On being hopeful

Hopeful Commitment

Turtles as hopeful monsters.

A recently published study on the development of the turtle shell highlights the important role that development plays in the origin of evolutionary novelties. The evolution of the highly derived adult anatomy of turtles is a prime example of a macroevolutionary event triggered by changes in early embryonic development. Early ontogenetic deviation may cause patterns of morphological change that...

رابطه وجود و ماهیت در رساله ‏‎"on being and essence"‎‏

هدف عمده ای که من در رساله خود تعقیب می کنم بررسی رابطه وجود و ماهیت از نظر توماس آکوئینی در رساله معروف خود تحت همین نام، است، که نام لاتین آن ‏‎de ente et essentia‎‏ می باشد و ترجمه انگلیسی آن تحت عنوان ‏‎"on being and essence"‎‏ است که ترجمه معمول آن به فارسی ((وجود و ماهیت)) می باشد. البته بهترین ترجمه فارسی واژه ‏‎ente‎‏، ((موجودیت)) است ولی ما مطابق رسم آنرا رساله ((درباره وجود و ماهیت)) ...

The Return of Hopeful Monsters

Big Brother, the tyrant of George Orwell's 1984, directed his daily Two Minutes Hate against Emmanuel Goldstein, enemy of the people. When I studied evolutionary biology in graduate school during the mid-1960s, official rebuke and derision focused upon Richard Goldschmidt, a famous geneticist who, we were told, had gone astray. Although 1984 creeps up on us, I trust that the world will not be i...

Hopeful heretic--Richard Goldschmidt's genetic metaphors.

Richard Goldschmidt famously rejected the notion of atomic and corpuscular genes, arranged on the chromosome like beads-on-a-string. I provide an exegesis of Goldschmidt's intuition by analyzing his repeated and extensive use of metaphorical language and analogies in his attempts to convey his notion of the nature of the genetic material and specifically the significance of chromosomal pattern....