Lamarckian Research Articles

A competent memetic algorithm for complex scheduling

We face the job shop scheduling problem with sequence dependent setup times and makespan minimization by memetic algorithm. This algorithm combines a classic genetic algorithm with a local searcher. The performance of the local searcher relies on the combination of a tabu search algorithm with a neighborhood structure termed N S that are thoroughly described and analyzed. Also, two evolution models are considered: Lamarckian and Baldwinian evolution. We report results from an experimental study across conventional benchmark instances showing that the proposed algorithm outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods and that Lamarckian evolution is better than Baldwinian evolution.

Lamarckian evolution of the giant Mimivirus in allopatric laboratory culture on amoebae

Acanthamoeba polyphaga Mimivirus has been subcultured 150 times on germ-free amoebae. This allopatric niche is very different from that found in the natural environment, where the virus is in competition with many other organisms. In this experiment, substantial gene variability and loss occurred concurrently with the emergence of phenotypically different viruses. We sought to quantify the respective roles of Lamarckian and Darwinian evolution during this experiment. We postulated that the Mimivirus genes that were down-regulated at the beginning of the allopatric laboratory culture and inactivated after 150 passages experienced Lamarckian evolution because phenotypic modifications preceded genotypic modifications, whereas we considered that genes that were highly transcribed in the new niche but were later inactivated obeyed Darwinian rules. We used the total transcript abundances and sequences described for the genes of Mimivirus at the beginning of its laboratory life and after 150 passages in allopatric culture on Acanthamoeba spp. We found a statistically significant positive correlation between the level of gene expression at the beginning of the culture and gene inactivation during the 150 passages. In particular, the mean transcript abundance at baseline was significantly lower for inactivated genes than for unchanged genes (165 ± 589 vs. 470 ± 1,625; p < 1e–3), and the mean transcript levels during the replication cycle of Mimivirus M1 were up to 8.5-fold lower for inactivated genes than for unchanged genes. In addition, proteins tended to be less frequently identified from purified virions in their early life in allopatric laboratory culture if they were encoded by variable genes than if they were encoded by conserved genes (9 vs. 15%; p = 0.062). Finally, Lamarckian evolution represented the evolutionary process encountered by 63% of the inactivated genes. Such observations may be explained by the lower level of DNA repair of useless genes.

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

Julian Stannard The Parrots of Villa Gruber Discover Lapis Lazuli Salmon Poetry This is the last installment in poet Stannard ’s Genoese trilogy; Rina’s War and The Red Zone were the first and second collections in the series, respectively. With a voice and subjects that are distinctly British in nature, the poems in this collection span many of the major cities of Europe, including Paris, Rome, Bucharest, and Amsterdam . Stannard’s poems were featured in WLT’s July 2011 online issue. A Polish Book of Monsters Michael Kandel, ed. PIASA Books Five contemporary Polish authors, each with a distinctive voice, are represented in this collection of newly translated stories of fantasy and science fiction. Every selection contains an “utterly convincing alien world that nonetheless refracts our own,” with fantastical characters and themes of power, violence, and possession (Helena Goscilo). Through these themes, each author has penned a tale that predicts a sinister future. Nota Bene American sf. Its compass is fiction from Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico written between 1850 and 1920—nationally formative years during which Latin America contributed distinctive “local appropriations and local adaptations” to the “global genre” of sf. After steering us through a first chapter on utopian proto-sf, Rachel Haywood Ferreira guides us into darker territory: stories that vivify the raging conflict between Darwinian and Lamarckian evolution; that prophesy the end of the world; that pit canonical science against spiritualism , theosophy, occultism, and the like; that consider (seriously!) eugenics as a tool to counter threats to national identity ; and much more. In lucid, jargonfree prose, she layers this complex story onto a meticulously constructed skeleton that is simultaneously thematic and chronological. Wediscoverhowauthorsusedthe distancing in time and space allowed by sf to address the burning issues of national identity and its attendant political baggage of “nationality, race, and social class or profession.” Complicating this issue were postcolonial relations with first-world countries of the Northern Hemisphere. This uneasy dynamic was further muddled by the investiture by Latin America in science as “the supreme guarantor of truth” and in technological advancement as the means to progress —science and technology then being localized in the United States and northern Europe. Furthermore, individual works typically addressed geographically and temporally specific political agendas of the authors, many of whom actively participated in nation-building. Haywood Ferreira recounts this intellectually exciting literary adventure with skill and verve. Crucially, she does not assume we know anything about these authors or their political and cultural contexts. Rather, she regularly injects into accounts of their fiction doses of background that keep us on track. She thereby builds a persuasive case that viewing these works “through a lens of science fiction ” illuminates “Latin American attitudes toward science, literature, national identity, and other [social and cultural] issues of their times.” Anyone with even a passing interest in Latin American literature will want Emergence and Cosmos Latinos . Both belong on your shelf next to Thomas Colchie’s A Hammock beneath the Mangoes (1991), an anthology of late-twentieth-century stories, mostly in the fantastic mode, and the endlessly delightful Antología de la literatura fantástica, edited by Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo (2nd ed., 1965; Eng. The Book of Fantasy, 1988). Optimists will leave room for future anthologies by Bell and Molina Gavilán and literary histories by Haywood Ferreira. Both of their books cry out for successors . Wesleyan, are you listening? Michael A. Morrison University of Oklahoma Christopher Hitchens. Arguably: Essays. New York. Twelve / Hachette. 2011. isbn 9781455502776 Ordinary book reviewers have three tasks: to determine what the author set out to do; how well that task was accomplished; and whether it was worth undertaking. Here the reviewer is in a way subordinate to the book. Not so reviewers given the space to show their credentials as public intellectuals. January–February 2012 | 75 In their work, readers often find it difficult to discover just what book is being discussed because the reviewer subsumes the discussion in a wider consideration of the topic. Christopher Hitchens is preeminently in the second group. He seems to be as widely read and traveled as he is prolific—the publicity sheet for the book notes that...

