Natural Sciences are a Natural History

Introducing Books/ Dagestan: A Natural History, Mehrnaz Shirazi Adl

University of Natural Sciences

We start with irrationality proofs. Historically, the first ones concerned irrational algebraic numbers, like the square roots of non square positive integers. Next, the theory of continued fraction expansion provided a very useful tool. Among the first proofs of irrationality for numbers which are now known to be transcendental are the ones by H. Lambert and L. Euler, in the XVIIIth century, f...

Are We Ready for a Natural History of Motor Learning?

Here we argue that general principles with regard to the contributions of the cerebellum, basal ganglia, and primary motor cortex to motor learning can begin to be inferred from explicit comparison across model systems and consideration of phylogeny. Both the cerebellum and the basal ganglia have highly conserved circuit architecture in vertebrates. The cerebellum has consistently been shown to...

in Humanities , Social Sciences , and Natural Sciences

Natural history and temporalization: reflections on Buffon's Natural history.

This article presents a rereading of Buffon's Natural History in the light of the concepts of temporal reversibility and irreversibility. The goal is to determine to what extent Buffon introduces a transformationist concept of natural forms in this work. To that effect, the main points of classical natural history and the doctrine of preformed germs are analyzed. Subsequently, Buffon's use of t...