It was not until the sixteenth century that dead bodies were submitted to medico-legal investigation. The horror which human dissections inspired in the ancients, and the religious awe with which they beheld the mortal wreck of their fellows, not only retarded the progress of anatomy and physiology, but excluded the light of medicine from the researches of the forum. The Jewish law, indeed, con...

In the chapter “Religious Opinions” of his Autobiography, Darwin sustains that, after the law of natural selection has been discovered, the old argument about a “design” of nature as written by Paley falls apart, the same argument which he believed to be decisive in the past. So, in accordance with Darwin, we can no longer argue, for example, that the perfect hinge of a bivalve shell must have ...

It has existed for several millennia, in the form of commentaries on religious books, law and literature. We see it today in concordances, citation indexes and genome maps. You probably have created some of it, as a bookmark file in your web browser. The “it” we refer to is superimposed information: data “placed over” existing information sources to help organize, access, connect and reuse info...