Public health in Calcutta

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An Evolutionary Perspective of Radical Innovation and its implications for Management and Organizations

The thesis develops an evolutionary perspective of technological change based on a complex analogy between biological and technological evolution. The theoretical framework is based on a rich tradition of interdisciplinary research, integrating Herbert Simon\u2019s seminal theory on modular complex systems, artifact-centered evolutionary models of innovation (e.g. Basalla\u2019s), and fundamental evolutionary processes recently researched in microbiology \u2013 including in particular exaptation and horizontal transfer. The novel evolutionary perspective is supported by analytical narratives of paradigmatic historical and prehistorical cases \u2013 including the bow-and-arrow and the turbojet revolution \u2013 emphasizing its explanatory power in understanding presumptive anomalies and the inception of radical innovation. Finally, some implications for innovation management (managing creative radical engineering), organizations (rethinking the mirror hypothesis) are explored as promising implications of this novel perspective of technological change.The thesis develops an evolutionary perspective of technological change based on a complex analogy between biological and technological evolution. The theoretical framework is based on a rich tradition of interdisciplinary research, integrating Herbert Simon\u2019s seminal theory on modular complex systems, artifact-centered evolutionary models of innovation (e.g. Basalla\u2019s), and fundamental evolutionary processes recently researched in microbiology \u2013 including in particular exaptation and horizontal transfer. The novel evolutionary perspective is supported by analytical narratives of paradigmatic historical and prehistorical cases \u2013 including the bow-and-arrow and the turbojet revolution \u2013 emphasizing its explanatory power in understanding presumptive anomalies and the inception of radical innovation. Finally, some implications for innovation management (managing creative radical engineering), organizations (rethinking the mirror hypothesis) are explored as promising implications of this novel perspective of technological change

Agricultural science, plant breeding and the emergence of a Mendelian system in Britain, 1880-1930

Following Thomas P. Hughes’s systems approach in the history of technology, and making use of previously unexamined sources, this dissertation seeks to show that the development of British Mendelism may be explained, and the success it enjoyed more accurately gauged, by analysing the emergence of a system whose elements justified the theory, protected it, made it useful, and slowly territorialized the world. Accordingly, the analysis will cover the principle elements of this system: the system builders, institutes, ideas and varieties that were, in one way or another, Mendelian. The first of the Mendelian system builders, William Bateson, is already well known for his introduction of Mendelism to Britain in the years after 1901 and his coinage of a new name for the discipline; Genetics. He was joined by two colleagues, Rowland Biffen and Thomas Wood, both of whom collaborated with Bateson in creating a string of institutes concerned with changing agriculture by using the new Mendelian theory. The proponents of the new theory often talked of their new found ability to transfer characters and build up new varieties of agricultural value. These claims were welcomed by politicians and the popular press and the idea that the new genetics would lead to a beneficial revolution in agriculture became a popular cause of the day. However, the release of the first of these new Mendelian varieties in 1910 in Britain is far less well known than the almost simultaneous development of the chromosome theory at Columbia University by Thomas Hunt Morgan. On one view of the history of genetics, the discipline, which had been born in Moravia, and popularised in Britain, was from 1910 most fruitfully developed in Morgan’s fly room. From this perspective it might be thought that the British School, under Bateson, became a disciplinary backwater, at least in part because Bateson refused to accept chromosome theory. This thesis argues that far from being in a genetic backwater, Bateson along with Mendelian allies Biffen and Wood were at the cutting edge of a wide ranging movement to improve agriculture through the introduction of new Mendelian varieties

