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Abduction is a method of logical inference introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce which comes prior to induction and deduction for which the colloquial name is to have a "hunch". Abductive reasoning starts when an inquirer considers of a set of seemingly unrelated facts, armed with an intuition that they are somehow connected.

An abstract object is an object which does not exist at any particular time or place, but rather exists as a type of thing. In philosophy, an important distinction is whether an object is considered abstract or concrete. Abstract objects are sometimes called abstracta (sing. abstractum) and concrete objects are sometimes called concreta (sing. concretum). The type-token distinction identifies that physical objects are tokens of a particular type of thing.

Abstraction is the process or result of generalization by reducing the information content of a concept or an observable phenomenon, typically to retain only information which is relevant for a particular purpose. For example, abstracting a leather soccer ball to a ball retains only the information on general ball attributes and behaviour. Similarly, abstracting happiness to an emotional state reduces the amount of information conveyed about the emotional state.

Academia is a collective term for the community of students and scholars engaged in higher education and research.

Acculturation is the exchange of cultural features that results when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first hand contact; the original cultural patterns of either or both groups may be altered, but the groups remain distinct. (Kottak 2007) However, anthropologist Franz Boas (1888, pp.

The Aché (pronounced Ah·CHAY) Indians are a traditional hunter-gatherer tribe living in Paraguay.

Adaptability is a feature of a system or of a process. This word has been put to use as a specialised term in different disciplines and in business operations. Word definitions of adaptability as a specialised term differ little from . According to Andresen and Gronau adaptability in the field of organisational management can in general be seen as an ability to change something or oneself to fit to occurring changes.

Adaptation is the process whereby an organism becomes better suited to its habitat. This process takes place over many generations, and is one of the basic phenomena of biology. Also, the term adaptation may refer to a feature which is especially important for an organism's survival. For example, the adaptation of horses' teeth to the grinding of grass, or their ability to run fast and escape predators.

Adaptationism is a set of methods in the evolutionary sciences for distinguishing the products of adaptation from traits that arise through other processes. It is employed in fields such as ethology and evolutionary psychology that are concerned with identifying adaptations. George Williams' Adaptation and Natural Selection was highly influential in its development, defining some of the heuristics, such as complex functional design, used to identify adaptations.

In behavioral ecology an adaptive behavior is a behavior which contributes directly or indirectly to an individual's reproductive success and is thus subject to the forces of natural selection. Examples include favoring kin in altruistic behaviors, female selection of the most fit male, and defending a territory or harem from rivals. Conversely, a non-adaptive behavior is a behavior or trait that is counterproductive to an individual's survival or reproductive success.

In evolutionary biology, fitness landscapes or adaptive landscapes are used to visualize the relationship between genotypes and reproductive success. It is assumed that every genotype has a well defined replication rate (often referred to as fitness). This fitness is the "height" of the landscape. Genotypes which are very similar are said to be "close" to each other, while those that are very different are "far" from each other.

Adoption is a process whereby a person assumes the parenting for another who is not kin and, in so doing, permanently transfers all rights and responsibilities from the original parent or parents. Unlike guardianship or other systems designed for the care of the young, adoption is intended to effect a permanent change in status and as such requires societal recognition, either through legal or religious sanction.

Affective neuroscience is the study of the neural mechanisms of emotion. This interdisciplinary field combines neuroscience with the psychological study of personality, emotion, and mood.

An affordance is a quality of an object, or an environment, that allows an individual to perform an action. The term is used in a variety of fields: perceptual psychology, cognitive psychology, environmental psychology, industrial design, human-computer interaction (HCI), interaction design and artificial intelligence. The common psychological term for affordance is stimulus-response compatibility. As explained below, two different definitions have developed.

Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (May 28, 1807 - December 14, 1873) was a paleontologist, glaciologist, and geologist, and was a prominent innovator in the study of the Earth's natural history. He grew up in Switzerland and became a professor of natural history at University of Neuchâtel. Later, he accepted a professorship at Harvard University in the United States.

An agent-based model (ABM) (also known as multiple-agent system) is a computational model for simulating the actions and interactions of autonomous individuals with a view to assessing their effects on the system as a whole. It combines elements of game theory, complex systems, emergence, computational sociology, multi-agent systems, and evolutionary programming. Monte Carlo Methods are used to introduce randomness.

In artificial intelligence, an intelligent agent (IA) is an autonomous entity which observes and acts upon an environment (i.e. it is an agent) and directs its activity towards achieving goals (i.e. it is rational). Intelligent agents may also learn or use knowledge to achieve their goals. They may be very simple or very complex: a reflex machine such as a thermostat is an intelligent agent, as is a human being, as is a community of human beings working together towards a goal.

In psychology, as well as other social and behavioral sciences, aggression refers to behavior between members of the same species that is intended to cause pain or harm. Predatory or defensive behavior between members of different species is not normally considered "aggression. " Aggression takes a variety of forms among humans and can be physical, mental, or verbal. Aggression should not be confused with assertiveness, although the terms are often used interchangeably among laypeople, e.g.

Ageing is the accumulation of changes in an organism or object over time. Ageing in humans refers to a multidimensional process of physical, psychological, and social change. Some dimensions of ageing grow and expand over time, while others decline. Reaction time, for example, may slow with age, while knowledge of world events and wisdom may expand.

Agoraphobia is an anxiety disorder, often precipitated by the fear of having a panic attack in a setting from which there is no easy means of escape. As a result, sufferers of agoraphobia avoid public and/or unfamiliar places, especially large, open, spaces such as shopping malls or airports where there are few 'places to hide'. In severe cases, the sufferer may become confined to his or her home, experiencing difficulty traveling from this "safe place."

Agricultural science is a broad multidisciplinary field that encompasses the parts of exact, natural, economic and social sciences that are used in the practice and understanding of agriculture. (Veterinary science, but not animal science, is often excluded from the definition.)

In the field of animal communication, an alarm signal is an antipredator adaptation referring to various signals emitted by social animals in response to danger. Many primates and birds have elaborate alarm calls for warning conspecifics of approaching predators. For example, the characteristic alarm call of the Blackbird is a familiar sound in many gardens. Other animals like fish and insects may use other non-auditory signals, such as chemical messages.

Algebra is the branch of mathematics concerning the study of the rules of operations and the things which can be constructed from them, including terms, polynomials, equations and algebraic structures. Together with geometry, analysis, combinatorics, and number theory, algebra is one of the main branches of pure mathematics. Elementary algebra is often part of the curriculum in secondary education and introduces the concept of variables representing numbers.

In mathematics, computing, linguistics, and related subjects, an algorithm is an effective method for solving a problem using a finite sequence of instructions. Algorithms are used for calculation, data processing, and many other fields. Each algorithm is a list of well-defined instructions for completing a task.

An allele is one of a series of different forms of a gene. The word is a short from of allelomorph ('other form'), which was used in the early days of genetics to describe variant forms of a gene detected as different phenotypes. Alleles are now understood to be alternative DNA sequences at the same physical gene locus, which may or may not result in different phenotypic traits.

Allergy is a disorder of the immune system often also referred to as atopy. Allergic reactions occur to normally harmless environmental substances known as allergens; these reactions are acquired, predictable, and rapid. Strictly, allergy is one of four forms of hypersensitivity and is called type I (or immediate) hypersensitivity.

Resource allocation is used to assign the available resources in an economic way. It is part of resource management.

Altruism is the deliberate pursuit of the interests or welfare of others or the public interest.

Ambivalence is a state of having simultaneous, conflicting feelings toward a person or thing. Stated another way, ambivalence is the experience of having thoughts and emotions of both positive and negative valence toward someone or something. A common example of ambivalence is the feeling of both love and hatred for a person.

"Phyletic evolution" redirects here. You may be looking for phyletic gradualism. Anagenesis, also known as "phyletic change," is the evolution of species involving an entire population rather than a branching event, as in cladogenesis. When enough mutations reach fixation in a population to significantly differentiate from an ancestral population, a new species name may be assigned.

Two structures in biology are said to be analogous if they perform the same or similar function by a similar mechanism but evolved separately. Similar structures may have evolved through different pathways, a process known as convergent evolution, or may be homologous. The concept of analogy is contrasted with that of homology, which refers to two structures that share a common ancestor and share basic structure.

Analytical Marxism refers to a style of thinking about Marxism that was prominent amongst English-speaking philosophers and social scientists during the 1980s. It was mainly associated with the September Group of academics, so called because of their biennial September meetings to discuss common interests.

Anatidae is the biological family that includes the ducks, geese and swans. The family has a cosmopolitan distribution, occurring on all the world's continents except Antarctica and on most of the world's islands and island groups. These are birds that are evolutionarily adapted for swimming, floating on the water surface, and in some cases diving in at least shallow water. (The Magpie Goose is no longer considered to be part of the Anatidae, but is placed in its own family Anseranatidae.

Anger is an emotion. The physical effects of anger include increased heart rate, blood pressure, and levels of adrenaline and noradrenaline. Some view anger as part of the fight or flight brain response to the perceived threat of harm. Anger becomes the predominant feeling behaviorally, cognitively, and physiologically when a person makes the conscious choice to take action to immediately stop the threatening behavior of another outside force.

Animal cognition is the title given to a modern approach to the mental capacities of non-human animals. It has developed out of comparative psychology, but has also been strongly influenced by the approach of ethology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary psychology. The alternative name cognitive ethology is therefore sometimes used; and much of what used to be considered under the title of animal intelligence is now thought of under this heading.

Animal communication is any behavior on the part of one animal that has an effect on the current or future behaviour of another animal. The study of animal communication, sometimes called spencerology (distinguishable from anthroposemiotics, the study of human communication) has played an important part in the methodology of ethology, sociobiology, and the study of animal cognition.

Animal culture describes the current theory of cultural learning in non-human animals through socially transmitted behaviors. The question as to the existence of culture in non-human societies has been a contentious subject for decades, much due to the inexistence of a concise definition for culture. However, many leading scientists agree on culture being defined as a process, rather than an end product.

Homosexual behavior in animals refers to the documented evidence of homosexual, bisexual and transgender behavior in non-human animals. Such behaviors include sex, courtship, affection, pair bonding, and parenting. A 1999 review by researcher Bruce Bagemihl shows that homosexual behavior, has been observed in close to 1500 species, ranging from primates to gut worms, and is well documented for 500 of them.

Animals are a major group of mostly multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Animalia or Metazoa. Their body plan eventually becomes fixed as they develop, although some undergo a process of metamorphosis later on in their life. Most animals are motile, meaning they can move spontaneously and independently. Most animals are also heterotrophs, meaning they must ingest other organisms for sustenance.

Animal welfare refers to the viewpoint that it is morally acceptable for humans to use nonhuman animals for food, in animal research, as clothing, and in entertainment, so long as unnecessary suffering is avoided. The position is contrasted with the animal rights position, which holds that other animals should not be used by, or regarded as the property of, humans.

Animism (from Latin anima) is a philosophical, religious or spiritual idea that souls or spirits exist not only in humans but also in other animals, plants, rocks, natural phenomena such as thunder, geographic features such as mountains or rivers, or other entities of the natural environment, a proposition also known as hylozoism in philosophy. Animism may further attribute souls to abstract concepts such as words, true names or metaphors in mythology.

In statistics, analysis of variance (ANOVA) is a collection of statistical models, and their associated procedures, in which the observed variance is partitioned into components due to different explanatory variables. In its simplest form ANOVA gives a statistical test of whether the means of several groups are all equal, and therefore generalizes Student's two-sample t-test to more than two groups.

Ants are social insects of the family Formicidae, and along with the related wasps and bees, they belong to the order Hymenoptera. Ants evolved from wasp-like ancestors in the mid-Cretaceous period between 110 and 130 million years ago and diversified after the rise of flowering plants. Today, more than 12,000 species are classified with upper estimates of about 14,000 species.

In physics and cosmology, the anthropic principle is the collective name for several ways of asserting that physical and chemical theories, especially astrophysics and cosmology, need to take into account that there is life on Earth, and that one form of that life, Homo sapiens, has attained rationality. The only kind of universe humans can occupy is one that is similar to the current one.

Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human characteristics to non-human creatures and beings, phenomena, material states and objects or abstract concepts. Examples include animals and plants depicted as creatures with human motivation able to reason and converse and forces of nature such as winds, rain or the sun.

Anti-intellectualism describes a sentiment of hostility towards, or mistrust of, intellectuals and intellectual pursuits. This may be expressed in various ways, such as attacks on the merits of science, education, art, or literature. Anti-intellectuals often perceive themselves as champions of the ordinary people and populism against elitism, especially academic elitism.

Antipredator adaptations are evolutionary adaptations developed over time, which assist prey organisms in their constant struggle against their predators. There are several ways antipredator adaptations can be classified, such as behavioral or non-behavioral or by taxonomic groups. The act of a predator acquiring a food source can be divided into four stages: detection, attack, capture and consumption.

Anti-psychologism is a thesis about the nature of logical truth, that it does not depend upon the contents of human ideas but exists independent of human ideas. The term was coined by Gottlob Frege, and has been the centre of an important debate in analytical philosophy, closely related to the internalism and externalism debate in logic and epistemology. The rival thesis, psychologism, is not widely held amongst logicians, but it does have some high-profile defenders, for example Dov Gabbay.

Frogs are amphibians in the order Anura (meaning "tail-less", from Greek an-, without + oura, tail), formerly referred to as Salientia (Latin saltare, to jump). Most frogs are characterized by long hind legs, a short body, webbed digits (fingers or toes), protruding eyes and the absence of a tail. Frogs are widely known as exceptional jumpers, and many of the anatomical characteristics of frogs, particularly their long, powerful legs, are adaptations to improve jumping performance.

Anxiety is a psychological and physiological state characterized by cognitive, somatic, emotional, and behavioral components.

An ape is any member of the Hominoidea superfamily of primates. Due to its ambiguous nature, the term ape is less suitable as a means of describing taxonomic relationships. Under the current classification system there are two families of hominoids: the family Hylobatidae consists of 4 genera and 14 species of gibbon, including the Lar Gibbon and the Siamang, collectively known as the lesser apes.

Apostatic selection is frequency-dependent selection by predators, particularly in regard to prey that are different morphs of a polymorphic species that is not a mimic (non-mimetic) of another species. It is closely linked to the idea of prey switching, however the two terms are regularly used to describe different aspects of the same phenomenon. Apostatic selection has been used by authors looking at the differences between different genetic morphs.

Applied ethics is, in the words of Brenda Almond, co-founder of the Society for Applied Philosophy, "the philosophical examination, from a moral standpoint, of particular issues in private and public life that are matters of moral judgment". It is thus a term used to describe attempts to use philosophical methods to identify the morally correct course of action in various fields of human life.

Mechanistic models for niche apportionment are biological models used to explain relative species abundance distributions. These models describe how species break up resource pool in multi-dimensional space, determining the distribution of abundances of individuals among species.

Apraxia is a neurological disorder characterized by loss of the ability to execute or carry out learned purposeful movements, despite having the desire and the physical ability to perform the movements. It is a disorder of motor planning which may be acquired or developmental, but may not be caused by incoordination, sensory loss, or failure to comprehend simple commands (which can be tested by asking the person to recognize the correct movement from a series).

The terms "a priori" and "a posteriori" are used in philosophy to distinguish two types of knowledge, justifications or arguments. A priori knowledge or justification is independent of experience (for example 'All bachelors are unmarried'); a posteriori knowledge or justification is dependent on experience or empirical evidence (for example 'Some bachelors are very happy').

Archaeology is the science that studies human cultures through the recovery, documentation, analysis, and interpretation of material culture and environmental data, including architecture, artifacts, biofacts, and landscapes. Archaeology aims to understand humankind through these humanistic endeavors.

An archetype is an original model of a person, ideal example, or a prototype after which others are copied, patterned, or emulated; a symbol universally recognized by all. In psychology, an archetype is a model of a person, personality, or behavior.

Archosaurs (Greek for 'ruling lizards') are a group of diapsid amniotes represented by modern birds and crocodilians. This group also includes extinct non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs and relatives of crocodiles. There is some debate about when archosaurs first appeared. Those who classify the Permian reptiles Archosaurus rossicus and/or Protorosaurus speneri as true archosaurs maintain that archosaurs first appeared in the late Permian.

Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy.

In evolutionary biology, an evolutionary arms race is an evolutionary struggle between competing sets of co-evolving genes that develop adaptations and counter-adaptations against each other, resembling an arms race, which are also examples of positive feedback. The co-evolving gene sets may be in different species, as in an evolutionary arms race between a predator species and its prey (Vermeij, 1987), or a parasite and its host.

Larry Arnhart is a Presidential Research Professor of Political Science at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois. His areas of teaching and research include the history of political philosophy, biopolitical theory, and American political thought. Arnhart is the author of five books and more than thirty peer-reviewed articles. Has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 1977, an M.A. in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 1974, and a B.A.

An arthropod is an invertebrate that has an exoskeleton, a segmented body, and jointed attachments called appendages. Arthropods are animals belonging to the Phylum Arthropoda (from Greek arthron, "joint", and podos "foot", which together mean "jointed feet"), and include the insects, arachnids, crustaceans, and others. Arthropods are characterized by their jointed limbs and cuticles, which are mainly made of chitin; the cuticles of crustaceans are also biomineralized with calcium carbonate.

Artificial brain is the research to develop software and hardware that has cognitive abilities similar to the animal or human brain. The idea plays three important roles in science: An ongoing attempt by the neuroscientists to understand how the human brain works. A thought experiment in the philosophy of artificial intelligence, demonstrating that it is possible, in theory, to create a machine that has all the capabilities of a human being.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science which aims to create it. Textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents,"

An artificial neural network (ANN), usually called "neural network" (NN), is a mathematical model or computational model that tries to simulate the structure and/or functional aspects of biological neural networks. It consists of an interconnected group of artificial neurons and processes information using a connectionist approach to computation.

Asexual reproduction is reproduction which does not involve meiosis, ploidy reduction, or fertilization. Only one parent is involved in asexual reproduction. A more stringent definition is agamogenesis which refers to reproduction without the fusion of gametes. Asexual reproduction is the primary form of reproduction for single-celled organisms such as the archaea, bacteria, and protists. Many plants and fungi reproduce asexually as well.

W. Ross Ashby was an English psychiatrist and a pioneer in cybernetics, the study of complex systems. His first name was not used: he was known as Ross Ashby. His two books, Design for a brain and An introduction to cybernetics, were landmark works. They introduced exact, logical, thinking to the nascent discipline, and were highly influential.

Assortative mating (also called assortative pairing) takes place when sexually reproducing organisms tend to mate with individuals that are like themselves in some respect (positive assortative mating) or dissimilar (negative assortative mating). In evolution, these two types of assortative mating have the effect, respectively, of reducing and increasing the range of variation, or trait variance, when the assorting is cued on heritable traits.

The term atavism (derived from the Latin atavus, a great-grandfather's grandfather; more generally, an ancestor) denotes the tendency to revert to ancestral type. An atavism is an evolutionary throwback, such as traits reappearing which had disappeared generations ago. Atavisms occur because genes for previously existing phenotypical features are often preserved in DNA, even though the genes are not expressed in some or most of the organisms possessing them.

Atheism can be either the rejection of theism

Atomism is a natural philosophy developed by Leucippus and his student Democritus in the fifth century BC

Austria /ˈɔːstriə/, officially the Republic of Austria, is a landlocked country of roughly 8.3 million people in Central Europe. It borders both Germany and the Czech Republic to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west. The territory of Austria covers 83,872 square kilometres (32,383 sq mi), and is influenced by a temperate and alpine climate.

The Austrian School (also known as the Vienna School or the Psychological School) is a school of economic thought that emphasizes the spontaneous organizing power of the price mechanism. Austrians hold that the complexity of human behavior makes mathematical modeling of the evolving market extremely difficult and advocate a laissez faire approach to the economy.

Autism is a brain development disorder characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior. These signs all begin before a child is three years old. Autism involves many parts of the brain; how this occurs is not well understood. The two other autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are Asperger syndrome, which lacks delays in cognitive development and language, and PDD-NOS, diagnosed when full criteria for the other two disorders are not met.

In biology the word autogenesis has been used to describe two similar concepts: Abiogenesis - the origin of life, as used by Aristotle and in modern theory. Orthogenesis - a discredited evolutionary idea that hypothesised a directed 'teleological' form of evolution. Autogenesis may also have been used to mean a combination of the two, a purposeful, directed or 'special creation' abiogenesis event, the product of which undergoes orthogenesis.

In theoretical computer science, automata theory is the study of abstract machines and problems which they are able to solve. Automata theory is closely related to formal language theory as the automata are often classified by the class of formal languages they are able to recognize. An automaton is a mathematical model for a finite state machine (FSM).

Autonomy is a concept found in moral, political, and bioethical philosophy. Within these contexts, it refers to the capacity of a rational individual to make an informed, un-coerced decision. In moral and political philosophy, autonomy is often used as the basis for determining moral respectibility for one's actions. One of the best known philosophical theories of autonomy was developed by Kant.

Autopoiesis literally means "auto (self)-creation", and expresses a fundamental dialectic between structure and function.

Awareness is the state or ability to perceive, to feel, or to be conscious of events, objects or sensory patterns. In this level of consciousness, sense data can be confirmed by an observer without necessarily implying understanding. More broadly, it is the state or quality of being aware of something. In biological psychology, awareness is defined as a human's or an animal's perception and cognitive reaction to a condition or event.

Axiology is the study of quality or value. It is often taken to include ethics and aesthetics - philosophical fields that depend crucially on notions of value - and sometimes it is held to lay the groundwork for these fields, and thus to be similar to value theory and meta-ethics. The term was first used in the early 20th century by Paul Lapie, in 1902, and E. von Hartmann, in 1908.

Backpropagation, or propagation of error, is a common method of teaching artificial neural networks how to perform a given task. It was first described by Paul Werbos in 1974, but it wasn't until 1986, through the work of David E. Rumelhart, Geoffrey E. Hinton and Ronald J. Williams, that it gained recognition, and it led to a “renaissance” in the field of artificial neural network research. It is a supervised learning method, and is an implementation of the Delta rule.

The bacteria are a large group of unicellular microorganisms. Typically a few micrometres in length, bacteria have a wide range of shapes, ranging from spheres to rods and spirals. Bacteria are ubiquitous in every habitat on Earth, growing in soil, acidic hot springs, radioactive waste, water, and deep in the Earth's crust, as well as in organic matter and the live bodies of plants and animals.

The Balance of nature refers to the theory that ecological systems are usually in a stable equilibrium, which is to say that a small change in some particular parameter (the size of a particular population, for example) will be corrected by some negative feedback that will bring the parameter back to its original "point of balance" with the rest of the system.

The Baldwin effect, also known as Baldwinian evolution or ontogenic evolution, is an early evolutionary theory put forward in 1896 in a paper "A New Factor in Evolution" by American psychologist James Mark Baldwin which proposes a mechanism for specific selection for general learning ability. Selected offspring would tend to have an increased capacity for learning new skills rather than being confined to genetically coded, relatively fixed abilities.

David L. Baltimore (born 7 March 1938) is an American biologist, university administrator, and Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine. He served as president of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) from 1997 to 2006, and is currently the Robert A. Millikan Professor of Biology at Caltech. He also served as president of Rockefeller University from 1990 to 1991, and was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2007.

Bargaining or haggling is a type of negotiation in which the buyer and seller of a good or service dispute the price which will be paid and the exact nature of the transaction that will take place, and eventually come to an agreement. Bargaining is an alternative pricing strategy to fixed prices. Optimally, if it costs the retailer nothing to engage and allow bargaining, he can divine the buyer's willingness to spend.

Kenneth Jon Barwise was a U.S. mathematician, philosopher and logician who proposed some fundamental revisions to the way that logic is understood and used. Born in Independence, Missouri to Kenneth T. and Evelyn, he was a precocious child. A pupil of Solomon Feferman at Stanford University, Barwise started his research in infinitary logic.

The basic needs approach is one of the major approaches to the measurement of absolute poverty. It attempts to define the absolute minimum resources necessary for long-term physical well-being, usually in terms of consumption goods. The poverty line is then defined as the amount of income required to satisfy those needs. A traditional list of immediate "basic needs" is food (including water), shelter, and clothing.

Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (July 17, 1714 - May 26, 1762) was a German philosopher.

Bayesian probability is one of the most popular interpretations of the concept of probability. The Bayesian interpretation of probability can be seen as an extension of logic that enables reasoning with uncertain statements. To evaluate the probability of a hypothesis, the Bayesian probabilist specifies some prior probability, which is then updated in the light of new relevant data. The Bayesian interpretation provides a standard set of procedures and formulae to perform this calculation.

Beauty is a characteristic of a person, animal, place, object, or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning, or satisfaction. Beauty is studied as part of aesthetics, sociology, social psychology, and culture. As a cultural creation, beauty has been extremely commercialized. An "ideal beauty" is an entity which is admired, or possesses features widely attributed to beauty in a particular culture, for perfection.

Behavior or behaviour refers to the actions or reactions of an object or organism, usually in relation to the environment. Behavior can be conscious or subconscious, overt or covert, and voluntary or involuntary.

Behavioral ecology is the study of the ecological and evolutionary basis for animal behavior, and the roles of behavior in enabling an animal to adapt to its environment (both intrinsic and extrinsic). Behavioral ecology emerged from ethology after Niko Tinbergen (a seminal figure in the study of animal behavior), outlined the four causes of behavior. If an organism has a trait which provides them with a selective advantage (i.e.

Behavioural genetics is the field of biology that studies the role of genetics in animal behaviour. The field is an overlap of genetics, ethology, and psychology. Classically, behavioural geneticists have studied the inheritance of behavioural traits. The field is generally considered to have been established with the publication of John L. Fuller and William R. Thompson's book Behavior Genetics in 1960 (Wiley, New York).

Behaviorism (or behaviourism), also called the learning perspective (where any physical action is a behavior), is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things which organisms do - including acting, thinking and feeling - can and should be regarded as behaviors. The school of psychology maintains that behaviors as such can be described scientifically without resource either to internal physiological events or to hypothetical constructs such as the mind.

The term behavioural sciences (or behavioral sciences) encompasses all the disciplines that explore the activities of and interactions among organisms in the natural world. It involves the systematic analysis and investigation of human and animal behaviour through controlled and naturalistic experimental observations and rigorous formulations. (E. D. Klemke, R. Hollinger, and A. D. Kline)

Behaviorism (or behaviourism), also called the learning perspective (where any physical action is a behavior), is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things which organisms do - including acting, thinking and feeling - can and should be regarded as behaviors. The school of psychology maintains that behaviors as such can be described scientifically without resource either to internal physiological events or to hypothetical constructs such as the mind.

Vladimir Nikolayevich Beklemishev was a Russian zoologist and entomologist. Beklemishev began his career at Saint Petersburg University . In 1918 he moved to Perm where he held the post of a docent at the recently opened Perm University, becoming professor of the same university in 1920. After 1932 he was the head of the Division of Entomology of the Institute of Malaria and Medical Parasitology in Moscow (now the Institute of Medical Parasitology and Tropical Medicine .

Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true.

Bell's theorem is a no-go theorem, loosely stating that: It is the most famous legacy of the late physicist John S. Bell. The theorem has important implications for physics itself and philosophy of science as well. Physically, Bell's theorem proves that local hidden variable theories cannot remove the statistical nature of quantum mechanics. Philosophically, Bell's theorem implies that if quantum mechanics is correct, the universe is not locally deterministic.

Burrhus Frederic Skinner (March 20, 1904 - August 18, 1990) was an American psychologist, author, inventor, advocate for social reform,

Johan(nes) Abraham Bierens de Haan was a Dutch biologist and ethologist. He was born in Haarlem, and died in Siena, Italy.

Bifurcation theory is the mathematical study of changes in the qualitative or topological structure of a given family. Examples of such families are the integral curves of a family of vector fields or, the solutions of a family of differential equations.

Astrobiology (other terms have been exobiology, exopaleontology, and bioastronomy) is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe.

Biochemistry is the study of the chemical processes in living organisms. It deals with the structure and function of cellular components such as proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, nucleic acids and other biomolecules. Among the vast number of different biomolecules, many are complex and large molecules, which are composed of similar repeating subunits. Each class of polymeric biomolecule has a different set of subunit types.

Biodiversity is the variation of life forms within a given ecosystem, biome, or for the entire Earth. Biodiversity is often used as a measure of the health of biological systems. The biodiversity found on Earth today consists of many millions of distinct biological species, which is the product of nearly 3.5 billion years of evolution.

Bioeconomics is the study of the dynamics of living resources using economic models. It is an attempt to apply the methods of environmental economics and ecological economics to empirical biology. Bioeconomics applies optimal control methods to mathematical models using environmental and ecological elements for resource protection issues relating to resource economics.

Bioenergetics is the subject of a field of biochemistry that concerns energy flow through living systems. This is an active area of biological research that includes the study of thousands of different cellular processes such as cellular respiration and the many other metabolic processes that can lead to production and utilization of energy in forms such as ATP molecules.

Bioethics is the philosophical study of the ethical controversies brought about by advances in biology and medicine. Bioethicists are concerned with the ethical questions that arise in the relationships among life sciences, biotechnology, medicine, politics, law, philosophy, and theology.

Biogenesis is the process of lifeforms producing other lifeforms, e.g. a spider lays eggs, which develop into spiders. It may also refer to biochemical processes of production in living organisms.

Biogeography is the study of the distribution of biodiversity over space and time. It aims to reveal where organisms live, and at what abundance. Biogeography does more than ask Which species? and Where. It also asks Why? and what is sometimes more crucial, Why not?.

Biological anthropology, or physical anthropology is a branch of anthropology that studies the mechanisms of biological evolution, genetic inheritance, human adaptability and variation, primatology, primate morphology, and the fossil record of human evolution. Physical anthropology was developed in 19th century, prior to the rise of Alfred Russel Wallace's and Charles Darwin's theories of natural selection and Gregor Mendel's work on genetics.

Biological classification or scientific classification in biology, is a method by which biologists group and categorize organisms by biological type, such as genus or species. Biological classification is a form of scientific taxonomy, but should be distinguished from folk taxonomy, which lacks scientific basis. Modern biological classification has its root in the work of Carolus Linnaeus, who grouped species according to shared physical characteristics.

Biological determinism (also biologism) is the interpretation of humans and human life from a strictly biological point of view, and it is closely related to genetic determinism. Other definition is that biological determinism is the hypothesis that biological factors such as an organism's individual genes (as opposed to social or environmental factors) completely determine how a system behaves or changes over time.

The development of biomaterials is not a new area of science, having existed for around half a century. The study of biomaterials is called biomaterial science. It is a provocative field of science, having experienced steady and strong growth over its history, with many companies investing large amounts of money into the development of new products. Biomaterial science encompasses elements of medicine, biology, chemistry, tissue engineering and materials science.

Health science or biomedical science is the applied science dealing with health. There are two approaches to health science: the study and research of the food that we eat; and the study and research of health-related issues to understand how humans and other animals function, and the application of that knowledge to improve health and to prevent and cure diseases.

Bionics (also known as biomimetics, bio-inspiration, biognosis, biomimicry, or bionical creativity engineering) is the application of biological methods and systems found in nature to the study and design of engineering systems and modern technology.

Biophysics (also biological physics) is an interdisciplinary science that employs and develops theories and methods of the physical sciences for the investigation of biological systems . Studies included under the branches of biophysics span all levels of biological organization, from the molecular scale to whole organisms and ecosystems. Biophysical research shares significant overlap with biochemistry, nanotechnology, bioengineering, agrophysics and systems biology.

The term "biopolitics" or "biopolitical" can refer to several different yet compatible concepts.

Biosemiotics (from the Greek bios meaning "life" and semeion meaning "sign") is a growing field that studies the production, action and interpretation of signs in the biological realm. Biosemiotics attempts to integrate the findings of scientific biology and semiotics, representing a paradigmatic shift in the occidental scientific view of life, demonstrating that semiosis (sign process, including meaning and interpretation) is its imminent and intrinsic feature.

The biosphere is the global sum of all the world's ecosystems. It can also be called the zone of life on Earth. From the broadest biophysiological point of view, the biosphere is the global ecological system integrating all living beings and their relationships, including their interaction with the elements of the lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. The biosphere is postulated to have evolved, beginning through a process of biogenesis or biopoesis, at least some 3.5 billion years ago.

Biostratigraphy is the branch of stratigraphy which focuses on correlating and assigning relative ages of rock strata by using the fossil assemblages contained within them. Usually the aim is correlation, demonstrating that a particular horizon in one geological section represents the same period of time as another horizon at some other section. The fossils are useful because sediments of the same age can look completely different because of local variations in the sedimentary environment.

Biotechnology is technology based on biology, agriculture, food science, and medicine. Modern use of the term usually refers to genetic engineering as well as cell- and tissue culture technologies. However, the concept encompasses a wider range and history of procedures for modifying living things according to human purposes, going back to domestication of animals, cultivation of plants and "improvements" to these through breeding programs that employ artificial selection and hybridization.

Bipedalism is a form of terrestrial locomotion where an organism moves by means of its two rear limbs, or legs. An animal or machine that usually moves in a bipedal manner is known as a biped, meaning "two feet" (from the Latin bi for "two" and ped for "foot"). Types of bipedal movement include walking, running, or hopping, on two appendages. Relatively few modern species are habitual bipeds whose normal method of locomotion is two-legged.

Birds are winged, bipedal, endothermic, vertebrate animals that lay eggs. There are around 10,000 living species, making them the most numerous tetrapod vertebrates. They inhabit ecosystems across the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Birds range in size from the 5 cm (2 in) Bee Hummingbird to the 3 m (10 ft) Ostrich.