A conceptual model for the origin of worker behaviour and adaptation of eusociality

In a model based on the wasp family Vespidae, the origin of worker behaviour, which constitutes the eusociality threshold, is not based on relatedness, therefore the origin of eusociality does not depend on inclusive fitness, and workers at the eusociality threshold are not altruistic. Instead, incipient workers and queens behave selfishly and are subject to direct natural selection. Beyond the eusociality threshold, relatedness enables 'soft inheritance' as the framework for initial adaptations of eusociality. At the threshold of irreversibility, queen and worker castes become fixed in advanced eusociality. Transitions from solitary to facultative, facultative to primitive, and primitive to advanced eusociality occur via exaptation, phenotypic accommodation and genetic assimilation. Multilevel selection characterizes the solitary to highly eusocial transition, but components of multilevel selection vary across levels of eusociality. Roles of behavioural flexibility and developmental plasticity in the evolutionary process equal or exceed those of genotype.

Selected Papers from NaBIC 2010

The Second World Congress on Nature and Biologically Inspired Computing (NaBIC2010) was held at the Kitakyushu International Conference Center December 15-17, 2010, in Kitakyushu, Japan. NaBIC2010 provided a forum for researchers, engineers, and students from worldwide to discuss state-of-the-art machine intelligence and to address issues related to building human-friendly machines by learning from nature. NaBIC2010 covered a wide range of studies ? from theoretical and algorithmic studies on nature and biologically inspired computing techniques to their real-world applications. Top researchers presenting papers at NaBIC2010 were invited to contribute to this special issue. Through a fair peer review process, four extended papers have been accepted ? an acceptance rate of 50%. The first paper entitled gA Study on Computational Efficiency and Plasticity in Baldwinian Learningh by Liu and Iba analyzes Baldwinian evolution efficiency by comparing it to alternatives such as standard Darwinian evolution with no learning, Lamarckian evolution, and Baldwinian evolution with different learning and plasticity evolution. The second paper entitled gExperimental Study of a Structured Differential Evolution with Mixed Strategiesh by Ishimizu and Tagawa proposes island-based DE with ring or torus networks. The authors examine the performance of the proposed DE with the effects of different strategies. The third paper entitled gMulti-Space Competitive DGA for Model Selection and its Application to Localization of Multiple Signal Sourcesh by Ishikawa, Misawa, Kubota, Tokiwa, Horio, and Yamakawa proposes a distributed genetic algorithm in which each subpopulation searches for a solution in different decision space. Subpopulations change size based on search progress. The fourth paper entitled gAn Extended Interactive Evolutionary Computation Using Heart Rate Variability as Fitness Value for Composing Music Chord Progressh by Fukumoto, Nakashima, Ogawa, and Imai uses heart-rate variability instead of direct human evaluations in an interactive evolutionary computation framework. As guest editors of this special issue, we would like to thank the authors for their unique and interesting contributions and the reviewers for their careful checking and invaluable comments.

