This paper explores the complex relationship between the plant evolutionist G. Ledyard Stebbins and the animal evolutionist Theodosius Dobzhansky. The manner in which the plant evolution was brought into line, synthesized, or rendered consistent with the understanding of animal evolution (and especially insect evolution) is explored, especially as it culminated with the publication of Stebbins's 1950 book Variation and Evolution in Plants. The paper explores the multi-directional traffic of influence between Stebbins and Dobzhansky, but also their social (...) and professional networks that linked plant evolutionists like Stebbins with Edgar Anderson, Carl Epling, and the 'Carnegie team' of Jens Clausen, David Keck, and William Hiesey with collaborators on the animal side like I. Michael Lerner, Sewall Wright and L.C. Dunn and other 'architects' of the synthesis like Ernst Mayr, Julian Huxley and George Gaylord Simpson. The compatibility in training, work styles, methodologies, goals, field sites, levels of analysis, and even choice of organismic systems is explored between Stebbins and Dobzhansky. Finally, the extent to which coevolution between plants and insects is reflected in the relationship is explored, as is the power dynamic in the relationship between two of the most visible figures associated with the evolutionary synthesis. (shrink)

Una importante causa filosófica e ideológica de la inhumanidad de la sociedad rusa durante las décadas del marxismo-leninismo fue la obsesiva orientación de los marxistas-leninistas hacia el futuro histórico (futuro comunismo) en aras de lo cual, comunidades, culturas y personas podían ser reducidas a medios para alcanzar ese fin histórico. El autor de los debates apoyándose en los propios pensadores rusos de la "tradición clásica", como por ejemplo Herzen, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, Leontiev y Berdiaev. No se opone a cualquier tipo de (...) orientación de futuro, pero recalca la importancia de las personas actuales. (shrink)

Isolated neutron stars undergoing non-radial oscillations are expected to emit gravitational waves in the kilohertz frequency range. To date, radio astronomers have located about 1,300 pulsars, and can estimate that there are about 2×108 neutron stars in the galaxy. Many of these are surely old and cold enough that their interiors will contain matter in the superfluid or superconducting state. In fact, the so-called glitch phenomenon in pulsars (a sudden spin-up of the pulsar's crust) is best described by assuming the (...) presence of superfluid neutrons and superconducting protons in the inner crusts and cores of the pulsars. Recently there has been much progress on modelling the dynamics of superfluid neutron stars in both the Newtonian and general relativistic regimes. We will discuss some of the main results of this recent work, perhaps the most important being that superfluidity should affect the gravitational waves from neutron stars (emitted, for instance, during a glitch) by modifying both the rotational properties of the background star and the modes of oscillation of the perturbed configuration. Finally, we present an analysis of the so-called zero-frequency subspace (i.e., the space of time-independent perturbations) and determine that it is spanned by two sets of polar (or spheroidal) and two sets of axial (or toroidal) degenerate perturbations for the general relativistic system. As in the Newtonian case, the polar perturbations are the g-modes which are missing from the pulsation spectrum of a non-rotating configuration, and the axial perturbations should lead to two sets of r-modes when the degeneracy of the frequencies is broken by having the background rotate. (shrink)

Time, of course, will provide the opportunity for a deeper and fuller contemplation of the historical significance of the June 1983 Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU. But even now it is clear that it went far beyond the mere examination of current questions of the ideological and general political work of the party, above all because the speech of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Comrade Iu. V. Andropov set forth the most important (...) theoretical positions having to do with the preparation of the new version of the program of the CPSU, positions which over the long term will determine the activity of the party and the nation and the development of Soviet society. The importance of the plenum also consisted in the fact that its proceedings brought to light the full scope of the tremendous role played by ideology, by the ideological struggle, and by ideological activity in today's world. There is a struggle going on between two polar opposite world outlooks, two political courses, socialism and imperialism, which is unprecedented throughout the entire postwar period as regards its intensity and ascerbity. There is a struggle taking place for the hearts and minds of billions of people on the planet. The future of mankind depends to no little degree on the outcome of this ideological struggle. Finally, the importance of the Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU also lay in the fact that it posed a whole series of extremely important practical tasks in the area of ideological activity, including scientific activity, and the task of intensifying the influence of ideology on solving economic, social, political, and educational problems. (shrink)

A function is recursive (in given operations) if its values are computed explicitly and uniformly in terms of other "previously computed" values of itself and (perhaps) other "simultaneously computed" recursive functions. Here, "explicitly" includes definition by cases. We investigate those recursive functions on the structure $\mathbf{N} = \langle \omega, 0, \operatorname{succ,pred}\rangle$ that are computed in terms of themselves only, without other simultaneously computed recursive functions.

