bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Ancestral Nucleotide and Amino Acid Sequences
Authors: Nei Masatoshi , Kumar Sudhir
Published: November 2023

If we can infer the amino acid sequences of ancestral proteins, it is possible to study how the function of a gene has changed in the evolutionary process. Previously, the sequences of ancestral genes and proteins were inferred by parsimony methods in the process of reconstruction of phylogenetic trees, but these sequences were rarely used for studying the evolution of genes. In recent years, it has become possible to reconstruct an ancestral protein by using site-directed mutagenesis and to study bio chemical properties of the ancestral protein. This has opened a new field of evolutionary study; we can now study the functional change of proteins in the evolutionary process in the laboratory (e.g., Jermann et al. 1995; Chandrasekharan et al. 1996; Dean and Golding 1997; Yokoyama et al. 1999).
Population Trees from Genetic Markers
Authors: Nei Masatoshi , Kumar Sudhir
Published: November 2023

To construct a phylogenetic tree for a group of populations or closely related species, it is customary to use allele frequency data from many different genetic loci. This is because the genetic differences between pop ulations are small and they are usually measured in terms of allele frequency differences rather than nucleotide or amino acid differences. Of course, any allelic difference is caused by differences in nucleotide sequence between alleles. Therefore, the ideal approach to this problem is to consider the nucleotide differences as well as the frequency differences among populations.
Perspectives
Authors: Nei Masatoshi , Kumar Sudhir
Published: November 2023

We have discussed various statistical methods that are useful for the study of molecular evolution. We hope these methods will help re searchers to analyze their data objectively and obtain reasonable answers to various problems of evolution. Needless to say, current statistical methods are not necessarily perfect, and many of them need further refinements. New statistical methods will also be required to deal with new biological problems that will surely arise in the future. In this chapter, we present an overview on the use of statistical methods in molecular evolutionary genetics with an emphasis on future studies.
A Historical Overview
Authors: Basso Anna
Published: November 2023

The Importance of the Past is frequently played down, but our concepts about aphasia have developed in the course of the last two centuries, and our current understanding and way of thinking about aphasia have been shaped by classic research. Chapter 1 retraces the history of aphasia from the discoveries of Broca in 1861 and 1865 to the 1970s. Eighteenth-century localization of functions in the brain was conducted only in broad concepts, such as perception, intelligence, and memory. With Franzjoseph Gall the question radically changed. Gall (1825) argued that the brain contains separate organs located in the cerebral cortex and that each organ subserves a specific intellectual, moral, or spiritual faculty. Gall’s ideas were revolutionary for his time and were opposed by many of his contemporaries, who rejected the idea that mental faculties could be localized in separate parts of the brain. In addition, Gall’s phrenology and his bizarre list of 27 faculties rapidly threw discredit on his doctrine, and he is now remembered more for these aspects than for his undeniable merits. According to Benton, “a quantum leap to another mode of thinking was introduced by Franz Joseph Gall in the first decades of the 19th century” (Benton, 1988, p. 5). The claim that somehow survived and that played an important role during the following decades was that the language faculty was located in the frontal lobes.
Classification of the Aphasias
Authors: Basso Anna
Published: November 2023

interesting findings, such as the discovery that lesions in specific parts of the brain may produce selective cognitive disorders of language, perception, and praxis. Yet, the classic anatomo-clinical method had some limitations connected to the paucity of studied cases and the necessary presence of a striking defect, with the obvious consequence that negative cases (patients with damage in a given area without the expected symptoms), were not taken into consideration. The classic anatomo-clinical correlation method inferred the neural basis of a cognitive function from the clinical analysis of the damaged behavior and the subsequent (generally post¬ mortem) localization of the lesion. However, if only positive cases, namely, patients in whom a given area is damaged and the putative corresponding symptoms are present, are considered, it is not possible to demonstrate whether a lesion in a given area always damages a specific function. In addition, it is always risky to extrapolate from a single case. One should wait for replications before reaching a conclusion about a relationship between a given impaired function and a specific cerebral area. Finally, many patients die long after having been examined; they may survive for many years, and when they undergo autopsy, it is not always easy to identify the exact lesion that produced the symptoms of interest.
Aphasia Therapy from World War I to the 1970s
Authors: Basso Anna
Published: November 2023

This Chapter Retraces the History of aphasia rehabilitation and correlates it with contemporary interpretations of the nature of aphasia. Before World War I only sporadic and anecdotal treatment reports can be found. From World War I to World War II aphasia therapy remained a rather uncommon procedure, mostly developed in the German-speaking countries and essentially based on didactic principles (Howard & Hatfield, 1987). After World War II it gained popularity and began to be regularly practiced in other countries as well.
Efficacy of Aphasia Therapy
Authors: Basso Anna
Published: November 2023

