In his ‘Universal Darwinism’ paper of 1983, Richard Dawkins argued that only ‘Darwinian selection’ is ‘in principle capable of doing the job of explaining the existence of adaptive complexity’. The question of whether natural selection should have an explanatory monopoly on adaptation remains a live issue nearly 40 years later. It is, for example, one of several topics under dispute in the context of ongoing calls for an ‘Extended Evolutionary Synthesis’. In this talk I explain the strong appeal of Universal Darwinism, before assessing it using a series of examples from evolutionary biology, cultural evolution, and machine learning. I argue that adaptation always required some interplay between variation and selection, at some point in the history of the adapted system. But it is worth adding discipline to this informally stated position. There are important explanatory differences in how reproductive processes bring about adaptation in organic media, and how other processes bring about adaptation in reconfigurable systems such as neural networks and cultural groups. In short, the position of Universal Darwinism only survives scrutiny if its key claims are understood in hedged, vague or loose ways.
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The Spirit of Inquiry celebrates the 200th anniversary of the remarkable Cambridge Philosophical Society and brings to life the many remarkable episodes and illustrious figures associated with the Society, including Adam Sedgwick, Mary Somerville, Charles Darwin, and Lawrence Bragg.
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Dementia is a topic of considerable public interest. How empirical evidence has contributed to this societal awareness and indeed fear will be covered in this talk. It will span research from the 1980s when not much was understood about dementia up to contemporary perspectives. The focus will be on the epidemiological and public health evidence base, and how this relates to the results published from clinical and lab based research. The findings from UK and other high income countries of reduced age specific prevalence (%) will be explored, and the implications of results from brain based studies that dementia is not inevitable in the presence of ‘alzheimer’ type changes. The role of inequalities, risk varying across countries and time and our knowledge about protective factors have strengthened during recent years, and the balance of high risk with whole population approaches to reducing risk for society will be considered.
The structural mechanics of shape-changing structures: from bending armadillos, self-deploying satellites, to roll-up displays.
Most structures, e.g. buildings & bridges, are designed to be near rigid when loaded: in view of high winds or heavy traffic, their movements are barely noticeable. Formally, they are stiff, strong and stable, in terms of their “structural mechanics” – the study of their loaded deformation. Large movements from material weakness, overloading, or bad design, typically portend failure & eventual collapse. Embracing large movements, i.e. deliberate changes in shape, can admit new behaviour if safe and reversible, to yield transformer-like technologies and simple explanations of biological morphology, for example. In this talk, I will describe several structural mechanics principles for making shape-changing structures, out of ordinary materials, complete with physical demonstrations.
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