Information Theory, Evolution and The Origin ofLife: The Origin and Evolution of Life as a Digital Message: How Life Resembles a Computer, Second Edition. Hu- bert P. Yockey, 2005, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 400 pages, index; hardcover, US $60.00; ISBN: 0-521-80293-8. The reason that there are principles of biology that cannot be derived from the laws of physics and chemistry lies simply in the fact that the genetic information content of the genome for constructing even the simplest organisms is (...) much larger than the information content of these laws. Yockey in his previous book (1992, 335) In this new book, Information Theory, Evolution and The Origin ofLife, Hubert Yockey points out that the digital, segregated, and linear character of the genetic information system has a fundamental significance. If inheritance would blend and not segregate, Darwinian evolution would not occur. If inheritance would be analog, instead of digital, evolution would be also impossible, because it would be impossible to remove the effect of noise. In this way, life is guided by information, and so information is a central concept in molecular biology. The author presents a picture of how the main concepts of the genetic code were developed. He was able to show that despite Francis Crick's belief that the Central Dogma is only a hypothesis, the Central Dogma of Francis Crick is a mathematical consequence of the redundant nature of the genetic code. The redundancy arises from the fact that the DNA and mRNA alphabet is formed by triplets of 4 nucleotides, and so the number of letters (triplets) is 64, whereas the proteome alphabet has only 20 letters (20 amino acids), and so the translation from the larger alphabet to the smaller one is necessarily redundant. Except for Tryptohan and Methionine, all amino acids are coded by more than one triplet, therefore, it is undecidable which source code letter was actually sent from mRNA. This proof has a corollary telling that there are no such mathematical constraints for protein-protein communication. With this clarification, Yockey contributes to diminishing the widespread confusion related to such a central concept like the Central Dogma. Thus the Central Dogma prohibits the origin of life "proteins first." Proteins can not be generated by "self-organization." Understanding this property of the Central Dogma will have a serious impact on research on the origin of life. (shrink)

Using the Job Demands-Resources model literature and the life-span theory as scholarly frameworks, we examined the effects of job demands and job resources as mediators in the relationship between bundles of used HRM practices and employee outcomes. In addition, we tested for age differences in our research model. Findings confirmed the hypothesized original 2-factor structure representing maintenance and development HRM practices. Structural Equation Modeling analyses showed that the maintenance HRM bundle related directly and negatively to employee outcomes, without moderating effects (...) of age. However, job resources appeared to mediate this relationship in a positive way as it also did for the development HRM bundle. Whereas this study showed the ‘driving power’ of the actual use of HRM bundles through job resources, regardless of the employee’s age, this study also suggests a ‘dark side’ of HRM. In particular, we found that development HRM bundles may also increase job demands, which, in turn, may result in lower levels of beneficial employee outcomes. These empirical outcomes demonstrate the strength of the driving power eliciting from job resources preceded by any HRM bundle. Moreover, this effect appears to apply to employees of all ages. Our moderated-mediation model appeared robust for several control variables. Overall, this study provides an extension of the well-known Job Demands-Resources model by including maintenance and development bundles of HRM practices used by employees that have a differential effect on job demands and job resources which in turn have an impact on employee outcomes. (shrink)

In people with chronic low back pain, maladaptive structural and functional changes on a cortical level have been identified. On a functional level, somatosensory cortical excitability has been shown to be reduced in chronic pain conditions, resulting in cortical disinhibition. The occurrence of structural and/or functional maladaptive cortical changes in people with CLBP could play a role in maintaining the pain. There is currently no measurement protocol for cortical excitability that employs stimulation directly to the lower back. We developed a (...) protocol for the measurement of single pulse somatosensory evoked potential waveforms and paired-pulse behavior generated from sensory nerves of the lower back and quantified its test–retest reliability in a sample of 30 healthy individuals to gain insights into the normal variability of cortical responses, which could then be compared to results from people with CLBP. We investigated cortical excitability by measuring SEPs and PPB. PPB was defined as the ratio of the amplitude of the second cortical response divided by the first cortical response. A2s was determined by subtracting the response to single-pulse stimuli from the paired pulse stimuli response to account for linear superposition effects. The test–retest reliability of the protocol was very poor with no evidence of systematic bias but a high amount of random variability between sessions. There was no significant difference in the right side PPB for session 1 and session 2 ; mean session difference [ = −0.44 ; t = −1.17, p = 0.26]. The ICC3.1 for the outlier-removed right side PPB were 0.19 and 0.43 for left side PPB. This finding potentially has wider implications for PPB protocols. If these findings were replicated in other groups and other nerves, it would question the validity of this measure more generally. However, these findings are restricted to healthy people and sensory nerves of the lower back and may not be generalizable. (shrink)