In Chapter 3, An Attempt was Made to Offer a guide to the rich and varied treatments for aphasia by regrouping them into six different approaches. Before describing more recent changes in aphasic patients’ management, it is worth considering whether aphasia therapy based on the approaches so far described has had any positive effects on recovery of language. The efficacy of the Luria approach will not be discussed because it has rarely been applied in Western countries and experimental data are scanty. Interested readers are referred to Luria’s original work (Luria, 1970), where many follow-up cases are described in great detail. As for the other approaches, the type of aphasia treatment involved has rarely been specified and it is not possible to compare their relative efficacy.
Cognitive Neuropsychology
Authors: Basso Anna
Published: November 2023

It can be Argued that the first cycle in the history of aphasia research comes to a close with the studies on efficacy of aphasia therapy reported in Chapter 4. The nature of the aphasic disorder was discussed in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, and two schools of thought—the associationist and the holistic—had faced each other. After relaunching of the associationist approach, objective methods of evaluating the disorder were devised. Therapy for aphasia became common practice, and its effectiveness was thoroughly investigated. Yet, the classic clinical approach had exhausted its propulsive spur, and a totally new approach was needed. This was to be the cognitive neuropsychological approach.
The Lexicon
Authors: Basso Anna
Published: November 2023

The Structure of the Lexicon and how lexical representations interact is one of the most thoroughly investigated topics in cognitive neuropsychology. The interest in our knowledge of words can be easily understood if we consider that besides production and comprehension of words, reading and writing also involve lexical processing. Moreover, models of word processing are easier to elaborate than models of sentence processing (which are in fact less detailed and more controversial), and it is understandable that they have attracted the interest of researchers.
Cognitive Rehabilitation
Authors: Basso Anna
Published: November 2023

As Stated in Chapter 5, Cognitive neuropsychology fostered an approach to the study of aphasia that was radically different from the classic clinical approach that related verbal behaviors, such as comprehension and reading, to specific cerebral areas. Cognitive neuropsychologists assumed that cognitive tasks are not unitary but rather are the result of a series of cognitive processes, which they endeavored to clarify. Chapter 6 illustrated how a behavior such as naming a picture or reading a word is accomplished. The aim of this chapter is to establish whether and how such cognitive models of language processing have affected implementation of rehabilitation. Selected case studies of patients reportedly rehabilitated following the cognitive neuropsychological approach are considered, and the intervention procedures are compared to the more traditional clinical approaches described in Chapter 3.
Rehabilitation of Lexical and Sentence Disorders
Authors: Basso Anna
Published: November 2023

The Question of what to do has not been dealt with in Chapter 8; it will be taken up in this and The next chapter. An effort will be made to clarify how the suggested treatments are logically compatible with the underlying theory and constrained by it. However, no claim is made that these are the only rational suggestions to be derived from cognitive neuropsychological models, but merely that they take into consideration the model and are constrained by its structure and processes.
Edith Wharton 1862–1937
Authors: Benstock Shari
Published: November 2023

Edith Newbold Jones, who became the writer Edith Wharton, was born on January 24, 1862, in her parents’ New York City spacious brownstone at 14 West Twenty-third Street, Just off Fifth Avenue and the fashionable Madison Square. She entered a country divided by a war whose consequences would touch her own life and become part of her literary subject matter. Descended from Anglo-Dutch merchant families, she was born in a period of social, economic, and cultural transition. Her extended family was distinguished by its social status. The Joneses belonged to an elite group called the “society of birth”; George Frederic Jones and his wife Lucretia lived on inherited Manhattan real estate investments from the estates of George Frederic’s father and grandfather. They created a life of ease for themselves, their family, and friends that included their civic and charitable responsibilities as members of the New York elite.
The Original Meaning of theFourteenth Amendment
Authors: Perry Michael J
Published: November 2023

I want to inquire into the implications both of originalism and of normative minimalism for the constitutional doctrine the modern Supreme Court has fashioned in the name of “equal protection” and also for the doctrine it has fashioned in the name of “substantive due process”. We cannot begin that inquiry, however, until we ascertain the original meaning of the relevant part of the Fourteenth Amendment, the second sentence of section 1, which provides: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
The Challenge of Time and Space in Ecology
Authors: Magnuson John J , Kratz Timothy K , Benson Barbara J
Published: November 2023

