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Jean Baudrillard (27 July 1929 – 6 March 2007) (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃� bodʁijaʁ])[2] was

a French sociologist,philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is

frequently associated withpostmodernism and post-structuralism.

[edit]Life

Baudrillard was born in Reims, northeastern France, on July 27, 1929. He told interviewers that his

grandparents werepeasants and his parents were civil servants. During his high school studies at the Reims

Lycée, he came into contact with pataphysics (via the philosophy professor Emmanuel Peillet), which is

said to be crucial for understanding Baudrillard's later thought.[3] He became the first of his family to attend

university when he moved to Paris to attendSorbonne University.[4] There he studied German language and

literature, which led to him to begin teaching the subject at several different lycées, both Parisian and

provincial, from 1960 until 1966.[3] While teaching, Baudrillard began to publish reviews of literature and

translated the works of such authors as Peter Weiss, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and

Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann.[5]

During his time as a teacher of German language and literature, Baudrillard began to transfer to sociology,

eventually completing his doctoral thesis Le Système des objets (The System of Objects) under the

dissertation committee of Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Bourdieu. Subsequently, he began

teaching sociology at the Université de Paris-X Nanterre, a university campus just outside of Paris which

would become heavily involved in the events of May 1968.[6]During this time, Baudrillard worked closely with

Philosopher Humphrey De Battenburge, who described Baudrillard as a "visionary".[7] At Nanterre he took

up a position asMaître Assistant (Assistant Professor), then Maître de Conférences (Associate Professor),

eventually becoming a professor after completing his accreditation, L'Autre par lui-même (The Other by

Himself).

In 1970, Baudrillard made the first of his many trips to the USA (Aspen), and in 1973, the first of several

trips to Japan (Kyoto). He was given his first camera in 1981 in Japan, which led to his becoming a

photographer.[8]

In 1986 he moved to IRIS (Institut de Recherche et d'Information Socio-Économique) at the Université de

Paris-IX Dauphine, where he spent the latter part of his teaching career. During this time he had begun to

move away from sociology as a discipline (particularly in its "classical" form), and, after ceasing to teach full

time, he rarely identified himself with any particular discipline, although he remained linked to the academic

world. During the 1980s and 1990s his books had gained a wide audience, and in his last years he became,

to an extent, an intellectual celebrity,[9] being published often in the French- and English-speaking popular

press. He nonetheless continued supporting the Institut de Recherche sur l'Innovation Sociale at the Centre

National de la Recherche Scientifique and was Satrap at the Collège de Pataphysique. Baudrillard taught at

theEuropean Graduate School in Saas-Fee[10] and collaborated at the Canadian theory, culture and

technology review Ctheory, where he was abundantly cited. In 1999-2000, his photographs were exhibited

at the Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris.[11] In 2004, Baudrillard attended the major

conference on his work, "Baudrillard and the Arts," at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in Karlsruhe,

Germany.[12]

[edit]Core ideas

Baudrillard was a social theorist and critic best known for his analyses of the modes of mediation and

technological communication. His writing, though mostly concerned with the way technological progress

affects social change, covers diverse subjects  — including consumerism, gender relations, the social

understanding of history, journalistic commentaries about AIDS, cloning, the Rushdie affair, the first Gulf

War and the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City.

His published work emerged as part of a generation of French thinkers including Gilles Deleuze, Jean-

François Lyotard,Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan who all shared an interest

in semiotics, and he is often seen as a part of the poststructuralist philosophical school.[13] In common with

many poststructuralists, his arguments consistently draw upon the notion that signification and meaning are

both only understandable in terms of how particular words or "signs" interrelate. Baudrillard thought, as

many post-structuralists, that meaning is brought about through systems of signs working together.

Following on from the structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Baudrillard argued that meaning (value)

is created through difference - through what something is not (so "dog" means "dog" because it is not-"cat",

not-"goat", not-"tree", etc.). In fact, he viewed meaning as near enough self-referential: objects, images of

objects, words and signs are situated in a web of meaning; one object's meaning is only understandable

through its relation to the meaning of other objects; in other words, one thing's prestige relates to another's

mundanity.