Following Birkhoff and von Neumann, quantum logic has traditionally been based on the lattice of closed linear subspaces of some Hubert space, or, more generally, on the lattice of projections in a von Neumann algebra A. Unfortunately, the logical interpretation of these lattices is impaired by their nondistributivity and by various other problems. We show that a possible resolution of these difficulties, suggested by the ideas of Bohr, emerges if instead of single projections one considers elementary propositions to be (...) families of projections indexed by a partially ordered set C(A) of appropriate commutative subalgebras of A. In fact, to achieve both maximal generality and ease of use within topos theory, we assume that A is a so-called Rickart C*-algebra and that C(A) consists of all unital commutative Rickart C*-subalgebras of A. Such families of projections form a Hey ting algebra in a natural way, so that the associated propositional logic is intuitionistic: distributivity is recovered at the expense of the law of the excluded middle. Subsequently, generalizing an earlier computation for n x n matrices, we prove that the Heyting algebra thus associated to A arises as a basis for the internal Gelfand spectrum (in the sense of Banaschewski-Mulvey) of the "Bohrification" A̱ of A, which is a commutative Rickart C*-algebra in the topos of functors from C(A) to the category of sets. We explain the relationship of this construction to partial Boolean algebras and Bruns-Lakser completions. Finally, we establish a connection between probability measures on the lattice of projections on a Hubert space H and probability valuations on the internal Gelfand spectrum of A̱ for A = B(H). (shrink)

Der von W. SELB (S.) und H. KAUFHOLD (K.) unter dem Titel „Das Syrisch-Römische Rechtsbuch“ (SRRB) edierte Text hat seit dem Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts zunächst in Form von kleinen Fragmenten in verschiedenen orientalischen Sprachen Spuren in der europäischen rechtsgeschichtlichen Forschung hinterlassen. Erst mit der Entdeckung einer syrischen Handschrift im Britischen Museum durch J. P. N. Land 1858 ist das Werk in einem wesentlichen Textzeugen bekannt und seitdem durch weitere Funde ergänzt, ins Lateinische und moderne Sprachen übersetzt und juristisch kommentiert (...) worden. Dennoch hat es bislang keine auf allen (syrischen) Handschriften beruhende kritische Edition erfahren. Die Autoren machen dies im ersten Kapitel (Bd.1, 27–42) verständlich, indem sie die Irrungen und Wirrungen der Wissenschaftsgeschichte des Textes darlegen. In diesem ersten Kapitel werden die Grundfragen, welche sich mit dem Text und seinem Verständnis verbinden, in offener und klarer Sprache formuliert. Das SRRB ist demnach eine einheitliche Sammlung von Erklärungen zu juristischen Texten zumeist normativen Charakters (Kaiserinstitutionen, leges) oder seltener von Juristenschriften (z. B. Paulussentenzen) aus verschiedenen Zeiten, die als „interpretatio“ um das Jahr 474 n. Chr. in griechischer Sprache entstanden ist (I, 46). Diese Erkenntnis, die S. im Kern schon in seiner Habilitationsschrift thesenhaft formuliert hat, wird durch die gegenwärtige Schrift erhärtet. Sie bildet die Grundlage für jede weitere Beschäftigung mit der Quelle. Richtungsweisend sind ebenfalls die nunmehr angestellten Überlegungen zum Verfasser des SRRB. In einer Handschrift (R III) wird ein Ambrosius confessor als Autor benannt. Diese Notiz deutete die Forschung bislang als Hinweis auf den Kirchenvater Ambrosius von Mailand, der freilich als Autor eines juristischen Werkes mit prononciert östlicher Verbreitung schwerlich in Frage kommt. Dennoch haben die Autoren die handschriftliche Notiz nicht als völlig aus der Luft gegriffen betrachtet. (shrink)

Social network analysis (SNA) is an increasingly popular approach that provides researchers with highly developed tools to map and analyze complexes of social relations. Although a number of network scholars have explicated the assumptions that underpin SNA, the approach has yet to be discussed in relation to established philosophies of science. This article argues that there is a tension between applied and methods-oriented SNA studies, on the one hand, and those addressing the social-theoretical nature and implications of networks, on the (...) other. The former, in many cases, exhibits positivist tendencies, whereas the latter incorporate a number of assumptions that are directly compatible with core critical realist views on the nature of social reality and knowledge. This article suggests that SNA may be detached from positivist social science and come to constitute a valuable instrument in the critical realist toolbox. (shrink)

Following the success of the publication of "The Supreme Doctrine" in 1998, Sussex Academic is proud to announce a completely new and updated translation by ...

