It naturally makes researchers bristle when a new guy comes along and makes grand pronouncements that everyone else has missed the big idea. Stephan Wolfram encountered some of that with his 1192 page tome, “A New Kind of Science” where he argued that cellular automata do much better at simulating complex phenomena than more sophisticated models. It helps things not a bit when the new guy struc...

“Aeromonas” (Graf, 2015) is a new coming reference hardback and ebook that provides an overview on taxonomy, ecology, and pathogenicity of the genus Aeromonas, a group of bacterial species in the gamma subclass of the Proteobacteria (i.e., Gammaproteobacteria). Aeromonas is a Gram-negative, motile, and facultative anaerobic bacterium. Some of the members are associated to infections in humans, ...

The period of the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s was the decade of the small entrepreneur. The outcome was an entrepreneurial explosion during which small suddenly became more beautiful in the marketplace. During this period, entrepreneurship was everywhere, offering something new to governments, cities, corporations, and individuals [3, p. 16]. The new interest in entrepreneurship was not con...

Hill was a central-state materialist who kicked qualia upstairs into the brain. In this important and engaging book, he converts to externalist representationalism, kicking qualia downstairs into the extracranial world where they seem to reside. All awareness 'constitutively involves representations' (69); and 'the phenomenal character of an experience is the set of qualia that the experience r...

In “Quantum Evolution”, Johnjoe McFadden makes far-reaching claims for the importance of quantum physics in the solution of problems in biological science. In this review, I shall discuss the relevance of unitary wavefunction dynamics to biological systems, analyse the inverse quantum Zeno effect, and argue that McFadden’s use of quantum theory is deeply flawed. In the first half of his book, M...

In the past two decades, as the amount of available information has been growing almost exponentially and data has become ever so plentiful, the gap between existing knowledge resources (in textual, audio and video form) and the ability of computer systems to extract that very knowledge has also been alarmingly widening. The dream of having a piece of wood becoming human, speak and understand (...

Understanding evolutionary change has become more complicated in recent years. After a number of theoretical expansions from Darwin's theory of evolution to neo-Darwinism and the Modern Synthesis, evolutionary theory is currently influenced by a fundamental debate about how to expand its theoretical framework even more (Pigliucci and Müller, 2010). This debate is driven by research results on t...

Michael Lewis’ Moneyball is a fascinating account of a recent revolution in baseball. The book tells the story of the Oakland A’s, who pioneered the use of advanced statistics in player evaluation to gain a competitive advantage. The A’s caught Lewis’ attention due to their ability to consistently field playoff calibre teams despite having a payroll less than a third the size of rivals such as ...

The field of Epigenetics is rapidly evolving, such that the pace of our advances in the knowledge and understanding of this phenomenon often outstrips the basic teaching literature. In the preface to this book, the author describes the rationale for the book was to develop a text that would provide an “easily digestible text that could provide an introduction to the subject of epigentics.” In e...