From this starting point Baudrillard constructed broad theories of human society based upon this kind of

self-referentiality. His pictures of society portray societies always searching for a sense of meaning  — or a

"total" understanding of the world  — that remains consistently elusive. In contrast to poststructuralists such

as Foucault, for whom the formations of knowledge emerge only as the result of relations of power,

Baudrillard developed theories in which the excessive, fruitless search for total knowledge lead almost

inevitably to a kind of delusion. In Baudrillard's view, the (human) subject may try to understand the (non-

human) object, but because the object can only be understood according to what it signifies (and because

the process of signification immediately involves a web of other signs from which it is distinguished) this

never produces the desired results. The subject, rather, becomes seduced (in the original Latin

sense, seducere, to lead away) by the object. He therefore argued that, in the last analysis, a complete

understanding of the minutiae of human life is impossible, and when people are seduced into thinking

otherwise they become drawn toward a "simulated" version of reality, or, to use one of his neologisms, a

state of "hyperreality." This is not to say that the world becomes unreal, but rather that the faster and more

comprehensively societies begin to bring reality together into one supposedly coherent picture, the more

insecure and unstable it looks and the more fearful societies become.[14] Reality, in this sense, "dies out."[15]

Accordingly, Baudrillard argued that the excess of signs and of meaning in late 20th century "global" society

had caused (quite paradoxically) an effacement of reality. In this world neither liberal nor Marxist utopias are

any longer believed in. We live, he argued, not in a "global village," to useMarshall McLuhan's phrase, but

rather in a world that is ever more easily petrified by even the smallest event. Because the "global" world

operates at the level of the exchange of signs and commodities, it becomes ever more blind

to symbolic acts such as, for example, terrorism. In Baudrillard's work the symbolic realm (which he

develops a perspective on through the anthropological work of Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille) is seen

as quite distinct from that of signs and signification. Signs can be exchanged like commodities; symbols, on

the other hand, operate quite differently: they are exchanged, like gifts, sometimes violently as a form

of potlatch. Baudrillard, particularly in his later work, saw the "global" society as without this "symbolic"

element, and therefore symbolically (if not militarily) defenseless against acts such as the Rushdie

Fatwa[16] or, indeed, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States and its military

establishment (see below).

In 2004, the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies was launched.

[edit]The object value system

In his early books, such as The System of Objects, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign,

and The Consumer Society, Baudrillard's main focus is upon consumerism, and how different objects are

consumed in different ways. At this time Baudrillard's political outlook was loosely associated

with Marxism (and situationism), but in these books he differed from Marx in one significant way. For

Baudrillard, it was consumption, rather than production, which was the main drive in capitalist society.

Baudrillard came to this conclusion by criticising Marx's concept of "use-value." Baudrillard thought that both

Marx's and Adam Smith's economic thought accepted the idea of genuine needs relating to genuine uses

too easily and too simply—despite the fact that Marx did not use the term 'genuine' in relation to needs or

use-values. Baudrillard argued, drawing from Georges Bataille, that needs are constructed, rather than

innate. He stressed that all purchases, because they always signify something socially, have their fetishistic

side. Objects always, drawing from Roland Barthes, "say something" about their users. And this was, for

him, why consumption was and remains more important than production: because the "ideological genesis

of needs"[17] precedes the production of goods to meet those needs.

He wrote that there are four ways of an object obtaining value. The four value-making processes are as

follows:[18]

1. The first is the functional value of an object; its instrumental purpose. A pen, for instance, writes;

and a refrigerator cools.

2. The second is the exchange value of an object; its economic value. One pen may be worth three

pencils; and one refrigerator may be worth the salary earned by three months of work.

3. The third is the symbolic value of an object; a value that a subject assigns to an object in relation to

another subject. A pen might symbolize a student's school graduation gift or a commencement

speaker's gift; or a diamond may be a symbol of publicly declared marital love.

4. The last is the sign value of an object; its value within a system of objects. A particular pen may,

while having no added functional benefit, signify prestige relative to another pen; a diamond ring

may have no function at all, but may suggest particular social values, such as taste or class.

Baudrillard's earlier books were attempts to argue that the first two of these values are not simply

associated, but are disrupted by the third and, particularly, the fourth. Later, Baudrillard rejected Marxism

totally (The Mirror of Production and Symbolic Exchange and Death). But the focus on the difference

between sign value (which relates to commodity exchange) and symbolic value (which relates

to Maussian gift exchange) remained in his work up until his death. Indeed it came to play a more and more

important role, particularly in his writings on world events.

