The purpose of this article should become plain during the reading of it, but perhaps some prior explanation is needed. Almost from the beginning of my study of the paṭiccasamuppāda I have had the notion that it could not have come into existence in the form the usual twelvefold formulation takes. For reasons which I try to make clear this twelvefold formulation is not a satisfactory statement of what it is supposed to explain, namely the reasons for each individual's continued (...) rebirths. I feel - and sadly I have to emphasize, before someone else does it for me, that in the final analysis I am relying more or less on intuition for my attitude towards the twelvefold formulation - that if one person alone had been responsible for the usually referred to formulation, and especially if that one person had been the Buddha, then those anomalies that now prevail would never have existed. (shrink)

The development of comparative biology has been of interest to philosophers and historians. Particular attention has been placed on the ‘war’ of the 1970s and 1980s, the apparent dispute among those who preferred this or that methodology. In this contribution we examine the history of comparative biology from the perspective of fundamentals rather than methodologies. Our examination is framed within the artificial—natural classification dichotomy, a viewpoint currently lost from view but worth resurrecting.