A Study on Computational Efficiency and Plasticity in Baldwinian Learning

Baldwinian evolution is a hybridization of populationbased search and local refinements. Unlike in Lamarckian evolution, selection is made based on fitness improved in local refining, but refined traits are not known to offspring. For potential use in computational applications, we must investigate the Baldwinian evolutionmechanism, in term of computational cost and fitness improvement. In this paper, a set of experiments is presented, to find what is produced in Baldwinian learning. We found that, on the static landscapes involved, learning cost is paid to maintain a certain level of potential to reach good solutions, rather than to further explore on the landscape. Plasticity codes in genotypes can help in selecting appropriate parts to refine and improve search performance. However, this improvement remains limited because no learned traits are passed on, and does not enable exploration far beyond parents.

Development of an Effective Strategy to Teach Evolution

This study proposes a new instructional strategy and corresponding materials designed from various alternative frameworks to help students understand evolution as a biologically acceptable theory. Biology teachers have normally taught the evolutionary mechanism by means of comparing Lamarckism with natural selection. In this study, a new instructional strategy in which the Lamarckian explanation is first excluded because Lamarckism is known to be subsumed in a learner's cognitive structure as a strong preconception of evolution is suggested for teaching evolution. After mutation theory is introduced, Darwinism including natural selection is explained separately during the next class hour. Corresponding instructional materials that aid student understanding of the evolutionary mechanism were developed using recently published articles on human genetic traits as scientific evolutionary evidence instead of the traditional evolutionary subject matter, giraffe neck. Evolutionary evidence from human genetic traits allows students to exclude anthropocentric thoughts effectively and raise concern for the phenomenon of evolution positively. The administered instructional strategy and materials in this research improved student conception, concern, and belief of evolution and it is believed that they helped students understand the evolutionary mechanism effectively.

Differential regulation of a MYB transcription factor is correlated with transgenerational epigenetic inheritance of trichome density in Mimulus guttatus

• Epigenetic inheritance, transgenerational transmission of traits not proximally determined by DNA sequence, has been linked to transmission of chromatin modifications and gene regulation, which are known to be sensitive to environmental factors. Mimulus guttatus increases trichome (plant hair) density in response to simulated herbivore damage. Increased density is expressed in progeny even if progeny do not experience damage. To better understand epigenetic inheritance of trichome production, we tested the hypothesis that candidate gene expression states are inherited in response to parental damage. • Using M. guttatus recombinant inbred lines, offspring of leaf-damaged and control plants were raised without damage. Relative expression of candidate trichome development genes was measured in offspring. Line and parental damage effects on trichome density were measured. Associations between gene expression, trichome density, and response to parental damage were determined. • We identified M. guttatus MYB MIXTA-like 8 as a possible negative regulator of trichome development. We found that parental leaf damage induces down-regulation of MYB MIXTA-like 8 in progeny, which is associated with epigenetically inherited increased trichome density. • Our results link epigenetic transmission of an ecologically important trait with differential gene expression states - providing insight into a mechanism underlying environmentally induced 'soft inheritance'.

Perinatal Exposure to Environmental Chemicals Induces Epigenomic Changes in Offspring

Many researchers propose that invisible internal alterations that occur through exposure to environmental factors during fetal or neonatal stages affect the risk of cancer, hypertension, and diabetes after maturation. Barker's hypothesis, which states that reduced fetal growth is strongly associated with metabolic syndromes including cardiovascular disease and diabetes, has now been widely accepted and expanded into the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD). Potential molecular mechanisms underlying this phenomenon include the alteration and persistence of epigenomic programming. Clear biochemical evidence has not yet been obtained in human studies; however, in laboratory animals, the fetal environment including physical and chemical factors altered epigenomic states such as DNA methylation and histone modification, and persistent changes affected specific gene expression regulation, resulting in disease susceptibility. Furthermore, in recent studies, environmental chemical exposure during pregnancy altered sperm DNA methylation patterns of male offspring, and the altered status and resulting phenotypes were inherited in the next generation. Challenging and eccentric studies focusing on epigenetic transgenerational effects are currently being conducted to demonstrate the existence of Lamarckian inheritance.

