ELECTION to this lectureship has brought me an honour which I rank highly, in that I am aware of the acknowledged distinction of my predecessors and which laid claim to their appointment to this office. The invitation has also placed upon my shoulders a heavy responsibility, namely to discharge my duty as creditably as they did, and has planted in me a fear lest I fail to do so. I mean, however...

FORTY YEARS AGO, this month, I started in practice, I confess without the benefit of vocational training; that came two months later when my chief had his first coronary. I was extremely fortunate in becoming assistant, and later partner, to John Taggart of the Antrim Road, one of the most distinguished practitioners of his day. Taggart was a County Antrim man, with all the bluntness and sagaci...

More than forty years have passed since a learning machine called the perceptron was proposed by Rosenblatt. It has played a major role for these forty years, not only in the area of computational neuroscience in elucidating the function of cerebellum, but also in theoretical and practical studies of learning machines. The present talk reviews these developments from my personal point

In 1966, William D. Hamilton published a landmark paper in evolutionary biology: "The Moulding of Senescence by Natural Selection." It is now apparent that this article is as important as his better-known 1964 articles on kin selection. Not only did the 1966 article explain aging, it also supplied the basic scaling forces for natural selection over the entire life history. Like the Lorentz tran...