Professor Pandit, working among the admirable group of philosophers at the University of Delhi, has written a fundamental criticism and a constructive re-interpretation of all that has been preserved as serious epistemological and methodological reflections on the sciences in modern Western philosoph- from the times of Galileo, Newton, Descartes and Leibniz to those of Russell and Wittgenstein, Carnap and Popper, and, we need hardly add, onward to the troubling relativisms and reconstructions of historical epistemologies in the works of Hanson, Kuhn, (...) Lakatos and Feyerabend. His themes are intrigu ing, set forth as they are with masterly case studies of physics and the life sciences, and within an original conceptual framework for philosophical analysis of the processes, functions, and structures of scientific knowing. Pandit's contributions deserve thoughtful examination. For our part, we wish to point to some among them: (1) an interactive articulation of subjective and objective factors of both problems and theories in the course of scientific development; (2) a striking contrast between the explanatory power of a scientific theory and its 'resolving power', i. e. (shrink)

The humanitarian thought did not encounter such challenges that we face today. Biotechnologies outline the perspectives of “posthuman” personology, while digitalization and robotization of almost all spheres of social practice bring to the fore the idea of homodicy – justifying the need for human existence. The article analyzes four blocks of challenges to humanitarian knowledge: (1) achievements in medicine, prosthetics, transplantology and genetic engineering, which outlined the separation of a sentient subject from traditional anthropomorphism (“posthuman” personology); (2) studies of the (...) brain neurophysiology, which advanced new arguments against free will; (3) costs of ill-considered propaganda of human rights; (4) digitization of almost all socio-cultural practices – from economics and military affairs to the formation and functioning of authority. Digitalization permeates all these “problematization fields,” setting their common conceptual and technological platform. In this regard, the question arises of the humanitarian expertise of modern technologies and the projects of education, communication and management, which implemented with their help. That expertise deals with not only the consequences, progress or even the possibility of implementing such projects, but also with their necessity. The focus and criteria of such expertise are important. Obviously, it cannot be directed only at the preservation of the biological species of homo sapiens and the conditions of its survival. Paradoxical choice arises in a situation where freedom and free will are questioned: which is more important – homo or sapiens? It is time for a clear distinction between the concepts of humanism and humanitarianism, including in the latter the posthuman personology. If humanitarianism is a personology of free spirit, then humanism seems to have a place next to economism and nationalism as forms of confined humanitarianism. This wide range of problems requires comprehension not only of their content but also of the methodology of the humanities and of the prospects of the humanities in modern society. (shrink)

In this article, the authors study the problem of balance of trust and mistrust associated with the turbulence of modern society, redundancy, and heterogeneity of information and communication flows creating a contradictory picture of the world. Social networks are considered as one of the basic modern information resources creating previously unavailable opportunities for communication, interaction, information sharing, and commonality construction. Social networks users broadcast the experience of constructing communications in real daily life in the Internet community forming circles of ‘friends‘, (...) building a chain of weak social ties; but the problem of trusting ‘friends‘ remains not solved in global space. A survey of users of social networks, conducted as part of this study, demonstrates conflicting findings. The opinions of ‘friends‘ does not always have an impact on the degree of trusting events, information, groups, likes, and dislikes to other users. Users often trust strangers and less familiar people. The social networks demonstrates the demand for uniting ‘brige-building‘ trust. However, the trust remains extremely narrow throughout, leading to fragmentation and alienation of individuals from each other in an attempt to find their safe niche. Distrust of narrow and wide radius leads to far-reaching consequences and greater uncertainty in society, not creating the preconditions for openness and the vision of the future. (shrink)

“Spy and Scholar.” “Party Functionary and Social Scientist.” The association of the professions or callings is surely intriguing because seemingly incongruous. In an age in which the two primary meanings of intelligence have been blurred in the persons and activities of certain individuals, however, the incongruity has been submerged in intrigue. But whereas the persons and activities of scholars and social scientists are not the stuff of myth, those of spies and party functionaries have attained mythic proportions. Richard Sorge was (...) not posthumously made a “Hero of the Soviet Union” by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on November 5,1964 because he was a “scholar” and “social scientist”. (shrink)

Celebrated and castigated as the “Hobbes of the twentieth century” and even a modern Machiavelli. Carl Schmitt (1888–1984) is undoubtedly the most controversial legal and political theorist of the twentieth century. He greatly influenced the thinking of such political scientists and political philosophers as Hans J. Morgenthau, Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, Leo Strauss, and Julien Freund. But Schmitt always spoke and wrote as a jurist. He grounded his thinking in jurisprudence and was the teacher in the wider sense of such (...) jurists as Ernst‐Wolfgang Böckenförde and Ernst‐Rudolf Huber. (shrink)

Even a decade after the end of the 1914–1918 war, economic theory assumed that the world was tranquil and orderly. By 1939 an economic slump without parallel, allied to the re-emergence of military ambition in Europe, had brought economic theorists face to face with reality. In this classic book, first published in 1967, Professor Shackle provides a study, in exact and professional language, of the precise nature, structure, presuppositions, language and inter-relations of the theories which were formulated in these fourteen (...) years - unparalleled in the whole history of economics except perhaps by the years of the Physiocrats and Adam Smith. These theories are not prototypes on the way to something better but are of essential and permanent importance. (shrink)