Biosemiotics and Religion: Theoretical Perspectives on Language, Society and the Supernatural

2021 ◽  
pp. 026327642110293
Author(s):  
Joseph S. Alter

An anthropological perspective on biosemiosis raises important questions about sociality, ecology and communication in contexts that encompass many different forms of life. As such, these questions are important for understanding the problem of religion in relation to social theory, as well as understanding our collective, biosocial animal history and the development of human culture, as an articulation of power, on an evolutionary time scale. The argument presented here is that biosemiotics provides a framework for extending Talal Asad’s genealogical critique of religion to culture more broadly, providing an important perspective on power in relation to communication and in relation to the ‘supernatural’ attributes of language in a multi-species environment of signs and sign relationships.

1981 ◽  
Vol 59 ◽  
pp. 465-468
Author(s):  
C. Doom ◽  
J.P. De Grève

AbstractThe remaining core hydrogen burning lifetime after a case B of mass exchange is computed for the mass gaining component in massive close binaries. Effects of stellar wind mass loss and mass loss during Roche Lobe OverFlow (RLOF) are included. Consequences for the evolutionary scenario are discussed.


2010 ◽  
Vol 263 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryo Hironaga ◽  
Norio Yamamura

1995 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrik Hautop Lund ◽  
Domenico Parisi

Populations of simple artificial organisms modeled as neural networks evolve a preference for one particular food type in an environment that contains more than one food type if the quantity of energy extracted from each food type is allowed to coevolve with the behavioral preference (evolvable fitness formula). If, after the emergence of the food preference, the preferred food gradually disappears from the environment at the evolutionary time scale, the evolved specialist strategy is maintained until the preferred food type has completely disappeared. Then a new specialist strategy suddenly emerges with a preference for another food type present in the environment. The appearance of the new strategy takes very few generations, in fact much fewer than in a population starting from zero (random initial population) in the same environment. This, together with the fact that the population with an evolutionary past is more efficient than the population starting from zero, suggests that the former population is preadapted to the changed environment. An analysis of the activation values of the hidden units indicates that the new food preference can be an “exaptation,” that is, a new adaptation based on a structure that has previously emerged for adaptively neutral reasons.


2008 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carole Knibbe ◽  
Jean-Michel Fayard ◽  
Guillaume Beslon

Systems biology invites us to consider the dynamic interactions between the components of a living cell. Here, by evolving artificial organisms whose genomes encode protein networks, we show that a coupling emerges at the evolutionary time scale between the protein network and the structure of the genome. Gene order is more stable when the protein network is more densely connected, which most likely results from a long-term selection for mutational robustness. Understanding evolving organisms thus requires a systemic approach, taking into account the functional interactions between gene products, but also the global relationships between the genome and the proteome at the evolutionary time scale.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (5) ◽  
pp. e19193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Lefeuvre ◽  
Gordon W. Harkins ◽  
Jean-Michel Lett ◽  
Rob W. Briddon ◽  
Mark W. Chase ◽  
...  

2013 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 265-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Igor V. Babkin ◽  
Alexander I. Tyumentsev ◽  
Artem Yu. Tikunov ◽  
Alexander M. Kurilshikov ◽  
Elena I. Ryabchikova ◽  
...  

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document