All of us can sense change over time and differences across the landscape. We sense “the reddening sky with dawn’s new light, the rising strength of lake waves during a thunderstorm, and the changing seasons of plant flowering as temperature and rain affect our landscapes” (Magnuson 1990, p. 495). We sense in a lake the patches of aquatic plants next to which the large fish lie, in a forest of northern Wisconsin we sense the brown-water lake with cranberries hanging along shore and the crystal-clear lake with beaches of sand, and across the Wisconsin region we sense the transitions from cropland to forest as we drive north. More difficult challenges for scientists who study long-term regional ecology are to sense quantitatively long-term change and dynamics and large-scale gradients and patchiness, and at a suitably fine resolution for analyses of ecological structure and function. The challenges are to achieve a predictive understanding of not just temporal and spatial pattern and variability but also the interactions between these two dimensions. The challenges are to develop and test models and to synthesize our knowledge about how the world works.
Synthetic Summary and Prospective
Authors: Benson Barbara J , Kratz Timothy K , Magnuson John J
Published: November 2023

We are in the third decade of the North Temperate Lakes LTER program. The challenge LTER researchers undertook was to understand the dynamics of temperate lakes in a landscape context and over time scales ranging from years to decades or longer. We used the idea of the invisible present and the invisible place (Chapter I) to visualize why broader spatial extents and longer time series were essential to understanding lake ecosystems. A point in time and space, out of context with its past and its surroundings, is destined to be misunderstood and misinterpreted. In many ways, we were attempting to do a new kind of science. From the vantage of more than two decades of LTER research, we summarize the gain in scientific understanding from the North Temperate Lakes LTER program, our contributions to a changing infrastructure for ecological science, and our reflections on the future. At least eight scientific themes permeate chapters of this synthesis volume on the North Temperate Lakes LTER program. The hydrologic template in which lakes are embedded provides a powerful framework for studying lake status and dynamics.
A Tale of Two Revolutions
Authors: Carnot Sadi
Published: November 2023

The story of thermodynamics begins in 1824 in Paris. France had been rocked to its foundations by thirty-five years of war, revolution, and dictatorship. A king had been executed, constitutions had been written, Napoleon had come and gone twice, and the monarchy had been restored twice. Napoleon had successfully marched his armies through the countries of Europe and then disastrously in-to Russia. France had been invaded and occupied and had paid a large war indemnity.
The Greatest Simplicity
Authors: Gibbs Willard
Published: November 2023

He held few positions of academic or scientific eminence. During his thirty-two years of teaching, no more than a hundred students in total attended his courses. For the first ten years of his tenure at Yale University, he received no salary. He rarely attended professional meetings or traveled. Except for an obligatory European trip to the scientific outside world, and annual excursions to the New England and Adirondack mountains, his life was confined to New Haven, Connecticut, and hardly spanned more than the two blocks separating his home on High Street and his office in the Sloane Laboratory.
Reluctant Revolutionary
Authors: Planck Max
Published: November 2023

The first of the revolutionary quantum theorists we meet, Max Planck, would not have succeeded in revolutions of the other kind. Planck was born into the conservative society of nineteenth-century Prussia, and in his formal, disciplined way, he remained committed to the Prussian traditions, even in his scientific work, it seemed, throughout his life. Planck’s life was devoted to an intense, sometimes desperate search—a “hunger of the soul,” in Einstein’s words—for what was absolute and fundamental. “It is of paramount importance,” Planck wrote in his scientific autobiography, “that the outside world is something independent from man, something absolute, and the quest for the laws which apply to this absolute appeared to me as the most sublime scientific pursuit in life.” His faith in physics, ideally rooted in the principles of classical physics, as a manifestation of the absolute principles had the intensity of a religious belief. His intellectual strength and integrity, Einstein tells us, grew from an “emotional condition . . . more like that of a deeply religious man or a man in love; the daily effort is not dictated by either a purpose or a program, but by an immediate need.”
Science by Conversation
Authors: Bohr Niels
Published: November 2023

Quantum theory was not an overnight success. Its reception during the first decade of its history was hesitant, and its practitioners were scarce. By 1910, the Planck postulates were more or less recognized, but they had been applied mostly to problems concerning radiation and the solid state, and hardly at all in the realm of atoms and molecules. There had been no movement toward the formulation of a general quantum physics.
Wave Mechanics
Authors: dinger Erwin Schro¨ , Broglie Louis de
Published: November 2023

Paul Dirac has offered the opinion that his fellow theorists are guided not only by their hopes, but just as importantly, by their fears. Theoretical researchers find it hard, he says, to ignore fears that their work contains hidden, possibly disastrous, flaws; and their thoughts, influenced by this worry, are not so logical as they might be: “You might think a good research worker would review the situation quite calmly and unemotionally and with a completely logical mind, and proceed to develop whatever ideas he has in an entirely rational way.
Tellingthe Tale of the Quarks
Authors: Gell-Mann Murray
Published: November 2023

