when constantine announced christianity as the official religion of the roman empire in 14th century, a great deal of attention has been attracted to the relationship between religion and state and much literature has appeared so far. the literature has not much been directly refered to social scientists, being based on a christian interpretation of religious societies and a western concept of ...

the mystical anthropological notion of internationalism means belonging to a common divine origin and natural interfaces between humans, beyond national and linguistic differences. accordingly, it is necessary to consider a metaphysical hometown as origin and ultimate goal for human being. in rumi’s mystical approach, human is defined as an observer of his relationship with the origin of being ...

Diverse species exhibit cultural traditions, i.e. population-specific profiles of socially learned traits, from songbird dialects to primate tool-use behaviours. However, only humans appear to possess cumulative culture, in which cultural traits increase in complexity over successive generations. Theoretically, it is currently unclear what factors give rise to these phenomena, and consequently ...

Priority setting research in health economics has traditionally employed quantitative methodologies and been informed by post-positivist philosophical assumptions about the world and the nature of knowledge. These approaches have been rewarded with well-developed and validated tools. However, it is now commonly noted that there has been limited uptake of economic analysis into actual priority s...

When G is a rooted graph where each edge may independently succeed with probability p, we consider the expected number of vertices in the operational component of G containing the root. This expected value EV (G;p) is a polynomial in p. We present several distinct equivalent formulations of EV (G;p), unifying prior treatments of this topic. We use results on network resilience (introduced by Co...

Most scientists take ethical arguments for conservation as given and focus on scientific or economic questions. Although nature conservation is often considered a just cause, it is given little further consideration. A lack of attention to ethical theory raises serious concerns for how conservation scientists conceive and practice ethics. I contrast two common ways scientists approach ethics, a...