For over a century, Haeckel's Gastraea theory remained a dominant theory to explain the origin of multicellular animals. According to this theory, the animal ancestor was a blastula‐like colony of uniform cells that gradually evolved cell differentiation. Today, however, genes that typically control metazoan development, cell differentiation, cell‐to‐cell adhesion, and cell‐to‐matrix adhesion are found in various unicellular relatives of the Metazoa, which suggests the origin of the genetic programs of cell differentiation and adhesion in the root of the Opisthokonta. Multicellular (...) stages occurring in the complex life cycles of opisthokont protists (mesomycetozoeans and choanoflagellates) never resemble a blastula. Here, we discuss a more realistic scenario of transition to multicellularity through integration of pre‐existing transient cell types into the body of an early metazoon, which possessed a complex life cycle with a differentiated sedentary filter‐feeding trophic stage and a non‐feeding blastula‐like larva, the synzoospore. Choanoflagellates are considered as forms with secondarily simplified life cycles. (shrink)

Издание содержит: научное изучение времени и информации; философское изучение времени и информации; практическое применение знаний о времени и информации и др.

The report brought to the section members’ notice issues consideration of the major tendencies of religious and aesthetic medium transformation laying the emphasis on the major factors of this transformation together with its socio-cultural basis. Based on the comparison of the processes taking place within Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodoxy the report marks the concurrency of religious and aesthetic processes present within the named confessions which challenges the idea of absolute uniqueness of religious and aesthetic experience of the orthodox in Russia (...) nowadays. The syncretism in the first place and dialectical unity of fundamentalism and modernism in the second, can be considered as the leading tendencies of transformation of religious and aesthetic medium of modern Christianity. (shrink)

Summary Transsexuals are individuals who identify as a member of the gender opposite to that which they are born. Many transsexuals report that they have always had a feeling of a mismatch between their inner gender-based ‘‘body image’’ and that of their body’s actual physical form. Often transsexuals undergo gender reassignment surgery to convert their bodies to the sex they feel they should have been born. The vivid sensation of still having a limb although it has been amputated, a phantom (...) limb, was first described by Weir Mitchell over a century ago. The same phenomenon is also occurs after amputation of the penis or a breast. Around 60% of men who have had to have their penis amputated for cancer will experience a phantom penis. It has recently been shown that a significant factor in these phantom sensations is ‘‘cross-activation’’ between the de-afferented cortex and surrounding areas. Despite this it also known that much of our body image is innately ‘‘hard-wired’’ into our brains; congenitally limbless patients can still experience phantom sensations. We hypothesise that, perhaps due to a dissociation during embryological development, the brains of transsexuals are ‘‘hard-wired’’ in manner, which is opposite to that of their biological sex. We go on to predict that male-to-female transsexuals will be much less likely to experience a phantom penis than a ‘‘normal’’ man who has had his penis amputated for another reason. The same will be true of female-to-male transsexuals who have had breast removal surgery. We also predict that some female-to-male transsexuals will have a phantom penis even although there is not one physically there. We believe that this is an easily testable hypothesis, which, if correct, would offer insights into both the basis of transsexuality and provide farther evidence that we have a gender specific body image, with a strong innate component that is ‘‘hard-wired’’ into our brains. This would furnish us with a better understanding the mechanism by which nature and nurture interact to link the brain-based internal body image with external sexual morphology.. (shrink)

The Rāmāyaṇa tradition can undoubtedly be called one of the most fascinating literary artifacts in South Asia, considering the veritable influence it had exercised on the cultural and moral ethos of the people of this geographical location. Practitioners of kāvya, in various spatiotemporal locations, responded differently to Rāmakathā (Rama’s story) (the basic narrative of Rāma’s marriage, exile, and battle with Rāvaṇa) and produced numerous versions of the Rāmāyaṇa to both entertain and instruct the readers. Among the numerous versions of the (...) Rāmāyaṇas in South Asia, the Rāmāyaṇa composed by Vālmīki is particularly important, as it is considered by poets and literary theoreticians as the first literary artifact (ādikāvya) in Sanskrit literary tradition. In addition to being the first kāvya, the Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki also gives the readers a good glimpse into the traditional Indian thinking about the very process of composing a kāvya through the first four sargas of the first chapter of Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa titled Bālakāṇḍa which can be rightly called an upodghāta or preamble to the whole story. This paper explores how these four sargas in Bālakāṇḍa subtly reflects some of the crucial thoughts pertaining to the form of kāvya in the kāvyaśāstra tradition. These cardinal principles of kāvya that the Bālakāṇḍa in the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa reflects are twofold—(1) kāvya is a formally unique linguistic expression with aesthetic and formal singularities and (2) the aesthetic emotion (rasa), irrespective of the nature of its ordinary counterpart in daily life, ultimately leads to an alaukika experience. (shrink)

Recent years have seen the attention of physicists and philosophers, both at home and abroad, increasingly drawn, as is evident in the professional literature, to the question of the possibility of the existence of particles moving at speeds greater than that of light and to determining the physical and philosophical consequences of this hypothesis. The philosophical consequences have to do primarily with the causality principle. We are in receipt of two articles in which these questions are examined from different perspectives (...) and which supplement each other. (shrink)