It is said that a student once asked Enrico Fermi about the name of a fundamental particle, and that Fermi responded, “Young man, if I could remember the names of these particles, I would have been a botanist.” At that time (the mid-1950s), only a dozen particles were known, but their taxonomy was already a tangled problem. Ten years later the list was approaching one hundred and getting longer as powerful new accelerators came on line and increasingly sensitive devices for particle detection were developed. The “botanists” among particle physicists were in despair.
Gridding Reservoir Layers
Authors: Deutsch Clayton V
Published: November 2023

A first step in reservoir modeling is to establish the major reservoir architecture, that is, the geometry of the hydrocarbon-bearing formation and important adjacent geological formations. The reservoir “volume” must be filled with a grid network that makes it straightforward to account for the variety of available data, in particular the geological information concerning layering and stratigraphic correlation.
Autistic Learning Disabilities of Communication: Identifying the Components of Communication
Authors: Siegel Bryna
Published: November 2023

This chapter will deal with defining the ways in which the earliest stages of language development in children with ASDs differ from children with other reasons for their communication difficulties. Communication-based autistic learning disabilities can be seen as emerging from successive failures to normally develop skills like the use of communicative gaze, gestures, and body language. It is these pre-language, paralinguistic failures that eventually lead to a failure to develop any or much spoken language. Receptive and expressive language relies on these earlier-emerging paralinguistic skills as a foundation. This chapter will take a very developmental perspective, laying out a rationale for building these foundational skills when treating communication disabilities in ASDs.
Autistic Learning Disabilities of Communication: Treatments for the Verbal Child
Authors: Siegel Bryna
Published: November 2023

Some children with ASDs have words all along, but do not use those words as much as others their age, or use expressive speech in peculiar ways. Others are very delayed in initial language development, but with speech therapy at two, three, and four years of age develop functional speech and grammar by age five or six. In this chapter, we will focus on verbal children with ASDs and the challenges of improving their language use. This chapter is intended for parents and teachers who focus on children who have moved beyond the “preverbal” or limited verbal “speaking” stage and are speaking in phrases and sentences. By kindergarten or first grade age, these children are often in separate and different educational placements from the children who continue to need the support of visual icon communication curricula. For parents, children at this stage usually present new challenges, like that of getting the child to talk more.
Modeling the Evolution of Phenotypic Plasticity
Authors: Berrigan David , Scheiner Samuel M
Published: November 2023

Mathematical models have long played a critical role in evolutionary biology. Models allow us to systematically characterize complex interactions and to explore the consequences of assumptions about genotypes, phenotypes, and the environment. Models of phenotypic plasticity have shaped research and raised a host of compelling questions for ecologists, physiologists, and geneticists. Most formal models of plasticity evolution are only about 15 years old (e.g., Orzack 1985; Via and Lande 1985; Gavrilets 1986; Stearns and Koella 1986), although the concepts are much older (chapter 2). To some extent models have outrun data, as we discuss in this chapter. Yet substantial gaps still exist among plasticity models. Decades ago, Levins (1968) pointed out that models attempt to maximize three things: generality, precision, and realism. However, only two can ever be maximized within a single model. Until now, models of plasticity evolution have concentrated on the first two factors, generality and precision. Few models have attempted to maximize realism, especially with regard to the melding of genetics with traits such as morphology and life history. One goal of this chapter is to point out potential avenues toward this melding.
Cognitive Social Science
Authors: Turner Mark
Published: November 2023

IT 1s no surprise that the fundamental topic of study in cognitive science is mental events, viewed as occurring in single brains or distributively across as few as two brains or as many as all the brains of an entire community and its descendent communities, and lasting as briefly as a few milliseconds or as long as tens of thousands of years. It is also no surprise that political science, economics, sociology, and anthropology share with cognitive science this fundamental topic of study—mental events, however distributed. Nonmental facts (the location of coal, the date of the potato blight in Ireland) can mean something in social science only because they bear on mental events. The distribution of oil in the earth’s crust can mean something in economics because the geological facts of the matter are enmeshed in a mental world of belief, desire, need, demand, value, utility, pricing, judgment, decision, competition, cooperation, conflict, and persuasion. The study of oil without mental events is natural science, not social science.
“everybody knew it was going to happen within months”—bell labs feels safely in the lead
Authors: Hecht Jeff
Published: November 2023

TED MAIMAN AND HUGHES RESEARCH LABORATORIES weren’t on the radars at Bell Labs. Bell felt safely in the lead and confident of its staying power. Bell managers didn’t skimp in the pursuit of promising ideas or haggle about spending $1500 on a potentially useful instrument. They sent 18 people to Shawanga Lodge, plus John Sanders, who listed himself as coming from Oxford University. That delegation was more than ten percent of the total attendance. Most returned optimistic that they were well on their way to a working laser. “Everybody knew it was going to happen within months,” recalls Al Clogston, who was in charge of coordinating Bell’s various laser projects.
“we were astounded”—a stunned reaction
Authors: Hecht Jeff
Published: November 2023

