In this second volume of Professor Needham's proposed eight-volume treatise on Chinese science and civilization, he describes in extensive and loving detail the philosophical background against which the specific sciences in China developed. In the first part, Confucianism, Taoism, Mohism and Legalism are analyzed with special attention being paid to the implications of these philosophies for w...

The controversial question of the relationship between obesity and disease has been considerably clearer after the demonstration in several prospective, epidemiological studies that the subgroup of central, visceral obesity is particularly prone to develop cardiovascular disease, stroke, and non-insulin dependent diabetes mellitus. Visceral obesity is associated with multiple central endocrine ...

The apprehension of the last three factors of the Drake equation, fi · fc · L, is misguided or at least not very well examined. This article scrutinizes the underlying suppositions involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) research. What is meant by “intelligence,” “technology,” and “civilization”? What makes them possible, and how do they evolve? The present examination a...

south indian language, culture and civilization, dravidian civilization, is important for many of linguists, anthropologists and archaeologists. so, they are trying to find the origins of it. today, the scholars of civilizations try, however, to find any connection between dravidians culture and their own language and culture. so, they attempt to study in this field. it is clear that the cultur...

This report examines the issue of the resource demands and constraints for very fast large-scale settlement by technologically mature civilizations. I derive various bounds due to the energy and matter requirements for relativistic probes, and compare with bounds due to the need to avoid collisions with interstellar dust. When two groups of the same species race for the universe, the group with...

An interesting consequence of the modern cosmological paradigm is the spatial infinity of the universe. When coupled with naturalistic understanding of the origin of life and intelligence, which follows the basic tenets of astrobiology, and with some fairly incontroversial assumptions in the theory of observation selection effects, this infinity leads, as Ken Olum has recently shown, to a parad...

History and Philosophy of Biology by Robert Kretsinger could as well have been called ‘History and Philosophy of Science’ as it reaches well beyond the realm of biology and includes historical advances made in mathematics, physics and chemistry. Robert Kretsinger is an experienced Commonwealth Professor of Biology at the University of Virginia. In terms of research he has produced a wealth of b...

Copyright © 2015 Da-wei Qin et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Disease of modern civilization (DMC) such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease is caused by the pressure and tension, as well as nutrition...

Anthropic reasoning often begins with the premise that we should expect to find ourselves typical among all intelligent observers. However, in the infinite universe predicted by inflation, there are some civilizations which have spread across their galaxies and contain huge numbers of individuals. Unless the proportion of such large civilizations is unreasonably tiny, most observers belong to t...

rought up in a world whose culture and religion are rooted in the civilizations of the eastern crescent of the Mediterranean Sea, one is led to believe that the progress made in overcoming the prejudice that Peter Singer calls speciesism is of relatively recent development. But this stems from the limitations of the Western background; animal liberation has been known and widely practiced in Fa...