[edit]Simulacra and Simulation

Main article: Simulacra and Simulation

As he developed his work throughout the 1980s, he moved from economically based theory to the

consideration of mediation and mass communications. Although retaining his interest

in Saussurean semiotics and the logic of symbolic exchange (as influenced by anthropologist Marcel

Mauss), Baudrillard turned his attention to Marshall McLuhan, developing ideas about how the nature of

social relations is determined by the forms of communication that a society employs. In so doing,

Baudrillard progressed beyond both Saussure's and Roland Barthes' formal semiology to consider the

implications of a historically understood (and thus formless) version of structural semiology. The concept of

Simulacra [19][20] also involves a negation of the concept of reality as we usually understand it. Baudrillard

argues that today there is no such thing as reality.

Simulation, Baudrillard claims, is the current stage of the simulacrum: All is composed of references with no

referents, a hyperreality. Progressing historically from the Renaissance, in which the dominant simulacrum

was in the form of the counterfeit—mostly people or objects appearing to stand for a real referent (for

instance, royalty, nobility, holiness, etc.) that does not exist, in other words, in the spirit of pretense, in

dissimulating others that a person or a thing does not really "have it" -- to the industrial revolution, in which

the dominant simulacrum is the product, the series, which can be propagated on an endless production line;

and finally to current times, in which the dominant simulacrum is the model, which by its nature already

stands for endless reproducibility, and is itself already reproduced.

Some examples Baudrillard brings up of the simulacrum of the model are: 1) the development of nuclear

weapons as deterrents—useful only in the hyperreal sense, a reference with no real referent, since they are

always meant to be reproducible but are never intended to be used—2) the (former) Twin Towers of the

World Trade Center, which replaced a New York of constantly competing, distinct heights with a singular

model of the ultimate New York building: already doubled, already reproduced, itself a reproduction, a

singular model for all conceivable development, and 3) a menage-a-trois with identical twins where the

fantasy comprises having perfection reproduced in front of your eyes, though the reality behind this

reproduction is nil and impossible to comprehend otherwise, since the twins are still just people. The very

act of perceiving these, Baudrillard insists, is in the tactile sense, since we already assume the

reproducibility of everything, since it is not the reality of these simulations that we imagine (in fact, we no

longer "imagine" in the same sense as before; both the imagined and the real are equally hyperreal, equally

both reproducible and already reproductions themselves), but the reproducibility thereof. We do not imagine

them reproduced for us, since the original image is itself a reproduction—rather, we perceive the model, the

simulation.

[edit]The end of history and meaning

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, one of Baudrillard's most common themes was historicity, or, more

specifically, how present day societies utilise the notions of progress and modernity in their political choices.

He argued, much like the political theorist Francis Fukuyama, that history had ended or "vanished" with the

spread of globalization; but, unlike Fukuyama, Baudrillard averred that this end should not be understood as

the culmination of history's progress, but as the collapse of the very idea of historical progress. For

Baudrillard, the end of the Cold War was not caused by one ideology's victory over the other, but the

disappearance of the utopian visions that both the political Right and Left shared. Giving further evidence of

his opposition toward Marxist visions of global communism and liberal visions of global civil society,

Baudrillard contended that the ends they hoped for had always been illusions; indeed, as his book The

Illusion of the End argued, he thought the idea of an end itself was nothing more than a misguided dream:

The end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history. There are no longer any dustbins

for disposing of old ideologies, old regimes, old values. Where are we going to throw Marxism,

which actually invented the dustbins of history? (Yet there is some justice here since the very

people who invented them have fallen in.) Conclusion: if there are no more dustbins of history, this

is because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin, just as the planet

itself is becoming its own dustbin.[21]

Within a society subject to and ruled by fast-paced electronic communication and global information

networks the collapse of this façade was always going to be, he thought, inevitable. Employing a quasi-

scientific vocabulary that attracted the ire of the physicist Alan Sokal, Baudrillard wrote that the speed

society moved at had destabilized the linearity of history: "we have the particle accelerator that has

smashed the referential orbit of things once and for all."[22]

In making this argument Baudrillard found some affinity with the postmodern philosophy of Jean-

