evolutionary computation in bioinformatics
The Origin of Christology
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Moule, C. F. D., PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press, This book is about the processes by which Christians of the first century came to understand Jesus as they did. Some writers represent these as 'evolutionary', as though a merely human teacher came to be thought of as a divine figure (a new species, so to speak). Professor Moule suggests that 'development' is a preferable analogy, implying not the evolution of a new species of figure, but the development of understanding of what was there in Jesus from the beginning. The author re-examines four familiar characterizations of Jesus as 'the Son of Man', 'the Son of God', 'Christ' and 'Lord'; then he considers the reflexion in the Pauline epistles of an experience of Jesus as more than individual. In his concluding chapter Professor Moule speculates, in dialogue with Dr Haddon Willmer, about the implications of his findings for Christian doctrine. The book, which earned for the author the Collins Biennial Religious Book Award in , embodies his Moorhouse Lectures in Melbourne, Australia. It was first published in June .
The Believing Primate: Scientific, Philosophical, and
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Schloss, Jeffrey / Murray, Michael J., PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press, Over the last two decades, scientific accounts of religion have received a great deal of scholarly and popular attention both because of their intrinsic interest and because they are widely as constituting a threat to the religion they analyse. The Believing Primate aims to describe and discuss these scientific accounts as well as to assess their implications. The volume begins with essays by leading scientists in the field, describing these accounts and discussing evidence in their favour. Philosophical and theological reflections on these accounts follow, offered by leading philosophers, theologians, and scientists. This diverse group of scholars address some fascinating underlying questions: Do scientific accounts of religion undermine the justification of religious belief? Do such accounts show religion to be an accidental by-product of our evolutionary development? And, whilst we seem naturally disposed toward religion, would we fare better or worse without it? Bringing together dissenting perspectives, this provocative collection will serve to freshly illuminate ongoing debate on these perennial questions.
Do the Right Thing: Studies in Limited Rationality
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Russell, Stuart J. / Wefald, Eric H., PUBLISHER: MIT Press (MA), Like Mooki, the hero of Spike Lee's film "Do the Right Thing," artificially intelligent systems have a hard time knowing what to do in all circumstances. Classical theories of perfect rationality prescribe the "right thing" for any occasion, but no finite agent can compute their prescriptions fast enough. In "Do the Right Thing, " the authors argue that a new theoretical foundation for artificial intelligence can be constructed in which rationality is a property of "programs" within a finite architecture, and their behavior over time in the task environment, rather than a property of individual decisions. "Do the Right Thing" suggests that the rich structure that seems to be exhibited by humans, and ought to be exhibited by AI systems, is a necessary result of the pressure for optimal behavior operating within a system of strictly limited resources. It provides an outline for the design of new intelligent systems and describes theoretical and practical tools for bringing about intelligent behavior in finite machines. The tools are applied to game planning and real-time problem solving, with surprising results. Contents: Limited Rationality. Execution Architectures for Decision Procedures. Metareasoning Architecture. Rational Metareasoning. Application to Game Playing. Application to Problem Solving Search. Learning the Value of Computation. Toward Limited Rational Agents.
Economia: Thorstein Veblen - UTET -
Titolo: Thorstein Veblen Autore: Thorstein Veblen Editore: UTET - Il Sole 24 Ore Collana: Economia Classica per Tempi Moderni - a cura di Fabrizio Galimberti Anno: Dimensione: 19x12 cm circa Numero di pagine: 208 Copertina: brossura Stato: nuovo "..a poco a poco, come l'attivita' industriale sostituisce sempre piu' largamente l'attivita' di rapina nella vita quotidiana della comunita' e negli abiti mentali degli uomini, la proprieta' accumulata sostituisce sempre piu' i trofei delle gesta predatorie come fondamento convenzionale di strapotere e di successo. Percio', con lo sviluppo dell'industria organizzata il possesso della ricchezza acquista relativamente importanza ed efficacia come base convenzionale della reputazione e della stima.." Thorstein Veblen, influenzato dalla teoria evoluzionistica di Darwin, introdusse il concetto di Evolutionary Economics per designare una teoria del processo evolutivo delle istituzioni, mantenendosi pero' sempre estraneo al darwinismo sociale. La sua critica feroce all'economia ortodossa, condotta con la sua abituale ironia, esercito' ampia influenza sugli sviluppi delle successive teorie economiche ed in particolare sulla scuola istituzionalista che privilegiava l'interazione tra economia e forme istituzionali. Il libro contiene alcuni scritti di questo economista. libro libri economia finanza
Bringing Systems Thinking to Life: Expanding the Horizons
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Bregman, Ona Cohn / White, Charles M., PUBLISHER: Routledge, In a single volume, Bringing Systems Thinking to Life: Expanding the Horizons for Bowen Family Systems Theory presents the extraordinary diversity and breadth of Bowen theory applications that address human functioning in various relationship systems across a broad spectrum of professions, disciplines, cultures, and nations. Providing three chapters of never-before-published material by Dr. Bowen, the book also demonstrates the transcendent nature and versatility of Bowen theory-based social assessment and its extension into fields of study and practice far beyond the original psychiatric context in which it was first formulated including social work, psychology, nursing, education, literary studies, pastoral care and counseling, sociology, business and management, leadership studies, distance learning, ecological science, and evolutionary biology - and providing ample evidence that Bowen theory has joined that elite class of theories that have enjoyed broad application to social phenomena while lending credibility to the claim that Bowen theory is one of the previous and current centuriesa (TM) most significant social-behavioral theories. More than a a oeresource manuala for Bowen theory enthusiasts, this book helps put a new great theory on the intellectual landscape.
