960 Emerging Infectious Diseases • www.cdc.gov/eid • Vol. 13, No. 6, June 2007 of the evidence for and against these hypotheses, which remain speculative, is evenhanded and up-to-date. His accounts of the human and social effects of epidemic diseases and the origins of public health are full of lively anecdotes and colorful detail. Interspersed throughout are personal asides, clinical pearls, a...

Concern for the environment and a move towards “sustainable development” has assisted progress in a wide range of renewable energy technologies in recent years. The science suggests that a transition from fossil fuels to sustainable sources of energy in a time frame commensurate with the demise of the fossil fuels and prevention of runaway climate change is needed. However, while the movement t...

Nowadays the research topics of science and technology are diversified and segmented into more and more categories. The number of interdisciplinary research topics has also increased. With increasingly sophisticated research on science and technology, there is a growing need for interdisciplinary and international availability, distribution and exchange of the latest research results, in re-edi...

In a recent issue of TREE, Coleman and Gross’ claim that if life history theory is incorporated, it appears that the Concorde fallacy, originally proposed by Dawkin+, is itself a fallacy. They conclude that ‘There is no role for the Concorde fallacy in understanding parental-investment theory’. In this last comment they may be right. However, the idea is not new. Dawkins, in The Exrended fhenor...

The relation between science and religion is often discussed in the media — what are your views? For the large majority of scientists, religion has no direct impact on their research and this is not an issue that concerns them. But I don’t believe that we should pretend that science and religion are ‘compatible’: they are actually diametrically opposed ways of thinking and acquiring knowledge. ...

-This paper explores the evolutionary foundations of altruism among siblings and extends the biologists’ kin-selection theory to a richer class of games between relatives. We show that a population will resist invasion by dominant mutant genes if individuals maximize a ‘‘semi-Kantian’’ utility function in games with their siblings. It is shown that a population that resists invasion by dominant...

his research partner Nico Forraz. He plans to open the world's biggest institute devoted to cord blood and adult stem cells. McGuckin has been a leader of researchers working in the UK on stem cells derived from babies' umbilical cord blood. The method is less controversial than embryo-derived stem cells as no embryo is destroyed in the process. He told the Times Higher Education that France ha...

David Goldberg's beef isn't just about beef. His goal is to justify the raising, killing, and eating of cows, steers (castrated bulls), and the myriad of other animals we routinely kill for food. While he promises to give us three arguments in defense of meat-eating, I detect five arguments: (i) the monk aping argument (If monks do it, so can I), (ii) the selfish gene argument, (iii) the animal...