Maximiliano Martinez

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is the self-proclaimed inventor of the binary system and is considered as such by most historians of mathematics and/or mathematicians. Really though, we owe the groundwork of today’s computing not to Leibniz but to the Englishman Thomas Harriot and the Spaniard Juan Caramuel de Lobkowitz, whom Leibniz plagiarized. This plagiarism has been identified on the basis of several facts: Caramuel’s work on the binary system is earlier than Leibniz’s, Leibniz was acquainted—both directly and indirectly—with Caramuel’s work and Leibniz had a natural tendency to plagiarize scientific works.

In this article we argue that the classical—linear and bottom-up directed—models of causation in biology, and the ‘‘proximate/ultimate’’ dichotomy, are inappropriate to capture the complexity inherent to biological processes. We introduce a new notion of ‘‘multilevel causation’’ where old dichotomies such as proximate/ultimate and bottom-up/ top-down are reinterpreted within a multilevel, web-like, approach. In briefly reviewing some recent work on complexity, EvoDevo, carcinogenesis, autocatalysis, comparative genomics, animal regeneration, phenotypic plasticity, and niche construction, we will argue that such reinterpretation is a necessary step for the advancement of the ‘‘Extended Synthesis.’’.

La idea de «naturaleza humana» que Ortega y Gasset defiende es tan novedosa como opuesta a lo que habitualmente se entiende. Estamos en un error si el punto de partida es concebir al hombre como un ser vivo entre otros. Ni la ciencia ni la filosofía, mientras se mantenga en la tradición eleática, pueden dar una explicación clara. La ciencia, porque si contemplamos al hombre, tal y como se nos presenta, es imposible distinguir en él lo material de lo espiritual, su cuerpo y su psique. La filosofía, porque el concepto de «naturaleza humana» es una invención de nuestra razón, una fantasía. No existe tal naturaleza porque el ser del hombre es de tal modo extraño y diferente al resto de seres que su «consistencia» está precisamente en ir siendo lo que nunca acaba de ser. Por tanto, es un acontecer, un camino, una historia que se va ejecutando en una circunstancia. Esto es, mi vida, la de cada cual.

Previous research has focused on the relation between social class and prosocial behavior. However, this relation is yet unclear. In this work, we shed light on this issue by considering the effect of the level of empathy and the social class of the recipient of help on two types of prosociality, namely helping and caring. In one experimental study, we found that for high-class participants, empathy had a positive effect on helping, regardless of the recipient’s social class. However, empathy had no effect for low-class participants. When it comes to caring, empathy had a positive effect for both high and low-class participants, but only when the recipient of help belonged to the same social class. This highlights that empathy by itself is not sufficient to promote cooperative relations and that the social class of the recipient of help should be taken into account to shed light on this issue.

Very few scientists today question the fact that information, together with matter and energy, is one of the three constructs forming the ontology of the universe. However, there is still a long way to go before in order to establish the interrelations between information and energy and information and matter, as Einstein did between matter and energy. In this paper, after introducing the energy, matter, information model, which covers the three constructs and their relationships, we illustrate real examples—two qualitative and two quantitative—of the interrelations between energy and information. This closes the open question with respect to the interrelationship between energy and information.

En este artículo argumento que para la Síntesis extendida resulta imperioso reemplazarlos modelos causales tradicionales en biología, el de causas próximas— últimas y el de lacausalidad lineal ascendente, debido a su incapacidad para capturar la causalidad biológicacompleja que describen la mayoría de áreas de investigación en la actualidad. Estas nuevastendencias muestran la necesidad de reconceptualizar la causalidad y así permitir la construcciónde modelos multinivel que conecten bidireccionalmente diversos niveles de organizacióny diferentes escalas de tiempo. La causalidad multinivel es fundamental en losprocesos de organización natural, por lo que, argumento, la extensión de la síntesis debeubicarla en su base.

En este artículo defendemos la necesidad de reformular los conceptos de constreñimiento del desarrollo y variación considerando trabajos empíricos y teóricos recientes, principalmente sobre genes Hox, estado filotípico y morfogénesis. Argumentamos que la noción de variación isotrópica e ilimitada asociada con las teorías darwinianas y neodarwinianas deben ser reconsideradas a la luz de los aportes recientes de la biología del desarrollo. En esta visión, la variación estaría constreñida y sesgada. Esta reforma del concepto de variación coincide con la reformulación del de constreñimiento, los cuales serían entendidos como un factor causal positivo en la evolución, en contraposición a como suelen ser entendidos en biología.

In this paper, using a multilevel approach, we defend the positive role of natural selection in the generation of organismal form. Despite the currently widespread opinion that natural selection only plays a negative role in the evolution of form, we argue, in contrast, that the Darwinian factor is a crucial (but not exclusive) factor in morphological organization. Analyzing some classic arguments, we propose incorporating the notion of ‘downward causation’ into the concept of ‘natural selection.’ In our opinion, this kind of causation is fundamental to the operation of selection as a creative evolutionary process