François Lyotard, who famously argued that in the late Twentieth Century there was no longer any

room for "metanarratives." (The triumph of a coming communism being one such metanarrative.) But,

in addition to simply lamenting this collapse of history, Baudrillard also went beyond Lyotard and

attempted to analyse how the idea of forward progress was being employed in spite of the notion's

declining validity. Baudrillard argued that although genuine belief in a universal endpoint of history,

wherein all conflicts would find their resolution, had been deemed redundant, universality was still a

notion utilised in world politics as an excuse for actions. Universal values which, according to him, no

one any longer believed universal were and are still rhetorically employed to justify otherwise

unjustifiable choices. The means, he wrote, are there even though the ends are no longer believed in,

and are employed in order to hide the present's harsh realities (or, as he would have put it, unrealities).

"In the Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forward progress. Today,

by contrast, universalization is expressed as a forward escape."[23]

Ernst Walter Mayr (July 5, 1904 – February 3, 2005)[1][2] was one of the 20th century's leading

evolutionarybiologists. He was also a renowned taxonomist, tropical explorer, ornithologist, historian of

science, and naturalist.[3]His work contributed to the conceptual revolution that led to the modern

evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics,systematics, and Darwinian evolution, and to the

development of the biological species concept.

Neither Charles Darwin nor anyone else in his time knew the answer to the species problem: how

multiple speciescould evolve from a single common ancestor. Ernst Mayr approached the problem

with a new definition for the concept of species. In his book Systematics and the Origin of

Species (1942) he wrote that a species is not just a group of morphologically similar individuals, but a

group that can breed only among themselves, excluding all others. When populations within a species

become isolated by geography, feeding strategy, mate selection, or other means, they may start to

differ from other populations through genetic drift and natural selection, and over time may evolve into

new species. The most significant and rapid genetic reorganization occurs in extremely small

populations that have been isolated (as on islands).

His theory of peripatric speciation (a more precise form of allopatric speciation which he advanced),

based on his work on birds, is still considered a leading mode of speciation, and was the theoretical

underpinning for the theory ofpunctuated equilibrium, proposed by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay

Gould. Mayr is sometimes credited with inventing modern philosophy of biology, particularly the part

related to evolutionary biology, which he distinguished from physics due to its introduction of (natural)

history into science.

Mayr's ideas

As a traditionally trained biologist with little mathematical experience, Mayr was often highly critical of

early mathematical approaches to evolution such as those of J.B.S. Haldane, famously calling in 1959

such approaches "beanbag genetics". He maintained that factors such as reproductive isolation had to

be taken into account. In a similar fashion, Mayr was also quite critical of molecular

evolutionary studies such as those of Carl Woese.

In many of his writings, Mayr rejected reductionism in evolutionary biology, arguing that evolutionary

pressures act on the whole organism, not on single genes, and that genes can have different effects

depending on the other genes present. He advocated a study of the whole genome rather than of

isolated genes only. Current molecular studies in evolution and speciation indicate that

although allopatric speciation seems to be the norm in groups (such as in many invertebrates—

especially in the insects), there are numerous cases of sympatric speciation in groups with greater

mobility (such as the birds).

After articulating the biological species concept in 1942, Mayr played a central role in the species

problem debate over what was the best species concept. He staunchly defended the biological

species concept against the many definitions of "species" that others proposed.

Mayr was an outspoken defender of the scientific method, and one known to sharply critique science

on the edge. As a notable recent example, he criticized the search for aliens as conducted by fellow

Harvard professor Paul Horowitz as being a waste of university and student resources, for its inability

to address and answer a scientific question.

Mayr rejected the idea of a gene-centered view of evolution and starkly but politely criticized Richard

Dawkins' ideas:

The funny thing is if in England, you ask a man in the street who the greatest living Darwinian is, he

will say Richard Dawkins. And indeed, Dawkins has done a marvelous job of popularizing Darwinism.

But Dawkins' basic theory of the gene being the object of evolution is totally non-Darwinian. I would

not call him the greatest Darwinian.[13]

Mayr insisted throughout his career that the gene as the target of selection cannot and should not be

considered a valid idea in modern evolutionary thought.