New Century of Biology
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Kress, W. John / Barrett, Gary W. / Mayr, Ernst, PUBLISHER: Smithsonian Books, In the twentieth century, scientists in the relatively new field of biology played an important role in exposing the threats of environmental degradation, loss of species diversity, habitat fragmentation, scarce energy resources, and human population growth. In the essays found in A New Century of Biology, some of the world's most notable biologists consider how their discipline must evolve to address these problems in the twenty-first century. The next one hundred years, the contributors argue, will likely be dominated by breakthroughs in evolutionary biology and systems ecology, by an increased need for scientists to integrate research, teaching, and service missions, and by problem-solving ventures on greater spatial and temporal scales. Because human activity and increased population will continue to have a profound impact on the environment, biologists must define an effective strategy for integrating the biological sciences with global economics and human social structure. The eleven contributors are leaders in the fields of ecology and evolution, morphology and development, behavior, microbiology, ecosystem energetics and biogeochemistry, biodiversity and conservation biology, and human sciences. While acknowledging the real problems their discipline must address, they offer an optimistic agenda for the future.
An Introduction to Game Theory
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Osborne, Martin J., PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press, USA, Game-theoretic reasoning pervades economic theory and is used widely in other social and behavioral sciences. An Introduction to Game Theory, by Martin J. Osborne, presents the main principles of game theory and shows how they can be used to understand economic, social, political, and biological phenomena. The book introduces in an accessible manner the main ideas behind the theory rather than their mathematical expression. All concepts are defined precisely, and logical reasoning is used throughout. The book requires an understanding of basic mathematics but assumes no specific knowledge of economics, political science, or other social or behavioral sciences. Coverage includes the fundamental concepts of strategic games, extensive games with perfect information, and coalitional games; the more advanced subjects of Bayesian games and extensive games with imperfect information; and the topics of repeated games, bargaining theory, evolutionary equilibrium, rationalizability, and maxminimization. The book offers a wide variety of illustrations from the social and behavioral sciences and more than 280 exercises. Each topic features examples that highlight theoretical points and illustrations that demonstrate how the theory may be used. Explaining the key concepts of game theory as simply as possible while maintaining complete precision, An Introduction to Game Theory is ideal for undergraduate and introductory graduate courses in game theory.
A Constitution for the European Union
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Blankart, Charles Beat / Mueller, Dennis C., PUBLISHER: MIT Press (MA), The leaders of European Union member states have declared that a European constitution should take "a clear, open, effective, democratically controlled Community approach." Their goal--that within the Union, "European institutions should be brought closer to its citizens"--raises many questions about implementation. What is the most effective procedure for connecting citizens' preferences to political action and policy choices at the EU level? The contributors to this CESifo volume, internationally prominent economists and other scholars, address the major issues that arise in the writing of a constitution. They do so with the underlying assumption that individuals are rational actors and the goal of the state is to advance their collective interests. The ten chapters consider such topics as how a constitution might be designed to prevent military conflict, whether the EU will evolve "by default" into a federal state, the apparent contradiction between the evolutionary development of the EU and the static structure of the constitution, the definition of citizenship and rights, the division and distribution of power, the budgetary deadlock on the provision of public goods and the redistribution of resources, coordinating policy, alternative methods for choosing an EU president, and the role of such direct democracy institutions as referenda and initiatives. The editors conclude by summing up the main arguments advanced to offer a unified approach to these issues.