Bird vocalization includes both bird calls and bird songs. In non-technical use, bird songs are the bird sounds that are melodious to the human ear. In ornithology, bird 'songs' are often distinguished from shorter sounds, which may be termed 'calls'.

Blackmail is the crime of threatening to reveal substantially true information about a person to the public, a family member, or associates unless a demand made upon the victim is met. This information is usually of an embarrassing and/or socially damaging nature. As the information is substantially true, the act of revealing the information may not be criminal in its own right nor amount to a civil law defamation; the crime is making demands in exchange for withholding it.

In Darwin's time, biologists held to the theory of blending inheritance-an offspring was an average of its parent. If an individual had one short parent and one tall parent, it would always be of some interim height between that of its parents. In turn, this interim height would become a theoretical extreme (either tall or short) that, in turn, bounded the potential height of its own offspring.

Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann was an Austrian physicist famous for his founding contributions in the fields of statistical mechanics and statistical thermodynamics. He was one of the most important advocates for atomic theory when that scientific model was still highly controversial.

The Bonobo, Pan paniscus, until recently called the Pygmy Chimpanzee and less often, the Dwarf or Gracile Chimpanzee, is a great ape and one of the two species making up the genus Pan. The other species in genus Pan is Pan troglodytes, or the Common Chimpanzee. Although the name "chimpanzee" sometimes is used to refer to both species together, it is usually understood as referring to the Common Chimpanzee.

Bootstrapping or booting refers to a group of metaphors that share a common meaning, a self-sustaining process that proceeds without external help. The term is often attributed to Rudolf Erich Raspe's story ', where the main character pulls himself out of a swamp, though it's disputed whether it was done by his hair or by his bootstraps.

Botany, plant science(s), phytology, or plant biology is a branch of biology and is the scientific study of plant life and development. Botany covers a wide range of scientific disciplines that study plants, algae, and fungi including: structure, growth, reproduction, metabolism, development, diseases, chemical properties, and evolutionary relationships between the different groups.

Raymond Boudon (born January 27, 1934, in Paris) is a French sociologist. Professor in the University of Paris-Sorbonne, he is member of many important institutions: Academie des Sciences morales et politiques, Academia Europaea, British Academy, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, International Academy of Human Sciences of St Petersburg, Central European Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Kenneth Ewart Boulding was an economist, educator, peace activist, poet, religious mystic, devoted Quaker, systems scientist, and interdisciplinary philosopher. He was cofounder of General Systems Theory and founder of numerous ongoing intellectual projects in economics and social science. He was married to Elise M. Boulding.

In mathematics, in the field of differential equations, a boundary value problem is a differential equation together with a set of additional restraints, called the boundary conditions. A solution to a boundary value problem is a solution to the differential equation which also satisfies the boundary conditions. Boundary value problems arise in several branches of physics as any physical differential equation will have them.

In science studies, boundary-work is a term used to refer to instances in which boundaries, demarcations, or other divisions between fields of knowledge are created, advocated, attacked, or reinforced. Academic scholarship on boundary-work has emphasized that such delineations often have high stakes involved for the participants, and carries with it the implication that such boundaries are flexible and socially constructed.

In game theory, bounded rationality is a concept based on the fact that rationality of individuals is limited by the information they have, the cognitive limitations of their minds, and the finite amount of time they have to make decisions. This contrasts with the concept of rationality as optimization.

Jean Louis Auguste Brachet was a Belgian biochemist who made a key contribution in understanding the role of RNA. Brachet was born in Etterbeek and he studied medicine at the Université Libre de Bruxelles graduating in 1934. He then worked at the University of Cambridge and at Princeton University and at several institutes of marine biological research.

The brain is the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate, and most invertebrate, animals. Some primitive animals such as jellyfish and starfish have a decentralized nervous system without a brain, while sponges lack any nervous system at all. In vertebrates, the brain is located in the head, protected by the skull and close to the primary sensory apparatus of vision, hearing, balance, taste, and smell. Brains can be extremely complex.

In philosophy, the brain in a vat is an element used in a variety of thought experiments intended to draw out certain features of our ideas of knowledge, reality, truth, mind, and meaning.

Brazil, officially the Federative Republic of Brazil listen, is a country in South America. It is the fifth largest country by geographical area, occupying nearly half of South America, the fifth most populous country, and the fourth most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Atlantic Ocean on the east, Brazil has a coastline of over 7,491 kilometers (4,655 mi).

Great Britain is an island lying to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island. With a population of about 59.6 million people, it is the third most populated island on Earth. Great Britain is surrounded by over 1000 smaller islands and islets. The island of Ireland lies to its west.

Brownian motion (named after the Scottish botanist Robert Brown) is the seemingly random movement of particles suspended in a fluid (i.e. a liquid or gas) or the mathematical model used to describe such random movements, often called a particle theory. The mathematical model of Brownian motion has several real-world applications. An often quoted example is stock market fluctuations.

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (7 September 1707 - 16 April 1788) was a French naturalist, mathematician, cosmologist and encyclopedic author. His collected information influenced the next two generations of naturalists, including Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Cuvier. Buffon published thirty-five quarto volumes of his Histoire naturelle during his lifetime, and nine more volumes were published after his death.

Brad J. Bushman is a Professor at the University of Michigan with appointments in psychology, communication studies, and the Institute for Social Research. He has published extensively on the causes and consequences of human aggression. His work has questioned the utility of catharsis, and relates also to violent video game effects on aggression. Along with Roy Baumeister, his work suggests that it is narcissism, not low self-esteem, that causes people to act more aggressively after an insult.

Caenorhabditis elegans is a free-living, transparent nematode (roundworm), about 1 mm in length, which lives in temperate soil environments. Research into the molecular and developmental biology of C. elegans was begun in 1974 by Sydney Brenner and it has since been used extensively as a model organism.

Canalisation is a measure of the ability of a population to produce the same phenotype regardless of variability of its environment or genotype. The term canalisation was coined by C. H. Waddington, who also helped explain its developmental mechanisms. He also introduced the epigenetic landscape, in which a canalised trait is illustrated as a valley enclosed by high ridges, safely guiding the phenotype to its "fate".

Canidae is the biological family of carnivorous mammals that includes the wolves, foxes, jackals, coyotes, and the domestic dog; a member of this family is called a canid. The Canidae family is divided into the "wolf-like" and "dog-like" animals of the tribe Canini and the "foxes" of the tribe Vulpini. The two species of the basal Caninae are more primitive and do not fit into either tribe.

Walter Bradford Cannon (October 19, 1871 - October 19, 1945) was an American physiologist, Professor and chairman of the Department of Physiology at Harvard Medical School, who developed the concept of homeostasis, and popularized it in his book The Wisdom of the Body, published in 1932 by W. W. Norton, New York.

Capitalism typically refers to an economic and social system in which the means of production (also known as capital) are privately controlled; labor, goods and capital are traded in a market; profits are distributed to owners or invested in new technologies and industries; and wages are paid to labor.

Rudolf Carnap (May 18, 1891 - September 14, 1970) was an influential German-born philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a leading member of the Vienna Circle and a prominent advocate of logical positivism.

Catalysis is the process in which the rate of a chemical reaction is either increased or decreased by means of a chemical substance known as a catalyst. Unlike other reagents that participate in the chemical reaction, a catalyst is not consumed by the reaction itself. The catalyst may participate in multiple chemical transformations. Catalysts that speed the reaction are called positive catalysts. Catalysts that slow down the reaction are called negative catalysts or inhibitors.

In mathematics, catastrophe theory is a branch of bifurcation theory in the study of dynamical systems; it is also a particular special case of more general singularity theory in geometry. Bifurcation theory studies and classifies phenomena characterized by sudden shifts in behavior arising from small changes in circumstances, analysing how the qualitative nature of equation solutions depends on the parameters that appear in the equation.

Categorization is the process in which ideas and objects are recognized, differentiated and understood. Categorization implies that objects are grouped into categories, usually for some specific purpose. Ideally, a category illuminates a relationship between the subjects and objects of knowledge. Categorization is fundamental in language, prediction, inference, decision making and in all kinds of environmental interaction. There are many categorization theories and techniques.

In mathematics, category theory deals in an abstract way with mathematical structures and relationships between them: it abstracts from sets and functions to objects linked in diagrams by morphisms or arrows. One of the simplest examples of a category (which is a very important concept in topology) is that of groupoid, defined as a category whose arrows or morphisms are all invertible.

In philosophy, a causal chain is an ordered sequence of events in which any one event in the chain causes the next. Some philosophers believe causation relates facts, not events, in which case the meaning is adjusted accordingly.

Causality refers to the relationship between an event (the cause) and a second event, where the second event is a direct consequence of the first. The philosophical treatment of causality extends over millennia. In the Western philosophical tradition, discussion stretches back at least to Aristotle, and the topic remains a staple in contemporary philosophy. Aristotle distinguished between accidental (cause preceding effect) and essential causality (one event seen in two ways).

Cell biology (formerly cytology, from the Greek kytos, "container") is an academic discipline that studies cells - their physiological properties, their structure, the organelles they contain, interactions with their environment, their life cycle, division and death. This is done both on a microscopic and molecular level.

In developmental biology, cellular differentiation is the process by which a less specialized cell becomes a more specialized cell type. Differentiation occurs numerous times during the development of a multicellular organism as the organism changes from a single zygote to a complex system of tissues and cell types. Differentiation is a common process in adults as well: adult stem cells divide and create fully-differentiated daughter cells during tissue repair and during normal cell turnover.

Cell division is a process by which a cell, called the parent cell, divides into two or more cells, called daughter cells. Cell division is usually a small segment of a larger cell cycle. This type of cell division in eukaryotes is known as mitosis, and leaves the daughter cell capable of dividing again. The corresponding sort of cell division in prokaryotes is known as binary fission.

Membrane or Transmembrane receptors are specialized integral membrane proteins that take part in communication between the the cell and the outside world. Extracellular signaling molecules attach to the receptor, triggering changes in the function of the cell. This process is called signal transduction: The binding initiates a chemical change on the intracellular side of the membrane. In this way the receptors play a unique and important role in cellular communications and signal transduction.

Cell theory refers to the idea that cells are the basic unit of structure in every living thing. Development of this theory during the mid 1600s was made possible by advances in microscopy. This theory is one of the foundations of biology. The theory says that new cells are formed from other existing cells, and that the cell is a fundamental unit of structure, function and organization in all living organisms.

A cellular automaton (pl. cellular automata, abbrev. CA) is a discrete model studied in computability theory, mathematics, physics, theoretical biology and microstructure modeling. It consists of a regular grid of cells, each in one of a finite number of states, such as "On" and "Off". The grid can be in any finite number of dimensions. For each cell, a set of cells called its neighborhood (usually including the cell itself) is defined relative to the specified cell.

Centipedes are arthropods belonging to the class Chilopoda and the Subphylum Myriapoda. They are elongated metameric animals with one pair of legs per body segment. A key trait uniting this group is a pair of venom claws or forcipules formed from a modified first appendage. This also means that centipedes are an exclusively predatory taxon, which is uncommon. Centipedes normally have a drab coloration combining shades of brown and red.

Centralisation, or centralization, is the process by which the activities of an organisation, particularly those regarding decision-making, become concentrated within a particular location and/or group. In political science, this refers to the concentration of a government's power - both geographically and politically, into a centralised government.

A ceremony is an activity, infused with ritual significance, performed on a special occasion.

In visual perception, change blindness is the phenomenon that occurs when a person viewing a visual scene apparently fails to detect large changes in the scene. For change blindness to occur, the change in the scene typically has to coincide with some visual disruption such as a saccade (eye movement) or a brief obscuration of the observed scene or image. When looking at still images, a viewer can experience change blindness if part of the image changes.

Chaos typically refers to a state lacking order or predictability. In ancient Greece, it referred to the initial state of the universe, and, by extension, space, darkness, or an abyss (the antithetical concept was cosmos). In modern English, it is used in classical studies with this original meaning; in mathematics and science to refer to a very specific kind of unpredictability; and informally to mean a state of confusion.

Chaos theory is a branch of mathematics which studies the behavior of certain dynamical systems that may be highly sensitive to initial conditions. This sensitivity is popularly referred to as the butterfly effect. As a result of this sensitivity, which manifests itself as an exponential growth of error, the behavior of chaotic systems appears to be random.

Charles W. Morris was an American semiotician and philosopher.

Cheating is an act of lying, deception, fraud, trickery, imposture, or imposition. Cheating characteristically is employed to create an unfair advantage, usually in one's own interest, and often at the expense of others, Cheating implies the breaking of s. The term "cheating" is less applicable to the breaking of laws, as illegal activities are referred to by specific legal terminology such as fraud or corruption.

Chemical kinetics, also known as reaction kinetics, is the study of rates of chemical processes. Chemical kinetics includes investigations of how different experimental conditions can influence the speed of a chemical reaction and yield information about the reaction's mechanism and transition states, as well as the construction of mathematical models that can describe the characteristics of a chemical reaction.

The Chemical Revolution, also called the first chemical revolution, denotes the reformulation of chemistry based on the Law of Conservation of Matter and the oxygen theory of combustion. It was centered on the work of French chemist Antoine Lavoisier. On February 20, 1773, Lavoisier wrote: "the importance of the end in view prompted me to undertake all this work, which seemed to me destined to bring about a revolution in . . . chemistry. An immense series of experiments remains to be made.

A chiefdom is a type of complex society of varying degrees of centralization that is led by an individual known as a chief. In anthropological theory, one model of human social development rooted in ideas of cultural evolution describes a chiefdom as a form of social organization more complex than a tribe or a band society, and less complex than a state or a civilization. The most succinct (but still working) definition of a chiefdom in anthropology belongs to Robert L.

A child is a human being between the stages of birth and puberty. The legal definition of "child" generally refers to a minor, otherwise known as a person younger than the age of majority. "Child" may also describe a relationship with a parent or authority figure, or signify group membership in a clan, tribe, or religion; it can also signify being strongly affected by a specific time, place, or circumstance, as in "a child of nature" or "a child of the Sixties."

Child development refers to the biological and psychological changes that occur in human beings between birth and the end of adolescence, as the individual progresses from dependency to increasing autonomy. Because these developmental changes may be strongly influenced by genetic factors and events during prenatal life, genetics and prenatal development are usually included as part of the study of child development.

Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher,

Chronobiology is a field of science that examines periodic (cyclic) phenomena in living organisms and their adaptation to solar and lunar related rhythms. These cycles are known as biological rhythms. "Chrono" pertains to time and "biology" pertains to the study, or science, of life.

In computability theory the Church-Turing thesis (also known as Church's thesis, Church's conjecture and Turing's thesis) is a combined hypothesis ("thesis") about the nature of effectively calculable (computable) functions by recursion (Church's Thesis), by mechanical device equivalent to a Turing machine (Turing's Thesis) or by use of Church's λ-calculus.

The ciliates are a group of protists characterized by the presence of hair-like organelles called cilia, which are identical in structure to flagella but typically shorter and present in much larger numbers with a different undulating pattern than flagella. Cilia occur in all members of the group (although the peculiar suctoria only have them for part of the life-cycle) and are variously used in swimming, crawling, attachment, feeding, and sensation.

A civilization is a complex society or culture group characterized by dependence upon agriculture, long-distance trade, state form of government, occupational specialization, population, and class stratification.

Civil society is composed of the totality of voluntary civic and social organizations and institutions that form the basis of a functioning society as opposed to the force-backed structures of a state (regardless of that state's political system) and commercial institutions of the market.

A clade (from ancient Greek klados, "branch") is a term used in modern alpha taxonomy, the scientific classification of living and fossil organisms, to describe a monophyletic group, defined as a group consisting of a single common ancestor and all its descendants. The common ancestor of any reasonably-sized group, and most of its descendants, will usually be long extinct. It is not necessary for a clade to contain any living representatives.

Phylogenetic nomenclature (PN) or phylogenetic taxonomy is an alternative to rank-based nomenclature, applying definitions from cladistics. Its two defining features are the use of phylogenetic definitions of biological taxon names, and the lack of obligatory ranks. It is currently not regulated, but the PhyloCode (International Code of Phylogenetic Nomenclature) is intended to regulate it once implemented. The terms cladism and cladist were first introduced by Ernst W. Mayr in 1965.

Cladistics is a form of biological systematics which classifies living organisms on the basis of shared ancestry. It can be distinguished from other taxonomic systems, such as phenetics, by its focus on evolutionary relationships; while other systems usually use morphological similarities to group similar species into genera, families and other higher level classification, cladistics tries to construct a tree representing the ancestry of organisms and species.

Classical conditioning (also Pavlovian or respondent conditioning) is a form of associative learning that was first demonstrated by Ivan Pavlov. The typical procedure for inducing classical conditioning involves presentations of a neutral stimulus along with a stimulus of some significance. The neutral stimulus could be any event that does not result in an overt behavioral response from the organism under investigation. Pavlov referred to this as a conditioned stimulus (CS).

Classical genetics consists of the techniques and methodologies of genetics that predate the advent of molecular biology. A key discovery of classical genetics in eukaryotes was genetic linkage. The observation that some genes do not segregate independently at meiosis, broke the laws of Mendelian inheritance, and provided science with a way to map characteristics to a location on the chromosomes. Linkage maps are still used today, especially in breeding for plant improvement.

Claude Bernard (July 12, 1813 - February 10, 1878) was a French physiologist. Historian of science I. Bernard Cohen of Harvard University called Bernard "one of the greatest of all men of science". Among many other accomplishments, he was one of the first to suggest the use of blind experiments to ensure the objectivity of scientific observations.

Climate encompasses the statistics of temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, rainfall, atmospheric particle count and numerous other meteorological elements in a given region over long periods of time. Climate can be contrasted to weather, which is the present condition of these same elements over periods up to two weeks. The climate of a location is affected by its latitude, terrain, altitude, ice or snow cover, as well as nearby water bodies and their currents.

Cloning in biology is the process of producing populations of genetically-identical individuals that occurs in nature when organisms such as bacteria, insects or plants reproduce asexually. Cloning in biotechnology refers to processes used to create copies of DNA fragments, cells (cell cloning), or organisms. More generally, the term refers to the production of multiple copies of a product such as digital media or software.

In a broad sense, biological coevolution is "the change of a biological object triggered by the change of a related object". Coevolution can occur at multiple levels of biology: it can be as microscopic as correlated mutations between amino acids in a protein, or as macroscopic as covarying traits between different species in an environment. Each party in a coevolutionary relationship exerts selective pressures on the other, thereby affecting each others' evolution.

Cognition is the scientific term for "the process of thought". Usage of the term varies in different disciplines; for example in psychology and cognitive science it usually refers to an information processing view of an individual's psychological functions. Other interpretations of the meaning of cognition link it to the development of concepts; individual minds, groups, and organizations.

A cognitive architecture is a blueprint for intelligent agents. It proposes (artificial) computational processes that act like certain cognitive systems, most often, like a person, or acts intelligent under some definition. Cognitive architectures form a subset of general agent architectures. The term 'architecture' implies an approach that attempts to model not only behavior, but also structural properties of the modelled system.

Cognitive development is a field of study in neuroscience and psychology focusing on a child's development in terms of information processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill, and other topics in cognitive psychology. A large portion of research has gone into understanding how a child conceptualizes the world. Jean Piaget was a major force in the founding of this field, forming his "theory of cognitive development". Many of his claims have since fallen out of favor.

The fusion of cognitive science and classical ethology into cognitive ethology "emphasizes observing animals under more-or-less natural conditions, with the objective of understanding the evolution, adaptation (function), causation, and development of the species-specific behavioral repertoire" -.

Functionalism is a theory of the mind in contemporary philosophy, developed largely as an alternative to both the identity theory of mind and behaviourism. Its core idea is that mental states (beliefs, desires, being in pain, etc. ) are constituted solely by their functional role - that is, they are causal relations to other mental states, sensory inputs, and behavioral outputs.

Cognitive maps, mental maps, mind maps, cognitive models, or mental models are a type of mental processing composed of a series of psychological transformations by which an individual can acquire, code, store, recall, and decode information about the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in their everyday or metaphorical spatial environment. The credit of the creation of this term is given to Edward Tolman.

Cognitive neuroscience is an academic field concerned with the scientific study of biological substrates underlying cognition, with a specific focus on the neural substrates of mental processes. It addresses the questions of how psychological/cognitive functions are produced by the brain. Cognitive neuroscience is a branch of both psychology and neuroscience, overlapping with disciplines such as physiological psychology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology and neuropsychology .

Cognitive psychology is a discipline within psychology that investigates the internal mental processes of thought such as visual processing, memory, problem solving, and language. The school of thought arising from this approach is known as cognitivism which is interested in how people mentally represent information processing.

The cognitive revolution is the name for an intellectual movement in the 1950s that began what are known collectively as the cognitive sciences. It began in the modern context of greater interdisciplinary communication and research. The relevant areas of interchange were the combination of psychology, anthropology and linguistics with approaches developed within the then-nascent fields of artificial intelligence, computer science and neuroscience.

Cognitive Robotics has been called an oxymoron. The word "robot" comes from a Czech play, Rossum's Universal Robots, where a population of workers were manufactured to perform labor. Popular culture today defines the robot as a mindless worker that simply does what it is programmed to do. Like an elevator, a robot responds to its sensory input with motor output based on rules. A robot is a zombie.

Cognitive science may be concisely defined as the study of the nature of intelligence. It embraces multiple research disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, artificial intelligence, sociology and biology. The term cognitive science was coined by Christopher Longuet-Higgins in his 1973 commentary on the Lighthill report, which concerned the then-current state of Artificial Intelligence research.

In psychology, cognitivism is a theoretical approach in understanding the mind using quantitative, positivist and scientific methods, that describes mental functions as information processing models.

Collective action is the pursuit of a goal or set of goals by more than one person. It is a term which has formulations and theories in many areas of the social sciences.

Colonization, (or Colonisation in British English), occurs whenever any one or more species populate an area. The term, which is derived from the Latin colere, "to inhabit, cultivate, frequent, practice, tend, guard, respect," originally related to humans. However, 19th century biogeographers dominated the term to describe the activities of birds, bacteria, or plant species.

Animal colouration has been a topic of interest and research in biology for well over a century. Colours may be cryptic (functioning as an adaptation allowing the prevention of prey detection; aposematic or may be the result of sexual selection. Colouration may also be function in mimicry of other organisms. The subject may be investigated in terms of both the chemical and physical basis of the colours and the evolution of colouration .

Color vision is the capacity of an organism or machine to distinguish objects based on the wavelengths (or frequency|frequencies) of the light they reflect or emit. The nervous system derives color by comparing the responses to light from the several types of Cone cell|cone photoreceptors in the eye. These cone photoreceptors are sensitive to different portions of the visible spectrum.

A commodity is some good for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market. It is a product that is the same no matter who produces it, such as petroleum, notebook paper, or milk. In other words, copper is copper. The price of copper is universal, and fluctuates daily based on global supply and demand. Stereos, on the other hand, have many levels of quality. And, the better a stereo is [perceived to be], the more it will cost.

The commons refers to resources that are collectively owned. This can include everything from land to software. The process by which the commons are transformed into private property is often termed enclosure.

Common sense (or, when used attributively as an adjective, commonsense, common-sense, or commonsensical), based on a strict construction of the term, consists of what people in common would agree on: that which they "sense" as their common natural understanding.

Direct realism, also known as naïve realism or common sense realism, is a theory of perception that claims that the senses provide us with direct awareness of the external world. In contrast, indirect realism and representationalism claim that we are directly aware only of internal representations of the external world. Idealism, on the other hand, asserts that no world exists apart from mind-dependent ideas.

Communication is a process of transferring information from one entity to another. Communication processes are sign-mediated interactions between at least two agents which share a repertoire of signs and semiotic rules. Communication is commonly defined as "the imparting or interchange of thoughts, opinions, or information by speech, writing, or signs".

Comparative anatomy is the study of similarities and differences in the anatomy of organisms. It is closely related to evolutionary biology and phylogeny (the evolution of species).

Comparative biology is a multidisciplinary approach to understanding organismic diversity that uses natural variation and disparity to elucidate phylogenetic history. Comparative biologists attempt to understand the diversity and complexity of life at all levels-from genes, to anatomy, to behavior-and the critical role of organisms in ecosystems.

Comparative linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness. Genetic relatedness implies a common origin or proto-language, and comparative linguistics aims to construct language families, to reconstruct proto-languages and specify the changes that have resulted in the documented languages.

Psychologists and scientists do not always agree on what should be considered comparative psychology. Taken in its most usual, broad sense, it refers to the study of the behavior and mental life of animals other than human beings. Another possibility is that the emphasis should be placed on cross-species comparisons-including human to animal comparisons.

Competition is a contest between individuals, groups, nations, animals, etc. for territory, a niche, or allocation of resources. It arises whenever two or more parties strive for a goal which cannot be shared. Competition occurs naturally between living organisms which co-exist in the same environment. For example, animals compete over water supplies, food, and mates, etc.

Complex adaptive systems are special cases of complex systems. They are complex in that they are diverse and made up of multiple interconnected elements (and so a part of network science) and adaptive in that they have the capacity to change and learn from experience. The term complex adaptive systems (CAS) was coined at the interdisciplinary Santa Fe Institute (SFI), by John H. Holland, Murray Gell-Mann and others.

In general usage, complexity tends to be used to characterize something with many parts in intricate arrangement. The study of these complex linkages is the main goal of network theory and network science. In science there are at this time a number of approaches to characterizing complexity, many of which are reflected in this article.

In anthropology and archaeology, a complex society is a social formation that is otherwise described as a formative or developed state (i.e. a civilization, to use an old-fashioned term).

Complex systems is a scientific field which studies the common properties of systems that are considered fundamentally complex. Such systems are used to model processes in biology, economics, physics and many other fields. It is also called complex systems theory, complexity science, study of complex systems, sciences of complexity, non-equilibrium physics, and historical physics. The key problems of complex systems are difficulties with their formal modeling and simulation.

Computability refers to the ability to solve a problem in an effective manner. It is a key topic of the field of computability theory within mathematical logic and computer science. The computability of a problem is closely linked to the existence of an algorithm to solve the problem. The most widely-studied form of computability is Turing computability, which is computability via a Turing machine. However, many other forms of computability are studied as well.

Computation is a general term for any type of information processing. This includes phenomena ranging from human thinking to calculations with a more narrow meaning. Computation is a process following a well-defined model that is understood and can be expressed in an algorithm, protocol, network topology, etc. Computation is also a major subject matter of computer science: it investigates what can or cannot be done in a computational manner.

A computational model is a mathematical model in computational science that requires extensive computational resources to study the behavior of a complex system by computer simulation. The system under study is often a complex nonlinear system for which simple, intuitive analytical solutions are not readily available.

A computer simulation, a computer model, or a computational model is a computer program, or network of computers, that attempts to simulate an abstract model of a particular system. Computer simulations have become a useful part of mathematical modeling of many natural systems in physics, astrophysics, chemistry and biology, human systems in economics, psychology, and social science and in the process of engineering new technology, to gain insight into the operation of those.

In philosophy, the computational theory of mind is the view that the human mind is best conceived as an information processing system and that thought is a form of computation. The theory was proposed in its modern form by Hilary Putnam in 1961 and developed by Jerry Fodor in the 60s and 70s. This view is common in modern cognitive psychology and is presumed by theorists of evolutionary psychology.

Computer music is a term that was originally used within academia to describe a field of study relating to the applications of computing technology in music composition; particularly that stemming from the Western art music tradition. It includes the theory and application of new and existing technologies in music, such as sound synthesis, digital signal processing, sound design, sonic diffusion, acoustics, and psychoacoustics.

A computer simulation, a computer model, or a computational model is a computer program, or network of computers, that attempts to simulate an abstract model of a particular system. Computer simulations have become a useful part of mathematical modeling of many natural systems in physics, astrophysics, chemistry and biology, human systems in economics, psychology, and social science and in the process of engineering new technology, to gain insight into the operation of those.

There are two prevailing theories in contemporary philosophy which attempt to explain the nature of concepts . The representational theory of mind proposes that concepts are mental representations, while the semantic theory of concepts holds that they are abstract objects. Ideas are taken to be concepts, although abstract concepts do not necessarily appear to the mind as images as some ideas do. Many philosophers consider concepts to be a fundamental ontological category of being.

In economics and business decision-making, sunk costs are retrospective (past) costs which have already been incurred and cannot be recovered. Sunk costs are sometimes contrasted with prospective costs which are future costs that may be incurred or changed if an action is taken. Both retrospective and prospective costs may be either fixed (that is, they are not dependent on the volume of economic activity, however measured) or variable (dependent on volume).

Conflict resolution is a range of methods for alleviating or eliminating sources of conflict. The term "conflict resolution" is sometimes used interchangeably with the term dispute resolution or alternative dispute resolution. Processes of conflict resolution generally include negotiation, mediation, and diplomacy.

Connectionism is a set of approaches in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience and philosophy of mind, that models mental or behavioral phenomena as the emergent processes of interconnected networks of simple units. There are many forms of connectionism, but the most common forms use neural network models.

Consciousness is subjective experience or awareness or wakefulness or the executive control system of the mind. It is an umbrella term that may refer to a variety of mental phenomena . Although humans realize what everyday experiences are, consciousness refuses to be defined, philosophers note. Consciousness in medicine (e.g. , anaesthesiology) is simply regarded as wakefulness and is assessed by observing a patient's alertness and responsiveness.

Consensus in the English language is defined firstly as unanimous or general agreement; and secondly group solidarity of belief or sentiment. Ideally, achieving consensus requires serious treatment of every group member's considered opinion. Those who wish to take up some action want to hear those who oppose it, because they count on the fact that the ensuing debate will improve the consensus.

Conservation biology is the scientific study of the nature and status of Earth's biodiversity with the aim of protecting species, their habitats, and ecosystems from excessive rates of extinction. It is an interdisciplinary subject drawing on sciences, economics, and the practice of natural resource management.

Consilience, or the unity of knowledge (literally a "jumping together" of knowledge), has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos, inherently comprehensible by logical process, a vision at odds with mystical views in many cultures that surrounded the Hellenes. The rational view was recovered during the high Middle Ages, separated from theology during the Renaissance and found its apogee in the Age of Enlightenment.

Conspicuous consumption is a term used to describe the lavish spending on goods and services acquired mainly for the purpose of displaying income or wealth. In the mind of a conspicuous consumer, such display serves as a means of attaining or maintaining social status. A very similar but more colloquial term is "keeping up with the Joneses". Invidious consumption, a more specialized term, refers to consumption deliberately intended to cause envy.

Biological constraints are factors which make populations resistant to evolutionary change. Constraint has played an important role in the development of such ideas as homology and body plans.

see also Constructivism (learning theory) Constructionist learning is inspired by the constructivist theory that individual learners construct mental models to understand the world around them. However, constructionism holds that learning can happen most effectively when people are also active in making tangible objects in the real world. In this sense, constructionism is connected with experiential learning and builds on some of the ideas of Jean Piaget.

Constructive realism is a branch of philosophy, specifically the philosophy of science. It was developed in the late 1980s by Friedrich Wallner (also Fritz Wallner) in Vienna. In his paper abstract on constructive realism, Wallner describes it as follows: "Traditional convictions regarding science (such as universalism, necessity and eternal validity) are currently in doubt. Relativism seems to destroy scientific claims to rationality.

Constructivist epistemology is an epistemological perspective in philosophy about the nature of scientific knowledge. Constructivists maintain that scientific knowledge is constructed by scientists and not discovered from the world. Constructivism believes that there is no single valid methodology and there are other methodologies for social science: qualitative research.

Consumerism is the equation of personal happiness with consumption and the purchase of material possessions. The term is often associated with criticisms of consumption starting with Thorstein Veblen or, more recently by a movement called Enoughism. Veblen's subject of examination, the newly emergent middle class arising at the turn of the twentieth century, comes to full fruition by the end of the twentieth century through the process of globalization.

In common usage a contingency is a conditional response plan made in preparation for various future circumstances including the unanticipated. Calling General Petraeus for advice if that happens is a contingency. In philosophy and logic, contingency is the status of propositions that are not necessarily true or necessarily false. Here are four classes of propositions, some of which overlap: necessarily true propositions, which must be true, no matter what the circumstances are or could be .

Agreement is said to be reached when an offer capable of immediate acceptance is met with a "mirror image" acceptance (ie, an unqualified acceptance). The parties must have the necessary capacity to contract and the contract must not be either trifling, indeterminate, impossible or illegal. Contract law is based on the principle expressed in the Latin phrase pacta sunt servanda (usually translated "pacts must be kept", but more literally "agreements are to be kept").

Agreement is said to be reached when an offer capable of immediate acceptance is met with a "mirror image" acceptance (ie, an unqualified acceptance). The parties must have the necessary capacity to contract and the contract must not be either trifling, indeterminate, impossible or illegal. Contract law is based on the principle expressed in the Latin phrase pacta sunt servanda (usually translated "pacts must be kept", but more literally "agreements are to be kept").

In classical logic, a contradiction consists of a logical incompatibility between two or more propositions. It occurs when the propositions, taken together, yield two conclusions which form the logical inversions of each other. Illustrating a general tendency in applied logic, Aristotle’s law of noncontradiction states that “One cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same respect and at the same time.

A convention is a set of agreed, stipulated or generally accepted standards, norms, social norms or criteria, often taking the form of a custom. Certain types of rules or customs may become law and regulatory legislation may be introduced to formalise or enforce the convention (e.g. laws which determine which side of the road vehicles must be driven). In a social context, a convention may retain the character of an "unwritten" law of custom (e.g.