Beyond Desartes and Newton: Recovering life and humanity

Attempts to ‘naturalize’ phenomenology challenge both traditional phenomenology and traditional approaches to cognitive science. They challenge Edmund Husserl’s rejection of naturalism and his attempt to establish phenomenology as a foundational transcendental discipline, and they challenge efforts to explain cognition through mainstream science. While appearing to be a retreat from the bold claims made for phenomenology, it is really its triumph. Naturalized phenomenology is spearheading a successful challenge to the heritage of Cartesian dualism. This converges with the reaction against Cartesian thought within science itself. Descartes divided the universe between res cogitans, thinking substances, and res extensa, the mechanical world. The latter won with Newton and we have, in most of objective science since, literally lost our mind, hence our humanity. Despite Darwin, biologists remain children of Newton, and dream of a grand theory that is epistemologically complete and would allow lawful entailment of the evolution of the biosphere. This dream is no longer tenable. We now have to recognize that science and scientists are within and part of the world we are striving to comprehend, as proponents of endophysics have argued, and that physics, biology and mathematics have to be reconceived accordingly. Interpreting quantum mechanics from this perspective is shown to both illuminate conscious experience and reveal new paths for its further development. In biology we must now justify the use of the word “function”. As we shall see, we cannot prestate the ever new biological functions that arise and constitute the very phase space of evolution. Hence, we cannot mathematize the detailed becoming of the biosphere, nor write differential equations for functional variables we do not know ahead of time, nor integrate those equations, so no laws “entail” evolution. The dream of a grand theory fails. In place of entailing laws, a post-entailing law explanatory framework is proposed in which Actuals arise in evolution that constitute new boundary conditions that are enabling constraints that create new, typically unprestatable, Adjacent Possible opportunities for further evolution, in which new Actuals arise, in a persistent becoming. Evolution flows into a typically unprestatable succession of Adjacent Possibles. Given the concept of function, the concept of functional closure of an organism making a living in its world, becomes central. Implications for patterns in evolution include historical reconstruction, and statistical laws such as the distribution of extinction events, or species per genus, and the use of formal cause, not efficient cause, laws

From Heredity to Genetics: Political, Medical, and Agro-Industrial Contexts

Book Chapte

Fantastical Flora: Cryptobotanical Imaginaries in Victorian Fin-de-Siècle Literature

This study examines instances of imaginary plant life, or ‘cryptobotany’, in the late- nineteenth and early twentieth-century. It draws on a diverse range of sources from Transatlantic literary and visual culture – including fictional and non-fictional prose, poetry, newspapers and periodical culture, drawing manuals, horticultural guides and advertisements – in order to examine the significant and pervasive way in which visions of new, fantastical vegetable kingdoms, containing a seemingly limitless variety of weird and wonderful plants, gripped late Victorian and Edwardian culture and society. By contextualising these visions with relation to contemporary aesthetic, economic, scientific and socio-political discourses, the thesis considers why and how such imaginative representations of plant-life proliferated, with a particular focus on the capacity of these representations to articulate and sustain expectations, hopes and fears concerning the ongoing planetary impact of industrializing, globalizing modernity. As such, the study contributes to the emergent strand of scholarship that recognises plants as worthy of critical attention, providing as it does so an ecologically- informed frame through which to re-examine speculative narratives of the late- Victorian period. The thesis is presented as six chapters arranged around three thematic concerns: cryptobotanical commodification, progress and aberration. The first two chapters concern plants that were imagined to have enormous social benefit to modern, metropolitan civilisation. Focusing on discourses of energy and hygiene, the chapters unpick how beneficial qualities of plants were used to address fears of entropy and contamination that proliferated at the fin-de-siècle. Chapters three and four are interested in the phenomena of ‘improving plants’; from aesthetics to horticulture, these chapters examine the various ways that plants were being transformed and idealised in the period, and the impact these new ideas had on conceptions of the natural world and the human subject. Finally, chapters five and six detail queer or otherwise deviant plant imaginaries. Drawing from Gothic fiction, imperial romance and decadent literature, the chapters explore how these entanglements with imagined plants were used to expand the limits of perception, from interrogating possible hybridity between flora and fauna, to the ability for plants to resist the systems of knowledge and control discussed in earlier chapters. Together, these case studies make manifest the imaginative plasticity of vegetable life in the period, offering insight into how plants were employed to confront issues as diverse as sustainability, evolutionary lineage and aesthetic self-expression

William Dean Howells and the New Science: Darwinian Evolution and the Rise of Realism