The idea that a few people have about the gene being the target of selection is completely impractical;

a gene is never visible to natural selection, and in the genotype, it is always in the context with other

genes, and the interaction with those other genes make a particular gene either more favorable or less

favorable. In fact, Dobzhanksy, for instance, worked quite a bit on so-called lethal chromosomes which

are highly successful in one combination, and lethal in another. Therefore people like Dawkins in

England who still think the gene is the target of selection are evidently wrong. In the 30s and 40s, it

was widely accepted that genes were the target of selection, because that was the only way they

could be made accessible to mathematics, but now we know that it is really the whole genotype of the

individual, not the gene. Except for that slight revision, the basic Darwinian theory hasn't changed in

the last 50 years.[13]

Mayr also had reservations about evolution:

"It must be admitted, however, that it is a considerable strain on one’s credulity to assume that finely

balanced systems such as certain sense organs (the eye of vertebrates, or the bird’s feather) could be

improved by random mutations." [14]

GOULDControversies

Gould received many accolades for his scholarly work and popular expositions of natural history,[14]

[50] but was not immune from criticism by those in the biological community who felt his public

presentations were, for various reasons, out of step with mainstream evolutionary theory.[51] The public

debates between Gould's supporters and detractors have been so quarrelsome that they have been

dubbed "The Darwin Wars" by several commentators.[52][53][54][55]

John Maynard Smith, an eminent British evolutionary biologist, was among Gould's strongest critics.

Maynard Smith thought that Gould misjudged the vital role of adaptation in biology, and was also

critical of Gould's acceptance of species selection as a major component of biological evolution.[56] In a

review of Daniel Dennett's book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Maynard Smith wrote that Gould "is giving

non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory."[57] But Maynard Smith has not

been consistently negative, writing in a review of The Panda's Thumb that "Stephen Gould is the best

writer of popular science now active. . . . Often he infuriates me, but I hope he will go right on writing

essays like these."[58] Maynard Smith was also among those who welcomed Gould's reinvigoration of

evolutionary paleontology.[20]

One reason for such criticism was that Gould appeared to be presenting his ideas as a revolutionary

way of understanding evolution, and argued for the importance of mechanisms other than natural

selection, mechanisms which he believed had been ignored by many professional evolutionists. As a

result, many non-specialists sometimes inferred from his early writings that Darwinian explanations

had been proven to be unscientific (which Gould never tried to imply). Along with many other

researchers in the field, Gould's works were sometimes deliberately taken out of context

by creationists as a "proof" that scientists no longer understood how organisms evolved.[59] Gould

himself corrected some of these misinterpretations and distortions of his writings in later works.[60]

Gould also disagreed with Richard Dawkins over the importance of gene selection in evolution.

Dawkins argued that evolution is best understood as competition among genes (or replicators), while

Gould advocated the importance of multi-level selection, including selection amongst genes, cell

lineages, organisms, demes, species, andclades.[55] Criticism of Gould and his theory of punctuated

equilibrium can be found in chapter 9 of Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker and chapter 10 of

Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Dawkins subsequently offered a concession via an endnote in a

new edition of his book The Selfish Gene, where he states:

p.86 Progressive evolution may be not so much a steady upward climb as a series of discrete steps

from stable plateau to stable plateau

This paragraph is a fair summary of one way of expressing the now well-known theory of punctuated

equilibrium. I am ashamed to say that, when I wrote my conjecture, I, like many biologists in England

at the time, was totally ignorant of that theory, although it had been published three years earlier. I

have since, for instance in The Blind Watchmaker, become somewhat petulant - perhaps too much so

- over the way the theory of punctuated equilibrium has been oversold. If this has hurt anybody's

feelings, I regret it. They may like to note that, at least in 1976, my heart was in the right place.[61]

[edit]Opposition to sociobiology and evolutionary psychology

Gould also had a long-running public feud with E. O. Wilson and other evolutionary biologists

over human sociobiology and its later descendant evolutionary psychology(which Gould, Lewontin,

and Maynard Smith opposed, but which Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Steven

Pinker advocated).[62] These debates reached their climax in the 1970s, and included strong opposition

from groups like the Sociobiology Study Group and Science for the People.[63] Pinker accuses Gould,

Lewontin, and other opponents of evolutionary psychology of being "radical scientists," whose stance

on human nature is influenced by politics rather than science.[64] Gould stated that he made "no

attribution of motive in Wilson's or anyone else's case" but cautioned that all human beings are

influenced, especially unconsciously, by our personal expectations and biases. He wrote:

I grew up in a family with a tradition of participation in campaigns for social justice, and I was active, as

a student, in the civil rights movement at a time of great excitement and success in the early 1960s.