Convergent evolution describes the acquisition of the same biological trait in unrelated lineages. The wing is a classic example of convergent evolution in action. Although their last common ancestor did not have wings, birds and bats do, and are capable of powered flight. The wings are similar in construction, due to the physical constraints imposed upon wing shape.

Cooperation, co-operation, or coöperation is the process of working or acting together, which can be accomplished by both intentional and non-intentional agents. In its simplest form it involves things working in harmony, side by side, while in its more complicated forms, it can involve something as complex as the inner workings of a human being or even the social patterns of a nation. It is the alternative to working separately in competition.

In game theory, a correlated equilibrium is a solution concept that is more general than the well known Nash equilibrium. It was first discussed by mathematician Robert Aumann (1974). The idea is that each player chooses her action according to her observation of the value of the same public signal. A strategy assigns an action to every possible observation a player can make.

Carl Erich Correns was a German botanist and geneticist, who is notable primarily for his independent discovery of the principles of heredity, and for his rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's earlier paper on that subject, which he achieved simultaneously but independently of the botanists Erich Tschermak von Seysenegg and Hugo de Vries.

Corvidae is a cosmopolitan family of oscine passerine birds that contains the crows, ravens, rooks, jackdaws, jays, magpies, treepies, choughs and nutcrackers. The common English name used is corvids (more technically) or the crow family (more informally), and there are over 120 species. The genus Corvus, including the crows and ravens, makes up over a third of the entire family.

Cosmic evolution is the scientific study of universal change. It is an intellectual framework that offers a grand synthesis of the many varied changes in the assembly and composition of radiation, matter, and life throughout the history of the universe.

Cosmology is the study of the Universe in its totality, and by extension, humanity's place in it. Though the word cosmology is recent (first used in 1730 in Christian Wolff's Cosmologia Generalis), study of the universe has a long history involving science, philosophy, esotericism, and religion.

In business, retail, and accounting, a cost is the value of money that has been used up to produce something, and hence is not available for use anymore. In economics, a cost is an alternative that is given up as a result of a decision. In business, the cost may be one of acquisition, in which case the amount of money expended to acquire it is counted as cost. In this case, money is the input that is gone in order to acquire the thing.

A counterfactual conditional, subjunctive conditional, or remote conditional, is a conditional (or "if-then") statement indicating what would be the case if its antecedent were true. This is to be contrasted with an indicative conditional, which indicates what is (in fact) the case if its antecedent is (in fact) true.

The coyote (Canis latrans), the American jackal or the prairie wolf, is a species of canid found throughout North and Central America, ranging from Panama in the south, north through Mexico, the United States and Canada. It occurs as far north as Alaska and all but the northernmost portions of Canada. There are currently 19 recognized subspecies, with 16 in Canada, Mexico and the United States, and 3 in Central America.

Creationism refers to the religious belief that humanity, life, the Earth, and the universe were created in some form by a supernatural being or beings, commonly a single deity. However the term is more commonly used to refer to religiously motivated rejection of natural biological processes, in particular evolution, as an explanation accounting for the history, diversity, and complexity of life on earth.

The creation-evolution controversy (also termed the creation vs. evolution debate or the origins debate) is a recurring theological and cultural-political dispute about the origins of the Earth, humanity, life, and the universe,

Creativity is a mental and social process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts. Creativity is fueled by the process of either conscious or unconscious insight. An alternative conception of creativeness is that it is simply the act of making something new.

Francis Harry Compton Crick OM FRS (8 June 1916 - 28 July 2004), was a British molecular biologist, physicist, and neuroscientist, and most noted for being one of two co-discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953, together with James D. Watson.

Societies define crime as the breach of one or more rules or laws for which some governing authority via mechanisms such as "police power" may ultimately prescribe a conviction. While every crime violates the law, not every violation of the law counts as a crime; for example: breaches of contract and of other civil law may rank as "offences" or as "infractions".

Criminal justice is the system of practices and institutions of governments directed at upholding social control, deterring and mitigating crime, and sanctioning those who violate laws with criminal penalties and rehabilitation efforts. The rights of the accused are rights that protect those accused of crime.

Crustaceans (Crustacea) are a very large group of arthropods, comprising almost 52,000 described species, and are usually treated as a subphylum . They include various familiar animals, such as crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, krill and barnacles. The majority of them are aquatic, living in either marine or fresh water environments, but a few groups have adapted to life on land, such as terrestrial crabs, terrestrial hermit crabs and woodlice.

Cultural determinism is the belief that the culture in which we are raised determines who we are at emotional and behavioral levels. This supports the theory that environmental influences dominate who we are instead of biologically inherited traits. Yet another way of looking at the concept of cultural determinism is to contrast it with the idea of environmental determinism.

Sociocultural evolution(ism) is an umbrella term for theories of cultural evolution and social evolution, describing how cultures and societies have developed over time. Although such theories typically provide models for understanding the relationship between technologies, social structure, the values of a society, and how and why they change with time, they vary as to the extent to which they describe specific mechanisms of variation and social change.

Cultural selection theory is a scientific discipline that explores sociological and cultural evolution the same way that Darwinian selection theory is used to explain biological evolution. This theory is a logical extension of memetics. In memetics, memes, much like biology's genes, are informational units passed through generations of culture.

Curiosity is an emotion related to natural inquisitive behaviour such as exploration, investigation, and learning, evident by observation in human and many animal species. The term can also be used to denote the behavior itself being caused by the emotion of curiosity. As this emotion represents a drive to know new things, curiosity is the fuel of science and all other disciplines of human study.

Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert Cuvier was a French naturalist and zoologist. Of humble working class origins, he belonged to a new class of self-made scholars who worked their way to the top of academe. Cuvier was a major figure in natural sciences research in the early 19th century, and was instrumental in establishing the fields of comparative anatomy and paleontology by comparing living animals with fossils.

Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems. Cybernetics is closely related to control theory and systems theory. Both in its origins and in its evolution in the second-half of the 20th century, cybernetics is equally applicable to physical and social (that is, language-based) systems.

Cytogenetics is a branch of genetics that is concerned with the study of the structure and function of the cell, especially the chromosomes. It includes routine analysis of G-Banded chromosomes, other cytogenetic banding techniques, as well as molecular cytogenetics such as fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) and comparative genomic hybridization (CGH).

Dance is a sport and art form that generally refers to movement of the body, usually rhythmic and to music, used as a form of expression, social interaction or presented in a spiritual or performance setting. Dance may also to regarded as a form of nonverbal communication between humans, and is also performed by other animals. Gymnastics, figure skating and synchronized swimming are sports dance disciplines, while martial arts kata are often compared to dances.

Sir D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson was a biologist, mathematician, and classics scholar. A pioneering mathematical biologist, he is mainly remembered as the author of the 1917 book, On Growth and Form, an influential work of striking originality and elegance. Peter Medawar, the 1960 Nobel Laureate in Medicine, called it "the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue".

Charles Robert Darwin FRS (12 February 1809 - 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist who realised and presented compelling evidence that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors, through the process he called natural selection.

Darwinism is a term used for various movements or concepts related to ideas of transmutation of species or evolution, including ideas with no connection to the work of Charles Darwin. The meaning of Darwinism has changed over time, and varies depending on who is using the term. In modern usage, particularly in the United States, Darwinism is often used by creationists as a pejorative term.

Data are pieces of information that represent the qualitative or quantitative attributes of a variable or set of variables. Data (plural of "datum", which is seldom used) are typically the results of measurements and can be the basis of graphs, images, or observations of a set of variables. Data are often viewed as the lowest level of abstraction from which information and knowledge are derived.

David Henry Peter Maybury-Lewis was an anthropologist, ethnologist of lowland South America, activist for indigenous peoples' human rights and professor emeritus of Harvard University. Born in Hyderabad, Pakistan, Maybury-Lewis attended Oxford University, at which he earned a D. Phil. In 1960, he joined the Harvard faculty, and was Edward C. Henderson Professor of Anthropology there from 1966 until he retired in 2004.

David Courtnay Marr was a British neuroscientist and psychologist. Marr integrated results from psychology, artificial intelligence, and neurophysiology into new models of visual processing. He is acknowledged as a founder of the discipline of Computational Neuroscience. Born in Woodford, Essex, and educated at Rugby School; he was admitted at Trinity College, Cambridge on 1 October 1963 (having been awarded the Lees Knowles Rugby Exhibition).

Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL (born 26 March 1941) is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and popular science author. He was formerly Professor for Public Understanding of Science at Oxford and was a fellow of New College, Oxford. Dawkins came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and introduced the term meme.

Death is the termination of the biological functions that define a living organism. It refers to both a particular event and to the condition that results thereby. The true nature of the latter has for millennia been a central concern of the world's religious traditions and of philosophical enquiry. Many religions maintain a belief in either some kind of afterlife or rebirth. The effect of physical death on any possible mind or soul remains for many an open question.

Deception (also called beguilement, deceit, bluff, or subterfuge) is the act of convincing another to believe information that is not true, or not the whole truth as in certain types of half-truths. Deception involves concepts like propaganda, distraction and/or concealment. Fiction, while sometimes manipulative, is not a deception unless it is portrayed as partially truthful or as the whole truth.

Decision making can be regarded as an outcome of mental processes leading to the selection of a course of action among several alternatives. Every decision making process produces a final choice. The output can be an action or an opinion of choice.

Decision theory in mathematics and statistics is concerned with identifying the values, uncertainties and other issues relevant in a given decision and the resulting optimal decision. It is very closely related to the field of game theory.

Societal collapse broadly includes both quite abrupt societal failures typified by the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, the Mayan Civilization collapse and others of the type, as well as more extended grinding declines of superpowers like the Roman empire in Western Europe and the Han Dynasty in East Asia. The great irony expressed by these and others like them is that civilizations that seem ideally designed to creatively solve problems find themselves doing so self-destructively.

Deconstruction is the name given by French philosopher Jacques Derrida to an approach (whether in philosophy, literary analysis, or in other fields) which rigorously pursues the meaning of a text to the point of undoing the oppositions on which it is apparently founded, and to the point of showing that those foundations are irreducibly complex, unstable or impossible.

In evolutionary developmental biology, the concept of deep homology is used to describe cases where growth and differentiation processes are governed by genetic mechanisms that are homologous and deeply conserved across a wide range of species. Textbook examples common to metazoa include the homeotic genes that control differentiation along major body axes, and pax genes involved in the development of the eye and other sensory organs.

In linguistics, and especially the study of syntax, the deep structure of a linguistic expression is a theoretical construct that seeks to unify several related structures. For example, the sentences "Pat loves Chris" and "Chris is loved by Pat" mean roughly the same thing and use similar words. Some linguists, in particular Noam Chomsky, have tried to account for this similarity by positing that these two sentences are distinct surface forms that derive from a common deep structure.

Defeasible reasoning is a kind of reasoning that is based on reasons that are defeasible, as opposed to the indefeasible reasons of deductive logic. Defeasible reasoning is a kind of non-demonstrative reasoning, where the reasoning does not produce a full, complete, or final demonstration of a claim, i.e. , where fallibility and corrigibility of a conclusion are acknowledged.

The idea of degeneration had significant influence on science, art and politics from the 1850s to the 1950s. The social theory developed consequently from Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution. Evolution meant that mankind's development was no longer fixed and certain, but could change and evolve or degenerate into an unknown future, possibly a bleak future that clashes with the analogy between evolution and civilization as a progressive positive direction.

In biology, a deme is a term for a local population of organisms of one species that actively interbreed with one another and share a distinct gene pool. When demes are isolated for a very long time they can become distinct subspecies or species. In evolutionary computation a "deme" often refers to any isolated sub-population subjected to selection as a unit rather than as individuals.

Democracy is a form of goverment ruled by the people.

The Demographic transition model (DTM) is a model used to represent the process of explaining the transformation of countries from high birth rates and high death rates to low birth rates and low death rates as part of the economic development of a country from a pre-industrial to an industrialized economy.

Denazification was an Allied initiative to rid German and Austrian society, culture, press, economy, judiciary, and politics of any remnants of the Nazi regime. It was carried out specifically by removing those involved from positions of influence and by disbanding or rendering impotent the organizations associated with it. The program of denazification was launched after the end of the Second World War and was solidified by the Potsdam Agreement.

Daniel Clement Dennett is a prominent American philosopher whose research centers on philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies, the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and a University Professor at Tufts University. Dennett is also a noted atheist and advocate of the Brights movement.

Jacques Derrida (15 July 1930 - 8 October 2004) was a French philosopher born in Algeria, who is known as the founder of deconstruction. His voluminous work had a profound impact upon literary theory and continental philosophy. Derrida's best known work is Of Grammatology.

René Descartes, (31 March 1596 - 11 February 1650), also known as Renatus Cartesius, was a French philosopher, mathematician, physicist, and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the "Father of Modern Philosophy", and much of subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which continue to be studied closely to this day.

Design is the planning that lays the basis for the making of every object or system. It can be used both as a noun and as a verb and, in a broader way, it means applied arts and engineering . As a verb, "to design" refers to the process of originating and developing a plan for a product, structure, system, or component with intention. As a noun, "a design" is used for either the final (solution) plan (e.g.

Determinism is the view that every event, including human cognition, behavior, decision, and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. With numerous historical debates, many varieties and philosophical positions on the subject of determinism exist from traditions throughout the world.

Developmental biology is the study of the process by which organisms grow and develop. Modern developmental biology studies the genetic control of cell growth, differentiation and "morphogenesis," which is the process that gives rise to tissues, organs and anatomy. Developmental biology is that branch of life science, which deals with the study of the process by which organisms grow and develop.

Developmental psychology, also known as human development, is the scientific study of systematic psychological changes that occur in human beings over the course of the life span. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence and adult development, aging, and the entire life span.

In biology the developmental systems theory (DST) is a collection of models of biological development and evolution that argue that the emphasis the modern evolutionary synthesis places on genes and natural selection as explanation of living structures and processes is inadequate.

In biology the developmental systems theory (DST) is a collection of models of biological development and evolution that argue that the emphasis the modern evolutionary synthesis places on genes and natural selection as explanation of living structures and processes is inadequate.

Hugo Marie de Vries was a Dutch botanist and one of the first geneticists. He is known chiefly for suggesting the concept of genes, rediscovering the laws of heredity in the 1890s while unaware of Gregor Mendel's work, for introducing the term "mutation", and for developing a mutation theory of evolution.

John Dewey (October 20, 1859 - June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose thoughts and ideas have been highly influential in the United States and around the world. Dewey, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, is recognized as one of the founders of the philosophical school of pragmatism.

Dialectic (also called dialectics or the dialectical method) is a method of argument, which has been central to both Eastern and Western philosophy since ancient times. The word "dialectic" originates in Ancient Greece, and was made popular by Plato's Socratic dialogues. Dialectic is rooted in the ordinary practice of a dialogue between two people who hold different ideas and wish to persuade each other.

Dialectic (also called dialectics or the dialectical method) is a method of argument, which has been central to both Eastern and Western philosophy since ancient times. The word "dialectic" originates in Ancient Greece, and was made popular by Plato's Socratic dialogues. Dialectic is rooted in the ordinary practice of a dialogue between two people who hold different ideas and wish to persuade each other.

A dialogue (sometimes spelled dialog) is a conversation between two or more people. It is also a literary form in which two or more parties engage in a discussion.

In nutrition, the diet is the sum of food consumed by a person or other organism. Dietary habits are the habitual decisions an individual or culture makes when choosing what foods to eat. Although humans are omnivores, each culture holds some food preferences and some food taboos. Individual dietary choices may be more or less healthy.

In developmental biology, cellular differentiation is the process by which a less specialized cell becomes a more specialized cell type. Differentiation occurs numerous times during the development of a multicellular organism as the organism changes from a single zygote to a complex system of tissues and cell types. Differentiation is a common process in adults as well: adult stem cells divide and create fully-differentiated daughter cells during tissue repair and during normal cell turnover.

Wasps of the genus Sphex (commonly known as digger wasps) are cosmopolitan predators of the family Sphecidae that sting and paralyze prey insects. There are over 130 known digger wasp species. In preparation for egg laying they construct a protected "nest" (some species dig nests in the ground, while others use pre-existing holes) and then stock it with captured insects. Typically the prey are left alive, but paralyzed by wasp toxins. The wasps lay their eggs in the provisioned nest.

In psychology, discrimination learning is the process by which animals or people learn to make different responses to different stimuli.

A disease or medical condition is an abnormal condition of an organism that impairs bodily functions, associated with specific symptoms and signs. It may be caused by external factors, such as invading organisms, or it may be caused by internal dysfunctions, such as autoimmune diseases.

In logic and mathematics, or, also known as logical disjunction or inclusive disjunction, is a logical operator that results in true whenever one or more of its operands are true. E.g. in this context, "A or B" is true if A is true, or if B is true, or if both A and B are true. In grammar, or is a coordinating conjunction. In ordinary language "or" sometimes has the meaning of exclusive disjunction.

Biological dispersal refers to a species movement away from an existing population or away from the parent organism. Through simply moving from one habitat patch to another, the dispersal of an individual has consequences not only for individual fitness, but also for population dynamics, population genetics, and species distribution.

A disposition is a habit, a preparation, a state of readiness, or a tendency to act in a specified way. The terms dispositional belief and occurrent belief refer, in the former case, to a belief that is held in the mind but not currently being considered, and in the latter case, to a belief that is currently being considered by the mind. In Bourdieu's theory of fields dispositions are the natural tendencies of each individual to take on a certain position in any field.

Distributive justice concerns what some consider to be socially just with respect to the allocation of goods in a society. Thus, a community in which incidental inequalities in outcome do not arise would be considered a society guided by the principles of distributive justice. Allocation of goods takes into thought the total amount of goods to be handed out, the process on how they in the civilization are going to dispense, and the pattern of division.

Division of labour or specialisation is the specialisation of cooperative labour in specific, circumscribed tasks and roles, intended to increase the productivity of labour. Historically the growth of a more and more complex division of labour is closely associated with the growth of total output and trade, the rise of capitalism, and of the complexity of industrialisation processes.

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms and some viruses. The main role of DNA molecules is the long-term storage of information. DNA is often compared to a set of blueprints or a recipe, or a code, since it contains the instructions needed to construct other components of cells, such as proteins and RNA molecules.

DNA profiling (also called DNA testing, DNA typing, or genetic fingerprinting) is a technique employed by forensic scientists to assist in the identification of individuals on the basis of their respective DNA profiles. DNA profiles are encrypted sets of numbers that reflect a person's DNA makeup, which can also be used as the person's identifier. DNA profiling should not be confused with full genome sequencing.

Theodosius Grygorovych Dobzhansky, also known as T. G. Dobzhansky, and sometimes Anglicized to Theodore Dobzhansky was a noted geneticist and evolutionary biologist, and a central figure in the field of evolutionary biology for his work in shaping the unifying modern evolutionary synthesis. Dobzhansky was born in Ukraine (then part of Imperial Russia) and emigrated to the United States in 1927.

The dog is a domesticated form of the Gray Wolf, a member of the Canidae family of the order Carnivora. The term is used for both feral and pet varieties. The domestic dog has been one of the most widely kept working and companion animals in human history. Amongst canine enthusiasts, the word "dog" may also mean the male of a canine species, as opposed to the word "bitch" (the female of the species).

W. V. O. Quine's paper "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", published in 1951, is one of the most celebrated papers of twentieth century philosophy in the analytic tradition. According to Harvard professor of philosophy Peter Godfrey-Smith, this "paper [is] sometimes regarded as the most important in all of twentieth-century philosophy". The paper is an attack on two central parts of the logical positivists' philosophy.

Louis Antoine Marie Joséph Dollo (1857-1931) was a French-born Belgian palaeontologist, known for formulating Dollo's law. In 1878, he supervised the excavation of the famous, multiple Iguanodon find, at Bernissart, Belgium. Recently, the stochastic Dollo model is being used to analyze matrix of cognates statistically. In linguistics, this model permits newly coined cognate to arise only once on a tree languages.

Domain specificity is a theoretical position in cognitive science that argues that many aspects of cognition are supported by specialized, presumably evolutionarily specified, learning devices. The position is a close relative of modularity of mind, but is considered more general in that it does not necessarily entail all the assumptions of Fodorian modularity (e.g. , informational encapsulation). Instead, it is properly described as a variant of psychological nativism.

Domestication or taming refers to the process whereby a population of animals or plants, through a process of selection, becomes accustomed to human provision and control. A defining characteristic of domestication is artificial selection by humans. Some species such as the Asian Elephant, numerous members of which have for many centuries been used as working animals, are not domesticated because they have not normally been bred under human control, even though they have been commonly tamed.

Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch was a German biologist and philosopher from Bad Kreuznach. He is most noted for his early experimental work in embryology and for his neo-vitalist philosophy of entelechy.

Drosophila is a genus of small flies, belonging to the family Drosophilidae, whose members are often called "fruit flies" or more appropriately (though less frequently) pomace flies, vinegar flies, or wine flies, a reference to the characteristic of many species to linger around overripe or rotting fruit.

In philosophy of mind, dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, which begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical. Ideas on mind/body dualism originate at least as far back as Zarathushtra. Plato and Aristotle deal with speculations as to the existence of an incorporeal soul that bore the faculties of intelligence and wisdom.

The Duhem-Quine thesis (also called the Duhem-Quine problem) is that it is impossible to test a scientific hypothesis in isolation, because an empirical test of the hypothesis requires one or more background assumptions (also called auxiliary assumptions or auxiliary hypotheses). The hypothesis in question is by itself incapable of making predictions. Instead, the consequences of the hypothesis typically rest on background assumptions from which to derive predictions.

David Émile Durkheim (April 15, 1858 - November 15, 1917) was a French sociologist and pioneer in the development of modern sociology and anthropology. His work and editorship of the first journal of sociology, L'Année Sociologique, as well as his creation of the first European department of sociology, helped establish sociology within academia as an accepted social science.

A duty to rescue is a concept in tort law that arises in a number of cases, describing a circumstance in which a party can be held liable for failing to come to the rescue of another party in peril.

Sir John Carew Eccles, AC FRS FRACP FRSNZ FAAS (27 January 1903 - 2 May 1997) was an Australian neurophysiologist who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the synapse. He shared the prize together with Andrew Fielding Huxley and Alan Lloyd Hodgkin.

Ecodynamics is a part of applied economics. It covers the lore of the monetary value, the usage of money and the money flow. It deals with labour and capital.

Ecological anthropology is a subfield of anthropology that deals with human-environmental relationships over time and space. It investigates the ways that a population shapes its environment and the subsequent manners in which these relations form the population’s social, economic, and political life . Ecological anthropology applies a systems approach (Ellen 1982; Hardesty 1997; McGee 1996) to the study of the interrelationship between culture and the environment.

An ecological crisis occurs when the environment of a species or a population changes in a way that destabilizes its continued survival. There are many possible causes of such crises: It may be that the environment quality degrades compared to the species' needs, after a change of abiotic ecological factor (for example, an increase of temperature, less significant rainfalls).

Ecological economics is a transdisciplinary field of academic research that aims to address the interdependence and coevolution of human economies and natural ecosystems over time and space. It is distinguished from environmental economics, which is the mainstream economic analysis of the environment, by its treatment of the economy as a subsystem of the ecosystem and its emphasis upon preserving natural capital.

Ecological succession, a fundamental concept in ecology, refers to more-or-less predictable and orderly changes in the composition or structure of an ecological community. Succession may be initiated either by formation of new, unoccupied habitat or by some form of disturbance of an existing community.

Ecological validity is a form of validity in a research study. For a research study to possess ecological validity, the methods, materials and setting of the study must approximate the real-life situation that is under investigation. Unlike internal and external validity, ecological validity is not necessary to the overall validity of a study.

The science of ecology includes everything from global processes (above), the study of various marine and terrestrial habitats (middle) to individual interspecific interactions like predation and pollination (below). Ecology is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the distribution and abundance of organisms and their interactions with their environment.

Law and Economics, or economic analysis of law, is an approach to legal theory that applies methods of economics to law. It includes the use of economic concepts to explain the effects of laws, to assess which legal rules are economically efficient, and to predict which legal rules will be promulgated.

Economic anthropology is a scholarly field that attempts to explain human economic behavior using the tools of both economics and anthropology. It is practiced by anthropologists and has a complex relationship with economics. There are three major paradigms within the field of economic anthropology: formalism, substantivism and culturalism.

Economic growth is an increase in activity in an economy. It is often measured as the rate of change of gross domestic product (GDP). Economic growth refers only to the quantity of goods and services produced; it says nothing about the way in which they are produced.

Economic imperialism in contemporary economics refers to economic analysis of seemingly non-economic aspects of life, such as crime, law, irrational behavior, the family, prejudice, politics, sociology, religion, war, science and research.

Economic inequality comprises all disparities in the distribution of economic assets and income. The term typically refers to inequality among individuals and groups within a society, but can also refer to inequality among countries. Economic Inequality generally refers to equality of outcome, and is related to the idea of equality of opportunity. It is a contested issue whether economic inequality is a positive or negative phenomenon, both on utilitarian and moral grounds.

See Homo Oeconomicus for the journal so titled. Homo economicus, or Economic human, is the concept in some economic theories of humans as rational and broadly self-interested actors who have the ability to make judgments towards their subjectively defined ends.

Information economics or the economics of information is a branch of microeconomic theory that studies how information affects an economy and economic decisions. Information has special characteristics. It is easy to create but hard to trust. It is easy to spread but hard to control. It influences many decisions. These special characteristics (as compared with other types of goods) complicate many standard economic theories.

The knowledge economy is a term that refers either to an economy of knowledge focused on the production and management of knowledge in the frame of economic constraints, or to a knowledge-based economy. In the second meaning, more frequently used, it refers to the use of knowledge technologies to produce economic benefits. The phrase was popularized if not invented by Peter Drucker as the title of Chapter 12 in his book The Age of Discontinuity.

The family, although recognized as fundamental from Adam Smith on, received little systematic treatment in economics before the 1950s. A significant exception was Thomas Malthus's model of population growth. The work of Gary Becker and others initiated contemporary research on family economics with the application and extension of microeconomic theory and empirical methods.

Educational research is research conducted to investigate behavioral patterns in pupils, students, teachers and other participants in schools and other educational institutions. Such research is often conducted by examining work products such as documents and standardized test results. As with other social sciences, educational researchers use a variety of qualitative and quantitative research methods.

Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 - 18 April 1955) was a theoretical physicist.

An electric fish is a fish that can generate electric fields. It is said to be electrogenic; a fish that has the ability to detect electric fields is said to be electroreceptive. All fish that are electrogenic are also electroreceptive. Electric fish species can be found both in the sea and in freshwater rivers of South America and Africa.

Electrochemistry is a branch of chemistry that studies chemical reactions which take place in a solution at the interface of an electron conductor and an ionic conductor, and which involve electron transfer between the electrode and the electrolyte or species in solution. If a chemical reaction is driven by an external applied voltage, as in electrolysis, or if a voltage is created by a chemical reaction as in a battery, it is an electrochemical reaction.

An electron is a subatomic particle that carries a negative electric charge. It has no known substructure and is believed to be a point particle. An electron has a mass that is approximately 1836 times less than that of the proton. The intrinsic angular momentum of the electron is a half integer value of 1/2, which means that it is a fermion.

Electroreception, sometimes called electroception, is the biological ability to perceive electrical impulses. It is particularly common among aquatic creatures since salt water is a much more efficient conductor than air. It is used for electrolocation (detecting objects) and for electrocommunication. There are no known cases of mimicry involving electroreception, though it is theoretically possible.

Caenorhabditis elegans is a free-living, transparent nematode (roundworm), about 1 mm in length, which lives in temperate soil environments. Research into the molecular and developmental biology of C. elegans was begun in 1974 by Sydney Brenner and it has since been used extensively as a model organism.

Eliminative materialism (also called eliminativism) is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. Its primary claim is that people's common-sense understanding of the mind is false and that certain classes of mental states that most people believe in do not exist. Some eliminativists argue that no coherent neural basis will be found for many everyday psychological concepts such as belief or desire, since they are poorly defined.

Mary Anne (Mary Ann, Marian) Evans (22 November 1819 - 22 December 1880), better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist. She was one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. Her novels, largely set in provincial England, are well known for their realism and psychological insight. She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure that her works were taken seriously.

Else Frenkel-Brunswik was a Polish-Austrian psychologist.

Philosophers, cognitive scientists and artificial intelligence researchers who study embodied cognition and the embodied mind believe that the nature of the human mind is largely determined by the form of the human body. They argue that all aspects of cognition, such as ideas, thoughts, concepts and categories are shaped by aspects of the body.

Embryology is the study of the development of an embryo. An embryo is defined as any organism in an early stage well before birth or hatching, or in plants, before germination occurs. Embryology refers to the study of the development immediately after conception, and therefore the fertilized egg cell and its differentiation into tissues and organs during the first 8 weeks, after 8 weeks the embryo becomes a fetus.

Induction, in biology, refers to the initiation or cause of a change or process, such as the production of a specific morphogenetic effect in the developing embryo. As such, it may refer to induction in the subject of: Morphogenesis Regulation of gene expression Cellular differentiation Enzyme induction

In philosophy, systems theory and science, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems.

Emergent evolution is the hypothesis that, in the course of evolution, some entirely new properties, such as life and consciousness, appear at certain critical points, usually because of an unpredictable rearrangement of the already existing entities. The concept has influenced the development of systems theory and complexity theory.

An emotion is a mental and physiological state associated with a wide variety of feelings, thoughts, and behavior. Emotions are subjective experiences, often associated with mood, temperament, personality, and disposition. The English word 'emotion' is derived from the French word émouvoir. This is based on the Latin emovere, where e- (variant of ex-) means 'out' and movere means 'move'. The related term "motivation" is also derived from movere.

In philosophy, empiricism is a theory of knowledge which asserts that knowledge arises from experience. Empiricism is one of several competing views about how we know "things," part of the branch of philosophy called epistemology, or "the Theory of Knowledge".

In philosophy, empiricism is a theory of knowledge which asserts that knowledge arises from experience. Empiricism is one of several competing views about how we know "things," part of the branch of philosophy called epistemology, or "the Theory of Knowledge".

Endocrinology is a branch of medicine dealing with disorder of the endocrine system and its specific secretions called hormones, the integration of developmental events such as proliferation, growth, and differentiation and the coordination of metabolism, respiration, excretion, movement, reproduction, and sensory perception depend on chemical cues, substances synthesised and secreted by specialized cells.

Entrepreneurship is the practice of starting new organizations or revitalizing mature organizations, particularly new businesses generally in response to identified opportunities. Entrepreneurship is often a difficult undertaking, as a vast majority of new businesses fail. Entrepreneurial activities are substantially different depending on the type of organization that is being started.

The first law of thermodynamics, formalized through the heat-friction experiments of James Joule in 1843, deals with the concept of energy, which is conserved in all processes; the first law, however, lacks in its ability to quantify the effects of friction and dissipation.

Swenson's Law of Maximum Entropy Production (MEP or LMEP) can be formulated as follows: "A system will select the path or assemblage of paths out of available paths that minimizes the potential or maximizes the entropy at the fastest rate given the constraints"

Environmental ethics is the part of environmental philosophy which considers extending the traditional boundaries of ethics from solely including humans to including the non-human world. It exerts influence on a large range of disciplines including law, sociology, theology, economics, ecology and geography. There are many ethical decisions that human beings make with respect to the environment.

Environmentalism, is a broad philosophy and social movement regarding concerns for environmental conservation and improvement of the state of the environment. Environmentalism and environmental concerns are often represented with the color green. An informal or derogatory label for environmentalists is the term "greenie" or "tree-hugger".

Environmental philosophy is a branch of philosophy that is concerned with the natural environment and humans' place within it. Environmental philosophy includes environmental ethics, environmental aesthetics, ecofeminism & environmental theology.

Environmental policy is any [course of] action deliberately taken [or not taken] to manage human activities with a view to prevent, reduce, or mitigate harmful effects on nature and natural resources, and ensuring that man-made changes to the environment do not have harmful effects on humans.

Sustainability, in a broad sense, is the capacity to endure. It can be defined in biological terms as the ability of an ecosystem to maintain ecological processes, functions, biodiversity and productivity into the future. In ecology, the word describes how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time. The word 'sustainability' has become a wide-ranging term that can be applied to almost every facet of life on Earth, from a local to a global scale and over various time periods.

Envy (also called invidiousness) may be defined as an emotion that "occurs when a person lacks another’s (perceived) superior quality, achievement, or possession and either desires it or wishes that the other lacked it. " It can also derive from a sense of low self-esteem that results from an upward social comparison threatening a person's self image: another person has something that the envier considers to be important to have.

Enzymes are biomolecules that catalyze chemical reactions. Nearly all known enzymes are proteins. However, certain RNA molecules can be effective biocatalysts too. These RNA molecules have come to be known as ribozymes. In enzymatic reactions, the molecules at the beginning of the process are called substrates, and the enzyme converts them into different molecules, called the products. Almost all processes in a biological cell need enzymes to occur at significant rates.

Edward Osborne Wilson is an American biologist, researcher, theorist, naturalist and author. His biological specialty is myrmecology, a branch of entomology. Wilson is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. He is known for his career as a scientist, his advocacy for environmentalism, and his secular-humanist and deist ideas pertaining to religious and ethical matters.

Boris Ephrussi was a French geneticist of Russian origin. He was one of the many famous Jewish life scientists. He had published two papers in November 1966 which represented a key step in a decade of research in his laboratory. This research helped transform mammalian, and especially human, genetics. Boris started his scientific training as a Russian émigré in 1920. He studied the initiation and regulation of embryological processes by intracellular and extracellular factors.