RIPPLES OF REACTION began spreading as soon as the reporters left the Hughes press conference. Walter Sullivan, the science editor for the New York Times, didn’t attend, but afterward he tried to reach Townes, whom he often asked questions about physics. Townes was away from Columbia, but the physics department announced the call over its public address system, and Abella picked it up, identifying himself as a graduate student.
Antisense Disruption of Gene Expression in the Preimplantation Embryo
Authors: Barcroft Lisa C , Jones-Taggart D Holstead , Watson Andrew J
Published: November 2023

Development of techniques such as reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT- PCR), differential display RT-PCR, and, more recently, the use of gene-array chips has allowed a number of developmentally regulated gene products within the preimplantation embryo to be identified and characterized. Many of these gene products are involved in cell adhesion (1–10), inter- and intracellular signaling (11–19), cell cycle regulation (20–23), autocrine regulation (24–36), embryo metabolism (37–46), and ion transport (47–56). Despite extensive investigation of the timing of mRNA and protein expression of these gene products, there have been few studies examining the effect of disrupting the expression of a given gene. Most studies investigating gene function within somatic cells and preimplantation embryos have used one or two means of disrupting gene expression: antigene strategies or anti-mRNA strategies.
The Mighty Shall Be Weak
Authors: Zee A
Published: November 2023

When my son Andrew was about four years old, he asked me whether gravity or Superman were stronger. Clearly, I replied, Superman’s got to be stronger, since he can zip away from the earth’s gravity at a moment’s notice. But on second thought, is Superman strong enough to move galaxies around? Can Superman rein in the expansion of the whole universe? Only gravity is strong enough to get the universe to perform.
Darkness at Night
Authors: Zee A
Published: November 2023

Night after night, the darkness came. Strange noises filled the jungle, and our ancestors huddled closer together. For eons, the darkness of night frightened and mystified us, but nowadays, nobody thinks the darkness puzzling. Every person in the street knows, presumably, the explanation taught to schoolboys: The earth rotates on its axis as it moves around the sun, and every twenty-four hours night falls on that half of the world facing away from the sun.
The Rich Get Riche
Authors: Zee A
Published: November 2023

In the history of the universe, the formation of galaxies was a particularly momentous event. Before that, the universe was an undifferentiated, uniform cloud of matter. But about forty thousand years after the big bang, bits of matter started to come together, forming enormous structures that eventually condensed into galaxies. Galaxy formation marked the first step in the emergence of structures in our universe: Within the galaxy, protostars soon formed. The rest, as they say, is history. The debris around some stars eventually cooled into lumps. On some of these lumps, biological evolution began. What happened afterward, some cosmologists might say, is a yawning anticlimax. Certainly, from the cosmological point of view, nothing much of significance had transpired since the lumping of matter made the universe take on its present look—a vast and inconceivable emptiness dotted here and there by a few specks of matter.
From Hair Whorls to the Edge of Creation
Authors: Zee A
Published: November 2023

When I was in the first or the second grade, we boys used to examine the backs of each other’s heads. We would pretend to count the number of whorls in our friends’ hair, all the while chanting, “One whorl means that you are a man; two whorls, you are a goblin; and three whorls, well, you must be a monkey in disguise!” With malicious glee, we would gang up on some poor soul and tell him that he had three whorls in his hair. The victim, in disbelief, would ask a friend to check the back of his head. At this point, the so-called friend would examine the victim’s head with exaggerated care, saying, “Let’s see, here is one whorl. Mmm, oh, no, here is another one! And, here is a third!” The victim, after trying in vain to examine the back of his own head in a mirror and now utterly unsure whom among his “friends” he could trust, would reluctantly go ask the teacher to examine his head.
The Fall and Rise of Gravity
Authors: Zee A
Published: November 2023

When I was a child, I came across a book in which there was a picture of a double-decker bus tilting at a precarious angle. The author explained that physicists can actually calculate how far the bus can be tilted before tipping over. This passage impressed me deeply, partly because I was taken by the notion that we can predict how Nature will behave, and partly because I had ridden some weeks earlier on a doubledecker bus—no, not only that, but I had sat in the front row on the top deck—and the thought that it might tip over was deliciously titillating.
Commentary on Part I
Authors: Cohen Leslie B
Published: November 2023

It is a pleasure to be able to contribute to this excellent book on early categorization and its development. I have had the good fortune to collaborate with some of the authors in the infant section of the book and I am delighted by the way that they, and others, have built on the early demonstration studies we and others reported in the 1970s. Today infant categorization is one of the foremost areas within infant cognition, and rightly so.

