Rising on columns of fire, rockets launched to the moon – and I who'd wished to work with astronauts, am assigned instead to weigh SAC bomber crew immersed in water – measure " lean body mass, " wondered what difference a paunch on a pilot would make sitting in a B52. Silent— eyes hidden behind red goggles, they swaggered in their muscled nakedness into my lab. Dark-adapted to their cockpits, r...

Kenneth Boulding’s AEA presidential address argued that economics is a moral science. His view derived from his general systems theory thinking, his three systems view of human society, and his early contributions to evolutionary economics. Boulding’s argument that economics could not be value-free should be distinguished from other well-known views of economics as a moral science, such as Gunn...

Institutions matter both for long-term economic evolution as well as for more short-termed economic performance. The law is particularly important in shaping the institutional framework for economic activities. This paper gives an overview of typical evolutionary explanations of legal change, i.e. the generation and dissemination of legal innovations over time. The main actors, the key determin...

1 Dept. of Geology, Royal Museum for Central Africa, 3080 Tervuren, Belgium, [email protected] 2 Dept. ArGEnCo,University of Liège, Sart Tilman B52, 4000 Liège, Belgium 3 Delft Inst. of Earth Obs. and Space Systems, Delft Univ. of Tech., 2629HS Delft, The Netherlands 4 Dept. of Geophysics/Astrophysics, National Museum of Natural History, Luxembourg 5 Centre d’Informations Géog...

Evolutionary arguments in non-cooperative game theory are becoming more and more important to justify or refine equilibrium concepts. In cooperative game theory they are rare but growing in number. This paper discusses various approaches, in particular their usefulness and relevance for real world voting games. As the existing approaches turn out to fail to provide any empirically relevant insi...

Various authors allege that the theory of group selection is inconsistent with methodological individualism, and therefore analysts must reject at least one of these principles. The present article argues for their compatibility. The meaning of methodological individualism is clarified, and the new version of group selection (articulated by Wilson and Sober (1994, 1998)) is explained. The two p...

Complex evolving systems, consisting of populations of varied and replicating entities are found in both nature and human society. There exists no alternative to the core Darwinian principles of variation, selection and inheritance to explain the evolution of such systems. Neither the actual existence of human intentionality nor the hypothetical possibility of Lamarckian acquired character inhe...

To gain insight into splicing regulation, we developed a microarray to assay all annotated alternative splicing events in Drosophila melanogaster and identified the alternative splice events controlled by four splicing regulators: dASF/SF2, B52/SRp55, hrp48, and PSI. The number of events controlled by each of these factors was found to be highly variable: dASF/SF2 strongly affects >300 splicing...

1. Mycobacterium tuberculosis and the liver stage of Plasmodium falciparum are intracellular pathogens which are potentially susceptible to cytotoxic T-lymphocytes, a crucial component of the protective immune response to viral infections. Evidence from animal models points to a protective role for cytotoxic T-lymphocytes against M. tuberculosis and P. falciparum, but cytotoxic T-lymphocytes sp...