Books Reviewed in this Article: Beyond Ideology: Religion and the Future of Western Civilization. By Ninian Smart. Pp.350, London, Collins, 1981, £9.95. Neophtonism and Indian Thought. Edited by R. Baine Harris. Pp.xiii, 353, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1982, $39.00, $12.95. Monotheism: A Philosophic Inquiry into the Foundations of Theology and Ethics. By Lenn Evan Goodman. Pp.122, Totowa, Allenheld, Osmun, 1981, $13.50. Neoplatonism and Christian Thought. Edited by Dominic J. O'Meara. Pp. xviii, 297, Albany, State University of New (...) York Press, 1981, $39.00, $12.95. The Path to Transcendence: From Philosophy to Mysticism in Saint Augustine. By Paul Henry, introduction and translation by Francis F. Burch. pp.xxix, 120, Pittsburgh, The Pickwick Press, 1981, $10.95. The Adequacy of Christian Ethics. By Brian Hebblethwaite. Pp. 144, London, Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1981, £5.95. Ethics. By Wolfhart Pannenberg. Pp. 220, Philadelphia, The Westminster Press, 1981, $10.95. Human Nature, Election, and History. By Wolfhart Pannenberg. Pp. 116, Philadelphia, The Westminster Press, 1982, £2.95. Ethics, Religion and Politics. By G.E.M. Anscombe. Pp.ix, 161, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1981, £12.00. Moral Thinking: its Levels, Method and Point. By R.M. Hare. Pp.viii, 242, Oxford University Press, 1982, £11.00, £3.95. Utilitarianism and Beyond. Edited by Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams. Pp.vii, 290. £7.50. Cambridge University Press, 1982, £20.00. Language and Political Understanding. By Michael J. Shapiro. Pp.253, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1981, £18.20. Marx's Politics. By Allan Gilbert. Pp.xv, 326, Oxford, Martin Robertson, 1981, £16.50. Feuerbach. By Marx W. Wartofsky. Pp.xx, 460, Cambridge University Press, 1977, £30.00, £9.95. Nietzsche, Vol. 1: The Will to Power as Art. By Martin Heidegger, translated with notes and an analysis by D.F. Krell. Pp.xvi, 263, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981, £11.50. Freedom and Karl Jaspers's Philosophy. By Elizabeth Young‐Bruehl. Pp.xiv, 233, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1981, £14.00. ‘Being and Meaning’: Paul Tillich's Theory of Meaning, Truth and Logic. By I.E. Thompson. Pp.x, 244, Edinburgh University Press, 1981, £15.00. The Rationality of Science. By W.H. Newton‐Smith. Pp.xii, 294, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981, £9.95, £5.95. Realism and the Progress of Science. By Peter Smith. Pp.viii, 135, Cambridge University Press, 1981, £12.50. Angels and principalities. By Wesley Carr. Pp.xii, 242, Cambridge University Press, 1981, £13.50. Rconciliation: A Study of Paul's Theology. By Ralph P. Martin. Pp.233, London, Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1981, £8.95. Suffering and Martyrdom in the New Testament. Edited by William Horbury and Brian McNeil. Pp.xxi, 217, Cambridge University Press, 1981, £17.50. Constantine and Eusebius. By Timothy D. Barnes. Pp.viii, 458, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1981, £24.50. Songs of Glory: the Romanesque Façades of Aquitaine. By Linda Seidel. Pp.x, 220, figs.63, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press. 1981, £17.50. Marsilio Ficino and the Phaedran Charioteer. Translated and edited by Michael J.B. Allen. Pp.x, 274, Berkeley‐Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1981, £18.50. The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, Volume 3. Pp.xiv, 162, London, Shepheard‐Walwyn, 1981, £8.00. The World of the Renaissance Jew: The Life and Thought of Abraham ben Mordecai Farissol. By David B. Ruderman. Pp.xvii, 265, Cincinatti, Hebrew Union College Press, 1981, $20.00. A Dialogue Concerning Heresies. Edited by T.M.C. Lawier, G. Marc'hadour and R.C. Marius. Pp.xiv, 888, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1981, £56.00. Canterbury and Rome, Sister Churches: A Roman Catholic Monk reflects upon Reunion in Diversity. By Robert Hale. Pp.xi, 188, London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1982, £5.95. Rome and Canterbury through Four Centuries: A Study of the Relations between the Church of Rome and the Anglican Churches 1530–1981. By Bernard and Margaret Pawley. Pp.xi, 387, London and Oxford, Mowbray, 1981, £4.95. American Indians and Christian Missions. By H.W. Bowden. Pp.xix, 255, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981, £10.50. Catholics in Western Democracies: A Study in Political Behaviour. By John H. Whyte. Pp.193, Dublin, Gill and Macmillan. 1981, £13.00. Päpstliche Unfehlbarkeit bei Newman und Döllinger: Ein historisch‐systema‐tischer Vergleich. By Wolfgang Klausnitzer. Pp.280, Innsbruck, Tyrolia Verlag, 1980, 54 DM. The Letters of Baron Friedrich von Hügel and Professor Norman Kemp Smith. Edited by Lawrence F. Barmann. Pp.353, New York, Fordham University Press, 1981, no price given. Merton: A Biography. By Monica Furlong. Pp.xx, 342, London, Collins, 1980, £6.95. The Autonomy of Religious Belief: A Critical Inquiry. Edited by Frederick J. Crosson. Pp.vii, 162, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, £8.95. The Theological Imagination: Constructing the Concept of God. By Gordon D. Kaufman. Pp.309. Philadelphia, The Westminster Press, 1981, $13.95. Spirits of Power: An Analysis of Shona Cosmology. By Hubert Bucher. Pp.231, Capetown, Oxford University Press, 1980, £8.75. Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah. By Jacob Neusner. Pp.xix, 419, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981, £17.50. (shrink)