The ability to categorize is so fundamental that even young infants must possess it to some degree. It allows infants and adults alike to represent groups of objects and events in the world and to act on the basis of those representations. Infants, as well as adults, must be able to acquire at least some types of categories. Consider what life would be like if they could not. Given that no two experiences are identical, learning from prior experience would be nonexistent and anticipating regularities in the world would be impossible. Oakes and Madole (chap. 6) make a similar point, albeit more conservatively. According to them, “the ability to categorize may be especially important in infancy, when an enormous amount of new information is encountered every day. By forming groups of similar objects, infants can effectively reduce the amount of information they must process, learn, and remember” (p. 132). But even if we can agree that from the outset young infants possess the ability to categorize, some of the most significant issues still remain. For example, what exactly is the nature of these earliest categories and how do they change with development and experience?
Transaction of Child Cognitive-Linguistic Abilities and Adult Input in the Acquisition of Lexical Categories at the Basic and Subordinate Levels
Authors: Mervis Carolyn B , Pani, John R , Pani Ariel M
Published: November 2023

Studies of category development typically are cross-sectional, use a group design, and focus on one or at most a few categories or category labels. Furthermore, designs usually are experimental rather than observational. This approach is highly practical and the chapters in this book provide ample evidence of its success in advancing our understanding of category and conceptual development and early lexical acquisition (for the latter, see also Golinkoff et al., 2000). Developmental timetables have been provided for changes in the types of information an infant or child uses in forming categories, as measured by habituation, preferential looking or handling, or sequential touching or sorting. Similarly, developmental timetables have been proposed for changes in the lexical principles governing the extension of toddlers’ and preschoolers’ object labels, as measured by comprehension or production of object names. Developmental timetables also have been offered for children’s attention to particular aspects of the social/pragmatic context when acquiring new words. Given their practicality, particularly in terms of the (relative) speed at which the research can be carried out and results obtained, narrowly focused cross-sectional studies using experimental designs are likely to continue to be the dominant approach to category or lexical development.
Austen’s Nostalgics
Authors: Dames Nicholas
Published: November 2023

Protesting against Edward Ferrars’s conversational decorum, Sense and Sensibility’s Marianne Dashwood proclaims: “I love to be reminded of the past, Edward—whether it be melancholy or gay, I love to recall it—and you will never offend me by talking of former times” (SS, 92).1 Marianne’s preference is not, however, reflected in the texts of her creator, which seem more interested in maintaining Edward’s tentative avoidance of the past than in cultivating a love of remembrance. Jane Austen’s novels do not bask in reminiscence, do not seek out obscure memories, and are not illuminated by sudden bursts of recollection—a tendency amply demonstrated by the fact that, having stated her love of memory, Marianne returns immediately to the topic at hand: how one might dispose of a purely hypothetical fortune. Memory may be invoked, but it does not become a topic in its own right.
Amnesiac Bodies Phrenology, Physiognomy, and Memory in Charlotie Brontë
Authors: Dames Nicholas
Published: November 2023

In the summer of 1851 Charlotte Brontë and her publisher George Smith visited a London phrenologist of some fame, a Dr. J. P. Browne, to have their faces and skulls “read” in the popular manner of the day.1 Into this encounter both Brontë and Smith went metaphorically masked, preferring the pseudonyms “Mr. and Miss Fraser’’ to their everyday identities. Remaining silent before Browne’s trained gaze, with the ambiguous, tangled, and often painful facts of their respective pasts temporarily irrelevant, and with only the immutable signs of their heads offered for inspection, both author and publisher were clinically examined; within days Browne issued two written reports of his findings, and soon thereafter Brontë, back in the haven of Haworth, received the reports from Smith. It did not take long for Brontë to register her enthusiasm about the success of the readings.
The Birth of Amnesia Collins, Sensation, Forgetting
Authors: Dames Nicholas
Published: November 2023

Our record of the reactions to Collins’s sensation novels of the 1860s reads like a record of forgettings.1 Responding to the 1860 publication in book form of The Woman in White, an anonymous reviewer in the Saturday Review describes the consumable nature of Collins’s mysteries, which, like yesterday’s meals, leave little memory behind them: “Nobody ever leaves his tales unfinished. This is a great compliment to his skill. But then very few feel at all inclined to read them a second time. Our curiosity once satisfied, the charm is gone.”2
Drifting
Authors: Gillham Nicholas Wright
Published: November 2023

In the fall of 1844 Galton took rooms in London near Hyde Park with two Cambridge friends, W. F. Gibbs and H. Vaughan Johnson. Gibbs was later tutor to the Prince of Wales while Johnson became involved in legal work with Galton’s friend Eben Kay. During 1845 the affairs surrounding Tertius’s estate were wound up and the family began to scatter. Emma, a spinster, lived with their mother either at Leamington or at Claverdon, a Warwickshire estate Tertius had purchased in 1824 as a summer residence. Delly married Robert Shirley Bunbury on May 18, 1845, only to be widowed a year later and left with their baby, Millicent. Milly would become close to Galton late in his life. In December Bessy married Edward Wheler. Lucy, wed for some time to James Moilliet, was suffering from the effects of rheumatic fever contracted as a child and had only three years to live. Darwin, Galton’s eldest brother, was married to his second wife. They were living with her mother at her country house near Stratford-on-Avon. Erasmus, Galton’s other brother, was farming his estate at Loxton in Somersetshire.
Riding High with the Royal
Authors: Gillham Nicholas Wright
Published: November 2023

