Sex and sexuality: An evolutionary view

In this article, I first offer a summary of Darwin’s main ideas, especially relating to sex, and explain how these have been elaborated by more recent evolutionary scholars. I then give an account of the historical divergence between psychoanalysis and classical Darwinian thought, and describe how the early psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein tried to counter this by addressing some biological themes in her work. Following a review of some contemporary attempts to bring psychoanalysis and evolutionary thought into alignment with each other, I make some suggestions regarding a view of sex and sexuality that would be sound in evolutionary terms while also being helpful in psychoanalytic ones

Invariant-Based Recognition of Complex Curved 3D Objects from Image Contours

To recognize three-dimensional objects bounded by smooth curved surfaces from monocular image contours, viewpoint-dependent image features must be related to object geometry. Contour bitangents and inflections along with associated parallel tangents points are the projection of surface points that lie on the occluding contour for a five-parameter family of scaled orthographic projection viewpoints. An invariant representation can be computed from these image features and used for modeling and recognizing objects. Modeling is achieved by moving an object in front of a camera to obtain a curve of possible invariants. The relative camera-object motion is not required, and 3D models are not utilized. At recognition time, invariants computed from a single image are used to index the model database. Using the matched features, independent qualitative and quantitative verification procedures eliminate potential false matches. Examples from an implementation are presented