Against the background of a recent exchange between Cristina Lafont and Hubert Dreyfus, I argue that Heidegger's method of ?formal indication? is at the heart of his attempt in Sein und Zeit to answer ?the ontological question of the being of the ?sum?? (SZ, p. 46). This method works reflexively, by picking out certain essential features of one's first-person singular being at the outset of its investigation that are implicit in the question ?what is it to be the entity (...) I am?? On the basis of these features, various further a priori, ontological structures (care and temporality) that constitute one as a first-person singular entity then become accessible. Formal indication is thus formal in two senses: it officially designates or signals certain first-person singular phenomena as the topic of investigation, and it picks out features which define the ontological form of the entity in question. It is thereby the method by which a legitimately transcendental account of our being may be begun to be generated by each of us from out of our factical, immanent existence. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson has been a major and influential spokesman for ordinary language philosophy throughout the late twentieth century, studying the relationship between common language and the language of formal logic. This reissue of his collection of early essays, Logico-Linguistic Papers, is published with a brand new introduction by Professor Strawson but, apart from minor corrections to the text, these classic essays remain original and intact. Logico-Linguistic Papers contains Strawson's major essay, 'On Referring', in which he disputed Bertrand Russell's theory of (...) definite descriptions, distinguishing between referring to an entity and asserting its existence. The book contains twelve essays in all, grouped by subject matter. The first five are concerned with the topic of singular reference and predication and the last three are all responses to J.L. Austin's treatment of the topic of truth. Strawson disputes the correspondence theory of truth, maintaining that facts are what statements state. The remaining papers deal with meaning, speech acts, logical truth and Chomsky's views on syntax. (shrink)

Reflecting Alan Robinson's fundamental contribution to computational logic, this book brings together seminal papers in inference, equality theories, and logic programming. It is an exceptional collection that ranges from surveys of major areas to new results in more specialized topics. Alan Robinson is currently the University Professor at Syracuse University. Jean-Louis Lassez is a Research Scientist at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Gordon Plotkin is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh. Contents: Inference. Subsumption, A Sometimes (...) Undervalued Procedure, Larry Wos, Ross Overbeek, and Ewing Lusk. The Markgraf Karl Refutation Procedure, Hans Jurgen Ohlbach and Jorg H. Siekmann. Modal Logic Should Say More than it Does, Melvin Fitting. Interactive Proof Presentation, W. W. Bledsoe. Intelligent Backtracking Revisited, Maurice Bruynooghe. A Science of Reasoning, Alan Bundy. Inductive Inference of Theories from Facts, Ehud Y. Shapiro. Equality. Solving Equations in Abstract Algebras: A Rule-based Survey of Unification, Jean-Pierre Jouannaud and Claude Kirchner. Disunification: A Survey, Hubert Comon. A Case Study of the Completion Procedure: Proving Ring Commutativity Problems, Deepak Kapur and Hantao Zhang. Computations in Regular Rewriting Systems I and II, Girard Huet and JeanJacques Levy. Unification and ML Type Reconstruction, Paris Kanellakis, Harry Mairson, and John Mitchell. Automatic Dimensional Analysis, Mitchell Wand. Logic Programming. Logic Programming Schemes and Their Implementations, Keith Clark. A Near-Horn Prolog for Compilation, Donald Loveland and David Reed. Unfold/Fold Transformations of Logic Programs, P. A. Gardner and J. C. Shepherdson. An Algebraic Representation of Logic Program Computations, Andrea Corradini and Ugo Montanari. Theory of Disjunctive Logic Programs, Jack Minker, Arcot Rajasekar, and Jorge Lobo. Bottom-Up Evaluation of Logic Programs, Jeffrey Naughton and Raghu Ramakrishnan. Absys, the First Logic Programming Language: A View of the Inevitability of Logic Programming, E. W. Elcock. (shrink)

