"Barabási mathematically describes networks in the World Wide Web, the internet, the human body, and society at large. Fowler seeks to identify the social and biological links that define us as humans. In this video Salon, Barabási and Fowler discuss contagion and the Obama campaign, debate the...

By D. Larriviere and M. A. Williams Abstract: Neuroenhancement (NE) refers to the use of prescription medications by healthy persons to boost their cognitive skills. This growing phenomenon represents a potential market not only for pharmaceutical manufacturers but also for physicians who might enter...

By Thorsten Botz-Bornstein The Chinese concept of wen is examined here in the context of contemporary gene theory and the "cultural branch" of gene theory called "memetics." The Chinese notion of wen is an untranslatable term meaning "pattern," "structure," "writing...

By Jayna L. Ditty and Philip A. Rolnick Since 1859, with the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species , biology has increasingly challenged comfortable theological assumptions. Being convinced, however, that evolutionary biology and theology have in common the desire to know truth, we have...

Justin Greaves, Wyn Grant This article argues that interdisciplinary collaboration can offer significant intellectual gains to political science in terms of methodological insights, questioning received assumptions and providing new perspectives on subject fields. Collaboration with natural scientists...

Marc Hauser and Justin Wood We synthesize the contrasting predictions of motor simulation and teleological theories of action comprehension and present evidence from a series of studies showing that monkeys and apes—like humans—extract the meaning of an event by ( a ) going beyond the surface appearance...

Maximilien Chaumon , Denis Schwartz and Catherine Tallon-Baudry Oscillatory synchrony in the gamma band (30–120 Hz) has been involved in various cognitive functions including conscious perception and learning. Explicit memory encoding, in particular, relies on enhanced gamma oscillations. Does this finding...

Ryan T. McKay, Daniel C. Dennett From an evolutionary standpoint, a default presumption is that true beliefs are adaptive and misbeliefs maladaptive. But if humans are biologically engineered to appraise the world accurately and to form true beliefs, how are we to explain the routine exceptions to this...

A review of Michael Ruse's book by Matt Gers. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Biology covers a broad range of topics in this field. It is not just a textbook focusing on evolutionary theory but encompasses ethics, social science and behaviour too. This essay outlines the scope of the work, discusses...

Joaquín M. Fuster Converging evidence from humans and nonhuman primates is obliging us to abandon conventional models in favor of a radically different, distributed-network paradigm of cortical memory. Central to the new paradigm is the concept of memory network or cognit—that is, a memory or an item...

By Kristin D. Neff The idea that people need high self-esteem in order to be psychologically healthy is almost a truism in Western developmental psychology. Parents are told that one of their most important tasks is to nurture their children’s self-esteem. Teachers are encouraged to give all their students...

Animal models are powerful and profitable tools for understanding both basic biological processes (such as transcription and translation) as well as much more complex ones, such as cancer origination and progression, organ development, and immune processes. This truth underlies the use of rodents and...