Epidemiology is the study of factors affecting the health and illness of populations, and serves as the foundation and logic of interventions made in the interest of public health and preventive medicine. It is considered a cornerstone methodology of public health research, and is highly regarded in evidence-based medicine for identifying risk factors for disease and determining optimal treatment approaches to clinical practice.

In biology, epigenesis has at least two distinct meanings: the unfolding development in an organism, and in particular the development of a plant or animal from an egg or spore through a sequence of steps in which cells differentiate and organs form; the theory that plants and animals develop in this way, in contrast to theories of preformationism. The originator of this theory of epigenesis was Aristotle in his book On the Generation of Animals.

In biology, the term epigenetics refers to changes in phenotype (appearance) or gene expression caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence, hence the name epi- -genetics These changes may remain through cell divisions for the remainder of the cell's life and may also last for multiple generations However, there is no change in the underlying DNA sequence of the organism;Adrian Bird (2007). "Perceptions of epigenetics". Nature 447: 396-398. doi:101038/nature05913.

In philosophy of mind, epiphenomenalism, also known as 'Type-E Dualism', is a view according to which some or all mental states are mere epiphenomena (side-effects or by-products) of physical states of the world. Thus, epiphenomenalism denies that the mind (as in its states, not its processing) has any influence on the body or any other part of the physical world: while mental states are caused by physical states, mental states do not have any influence on physical states.

Epistasis is the interaction between genes. Epistasis takes place when the effects of one gene are modified by one or several other genes, which are sometimes called modifier genes. The gene whose phenotype is expressed is said to be epistatic, while the phenotype altered or suppressed is said to be hypostatic. Epistasis should be distinguished from Dominance, which is an interaction between alleles at the same gene locus.

Epistemology (from Greek ' - episteme-, "knowledge, science" + ', "logos") or theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge. It addresses the questions: What is knowledge? How is knowledge acquired? What do people know? How do we know what we know? Much of the debate in this field has focused on analyzing the nature of knowledge and how it relates to similar notions such as truth, belief, and justification.

Equal opportunity is a term which has differing definitions and there is no consensus as to the precise meaning. Some use it as a descriptive term for an approach intended to provide a certain social environment in which people are not excluded from the activities of society, such as education, employment, or health care, on the basis of immutable traits. Equal opportunity practices include measures taken by organizations to ensure fairness in the employment process.

Escape response, escape reaction, or escape behaviour is a possible reaction in response to stimuli indicative of danger, in particular, it initiates an escape motion of an animal. In the cases of reflectory reactions, the escape response may also be called escape reflex. The term is also used in a more general setting: avoiding of unpleasant situations.

In philosophy, essentialism is the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must possess, and therefore all things can be precisely defined or described. This view is contrasted with non-essentialism, which states that, for any given kind of entity, there are no specific traits which entities of that kind must possess.

Ethical naturalism (also called moral naturalism or naturalistic cognitivistic definism) is the meta-ethical view which claims that: Ethical sentences express propositions. Some such propositions are true. Those propositions are made true by objective features of the world, independent of human opinion. These moral features of the world can be reduced to some set of non-moral features. This makes ethical naturalism a definist form of moral realism, which is in turn a form of cognitivism.

Ethics (also known as moral philosophy) is a branch of philosophy which seeks to address questions about morality, such as what the fundamental semantic, ontological, and epistemic nature of ethics or morality is, how moral values should be determined, how a moral outcome can be achieved in specific situations, how moral capacity or moral agency develops and what its nature is, and what moral values people actually abide by.

An ethnic group is a group of humans whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage that is real or presumed. Ethnic identity is further marked by the recognition from others of a group's distinctiveness and the recognition of common cultural, linguistic, religious, behavioural traits as indicators of contrast to other groups. Ethnicity is an important means through which people can identify themselves.

Ethnography (Greek ἔθνος ethnos = folk/people and γράφειν graphein = writing) is a methodological strategy used to provide descriptions of human societies, which as a methodology does not prescribe any particular method (e.g. observation, interview, questionnaire), but instead prescribes the nature of the study (i.e. to describe people through writing) .

Ethnology is the branch of anthropology that compares and analyzes the origins, distribution, technology, religion, language, and social structure of the ethnic, racial, and/or national divisions of humanity.

Ethology is the scientific study of animal behavior, and a sub-topic of zoology. Although many naturalists have studied aspects of animal behavior throughout history, the modern discipline of ethology is generally considered to have begun with the work during the 1930s of Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and Austrian biologist Konrad Lorenz, joint winners of the 1973 Nobel Prize in medicine.

Amitai Etzioni is a German-Israeli-American sociologist, known for his work on socioeconomics and communitarianism. He was a founder of the communitarian movement in the early 1990s and established the Communitarian Network to disseminate the movement’s ideas. His writings emphasize the importance for all societies of a carefully crafted balance between rights and responsibilities and autonomy and order.

Eugenics is the study of, or belief in, the possibility of improving the qualities of the human species or a human population by such means as discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable undesirable traits (negative eugenics) or encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits (positive eugenics)."

Evidence in its broadest sense includes everything that is used to determine or demonstrate the truth of an assertion. Giving or procuring evidence is the process of using those things that are either a) presumed to be true, or b) were themselves proven via evidence, to demonstrate an assertion's truth. Evidence is the currency by which one fulfills the burden of proof. There are many issues that surround evidence, making it the subject of much discussion and disagreement.

The wide range of evidence of common descent of living things strongly indicates the occurrence of evolution and provides a wealth of information on the natural processes by which the variety of life on Earth developed. This evidence supports the modern evolutionary synthesis, which is the scientific theory that explains how life changes over time. Fossils are important for estimating when various lineages developed.

Evil, in many cultures, is a broad term used to describe what are seen as subjectively harmful deeds that are labeled as such to steer moral support. Evil is usually contrasted with good, which describes acts that are subjectively beneficial to the observer. In some religions, evil is an active force, often personified as an entity such as Satan or Ahriman. Satan and Ahriman are considered bad by these religions, as well.

Evolutionary developmental biology (evolution of development or informally, evo-devo) is a field of biology that compares the developmental processes of different animals and plants in an attempt to determine the ancestral relationship between organisms and how developmental processes evolved.

In biology, evolution is change in the genetic material of a population of organisms from one generation to the next. Though changes produced in any one generation are normally small, differences accumulate with each generation and can, over time, cause substantial changes in the population, a process that can culminate in the emergence of new species. The similarities among species suggest that all known species are descended from a common ancestor through this process of gradual divergence.

In artificial intelligence, an evolutionary algorithm (EA) is a subset of evolutionary computation, a generic population-based metaheuristic optimization algorithm. An EA uses some mechanisms inspired by biological evolution: reproduction, mutation, recombination, and selection. Candidate solutions to the optimization problem play the role of individuals in a population, and the fitness function determines the environment within which the solutions "live".

Evolutionary biology is a sub-field of biology concerned with the origin of species from a common descent and descent of species, as well as their change, multiplication and diversity over time. Someone who studies evolutionary biology is known as an evolutionary biologist.

Evolutionary developmental biology (evolution of development or informally, evo-devo) is a field of biology that compares the developmental processes of different animals and plants in an attempt to determine the ancestral relationship between organisms and how developmental processes evolved.

Evolutionary economics is a heterodox school of economic thought that is inspired by evolutionary biology. Much like mainstream economics, it stresses complex interdependencies, competition, growth, structural change, and resource constraints but differs in the approaches which are used to analyze these phenomena. Mainstream economic reasoning begins with the postulates of scarcity and rational agents (that is, agents modeled as maximizing their individually-given welfares).

Evolutionary epistemology refers to two distinct topics: it is a subfield of naturalized epistemology as well as a theory in epistemology about the growth of knowledge.

Evolutionary ethics concerns approaches to ethics based on the role of evolution in shaping human psychology and behavior. Such approaches may be based in scientific fields such as evolutionary psychology or sociobiology, with a focus on understanding and explaining observed ethical preferences and choices. Alternatively and to a large extent separately, theories or ideas about evolution may be used to justify and advance particular ethical systems and particular morals (i.e.

Evolutionary game theory (EGT) is the application of game theory to interaction dependent strategy evolution in populations. It originated in 1973 with John Maynard Smith and George R. Price's formalization of evolutionarily stable strategies as an application of the mathematical theory of games to biological contexts, arising from the realization that frequency dependent fitness introduces a strategic aspect to evolution.

Evolutionary genetics is the broad field of studies that attempts to account for evolution in terms of changes in gene and genotype frequencies within populations and the processes that convert the variation with populations into more or less permanent variation between species. It considers the effect of micro-evolutionary changes among populations due to evolutionary forces, which account for the emergence of macro-evolutionary patterns in the long term.

Evolutionary medicine or Darwinian medicine is the application of modern evolutionary theory to understanding health and disease. It provides a complementary scientific approach to the present mechanistic explanations that dominate medical science, and particularly modern medical education. Such adaptations concern: The evolution of pathogens in terms of their virulence, resistance to antibiotics, and subversion of an individual’s immune system.

Evolutionary musicology is a subfield of biomusicology that grounds the psychological mechanisms of music perception and production in evolutionary theory. It covers vocal communication in non-human animal species, theories of the evolution of human music, and cross-cultural human universals in musical ability and processing.

Evolutionary programming is one of the four major evolutionary algorithm paradigms. It was first used by Lawrence J. Fogel in 1960 in order to use simulated evolution as a learning process aiming to generate artificial intelligence. Fogel used finite state machines as predictors and evolved them. Currently evolutionary programming is a wide evolutionary computing dialect with no fixed structure or, in contrast with some of the other dialects.

Evolutionary psychology (EP) attempts to explain psychological traits-such as memory, perception, or language-as adaptations, that is, as the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection. Adaptationist thinking about physiological mechanisms, such as the heart, lungs, and immune system, is common in evolutionary biology. Evolutionary psychology applies the same thinking to psychology.

Evolutionary Robotics (ER) is a methodology that uses evolutionary computation to develop controllers for autonomous robots. Algorithms in ER frequently operate on populations of candidate controllers, initially selected from some distribution. This population is then repeatedly modified according to a fitness function.

The modern evolutionary synthesis (also referred to as the new synthesis, the modern synthesis, and the evolutionary synthesis) is a union of ideas from several biological specialties which forms a logical account of evolution. This synthesis has been accepted by nearly all working biologists. The synthesis was produced over about a decade (1936-1947), and the development of population genetics (1918-1932) was the stimulus.

Evolutionism refers to doctrines of evolution, specifically to a widely held 19th century belief that organisms are intrinsically bound to improve themselves, and that changes are progressive and arise through inheritance of acquired characters, as in Lamarckism. The belief was extended to include cultural evolution and social evolution.

The evolution of complexity is an important outcome of the process of evolution. Evolution has produced some remarkably complex organisms - although the actual level of complexity is very hard to define or measure accurately in biology, with properties such as gene content, the number of cell types or morphology all being used to assess an organism's complexity.

The Evolution of Cooperation generally refers to: the study of how cooperation can emerge and persist (also known as cooperation theory) as elucidated by application of game theory, a 1981 paper by political scientist Robert Axelrod and evolutionary biologist William Hamilton in the scientific literature, or a 1984 book by Axelrod

The evolution of dominance concerns the evolution of genetic dominance. The central argument, that modifier genes act upon other genes to make them dominant or recessive, and that these are then themselves subject to natural selection was first proposed by the British population geneticist Ronald Fisher in 1928, and expanded upon in his book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. However, Sewall Wright and J.B.S.

The origin of language, also known as glottogony, is a topic that has attracted considerable attention throughout human history. The use of language is one of the most conspicuous traits that distinguishes Homo sapiens from other species. Unlike writing, spoken language leaves no explicit concrete evidence of its nature or even its existence. Therefore scientists must resort to indirect methods in trying to determine the origins of language.

Music is found in every known culture, past and present, varying wildly between times and places. Around 50,000 years ago, early modern humans began to disperse from Africa, reaching all the habitable continents. Since all people of the world, including the most isolated tribal groups, have a form of music, scientists conclude that music must have been present in the ancestral population prior to the dispersal of humans around the world.

The evolutionary origin of religions refers to the emergence of religious behavior during the course of human evolution. When humans first became religious remains unknown, but there is credible evidence of religious behavior from the Middle Paleolithic era and possibly earlier.

Enquiry into the evolution of ageing aims to explain why almost all living things weaken and die with age. There is not yet agreement in the scientific community on a single answer. The evolutionary origin of senescence remains a fundamental unsolved problem in biology. Historically, ageing was first likened to "wear and tear": living bodies get weaker just as with use a knife's edge becomes dulled or with exposure to air and moisture iron objects rust.

Scientists currently have developed several competing hypotheses to explain the evolution of sexual reproduction. Many groups of organisms, notably the majority of animals and plants, reproduce sexually. The evolution of sex contains two related, yet distinct, themes: its origin and its maintenance. However, since the hypotheses for the origins of sex are difficult to test experimentally, most current work has been focused on the maintenance of sexual reproduction.

Evolvability is a concept in evolutionary biology that tries to measure an organism's ability to evolve. Although several definitions are possible, most broadly evolvability is defined as the ability of a population of organisms to generate genetic diversity and evolve through natural selection. In evolution by natural selection, plants, animals, and other organisms produce offspring that are sometimes better adapted to the circumstances of life than their parents.

Exaptation, cooption, and preadaptation are related terms referring to shifts in the function of a trait during evolution. For example, a trait can evolve because it served one particular function, but subsequently it may come to serve another. Exaptations are common in both anatomy and behavior. Bird feathers are a classic example: initially these evolved for temperature regulation, but later were adapted for flight.

In common usage, existence is the world of which we are aware through our senses, but in philosophy the word has a more specialized meaning, and is often contrasted with essence. Philosophers investigate questions such as "What exists?" "How do we know?" "To what extent are the senses a reliable guide to existence?" "What is the meaning, if any, of assertions of the existence of categories, ideas, and abstractions.

Franz Serafin Exner was an Austrian physicist.

Experience as a general concept comprises knowledge of or skill in or observation of some thing or some event gained through involvement in or exposure to that thing or event. The history of the word experience aligns it closely with the concept of experiment. The concept of experience generally refers to know-how or procedural knowledge, rather than propositional knowledge. Philosophers dub knowledge based on experience "empirical knowledge" or "a posteriori knowledge".

In scientific research, an experiment is a method of investigating causal relationships among variables, or to test a hypothesis. An experiment is a cornerstone of the empirical approach to acquiring data about the world and is used in both natural sciences and social sciences. An experiment can be used to help solve practical problems and to support or negate theoretical assumptions.

Experimental economics is the application of experimental methods to study economic questions. Experiments are used to test the validity of economic theories and test-bed new market mechanisms. Using cash-motivated subjects, economic experiments create real-world incentives to help us better understand why markets and other exchange systems work the way they do. Experiments may be conducted in laboratory settings or in the field. Also see Simulations and games in economics education.

An explanation is a set of statements constructed to describe a set of facts which clarifies the causes,, and consequences of those facts. This description may establish rules or laws, and may clarify the existing ones in relation to any objects, or phenomena examined. The components of an explanation can be implicit, and be interwoven with one another. An explanation is often underpinned by an understanding that is represented by different media such as music, text, and graphics.

One theory is said to have more explanatory power than another theory about the same subject matter if it can predict and otherwise account for all the facts that the second one does, but also explains the causes of other facts which the second one does not. The opposite of explanatory power is explanatory impotence.

The term "Expressivity" is used in genetics that refering to variations of a phenotype in individuals carrying a particular genotype. The term can be used to qualitatively or quantitatively characterize the extent of the phenotype variation given a particular genotype. The term is equivalent to the severity of a condition in clinical medicine.

Internalism and externalism are the names of two contrasting theories in several areas of philosophy. The distinction between internal and external entities arises in many areas of debate with similar but distinct meanings.

In biology and ecology, extinction is the end of a organism or group of taxa. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of that species (although the capacity to breed and recover may have been lost before this point). Because a species' potential range may be very large, determining this moment is difficult, and is usually done retrospectively.

Extraterrestrial life is defined as life which does not originate from planet Earth. The existence of life outside the planet is theoretical and all assertions of such life remain disputed. Hypotheses regarding the origin(s) of extraterrestrial life, if it exists, are as follows: one proposes that it may have emerged, independently, from different places in the universe.

The false consensus effect is the tendency for people to project their way of thinking onto other people. In other words, they assume that everyone else thinks the same way they do. This supposed correlation is unsubstantiated by statistical data, leading to the perception of a consensus that does not exist. This logical fallacy involves a group or individual assuming that their own opinions, beliefs and predilections are more prevalent amongst the general public than they really are.

Fascism, pronounced /ˈfæʃɪzəm/, comprises a radical and authoritarian nationalist political ideology and a corporatist economic ideology developed in Italy. Fascists believe that nations and/or races are in perpetual conflict whereby only the strong can survive by being healthy, vital, and by asserting themselves in conflict against the weak. Fascists advocate the creation of a single-party state.

Fear is an emotional response to a threat. It is a basic survival mechanism occurring in response to a specific stimulus, such as pain or the threat of danger. Some Psychologists John B. Watson, Robert Plutchik, and Paul Ekman have suggested that fear is one of a small set of basic or innate emotions. This set also includes such emotions as joy, sadness, and anger. Fear should be distinguished from the related emotional state of anxiety, which typically occurs without any external threat.

Fear conditioning is the method by which organisms learn to fear new stimuli. It is a form of learning in which fear is associated with a particular neutral context (e.g. , a room) or neutral stimulus (e.g. , a tone). This can be done by pairing the neutral stimulus with an aversive stimulus (e.g. , a shock, loud noise, or unpleasant odor). Eventually, the neutral stimulus alone can elicit the state of fear.

Gustav Theodor Fechner, was a German experimental psychologist. An early pioneer in experimental psychology and founder of psychophysics, he inspired many 20th century scientists and philosophers. He is also credited with demonstrating the non-linear relationship between psychological sensation and the physical intensity of a stimulus via the formula: "S = K Log I". He was born at Groß Särchen, near Muskau, in Lower Lusatia, where his father was pastor.

Feed-forward is a term describing an element or pathway within a control system which passes a controlling signal from a source in the control system's external environment, often a command signal from an external operator, to a load elsewhere in its external environment.

Herbert Feigl (December 14, 1902 - June 1, 1988) was an Austrian philosopher and a member of the Vienna Circle. The son of a weaver, Feigl was born in Reichenberg (Liberec), Bohemia, and matriculated at the University of Vienna in 1922. He studied physics and philosophy under Moritz Schlick, the founder of the Vienna Circle, and received his doctorate in 1927 for the essay "Chance and Law: An Epistemological Analysis of the Roles of Probability and Induction in the Natural Sciences.

Female (♀) is the sex of an organism, or a part of an organism, which produces mobile ova (egg cells). The ova are defined as the larger gametes in a heterogamous reproduction system, while the smaller, usually motile gamete, the spermatozoon, is produced by the male. A female individual cannot reproduce sexually without access to the gametes of a male (an exception is parthenogenesis). Some organisms can reproduce both sexually and asexually.

Feminism is a political discourse aimed at equal rights and legal protection for women. It involves various movements, political and sociological theories, and philosophies, all concerned with issues of gender difference; that advocate equality for women; and that campaign for women's rights and interests.

Feminist epistemology is concerned with the way "in which gender does and ought to influence our conceptions of knowledge, the knowing subject, and practices of inquiry and justification", and comes under the umbrella of social epistemology - a broad set of approaches to the study of knowledge. Anderson argues that central to feminist epistemology is the concept of the situated knower and hence, situated knowledge.

Paul Karl Feyerabend was an Austrian-born philosopher of science best known for his work as a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked for three decades (1958-1989). His life was a peripatetic one, as he lived at various times in England, the United States, New Zealand, Italy, Germany, and finally Switzerland.

The true finches are passerine birds in the family Fringillidae. They are predominantly seed-eating songbirds. Most are native to Southern Hemisphere, but one subfamily is endemic to the Neotropics, one to the Hawaiian Islands, and one subfamily - monotypic at genus level - is found only in the Palaearctic.

First Principles is also the title of a work by Herbert Spencer. In philosophy, a first principle is a basic, foundational proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption. In mathematics, first principles are referred to as axioms or postulates.

Generally, a fishery is an entity engaged in raising and/or harvesting fish, which is determined by some authority to be a fishery. According to the FAO, a fishery is typically defined in terms of the "people involved, species or type of fish, area of water or seabed, method of fishing, class of boats, purpose of the activities or a combination of the foregoing features".

Fitness (often denoted <math>w</math> in population genetics models) is a central concept in evolutionary theory. It describes the capability of an individual of certain genotype to reproduce, and usually is equal to the proportion of the individual's genes in all the genes of the next generation. If differences in individual genotypes affect fitness, then the frequencies of the genotypes will change over generations; the genotypes with higher fitness become more common.

Jerry Alan Fodor is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He is the State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and is also the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he has laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, among other ideas. Fodor is of Jewish descent.

Folk biology or folkbiology is the cognitive study of how people classify and reason about the organic world. Humans everywhere classify animals and plants into obvious species-like groups. The relationship between a folk taxonomy and a scientific classification can assist in understanding how evolutionary theory deals with the apparent constancy of 'common species' and the organic processes centering on them.

Folk psychology (also known as common sense psychology, naive psychology or vernacular psychology) is the set of assumptions, constructs, and convictions that makes up the everyday language in which people discuss human psychology. Folk psychology embraces everyday concepts like 'beliefs', 'desires', 'fear', and 'hope'.

Foraging theory is a branch of behavioral ecology that studies the foraging behavior of animals in response to the environment in which the animal lives. Foraging theory considers the foraging behavior of animals in reference to the payoff that an animal obtains from different foraging options. Foraging theory predicts that the foraging options that deliver the highest payoff should be favored by foraging animals because it will have the highest fitness payoff.

Foraging theory is a branch of behavioral ecology that studies the foraging behavior of animals in response to the environment in which the animal lives. Foraging theory considers the foraging behavior of animals in reference to the payoff that an animal obtains from different foraging options. Foraging theory predicts that the foraging options that deliver the highest payoff should be favored by foraging animals because it will have the highest fitness payoff.

Fossils (from Latin fossus, literally "having been dug up") are the preserved remains or traces of animals, plants, and other organisms from the remote past. The totality of fossils, both discovered and undiscovered, and their placement in fossiliferous (fossil-containing) rock formations and sedimentary layers is known as the fossil record.

Michel Foucault, born Paul-Michel Foucault, was a French philosopher, sociologist and historian. He held a chair at the Collège de France with the title "History of Systems of Thought," and also taught at the University of California, Berkeley. Foucault is best known for his critical studies of social institutions, most notably psychiatry, medicine, the human sciences, and the prison system, as well as for his work on the history of human sexuality.

Foundationalism is any theory in epistemology that holds that beliefs are justified (known, etc. ) based on what are called basic beliefs (also commonly called foundational beliefs). Basic beliefs are beliefs that give justificatory support to other beliefs, and more derivative beliefs are based on those more basic beliefs. The basic beliefs are said to be self-justifying or self-evident, that is, they enjoy a non-inferential warrant (or justification), i.e.

France, officially the French Republic, is a country located in Western Europe, with several overseas islands and territories located on other continents. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean. It is often referred to as L’Hexagone because of the geometric shape of its territory.

Philipp Frank was a physicist, mathematician and also an influential philosopher during the first half of the 20th century. He was a logical-positivist, and a member of the Vienna Circle. He was born 20 March 1884 in Vienna, Austria, and died on 21 July 1966 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He studied physics at the University of Vienna and graduated in 1907 with a thesis in theoretical physics under the supervision of Ludwig Boltzmann.

In the broadest sense, a fraud is an intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual. The specific legal definition varies by legal jurisdiction. Fraud is a crime, and is also a civil law violation. Many hoaxes are fraudulent, although those not made for personal gain are not technically frauds. Defrauding people of money is presumably the most common type of fraud, but there have also been many fraudulent "discoveries" in art, archaeology, and science.

Freedom is the right to act according to ones will without being held up by the power of others. From a philosophical point of view, it can be defined as the capacity to determine your own choices. It can be defined negatively as an absence of subordination, servitude and constraint.

A free market describes a market without economic intervention and regulation by government except to regulate against force or fraud. The terminology is used by economists and in popular culture. A free market requires protection of property rights, but no regulation, no subsidization, no single monetary system, and no governmental monopolies. It is the opposite of a controlled market, where the government regulates prices or how property is used.

In economics, collective bargaining, psychology, and political science, "free riders" are those who consume more than their fair share of a public resource, or shoulder less than a fair share of the costs of its production. Free riding is usually considered to be an economic "problem" only when it leads to the non-production or under-production of a public good (and thus to Pareto inefficiency), or when it leads to the excessive use of a common property resource.

Free will raises the question whether, and in what sense, rational agents exercise control over their actions, decisions, choices. Addressing this question requires understanding the relationship between freedom and cause, and determining whether the laws of nature are causally deterministic.

Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (8 November 1848 - 26 July 1925) was a German mathematician who became a logician and philosopher. He was one of the founders of modern logic, and made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics. As a philosopher, he is generally considered to be the father of analytic philosophy, for his writings on the philosophy of language and mathematics.

Sigmund Freud, Sigismund Schlomo Freud (May 6, 1856 - September 23, 1939), was an Austrian neurologist who founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the defense mechanism of repression and for creating the clinical practice of psychoanalysis for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst.

Functionalism is a theory of the mind in contemporary philosophy, developed largely as an alternative to both the identity theory of mind and behaviourism. Its core idea is that mental states (beliefs, desires, being in pain, etc. ) are constituted solely by their functional role - that is, they are causal relations to other mental states, sensory inputs, and behavioral outputs.

The Gaia hypothesis is an ecological hypothesis proposing that the biosphere and the physical components of the Earth are closely integrated to form a complex interacting system that maintains the climatic and biogeochemical conditions on Earth in a preferred homeostasis. Originally proposed by James Lovelock as the earth feedback hypothesis, it was named - at the suggestion of his neighbor William Golding - the Gaia Hypothesis, after the Greek supreme goddess of Earth.

Sir Francis Galton FRS (16 February 1822 - 17 January 1911), cousin of Sir Douglas Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, was an English Victorian polymath, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician. He was knighted in 1909. Galton had a prolific intellect, and produced over 340 papers and books throughout his lifetime.

Game theory is a branch of applied mathematics that is used in the social sciences, most notably in economics, as well as in biology, engineering, political science, international relations, computer science, and philosophy. Game theory attempts to mathematically capture behavior in strategic situations, in which an individual's success in making choices depends on the choices of others.

Queer studies is the study of issues relating to sexual orientation and gender identity usually focusing on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people and cultures. Universities have also labeled this area of analysis Sexual Diversity Studies, Sexualities Studies or LGBTQ Studies (Q for "Questioning").

Carl Gegenbaur, "Karl Gegenbaur - Encyclopaedia Britannica" (biography), Encyclopædia Britannica, 2006, Britannica. com webpage: Britannica-KarlG. also Karl Gegenbaur, was a German anatomist and professor who demonstrated that the field of comparative anatomy offers important evidence supporting of the theory of evolution.

Gender is a term that refers to the set of characteristics that humans perceive as distinguishing between men and women, extending from one's biological sex to one's social role or gender identity. At the biological level, men and women are typically distinguished by the presence of a Y-chromosome in male cells, and its absence in female cells.

A gender difference is a distinction of biological and/or physiological characteristics typically associated with either males or females of a species in general. In the study of humans, socio-political issues arise in classifying whether a sex difference results from the biology of gender. This article focuses on quantitative differences which are based on a gradient and involve different averages.

A gene is the basic unit of heredity in a living organism. All living things depend on genes. Genes hold the information to build and maintain their cells and pass genetic traits to offspring. A modern working definition of a gene is "a locatable region of genomic sequence, corresponding to a unit of inheritance, which is associated with regulatory regions, transcribed regions, and or other functional sequence regions ".

Gene conversion is an event in DNA genetic recombination, which occurs at high frequencies during meiotic division but which also occurs in somatic cells. It is a process by which DNA sequence information is transferred from one DNA helix (which remains unchanged) to another DNA helix, whose sequence is altered. It is one of the ways a gene may be mutated. Gene conversion may lead to non-Mendelian inheritance and has often been recorded in fungal crosses.

Gene duplication (or chromosomal duplication or gene amplification) is any duplication of a region of DNA that contains a gene; it may occur as an error in homologous recombination, a retrotransposition event, or duplication of an entire chromosome. The second copy of the gene is often free from selective pressure - that is, mutations of it have no deleterious effects to its host organism. Thus it mutates faster than a functional single-copy gene, over generations of organisms.

Gene expression is the process by which information from a gene is used in the synthesis of a functional gene product. These products are often proteins, but in non-protein coding genes such as rRNA genes or tRNA genes, the product is a functional RNA. The process of gene expression is used by all known life - eukaryotes, prokaryotes and viruses - to generate the macromolecular machinery for life.

In population genetics, gene flow (also known as gene migration) is the transfer of alleles of genes from one population to another. Migration into or out of a population may be responsible for a marked change in allele frequencies (the proportion of members carrying a particular variant of a gene). Immigration may also result in the addition of new genetic variants to the established gene pool of a particular species or population.

Genome mapping is the creation of a genetic map assigning DNA fragments to chromosomes. When a genome is first investigated, this map is nonexistent. The map improves with the scientific progress and is perfect when the genomic DNA sequencing of the species has been completed. During this process, and for the investigation of differences in strain, the fragments are identified by small tags. These may be genetic markers or the unique sequence-dependent pattern of DNA-cutting enzymes.

General equilibrium theory is a branch of theoretical neoclassical economics. It seeks to explain the behavior of supply, demand and prices in a whole economy with several or many markets, by seeking to prove that equilibrium prices for goods exist and that all prices are at equilibrium, hence general equilibrium, in contrast to partial equilibrium.

A generalization of a concept is an extension of the concept to less-specific criteria. It is a foundational element of logic and human reasoning. Generalization posits the existence of a domain or set of elements, as well as one or more common characteristics shared by those elements. As such, it is the essential basis of all valid deductive inference. The process of verification is necessary to determine whether a generalization holds true for any given situation.

Systems theory is interdisciplinary theory about the nature of complex systems in nature, society, and science. More specifically, it is a framework by which one can investigate and/or describe any group of objects that work in concert to produce some result. This could be a single organism, any organization or society, or any electro-mechanical or informational artifact.

Generativity describes in broad terms the ability of a self-contained system to provide an independent ability to create, generate or produce content without any input from the originators of the system. In semiotics or epistemology, generativity refers to a form of communication that possesses compositionality and the ability to construct complex messages.

Genetic assimilation is a process by which the effect of an environmental condition, such as exposure to a teratogen, is used in conjunction with artificial selection or natural selection to create a strain of organisms with similar changes in phenotype that are encoded genetically. Despite superficial appearances, this does not require the inheritance of acquired characters, although epigenetic inheritance could potentially influence the result.

Canalisation is a measure of the ability of a population to produce the same phenotype regardless of variability of its environment or genotype. The term canalisation was coined by C. H. Waddington, who also helped explain its developmental mechanisms. He also introduced the epigenetic landscape, in which a canalised trait is illustrated as a valley enclosed by high ridges, safely guiding the phenotype to its "fate".

Genetic counseling is the process by which patients or relatives, at risk of an inherited disorder, are advised of the consequences and nature of the disorder, the probability of developing or transmitting it, and the options open to them in management and family planning in order to prevent, avoid or ameliorate it. This complex process can be seen from diagnostic (the actual estimation of risk) and supportive aspects.

Genetic determinism is the belief that genes determine physical and behavioral phenotypes. It is usually taken to mean "that the genotype completely determines the phenotype, that is, the genes completely determine how an organism turns out", or that "genes alone determine human traits and behaviours. " The term may be applied to the mapping of a single gene to a single phenotype, or more widely to the discredited belief that most or all phenotypes are determined exclusively by genes.

A genetic disorder is an illness caused by abnormalities in genes or chromosomes. While some diseases, such as cancer, are due in part to a genetic disorders, they can also be caused by environmental factors. Most disorders are quite rare and affect one person in every several thousands or millions. Some types of recessive gene disorders confer an advantage in the heterozygous state in certain environments.

Genetic diversity is a level of biodiversity that refers to the total number of genetic characteristics in the genetic makeup of a species. It is distinguished from genetic variability, which describes the tendency of genetic characteristics to vary. The academic field of population genetics includes several hypotheses and theories regarding genetic diversity. The neutral theory of evolution proposes that diversity is the result of the accumulation of neutral substitutions.

Genetic engineering, recombinant DNA technology, genetic modification/manipulation (GM) and gene splicing are terms that apply to the direct manipulation of an organism's genes. Genetic engineering is different from traditional breeding, where the organism's genes are manipulated indirectly. Genetic engineering uses the techniques of molecular cloning and transformation to alter the structure and characteristics of genes directly.

Genetic epistemology is a study of the origins (genesis) of knowledge, which was established by Jean Piaget. The goal of genetic epistemology is to link the validity of knowledge to the model of its construction. In other words, it shows that the method in which the knowledge was obtained/created affects the validity of that knowledge. For example, our direct experience with gravity makes our knowledge of it more valid than our indirect experience with black holes.

A DNA sequence or genetic sequence is a succession of letters representing the primary structure of a real or hypothetical DNA molecule or strand, with the capacity to carry information as described by the central dogma of molecular biology. The possible letters are A, C, G, and T, representing the four nucleotide bases of a DNA strand — adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine — covalently linked to a phosphodiester backbone.

