The role of various neurological structures and their functions play a key role in determining risk versus reward and pleasure versus pain. This neurobiological evolutionary development ultimately drives our motivation or avoidance based exclusively on our desire to survive. Following 16 years of prolonged combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, the…

The "cis"-regulatory hypothesis is one of the most important claims of evolutionary developmental biology. In this paper I examine the theoretical argument for "cis"-regulatory evolution and its role within evolutionary theorizing. I show that, although the argument has some weaknesses, it acts as a useful example for the importance of current…

The philosophy of biology today is one of the most exciting areas of philosophy. It looks critically across the life sciences, teasing out conceptual issues and difficulties bringing to bear the tools of philosophical analysis to achieve clarification and understanding. This essay surveys work in all of the major directions of research:…

The 42st annual conference of the Adult and Higher Education Alliance (AHEA) was held at the University of Central Florida in March 2018 and explored the theme, "Quality of Life in Adult Learning." The purpose of the Adult and Higher Education Alliance (AHEA) is to help institutions of higher education develop and sustain learning…

Comments on the critiques of Tryon (2009a, this issue) and Cunningham (2009, this issue). These critiques provide an interesting contrast: one favoring greater reductionism and one favoring less. I consider each in turn. Tryon (2009a) again has addressed the issue of mechanisms in these pages (cf. Tryon, 2009b). The concepts of function and…

Comments on a article by Dewsbury (February-March 2009) in which he stated, "Darwin provided a viable mechanism for evolutionary change, natural selection" (p. 67). Although this view is consistent with the modern synthesis, the author argues that (a) the natural selection "mechanism" provided by Darwin was not initially accepted by scientists…

Comments on the special issue on Charles Darwin and psychology (Dewsbury, February-March 2009), in which the authors present evidence supporting the validity of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and how generations of psychologists have viewed the natural world through its light, taking Darwinian theories for granted as being a literal…

Despite much research into mate selection, non-heterosexual populations are often only included for comparison purposes, while trans people and their partners are overlooked. This study attempts to address this using qualitative methodology to explore the mate selection of the partners of trans people. Six participants were recruited from online…

To mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, a special event was held at Oxford, which included a "Conversation" between Professor Richard Dawkins and Bishop Richard Harries. Here we present a personal reminiscence of the event.

Ask most men or women in the street who Charles Darwin was and the chances are that they will know something of the work he did: the work that has revolutionised our understanding of the living world and our place in it. The 200th centenary of his birth was in February 2009. Over the 150 years since the publication of his seminal work On the…

This paper describes a simple, rapid and low-cost technique for growing bacteria (or other microbes) in an environmental gradient, in order to determine the tolerance of the microbial population to varying concentrations of sodium chloride ions, and suggests how the evolutionary response of a microbial population to the selection pressure of the…

Students are rarely presented with a diversity of viewpoints about evolution and its mechanisms. The historical background to evolution normally suffices: Darwin's journey on The Beagle, his concepts of natural selection and common descent, and an outline of Mendel's experiments. With supplementary concepts such as ecological niches and the modes…

In this paper, I argue that characterisations of life through lists of properties have several shortcomings and should be replaced by theory-based accounts that explain the coexistence of a set of properties in living beings. The concept of life should acquire its meaning from its relationships with other concepts inside a theory. I illustrate…

A bioinformatics laboratory exercise based on inherited human morphological traits is presented. It teaches how morphological characters can be used to study the evolutionary history of humans using parsimony. The exercise can easily be used in a pen-and-paper laboratory, but if computers are available, a more versatile analysis can be carried…

As our understanding of learning focuses on the whole person rather than individual aspects of learning, so the process of learning is beginning to be studied from a wide variety of perspectives and disciplines. This handbook presents a comprehensive overview of the contemporary research into learning: it brings together a diverse range of…