In May 1854, married and enclosed in a carapace of Victorian respectability, Calton was elected to the Council of the Royal Geographical Society, the Society’s command and control center. The hard-charging Murchison was ever-present either as president, vice-president, or in some other capacity. Two unpaid honorary secretaries, appointed from the Council, supervised Society meetings. The Council’s Expeditions Committee provided instructions to explorers, which were then published. Once the Council decided favorably on a project, members sought funding through public subscription and from the Foreign Office. The Council also nominated candidates for the two gold medals the Society awarded annually. From his Council perch Calton watched a great drama unfold as Baker, Burton, Grant, Livingstone, Speke, and Stanley in search of the Nile’s source discovered Africa’s Great Lakes in the process. But Calton was no bystander. He wrote instructions for explorers, helped to raise subscriptions for their expeditions, and questioned measurements they reported. The Council Calton joined included his old master at Trinity, Whewell, and his Cambridge drop-out friend Mansfield Parkyns, whom he had last seen in Khartoum. It also boasted luminaries like Lt. Col.
The Mendelians Trump the Biometricians
Authors: Gillham Nicholas Wright
Published: November 2023

Francis Galton’s Ancestral Law of Heredity (1897) had its roots in the pedigrees he had analyzed for Hereditary Genius. The underlying as­ sumption was that the closest male relatives of the eminent man were the most likely to be eminent, with eminence diluting over hereditary distance. The ancestral model seemed to accommodate continuous variation satisfactorily and would be adopted by both Pearson and Weldon. However, for Bateson discontinuities were what counted in heredity and evolution, and this belief found strong reinforcement in Galton’s hypothesis of organic stability. The rediscovery of Mendel’s paper in 1900 at once provided the key for the hereditary cipher and unlocked in Bateson one of the first great geneticists. This chapter chronicles the ensuing controversy.
Greek Gifts
Authors: Benson Donald C
Published: November 2023

The Ancient Greeks Embarked Humanity on the scientific voyage of discovery that continues to the present day. The greatest of the Greek mathematical gifts to us from antiquity was the notion of proof In this chapter, we look at certain fundamental accomplishments of rigorous Greek mathematical thought-two alternate developments of the theory of ratio and proportion, subtle methods of filling in the gaps between the whole numbers. Thereby the Greeks carried forward the development of the number system.
Tubeland
Authors: Benson Donald C
Published: November 2023

IS THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH curved or flat? Despite the superficial appearance of flatness, learned people as far back as Pythagoras in the sixth century BCE have agreed that the surface of the earth is not flat but spherical. In fact, the Alexandrian mathematician and astronomer Eratosthenes of Cyrene (276?-195? BCE), gave a close approximation of the circumference of the earth using measurements of the shadows of objects of known height at different latitudes. It is a myth-probably initiated by Washington Irving in his History of Christopher Columbus {1828)-that in the time of Columbus there was a widely held belief in a flat earth.
The Calculating Eye
Authors: Benson Donald C
Published: November 2023

IN this chapter, we look at a mathematical innovation that promotes visual-spatial thinking-a geometric innovation that is used primarily for purposes that are not geometric and not even mathematical-an innovation that is so much a part of modem life that it is difficult to think that there was a time when it did not exist. I refer to the commonplace graphs that we see in every newspaper-for example, graphs showing the price of stocks and bonds day by day or hour by hour. A graph expresses the relationship between two variables with an effectiveness that is impossible to achieve with words alone. Graphs give instant insight into complex matters. Surprisingly, graphs were seldom seen before the twentieth century.
The Root of the Problem
Authors: Benson Donald C
Published: November 2023

Say “Algebra” and one thinks “equations.” Indeed, equations are a central concern of classical algebra. An equation poses a mathematical “whodunit.” The culprit x-the unknown x-left clues in the form of an equation, and the mathematical detective must determine its identity, the root (or roots) of the equation. As we will see, for certain Italian mathematiciansof the sixteenth century, equations led to high intrigue, but probably no actual crimes.
Symmetry Without Fear
Authors: Benson Donald C
Published: November 2023

