Human-animal Elision: A Darwinian Universe in George Eliot's Novels

The search for purpose in a post-Darwinian universe: George Bernard Shaw, 'creative evolution', and Shavian eugenics: 'The dark side of the force'.

The Irish playwright and socialist George Bernard Shaw has been of marginal concern for historians of biology because his vitalist Lamarckism has been viewed as out of step with contemporary science. However, Julian Huxley and J.B.S. Haldane were certainly of the opinion that Shaw was a man of influence in this regard and took pains to counter his views in their own attempts to engage the publi...

The Wraparound Universe Reviewed by George F . R . Ellis

Pessimistic Software Lock-Elision

Read-write locks are one of the most prevalent lock forms in concurrent applications because they allow read accesses to locked code to proceed in parallel. However, they do not offer any parallelism between reads and writes. This paper introduces pessimistic lock-elision (PLE), a new approach for nonspeculatively replacing read-write locks with pessimistic (i.e. non-aborting) software transact...

Biological and Animal Imagery in John Steinbeck's Migrant Agricultural Novels: A Re-evaluation

Critical reception of the work of John Steinbeck often makes note of that author's use ofbiological and animal imagery. Early evaluations of Steinbeck's use of biological and animal metaphors concluded that the author suffered from an "obsession" with biology that minimized the significance of the human experience. Much subsequent criticism echoes these early findings. An examination of Steinbe...

Darwinian sex roles confirmed across the animal kingdom.

Since Darwin's conception of sexual selection theory, scientists have struggled to identify the evolutionary forces underlying the pervasive differences between male and female behavior, morphology, and physiology. The Darwin-Bateman paradigm predicts that anisogamy imposes stronger sexual selection on males, which, in turn, drives the evolution of conventional sex roles in terms of female-bias...