The public profile of animal behavior research is out of all proportion to the number of biologists who engage in this kind of work, or the share of funding which they receive. The television genre of the ‘wildlife program’ was substantially shaped by the early contributions of Niko Tinbergen and his students, such as Desmond Morris at Granada Television. High-profile public controversies about...

Evolution is ubiquitous. It has become the language of as many as the scientific discussions in our civilization to day. The term was come from biology, explaining how and why we have biological system as we perceive, how our species become the only creatures to which the earth count on her life. But the highest potential in the idea of evolution is not merely in biological systems. The greates...

An objection to the memetic approach to culture Memetics is one possible evolutionary approach to the study of culture. Boyd and Richerson's models (1985, Boyd this volume), or my epidemiology of representations (1985, 1996), are among other possible evolutionary approaches inspired in various ways by Darwin. The memetic approach is based on the claim that culture is made of memes. If one takes...

Richard Dawkins has written another book on evolution. I haven't read it, but I noticed that one reviewer thought that the force of Dawkins' arguments was becoming diluted by a combination of militant atheism and over-flamboyant prose. To conservative scientists like me, the idea of selfish genes, while certainly snappy, leads to ignoring the biology surrounding the genes and, in the end, to a ...

Two popular, yet highly controversial concepts of non-human agency from two different fields of knowledge are compared in this essay: the theory of the selfish gene, introduced into neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology by Richard Dawkins, and actor-network theory, as brought forward in science & technology studies by Bruno Latour. It is argued that the two theories, despite all apparent differenc...

The main question that the article poses is whether today there still a possibility of media debate, for example on religion or Church; perhaps system mass governed by logic what Niklas Luhmann calls thematic career. Mass discuss various topics, but probably do not help to search solutions intra- and intersystem conflicts. According Luhmann, media, politics, science are autopoietic systems; the...