In classical genetics, the genome of a diploid organism including eukarya refers to a full set of chromosomes in a gamete; thereby, a regular somatic cell contains two full sets, or two genomes. In haploid organisms, including bacteria, archaea, viruses, and mitochondria, a cell contains only a single set of genes, or one genome, usually in a single circular or contiguous linear DNA (or RNA for retroviruses).

Genomic imprinting is a genetic phenomenon by which certain genes are expressed in a parent-of-origin-specific manner. It is an inheritance process independent of the classical Mendelian inheritance. Imprinted genes are either expressed only from the allele inherited from the mother, or in other instances from the allele inherited from the father (eg. IGF2). Forms of genomic imprinting have been demonstrated in insects, mammals and flowering plants.

The genotype is the genetic constitution of a cell, an organism, or an individual (i.e. the specific allele makeup of the individual) usually with reference to a specific character under consideration. For instance, the human albino gene has two allele forms, dominant A and recessive a, and there are three possible genotypes- AA (homozygous dominant), Aa (heterozygous), and aa (homozygous recessive).

Gene-environment interaction (or genotype-environment interaction or GxE) is the phenotypic effect of interactions between genes and the environment. Gene-environment interaction is exploited by plant and animal breeders to benefit agriculture. For example, plants can be bred to have tolerance for specific environments, such as high or low water availability. The way that trait expression varies across a range of environments for a given genotype is called its norm of reaction.

The genotype-phenotype distinction is drawn in genetics. "Genotype" is an organism's full hereditary information, even if not expressed. "Phenotype" is an organism's actual observed properties, such as morphology, development, or behavior. This distinction is fundamental in the study of inheritance of traits and their evolution. The genotype represents its exact genetic makeup - the particular set of genes it possesses.

The genotype-phenotype distinction is drawn in genetics. "Genotype" is an organism's full hereditary information, even if not expressed. "Phenotype" is an organism's actual observed properties, such as morphology, development, or behavior. This distinction is fundamental in the study of inheritance of traits and their evolution. The genotype represents its exact genetic makeup - the particular set of genes it possesses.

Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was a French naturalist who established the principle of "unity of composition". He was a colleague of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and expanded and defended Lamarck's evolutionary theories. Geoffroy's scientific views had a transcendental flavor (unlike Lamarck's materialistic views) and were similar to those of German morphologists like Lorenz Oken.

Geography is the study of the Earth and its lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena. A literal translation would be "to describe or write about the Earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes (276-194 B.C.).

The geologic time scale is a chronologic schema (or idealized model) relating stratigraphy to time that is used by geologists, paleontologists and other earth scientists to describe the timing and relationships between events that have occurred during the history of the Earth. The table of geologic time spans presented here agrees with the dates and nomenclature proposed by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, and uses the standard color codes of the United States Geological Survey.

Geology is the science and study of the solid and liquid matter that constitutes the Earth. The field of geology encompasses the study of the composition, structure, physical properties, dynamics, and history of Earth materials, and the processes by which they are formed, moved, and changed.

Geometry is a part of mathematics concerned with questions of size, shape, relative position of figures and with properties of space. Geometry is one of the oldest sciences. Initially a body of practical knowledge concerning lengths, areas, and volumes, in the third century BC geometry was put into an axiomatic form by Euclid, whose treatment—Euclidean geometry—set a standard for many centuries to follow.

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, born Nicolae Georgescu was a Romanian mathematician, statistician and economist, best known for his 1971 magnum opus The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, which situated the view that the second law of thermodynamics, i.e. , that usable "free energy" tends to disperse or become lost in the form of "bound energy", governs economic processes. He is also considered "one of the key intellectual progenitors of ecological economics".

Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The territory of Germany covers 357,021 square kilometers (137,847 sq mi) and is influenced by a temperate seasonal climate.

Gestalt psychology or gestaltism of the Berlin School is a theory of mind and brain positing that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies, or that the whole is different from the sum of its parts. The Gestalt effect refers to the form-forming capability of our senses, particularly with respect to the visual recognition of figures and whole forms instead of just a collection of simple lines and curves.

Michael T. Ghiselin is an American biologist, philosopher/historian of biology currently at the California Academy of Sciences. B.A. , University of Utah (1960); Ph.D.

Originally considered by Josiah Willard Gibbs in his paper On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances, the Gibbs paradox (Gibbs' paradox or Gibbs's paradox) applies to thermodynamics. It involves the discontinuous nature of the entropy of mixing. This discontinuous nature is paradoxical to the continuous nature of entropy itself with respect to equilibrium and irreversibility in thermodynamic systems. Suppose we have a box divided in half by a movable partition.

The giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis) is an African even-toed ungulate mammal, the tallest of all land-living animal species, and the largest ruminant. It is covered in large, irregular patches of yellow to black fur separated by white, off-white, or dark yellowish brown background. The average mass for an adult male giraffe is 1,191 kilograms (2,630 lb) while the average mass for an adult female is 828 kilograms (1,830 lb).

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 - 22 March 1832) was a German writer and, according to Gregory Maertz, "Germany's greatest man of letters… and the last true polymath to walk the earth. " Goethe's works span the fields of poetry, drama, literature, theology, philosophy, humanism and science. Goethe's magnum opus, lauded as one of the peaks of world literature, is the two-part drama Faust.

Stephen Jay Gould (September 10, 1941 - May 20, 2002) was a prominent American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Gradualism is the belief that changes occur, or ought to occur, slowly in the form of gradual steps

In mathematics and computer science, graph theory is the study of graphs: mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects from a certain collection. A "graph" in this context refers to a collection of vertices or 'nodes' and a collection of edges that connect pairs of vertices.

Gratitude, thankfulness, or appreciation is a positive emotion or attitude in acknowledgment of a benefit that one has received or will receive. The experience of gratitude has historically been a focus of several world religions, and has been considered extensively by moral philosophers such as Adam Smith.

The Hominidae (anglicized Hominids, also known as great apes) form a taxonomic family, including four extant genera: chimpanzees, gorillas, humans and orangutans. A number of known extinct genera are grouped with humans in the Hominina subtribe, others with orangutans in the Ponginae subtribe. The most recent common ancestor of the Hominidae lived some 13 million years ago, when the ancestors of the orangutans speciated from the ancestors of the other three genera.

Marjorie Glicksman Grene (December 13, 1910 - March 16, 2009) was an American philosopher. She wrote both on existentialism and the philosophy of science, especially the philosophy of biology. From 1988 until her death she was Honorary University Distinguished Professor of philosophy at Virginia Tech.

The waterfowl genus Anser includes all grey geese and usually the white geese too. It belongs to the true geese and swan subfamily. The genus has a Holarctic distribution, with at least one species breeding in any open, wet habitats in the subarctic and cool temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere in summer. Some also breed further south, reaching into warm temperate regions.

In evolutionary biology, group selection refers to the idea that alleles can become fixed or spread in a population because of the benefits they bestow on groups, regardless of the alleles' effect on the fitness of individuals within that group. Group selection was used as a popular explanation for adaptations, especially by V. C. Wynne-Edwards. For several decades, however, critiques, particularly by George C. Williams, John Maynard Smith and C.M.

A guessing game is a game in which the object is to guess some kind of information, such as a word, a phrase, a title, or the location of an object. Many of the games are played co-operatively. In some games some player(s) know the answer, but cannot tell the other(s), instead they must help them to guess it.

Habit, when used in the context of biology, refers to the instinctive actions of animals and the natural tendencies of plants. In zoology, this term most often refers to specific behavioral characteristics, even when directly related to physiology. For example: The spider monkey has an arboreal habit and rarely ventures onto the forest floor.

In psychology, habituation is the psychological process in humans and animals in which there is a decrease in psychological response and behavioral response to a stimulus after repeated exposure to that stimulus over a duration of time.

The Hadza people, or Hadzabe'e, are an ethnic group in central Tanzania, living around Lake Eyasi in the central Rift Valley and in the neighboring Serengeti Plateau. The Hadza number just under 1000. Some 300-400 Hadza live as hunter-gatherers, much as their ancestors have for thousands or even tens of thousands of years; they are the last functioning hunter-gatherers in Africa. The Hadza are not closely related to any other people.

Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (February 16, 1834 - August 9, 1919),"Ernst Haeckel — Britannica Concise" (biography), Encyclopædia Britannica Concise, 2006, Concise. Britannica. com webpage: CBritannica-Haeckel.

Physicist Hermann Haken is professor emeritus in theoretical physics at the University of Stuttgart and founder of synergetics. After his studies in mathematics and physics in Halle (Saale) and Erlangen, receiving his Ph. D. in mathematics at the University of Erlangen and being guest lecturer at universities in the UK and U.S. , he became in 1960 lecturer in theoretical physics at the university of Stuttgart. He became professor emeritus in 1995.

John Burdon Sanderson Haldane FRS, known as Jack (but who used 'J.B.S. ' in his printed works), was a British-born geneticist and evolutionary biologist. He was one of the founders of population genetics.

Haldane's rule relating to hybrids of species and extended to speciation in evolutionary theory is easily stated: It was originally formulated in 1922 by the British evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane. It is sometimes referred to as Haldane's law. In many organisms, such as mammals or Drosophila flies, males are the heterogametic sex, in that they have XY sex chromosomes, whereas females are homogametic, with XX chromosomes. However, in some other animals (i.e.

Handedness is an attribute of humans defined by their unequal distribution of fine motor skill between the left and right hands. An individual who is more dexterous with the right hand is called right-handed, and one who is more skilled with the left is said to be left-handed. A minority of people are equally skilled with both hands, and are termed ambidextrous. People who demonstrate awkwardness with both hands are said to be ambilevous or ambisinister.

The handicap principle is a hypothesis originally proposed in 1975 by biologist Amotz Zahavi to explain how evolution may lead to "honest" or reliable signaling between animals who have an obvious motivation to bluff or deceive each other. The handicap principle suggests that reliable signals must be costly to the signaler, costing the signaler something that could not be afforded by an individual with less of a particular trait.

Friedrich August von Hayek CH (8 May 1899 - 23 March 1992), was an Austrian and British economist and philosopher known for his defense of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism against socialist and collectivist thought. He is considered to be one of the most important economists and political philosophers of the twentieth century.

Oskar Heinroth was a German biologist who was one of the first to apply the methods of comparative morphology to animal behaviour, and was thus one of the founders of ethology. His extensive studies of behaviour in the Anatidae (ducks and geese) showed that instinctive behaviour patterns correlated with taxonomic relationships determined on the basis of morphological features.

Werner Heisenberg (5 December 1901 - 1 February 1976) was a German theoretical physicist who made foundational contributions to quantum mechanics and is best known for asserting the uncertainty principle of quantum theory. In addition, he also made important contributions to nuclear physics, quantum field theory, and particle physics. Heisenberg, along with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, set forth the matrix formulation of quantum mechanics in 1925.

Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (August 31, 1821-September 8, 1894) was a German physician and physicist who made significant contributions to several widely varied areas of modern science. In physiology and physiological psychology, he is known for his mathematics of the eye, theories of vision, ideas on the visual perception of space, color vision research, and on the sensation of tone, perception of sound, and empiricism.

Carl Gustav "Peter" Hempel was a philosopher of science and a major figure in 20th-century logical empiricism. He is especially well-known for his articulation of the Deductive-nomological model of scientific explanation, which was considered the "standard model" of scientific explanation during the 1950s and 1960's. He is also known for the Raven paradox, which highlights the problem of induction.

The Raven paradox, also known as Hempel's paradox or Hempel's ravens is a paradox proposed by the German logician Carl Gustav Hempel in the 1940s to illustrate a problem where inductive logic violates intuition. It reveals the problem of induction.

Henry Walter Bates FRS FLS FGS (Leicester, 8 February 1825 - London, 16 February 1892) was an English naturalist and explorer who gave the first scientific account of mimicry in animals. He was most famous for his expedition to the Amazon with Alfred Russel Wallace in 1848. Wallace returned in 1852, but lost his collection in a shipwreck. When Bates arrived home in 1859 after a full eleven years, he had sent back over 14,000 species of which 8,000 were new to science.

Heredity is the passing of traits to offspring (from its parent or ancestors). This is the process by which an offspring cell or organism acquires or becomes predisposed to the characteristics of its parent cell or organism. Through heredity, variations exhibited by individuals can accumulate and cause a species to evolve. The study of heredity in biology is called genetics, which includes the field of epigenetics.

Karl Ewald Konstantin Hering was a German physiologist who did much research into color vision and spatial perception. His uncle was the homeopath Constantine Hering. Born in Alt-Gersdorf, Kingdom of Saxony, Hering studied at the University of Leipzig and became a professor at Charles University in Prague.

In genetics, Heritability is the proportion of phenotypic variation in a population that is attributable to genetic variation among individuals. Variation among individuals may be due to genetic and/or environmental factors. Heritability analyses estimate the relative contributions of differences in genetic and non-genetic factors to the total phenotypic variance in a population.

Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation theory. Traditional hermeneutics - which includes Biblical hermeneutics - refers to the study of the interpretation of written texts, especially texts in the areas of literature, religion and law. Contemporary or modern hermeneutics encompasses not just issues involving the written text, but everything in the interpretative process.

A heterarchy is a system of organization replete with overlap, multiplicity, mixed ascendancy, and/or divergent-but-coexistent patterns of relation. Definitions of the term vary among the disciplines: in social and information sciences, heterarchies are networks of elements in which each element shares the same "horizontal" position of power and authority, each playing a theoretically equal role.

Heterogeneous is an adjective used to describe an object or system consisting of multiple items having a large number of structural variations. It is the opposite of homogeneous, which means that an object or system consists of multiple identical items. The term is often used in a scientific (such as a kind of catalyst), mathematical, sociological or statistical context.

Heterosis is a term used in genetics and selective breeding. The term heterosis, also known as hybrid vigor or outbreeding enhancement, describes the increased strength of different characteristics in hybrids; the possibility to obtain a genetically superior individual by combining the virtues of its parents. Heterosis is the opposite of inbreeding depression, which occurs with increasing homozygosity.

Heuristic is an adjective for experience-based techniques that help in problem solving, learning and discovery. A heuristic method is particularly used to rapidly come to a solution that is hoped to be close to the best possible answer, or 'optimal solution'. Heuristics are "rules of thumb", educated guesses, intuitive judgments or simply common sense. Heuristics as a noun is another name for heuristic methods.

A hierarchical organization is structured in such a way that every entity in the organization, except one, is subordinate to a single other entity. This is the dominant mode of organization among large organizations; most corporations, governments, and organized religions are hierarchical organizations. Hierarchies denote a singular/group of power at the top, a number of assistants underneath and hundreds of servants beneath them.

Higher education refers to a level of education that is provided by universities, vocational universities, community colleges, liberal arts colleges, institutes of technology and other collegiate level institutions, such as vocational schools, trade schools and career colleges, that award academic degrees or professional certifications. Since 1950, Article 2 of the first Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights obliges all signatory parties to guarantee the right to education.

The hippocampus is a major component of the brains of humans and other mammals. It belongs to the limbic system and plays important roles in long-term memory and spatial navigation. Like the cerebral cortex, with which it is closely associated, it is a paired structure, with mirror-image halves in the left and right sides of the brain. In humans and other primates, the hippocampus is located inside the medial temporal lobe, beneath the cortical surface.

Historical determinism is the stance in explaining history or advocating a political position that events are historically predetermined (and/or currently constrained) by various forces. Since such explanation is the norm, it may be better understood in contrast to its negation, i.e. the rejection of historical determinism. The italicized alternation (and/or) is significant because some political philosophies assert a form of the one and reject the other.

The Historikerstreit ("historians' quarrel") was an intellectual and political controversy in West Germany about the way the Holocaust should be interpreted in history. The German word Streit translates variously as "quarrel", "dispute", or "conflict". The most common translation of Historikerstreit in English language academic discourse is perhaps "the historians' dispute", though the German term is itself often used.

Historiography is the aspect of history, and of semiotics, that considers how knowledge of the past, recent or distant, is obtained and transmitted; simply put, historiography is the history of history. Broadly speaking, historiography examines the writing of history and the use of historical methods, drawing upon such elements as authorship, sourcing, interpretation, style, bias, and audience. The word historiography can also refer to a body of historical work.

The historiography of science usually refers to the study of History of Science in its disciplinary aspects and practices (methods, theories, schools) and to the study of its own historical development ("history of History of Science", i.e. , the history of the academic discipline called History of Science).

The history of artificial intelligence began in antiquity. There have always been myths, stories and rumors of artificial beings endowed with intelligence or consciousness by master craftsmen. Independently, philosophers (beginning as early as Aristotle) have attempted to describe the process of human thinking as the mechanical manipulation of symbols.

The history of biochemistry spans approximately 400 years. Although the term “biochemistry” seems to have been first used in 1882, it is generally accepted that the word "biochemistry" was first proposed in 1903 by Carl Neuberg, a German chemist.

The history of biology traces the study of the living world from ancient to modern times. Although the concept of biology as a single coherent field arose in the 19th century, the biological sciences emerged from traditions of medicine and natural history reaching back to ancient Egyptian medicine and the works of Aristotle and Galen in the ancient Greco-Roman world.

Ecology is generally spoken of as a new science, having only become prominent in the second half of the 20th Century. More precisely, there is agreement that ecology emerged as a distinct discipline at the turn of the 20th Century, and that it gained public prominence in the 1960s, due to widespread concern for the state of the environment.

The history of economic thought deals with different thinkers and theories in the subject that became political economy and economics from the ancient world to the present day. It encompasses many disparate schools of economic thought. Greek writers such as the philosopher Aristotle examined ideas about the "art" of wealth acquisition and questioned whether property is best left in private or public hands.

Evolutionary thought, the conception that species change over time, has roots in antiquity, in the ideas of the Greeks, Romans, Chinese and Islamic philosophers. However, until the 18th century, Western biological thinking was dominated by essentialism, the belief that every species has essential characteristics that are unalterable. This is in contrast with Arab/Persian thinking at the height of the Islamic Empire.

The history of genetics is generally held to have started with the work of an Augustinian friar, Gregor Mendel. His work on pea plants, published in 1866, described what came to be known as Mendelian Inheritance. In the centuries before—and for several decades after—Mendel's work, a wide variety of theories of heredity proliferated (see below).

The history of ideas is a field of research in history that deals with the expression, preservation, and change of human ideas over time. The history of ideas is a sister-discipline to, or a particular approach within, intellectual history. Work in the history of ideas may involve interdisciplinary research in the history of philosophy, the history of science, or the history of literature.

The area of study known as the history of mathematics is primarily an investigation into the origin of discoveries in mathematics and, to a lesser extent, an investigation into the mathematical methods and notation of the past. Before the modern age and the worldwide spread of knowledge, written examples of new mathematical developments have come to light only in a few locales. The most ancient mathematical texts available are Plimpton 322 (Babylonian mathematics c.

All human societies have medical beliefs that provide explanations for birth, death, and disease. Throughout history, illness has been attributed to witchcraft, demons, adverse astral influence, or the will of the gods. These ideas still retain some power, with faith healing and shrines still used in some places, although the rise of scientific medicine over the past millennium has altered or replaced many of the old beliefs.

The history of molecular biology begins in the 1930s with the convergence of various, previously distinct biological disciplines: biochemistry, genetics, microbiology, and virology. With the hope of understanding life at its most fundamental level, numerous physicists and chemists also took an interest in what would become molecular biology. In its modern sense, molecular biology attempts to explain the phenomena of life starting from the macromolecular properties that generate them.

The history of philosophy is the study of philosophical ideas and concepts through time.

As forms of science historically developed out of philosophy, physics was originally referred to as natural philosophy, a term describing a field of study concerned with "the workings of nature".

The 'history' of 'psychology' as a scholarly study of the mind and behavior dates back to the Ancient Greeks. It was widely regarded as a branch of philosophy until 1879, when psychology developed as an independent scientific discipline in Germany and the United States. Psychology borders on various other fields including physiology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, sociology, anthropology, as well as philosophy and other components of the humanities.

Science is a body of empirical, theoretical, and practical knowledge about the natural world, produced by a global community of researchers making use of scientific methods, which emphasize the observation, explanation, and adequate prediction of real world phenomena by experiment. Given the dual status of science as objective knowledge and as a human construct, good historiography of science draws on the historical methods of both intellectual history and social history.

Sociology is a relatively new academic discipline among other social sciences including economics, political science, anthropology, and psychology. The ideas behind it, however, have a long history and can trace their origins to a mixture of common human knowledge, works of art and philosophy.

The history of technology is the history of the invention of tools and techniques. Background knowledge has enabled people to create new things, and conversely, many scientific endeavors have become possible through technologies which assist humans to travel to places we could not otherwise go, and probe the nature of the universe in more detail than our natural senses allow. Technological artifacts are products of an economy, a force for economic growth, and a large part of everyday life.

Thomas Hobbes (5 April 1588 - 4 December 1679) was an English philosopher, remembered today for his work on political philosophy. His 1651 book Leviathan established the foundation for most of Western political philosophy from the perspective of social contract theory. Hobbes also contributed to a diverse array of fields, including history, geometry, physics of gases, theology, ethics, general philosophy, and political science.

John Allan Hobson, M.D. is an American psychiatrist and dream researcher. He is known for his research on the Rapid eye movement sleep. He is Professor of Psychiatry, Emeritus, Harvard Medical School, and Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Lancelot Thomas Hogben was a versatile British experimental zoologist and medical statistician. He is now best known for his popularising books on science, mathematics and language.

Holism in science, or Holistic science, is an approach to research that emphasizes the study of complex systems. This practice is in contrast to a purely analytic tradition which purports to understand systems by dividing them into their smallest possible or discernible elements and understanding their elemental properties alone. The holism/reductionism dichotomy is often evident in conflicting interpretations of experimental findings and in setting priorities for future research.

A holon is something that is simultaneously a whole and a part. The word was coined by Arthur Koestler in his book The Ghost in the Machine (1967, p. 48). Koestler was compelled by two observations in proposing the notion of the holon.

A homeobox is a DNA sequence found within genes that are involved in the regulation of patterns of development in animals, fungi and plants.

Homeostasis is the property of a system, either open or closed, that regulates its internal environment and tends to maintain a stable, constant condition. Typically used to refer to a living organism, the concept came from that of milieu interieur that was created by Claude Bernard and published in 1865. Multiple dynamic equilibria adjustment and regulation mechanisms make homeostasis possible.

Homicide (Latin homicidium, homo human being + caedere to cut, kill) refers to the act of killing another human being. It can also describe a person who has committed such an act, though this use is rare in modern English. Homicide is not always an illegal act, so although "homicide" is often used as a synonym for "murder," this is not formally correct.

Human evolution, or anthropogenesis, is the origin and evolution of Homo sapiens as a distinct species from other hominins, great apes and placental mammals. The study of human evolution encompasses many scientific disciplines, including physical anthropology, primatology, archaeology, linguistics and genetics. The term "human" in the context of human evolution refers to the genus Homo, but studies of human evolution usually include other hominins, such as the Australopithecines.

See Homo Oeconomicus for the journal so titled. Homo economicus, or Economic human, is the concept in some economic theories of humans as rational and broadly self-interested actors who have the ability to make judgments towards their subjectively defined ends.

Homo faber (Latin for "Man the Smith" or "Man the Maker"; in reference to the biological name for man, "Homo sapiens" meaning "man the wise") is a concept articulated by Hannah Arendt and Max Scheler. It refers to humans as controlling the environment through tools.

In evolutionary biology, homology refers to any similarity between characteristics that is due to their shared ancestry. There are examples in different branches of biology. Anatomical structures that perform the same function in different biological species and evolved from the same structure in some ancestor species are homologous. In genetics, homology refers to a similarity of DNA sequences.

Humans are bipedal primates belonging to the species Homo sapiens in Hominidae, the great ape family. Compared to other species, humans have a highly developed brain, capable of abstract reasoning, language, introspection and problem solving. This mental capability, combined with an erect body carriage that frees the arms for manipulating objects, has allowed humans to make far greater use of tools than any other species.

A homunculus (Latin for "little human", plural is "homunculi"; the diminutive of homo, "human") is, most generally, any representation of a human being. It is often used to illustrate the functioning of a system. In the scientific sense of an unknowable prime actor, it can be viewed as an entity or agent. “Preformationism,” a theory of heredity, claimed either the egg or the sperm (exactly which was a contentious issue) contained a complete preformed individual called a homunculus.

The hookworm is a parasitic nematode worm that lives in the small intestine of its host, which may be a mammal such as a dog, cat, or human. Two species of hookworms commonly infect humans, Ancylostoma duodenale and Necator americanus. Necator americanus predominates in the Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, China, and Indonesia, while A. duodenale predominates in the Middle East, North Africa, India and (formerly) in southern Europe.

Hope is a belief in a positive outcome related to events and circumstances in one's life. Hope is the feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best. When used in a religious context, hope carries a connotation of being aware of what Christians see as spiritual truth; see Hope (virtue). In Christian theology, hope is one of the three theological virtues (faith, hope, and love), which are spiritual gifts of God.

A hormone is a chemical released by one or more cells that affects cells in other parts of the organism. Only a small amount of hormone is required to alter cell metabolism. It is essentially a chemical messenger that transports a signal from one cell to another. All multicellular organisms produce hormones; plant hormones are also called phytohormones. Hormones in animals are often transported in the blood.

Human behavioral ecology (HBE) or human evolutionary ecology applies the principles of evolutionary theory and optimization to the study of human behavioral and cultural diversity. HBE examines the adaptive design of traits, behaviors, and life histories of humans in an ecological context. HBE overlaps with evolutionary psychology, human or cultural ecology, and decision theory.

Human biology is an interdisciplinary academic field of biology, biological anthropology, nutrition and medicine which focuses on humans; it is closely related to primate biology, and a number of other fields. The human biology major was founded in 1970 at Stanford University.

The human brain is the center of the human nervous system and is a highly complex organ. Enclosed in the cranium, it has the same general structure as the brains of other mammals, but is over three times as large as the brain of a mammal with an equivalent body size. Most of the expansion comes from the cerebral cortex, a convoluted layer of neural tissue that covers the surface of the forebrain.

Human cognition is the study of how the human brain thinks. As a subject of study, human cognition tends to be more than only theoretical in that its theories lead to working models that demonstrate behavior similar to human thought. The extent to which these models can be measured as similar to, or indistinguishable from, human thought is the measure of the accuracy of the human cognition model.

Human development is the process of growing to maturity. In biological terms, this entails growth from a one-celled zygote to an adult human being.

Human ecology is an academic discipline that deals with the relationship between humans, human societies, and their natural, social and created environments.

Human evolution, or anthropogenesis, is the origin and evolution of Homo sapiens as a distinct species from other hominins, great apes and placental mammals. The study of human evolution encompasses many scientific disciplines, including physical anthropology, primatology, archaeology, linguistics and genetics. The term "human" in the context of human evolution refers to the genus Homo, but studies of human evolution usually include other hominins, such as the Australopithecines.

Human genetics describes the study of inheritance as it occurs in human beings. Human genetics encompasses a variety of overlapping fields including: classical genetics, cytogenetics, molecular genetics, biochemical genetics, genomics, population genetics, developmental genetics, clinical genetics, and genetic counseling.

The human genome is the genome of Homo sapiens, which is stored on 23 chromosome pairs. Twenty-two of these are autosomal chromosome pairs, while the remaining pair is sex-determining. The haploid human genome occupies a total of just over 3 billion DNA base pairs. The Human Genome Project (HGP) produced a reference sequence of the euchromatic human genome, which is used worldwide in biomedical sciences.

The Human Genome Project (HGP) was an international scientific research project with a primary goal to determine the sequence of chemical base pairs which make up DNA and to identify and map the approximately 20,000-25,000 genes of the human genome from both a physical and functional standpoint.

Humanism is a perspective common to a wide range of ethical stances that attaches importance to human dignity, concerns, and capabilities, particularly rationality. Although the word has many senses, its meaning comes into focus when contrasted to the supernatural or to appeals to authority.

The humanities are academic disciplines which study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytic, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural and social sciences. Examples of the disciplines of the humanities are ancient and modern languages, literature, history, philosophy, religion, and visual and performing arts.

A human language is a language primarily intended for communication among humans. The two major categories of human languages are natural languages and constructed languages. The term is used in the opposition to other kinds of communication used by humans traditionally called "language", such as formal language or machine language, as well as to hypothetical alien languages. Often the terms "human language" and "natural language" are used synonymously.

Human nature is the concept that there are a set of characteristics, including ways of thinking, feeling and acting, that all 'normal' human beings have in common. The branches of science associated with the study of human nature include sociology, sociobiology and psychology, particularly evolutionary psychology and developmental psychology. Philosophers and theologians have also carried out research on human nature.

Human reproduction is any form of sexual reproduction resulting in the conception of a child, typically involving sexual intercourse between a man and a woman. During sexual intercourse, the interaction between the male reproductive system and the female reproductive system results in fertilization of the woman's ovum by the man's sperm, which after a gestation period is followed by childbirth.

Humans are bipedal primates belonging to the species Homo sapiens in Hominidae, the great ape family. Compared to other species, humans have a highly developed brain, capable of abstract reasoning, language, introspection and problem solving. This mental capability, combined with an erect body carriage that frees the arms for manipulating objects, has allowed humans to make far greater use of tools than any other species.

Human sexuality is how people experience the erotic and express themselves as sexual beings. Human sexuality has many aspects. Biologically, sexuality refers to the reproductive mechanism as well as the basic biological drive that exists in all species and can encompass sexual intercourse and sexual contact in all its forms.

David Hume (7 May 1711 - 25 August 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, economist, historian and a key figure in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume is often grouped with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others as a British Empiricist.

Humour or humor is the tendency of particular cognitive experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. Many theories exist about what humour is and what social function it serves. People of all ages and cultures respond to humour. The majority of people are able to be amused, to laugh or smile at something funny and thus they are considered to have a "sense of humour".

A hunter-gatherer society is one whose primary subsistence method involves the direct procurement of edible plants and animals from the wild, foraging and hunting without significant recourse to the domestication of either. Hunter-gatherers obtain most from gathering rather than hunting; up to 80% of the food is obtained by gathering.

Hunting is the practice of pursuing living animals for food, recreation, or trade. In present-day use, the term refers to lawful hunting, as distinguished from poaching, which is the killing, trapping or capture of the hunted species contrary to applicable law. The species which are hunted are referred to as game and are usually large, small or medium mammals or migratory or non-migratory gamebirds.

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher who is deemed the founder of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, believing that experience is the source of all knowledge, while at the same time he elaborated critiques of psychologism and historicism. Born into a Moravian Jewish family, he was baptized as a Lutheran in 1887. Husserl studied mathematics under Karl Weierstrass, completing a Ph.D.

Sir Julian Sorell Huxley FRS (22 June 1887-14 February 1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, humanist and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century evolutionary synthesis. He was Secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935-1942), the first Director of UNESCO, and a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund.

Thomas Henry Huxley PC FRS (4 May 1825 - 29 June 1895) was an English biologist, known as Darwin's Bulldog for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Huxley's famous 1860 debate with Samuel Wilberforce was a key moment in the wider acceptance of evolution, and in his own career. Wilberforce was coached by Richard Owen, against whom Huxley also debated on whether man was closely related to apes.

In biology and specifically genetics, hybrid has several meanings, all referring to the offspring of sexual reproduction.

A hypothesis is a proposed explanation for an observable phenomenon. The term derives from the Greek, hypotithenai meaning "to put under" or "to suppose. " For a hypothesis to be put forward as a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it. Scientists generally base scientific hypotheses on previous observations that cannot be satisfactorily explained with the available scientific theories.

Idealism is the philosophical theory that maintains that the ultimate nature of reality is based on mind or ideas. It holds that the so-called external or "real world" is inseparable from mind, consciousness, or perception. In the philosophy of perception, idealism is contrasted with realism in which the external world is said to have a so-called absolute existence prior to, and independent of, knowledge and consciousness.

Idealization is the process by which scientific models assume facts about the phenomenon being modeled that are certainly false. Often these assumptions are used to make models easier to understand or solve. Many times idealizations do not harm the predictive accuracy of the model for one reason or another. Most debates surrounding the usefulness of a particular model often are about the appropriateness of different idealizations.

An ideology is a set of aims and ideas that directs one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things, as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies, or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to all members of this society.

Image analysis is the extraction of meaningful information from images; mainly from digital images by means of digital image processing techniques. Image analysis tasks can be as simple as reading bar coded tags or as sophisticated as identifying a person from their face. Computers are indispensable for the analysis of large amounts of data, for tasks that require complex computation, or for the extraction of quantitative information.

Imagination, also called the faculty of imagining, is the ability of forming mental images, sensations and concepts, in a moment when they are not perceived through sight, hearing or other senses. Imagination helps provide meaning to experience and understanding to knowledge; it is a fundamental facility through which people make sense of the world, and it also plays a key role in the learning process.

Imitation is an advanced behavior whereby an individual observes and replicates another's. The word can be applied in many contexts, ranging from animal training to international politics.

Immanence, derived from the Latin in manere - "to remain within" - refers to philosophical and metaphysical theories of divine presence, which hold that some divine being or essence manifests in and through all aspects of the material world. It is usually applied in monotheistic, pantheistic, or panentheistic faiths to suggest that the spiritual world permeates the non-spiritual, and often contrasts the idea of transcendence.

An immune system is a system of biological structures and processes within an organism that protects against disease by identifying and killing pathogens and tumour cells. It detects a wide variety of agents, from viruses to parasitic worms, and needs to distinguish them from the organism's own healthy cells and tissues in order to function properly.

