Serendipity: An Ecologist’s Quest to Understand Nature

My Quest to Understand Human Intelligence

Abstract: This chapter traces the development of my thinking on the nature of human intelligence, from my early childhood experiences in special education to my scientific investigations of the boundary conditions of general cognitive ability, to the formulation of my Dual-Process Theory and Theory of Personal Intelligence, to my encounter with positive psychology. This chapter is a call to shi...

On the quest for easy-to-understand splitting rules

Decision trees are probably the most popular and commonly-used classification model. They are built recursively following a top-down approach (from general concepts to particular examples) by repeated splits of the training dataset. The chosen splitting criterion may affect the accuracy of the classifier, but not significantly. In fact, none of the proposed splitting criteria in the literature ...

AGAINST NATURE ? WHy ECOLOGISTS SHOULD NOT DIVERGE fROM NATURAL HISTORy

– A sort of dichotomy pervaded ecological studies in the last decades. On the one hand, an important part of ecologists had the diffuse perception that the observational approach of natural history had to fade away in favour of more formal experimental or modelling approaches. Others, on the other hand, had an increasing perception that these formal approaches were dismissing important cultural...

Beyond Serendipity to an Algorithmic Approach

To Understand Nature - Computer Modelling between Genetics and Evolution

We have presented the basic knowledge on the structure of molecules coding the genetic information, mechanisms of transfer of this information from DNA to proteins and phenomena connected with replication of DNA. In particular, we have described the differences of mutational pressure connected with replication of the leading and lagging DNA strands. We have shown how the asymmetric replication ...