Broad acceptance of Charles Darwin\u27s Origin of Species emboldened a young William Dean Howells to explore the possibility of a scientific foundation for a new literature combining close observations of the immediate environment with a method of interpreting these observations based on evolutionary science as Howells understood it. Charles Sprague\u27s The Darwinian Theory, published in the Atlantic in 1866, the year Howells became assistant editor, provided the foundation for this new method, and Alfred Russel Wallace\u27s The Malay Archipelago (1869) prompted Howells to take what he called a new direction in fiction based on evolutionary theory and natural selection. He began to explore this new approach in sketches written for the Atlantic (later published as Suburban Sketches) and further developed it in his first novel, Their Wedding Journey. Of special interest is the sketch Jubilee Days in which he examines the biological premises upon which Darwin and Wallace base their conclusions about natural selection. Howells continued to explore evolutionary theory in A Modern Instance in which he examines the locus of human morality and the educational process that shapes the human moral sense. Individual progress, analogous to social progress, requires inheritance of an innate altruistic tendency, which stands in tenuous opposition to the selfish impulses that had directed human behavior for millennia. If unsupported, altruism can revert to savage animalism; therefore, education must shape it. Additionally, a terminus of influence delimits the boundary beyond which the adult moral sense solidifies. Later in his career, however, Howells\u27s attitude toward evolution exhibits a slow but steady shift from measured optimism concerning the future of human society to one of doubt and pessimism. In The Minister\u27s Charge (1886), Howells concludes that adaptation is possible for the individual and that the variation introduced to the existing, relatively closed social structure will strengthen society as a whole. The Landlord at Lion\u27s Head (1897) presents an interpretation close in accord with an integrated evolutionary theory of Mendelian genetics with Darwinian natural selection. Howells eventually concludes that the best one can hope for is survival in the perpetual struggle and adaptation within a shifting social environment

Experimental and theoretical models of cultural evolution

This thesis contributes to the field of cultural evolution by presenting two experimental and two theoretical models of cultural evolution. Prior to presenting these I survey existing experimental and theoretical models of cultural evolution. In the first experiment, I test the hypothesis that increasing group size speeds up cultural accumulation, using a novel puzzle-solving task and within a transmission chain design. I find support for this hypothesis, in contrast with previous experiments. In the second experiment, also using a transmission chain design, I examine perceptual errors in recreating Acheulean handaxes and ask whether such errors can account for the variability of Acheulean technology over time. Using the accumulated copying error model to compare the experimental data to archaeological records, I conclude that perceptual errors alone were likely not the driving force behind Acheulean evolution. In the first theoretical chapter, I present models of cultural differences between populations and of cumulative culture, which build on existing models and accord with empirical data. I then show that the models, when combined, have two qualitative regimes which may correspond to human and nonhuman culture. In the second theoretical chapter, I present a ‘fundamental theorem of cultural selection’, an equivalent of Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection for cultural evolution. I discuss how this theorem formalizes and sheds light on cultural evolutionary theory. Finally I conclude and discuss future research directions

The Blind Scientist: A Critique of Neo-Darwinism\u27s A Priori Assumptions

This paper investigates neo-Darwinian fallacies specifically regarding a priori presumptions, leading to weak scientific methodology and praxis. It was found that five concepts must be true for neo-Darwinism to be true. These are gradualism, the tree of life hypothesis, the evidence of micro-evolutionary change accounting for macro-evolutionary change, time and chance, and methodological naturalism. Prima facie, these concepts have tremendous explanatory power. However, with an attempt to carefully examine these concepts, all five seem to be assumed a priori in order to dictate the outcome of neo-Darwinism rather than letting the evidence speak for itself. Coincidentally, it appears that the evidence does not support any of these five concepts. The evidence left by the Cambrian explosion, genomic potential, genetic entropy, irreducible complexity, genetic limits, cyclical change, probability theory, the epistemology of information, and the law of causality seems to provide contrary evidence to the five neo-Darwinian a priori assumptions. Additionally, potential biases for pushing neo-Darwinism were also examined and were found to play a significant role in the arrival of neo-Darwinian conclusions