Immunology is a broad branch of biomedical science that covers the study of all aspects of the immune system in all organisms. It deals with, among other things, the physiological functioning of the immune system in states of both health and disease; malfunctions of the immune system in immunological disorders; the physical, chemical and physiological characteristics of the components of the immune system in vitro, in situ, and in vivo.

In economic theory, imperfect competition is the competitive situation in any market where the conditions necessary for perfect competition are not satisfied. It is a market structure that does not meet the conditions of perfect competition. Forms of imperfect competition include: Monopoly, in which there is only one seller of a good. Oligopoly, in which there is a small number of sellers. Monopolistic competition, in which there are many sellers producing highly differentiated goods.

Implementation is the realization of an application, or execution of a plan, idea, model, design, specification, standard, algorithm, or policy. In computer science, an implementation is a realization of a technical specification or algorithm as a program, software component, or other computer system. Many implementations may exist for a given specification or standard.

Implementation theory is an area of game theory closely related to mechanism design where an attempt is made to add into a game a mechanism such that the equilibrium of the game conforms to some concept of social optimality. In a game where multiple agents are to report their preferences (or their type), it may be in the best interest of some agents to lie about their preferences. This may improve their payoff, but it may not be seen as a fair outcome to other agents.

In social choice theory, Arrow’s impossibility theorem, or Arrow’s paradox, demonstrates that no voting system can convert the ranked preferences of individuals into a community-wide ranking while also meeting a certain set of reasonable criteria with three or more discrete options to choose from. These criteria are called unrestricted domain, non-imposition, non-dictatorship, Pareto efficiency, and independence of irrelevant alternatives.

Inbreeding is breeding between close relatives, whether plant or animal. If practiced repeatedly, it can lead to exposure of recessive, deleterious traits. This generally leads to a decreased fitness of a population, which is called inbreeding depression. Deleterious alleles causing inbreeding depression can subsequently be removed through culling. This is known as genetic purging. Livestock breeders often practice inbreeding to "fix" desirable characteristics within a population.

In economics and sociology, an incentive is any factor (financial or non-financial) that enables or motivates a particular course of action, or counts as a reason for preferring one choice to the alternatives. It is an expectation that encourages people to behave in a certain way.

Incest refers to any sexual activity between close relatives (often within the immediate family) that is illegal or socially taboo. The type of sexual activity and the nature of the relationship between persons that constitutes a breach of law or social taboo vary with culture and jurisdiction.

In evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, inclusive fitness refers to an organism's classical fitness (how many of its own offspring it produces and supports) plus the number of equivalents of its own offspring it can add to the population by supporting others. From the gene's point of view, evolutionary success ultimately depends on leaving behind the maximum number of copies of itself in the population.

Putnam made a significant contribution to philosophy of mathematics in the Quine–Putnam "indispensability argument" for mathematical realism. This argument is considered by Stephen Yablo to be one of the most challenging arguments in favor of the acceptance of the existence of abstract mathematical entities, such as numbers and set The form of the argument is as follows.

1. One must have ontological commitments to all entities that are indispensable to the best scientific theories, and to those entities only (commonly referred to as "all and only").
2. Mathematical entities are indispensable to the best scientific theories. Therefore,
3. One must have ontological commitments to mathematical entities.

(excerpt from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Putnam)

Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, or social outlook that stresses independence and self-reliance. Individualists promote the exercise of one's goals and desires, while opposing most external interference upon one's choices, whether by society, or any other group or institution. Individualism is opposed to collectivism, which stresses that communal, community, group, societal, or national goals should take priority over individual goals.

Individuation is a concept which appears in numerous fields and may be encountered in work by Carl Jung, Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, David Bohm, and Manuel De Landa. In very general terms, it is the name given to processes whereby the undifferentiated tends to become individual, or to those processes through which differentiated components tend toward becoming a more indivisible whole.

Indoctrination is the process of ideas, attitudes, cognitive strategies or a professional methodology. It is often distinguished from education by the fact that the indoctrinated person is expected not to question or critically examine the doctrine they have learned. As such it is used pejoratively, often in the context of theology and religious dogma.

Induction, also known as inductive reasoning or inductive logic is a type of reasoning which involves moving from a set of specific facts to a general conclusion. It can also be seen as a form of theory-building, in which specific facts are used to create a theory that explains relationships between the facts and allows prediction of future knowledge.

Industrial metabolism was first proposed by Robert Ayres as ‘‘the whole integrated collection of physical processes that convert raw materials and energy, plus labour, into finished products and wastes…’’. The goal is to study the flow of materials through society in order to better understand the sources and causes of emissions, along with the effects of the linkages in our socio-technological systems. .

Inference the act or process of Inference is studied within several different fields. Human inference (i.e. how humans draw conclusions) is traditionally studied within the field of cognitive psychology. Logic studies the laws of valid inference. Statisticians have developed formal rules for inference from quantitative data. Artificial intelligence researchers develop automated inference systems.

Informatics is the science of information, the practice of information processing, and the engineering of information systems. Informatics studies the structure, algorithms, behavior, and interactions of natural and artificial systems that store, process, access and communicate information. It also develops its own conceptual and theoretical foundations and utilizes foundations developed in other fields.

Information as a concept has a diversity of meanings, from everyday usage to technical settings. Generally speaking, the concept of information is closely related to notions of constraint, communication, control, data, form, instruction, knowledge, meaning, mental stimulus, pattern, perception, and representation.

Information retrieval (IR) is the science of searching for documents, for information within documents and for metadata about documents, as well as that of searching relational databases and the World Wide Web. There is overlap in the usage of the terms data retrieval, document retrieval, information retrieval, and text retrieval, but each also has its own body of literature, theory, praxis and technologies.

Information science is an interdisciplinary science primarily concerned with the analysis, collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval and dissemination of information. Practitioners within the field study the application and usage of knowledge in organizations, along with the interaction between people, organizations and any existing information systems, with the aim of creating, replacing, improving or understanding information systems.

Information theory is a branch of applied mathematics and electrical engineering involving the quantification of information. Historically, information theory was developed by Claude E. Shannon to find fundamental limits on compressing and reliably storing and communicating data.

Infrastructure can be defined as the basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of a society or enterprise, or the services and facilities necessary for an economy to function. The term typically refers to the technical structures that support a society, such as roads, water supply, sewers, power grids, telecommunications, and so forth.

Inheritance is the practice of passing on property, titles, debts, and obligations upon the death of an individual. It has long played an important role in human societies. The rules of inheritance differ between societies and have changed over time.

The inheritance of acquired traits (or characteristics) is a hypothesis about a mechanism of heredity by which changes in physiology acquired over the life of an organism (such as the enlargement of a muscle through repeated use) may purportedly be transmitted to offspring. It is also commonly referred to as the theory of adaptation equated with the evolutionary theory of French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck known as Lamarckism.

Innatism is a philosophical doctrine that holds that the mind is born with ideas/knowledge, and that therefore the mind is not a 'blank slate' at birth, as early empiricists such as John Locke claimed. It asserts therefore that not all knowledge is obtained from experience and the senses.

Innatism is a philosophical doctrine that holds that the mind is born with ideas/knowledge, and that therefore the mind is not a 'blank slate' at birth, as early empiricists such as John Locke claimed. It asserts therefore that not all knowledge is obtained from experience and the senses.

The term innovation refers to a new way of doing something. It may refer to incremental and emergent or radical and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations. Following Schumpeter (1934), contributors to the scholarly literature on innovation typically distinguish between invention, an idea made manifest, and innovation, ideas applied successfully in practice.

The first section of the alimentary canal is the fore-gut (27) or stomodaeum. In the fore-gut, initial breakdown of large food particles occurs, mostly by saliva. The fore-gut includes the Buccal cavity, the esophagus, and the crop, which stores food before it passes to the mid-gut. Once food leaves the crop, it passes to the mid-gut (13) or mesenteron. The mid-gut is where digestion really happens, through enzymatic action.

Instinct is the inborn complex behavior of a living organism that is not learned. Since 1910, most scientific journals consider the term outdated although it remains popular among the general public and a number of scientists. Instincts are thought to occur as fixed action patterns. These fixed action patterns are unlearned and inherited. Problems occurred when it was discovered that stimuli can be variable due to imprinting in a sensitive period.

The term institutionalisation is widely used in social theory to denote the process of making something (for example a concept, a social role, particular values and norms, or modes of behaviour) become embedded within an organization, social system, or society as an established custom or norm within that system. See the entries on structure and agency and social construction for theoretical perspectives on the process of institutionalisation and the associated construction of institutions.

Institutions are structures and mechanisms of social order and cooperation governing the behavior of a set of individuals within a given human collectivity. Institutions are identified with a social purpose and permanence, transcending individual human lives and intentions, and with the making and enforcing of rules governing cooperative human behavior.

In the philosophy of science, instrumentalism is the view that a concept or theory should be evaluated by how effectively it explains and predicts phenomena, as opposed to how accurately it describes objective reality. Instrumentalism relates closely to pragmatism, especially in the work of John Dewey and his student Addison Webster Moore. This methodological viewpoint often contrasts with scientific realism, which defines theories as specially being more or less true.

Intelligence is an umbrella term used to describe a property of the mind that encompasses many related abilities, such as the capacities to reason, to plan, to solve problems, to think abstractly, to comprehend ideas, to use language, and to learn. There are several ways to define intelligence. In some cases, intelligence may include traits such as creativity, personality, character, knowledge, or wisdom.

An 's intention in performing an action is his or her specific purpose in doing so, the end or goal that is aimed at, or intended to accomplish. Whether an action is successful or unsuccessful depends at least on whether the intended result was brought about. Other consequences of someone's acting are called unintentional. However, recent research in experimental philosophy has shown that other factors may also matter for whether or not an action is counted as intentional.

The term intentionality was introduced by Jeremy Bentham as a principle of utility in his doctrine of consciousness for the purpose of distinguishing acts that are intentional and acts that are not . The term was later used by Edmund Husserl in his doctrine that consciousness is always intentional, a concept that he undertook in connection with theses set forth by Franz Brentano regarding the ontological and psychological status of objects of thought.

The intentional stance is a theory of mental content proposed by Daniel C. Dennett. The theory provides the underpinnings of his later works on free will, consciousness, folk psychology, and evolution. The intentional stance is a level of abstraction in which we view the behavior of a thing in terms of mental properties.

Interaction is a kind of action that occurs as two or more objects have an effect upon one another. The idea of a two-way effect is essential in the concept of interaction, as opposed to a one-way causal effect. A closely related term is interconnectivity, which deals with the interactions of interactions within systems: combinations of many simple interactions can lead to surprising emergent phenomena. Interaction has different tailored meanings in various sciences.

Interactionism, also known as symbolic interactionism (sometimes known as interpretivism) is a generic sociological paradigm that sees interaction and meaning as central to society and assumes that meanings are not inherent but are created through interaction.

An interdisciplinary field or multidisciplinary field is a field of study that crosses traditional boundaries between academic disciplines or schools of thought, as new needs and professions have emerged. Originally the terms interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary were applied within education and training pedagogies to describe studies that cut across several established disciplines or traditional fields of study.

The selfish gene theory postulates that natural selection will increase the frequency of those genes whose phenotypic effects ensure their successful replication. Generally, a gene achieves this goal by building, in cooperation with other genes, an organism capable of transmitting the gene to descendants. Intragenomic conflict arises when genes inside a genome are not transmitted by the same rules, or when a gene causes its own transmission to the detriment of the rest of the genome.

Introspection is the self-observation and reporting of conscious inner thoughts, desires and sensations. It is a conscious mental and usually purposive process relying on thinking, reasoning, and examining one's own thoughts, feelings, and, in more spiritual cases, one's soul. It can also be called contemplation of one's self, and is contrasted with extrospection, the observation of things external to one's self.

Intuition is the apparent ability to acquire knowledge without inference or the use of reason. “The word ‘intuition’ comes from the Latin word 'intueri', which is often roughly translated as meaning ‘to look inside’ or ‘to contemplate’. " Intuition provides us with beliefs that we cannot necessarily justify. For this reason, it has been the subject of study in psychology, as well as a topic of interest in the supernatural.

Inuit (plural; the singular Inuk means "man" or "person") is a general term for a group of culturally similar indigenous peoples inhabiting the Arctic regions of Canada, Greenland, and Alaska. The Inuit language is grouped under Eskimo-Aleut languages.

An invention is a new configuration, composition of matter, device, or process. Some inventions are based on pre-existing models or ideas and others are radical breakthroughs. Inventions can extend the boundaries of human knowledge or experience. Innovations are Inventions that become common in usage, and may be a major breakthroughs, minor in their impact, or with an effect in between these two extremes.

In economics, the invisible hand, also known as the invisible hand of the market, is the term economists use to describe the self-regulating nature of the marketplace. The invisible hand is a metaphor first coined by the economist Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. For Smith, the invisible hand was created by the conjunction of the forces of self-interest, competition, and supply and demand, which he noted as being capable of allocating resources in society.

An intelligence quotient, or IQ, is a score derived from one of several different standardized tests designed to assess intelligence. The term "IQ", from the German Intelligenz-Quotient, was coined by the German psychologist William Stern in 1912

Irrationality is cognition, thinking, talking or acting without inclusion of rationality. The term is used, usually pejoratively, to describe thinking and actions that are, or appear to be, less useful or illogical than other more rational alternatives.

In science, a process that is not reversible is called irreversible. This concept arises most frequently in thermodynamics, as applied to processes. Irreversibility is also used in economics to refer to investment or expenditures that involve large sunk costs. In thermodynamics, a change in the thermodynamic state of a system is irreversible if the system cannot be restored to its former state by infinitesimal changes in some property of the system without expenditure of energy.

Island biogeography is a field within biogeography that attempts to establish and explain the factors that affect the species richness of natural communities. The theory was developed to explain species richness of actual islands. It has since been extended to mountains surrounded by deserts, lakes surrounded by dry land, forest fragments surrounded by human-altered landscapes. Now it is used in reference to any ecosystem surrounded by unlike ecosystems.

Jaegwon Kim is an American philosopher currently working at Brown University. He is best known for his work on mental causation and the mind-body problem. Key themes in his work include: a rejection of Cartesian metaphysics, the limitations of strict psychophysical identity, supervenience, and the individuation of events.

Roman Osipovich Jakobson (Russian, Роман Осипович Якобсон) (11 October 1896 - 18 July 1982) was a Russian linguist and literary critic, associated with the Formalist school. He became one of the most influential linguists of the 20th century by pioneering the development of structural analysis of language, poetry, and art.

Jealousy is an emotion and typically refers to the negative thoughts and feelings of insecurity, fear, and anxiety over an anticipated loss of something that the person values, such as a relationship, friendship, or love. Jealousy often consists of a combination of emotions such as anger, sadness, and disgust.

The term judgment or judgement generally refers to the considered evaluation of evidence in the formation of making a decision. The term has three distinct uses: Informal and psychology —used in reference to the quality of cognitive faculties and adjudicational capabilities of particular individuals, typically called wisdom or discernment.

Justice is the concept of moral rightness based on ethics, rationality, law, natural law, fairness, religion and/or equity.

Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724 - 12 February 1804) was an 18th-century German philosopher from the Prussian city of Königsberg. Kant was the last influential philosopher of modern Europe in the classic sequence of the theory of knowledge during the Enlightenment beginning with thinkers John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. Kant created a new widespread perspective in philosophy which influenced philosophy through to the 21st Century.

Henry Bernard Davis Kettlewell was a British geneticist, lepidopterist and medical doctor, who carried out research into the influence of industrial melanism on natural selection in moths, showing why moths are darker in polluted areas.

Some organisms tend to exhibit strategies that favor the reproductive success of their relatives, even at a cost to their own survival and/or reproduction. The classic example is a eusocial insect colony, with sterile females acting as workers to assist their mother in the production of additional offspring. Many evolutionary biologists explain this by the theory of kin selection.

Philip Stuart Kitcher (born 1947) is a British philosophy professor who specializes in the philosophy of science. Born in London, Kitcher spent his early life in Eastbourne, East Sussex, on the South Coast of the United Kingdom. He earned his B.A. in Mathematics/History and Philosophy of Science from Christ's College, Cambridge in 1969, and his Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from Princeton University in 1974, where he worked closely with Thomas Kuhn.

Knowledge is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as (i) expertise, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject, (ii) what is known in a particular field or in total; facts and information or (iii) awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation. Philosophical debates in general start with Plato's formulation of knowledge as "justified true belief".

Knowledge acquisition is a method of learning, first proposed by Aristotle in his seminal work "Organon". Aristotle proposed that the mind at birth is a blank slate, or tabula rasa. As a blank slate it contains no knowledge of the objective, empirical universe, nor of itself.

Mary's room (also known as Mary the super-scientist) is a philosophical thought experiment proposed by Frank Jackson in his article "Epiphenomenal Qualia" (1982) and extended in "What Mary Didn't Know" (1986). The argument it is intended to motivate is often called the "Knowledge Argument" against physicalism—the view that the universe, including all that is mental, is entirely physical.

Knowledge transfer in the fields of organizational development and organizational learning is the practical problem of transferring knowledge from one part of the organization to another (or all other) part(s) of the organization. Like Knowledge Management, Knowledge transfer seeks to organize, create, capture or distribute knowledge and ensure its availability for future users. It is considered to be more than just a communication problem.

Thomas Samuel Kuhn was an American intellectual who wrote extensively on the history of science and developed several important notions in the sociology and philosophy of science.

Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called the "father of modern anthropology".

Imre Lakatos was a philosopher of mathematics and science, known for his thesis of the fallibility of mathematics and its 'methodology of proofs and refutations', and also for introducing the concept of the 'research programme' in his methodology of scientific research programmes.

Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de la Marck, usually known as Lamarck, (1 August 1744 - 18 December 1829) was a French soldier, naturalist, academic and an early proponent of the idea that evolution occurred and proceeded in accordance with natural laws. Lamarck fought in the Pomeranian War with Prussia, and was awarded a commission for bravery on the battlefield. At his post in Monaco, Lamarck became interested in natural history and resolved to study medicine.

Lamarckism (or Lamarckian inheritance) is the once popularly accepted, but since mainly discredited, idea that an organism can pass on characteristics that it acquired during its lifetime to its offspring. It is named for the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), who incorporated the action of soft inheritance into his evolutionary theories and is often incorrectly cited as the founder of soft inheritance.

Language acquisition is the study of the processes through which humans acquire language. By itself, language acquisition refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, whereas second language acquisition deals with acquisition of additional languages in both children and adults. The process of language acquisition is among the leading aspects that distinguishes humans from other organisms.

Since language development is the crucial part of the human cognitive nature, understanding language development is an important aspect to understand the base and to recall its various components of linguistics.

Larry Laudan is a contemporary philosopher of science and epistemologist. He has strongly criticized the traditions of positivism, realism, and relativism, and he proposes his own way to maintain science as a privileged and progressive institution, in the face of popular challenges. Laudan's philosophical view of "research traditions" is seen as important alternative to Imre Lakatos's "research programs.

Law is a system of rules, usually enforced through a set of institutions. It shapes politics, economics and society in numerous ways and serves as a primary social mediator in relations between people. Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus ticket to trading on derivatives markets. Property law defines rights and obligations related to the transfer and title of personal (often referred to as chattel) and real property.

Law and Economics, or economic analysis of law, is an approach to legal theory that applies methods of economics to law. It includes the use of economic concepts to explain the effects of laws, to assess which legal rules are economically efficient, and to predict which legal rules will be promulgated.

In psychology and education, a common definition of learning is a process that brings together cognitive, emotional, and environmental influences and experiences for acquiring, enhancing, or making changes in one's knowledge, skills, values, and world views (Illeris,2000; Ormorod, 1995). Learning as a process focuses on what happens when the learning takes place. Explanations of what happens constitute learning theories.

Legal naturalism is a term coined by Olufemi Taiwo to describe a current in the social philosophy of Karl Marx which can be interpreted as one of Natural Law. Taiwo considered it the manifestation of Natural Law in a dialectical materialist context.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (also Leibnitz or von Leibniz; 1 July 1646 - 14 November 1716) was a German philosopher, polymath and mathematician who wrote primarily in Latin and French. He occupies a grand place in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathematics. He invented infinitesimal calculus independently of Newton, and his notation has been in general use since then. He also invented the binary system, foundation of virtually all modern computer architectures.

Leslie Alvin White was an American anthropologist known for his advocacy of theories of cultural evolution, sociocultural evolution, and especially neoevolutionism, and for his role in creating the department of anthropology at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. He was president of the American Anthropological Association (1964).

Richard "Dick" Levins is a mathematical ecologist, and political activist. He is most famous for his work on evolution in changing environments. Levins' writing and speaking is extremely condensed. This, combined with his Marxism has made his analyses less well known than those of some other ecologists and evolutionists adept at popularization.

Richard Charles "Dick" Lewontin is an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist and social commentator. A leader in developing the mathematical basis of population genetics and evolutionary theory, he pioneered the notion of using techniques from molecular biology such as gel electrophoresis to apply to questions of genetic variation and evolution. In a pair of 1966 papers co-authored with J.L.

Life is a characteristic that distinguishes objects that have self-sustaining biological processes ("alive," "living"), from those which do not —either because such functions have ceased, or else because they lack such functions and are classified as ". " In biology, the science that studies living organisms, "life" is the condition which distinguishes active organisms from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, functional activity and the continual change preceding death.

Life expectancy is the expected (in the statistical sense) number of years of life remaining at a given age. It is denoted by ex, which means the average number of subsequent years of life for someone now aged x, according to a particular mortality experience. (In technical literature, this symbol means the average number of complete years of life remaining, ie excluding fractions of a year.

The term life history has been given many meanings in several scientific fields. It can refer to a variety of methods and techniques that are used for conducting qualitative interviews, especially in the fields of sociology and anthropology.

Life history theory is an analytical framework widely used in evolutionary biology, ecology, psychology, and evolutionary anthropology which postulates that many of the physiological traits and behaviors of organisms may be best understood in terms of effects of natural selection on the key maturational and reproductive characteristics that define the life course.

In philosophy of science the empirical limits of science define problems with observation, and thus are limits of human ability to inquire and answer questions about phenomena. These include topics such as infinity, the future and god. In the 20th century several of these were well-documented or proposed in physics: The Planck length - actually a limit on distance itself. The Schrödinger's cat paradox. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

One pattern is spread zones (geographical areas where a language family has spread widely, often repeated with several language families in sequence, like Indo-European and later Turkic languages in central Eurasia) vs. residual zones (areas, often mountainous, where many languages of various families have been preserved, like the Caucasus or New Guinea). For example, head marking is more common in the residual zones, which Nichols suggests is a result of long-term language contact.

The linguistic relativity principle (also known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) is the idea that the varying cultural concepts and categories inherent in different languages affect the cognitive classification of the experienced world in such a way that speakers of different languages think and behave differently because of it.

Linguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning. Grammar encompasses morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the rules that determine how words combine into phrases and sentences) and phonology (the study of sound systems and abstract sound units).

The linguistic turn was a major development in Western philosophy during the 20th century, the most important characteristic of which is the focusing of philosophy, and consequently also the other humanities, primarily on the relationship between philosophy and language. Ludwig Wittgenstein can be considered one of the ancestors of the linguistic turn.

Genetic linkage occurs when particular genetic loci or alleles for genes are inherited jointly. Genetic loci on the same chromosome are physically connected and tend to stay together during meiosis, and are thus genetically linked. This is called autosomal linkage. Alleles for genes on different chromosomes are usually not linked, due to independent assortment of chromosomes during meiosis.

Carl Linnaeus (Latinized as Carolus Linnaeus, also known after his ennoblement as, 23 May 1707 - 10 January 1778) was a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist, who laid the foundations for the modern scheme of binomial nomenclature. He is known as the father of modern taxonomy, and is also considered one of the fathers of modern ecology. Linnaeus was born in the countryside of Småland, in southern Sweden.

Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes-in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense-considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social prophecy, and other interdisciplinary themes. In the humanities, the latter style of scholarship is often called simply "theory.

John Locke (29 August 1632 - 28 October 1704) was an English philosopher. Locke is considered the first of the British empiricists, but is equally important to social contract theory. His ideas had enormous influence on the development of epistemology and political philosophy, and he is widely regarded as one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers, classical republicans, and contributors to liberal theory.

Logic is the art and science of reasoning. More specifically, it is defined by the Penguin Encyclopedia to be "The formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning". As a discipline, logic dates back to Aristotle, who established its fundamental place in philosophy.

Logical positivism (also called logical empiricism and neo-positivism) is a school of philosophy that combines empiricism, the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge of the world, with a version of rationalism incorporating mathematical and logico-linguistic constructs and deductions in epistemology. Logical positivism grew from the discussions of a group called the "First Vienna Circle" which gathered at the Café Central before World War I.

Logicism is one of the schools of thought in the philosophy of mathematics, putting forth the theory that mathematics is an extension of logic and therefore some or all mathematics is reducible to logic. Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead championed this theory fathered by Gottlob Frege. Frege gave up on the project after Russell recognized a paradox exposing an inconsistency in naive set theory. Russell and Whitehead continued on with the project in their Principia Mathematica.

Konrad Zacharias Lorenz (November 7, 1903 in Vienna - February 27, 1989 in Vienna) was an Austrian zoologist, animal psychologist, ornithologist, and Nobel Prize winner. He is often regarded as one of the founders of modern ethology, developing an approach that began with an earlier generation, including his teacher Oskar Heinroth. Lorenz studied instinctive behavior in animals, especially in greylag geese and jackdaws.

Love is any of a number of emotions and experiences related to a sense of strong affection and attachment. The word ' can refer to a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes, ranging from generic pleasure ("I loved that meal") to intense interpersonal attraction ("I love my boyfriend"). This diversity of uses and meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, even compared to other emotional states.

Moral error theory is a position characterized by its commitment to two propositions: (i) all moral claims are false and (ii) we have reason to believe that all moral claims are false.

The Rhesus Macaque (Macaca mulatta), often called the Rhesus Monkey, is one of the best known species of Old World monkeys. Adult males measure approximately 53 centimeters on average and weigh an average of 7.7 kilograms. Females are smaller, averaging 47 centimeters in length and 5.3 kilograms in weight. This macaque is brown or grey in color and have pink faces which are typically bereft of fur. Its tail is of medium length and averages between 20.7 and 22.9 centimeters.

Ernst Mach (February 18, 1838-February 19, 1916) was an Austrian physicist and philosopher, remembered for his contributions to physics such as the Mach number and the study of shock waves. As a philosopher of science, he was a major influence on logical positivism and through his criticism of Newton, a forerunner of Einstein's relativity.

A machine is any device that uses energy to perform some activity. In common usage, the meaning is that of a device having parts that perform or assist in performing any type of work. A simple machine is a device that transforms the direction or magnitude of a force without consuming any energy. The word "machine" is derived from the Latin word machina.

John Leslie Mackie (28 August 1917-12 December 1981) was an Australian philosopher, originally from Sydney. He is perhaps best known for his views on meta-ethics, especially his defence of moral skepticism. However, he has also made significant contributions to philosophy of religion and metaphysics.

Macroevolution is a scale of analysis of evolution in separated gene pools. Macroevolutionary studies focus on change that occurs at or above the level of species, in contrast with microevolution, which refers to smaller evolutionary changes (typically described as changes in allele frequencies) within a species or population. The process of speciation may fall within the purview of either, depending on the forces thought to drive it.

The term macromolecule by definition implies "large molecule", or large thing of science. In the context of biochemistry, the term may be applied to the four conventional biopolymers, as well as non-polymeric molecules with large molecular mass such as macrocycles. Macromolecules are synthesized through the process of polymerization, during which monomers (mono=single, meros=part) are assembled into large molecules - macromolecules. They are often used for biology.

The paradise fish or paradise gouramis (Macropodus opercularis), are small freshwater labyrinth fish found in ditches and paddy fields in East Asia, ranging from the Korean Peninsula to Northern Vietnam. Paradise gouramis were one of the first ornamental fishes available to western aquarium keepers, having been imported to Europe as early as the 1800s. These small fish (adults are typically about 10 cm) are ideal lone inhabitants of aquariums.

Magnanimity (derived from the Latin roots magn- great, and anima, soul) is the virtue of being great of mind and heart. It encompasses, usually, a refusal to be petty, a willingness to face danger, and actions for noble purposes. Its antithesis is pusillanimity. Both terms were coined by Aristotle, who called magnanimity "the crowning virtue. " Noah Webster's 1828 Dictionary of the American Language defines Magnanimity as such: MAGNANIM'ITY, n. [L. magnanimitas; magnus, great, and animus, mind.

The Major Transitions in Evolution is a book written by John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry. Maynard Smith and Szathmary identified several properties common to the transitions: Smaller entities have often come about together to form larger entities. e.g. Chromosomes, eukaryotes, sex multicellular colonies. Smaller entities often become differentiated as part of a larger entity. e.g.

Malaria is a vector-borne infectious disease caused by protozoan parasites. It is widespread in tropical and subtropical regions, including parts of the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Each year, there are approximately 350-500 million cases of malaria, killing between one and three million people, the majority of whom are young children in Sub-Saharan Africa. Ninety percent of malaria-related deaths occur in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Male (♂) refers to the sex of an organism, or part of an organism, which produces small mobile gametes, called spermatozoa. Each spermatozoon can fuse with a larger female gamete or ovum, in the process of fertilization. A male cannot reproduce sexually without access to at least one ovum from a female, but some organisms can reproduce both sexually and asexually. Not all species share a common sex-determination system.

The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus FRS (13 February 1766 - 23 December 1834),

Mammals (formally Mammalia) are a class of vertebrate animals whose females are characterized by the possession of mammary glands while both males and females are characterized by sweat glands, hair, three middle ear bones used in hearing, and a neocortex region in the brain. Mammals are divided into three main infraclass taxas depending how they are born. These taxas are: monotremes, marsupials and placentals.

Management in all business and human organization activity is simply the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives. Management comprises planning, organizing, staffing, leading or directing, facilitating and controlling or manipulating an organization (a group of one or more people or entities) or effort for the purpose of accomplishing a goal.

Marcel Kinsbourne is an Austrian-born pediatric neurologist and neuroscientist who was an early pioneer in the study of brain lateralization . He is presently a Professor of Psychology at both the New School for Social Research of The New School in New York City and the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University . Dr. Kinsbourne obtained his D.M. degree at Oxford University in 1963, where he served on the Psychology Faculty before relocating to the United States in 1967.

A market is any one of a variety of different systems, institutions, procedures, social relations and infrastructures whereby persons trade, and goods and services are exchanged, forming part of the economy. It is an arrangement that allows buyers and sellers to exchange things. Markets vary in size, range, geographic scale, location, types and variety of human communities, as well as the types of goods and services traded.

Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 - March 14, 1883) was a German

Marxian economics are economic theories based on the works of Karl Marx. Adherents of Marxian economics, particularly in academia, distinguish it from Marxism as a political ideology, arguing that Marx's approach to understanding the economy is intellectually independent of his advocacy of revolutionary socialism or his belief in the proletarian revolution.

Marxism-Leninism is a communist ideological stream that emerged as the mainstream tendency among the Communist parties in the 1920s as it was adopted as the ideological foundation of the Communist International during Stalin's era. However, in various contexts, different (and sometimes opposing) political groups have used the term "Marxism-Leninism" to describe the ideology that they claimed to be upholding.

Sexual selection is the theory proposed by Charles Darwin that states that certain evolutionary traits can be explained by intraspecific competition. Darwin defined sexual selection as the effects of the "struggle between the individuals of one sex, generally the males, for the possession of the other sex". Biologists today distinguish between "male to male combat" (it is usually males who fight each other), "mate choice" (usually female choice of male mates) and sexual conflict.

The philosophy of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena (including consciousness) are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance. As a theory, materialism is a form of physicalism and belongs to the class of monist ontology. As such, it is different from ontological theories based on dualism or pluralism.

The maternal age effect describes the exponentially increasing risks for numerical chromosomal abnormalities among a prospective mother's gametes as she ages. This increase reflects the overall increase in the rate of nondisjunction with maternal age. However, paternal age does also have an effect.. A research study conducted by Fisch et al. showed that paternal age has a negligible effect up to the age of 35.

Mathematical biology is also called theoretical biology,

A mathematical model uses mathematical language to describe a system. Mathematical models are used not only in the natural sciences and engineering disciplines but also in the social sciences; physicists, engineers, computer scientists, and economists use mathematical models most extensively. The process of developing a mathematical model is termed 'mathematical modelling' (also modeling).

A mathematical model uses mathematical language to describe a system. Mathematical models are used not only in the natural sciences and engineering disciplines but also in the social sciences; physicists, engineers, computer scientists, and economists use mathematical models most extensively. The process of developing a mathematical model is termed 'mathematical modelling' (also modeling).

In mathematics and its philosophy, a mathematical object is an abstract object arising in mathematics. Commonly encountered mathematical objects include numbers, permutations, partitions, matrices, sets, functions, and relations. Geometry as a branch of mathematics has such objects as points, lines, triangles, circles, spheres, polyhedra, topological spaces and manifolds. Algebra, another branch, has groups, rings, fields, group-theoretic lattices and order-theoretic lattices.

Mathematical psychology is an approach to psychological research that is based on mathematical modeling of perceptual, cognitive and motor processes, and on the establishment of law-like rules that relate quantifiable stimulus characteristics with quantifiable behavior. In practice "quantifiable behavior" is often constituted by "task performance". As quantification of behavior is fundamental in this endeavor, the theory of measurement is a central topic in mathematical psychology.