Scholars are often wary of citing such commitments. … [but] it is dangerous for a scholar even to

imagine that he might attain complete neutrality, for then one stops being vigilant about personal

preferences and their influences—and then one truly falls victim to the dictates of prejudice. Objectivity

must be operationally defined as fair treatment of data, not absence of preference.[65]

Gould's primary criticism held that human sociobiological explanations lacked evidential support, and

argued that adaptive behaviors are frequently assumed to be genetic for no other reason than their

supposed universality, or their adaptive nature. Gould emphasized that adaptive behaviors can be

passed on through culture as well, and either hypothesis is equally plausible.[66] Gould did not deny the

relevance of biology to human nature, but reframed the debate as "biological potentiality vs. biological

determinism." Gould stated that the human brain allows for a wide range of behaviors. Its flexibility

"permits us to be aggressive or peaceful, dominant or submissive, spiteful or generous… Violence,

sexism, and general nastiness are biological since they represent one subset of a possible range of

behaviors. But peacefulness, equality, and kindness are just as biological—and we may see their

influence increase if we can create social structures that permit them to flourish."[66]

MEANING OF LIFE

The meaning of life constitutes a philosophical question concerning

the purpose and significance oflife or existence in general. This concept can be expressed through a

variety of related questions, such as "Why are we here?", "What is life all about?", and "What is the

meaning of it all?" It has been the subject of much philosophical, scientific, and theological speculation

throughout history. There have been a large number of theories to these questions from many

different cultural and ideologicalbackgrounds.

The meaning of life is deeply mixed with the philosophical and religious conceptions

of existence, social ties, consciousness, and happiness, and touches many other issues, such

as symbolic meaning,ontology, value, purpose, ethics, good and evil, free will, conceptions of God,

the existence of God, thesoul, and the afterlife. Scientific contributions focus more on describing

related empirical facts about theuniverse; they largely shift the question from "why?" to "how?" and

provide context and parameters for meaningful conversations on such topics. Science also provides its

own recommendations for the pursuit of well-being and a related conception of morality. An

alternative,humanistic (rather than religious) approach is the question "What is the meaning

of my life?" The value of the question pertaining to the purpose of life may coincide with the

achievement of ultimate reality, or a feeling of oneness, or a feeling of sacredness.

20th century philosophy

Further information: 20th century philosophy

The current era has seen radical changes in conceptions of human nature. Modern science has

effectively rewritten the relationship of humankind to the natural world, advances in medicine and

technology have freed us from the limitations and ailments of previous eras, and philosophy—

particularly following the linguistic turn—altered how the relationships people have with themselves

and each other is conceived. Questions about the meaning of life have seen equally radical changes,

from attempts to reevaluate human existence in biological and scientific terms (as

in pragmatism and logical positivism), to efforts to meta-theorize about meaning-making as an activity

(existentialism, secular humanism).

[edit]Pragmatism

Pragmatism, originated in the late-19th-century U.S., to concern itself (mostly) with truth, positing that

"only in struggling with the environment" do data, and derived theories, have meaning, and

that consequences, like utility and practicality, are also components of truth. Moreover, pragmatism

posits that anything useful and practical is not always true, arguing that what most contributes to the

most human good in the long course is true. In practice, theoretical claims must be practically

verifiable, i.e. one should be able to predict and test claims, and, that, ultimately, the needs of mankind

should guide human intellectual inquiry.

Pragmatic philosophers suggest that the practical, useful understanding of life is more important than

searching for an impractical abstract truth about life. William Jamesargued that truth could be made,

but not sought.[35][36] To a pragmatist, the meaning of life is discoverable only via experience.

[edit]Existentialism

Main article: Meaning (existential)

Edvard Munch's The Scream, a representation of existential angst.

