Multitude Of Units Research Articles

Defining Communication and Language from Within a Pluralistic Evolutionary Worldview

New definitions are proposed for communication and language. Communication is defined as the evolution of physical, biochemical, cellular, community, and technological information exchange. Language is defined as community communication whereby the information exchanged comprises evolving individual and group-constructed knowledge and beliefs, that are enacted, narrated, or otherwise conveyed by evolving rule-governed and meaningful symbol systems, that are grounded, interpreted, and used from within evolving embodied, cognitive, ecological, sociocultural, and technological niches. These definitions place emphasis on the evolutionary aspects of communication and language, and they are here differentiated from four older paradigms that instead focus either on the referential or social aspects of language, or the informational or semantic aspects of communication. In contrast with these paradigms, the definitions proposed here for communication and language are in line with a pluralistic evolutionary worldview, one that necessitates the recognition that a multitude of units, levels, mechanisms and processes are involved in bringing forth communication and language.

Bayesian modeling of factorial time-course data with applications to a bone aging gene expression study

Many scientific studies, especially in the biomedical sciences, generate data measured simultaneously over a multitude of units, over a period of time, and under different conditions or combinations of factors. Often, an important question of interest asked relates to which units behave similarly under different conditions, but measuring the variation over time complicates the analysis significantly. In this article we address such a problem arising from a gene expression study relating to bone aging, and develop a Bayesian statistical method that can simultaneously detect and uncover signals on three levels within such data: factorial, longitudinal, and transcriptional. Our model framework considers both cluster and time-point-specific parameters and these parameters uniquely determine the shapes of the temporal gene expression profiles, allowing the discovery and characterization of latent gene clusters based on similar underlying biological mechanisms. Our methodology was successfully applied to discover transcriptional networks in a microarray data set comparing the transcriptomic changes that occurred during bone aging in male and female mice expressing one or both copies of the bromodomain (Brd2) gene, a transcriptional regulator which exhibits an age-dependent sex-linked bone loss phenotype.

Introduction: The origins of numerical abilities.

The papers in this theme issue are based on a discussion meeting at Royal Society in London on 20 and 21 February 2017, and at their Kavli Centre at Chicheley Hall in Buckinghamshire on the 22 and 23 February. In addition to the scientific presentations, two distinguished mathematicians, Fields Medallist, Cedric Villani and Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University, Marcus du Sautoy, summed up the implications of our new understanding of the origins of numerical abilities for mathematics and for mathematics education. Audio recordings of the talks and the subsequent discussions can be accessed at https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/2017/02/numerical-abilities/, https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/2017/02/numerical-abilities-future/. It is clear that humans have a sense of number. This is evident from their ability to count using counting words, such as one, two, three, … and counting symbols, such as 1, 2, 3, … or I, II, III, IV, … . In fact, Pagel & Meade [1] argue that reconstructions of the deep history of cognates from diverse language families show that counting words are among the longest-surviving words in all languages. Even when the culture fails to provide words or symbols to notate counting, humans are still able to enumerate objects in their environment, as evidence from work with Australian Aboriginal children [2], suggesting that the symbolic forms, perhaps especially the number words, arose to denote a pre-existing concept of number. One of the oldest questions in Western philosophy is what is a number that we may have a sense of it. Giaquinto [3], in his paper in this issue, notes that Euclid defined a number as ‘a multitude of units’ where a unit is a single individual thing. According to this view, ‘any pair of items is a 2 and so there are many 2 s; any trio is a 3 …

The Evolution of a ‘Memeplex’ in Late Mozart: Replicated Structures in Pamina's ‘Ach ich fühl's’

‘Memetics’, a concept most elegantly expounded by Richard Dawkins inThe Selfish Gene, asserts that human culture consists of a multitude of units transmitted between individuals by imitation and subject to evolutionary pressures. Such particles, ‘memes’, are broadly analogous to the genes of biological transmission. Four late pieces of Mozart's, including Pamina's aria ‘Ach ich fühl's’ fromDie Zauberflöte, are examined in terms of the meme concept and a conglomeration, or ‘memeplex’, consisting of seven memes is identified within them. The nature of the musical memeplex, in this specific case and also more generally, is considered, particularly from the perspective of its location at different levels of the structural hierarchy. The evolutionary history of some of Mozart's memes is examined with reference to selected passages from works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Finally, relationships between the musical memes under investigation and memes in the verbal-conceptual realm are explored.

Erratum

‘Memetics’, a concept most elegantly expounded by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, asserts that human culture consists of a multitude of units transmitted between individuals by imitation and subject to evolutionary pressures. Such particles, ‘memes’, are broadly analogous to the genes of biological transmission. Four late pieces of Mozart's, including Pamina's aria ‘Ach ich fuhl's’ from Die Zauberflote, are examined in terms of the meme concept and a conglomeration, or ‘memeplex’, consisting of seven memes is identified within them. The nature of the musical memeplex, in this specific case and also more generally, is considered, particularly from the perspective of its location at different levels of the structural hierarchy. The evolutionary history of some of Mozart's memes is examined with reference to selected passages from works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Finally, relationships between the musical memes under investigation and memes in the verbal-conceptual realm are explored.