Mathematics is the science and study of quantity, structure, space, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns, formulate new conjectures, and establish truth by rigorous deduction from appropriately chosen axioms and definitions. There is debate over whether mathematical objects such as numbers and points exist naturally or are human creations. The mathematician Benjamin Peirce called mathematics "the science that draws necessary conclusions".

In biology, mating is the pairing of opposite-sex or hermaphroditic organisms for copulation and, in social animals, also to raise their offspring. For animals, mating methods include random mating, disassortative mating, assortative mating, or a mating pool. In some birds, for example, it includes nest-building and feeding offspring. The human practice of making domesticated animals mate and of artificially inseminating them is part of animal husbandry.

A mating system is a way in which a group is structured in relation to sexual behaviour. The precise meaning depends upon the context. With respect to higher animals, it specifies which males mate with which females, under which circumstances; recognised animal mating systems include sexual monogamy, polygamy, polygyny, polygynandry, and promiscuity. In plants, it refers to the degree and circumstances of outcrossing.

The term matter traditionally refers to the substance that objects are made of.

Maxwell's demon is a thought experiment, first formulated in 1867

The Maya is a Mesoamerican civilization, noted for the only known fully developed written language of the pre-Columbian Americas, as well as its art, architecture, and mathematical and astronomical systems. Initially established during the Preclassic period (c. 2000 BC to 250 AD), many Maya cities reached their highest state development during the Classic period (c. 250 AD to 900 AD), and continued throughout the Postclassic period until the arrival of the Spanish.

John Maynard Smith, F.R.S. was a British theoretical evolutionary biologist and geneticist. Originally an aeronautical engineer during the Second World War, he then took a second degree in genetics under the well-known biologist J.B.S. Haldane. Maynard Smith was instrumental in the application of game theory to evolution and theorized on other problems such as the evolution of sex and signalling theory.

Ernst Walter Mayr, was one of the 20th century's leading evolutionary biologists. He was also a renowned taxonomist, tropical explorer, ornithologist, historian of science, and naturalist. His work contributed to the conceptual revolution that led to the modern evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics, systematics, and Darwinian evolution, and to the development of the biological species concept.

The meaning of life constitutes a philosophical question concerning the purpose and significance of human existence or biological life in general. This concept can be expressed through a variety of related questions, such as Why are we here?, What's life all about? and What is the meaning of it all? It has been the subject of much philosophical, scientific, and theological speculation throughout history.

In science, measurement is the process of obtaining the magnitude of a quantity, such as length or mass, relative to a unit of measurement, such as a meter or a kilogram. The term can also be used to refer to the result obtained after performing the process.

In philosophy, mechanism is the theory that all natural phenomena can be explained by laws of nature. It's the opposite of vitalism, which claims organisms have "vital forces" which aren't physical. The doctrine of mechanism in philosophy comes in two different flavors. They are both doctrines of metaphysics, but they are different in scope and ambitions: the first is a global doctrine about nature; the second is a local doctrine about human beings and their minds, which is hotly contested.

Mechanics is the branch of physics concerned with the behaviour of physical bodies when subjected to forces or displacements, and the subsequent effect of the bodies on their environment. The discipline has its roots in several ancient civilizations. During the early modern period, scientists such as Galileo, Kepler, and especially Newton, laid the foundation for what is now known as classical mechanics.

Medical anthropology is a subfield of social and cultural anthropology that examines the ways in which culture and society are organized around or impacted by issues of health, health care and related issues. The term "medical anthropology" has been used since 1963 as a label for empirical research and theoretical production by anthropologists into the social processes and cultural representations of health, illness and the nursing/care practices associated with these (Scotch, Norman A.

Medical education is education related to the practice of being a medical practitioner, either the initial training to become a doctor or additional training thereafter. Medical education and training varies considerably across the world. Various teaching methodologies have been utilised in medical education, which is an active area of educational research.

Medical ethics is primarily a field of applied ethics, the study of moral values and judgments as they apply to medicine. As a scholarly discipline, medical ethics encompasses its practical application in clinical settings as well as work on its history, philosophy, theology, and sociology.

Medical Genetics is the specialty of medicine that involves the diagnosis and management of hereditary disorders. Medical genetics differs from Human genetics in that human genetics is a field of scientific research that may or may not apply to medicine, but medical genetics refers to the application of genetics to medical care.

Biomedical research (or experimental medicine), in general simply known as medical research, is the basic research, applied research, or translational research conducted to aid and support the body of knowledge in the field of medicine. Medical research can be divided into two general categories: the evaluation of new treatments for both safety and efficacy in what are termed clinical trials, and all other research that contributes to the development of new treatments.

Medicine is the art and science of healing. It encompasses a range of health care practices evolved to maintain and restore health by the prevention and treatment of illness. Contemporary medicine applies health science, biomedical research, and medical technology to diagnose and treat injury and disease, typically through medication, surgery, or some other form of therapy. The word medicine is derived from the Latin ars medicina, meaning the art of healing.

A membrane is a layer of material which serves as a selective barrier between two phases and remains impermeable to specific particles, molecules, or substances when exposed to the action of a driving force. Some components are allowed passage by the membrane into a permeate stream, whereas others are retained by it and accumulate in the retentate stream. Membranes can be of various thickness, with homogeneous or heterogeneous structure.

Memetics is an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the meme. Starting from a proposition put forward in the writings of Richard Dawkins, it has since turned into a new area of study, one that looks at the self-replicating units of culture. It has been proposed that just as memes are analogous to genes, memetics is analogous to genetics.

In psychology, memory is an organism's mental ability to store, retain, and recall information. Traditional studies of memory began in the fields of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing the memory. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century put memory within the paradigms of cognitive psychology.

Gregor Johann Mendel (July 20, 1822 - January 6, 1884) was an Augustinian priest and scientist, and is often called the father of genetics for his study of the inheritance of certain traits in pea plants. Mendel showed that the inheritance of these traits follows particular laws, which were later named after him. The significance of Mendel's work was not recognized until the turn of the 20th century. Its rediscovery formed the foundation of the modern science of genetics.

The problem of mental causation is a conceptual issue in the philosophy of mind. That problem, in short, is how to account for the common-sense idea that intentional thoughts or intentional mental states are causes of intentional actions. The problem divides into several distinct sub-problems, including the problem of causal exclusion, the problem of anomalism, and the problem of externalism.

A mental disorder or mental illness is a psychological or behavioral pattern that occurs in an individual and is thought to cause distress or disability that is not expected as part of normal development or culture. The recognition and understanding of mental disorders has changed over time and across cultures.

Mental functions and cognitive processes are terms often used interchangeably (although not always correctly so, the term cognitive tends to have specific implications - see cognitive and cognitivism) to mean such functions or processes as perception, introspection, memory, creativity, imagination, conception, belief, reasoning, volition, and emotion — in other words, all the different things that we can do with our minds.

In philosophy of mind, mentalism is the view that the mind and mental states exist as causally efficacious inner states of persons. The view should be distinguished from substance dualism, which is the view that the mind and the body (or brain) are two distinct kinds of things which nevertheless interact (somehow) with one another. Although this dualistic view of the mind-body connection entails mentalism, mentalism does not entail dualism.

A mindset, in decision theory and general systems theory, refers to a set of assumptions, methods or notations held by one or more people or groups of people which is so established that it creates a powerful incentive within these people or groups to continue to adopt or accept prior behaviours, choices, or tools.

A mental model is an explanation of someone's thought process about how something works in the real world. It is a representation of the surrounding world, the relationships between its various parts and a person's intuitive perception about their own acts and their consequences. Our mental models help shape our behaviour and define our approach to solving problems and carrying out tasks.

In contemporary philosophy, specifically in fields of metaphysics such as philosophy of mind and ontology, a mental representation is one of the prevailing ways of explaining and describing the nature of ideas and concepts. According to the representational theory of mind, thinking occurs within an internal system of representation. The propositional attitudes of the mind are token mental representations (i.e. , mental particulars with semantic properties.

In philosophy, mereology is a collection of axiomatic first-order theories dealing with parts and their respective wholes. In contrast to set theory, which takes the set-member relationship as fundamental, the core notion of mereology is meronomic, which means based on part-whole relationships. Mereology is both an application of predicate logic and a branch of formal ontology.

Metaknowledge or meta-knowledge is knowledge about a preselected knowledge. For the reason of different definitions of knowledge in the subject matter literature, meta-information is or is not included in meta-knowledge. Detailed cognitive, systemic and epistemic study of human knowledge requires a distinguishing of these concepts. but in the common language knowledge includes information, and, for example, bibliographic data are considered as a meta-knowledge.

Metaphilosophy is the study of the nature, aims, and methods of philosophy. This article sets out the main views on these matters, which are varied.

A metaphor is a figure of speech concisely comparing two things, saying that one is the other.

Metaphysics investigates principles of reality transcending those of any particular science. Cosmology and ontology are traditional branches of metaphysics. It is concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world. Someone who studies metaphysics would be called either a "metaphysician" or a "metaphysicist".

A metapopulation consists of a group of spatially separated populations of the same species which interact at some level. The term metapopulation was coined by Richard Levins in 1969 to describe a model of population dynamics of insect pests in agricultural fields, but the idea has been most broadly applied to species in naturally or artificially fragmented habitats. In Levins' own words, it consists of "a population of populations".

Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov (also romanized Elie Metchnikoff) (16 May 1845 - 15 July 1916) was a Russian microbiologist best remembered for his pioneering research into the immune system. Mechnikov received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1908, for his work on phagocytosis.

Methodological individualism is a widely-used term in the social sciences. Its advocates see it as a philosophical method aimed at explaining and understanding broad society-wide developments as the aggregation of decisions by individuals. It has also been regarded as a form of "methodological reductionism," a reduction of the explanation of all large entities by reference to smaller ones. The term was originally coined by Joseph Schumpeter (1908, 1909).

Methodology can be defined as: "the analysis of the principles of methods, rules, and postulates employed by a discipline"; "the systematic study of methods that are, can be, or have been applied within a discipline"; or "a particular procedure or set of procedures."

Microeconomics is a branch of economics that studies how households and firms make decisions to allocate limited resources, typically in markets where goods or services are being bought and sold. Microeconomics examines how these decisions and behaviours affect the supply and demand for goods and services, which determines prices; and how prices, in turn, determine the supply and demand of goods and services.

Microevolution is the occurrence of small-scale changes in allele frequencies in a population, over a few generations, also known as "change below the species level". These changes may be due to several processes: mutation, natural selection, artificial selection, gene flow and genetic drift. Population genetics is the branch of biology that provides the mathematical structure for the study of the process of microevolution.

A microorganism or microbe is an organism that is microscopic (usually too small to be seen by the naked human eye). The study of microorganisms is called microbiology, a subject that began with Anton van Leeuwenhoek's discovery of microorganisms in 1675, using a microscope of his own design. Microorganisms are very diverse; they include bacteria, fungi, archaea, and protists; microscopic plants; and animals such as plankton and the planarian.

Microphysics are parts of physics that are characterized by base notions of microscopical geometrical extent. The most prominent of them are quantum mechanics, molecular physics, atomic physics, nuclear physics, particle physics and nanophysics.

John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 - 8 May 1873), English philosopher, political theorist, political economist, civil servant and Member of Parliament, was an influential liberal thinker of the 19th century whose works on liberty justified freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control.

Robert A. Millikan (March 22, 1868 - December 19, 1953) was an American experimental physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics for his measurement of the charge on the electron and for his work on the photoelectric effect. He served as president of Caltech from 1921 to 1945.

Mind refers to the aspects of intellect and consciousness manifested as combinations of thought, perception, memory, emotion, will and imagination, including all of the brain's conscious and unconscious cognitive processes. "Mind" is often used to refer especially to the thought processes of reason. Subjectively, mind manifests itself as a stream of consciousness. There are many theories of the mind and its function.

Mind-blindness can be described as an inability to develop an awareness of what is in the mind of another human. It is not necessarily caused by an inability to imagine an answer, but is often due to not being able to gather enough information to work out which of the many possible answers is correct. Mind-blindness is the opposite of empathy.

The mind-body dichotomy is the view that "mental" phenomena are, in some respects, "non-physical" (distinct from the body). In a religious sense, it refers to the separation of body and soul . The mind-body dichotomy is the starting point of Dualism, and became conceptualized in the form known to the modern Western world in René Descartes' philosophy, though it also surfaced in pre-Aristotelian concepts and in Avicennian philosophy.

Mobbing behavior is an antipredator behavior which occurs when individuals of a certain species mob a predator by cooperatively attacking or harassing it, usually in order to protect their offspring. A simple definition of mobbing is an assemblage of individuals around a potentially dangerous predator. This is most frequently seen in avian species, though it is also known to occur in many other animals such as the Meerkat.

A model organism is a species that is extensively studied to understand particular biological phenomena, with the expectation that discoveries made in the organism model will provide insight into the workings of other organisms. In particular, model organisms are widely used to explore potential causes and treatments for human disease when human experimentation would be unfeasible or unethical.

Modernity is a term that is related to the modern era, but is distinct both from it and from modernism. In different contexts, the term refers to a condition associated with cultural and intellectual movements of a period beginning anywhere from 1436 to 1789 (or for a few as late as 1895), and extending to the 1970s or later (Toulmin 1990, 3 & 5). In the field of philosophy, "modernity" and "enlightenment" tend to be used interchangeably (Norris 1995).

The modern evolutionary synthesis (also referred to as the new synthesis, the modern synthesis, and the evolutionary synthesis) is a union of ideas from several biological specialties which forms a logical account of evolution. This synthesis has been accepted by nearly all working biologists. The synthesis was produced over about a decade (1936-1947), and the development of population genetics (1918-1932) was the stimulus.

Many organisms consist of modules, both anatomically and in their metabolism. Anatomical modules are usually segments or organs. When we look at illustrations of metabolic reactions, we find that they, too, are modular: we can clearly identify, for instance, the citric acid cycle as a complex network that has only a few interfaces with other such modules.

Many organisms consist of modules, both anatomically and in their metabolism. Anatomical modules are usually segments or organs. When we look at illustrations of metabolic reactions, we find that they, too, are modular: we can clearly identify, for instance, the citric acid cycle as a complex network that has only a few interfaces with other such modules.

Modularity of mind is the notion that a mind may, at least in part, be composed of separate innate structures which have established, evolutionarily developed functional purposes. Proponents believe this view is implied by Noam Chomsky's concept of a universal, generative grammar. Such universal features of language imply the existence of an underlying "language acquisition device" structure in the brain.

Molecular biology is the study of biology at a molecular level. The field overlaps with other areas of biology and chemistry, particularly genetics and biochemistry. Molecular biology chiefly concerns itself with understanding the interactions between the various systems of a cell, including the interactions between DNA, RNA and protein biosynthesis as well as learning how these interactions are regulated. Writing in Nature, William Astbury described molecular biology as: "[...

Molecular computers also called DNA computer are massively parallel computers taking advantage of the computational power of molecules (specifically biological). Molectronics specifically refers to the sub-field of physics which addresses the computational potential of atomic arrangements.

Molecular genetics is the field of biology that studies the structure and function of genes at a molecular level. The field studies how the genes are transferred from generation to generation. Molecular genetics employs the methods of genetics and molecular biology. It is so-called to differentiate it from other sub fields of genetics such as ecological genetics and population genetics.

Molecular modelling is a collective term that refers to theoretical methods and computational techniques to model or mimic the behaviour of molecules. The techniques are used in the fields of computational chemistry, computational biology and materials science for studying molecular systems ranging from small chemical systems to large biological molecules and material assemblies.

Monism is any philosophical view which holds that there is unity in a given field of inquiry, where this is not to be expected. Thus, some philosophers may hold that the Universe is really just one thing, despite its many appearances and diversities; or theology may support the view that there is one God, with many manifestations in different religions.

A monkey is any cercopithecoid or platyrrhine primate. All primates that are not prosimians or apes are monkeys. The 264 known extant monkey species represent two of the three groupings of simian primates (the third group being the 21 species of apes). Monkeys are generally considered to be intelligent and, unlike apes, monkeys usually have tails.

Théodore André Monod was a French naturalist, explorer, and humanist scholar. In the course of his career, Monod was made director of the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire, professor at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, member of the Académie des sciences d'outre-mer in 1949, member of the Académie de Marine in 1957, and member of the Académie des Sciences in 1963. In 1960 he was one of the founders of the World Academy of Art and Science.

In common cladistic usage, a monophyletic group is a taxon (group of organisms) which forms a clade, meaning that it consists of an ancestor and all its descendants. The term is synonymous with the uncommon term holophyly. It is contrasted with the terms paraphyly, which is a taxon consisting of an ancestor and some of its descendants, and polyphyly, which is a taxon that does not share a common ancestor. However, this definition of the term took some time to be accepted.

Monte Carlo methods are a class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to compute their results. Monte Carlo methods are often used when simulating physical and mathematical systems. Because of their reliance on repeated computation of random or pseudo-random numbers, Monte Carlo methods are most suited to calculation by a computer. Monte Carlo methods tend to be used when it is unfeasible or impossible to compute an exact result with a deterministic algorithm.

Moral agency is a person's responsibility for making moral judgments and taking actions that comport with morality. A Moral agent is "a being who is capable of acting with reference to right and wrong"

Morality (from the Latin moralitas "manner, character, proper behavior") has three principal meanings. In its first, descriptive usage, morality means a code of conduct or belief which is held to be authoritative in matters of right and wrong. Morals are arbitrarily created and subjectively defined by society, philosophy, religion, and/or individual conscience. An example of the descriptive usage could be "common conceptions of morality have changed significantly over time.

Ethics (also known as moral philosophy) is a branch of philosophy which seeks to address questions about morality, such as what the fundamental semantic, ontological, and epistemic nature of ethics or morality is, how moral values should be determined, how a moral outcome can be achieved in specific situations, how moral capacity or moral agency develops and what its nature is, and what moral values people actually abide by.

Moral realism is the meta-ethical view which claims that: Ethical sentences express propositions. Some such propositions are true. Those propositions are made true by objective features of the world, independent of subjective opinion. This makes moral realism a non-nihilist form of cognitivism.

Morphogenesis (from the Greek morphê shape and genesis creation, literally, "beginning of the shape"), is the biological process that causes an organism to develop its shape. It is one of three fundamental aspects of developmental biology along with the control of cell growth and cellular differentiation. The process controls the organized spatial distribution of cells during the embryonic development of an organism.

The term morphology in biology refers to form, structure and configuration of an organism.

Morphometrics is a field concerned with studying variation and change in the form (size and shape) of organisms or objects. There are several methods for extracting data from shapes, each with their own benefits and weaknesses. These include measurement of lengths and angles, landmark analysis and outline analysis. Morphometric analyses are commonly performed on organisms, and are particularly useful in analysing the fossil record.

Motivation is the activation or energization of goal-oriented behavior. Motivation may be internal or external. The term is generally used for humans but, theoretically, it can also be used to describe the causes for animal behavior as well. This article refers to human motivation.

Motor control are information processing related activities carried out by the central nervous system that organize the musculoskeletal system to create coordinated movements and skilled actions. Motor control is also the name of a thriving field within Neuroscience that analyzes how people, animals and their nervous system controls movement. Simple tasks such as reaching for a cup of coffee are actually surprisingly complex.

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is the DNA located in organelles called mitochondria, structures within cells that convert the energy from food into a form that cells can use. Most other DNA present in eukaryotic organisms is found in the cell nucleus. Nuclear and mitochondrial DNA are thought to be of separate evolutionary origin, with the mtDNA being derived from the circular genomes of the bacteria that were engulfed by the early ancestors of today's eukaryotic cells.

A multi-agent system (MAS) is a system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents. Multi-agent systems can be used to solve problems which are difficult or impossible for an individual agent or monolithic system to solve. Examples of problems which are appropriate to multi-agent systems research include online trading, disaster response, and modelling social structures.

Multiculturalism refers to the acceptance of multiple ethnic cultures, for practical reasons and/or for the sake of diversity and applied to the demographic make-up of a specific place, usually at the organizational level, e.g. schools, businesses, neighborhoods, cities or nations. In this context, multiculturalists advocate extending equitable status to distinct ethnic and religious groups without promoting any specific ethnic, religious, and/or cultural community values as central.

Multiple discovery is the name for a hypothesis that most inventions and scientific discoveries are made independently and simultaneously by multiple inventors and scientists. Multiple discovery is opposed to the traditional view, the "heroic theory of invention and scientific development."

Multiple realizability, in philosophy of mind, is the thesis that the same mental property, state, or event can be implemented by different physical properties, states or events. The idea has its roots in the late 1960s and early 1970s when a number of philosophers, most prominently Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor, put it forth as an argument against reductionist accounts of the relation between mental and physical kinds.

Multivariate statistics is a form of statistics encompassing the simultaneous observation and analysis of more than one statistical variable. The application of multivariate statistics is multivariate analysis. Methods of bivariate statistics, for example ANOVA and t-tests, are special cases of multivariate statistics in which two variables are involved.

Music is an art form whose medium is sound. Common elements of music are pitch, rhythm, dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture. The word derives from Greek μουσική (mousike), "(art) of the Muses".

Musicology is the scholarly study of music. The word is used in narrow, broad and intermediate senses. In the narrow sense, musicology is confined to the music history of Western culture. In the intermediate sense, it includes all relevant cultures and a range of musical forms, styles, genres and traditions. In the broad sense, it includes all musically relevant disciplines and all manifestations of music in all cultures.

PCR mutagenesis is simple method for generating Site-directed mutagenesis. This method can generate mutations (base substitutions, insertions, and deletions) from double-stranded plasmid without the need for subcloning into M13-based bacteriophage vectors and for ssDNA rescue.

In biology, a mutation is a randomly derived change to the nucleotide sequence of the genetic material of an organism. Mutations can be caused by copying errors in the genetic material during cell division, or by exposure to mutagens, or can be induced by the organism itself, by cellular processes such as hypermutation.

In genetics, the mutation rate is the chance of a mutation occurring in an organism or gene in each generation (or, in the case of multicellular organisms, cell division). The mutation frequency is the number of individuals in a population with a particular mutation, and tends to be reported more often as it is easier to measure (for instance, there is no need to restrict the population to experiencing only one generation, as needed to measure mutation rate).

Mutualism is a biological interaction between two organisms, where each individual derives a fitness benefit, for example increased survivorship. Similar interactions within a species are known as co-operation. It can be contrasted with interspecific competition, in which each species experiences reduced fitness, and exploitation, in which one species benefits at the expense of the other.

In game theory, Nash equilibrium (named after John Forbes Nash, who proposed it) is a solution concept of a game involving two or more players, in which each player is assumed to know the equilibrium strategies of the other players, and no player has anything to gain by changing only his or her own strategy unilaterally.

National Socialism is a political term that is both vague and ambiguous. As the name suggests, features of nationalism and socialism are combined and interrelated to form an overall National Socialist ideology, although the combination process is neither obvious nor straightforward. The term most typically refers to Nazism, which was the ideology of the German Nazi Party (National Socialist German Workers' Party, or Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), which was led by Adolf Hitler.

Natural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards the observational than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research that is published in magazines than in academic journals. Grouped among the natural sciences, Natural history is the systematic study of any category of natural objects or organisms.

There are at least two basic types of philosophical stances characterizing naturalism. One is concerned with existence: what does exist and what does not exist? The second is concerned with knowledge: what are methods for gaining trustworthy knowledge of the natural world? Naturalism is the metaphysical position that "nature is all there is, and all basic truths are truths of nature.

The naturalistic fallacy is often claimed to be a formal fallacy. It was described and named by British philosopher G. E. Moore in his 1903 book Principia Ethica. Moore stated that a naturalistic fallacy was committed whenever a philosopher attempts to prove a claim about ethics by appealing to a definition of the term "good" in terms of one or more natural properties (such as "pleasant", "more evolved", "desired", etc.).

Naturalized epistemology is a collection of philosophic views concerned with the theory of knowledge that emphasize the role of natural scientific methods. This shared emphasis on scientific methods of studying knowledge shifts focus to the empirical processes of knowledge acquisition and away from many traditional philosophic questions. There are noteworthy distinctions within naturalized epistemology.

Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. Natural language generation systems convert information from computer databases into readable human language. Natural language understanding systems convert samples of human language into more formal representations such as parse trees or first order logic that are easier for computer programs to manipulate.

Natural philosophy or the philosophy of nature (from Latin philosophia naturalis), is a term applied to the study of nature and the physical universe that was dominant before the development of modern science. It is considered to be the precursor of natural sciences such as physics. Forms of science historically developed out of philosophy or more specifically natural philosophy.

Some philosophers and political scientists make a distinction between natural and legal rights. Legal rights (sometimes also called civil rights or statutory rights) are rights conveyed by a particular polity, codified into legal statutes by some form of legislature (or unenumerated but implied from enumerated rights), and as such are contingent upon local laws, customs, or beliefs.

In Science, the term natural science refers to a naturalistic approach to the study of the universe, which is understood as obeying rules or laws of natural origin. Overall, natural science is the core of all sciences.

Natural selection is the process by which heritable traits that make it more likely for an organism to survive and successfully reproduce become more common in a population over successive generations. It is a key mechanism of evolution. The natural genetic variation within a population of organisms means that some individuals will survive and reproduce more successfully than others in their current environment.

Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. It ranges in scale from the subatomic to the cosmic. The word nature is derived from the Latin word natura, or "essential qualities, innate disposition", and literally means "birth".

The nature versus nurture debates concern the relative importance of an individual's innate qualities versus personal experiences in determining or causing individual differences in physical and behavioral traits. The view that humans acquire all or almost all their behavioral traits from "nurture" is known as tabula rasa ("blank slate").

The nature versus nurture debates concern the relative importance of an individual's innate qualities versus personal experiences in determining or causing individual differences in physical and behavioral traits. The view that humans acquire all or almost all their behavioral traits from "nurture" is known as tabula rasa ("blank slate").

Naturphilosophie (philosophy of nature) was a current in the philosophical tradition of German idealism in the 19th century, particularly associated with Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Naturphilosophie attempts to comprehend nature in its totality and to outline its general theoretical structure, thus providing the foundational basis for the natural sciences.

Nazism, known officially in German as National Socialism

The negentropy, also negative entropy or syntropy, of a living system is the entropy that it exports to keep its own entropy low; it lies at the intersection of entropy and life. The concept and phrase "negative entropy" were introduced by Erwin Schrödinger in his 1943 popular-science book What is life? Later, Léon Brillouin shortened the phrase to negentropy, to express it in a more "positive" way: a living system imports negentropy and stores it.

Neoclassical economics is a term variously used for approaches to economics focusing on the determination of prices, outputs, and income distributions in markets through supply and demand, often as mediated through a hypothesized maximization of income-constrained utility by individuals and of cost-constrained profits of firms employing available information and factors of production, in accordance with rational choice theory.

Neo-Darwinism is a term used today to describe the 'modern synthesis' of Darwinian evolution by natural selection with Mendelian genetics, the latter of which Darwin himself had been unaware, but which entails that the mechanism of inheritance in evolution involves the digital, particulate entities known as genes, rather than the 'blending process' of pre-Mendelian evolutionary science.

The Neolithic Age, Era, or Period, or New Stone Age, was a period in the development of human technology, beginning about 9500 BCE in the Middle East

An action potential (or nerve impulse) is a transient alteration of the transmembrane voltage (or membrane potential) across an excitable membrane generated by the activity of voltage-gated ion channels embedded in the membrane. Action potentials play multiple roles in several types of excitable cells such as neurons, myocytes, and electrocytes. The best known action potentials are pulse-like waves of voltage that travel along axons of neurons.

The neural crest, a transient component of the ectoderm, is located in between the neural tube and the epidermis (or the free margins of the neural folds) of an embryo during neural tube formation. Neural crest cells quickly migrate during or shortly after neurulation, an embryological event marked by neural tube closure. It has been referred to as the fourth germ layer, due to its great importance.

Traditionally, the term neural network had been used to refer to a network or circuit of biological neurons. The modern usage of the term often refers to artificial neural networks, which are composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus the term has two distinct usages: Biological neural networks are made up of real biological neurons that are connected or functionally related in the peripheral nervous system or the central nervous system.

Otto Neurath (10 December 1882 - 22 December 1945) was an Austrian philosopher of science, sociologist, and political economist. Before he was forced to flee his native country for Great Britain in the wake of the Nazi occupation, Neurath was one of the leading figures of the Vienna Circle.

Neurocognitive is a term used to describe cognitive functions closely linked to the function of particular areas, neural pathways, or cortical networks in the brain. Therefore, their understanding is closely linked to the practice of neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience, two disciplines that broadly seek to understand how the structure and function of the brain relates to thought and behaviour.

Neuroethology ("neuro" Greek; related to nerve cells, "ethos" Greek; habit or custom) is the evolutionary and comparative approach to the study of animal behavior and its underlying mechanistic control by the nervous system.

Neurogenetics studies the role of genetics in the development and function of the nervous system. It considers neural characteristics as phenotypes (i.e. manifestations, measurable or not, of the genetic make-up of an individual), and is mainly based on the observation that the nervous systems of individuals, even of those belonging to the same species, may not be identical.

Neurology is a medical specialty dealing with disorders of the nervous system. Specifically, it deals with the diagnosis and treatment of all categories of disease involving the central, peripheral, and autonomic nervous systems, including their coverings, blood vessels, and all effector tissue, such as muscle. The corresponding surgical specialty is neurosurgery.

A biological neuron model is a mathematical description of the properties of nerve cells, or neurons, that is designed to accurately describe and predict biological processes. This is in contrast to the artificial neuron, which aims for computational effectiveness, although these goals sometimes overlap.

Neurophilosophy or philosophy of neuroscience is the interdisciplinary study of neuroscience and philosophy. Work in this field is often separated into two distinct methods. The first method attempts to solve problems in philosophy of mind with empirical information from the neurosciences. The second method attempts to clarify neuroscientific results using the conceptual rigor and methods of philosophy of science.

Neuropsychology is the basic scientific discipline that studies the structure and function of the brain related to specific psychological processes and overt behaviors. The term neuropsychology has been applied to lesion studies in humans and animals. It has also been applied to efforts to record electrical activity from individual cells (or groups of cells) in higher primates (including some studies of human patients).

Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system. Such studies span the structure, function, evolutionary history, development, genetics, biochemistry, physiology, pharmacology, informatics, computational neuroscience and pathology of the nervous system. The International Brain Research Organization was founded in 1960, the European Brain and Behaviour Society in 1968, and the Society for Neuroscience in 1969, but the study of the brain dates at least to ancient Egypt.

The neutral theory of molecular evolution is an influential theory, which was introduced with effect by Motoo Kimura in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The theory states that the vast majority of evolutionary changes at the molecular level are caused by random drift of selectively neutral mutants.

The neutral theory of molecular evolution is an influential theory, which was introduced with effect by Motoo Kimura in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The theory states that the vast majority of evolutionary changes at the molecular level are caused by random drift of selectively neutral mutants.

New Guinea, located north of Australia, is the world's second largest island. It became separated from the Australian mainland when the area now known as the Torres Strait flooded after the last glacial period. The name Papua has long been associated with the island. The western half of the island contains the Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Papua, while the eastern half forms the mainland of the independent country of Papua New Guinea.

New institutional economics (NIE) is an economic perspective that attempts to extend economics by focusing on the social and legal norms and rules that underlie economic activity.

Niche construction is the process in which an organism alters its own (or other species') environment, often but not always in a manner that increases its chances of survival. Traditionally, niche construction has been viewed as simply being an aspect of the organism's phenotype, and not having any special role in evolution.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 - August 25, 1900) was a 19th century German philosopher and classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, using a distinctive German language style and displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism. Nietzsche's influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism and postmodernism.

The Nobel Prize is a Swedish & International monetary prize, established by the 1895 will and estate of Swedish chemist and inventor Alfred Nobel. It was first awarded in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace in 1901. An associated prize, The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, was instituted by Sweden's central bank in 1968 and first awarded in 1969.

In mathematics, a nonlinear system is a system which is not linear, that is, a system which does not satisfy the superposition principle, or whose output is not proportional to its input. Less technically, a nonlinear system is any problem where the variable(s) to be solved for cannot be written as a linear combination of independent components.

In mathematics, a nonlinear system is a system which is not linear, that is, a system which does not satisfy the superposition principle, or whose output is not proportional to its input. Less technically, a nonlinear system is any problem where the variable(s) to be solved for cannot be written as a linear combination of independent components.

Noosphere, according to the thought of Vladimir Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin, denotes the "sphere of human thought". In the original theory of Vernadsky, the noosphere is the third in a succession of phases of development of the Earth, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life).

In ecology and genetics, a norm of reaction describes the pattern of phenotypic expression of a single genotype across a range of environments. One use of norms of reaction is in describing how different species—especially related species—respond to varying environments. But differing genotypes within a single species will also often show differing norms of reaction relative to a particular phenotypic trait and environment variable.

The brown rat, common rat, sewer rat, Hanover rat, Norway rat, Norwegian rat, or wharf rat (Rattus norvegicus) is one of the best known and most common rats. One of the largest muroids, it is a brown or grey rodent with a body up to 25 cm (10 in) long, and a similar tail length; the male weighs on average 350 g (12 oz) and the female 250 g (9 oz).

Nuclear DNA, nuclear deoxyribonucleic acid (nDNA), is DNA contained within a nucleus of eukaryotic organisms. In most cases it encodes more of the genome than the mitochondrial DNA and is passed sexually rather than matrilineally. Nuclear DNA is the most common DNA used in forensic examinations.