Each man and each woman creates the essence (meaning) of his and her life; life is not determined

by a supernatural god or an earthly authority, one is free. As such, one's ethical prime directives

are action, freedom, and decision, thus, existentialism opposes rationalismand positivism. In seeking

meaning to life, the existentialist looks to where people find meaning in life, in course of which using

only reason as a source of meaning is insufficient; the insufficiency gives rise to the emotions

of anxiety and dread, felt in facing one's radicalfreedom, and the concomitant awareness of death. To

the existentialist, existence precedes essence; the (essence) of one's life arisesonly after one comes

to existence.

Søren Kierkegaard coined the term "leap of faith", arguing that life is full of absurdity, and one must

make his and her own values in an indifferent world. One can live meaningfully (free of despair and

anxiety) in an unconditional commitment to something finite, and devotes that meaningful life to the

commitment, despite the vulnerability inherent to doing so.[37]

Arthur Schopenhauer answered: "What is the meaning of life?" by determining that one's life reflects

one's will, and that the will (life) is an aimless, irrational, and painful drive. Salvation, deliverance, and

escape from suffering are in aesthetic contemplation, sympathy for others, and asceticism.[38][39]

For Friedrich Nietzsche, life is worth living only if there are goals inspiring one to live. Accordingly, he

saw nihilism ("all that happens is meaningless") as without goals. He discredited asceticism, because

it denies one's living in the world; denied that values are objective facts, that are rationally necessary,

universally binding commitments: Our evaluations are interpretations, and not reflections of the world,

as it is, in itself, and, therefore, all ideations take place from a particular perspective.[31]

[edit]Absurdism

Main article: Absurdism

"... in spite of or in defiance of the whole of existence he wills to be himself with it, to take it along, almost defying

his torment. For to hope in the possibility of help, not to speak of help by virtue of the absurd, that for God all

things are possible – no, that he will not do. And as for seeking help from any other – no, that he will not do for all

the world; rather than seek help he would prefer to be himself – with all the tortures of hell, if so it must be."

Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death [40]

In absurdist philosophy, the Absurd arises out of the fundamental disharmony between the individual's

search for meaning and the apparent meaninglessness of the universe. As beings looking for meaning

in a meaningless world, humans have three ways of resolving the dilemma. Kierkegaard and Camus

describe the solutions in their works,The Sickness Unto Death (1849) and The Myth of

Sisyphus (1942):

Suicide  (or, "escaping existence"): a solution in which a person simply ends one's own life. Both

Kierkegaard and Camus dismiss the viability of this option.

Religious  belief in a transcendent realm or being: a solution in which one believes in the existence

of a reality that is beyond the Absurd, and, as such, has meaning. Kierkegaard stated that a belief

in anything beyond the Absurd requires a non-rational but perhaps necessary religious

acceptance in such an intangible and empirically unprovable thing (now commonly referred to as a

"leap of faith"). However, Camus regarded this solution as "philosophical suicide".

Acceptance of the Absurd: a solution in which one accepts and even embraces the Absurd and

continues to live in spite of it. Camus endorsed this solution, while Kierkegaard regarded this

solution as "demoniac madness": "He rages most of all at the thought that eternity might get it into

its head to take his misery from him!"[41]

[edit]Secular humanism

Further information: Secular Humanism

The "Happy Human" symbol representing Secular Humanism.

Per secular humanism, the human race came to be by reproducing in a progression of

unguided evolution as an integral part of nature, which is self-existing.[42][43] Knowledge does not come

from supernatural sources, but from human observation, experimentation, and rational analysis

(the scientific method): the nature of the universe is what people discern it to be.[42] Likewise,

"values and realities" are determined "by means of intelligent inquiry"[42] and "are derived from human

need and interest as tested by experience", that is, by critical intelligence.[44][45] "As far as we know, the

total personality is [a function] of the biological organism transacting in a social and cultural context."[43]

People determine human purpose, without supernatural influence; it is the human personality (general

sense) that is the purpose of a human being's life; humanism seeks to develop and fulfill:[42] "Humanism affirms our ability, and responsibility, to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that

aspire to the greater good of humanity".[44] Humanism aims to promote enlightened self-interest and

the common good for all people. It is based on the premises that the happiness of the individual

person is inextricably linked to the well-being of humanity, as a whole, in part, because humans are

social animals, who find meaning in personal relations, and because cultural progress benefits

everybody living in the culture.[43][44]

