Choice, habit and evolution

The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com Copyright SpringerSeveral leading mainstream economists including Gary Becker have treated habit as serially correlated behaviour resulting from deliberate choices. This approach puts choice before habit but involves assumptions of extensive memory and decision-making capacity. By contrast, earlier authors such as William James, John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen saw deliberation and choice as a contingent outcome of habits, where the latter are defined in terms of acquired dispositions rather than overt behaviour. The approach of this second group is more consistent with an evolutionary perspective and the limited computational capacities of the human brain. © Springer-Verlag 2009.Peer reviewe

Religion and British Sociology: The Power and Necessity of the Spiritual

Understanding the role of religion in early British sociology, as well as its fate in later sociology, requires a variety of perspectives: one is intellectual and concerns the various forms that the topic of religion took for British sociology. Another is organisational and ecological. British sociology as embodied in the Sociological Society was a part of a vast array of organisations that were part of a massive movement of social reform, international in scope, and motivated largely by the newly ‘social’ Christianity of the late Victorian era. As a kind of public discourse, sociology was part of what Maurice Cowling called the ‘Public Doctrine’ replacing religion (1980). As Cowling demonstrates for British intellectual life as a whole, the withdrawing roar of the sea of faith, as Matthew Arnold put it (1867), was in the ears of generations of British academics and thinkers, and especially in those who used the term ‘sociology’ or referred to sociological thinkers, such as Comte, or their precursors

Fluorescence imaging of MACPF/CDC proteins: new techniques and their application.

Structural and biochemical investigations have helped illuminate many of the important details of MACPF/CDC pore formation. However, conventional techniques are limited in their ability to tackle many of the remaining key questions, and new biophysical techniques might provide the means to improve our understanding. Here we attempt to identify the properties of MACPF/CDC proteins that warrant further study, and explore how new developments in fluorescence imaging are able to probe these properties