin the abolitionist
The theory of evolution is regarded as a triumph of disinterested scientific reason. Yet, on the 150th anniversary of "On the Origin of Species," new research reveals that Darwin was driven to the idea of common descent by a great moral cause
Opinion | Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’? (Published 2016)
The biologist William D. Hamilton entertained the notion. So can we.
Evolution and the Meaning of Life
In an aside to his contribution to our recent discussion of same-sex marriage (my contribution is here), Big Think’s Peter Lawler wrote that Darwinists agree with many religiously observant people […]
Evolutionary Political Economy: Content and Methods
In this paper we present the major theoretical and methodological pillars of evolutionary political economy. We proceed in four steps. Aesthetics: In chapter 1 the immediate appeal of evolutionary ...
Deleuze and Biosemiotics: Biological Emergence, Agency, and Subjectivity in Logic of Sense and A Thousand Plateaus
Fantastically Wrong: What Darwin Really Screwed Up About Evolution
It’s hard to overstate just how brilliant and huge an idea Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was and continues to be. It absolutely rocked Victorian England, to the extent that stuffy old Victorian England could be rocked past people just barely raising their voices in polite protest. But some folks, particularly highly \[…\]
Ramin Saadat, Reasoning: From Biological Foundations to the Hidden Thread of Shared Understanding - PhilArchive
This paper investigates the nature and origins of human reasoning by synthesizing insights from classical philosophy, evolutionary biology, and contemporary neuroscience. Moving beyond the Aristotelian definition of zoon logon echon, which ...
Culture on the Ground - Tim Ingold, 2004
Classical accounts of human evolution posit a progressive differentiation between the hands as instruments of rational intelligence and feet as ...
Social Norms and Cultural Evolution
A collection of ideas to do with social norms, cultural evolution, and how we learn from others
Meta Culture
The meta game of cultural impact and evolution
AI as Social Technology: Astor Lecture by Professor Henry Farrell
Bayesian Inference of Social Norms as Shared Constraints on Behavior
What people learn from punishment: A cognitive model
Spurious normativity enhances learning of compliance and enforcement behavior in artificial agents
Deference, Dissent, and Dispute Resolution: An Experimental Intervention Using Mass Media to Change Norms and Behavior in Rwanda
How Does Media Influence Social Norms? Experimental Evidence on the Role of Common Knowledge
20-year devs can't find work anymore
The Twelve-Factor App
When Tailwinds Vanish
Friendslop = Friendless<<Slop>> Or: Will We Ever Lock Eyes When We Play Again?
Rewilding cultures
Feral Labs – A network of temporary dislocated hubs for research in art, technology and communities.