Current Biology at 20

I can't recall if it was the morning or the afternoon of my first day in my new job that my boss said he thought it would be a good idea to start a journal to rival Nature, albeit only on the biology side. After pausing to gulp, I said “Yes, but….”.My boss was entrepreneurial publisher Vitek Tracz. My job was that of Managing Director of Current Biology Ltd., a newly formed company that had two Current Opinion titles as its starting point. I had taken the job after 16 years at Nature so, naturally, Vitek felt I should be able easily to start a rival.After a little, or perhaps a lot, of discussion about the problems of starting from scratch a high-profile journal containing all the elements of Nature, we settled on a rather less ambitious starting point. This was to publish mini-reviews with the aim of bettering the most-read section of Nature — its News and Views. We decided to start by publishing them every other month during 1991 and giving the journal away free to every subscriber to a Current Opinion journal as well as to several thousand high-ranking biologists. This would build up visibility and, we hoped, popularity so that we could then start to sell subscriptions, increase the frequency and, at some stage, perhaps, start publishing research papers.We kicked around many ideas for a title but in the end couldn't come up with anything that seemed more to the point than “Current Biology”. For the mini-reviews we came up with “Dispatches”. And for the journal as a whole we coined the slogan “Dispatches from the frontlines of Biology”. Twenty-four dispatches were to be commissioned for each issue, with four coming from each of the six areas of biology that had been defined by the Current Opinion series. They were to be heavily edited and illustrated in innovative ways and in colour. I commissioned the content. To help me edit it, I hired Kate Hooper, an editor from Nature. Celia Welcomme, who had brilliantly illustrated the then best-selling immunology text book (‘Roitt’) created the style of illustration. Vitek, himself, provided the creative input for the design of each cover.Current Biology kicked off in February 1991 and by the end of the year it was clear that we had a success on our hands and several thousand subscribers. This led us to turn it into a monthly subscription journal, at which point I decided I needed a Deputy Editor, a role filled by the current Editor, Geoffrey North, in May 1992. By then, the shall we? / shan't we? discussions had been resolved — we would start publishing research papers from the start of 1993.Peter NewmarkFounding Editor

On the origins of physicians: Darwinian or Lamarckian evolution?

Achieving acceptance to a North American and some European medical schools is one of the most difficult academic tasks faced by undergraduate students. The limited number of spots allows for only a fraction of the most highly promising applicants to be accepted each year. Perhaps one of the difficulties that many students face when applying to medical school is that due to the current restriction on enrollment, the application process poses selective pressures, independent of the applicants' suitability for the medical profession. Here I discuss, based on personal experiences, how I believe the process could become more just to all applicants. Allowing public needs and student interest to better dictate the number of graduating physicians could help relieve some of the current admission pressures, including the rather arbitrary selection of a small fraction of applicants from a large group of sufficiently proficient students. I believe that this proposal, if implemented, will likely not only remove some biases of our admission system, but also sufficiently change the landscape of those accepted, to include students with a genuine professional interest in the underserviced field of family practice.

Giuseppe Sergi, "champion" of Darwinism?

The Italian anthropologist, psychologist and evolutionist Giuseppe Sergi (1841-1936) may be regarded in some respects today as an "atypical" Darwinist, but, almost paradoxically, he was considered a "champion" of Darwinism by colleagues and commentators of his own time. Probably, two aspects of his work are responsible for this apparent anomaly: his faith in the so-called soft inheritance and his claims regarding a theory concerning the polyphyletic origin of human races. The soft inheritance theory, however, was needed by Sergi to support ideas regarding the complexity of inheritance in man, a fact that, in his opinion, could not completely be put down to mechanical laws, and polygeny was useful when trying to rectify the problem concerning the incompleteness of the fossil record. In both cases, it is possible to show that he was involved in supporting Darwinian theory during the most severe crisis of its consensus in Italy and at International level, between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Finally, the apparent unorthodox features which can be found in Sergi's ideas appear to be, in Kuhnian terms, ad hoc hypotheses put forward by Sergi himself in order to support the paradigm.

