Catholic Responses to Evolution, 1859-2009: Local Influences and Mid-Scale Patterns

Temporal Evolution and Local Patterns

We elaborate on the subject of pattern change as the result of population evolution. We give an overview of literature threads relevant to this subject, whereupon the major focus of related work is on pattern adaptation rather than on modeling and understanding change. We then describe our temporal model for patterns as evolving objects and propose criteria to capture the interestingness of pat...

Roman Catholic beliefs produce characteristic neural responses to moral dilemmas.

This study provides exploratory evidence about how behavioral and neural responses to standard moral dilemmas are influenced by religious belief. Eleven Catholics and 13 Atheists (all female) judged 48 moral dilemmas. Differential neural activity between the two groups was found in precuneus and in prefrontal, frontal and temporal regions. Furthermore, a double dissociation showed that Catholic...

Local variation in plant quality influences large-scale population dynamics

Spatial variation in ecological systems can arise both as a consequence of variation in the quality and availability of resources and as an emergent property of spatially structured interactions. We used a spatially explicit model to simulate populations of herbivore hosts and their parasitoids in landscapes with different levels of variance in plant patch quality and different spatial arrangem...

A Catholic Theological Perspective on Evolution and Intelligent Design

Local Patterns to Global Architectures: Influences of Network Topology on Human Learning.

A core question in cognitive science concerns how humans acquire and represent knowledge about their environments. To this end, quantitative theories of learning processes have been formalized in an attempt to explain and predict changes in brain and behavior. We connect here statistical learning approaches in cognitive science, which are rooted in the sensitivity of learners to local distribut...