Die Beiträge des vorliegenden Bandes erkunden das Phänomen der Musse in seiner Räumlichkeit und in seinem Verhältnis zur Zeit. Im mussetypischen Verweilen tritt das Nacheinander der Zeit zurück, während der Raum mit seinen Ordnungen des Nebeneinander bestimmend wird. Diese spezifische Raumzeitlichkeit wird in vier Abschnitten ausgelotet: Der erste ist Konzepten und Theorien der Musse gewidmet, der zweite der ästhetischen Erfahrung von Räumen der Natur und Kunst, der dritte gebauten Räumen der Musse, der vierte der Musseerfahrung, wie sie sich in Kommunikations- (...) und Schreibprozessen darstellt. Die Bandbreite der Untersuchungen reicht von der philosophischen, begriffsanalytischen Reflexion über die phänomenologische Analyse sowie von der literaturwissenschaftlichen Falluntersuchung hin zur kunsthistorischen Betrachtung. (shrink)

Justice Stephen J. Field was the champion of a form of liberalism often said to be especially friendly to capitalism, the approach to the Constitution traditionally identified with “Lochnerism,” i.e., a laissez-faire oriented judicial activism. More recently a form of judicial revisionism has arisen, challenging the accepted descriptions of “Lochnerism” and of Field's jurisprudence. This article is an attempt to extend the revisionist approach by arriving at a more satisfactory understanding of the grounding of Field's jurisprudence in the natural rights (...) philosophy. Field, it turns out, orienting around natural rights, was not so unambiguously friendly to capitalism as previous generations of scholars maintained, but his approach is surely friendlier than the constitutional theories that have replaced natural rights since Field's day. (shrink)

The Phenomenological Mind, by Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, is part of a recent initiative to show that phenomenology, classically conceived as the tradition inaugurated by Edmund Husserl and not as mere introspection, contributes something important to cognitive science. (For other examples, see “References” below.) Phenomenology, of course, has been a part of cognitive science for a long time. It implicitly informs the works of Andy Clark (e.g. 1997) and John Haugeland (e.g. 1998), and Hubert Dreyfus explicitly uses it (...) (e.g. 1992). But where the former use phenomenology in the background as broad context and Dreyfus uses it primarily (though not exclusively) as a critique of conventional AI, Gallagher and Zahavi wish to indicate a positive and constructive place for it within cognitive science. They do not recommend that we simply accept pronouncements of thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau‐Ponty and apply them to questions of cognition, but that we use revised forms of phenomenology to illuminate dimensions of cognitive experience that are missing in current research. The book is presented as an “introduction to philosophy of mind and cognitive science” written from a phenomenological perspective. It seeks to justify the use of phenomenology in cognitive science by showing what kinds of questions it asks and answers, the variety of uses to which it has recently been put and the fruitfulness of some of its findings. The catalog of topics, for the most part, matches other introductions to the philosophy of mind, such as questions of method, consciousness, perception, intentionality, embodiment, action, agency and other minds. One issue presented here that is not generally dealt with in existing philosophy of mind and cognitive science texts is temporality, a mainstay of the continental tradition. After an introductory chapter that places phenomenology in the context of other approaches, the book lays out the main tenets of phenomenological method. Here, one encounters expected components of phenomenology: the epoché (described below), phenomenological reduction, eidetic variation, and so on. This traditional fare is soon followed by some potential surprises, namely, attempts to “naturalize” phenomenology, a few attempts to formalize it, and the emergence of ‘neurophenomenology’. Each of these is a bit surprising because Husserl was a vocal critic of naturalism, seeing transcendental phenomenology as an alternative to the empirical study of consciousness. He was also skeptical about the possibilities of mathematizing phenomenology. Gallagher and Zahavi acknowledge these points, but since they are not repeating history or undertaking exegesis, strict adherence to canonical phenomenology is not required. Naturalizing phenomenology means recognizing that “the phenomena it studies are part of nature and are therefore also open to empirical investigation” (p.. (shrink)