Numerical cognition is a subdiscipline of cognitive science that studies the cognitive, developmental and neural bases of numbers and mathematics. As with many cognitive science endeavors, this is a highly interdisciplinary topic, and includes researchers in cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, neuroscience and cognitive linguistics. This discipline, although it may interact with questions in the philosophy of mathematics is primarily concerned with empirical questions.

Objectivity is both a central and elusive concept in philosophy. While there is no universally accepted articulation of objectivity, a proposition is generally considered to be objectively true when its truth conditions are "mind-independent"—that is, not the result of any judgments made by a conscious entity. Objective truths are those which are discovered rather than created.

Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or touched. Jean Piaget argued that object permanence is one of an infant's most important accomplishments, as without this concept, objects would have no separate, permanent existence. He concluded that infants develop this understanding by the end of the sensorimotor stage of cognitive development, which lasts from birth to about 2 years of age.

The Common Octopus (Octopus vulgaris) is the most studied of all octopus species. Its natural range extends from the Mediterranean Sea and the southern coast of England to at least Senegal in Africa. It also occurs off the Azores, Canary Islands, and Cape Verde Islands. O. vulgaris grows to 25 cm in mantle length with arms up to 1 m long. O. vulgaris is caught by bottom trawls on a huge scale off the northwestern coast of Africa. More than 20,000 tonnes are harvested annually.

Eugene Pleasants Odum was an American scientist known for his pioneering work on ecosystem ecology. The average schoolchild of today knows that humans (along with other life forms) depend on adequate conditions of food, water, and shelter from inclement elements and also that weather, geological, and biological factors (among others) are involved in the web of life that affords this environment. Further, the average schoolchild of today has heard the word "ecology.

The Oedipus complex, in psychoanalytic theory, is a group of largely unconscious (dynamically repressed) ideas and feelings which centre around the desire to possess the parent of the opposite sex and eliminate the parent of the same sex. According to classical theory, the complex appears during the so-called "oedipal phase" of libidinal and ego development; i.e. between the ages of three and five, though oedipal manifestations may be detected earlier.

In biology, offspring is the product of reproduction, a new organism produced by one or more parents. Collective offspring may be known as a brood or progeny in a more general way. This can refer to a set of simultaneous offspring, such as the chicks hatched from one clutch of eggs, or to all the offspring, as with the honeybee.

Anthony O'Hear is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Buckingham and Head of the Department of Education. He is the editor of the journal Philosophy and Honorary Director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. O'Hear was a Government special adviser on education for approximately ten years and was especially influential during the time of Margaret Thatcher and John Major as Prime Minister. He continues to be active in Conservative circles, especially in advocating social conservatism.

Olfaction (also known as olfactics or more commonly as smell) refers to the sense of smell. This sense is mediated by specialized sensory cells of the nasal cavity of vertebrates, and, by analogy, sensory cells of the antennae of invertebrates. For air-breathing animals, the olfactory system detects volatile or, in the case of the accessory olfactory system, fluid-phase chemicals. For water-dwelling organisms, e.g.

An oligopoly is a market form in which a market or industry is dominated by a small number of sellers (oligopolists). The word is derived, by analogy with "monopoly", from the Greek oligoi 'few' and poleein 'to sell'. Because there are few sellers, each oligopolist is likely to be aware of the actions of the others. The decisions of one firm influence, and are influenced by, the decisions of other firms.

Oncogenesis is the process of malignant transformation leading to the formation of a tumor. It is characterized by a progression of changes on cellular and genetic level that ultimately reprogram a cell to undergo uncontrolled cell division, thus forming a malignant mass. Oncovirinae, retroviruses which contain an oncogene, are categorized as oncogenic because they trigger the growth of tumorous tissues in the host. This process is also referred to as viral transformation.

Ontogeny (also ontogenesis or morphogenesis) (ontos present participle of 'to be', genesis 'creation') describes the origin and the development of an organism from the fertilized egg to its mature form. Ontogeny is studied in developmental biology, developmental psychology, developmental cognitive neuroscience, and developmental psychobiology. Ontogeny is that branch of life science which deals with the study of origin and development of an organism from fertilized ovum to its mature form.

Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as of the basic categories of being and their relations. Traditionally listed as a part of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how such entities can be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences.

An operational definition is a demonstration of a process - such as a variable, term, or object - in terms of the specific process or set of validation tests used to determine its presence and quantity. The term was coined by Percy Williams Bridgman. Properties described in this manner must be sufficiently accessible, so that persons other than the definer may independently measure or test for them at will. An operational definition is generally designed to model a conceptual definition.

In the evolutionary biology of sexual reproduction, the operational sex ratio (OSR) is the ratio of sexually competing males to females that are ready to mate. It is different from the physical sex ratio in that physical sex ratio also takes into account sexually inactive individual organisms, and sexually non-competitive individuals.

An opinion is a belief that may or may not be backed up with evidence, but which cannot be proved with that evidence. It is normally a subjective statement and may be the result of an emotion or an interpretation of facts; people may draw opposing opinions from the same facts. There can be the public opinion, or other types of opinion.

Opportunity cost or economic opportunity loss is the value of the next best alternative forgone as the result of making a decision. Opportunity cost analysis is an important part of a company's decision-making processes but is not treated as an actual cost in any financial statement. The next best thing that a person can engage in is referred to as the opportunity cost of doing the best thing and ignoring the next best thing to be done.

A central concern of ecology has traditionally been foraging behavior. In its most basic form, optimal foraging theory states that organisms forage in such a way as to maximize their energy intake per unit time. In other words, they behave in such a way as to find, capture and consume food containing the most calories while expending the least amount of time possible in doing so.

A central concern of ecology has traditionally been foraging behavior. In its most basic form, optimal foraging theory states that organisms forage in such a way as to maximize their energy intake per unit time. In other words, they behave in such a way as to find, capture and consume food containing the most calories while expending the least amount of time possible in doing so.

Organicism is a philosophical orientation that asserts that reality is best understood as an organic whole. By definition it is close to holism. Plato, Hobbes or Constantin Brunner are examples of such philosophical thought. Organicism is also a biological doctrine that stresses the organization, rather than the composition, of organisms. William Emerson Ritter coined the term in 1919. Organicism became well-accepted in the 20th century.

In biology, an organism is any living system. In at least some form, all organisms are capable of response to stimuli, reproduction, growth and development, and maintenance of homeostasis as a stable whole. An organism may either be unicellular (single-celled) or be composed of, as in humans, many billions of cells grouped into specialized tissues and organs. The term multicellular (many-celled) describes any organism made up of more than one cell.

Organ transplant is the moving of an organ from one body to another (or from a donor site on the patient's own body), for the purpose of replacing the recipient's damaged or failing organ with a working one from the donor site. Organ donors can be living or deceased (previously referred to as cadaveric). The emerging field of Regenerative medicine may soon allow organs to be re-grown from the patient's own cells (stem cells, or cells extracted from the failing organs.

The history of art refers to the history of the visual arts of painting, sculpture and architecture . It is the history of one of the fine arts, others of which are the performing arts and literature. It is also one of the humanities. The term sometimes encompasses theory of the visual arts, including aesthetics. Considered encyclopedically, the history of art is an attempt to survey art throughout human history, classifying cultures and periods by their distinguishing features.

The origin of language, also known as glottogony, is a topic that has attracted considerable attention throughout human history. The use of language is one of the most conspicuous traits that distinguishes Homo sapiens from other species. Unlike writing, spoken language leaves no explicit concrete evidence of its nature or even its existence. Therefore scientists must resort to indirect methods in trying to determine the origins of language.

Ornithology is a branch of zoology that concerns the study of birds. Several aspects of ornithology differ from related disciplines, due partly to the high visibility and the aesthetic appeal of birds. Most marked among these is the extent of studies undertaken by amateurs working within the parameters of strict scientific methodology.

The word orthodox, from Greek orthodoxos "having the right opinion", from orthos ("right", "true, "straight") + doxa ("opinion" or "praise", related to dokein, "to think"), is typically used to mean adhering to the accepted or traditional and established faith, especially in religion.

Orthogenesis, orthogenetic evolution, progressive evolution or autogenesis, is the hypothesis that life has an innate tendency to move in a unilinear fashion due to some internal or external "driving force". The hypothesis is based on essentialism and cosmic teleology and proposes an intrinsic drive which slowly transforms species. George Gaylord Simpson (1953) in an attack on orthogenesis called this mechanism "the mysterious inner force".

An ostensive definition conveys the meaning of a term by pointing out examples. This type of definition is often used where the term is difficult to define verbally, either because the words will not be understood (as with children and new speakers of a language) or because of the nature of the term (such as colors or sensations). It is usually accompanied with a gesture pointing out the object serving as an example, and for this reason is also often referred to as "".

The problem of other minds has traditionally been regarded as an epistemological challenge raised by the skeptic. The challenge may be expressed as follows: given that I can only observe the behaviour of others, how can I know that others have minds? The thought behind the question is that no matter how sophisticated someone's behaviour is, behaviour on its own is not sufficient to guarantee the presence of mentality.

Overdetermination, the idea that a single observed effect is determined by multiple causes at once (any one of which alone might be enough to account for the effect), was originally a key concept of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis.

Overpopulation is a condition where an organism's numbers exceed the carrying capacity of its habitat. In common parlance, the term usually refers to the relationship between the human population and its environment, the Earth. Overpopulation does not depend only on the size or density of the population, but on the ratio of population to available sustainable resources. It also depends on the means of resources used and distributed throughout the population.

In economics, overproduction refers to excess of supply over demand of products being offered to the market. This leads to lower prices and/or unsold goods.

Paleobiology (sometimes spelled palaeobiology) is a growing and comparatively new discipline which combines the methods and findings of the natural science biology with the methods and findings of the earth science paleontology. It is occasionally referred to as "geobiology. " Paleobiological research uses biological field research of current biota and of fossils millions of years old to answer questions about the molecular evolution and the evolutionary history of life.

Paleontology is the study of prehistoric life, including organisms' evolution and interactions with each other and their environments. As a "historical science" it tries to explain causes rather than conduct experiments to observe effects. Paleontological observations have been documented as far back as the 5th century BC. The science became established in the 18th century as a result of Georges Cuvier's work on comparative anatomy, and developed rapidly in the 19th century.

Paleoanthropology, which combines the disciplines of paleontology and physical anthropology, is the study of ancient humans as found in fossil hominid evidence such as petrifacted bones and footprints.

Paleobiology (sometimes spelled palaeobiology) is a growing and comparatively new discipline which combines the methods and findings of the natural science biology with the methods and findings of the earth science paleontology. It is occasionally referred to as "geobiology. " Paleobiological research uses biological field research of current biota and of fossils millions of years old to answer questions about the molecular evolution and the evolutionary history of life.

Paleontology is the study of prehistoric life, including organisms' evolution and interactions with each other and their environments. As a "historical science" it tries to explain causes rather than conduct experiments to observe effects. Paleontological observations have been documented as far back as the 5th century BC. The science became established in the 18th century as a result of Georges Cuvier's work on comparative anatomy, and developed rapidly in the 19th century.

Pangenesis was Charles Darwin's hypothetical mechanism for heredity. He presented this 'provisional hypothesis' in his 1868 work The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication and felt that it brought 'together a multitude of facts which are at present left disconnected by any efficient cause'. The etymology of the word comes from the Greek words pan (a prefix meaning "whole", "encompassing") and genesis (birth) or genos (origin).

Panic is a sudden fear which dominates or replaces thinking and often affects groups of people or animals. Panics typically occur in disaster situations, or violent situations which may endanger the overall health of the affected group.

Panic disorder is an anxiety disorder characterized by recurring severe panic attacks. It may also include significant behavioral change lasting at least a month and of ongoing worry about the implications or concern about having other attacks. The latter are called anticipatory attacks (DSM-IVR). Panic disorder is not the same as agoraphobia, although many with panic disorder also suffer from agoraphobia.

Panspermia is the hypothesis that "seeds" of life exist already all over the Universe, that life on Earth may have originated through these "seeds", and that they may deliver or have delivered life to other habitable bodies. The related but distinct idea of exogenesis is a more limited hypothesis that proposes life on Earth was transferred from elsewhere in the Universe but makes no prediction about how widespread it is.

The word paradigm has been used in linguistics and science to describe distinct concepts. To the 1960s, the word was specific to grammar: the 1900 Merriam-Webster dictionary defines its technical use only in the context of grammar or, in rhetoric, as a term for an illustrative parable or fable. In linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure used paradigm to refer to a class of elements with similarities.

The paradise fish or paradise gouramis (Macropodus opercularis), are small freshwater labyrinth fish found in ditches and paddy fields in East Asia, ranging from the Korean Peninsula to Northern Vietnam. Paradise gouramis were one of the first ornamental fishes available to western aquarium keepers, having been imported to Europe as early as the 1800s. These small fish (adults are typically about 10 cm) are ideal lone inhabitants of aquariums.

Parasitism is a type of symbiotic relationship between organisms of different species where one organism, the parasite, benefits at the expense of the host. In general, parasites are much smaller than their hosts, show a high degree of specialization for their mode of life, and reproduce more quickly and in greater numbers than their hosts.

Parasitism is a type of symbiotic relationship between organisms of different species where one organism, the parasite, benefits at the expense of the host. In general, parasites are much smaller than their hosts, show a high degree of specialization for their mode of life, and reproduce more quickly and in greater numbers than their hosts.

In evolutionary biology, parental investment (PI) is any parental expenditure (time, energy etc. ) that benefits one offspring at a cost to parents' ability to invest in other components of fitness . Components of fitness (Beatty 1992) include the wellbeing of existing offspring, parents' future reproduction, and inclusive fitness through aid to kin. Parental investment is sometimes incorrectly equated with parental care or parental effort.

The major competing explanations of the evolution of eusociality are parental manipulation and kin selection. Parental manipulation has been proposed by Alexander (1974) and Michener and Brothers (1974) and accounts for the evolution of altruism by selection on parents.

Parenting is the process of promoting and supporting the physical, emotional, social, and intellectual development of a child from infancy to adulthood. Parenting refers to the activity of raising a child rather than the biological relationship. In the case of humans, it is usually done by the biological parents of the child in question, although governments and society take a role as well. In many cases, orphaned or abandoned children receive parental care from non-parent blood relations.

Parsimony is a 'less is better' concept of frugality, economy or caution in arriving at a hypothesis or course of action. The word derives from Middle English parcimony, from Latin parsimonia, from parsus, past participle of parcere: to spare. It is a general principle that has applications from science to philosophy and all related fields.

Particle physics is a branch of physics that studies the elementary constituents of matter and radiation, and the interactions between them. It is also called high energy physics, because many elementary particles do not occur under normal circumstances in nature, but can be created and detected during energetic collisions of other particles, as is done in particle accelerators. Research in this area has produced a long list of particles.

Louis Pasteur (December 27, 1822 - September 28, 1895) was a French chemist and microbiologist born in Dole. He is best known for his remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and preventions of disease. His discoveries reduced mortality from puerperal fever, and he created the first vaccine for rabies. His experiments supported the germ theory of disease.

Pastoralism or pastoral farming is the branch of agriculture concerned with the raising of livestock. It is animal husbandry: the care, tending and use of animals such as camels, goats, cattle, yaks, llamas, sheep, and so forth. It may have a mobile aspect, moving the herds in search of fresh pasture and water. Pastoralism is found in many variations throughout the world.

Path dependence explains how the set of decisions one faces for any given circumstance is limited by the decisions one has made in the past, even though past circumstances may no longer be relevant. The phrase is regularly used to mean one of two things (Pierson 2004): Some authors use path dependence to mean simply "history matters" - a broad concept; Others use it to mean that institutions are self reinforcing - a narrow concept.

The science of pattern formation deals with the visible, orderly outcomes of self-organisation and the common principles behind similar patterns. In developmental biology, pattern formation refers to the generation of complex organizations of cell fates in space and time. Pattern formation is controlled by genes. The role of genes in pattern formation is best understood in the anterior-posterior patterning of embryos from the model organism Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly).

Pattern recognition is "the act of taking in raw data and taking an action based on the category of the data". Most research in pattern recognition is about methods for supervised learning and unsupervised learning. Pattern recognition aims to classify data based either on a priori knowledge or on statistical information extracted from the patterns. The patterns to be classified are usually groups of measurements or observations, defining points in an appropriate multidimensional space.

A pattern, from the French patron, is a type of theme of recurring events of or objects, sometimes referred to as elements of a set. These elements repeat in a predictable manner. It can be a template or model which can be used to generate things or parts of a thing, especially if the things that are created have enough in common for the underlying pattern to be inferred, in which case the things are said to exhibit the unique pattern.

Paul Forman is an historian of science and a curator of the Division of Medicine and Science at the National Museum of American History. Forman's primary research focus has been the history of physics, in which he has helped pioneer the application of cultural history to scientific developments. Forman is especially known for two controversial historical theses.

Peace is a term that most commonly refers to an absence of hostility, but which also represents a larger concept wherein there are healthy or newly-healed interpersonal or international relationships, safety in matters of social or economic welfare, the acknowledgment of equality and fairness in political relationships and, in world matters, peacetime; a state of being absent of any war or conflict.

The term peafowl can refer to the two species of bird in the genus Pavo of the pheasant family, Phasianidae. The African Congo Peafowl is placed in its own genus Afropavo and is not dealt with here. Peafowl are best known for the male's extravagant tail, which it displays as part of courtship. The male is called a peacock, the female a peahen, though it is common to hear the female also referred to as a "peacock" or "female peacock. " The female peafowl is brown or toned grey and brown.

Karl Pearson FRS established the discipline of mathematical statistics. In 1911 he founded the world's first university statistics department at University College London. He was a controversial proponent of eugenics, and a protégé and biographer of Sir Francis Galton. A sesquicentenary conference was held in London on 23 March 2007, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth.

Charles Sanders Peirce (September 10, 1839 - April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Peirce was educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for 30 years. It is largely his contributions to logic, mathematics, philosophy, and semiotics (and his founding of pragmatism) that are appreciated today.

Penetrance is a term used in genetics to describe the proportion of individuals carrying a particular variation of a gene that also express an associated trait. In medical genetics, the penetrance of a disease causing mutation is the proportion of individuals with the mutation who exhibit clinical symptoms.

In philosophy, psychology, and the cognitive sciences, perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of sensory information. It is a task far more complex than was imagined in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was predicted that building perceiving machines would take about a decade, a goal which is still very far from fruition.

In mathematics, percolation theory describes the behavior of connected clusters in a random graph. The applications of percolation theory to materials science and other domains are discussed in the article percolation.

In philosophy, personal identity refers to the numerical identity of persons through time. That is to say, the conditions under which a person is said to be identical to himself through time.

A bacteriophage is any one of a number of viruses that infect bacteria. Bacteriophages are among the most common organisms on Earth. The term is commonly used in its shortened form, phage. Typically, bacteriophages consist of an outer protein capsid enclosing genetic material.

A phenotype is any observable characteristic or trait of an organism: such as its morphology, development, biochemical or physiological properties, or behavior. Phenotypes result from the expression of an organism's genes as well as the influence of environmental factors and possible interactions between the two. The genotype of an organism is the inherited instructions it carries within its genetic code.

Phenotypic plasticity is the ability of an organism to change its phenotype in response to changes in the environment. Such plasticity in some cases expresses as several highly morphologically distinct results; in other cases, a continuous norm of reaction describes the functional interrelationship of a range of environments to a range of phenotypes.

A pheromone is a chemical signal that triggers a natural response in another member of the same species. There are alarm pheromones, food trail pheromones, sex pheromones, and many others that affect behavior or physiology. Their use among insects has been particularly well documented. In addition, some vertebrates and plants communicate by using pheromones.

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned argument.

The philosophy of biology is a subfield of philosophy of science, which deals with epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical issues in the biological and biomedical sciences. Although philosophers of science and philosophers generally have long been interested in biology, philosophy of biology only emerged as an independent field of philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s.

The philosophy of economics is the branch of philosophy which studies philosophical issues relating to economics. It can also be defined as the branch of economics which studies its own foundations and status as a moral science.

Philosophy of mind is a branch of modern analytic philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e. the relationship of the mind to the body, is commonly seen as the central issue in philosophy of mind, although there are other issues concerning the nature of the mind that do not involve its relation to the physical body.

In philosophy, the philosophy of physics studies the fundamental philosophical questions underlying modern physics, the study of matter and energy and how they interact. The philosophy of physics begins by reflecting on the basic metaphysical and epistemological questions posed by physics: causality, determinism, and the nature of physical law.

Philosophy of psychology refers to issues at the theoretical foundations of modern psychology. Some of these issues are epistemological concerns about the methodology of psychological investigation. For example: What is the most appropriate methodology for psychology: mentalism, behaviorism, or a compromise? Are self-reports a reliable data gathering method? What conclusions can be drawn from null hypothesis tests? Can first-person experiences (emotions, desires, beliefs, etc.

The philosophy of science is concerned with the assumptions, foundations, and implications of science. The field is defined by an interest in one of a set of "traditional" problems or an interest in central or foundational concerns in science. In addition to these central problems for science as a whole, many philosophers of science consider these problems as they apply to particular sciences. Some philosophers of science also use contemporary results in science to draw philosophical morals.

The philosophy of social science considers the nature of confirmation and explanation in the social (or human) sciences, such as sociology, anthropology and political science. Philosophers of social science are often concerned with the differences and similarities between the social and the natural sciences, as well as the ontological significance of structure and agency.

Phonology is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Just as a language has syntax and vocabulary, it also has a phonology in the sense of a sound system. When describing the formal area of study, the term typically describes linguistic analysis either beneath the word (e.g. , syllable, onset and rhyme, phoneme, articulatory gesture, articulatory feature, mora, etc.

Photosynthesis is a process that converts carbon dioxide into organic compounds, especially sugars, using the energy from sunlight. Photosynthesis occurs in plants, algae, and many species of Bacteria, but not in Archaea. Photosynthetic organisms are called photoautotrophs, since it allows them to create their own food. In plants, algae and cyanobacteria photosynthesis uses carbon dioxide and water, releasing oxygen as a waste product.

Phylogenetic diversity is a measure of biodiversity which incorporates taxonomic difference between species. It is defined and calculated as "the sum of the lengths of the all the branches that are members of the corresponding minimum spanning path", in which 'branch' is a segment of a cladogram, and the minimum spanning path is the mimimum distance between the two nodes.

Physicalism is a philosophical position holding that everything which exists is no more extensive than its physical properties; that is, that there are no kinds of things other than physical things. The term was coined by Otto Neurath in a series of early 20th century essays on the subject, in which he wrote: "According to physicalism, the language of physics is the universal language of science and, consequently, any knowledge can be brought back to the statements on the physical objects.

In physics the word system has a technical meaning, namely, it is the portion of the physical universe chosen for analysis. Everything outside the system is known as the environment, which in analysis is ignored except for its effects on the system. The cut between system and environment is a free choice, generally made to simplify the analysis as much as possible. An isolated system is one which has negligible interaction with its environment.

Physics is a natural science; it is the study of matter and its motion through spacetime and all that derives from these, such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the world and universe behave. Physics is one of the oldest academic disciplines, perhaps the oldest through its inclusion of astronomy.

Physiology is the study of the mechanical, physical, and biochemical functions of living organisms. Physiology has traditionally been divided between plant physiology and animal and all living things physiology but the principles of physiology are universal, no matter what particular organism is being studied.

Jean Piaget (born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, 9 August 1896 - 16 September 1980) was a Swiss psychologist and natural scientist, and is well known for his pedagogical studies. His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view is together called "genetic epistemology.

Pigeons and doves constitute the family Columbidae within the order Columbiformes, which include some 300 species of near passerine birds. In general parlance the terms "dove" and "pigeon" are used somewhat interchangeably.

Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. Pinker?s academic specializations are visual cognition and language development in children, and he is most famous for popularizing the idea that language is an "instinct" or biological adaptation shaped by natural selection.

Plant breeding is the art and science of changing the genetics of plants for the benefit of humankind. Plant breeding can be accomplished through many different techniques ranging from simply selecting plants with desirable characteristics for propagation, to more complex molecular techniques. Plant breeding has been practiced for thousands of years, since near the beginning of human civilization.

Plato (428/427 BC - 348/347 BC), was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of natural philosophy, science, and Western philosophy.

Platonism is the philosophy of Plato or the name of other philosophical systems considered closely derived from it. In a narrower sense the term might indicate the doctrine of Platonic realism. The central concept of Platonism is the Theory of Forms: the transcendent, perfect archetypes, of which objects in the everyday world are imperfect copies. The highest form is the Form of the Good, the source of all other forms, which could be known by reason.

Michael Polanyi, FRS (born Polányi Mihály) was a Hungarian?British polymath whose thought and work extended across physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford.

A policy is typically described as a deliberate plan of action to guide decisions and achieve rational outcome(s). However, the term may also be used to denote what is actually done, even though it is unplanned. The term may apply to government, private sector organizations and groups, and individuals. Presidential executive orders, corporate privacy policies, and parliamentary rules of order are all examples of policy. Policy differs from rules or law.

Political correctness (adjectivally, politically correct; both forms commonly abbreviated to PC) is a term applied to language, ideas, policies, or behavior seen as seeking to minimize offense to gender, racial, cultural, disabled, aged or other identity groups. Conversely, the term "politically incorrect" is used to refer to language or ideas that may cause offense or that are unconstrained by orthodoxy. The term itself and its usage are controversial.

Political economy originally was the term for studying production, buying and selling, and their relations with law, custom, and government. Political economy originated in moral philosophy. It developed in the 18th century as the study of the economies of states?polities, hence political economy.

A political system is a system of politics and government. It is usually compared to the legal system, economic system, cultural system, and other social systems. It is different from them, and can be generally defined on a spectrum from left, e.g. communism, to the right, e.g. fascism. However, this is a very simplified view of a much more complex system of categories involving i.e.

Politics is a process by which groups of people make decisions. The term is generally applied to behavior within civil governments, but politics has been observed in all human group interactions, including corporate, academic and religious institutions. It consists of "social relations involving authority or power" and refers to the regulation of a political unit, and to the methods and tactics used to formulate and apply policy.

Polygyny is a form of marriage in which a man has two or more wives at the same time. " It is distinguished from a relationship where a man who has a sexual partner outside marriage, such as a concubine, casual sexual partner, paramour, or other culturally recognized secondary partner. Polygyny is the most common form of polygamy. The much rarer practice of polyandry is the form of marriage in which one woman has two or more husbands at the same time.

Polymorphism in biology occurs when two or more clearly different phenotypes exist in the same population of a species ? in other words, the occurrence of more than one form or morph. In order to be classified as such, morphs must occupy the same habitat at the same time and belong to a panmictic population (one with random mating).

Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH, FRS, FBA (28 July 1902 - 17 September 1994) was an Austrian and British

Population biology is a study of populations of organisms, especially the regulation of population size, life history traits such as clutch size, and extinction. The term population biology is often used interchangeably with population ecology, although the term with biology is more frequently used when studying diseases, viruses, and microbes, and the term with ecology is used more frequently when studying plants and animals.

Population control is the practice of artificially altering the rate of population growth. Historically, population control has been implemented by limiting the population's birth rate, usually by government mandate, and has been undertaken as a response to factors including high or increasing levels of poverty, environmental concerns, religious reasons, and overpopulation.

Population dynamics is the branch of life sciences that studies short- and long-term changes in the size and age composition of populations, and the biological and environmental processes influencing those changes. Population dynamics deals with the way populations are affected by birth and death rates, and by immigration and emigration, and studies topics such as aging populations or population decline.

Population genetics is the study of the allele frequency distribution and change under the influence of the four evolutionary processes: natural selection, genetic drift, mutation and gene flow. It also takes account of population subdivision and population structure in space. As such, it attempts to explain such phenomena as adaptation and speciation. Population genetics was a vital ingredient in the modern evolutionary synthesis, its primary founders were Sewall Wright, J. B. S.

In population genetics and population ecology, population size (usually denoted N) is the number of individual organisms in a population. The effective population size (Ne) is defined as "the number of breeding individuals in an idealized population that would show the same amount of dispersion of allele frequencies under random genetic drift or the same amount of inbreeding as the population under consideration.

Positivism is a philosophy that holds that the only authentic knowledge is that which is based on actual sense experience. Metaphysical speculation is avoided. Though the positivist approach has been a 'recurrent theme in the history of western thought from the Ancient Greeks to the present day' and appears in Ibn al-Haytham's 11th Century text Book of Optics, the concept was first coined by Auguste Comte, widely considered the first modern sociologist, in the middle of the 19th century.

In philosophy and logic, the concept of possible worlds is used to express modal claims. In philosophy, the term "modality" covers such notions as "possibility", "necessity", and "contingency". Talk of possible worlds is very widespread in contemporary philosophical discourse (especially in the English-speaking world), though much about them is disputed.

Postmodernism (often abbreviated pomo in adjective form) literally means 'after the modernist movement'. While "modern" itself refers to something "related to the present", the movement of modernism and the following reaction of postmodernism are defined by a set of perspectives.

Post-structuralism encompasses the intellectual developments of certain continental philosophers and sociologists who wrote within the tendencies of twentieth-century French philosophy. The movement is difficult to define or summarize, but may be broadly understood as a body of distinct responses to structuralism (hence the prefix "post").

Charles Henri Georges Pouchet (February 26, 1833 ? 1894) was a French naturalist and anatomist who was born in Rouen. He was the son of naturalist Félix Archimède Pouchet (1800-1872). In 1865 he became chief of anatomical works at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, and was later co-director of the maritime laboratory at Concarneau. From 1879 to 1894 he was professor of comparative anatomy at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle.

Pragmatism is the philosophy where practical consequences and real effects are vital components of meaning and truth. Pragmatism began in the late nineteenth century with Charles Sanders Peirce and his pragmatic maxim. Through the early twentieth-century it was developed further in the works of William James, John Dewey and?in a more unorthodox manner?by George Santayana.

Praxis is the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted or practiced.

In evolutionary biology, preadaptation describes a situation where an organism uses a preexisting anatomical structure inherited from an ancestor for a potentially unrelated purpose. One example of preadaptation is dinosaurs having used feathers for insulation and display before using them to fly, or sweat glands in mammals being transformed into mammary glands.

In ecology, predation describes a biological interaction where a predator (an organism that is hunting) feeds on its prey, (the organism that is attacked). Predators may or may not kill their prey prior to feeding on them, but the act of predation always results in the death of the prey. The other main category of consumption is detritivory, the consumption of dead organic material.

Prehistory is a term used to describe the period before written history. Paul Tournal originally coined the term Pré-historique in describing the finds he had made in the caves of southern France. It came into use in French in the 1830s to describe the time before writing, and the word "prehistoric" was introduced into English by Daniel Wilson in 1851.

A primate is a member of the biological order Primates, the group that contains lemurs, lorisids, galagos, tarsiers, monkeys, and apes, with the last category including great apes. With the exception of humans, who inhabit every continent on Earth, most primates live in tropical or subtropical regions of the Americas, Africa and Asia. Primates range in size from the Madame Berthe's Mouse Lemur weighing only 30 grams (1.1 oz) to the Mountain Gorilla weighing 200 kilograms (440 lb).

Primatology is the study of primates. It is a diverse discipline and primatologists can be found in departments of biology, anthropology, psychology and many others. It is a branch of Physical anthropology, which, in itself, studies the genus Homo, especially Homo sapiens. The fields cross over in the study of the hominids, which include all ape-like ancestors of man and the other great apes (for a list of common ancestors with other living species see The Ancestor's Tale).

The aim of a probabilistic logic (or probability logic) is to combine the capacity of probability theory to handle uncertainty with the capacity of deductive logic to exploit structure. The result is a richer and more expressive formalism with a broad range of possible application areas. Probabilistic logic is a natural extension of traditional logic truth tables: the results they define are derived through probabilistic expressions instead.

Probability is a way of expressing knowledge or belief that an event will occur or has occurred. In mathematics the concept has been given an exact meaning in probability theory, that is used extensively in such areas of study as mathematics, statistics, finance, gambling, science, and philosophy to draw conclusions about the likelihood of potential events and the underlying mechanics of complex systems.

A problem is an issue or obstacle which makes it difficult to achieve a desired goal, objective or purpose. It refers to a situation, condition, or issue that is yet unresolved. In a broad sense, a problem exists when an individual becomes aware of a significant difference between what actually is and what is desired.

Problem solving is a mental process and is part of the larger problem process that includes problem finding and problem shaping. Considered the most complex of all intellectual functions, problem solving has been defined as higher-order cognitive process that requires the modulation and control of more routine or fundamental skills. Problem solving occurs when an organism or an artificial intelligence system needs to move from a given state to a desired goal state.

Procedural justice refers to the idea of fairness in the processes that resolve disputes and allocate resources. One aspect of procedural justice is related to discussions of the administration of justice and legal proceedings. This sense of procedural justice is connected to due process (U.S.

Productivity is a measure of output from a production process, per unit of input. For example, labor productivity is typically measured as a ratio of output per labor-hour, an input. Productivity may be conceived of as a metric of the technical or engineering efficiency of production. As such, the emphasis is on quantitative metrics of input, and sometimes output.

Professionalization is the social process by which any trade or occupation transforms itself into a true "profession of the highest integrity and competence. " This process tends to involve establishing acceptable qualifications, a professional body or association to oversee the conduct of members of the profession and some degree of demarcation of the qualified from unqualified amateurs.

In economics, profit maximisation is the process by which a firm determines the price and output level that returns the greatest profit. There are several approaches to this problem. The total revenue—total cost method relies on the fact that profit equals revenue minus cost, and the marginal revenue—marginal cost method is based on the fact that total profit in a perfectly competitive market reaches its maximum point where marginal revenue equals marginal cost.