Frail Hypotheses in Evolutionary Biology

In the last decades, under the headings of “mutation strategies,” “evolvability,” or “soft inheritance,” many ideas have been advanced on mechanisms assumed to promote innovative evolution beyond what one may anticipate from the classical model of random mutation and selection. Many population geneticists find these ideas superficially seducing but mathematically unfounded. While agreeing with the need to critically evaluate such proposals in the light of population genetics, I will argue that population geneticists are not immune to criticism. For instance, the “infinite site model” introduced by Kimura makes the unrealistic assumption that any neutral mutation arises only once during a neutral fixation episode, which leads, I propose, to an underestimation of the neutral fixation rates in large populations. Critical parameters such as mutation and recombination rates, effective population sizes or beneficial/deleterious mutation ratios are assigned convenient values, which may seem ad hoc to people outside the field. The lack of concern for the subtleties of genetic mechanisms is also criticized. Phenomena such as compensatory mutations, recurrent mutations, hot spots, and polymorphism, which population geneticists treat in the mathematical context of neutral versus selective fixations, can instead be interpreted in terms of genetic mechanisms for producing complex mutational events. Finally, single nucleotide substitutions are often treated as the quasi-exclusive source of variations, yet they cannot help much once the genes are optimized with respect to these substitutions. I suggest that population geneticists should invest more effort in refining the numerical values of the critical parameters used in their models. They should take into account the recent proposals on how mutations arise. They should also pay more attention to phenotypic variations, and develop criteria to discriminate between proposed evolutionary mechanisms that can actually work, and others that cannot.

Shopping for answers from Marx and Spencer

Shopping for answers from Marx and Spencer

A Lamarckian Hybrid of Differential Evolution and Conjugate Gradients for Neural Network Training

The paper describes two schemes that follow the model of Lamarckian evolution and combine differential evolution (DE), which is a population-based stochastic global search method, with the local optimization algorithm of conjugate gradients (CG). In the first, each offspring is fine-tuned by CG before competing with their parents. In the other CG is used to improve both parents and offspring in a manner that is completely seamless for individuals that survive more than one generation. Experiments involved training weights of feed-forward neural networks to solve three synthetic and four real-life problems. In six out of seven cases the DE---CG hybrid, which preserves and uses information on each solution's local optimization process, outperformed two recent variants of DE.

Gemmules and Elements: On Darwin’s and Mendel’s Concepts and Methods in Heredity

Inheritance and variation were a major focus of Charles Darwin’s studies. Small inherited variations were at the core of his theory of organic evolution by means of natural selection. He put forward a developmental theory of heredity (pangenesis) based on the assumption of the existence of material hereditary particles. However, unlike his proposition of natural selection as a new mechanism for evolutionary change, Darwin’s highly speculative and contradictory hypotheses on heredity were unfruitful for further research. They attempted to explain many complex biological phenomena at the same time, disregarded the then modern developments in cell theory, and were, moreover, faithful to the widespread conceptions of blending and so-called Lamarckian inheritance. In contrast, Mendel’s approaches, despite the fact that features of his ideas were later not found to be tenable, proved successful as the basis for the development of modern genetics. Mendel took the study of the transmission of traits and its causes (genetics) out of natural history; by reducing complexity to simple particulate models, he transformed it into a scientific field of research. His scientific approach and concept of discrete elements (which later gave rise to the notion of discrete genes) also contributed crucially to the explanation of the existence of stable variations as the basis for natural selection.

Is Lamarckian evolution relevant to medicine?

Background200 years have now passed since Darwin was born and scientists around the world are celebrating this important anniversary of the birth of an evolutionary visionary. However, the theories of his colleague Lamarck are treated with considerably less acclaim. These theories centre on the tendency for complexity to increase in organisms over time and the direct transmission of phenotypic traits from parents to offspring.DiscussionLamarckian concepts, long thought of no relevance to modern evolutionary theory, are enjoying a quiet resurgence with the increasing complexity of epigenetic theories of inheritance. There is evidence that epigenetic alterations, including DNA methylation and histone modifications, are transmitted transgenerationally, thus providing a potential mechanism for environmental influences to be passed from parents to offspring: Lamarckian evolution. Furthermore, evidence is accumulating that epigenetics plays an important role in many common medical conditions.SummaryEpigenetics allows the peaceful co-existence of Darwinian and Lamarckian evolution. Further efforts should be exerted on studying the mechanisms by which this occurs so that public health measures can be undertaken to reverse or prevent epigenetic changes important in disease susceptibility. Perhaps in 2059 we will be celebrating the anniversary of both Darwin and Lamarck.

