Conrad Waddington published an influential model for evolution in his 1942 paper, Canalization of Development and Inheritance of Acquired Characters. In this classic, albeit controversial, paper, he proposed that an unknown mechanism exists that conceals phenotypic variation until the organism is stressed. Recent studies have proposed that the highly conserved chaperone Hsp90 could function as ...

Scientists are not always remembered for the ideas they cherished most. In the case of the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, his name since the end of the nineteenth century has been tightly linked to the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters. This was indeed an idea that he endorsed, but he did not claim it as his own nor did he give it much thought. He took pride instead in adv...

Neural changes related to learning of the meaning of Chinese characters in English speakers were examined using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We examined item specific learning effects for trained characters, but also the generalization of semantic knowledge to novel transfer characters that shared a semantic radical (part of a character that gives a clue to word meaning, e.g. w...

Native English speakers with no knowledge of Chinese were trained on 60 Chinese characters according to one of three mapping conditions: orthography to pronunciation and meaning (P + M), orthography to pronunciation (P), and orthography to meaning (M). Following the training, fMRI scans taken during passive viewing of Chinese characters showed activation in brain regions that partially overlap ...

Before an environment can be populated with characters, a set of models must first be acquired and prepared. Sometimes it may be possible for artists to create each virtual character individually for example, if only a small number of individuals are needed, or there are many artists available to create a larger population of characters. However, for most applications that need large and hetero...