Guest Column: What Was it Like Down There?

Marine sediments tell it like it was.

W e live in a constantly changing environment. Although some changes are natural and therefore beyond our control, there is no question that many anthropogenic activities have dramatically altered our planet. The ‘‘human footprint’’ is now discernable around the globe, so much so that Crutzen (1) proposed a new geological epoch (the Anthropocene) to delineate the recent human-dominated era of E...

If There Is Something It Is Like to Be Alife, What Is It?

In the field of consciousness studies, the phrase ‘Is there something it is like to be X?’, derived from Nagel’s ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ (Nagel 1974), has become an acceptable way of asking whether X is conscious. It is my contention that this is a question that should be asked in the context of artificial organisms of the type studied in Alife, and especially of physically embodied orga...

Guest Editor's Column

What was Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection and what was it for?

Fisher's 'fundamental theorem of natural selection' is notoriously abstract, and, no less notoriously, many take it to be false. In this paper, I explicate the theorem, examine the role that it played in Fisher's general project for biology, and analyze why it was so very fundamental for Fisher. I defend and Lessard (1997) in the view that the theorem is in fact a true theorem if, as Fisher cla...

Recalling what was where when seeing nothing there

So-called "looks-at-nothing" have previously been used to show that recalling what also elicits the recall of where this was. Here, we present evidence from an eye-tracking study which shows that disrupting looks to "there" does not disrupt recalling what was there, nor do (anticipatory) looks to "there" facilitate recalling what was there. Therefore, our results suggest that recalling where do...