Software Metrics
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Sayward, Frederick / Shaw, Mary / Perlis, Alan J., PUBLISHER: MIT Press (MA), Software metrics is a new area of computer science designed to enable programmers and other practitioners to assign quantitative indexes of merit to software. In this volume, "software" is defined broadly as a generic for all the stages of tailoring a computer system to solve a problem. "Software Metrics" is the first book to survey this new area, measuring its present extent, describing its characteristic features, and indicating directions of potential expansion. The aim of the articles included in the book is to provide precise, quantified answers to such questions as: What are the memory requirements of the software? The speed requirements? What is the cost of production? The likely time schedule of production? When will it have to be replaced? What manpower loading should be used? how close to its limits is the system expected to run? What levels of satisfactory testing are sufficient? How well does the testing environment approximate the execution environment? What is the enhancement cost? To what extent has the problem--of the technology--moved beyond the program? Would it cost less to rebuild the system than to maintain and enhance it? "In software, evolutionary complexity is probably more important than the classical time and space measures with which computer science has been concerned so far," the editors note in their introductory overview. This overview gauges the range of the book's fifteen contributions by the major developers of software metrics.
For Love of Insects
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Eisner, Thomas / Wilson, Edward Osborne, PUBLISHER: Belknap Press, Imagine beetles ejecting defensive sprays as hot as boiling water; female moths holding their mates for ransom; caterpillars disguising themselves as flowers by fastening petals to their bodies; termites emitting a viscous glue to rally fellow soldiers--and you will have entered an insect world once beyond imagining, a world observed and described down to its tiniest astonishing detail by Thomas Eisner. The story of a lifetime of such minute explorations, "For Love of Insects" celebrates the small creatures that have emerged triumphant on the planet, the beneficiaries of extraordinary evolutionary inventiveness and unparalleled reproductive capacity. To understand the success of insects is to appreciate our own shortcomings, Eisner tells us, but never has a reckoning been such a pleasure. Recounting exploits and discoveries in his lab at Cornell and in the field in Uruguay, Australia, Panama, Europe, and North America, Eisner time and again demonstrates how inquiry into the survival strategies of an insect leads to clarifications beyond the expected; insects are revealed as masters of achievement, forms of life worthy of study and respect from even the most recalcitrant entomophobe. Filled with descriptions of his ingenious experiments and illustrated with photographs unmatched for their combination of scientific content and delicate beauty, Eisner's book makes readers participants in the grand adventure of discovery on a scale infinitesimally small, and infinitely surprising. Acquista Ora
Archaeology, Language, and History: Essays on Culture and
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Terrell, John Edward, PUBLISHER: Praeger, Ever since Darwin, the world has been struggling with the mystery of human diversity. As the historian Peter Bowler has written, "an evolutionary interpretation of the history of life on the earth must inevitably extend itself to include the origins of the human race." But this has proved to be a difficult and controversial task. Understanding human origins means accounting not only for the obvious differences between people and cultures around the world, but also for the unity of Homo sapiens as a single biological species. As Stephen Jay Gould has said, "flexibility is the hallmark of human evolution." Because so much of who we are is learned rather than genetically predetermined, a satisfactory understanding of human evolution--to use old parlance--must account both for the human body and the human soul. At any single moment of time, it is always possible to find instances where people seem to live in their own world, speak in their own distinctive ways, and have their own exclusive cultural traits and practices. Over the course of time, however, it is not so easy to find places where these dimensions of our diversity stay together. The essays in this collection show why we must stop thinking that "race," language, and culture go together, and why we should be wary of the commonsense beliefs that human races exist and that people who speak different languages come from fundamentally different biological lineages.
Methodology, Theory, and Knowledge in the Managerial and
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Geisler, Eliezer / Rogers, Everett M., PUBLISHER: Quorum Books, Geisler argues that the over-reliance on co-variation techniques and statistical methods, instead of process approach and in-depth analysis, produces meaningless knowledge in the managerial and organizational sciences, and indeed throughout all the social sciences. He offers instead a new and different approach, based on the notion of what he calls "dynamic morphologies"--an "architecture of slicing complex phenomena." This way it is possible to explain many inconsistencies in research findings, and to find a cohesive, systematic outlook on research, research design, and knowledge creation. Intellectually challenging and following in the footsteps of Kuhn, Argyris, and Popper, Geisler's approach is frankly revolutionary in research design and contains its own notions, terms, and nomenclature. A provocative discussion for academics and others well trained in the organizational, managerial, and social sciences. Geisler's dynamic morphologies provide a means to research complex phenomena and gain knowledge about them. They are composed of a chain of events, combined logically and temporally, and a method by which this process is studied. Geisler also contends that knowledge in the organizational and managerial sciences is only viable when it describes and explains the complex, higher-order phenomena. Therefore, theory building and research in these fields must be linked to higher-order constructs and the phenomena that they attempt to explain. This is the central notion of "amplitude" that Geisler introduces and describes. His book also criticizes the evolutionary epistemology view of knowledge creation and contends that knowledge in all of these fields of study in general is notevolutionary, but instead, cumulative and expansive.
