Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

For many years there has been a good deal of scholarly and ideological writing on the correspondence which is said to have taken place between Karl Marx and Charles Darwin. The two presumed letters from Charles Darwin to Karl Marx have been published several times, and their significance appraised. In this article their authenticity as letters to Marx is discussed and questioned, and the possibility that Edward Aveling is the addressee of at least one of them is argued.

An account of Socrates' encounter with divine revelation.

The ninth Pythian is one of Pindar's masterpieces. It contains the romantic story of the love of Apollo for the heroic nymph Cyrene, which is the foundation-legend of the great city, and he attaches to the end of the ode another graceful love-tale which was a family tradition of the athlete's ancestors. The style of the ode is suitable to the subject, and the rhythm is partly Dorian, partly Lydian. Therefore the grand style which is maintained throughout, the style in (...) which Pindar always excels, is richly mellowed and tempered with a certain lusciousness, a rarer quality of his work, but appropriate here to the romantic theme. And Pindar combines here the energy which is his birthright with a certain dignified ease and clearness, and his besetting faults of harshness, bitterness, or overpungency and overstrain are absent altogether. ‘Out of the strong hath come forth sweetness.’. (shrink)

There is a sense in which a philosophic theory can be confirmed. We may ask what its effects were on the development of scientific theory,—did it clarify ideas and help open up new areas of research, or did it constrain the work of science? In this essay, we shall try to judge the significance of dialectical materialism from this standpoint. We shall be concerned with the bearing of this philosophy on scientific work, especially in the Soviet Union.Now dialectical materialism is (...) not a “philosophy” in the same sense which the word has when applied to, let us say, logical empiricism. The difference is evident when a writer like Haldane asks, for instance, how far scientific discoveries have verified the principles of dialectical materialism.' We could not ask in a similar way whether scientific discoveries have confirmed the principles of logical empiricism. For the latter affirms no factual propositions concerning the world; it enunciates solely the principle of verifiability, and there is clearly no scientific discovery which could possibly refute the requirement of verification. If it makes sense to ask how far scientific discoveries verify dialectical materialism, then the latter must obviously contain factual propositions concerning nature which should be stated in a way to permit of confirmation of rejection. (shrink)

This essay discusses the views of historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, who sets forth that democratic societies tend toward a determinist outlook; she fears that the weakened belief in free will and its heroes endangers a democratic society. She regards H. G. Wells as the founder in 1920 of the "new history," with its antiheroic bias. She welcomes therefore the television series The Civil War for having achieved "a history from above and history from below," with its heroes among common soldiers as (...) well as the generals and statesmen. Himmelfarb criticizes the "debunking" historians who not only belittle the significance of heroes but find in "small causes" (e.g., the origins of Hitler's obsessive anti-Semitism) a basis for large-scale events (e.g., the Holocaust). Himmelfarb finds that H. G. Wells's Outline of History was intended not only to displace military conquerors as the heroes of history but to elevate the scientific elite in their place as history's truly constructive people. Americans, however, were, earlier, first introduced to another variety of "new history" by two Columbia University professors, Charles A. Beard and James Harvey Robinson, who wrote textbooks used by perhaps millions of high school students; Beard had derived the concept in 1906 when he read the Socialist History of France, much of it written by the French socialist, Jean Jaurès. The philosophy of history still remains in a position similar to that which has long prevailed in the philosophy of physics, where determinism and indeterminism have persisted irreconcilably. (shrink)

This article examines the strongest case to date in favor of a Whiteheadian atheism. But this case proves inadequate to account for genuine novelty.