Symmetry Is Organized Repetition, seen both in the tiger’s stripes and in Blake’s poetry; also, in the tile work of the Alhambra} the fugues of Bach, the biology of the starfish, the growth of crystals, the shape of galaxies, and the theory of subatomic particles. The bilateral symmetry of the human body is only the first page of the intricate book of symmetry.
The Magic Mirror
Authors: Benson Donald C
Published: November 2023

A MAGIC MIRROR that answers every question truthfully would be a dentist’s dream. Common sense suggests that this is only a fairy tale and no such truth-machine can exist. In fact, if there were such a mirror, we could confound it with the following question: A little reflection shows that neither Yes nor No can be a truthful answer. If the mirror says Yes, then it should have said No; and if it says No, then it should have said Yes. The best that the mirror can do is to say: The above is a version of the liar’s paradox -first stated by the Cretan Epimenides in the seventh century BCE. Epimenides said, “All Cretans are liars.” Did he lie or tell the truth? One might think that the search for a truth machine died out with the practice of witchcraft and alchemy. Such was not the case. Early in the twentieth century, the search for a truth machine was a serious, respectable, and plausible concern of mathematical logic.
On the Shoulders of Giants
Authors: Benson Donald C
Published: November 2023

Calculus is Latin for pebble. The original meaning is preserved in medical terminology: a kidney stone is called a renal calculus. In antiquity, calculi were used for voting-black or white indicating condemnation or acquittal. However, the ancient use of pebbles for reckoning is the source of our common usage: a calculus is a method of computation. Specifically, the calculus refers to a method of computation developed in the seventeenth century. Truly, “method of computation” understates the nature and importance of the calculus, which opened up a new view of the world and led to Newton’s astonishing discoveries in physics.
Roller-Coaster Science
Authors: Benson Donald C
Published: November 2023

The Optimism Of Doctor Pangloss is the butt of Voltaire’s biting satire. Actually, Doctor Pangloss is a stand-in for Gottfried Leibniz, who enjoyed more esteem as co-discoverer of the calculus than for his philosophy of optimism. In physics, however, principles of optimality stand on firmer ground. In fact, there are several variational principles that state that of all conceivable happenings, nature chooses the one of least “effort.” The oldest of these principles is known as Fermat’s principle of least time, which states that a ray of light selects, from all possible pathsbetween two points, the path of least time. Fermat’s principle explains the reflection and refraction of light. In 1746, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759) formulated a similar minimum principle for mechanics, the principle of least action, that characterizes the motion or equilibrium configuration of a mechanical system, for example, a pendulum, a gyroscope, or a suspension bridge.
The Species Problem
Authors: Hey Jody
Published: November 2023

Are dogs one species or many species? Our canine pets and helpers are a diverse lot, but it is not just the diversity that causes this common question. The uncertainty also arises from knowing that so much of dog diversity is found between fairly distinct breeds. When engaged in plain talk, people usually use the word species to speak of distinct kinds of organisms. In this sense, there are many species of dogs, indeed hundreds of kinds in so far as we refer to different breeds as kinds, and to kinds as species. But we usually stop short of equating dog breeds with species when we recall how easily dogs of different breeds mate with one another (and produce healthy fertile pups that look like a mixture of the parents). Mixed breed dogs remind us of another commonplace view of species, which is that organisms of different species do not join in sexual reproduction. But with this sexual criterion in mind, it is tempting to ask whether breeds of very different size and shape are different species. Does it help to answer the question about dogs and species if we suppose that a Chihuahua cannot jump enough to make puppies with a Mastiff that cannot stoop enough? Probably not. Firstly, reasoning by the mechanics of copulation leads to some puzzling groupings, perhaps including a Chihuahua and a Toy Poodle in one species that does not include a much larger Standard Poodle. Secondly, the most we could ask with this criterion is whether two dogs are in the same species, and the criterion could not be used to count species or to describe species boundaries.
Categories
Authors: Hey Jody
Published: November 2023

Is it possible that human minds and human language are dysfunctional in some way that causes them to be poor tools for understanding and describing biological diversity? This is the possibility that was inspired by the repeated knowing failure of biologists to measure species, and that was discussed at the end of chapter 2. In chapter 3, we stepped back and explored the theoretical basis of biological understanding, and the role played by some relatively straightforward words (like gene) within that understanding. At that level, which stopped short of species, we found no noteworthy conflicts between language and our best understanding of reality, despite the fact that common words are some times ambiguous. Now we turn to focus more explicitly on language and on the way that language corresponds to reality. People use language to further a seemingly endless variety of goals, but is it an inherently reliable tool for building a model of the larger world? And if it is not perfect, why not? And where lie the imperfections? By asking, I assume the question is sensible, and thus also assume considerable utility on the Part of language. Necessarily I presuppose that language is just great for many things, even for communicating about language. But language is complex, and the real world of which language is a Part is also complex, and the fit between language and reality could be better in some respects than others.