The Extremes of the Bell Curve: Excellent and Poor School
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Maccabe, James H., PUBLISHER: Psychology Press, David Hamilton is a leader in the American institutionalist school of heterodox economics that emerged after WWII. This volume includes 25 articles written by Hamilton over a period of nearly half a century. In these articles he examines the philosophical foundations and practical problems of economics. The result of this is a unique institutionalist view of how economies evolve and how economics itself has evolved with them. Hamilton applies insight gained from his study of culture to send the message that human actions situated in culture determine our economic situation. David Hamilton has advanced heterodox economics by replacing intellectual concepts from orthodox economics that hinder us with concepts that help us. In particular, Hamilton has helped replace equilibrium with evolution, make-believe with reality, ideological distortion of government with practical use of government, the economy as a product of natural law with the economy as a product of human law and, last, he has helped us replace the entrepreneur as a hero with the entrepreneur as a real person. These articles provide an alternative to the self-adjusting market. They provide an explanation of how the interaction of cultural patterns and technology determine the evolutionary path of the economic development of a nation. This is not a simple materialist depiction of economic history as some Marxists have advocated, instead Hamilton treats technology and culture as endogenous forces, embedded and inseparable from each other and therefore, economic development. This volume will be of most interest and value to professional economists and graduate students who are looking for an in-depth explanation of the origins and significance of institutional economics.
H.G. Bronn, Ernst Haeckel, and the Origins of German
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Gliboff, Sander, PUBLISHER: MIT Press (MA), The German translation of Darwin's "The Origin of Species" appeared in , just months after the original, thanks to Heinrich Georg Bronn, a distinguished German paleontologist whose work in some ways paralleled Darwin's. Bronn's version of the book (with his own notes and commentary appended) did much to determine how Darwin's theory was understood and applied by German biologists, for the translation process involved more than the mere substitution of German words for English. In this book, Sander Gliboff tells the story of how "The Origin of Species" came to be translated into German, how it served Bronn's purposes as well as Darwin's, and how it challenged German scholars to think in new ways about morphology, systematics, paleontology, and other biological disciplines. Gliboff traces Bronn's influence on German Darwinism through the early career of Ernst Haeckel, Darwin's most famous nineteenth-century proponent and popularizer in Germany, who learned his Darwinism from the Bronn translation. Gliboff argues, contrary to most interpretations, that the German authors were not attempting to "tame" Darwin or assimilate him to outmoded systems of romantic "Naturphilosophie." Rather, Bronn and Haeckel were participants in Darwin's project of revolutionizing biology. We should not, Gliboff cautions, read pre-Darwinian meanings into Bronn's and Haeckel's Darwinian words. Gliboff describes interpretive problems faced by Bronn and Haeckel that range from the verbal (how to express Darwin's ideas in the existing German technical vocabulary) to the conceptual. One of these conceptual problems, the origins of novel variation and the proper balance between creativity and constraint in evolution, emerges as crucial. Specialists in evolutionary biology today, Gliboff points out, continue to grapple with comparable questions--continuing a larger process of translation and interpretation of Darwin's work.
Inside the Beagle with Charles Darwin
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: MacDonald, Fiona / Bergin, Mark, PUBLISHER: Enchanted Lion Books, In the "Inside... series, history and discovery, architecture and engineering combine to bring the past to life in a unique and fascinating way. Filled with full-color, cut-away illustrations, picture strips, photographs and informative text, each volume takes us "inside," either a structure or a city, a natural phenomenon or an idea. This "inside look" provides a novel way of learning about history and culture. Climb aboard the "Beagle and embark upon a fascinating ship and an amazing journey of discovery with the young naturalist, Charles Darwin, who has yet to become the "father of evolutionary biology." In these pages, you will meet Darwin at the age of 22. You also will encounter his ship, the "Beagle, through detailed cut-away illustrations, showing compartments, living quarters, service areas, rigging and equipment. Moreover, you will learn about a sailor's day aboard the "Beagle, from what he ate to the navigation equipment he used to how he worked the rigging. And you will travel upriver with Darwin to a tropical rainforest, where you will encounter Indians and Condors. Then, as Darwin explores Cape Horn and Terria Del Fuego, you will learn about the lives of the Indians, as well as about famines, cannibals and matricide. You also will travel to the Pampas and the Andes, to Santiago and the Galapagos Islands, where you will learn about volcanoes, craters, and the natural history of reptiles, great tortoises, fish, insects and birds. From there you will travel to New Zealand, Australia, the Cape of Good Hope, Mauritius, St. Helena, and finally home with Darwin to England. In addition to its informative text and numerous detailed spreads, Inside the "Beagle with Charles Darwinalso covers Darwin's major findings during the voyage, his conclusions, and the period after the voyage. A section of voyage facts, a glossary and an index also are included, making this book an excellent resource as well as a good read.