In recent years, Sam Harris has become a leading figure in the rational scrutiny of religions and religious cultures, earning himself a place as a prominent “New Atheist,” along with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens. To the extent that the New Atheism is a genuine social movement, Harris deserves much of the credit for it. In 2004, he made a dramatic breakthrough when T...

Webble technology is the most recent form of Meme Media following Richard Dawkins’ seminal ideas about memetics and relying on Yuzuru Tanaka’s interpretation of the Meme concept in the form of IntelligentPad. The reach of Webble technologies is demonstrated by means of a particular Web-based interactive laboratory. It arises the question how this novel technology is perceived and what impact it...

Structural and operational principles underlying the organization of the vertebrate retina and bacterial flagellar apparatus are reviewed in the context of William Paley’s classic intelligent designer vs. Richard Dawkins’ contemporary “blind watchmaker” interpretations of biological origins and diversity. The significance of inverted retinal microanatomy and retinocytophysiology is diagnosed. I...

Celem artykułu jest pokazanie, jak wychowanie religijne, którego doświadczył B. F. Skinner, zmieniło jego postrzeganie człowieka i świata, a w ostateczności wpłynęło na porzucenie przez niego wiary skierowało go ścieżkę radykalnego behawioryzmu. Analiza dostępnej literatury wykazuje, że różnica poglądach przeciwników Skinnera (Joseph Wood Krutch, Tomasz Szasz, Ayn Rand) oraz sojuszników (Richar...

As the media begin increasingly to focus on analyses of the US presidential candidate hopefuls, many people are now beginning to think about the consequences of the end of the Bush era. For researchers many potential changes loom — the new head of Britain's Medical Research Council, Leszek Borysiewicz, has already warned that the country's pre-eminent position in stem cell research is likely to...

I examine the central atheistic argument of Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion (“Dawkins’s Gambit”) and illustrate its failure. I further show that Dawkins’s Gambit is a fragment of a more comprehensive critique of theism found in David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Among the failings of Dawkins’s Gambit is that it is directed against a version of the God Hypothesis that fe...

Scientists have used Richard Dawkins’ ideas of the extended phenotype to postulate levels of selection higher than an individual in evolution. Dawkins rejects this extension and insists that there must be a reproductive bottleneck for the extended phenotype, and thus, higher levels of selection to exist. In this research, a model is presented that shows levels of selection higher than the indiv...

A formal language approach for the specification of ALife models is presented. “Relational Growth Grammars” incorporate rulebased, procedural and object-oriented concepts. By enabling parametric Lindenmayer systems to rewrite multiscaled graphs, it becomes possible to represent genes, plant organs and populations as well as developmental aspects of these entities in a common formal framework. G...