We review and summarize Terrence Deacon’s book, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter.

Biodiversity-friendly farming is a growing area of discussion among farmers, as well as in government departments and non-government organizations interested in conservation on private land. Those seeking to encourage biodiversity on farms must understand the production challenges presented by wildlife. Such species destroy agricultural commodities or present threats to family, pets, or infrast...

Terrence Deacon’s (2012) notion developed in his book Incomplete Nature (IN) that living organisms are teleodynamic systems that are self-maintaining, self-correcting and self-reproducing is extended to human social systems. The hypothesis is developed that culture, language, organization, science, economics and technology (CLOSET) can be construed as living organisms that evolve, maintain and ...

This paper analyses the probability distribution of worldwide forest areas. We find moderate support for a Pareto-type (power law) using FAO data from 1990 to 2015. Power laws are common features many complex systems in nature. A power law is plausible model world areas all examined years, although log-normal alternative that cannot be rejected. The random growth could generate or distribution....

Fractals have experienced considerable success in quantifying the complex structure exhibited by many natural patterns and have captured the imagination of scientists and artists alike [Mandelbrot]. With ever widening appeal, they have been referred to both as "fingerprints of nature" [Taylor et al 1999] and "the new aesthetics" [Richards]. Recently, we showed that the drip patterns of the Amer...

An intelligent agent uses known facts including statistical knowledge to assign degrees of belief to assertions it is un certain about We investigate three principled techniques for doing this All three are applications of the principle of indi erence because they assign equal degree of belief to all basic situations consistent with the knowledge base They di er because there are competing intu...

Most approaches to generative phonology grant a privileged status to “natural” phonological rules, those that have a clear phonetic motivation. In Optimality Theory, for example, children are typically assumed to begin language learning with markedness constraints ranked above faithfulness constraints (see Smolensky 1996). The implication — often not made explicit — is that phonetically arbitra...

The paper is concerned with supporting natural patterns of scientific collaboration in Access Grid environments. We reveal that no current approach to Access Grid allows dynamic session invocation within on-going Access Grid sessions nor workflow driven session triggering among users involved in that workflow. A model for a lightweight signaling architecture integrated within Access Grid is pro...

In this paper, crystallographic aspects of ancient, medieval and modern Turkish ornaments are dealt with. Crystallographic patterns (CPs) are considerably different from other patterns. The following are characteristic of CPs: the edge of ornament elements draws the edge of the figure; maximal compactness of the ornament elements; lack of background or transformation of background to ornament e...