近代四川的三次文化浪潮

本对近代四川的三次化浪潮作了介绍,论述了当时的历史背景和三次化浪潮的深远意义,对促进社会发展有积极意义。     

A Brief History of Evolution

I present in this paper a non-reductionist framework of eight nested modes of evolution that have successively emerged to organize the reproduction of all organisms, from the blue-green algae to our societies. The processes of biological, “Darwinian” evolution are those of drift during reproduction, and of selection. The key unit of evolutionary time is the generation, and its locus is the organisms' life-cycle setup. Different life-cycle setups support different mechanisms of reproduction, and therefore different modes of evolution. By tracing the different life-cycle setups attested throughout life's history, we can characterize the successive modes of evolution with which they are associated as follows: basic; reptilian; archaic mammalian; progressive mammalian; sociocultural; extrasomatically enhanced sociocultural; tinkering; and finally parabiological. These successively emerging modes govern a progressively reduced number of life-forms. The first four modes are “Darwinian” in the strict sense. The fifth, or sociocultural mode, which governs whales and elephants' societies in addition to hominoids, is already not “Darwinian” in the traditional sense. The last three modes have emerged with the genus homo, through the progressive extension of its life-cycle setups. The present framework is to be used heuristically, as a prism with which to separate the evolutionary spectrum of the constituent elements of human behavior. An example of such a behavioral evolutionary spectrum is presented in conclusion, and used to compare the present framework with those recently proposed by Maynard Smith and Szathmáry and by Foley.     

A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World

Abstract

The reasons for the lack of communication between economists and econophysicists are clarified by giving an outline of the methodological differences between economics and econophysics, which has emerged as a new field of research over the last decade. Theorists working in econophysics see economic and financial phenomena through the ‘lens’ of statistical physics. So far, there has been no real dialogue between economists and econophysicists because both communities adhere to their own methodological precepts.     

Communications Revolutions: A Historiographical Concept

This essay explores the origins and the development of a ‘communicationsrevolution’, which would give rise to a new concept withinhistoriography. It proposes that the Communications Revolutioncan be explained as a macrohistorical process, comparable tothe Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, whichhave both had permanent and irreversible consequences in themodern era. The communications revolution, like the other two,began in the early modern era, and is still ongoing. The conceptof a Communications Revolution encompasses smaller ‘mediarevolutions’, more easily ascribed to a specific historicalperiod, and to a large extent mutually interrelated and dependent.The development of postal services gave rise to a new understandingof space and time, and it is this development that the essayidentifies as the mainspring of change in the communicationsrevolution. Postal services enabled faster movements of people,goods, and information. The new medium of the printed book,newspaper or sheet magnified the effects of this faster disseminationof information and news. So the Communications Revolution canbe argued to have been the motor that enabled the constructionof the infrastructure of the modern world, newspapers, cartography,and the ‘public sphere’ of politics, of warfareand diplomacy. Indeed, there is scope for discussion as to whetherit was in fact the Communications Revolution which may haveopened the way for both the Scientific Revolution and the IndustrialRevolution.     

A Brief History of Brain Archiving

This paper narrates the history of the conservation of the human brain, tracking techniques of brain archiving from the first experiments in the preservation of soft tissue in spirits of alcohol to the latest refinements in cryogenic technology. It traces the changing social and legal conditions that permitted the collection of post mortem human tissue, as well as the increasingly sophisticated technologies that allowed for the preservation and storage of this material. This preliminary survey of brain archiving uses examples of specific collections in order to discuss changes in the techniques, goals and achievements of neural tissue collecting from the mid-eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries.     

A Brief Exploration of Neurological Art History

The invention of realistic portraiture to reveal "inner life" is attributed by some art historians to Jan van Eyck who worked in Flanders from 1420 onwards. We show, using clinical neurological examination of the gold mask of Agamemnon dating from 1550-1500 BC and of the portraits of Henry III and his son Edward I - important English royals - painted between 1216 and 1307, that realistic portraits were made well before the 15th Century. Thus artists unwittingly used neurology as part of their realistic approach to the presentation of the face. Because neurological diagnosis is often visual, neurology, in turn, has a rich potential to unveil examples of realism in art. We consider the art pieces examined here also pertinent to art historians, as they assess the role of art in documenting history.