The conversion of spring wheat into winter wheat and vice versa: false claim or Lamarckian inheritance?

The conversion of spring wheat into winter wheat and vice versa: false claim or Lamarckian inheritance?

Communication, Technology, and the Planetary Creature

Man and technology are inseparable: man produces technology, but the latter contributes to the continuous transformation of man. Today biological evolution based on random genetic mutations is largely exceeded by cultural (more specifically, technological) evolution, which is much faster due to the presence of Lamarckian inheritance mechanisms (imitation, learning and the like). This has two important consequences: 1) the formation of Homo technologicus, a symbiotic creature where biology meets technology intimately and is subject to a continuous transformation; and 2) the formation of a sort of Planetary Creature that originates from the interconnection of the individual man-machine symbionts and is heralded by the Internet and by the communication activities occurring in the Internet, in particular those taking place in the so-called social networks. The Planetary Creature is a single world-wide structure where important communication and cognitive processes occur, developing into a sort of connective intelligence that tends to absorb individual intelligences. This encroaching process can produce resistance and dissent as well as suffering, but can also enhance individual abilities. Actually, the growing efficiency and the decreasing costs of the communication mediated by technology offer unprecedented opportunities for augmenting knowledge and creativity and for eliciting novel forms of intellectual activity. On the other hand there might be negative consequences such as addiction to computers and virtuality, delegation of activities and abilities to machines, vulnerability of complex systems, undue control on individuals and economic exploitation. Some important consequences of these developments are examined concerning the body, the time and space categories, and in particular the identity concept. This text is the keynote address of Guiseppe O. Longo at the 9th International Conference on Sociocybernetics, organised by the Research Committee 51 of the International Sociological Association (ISA) in Urbino, 29 June - 5 July 2009. The theme of the conference was: `Modernity 2.0 - Emerging Social Media Technologies and Their Impacts´. Longo presents here the perspective of engineering science towards sociological issues. He has published several books on that topic, so far in Italian language only. Though some of his statements in the text don't seem well-founded to sociological readers or may be deemed highly speculative, we decided to make his ideas accessible to the non- Italian world. We think they are worth discussing. Wolfgang Hofkirchner

Communication, Technology, and the Planetary Creature

Man and technology are inseparable: man produces technology, but the latter contributes to the continuous transformation of man. Today biological evolution based on random genetic mutations is largely exceeded by cultural (more specifically, technological) evolution, which is much faster due to the presence of Lamarckian inheritance mechanisms (imitation, learning and the like). This has two important consequences: 1) the formation of Homo technologicus, a symbiotic creature where biology meets technology intimately and is subject to a continuous transformation; and 2) the formation of a sort of Planetary Creature that originates from the interconnection of the individual man-machine symbionts and is heralded by the Internet and by the communication activities occurring in the Internet, in particular those taking place in the so-called social networks. The Planetary Creature is a single world-wide structure where important communication and cognitive processes occur, developing into a sort of connective intelligence that tends to absorb individual intelligences. This encroaching process can produce resistance and dissent as well as suffering, but can also enhance individual abilities. Actually, the growing efficiency and the decreasing costs of the communication mediated by technology offer unprecedented opportunities for augmenting knowledge and creativity and for eliciting novel forms of intellectual activity. On the other hand there might be negative consequences such as addiction to computers and virtuality, delegation of activities and abilities to machines, vulnerability of complex systems, undue control on individuals and economic exploitation. Some important consequences of these developments are examined concerning the body, the time and space categories, and in particular the identity concept. This text is the keynote address of Guiseppe O. Longo at the 9th International Conference on Sociocybernetics, organised by the Research Committee 51 of the International Sociological Association (ISA) in Urbino, 29 June - 5 July 2009. The theme of the conference was: `Modernity 2.0 - Emerging Social Media Technologies and Their Impacts´. Longo presents here the perspective of engineering science towards sociological issues. He has published several books on that topic, so far in Italian language only. Though some of his statements in the text don't seem well-founded to sociological readers or may be deemed highly speculative, we decided to make his ideas accessible to the non- Italian world. We think they are worth discussing. Wolfgang Hofkirchner