Precis of Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature

The debate about the credentials of sociobiology has persisted because scholars have failed to distinguish the varieties of sociobiology and because too little attention has been paid to the details of the arguments that are supposed to support the provocative claims about human social behavior. I seek to remedy both dcfieieneies. After analysis of the relationships among different kinds of sociobiology and contemporary evolutionary theory, I attempt to show how some of the studies of the behavior of nonhuman animals meet the methodological standards appropriate to evolutionary research. I contend that the efforts of E. O. Wilson, Richard Alexander, Charles Lumsden, and others to generate conclusions about human nature are flawed, both because they apply evolutionary ideas in an unrigorous fashion and because they use dubious assumptions to connect their evolutionary analyses with their conclusions. This contention rests on analyses of many of the major sociobiological proposals about human social behavior, including: differences in sex roles, racial hostility, homosexuality, conflict between parents and adolescent offspring, incest avoidance, the avunculate, alliances in combat, female infanticide, and gene-culture coevolution. Vaulting Ambition thus seeks to identify what is good in sociobiology, to expose the errors of premature speculations about human nature, and to prepare the way for serious study of the evolution of human social behavior

The Tarnished Golden Rule: The Corrosive Effect of Federal Prevailing-Party Standards on State Reciprocal-Fee Statutes

It may have been with slight confusion that Asdrubal Alfaro read the foreclosure complaint filed against him in July 2012. An entity completely separate from the one to which he sent his monthly mortgage payments filed this case. So Mr. Alfaro called a longtime friend and attorney to help him save his home. With the representation of his friend, Mr. Alfaro mounted a successful defense. Mr. Alfaro\u27s attorney had noticed that the plaintiff bank, which years ago claimed to have purchased the debt from the original mortgagee, did not have the paperwork necessary to prove that it owned the relevant debt

A Comment on “Do Patents Facilitate Financing in the Software Industry?”

“Do Patents Facilitate Financing in the Software Industry?” by Ronald J. Mann contributes empirical evidence to our understanding of how software startups use patents. However, a close examination of the actual empirical findings in this paper points to rather different conclusions than those that Mann draws, namely: few software startups benefits from software patents and patents are not widely used by software firms to obtain venture financing. Indeed, among other things, the paper reports that 80% of venture-financed software startups had not acquired any patents within four years of receiving financing.

Electron and nuclear spin dynamics in the thermal mixing model of dynamic nuclear polarization

A novel mathematical treatment is proposed for computing the time evolution of dynamic nuclear polarization processes in the low temperature thermal mixing regime. Without assuming any a priori analytical form for the electron polarization, our approach provides a quantitative picture of the steady state that recovers the well known Borghini prediction based on thermodynamics arguments, as long as the electrons-nuclei transition rates are fast compared to the other relevant time scales. Substantially different final polarization levels are achieved instead when the latter assumption is relaxed in the presence of a nuclear leakage term, even though very weak, suggesting a possible explanation for the deviation between the measured steady state polarizations and the Borghini prediction. The proposed methodology also allows to calculate nuclear polarization and relaxation times, once specified the electrons/nuclei concentration ratio and the typical rates of the microscopic processes involving the two spin species. Numerical results are shown to account for the manifold dynamical behaviours of typical DNP samples.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figure

Screening and Merger Activity

In our paper targets, by setting a reserve price, screen acquirers on their (expected) ability to generate merger-speci?c synergies. Both empirical evidence and many common merger models suggest that the di?erence between high- and low-synergy mergers becomes smaller during booms. This implies that the target’s opportunity cost for sorting out relatively less ?tting acquirers increases and, hence, targets screen less tightly during booms, which leads to a hike in merger activity. Our screening mechanism not only predicts that merger activity is intense during economic booms and subdued during recessions but is also consistent with other stylized facts about takeovers and generates novel testable predictions

Définition macroscopique des unités lithostratigraphiques de l’Oxfordien moyen au Kimméridgien en Ajoie (Jura suisse): Nouvelles données acquises dans le cadre de la construction de l’autoroute A16

La mise sur pied en 2000 d’une section paléontologique (Paléontologie A16) en lien avec la construction de l’A16 (Transjurane), a permis la mise au jour de nombreux affleurements du Jurassique supérieur en Ajoie. De nouveaux profils sédimentologiques ont été levés grâce aux fouilles paléontologiques, aux travaux autoroutiers, à l’ouverture de nouvelles carrières et à la réalisation de forages. Un échantillonnage important a été réalisé à cette occasion. Ces nouvelles données et observations permettent aujourd’hui de préciser le découpage lithostratigraphique et l’évolution latérale des faciès carbonatés de la fin du Jurassique en Ajoie. Deux nouveaux noms de membre sont proposés pour la formation de Reuchenette

Comment

A comment on 'Harold Jeffreys's Theory of Probability Revisited' by Christian P. Robert, Nicolas Chopin, and Judith Roussea