The philosophical sub-genres posthumanism and transhumanism (sometimes used synonymously)

are extensions of humanistic values. One should seek the advancement of humanity and of all life to

the greatest degree feasible, to reconcile Renaissance humanism with the 21st

century's technoscientific culture, thus, every living creature has the right to determine its personal and

social "meaning of life".[46]

From a humanistic-psychotherapeutic point of view, the question of the meaning of life could also be

reinterpreted as "What is the meaning of my life?"[47] Instead of becoming focused on cosmic or

religious questions about overarching purpose, this approach suggests that the question is intensely

personal. There are many therapeutic responses to this question, for example Viktor Frankl argues for

"Dereflection", which largely translates as ceasing to endlessly reflect on the self, instead of engaging

in life. On the whole, the therapeutic response is that the question of meaning of life evaporates if one

is fully engaged in life. The question then morphs into more specific worries such as "What delusions

am I under?", "What is blocking my ability to enjoy things?", "Why do I neglect loved-ones?". See

also: Existential Therapy and Irvin Yalom

[edit]Logical positivism

Logical positivists ask: "What is the meaning of life?", "What is the meaning in asking?"[48][49] and "If

there are no objective values, then, is life meaningless?"[50] Ludwig Wittgenstein and the logical

positivists said:[citation needed] "Expressed in language, the question is meaningless"; because, in life the

statement the "meaning of x", usually denotes the consequences of x, or the significance of x, or what

is notable about x, etc., thus, when the meaning of life concept equals "x", in the statement the

"meaning of x", the statement becomes recursive, and, therefore, nonsensical, or it might refer to the

fact that biological life is essential to having a meaning in life.

The things (people, events) in the life of a person can have meaning (importance) as parts of a whole,

but a discrete meaning of (the) life, itself, aside from those things, cannot be discerned. A person's life

has meaning (for himself, others) as the life events resulting from his achievements, legacy, family,

etc., but, to say that life, itself, has meaning, is a misuse of language, since any note of significance, or

of consequence, is relevant only in life (to the living), so rendering the statement erroneous. Bertrand

Russell wrote that although he found that his distaste for torture was not like his distaste for broccoli,

he found no satisfactory, empirical method of proving this:[26]

When we try to be definite, as to what we mean when we say that this or that is "the Good," we find

ourselves involved in very great difficulties. Bentham's creed, that pleasure is the Good, roused furious

opposition, and was said to be a pig's philosophy. Neither he nor his opponents could advance any

argument. In a scientific question, evidence can be adduced on both sides, and, in the end, one side is

seen to have the better case — or, if this does not happen, the question is left undecided. But in a

question, as to whether this, or that, is the ultimate Good, there is no evidence, either way; each

disputant can only appeal to his own emotions, and employ such rhetorical devices as shall rouse

similar emotions in others ... Questions as to "values" — that is to say, as to what is good or bad on its

own account, independently of its effects — lie outside the domain of science, as the defenders of

religion emphatically assert. I think that, in this, they are right, but, I draw the further conclusion, which

they do not draw, that questions as to "values" lie wholly outside the domain of knowledge. That is to

say, when we assert that this, or that, has "value", we are giving expression to our own emotions, not

to a fact, which would still be true if our personal feelings were different.[51]

[edit]Postmodernism

Further information: Postmodernism

Postmodernist thought—broadly speaking—sees human nature as constructed by language, or by

structures and institutions of human society. Unlike other forms of philosophy, postmodernism rarely

seeks out a priori or innate meanings in human existence, but instead focuses on analyzing or

critiquing given meanings in order to rationalize or reconstruct them. Anything resembling a "meaning

of life", in postmodernist terms, can only be understood within a social and linguistic framework, and

must be pursued as an escape from the power structures that are already embedded in all forms of

speech and interaction. As a rule, postmodernists see awareness of the constraints of language as

necessary to escaping those constraints, but different theorists take different views on the nature of

this process: from radical reconstruction of meaning by individuals (as in deconstructionism) to

theories in which individuals are primarily extensions of language and society, without real autonomy

(as inpoststructuralism). In general, postmodernism seeks meaning by looking at the underlying

structures that create or impose meaning, rather than the epiphenomenalappearances of the world.

[edit]Evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychology holds that the ultimate meaning of life is to seek the fulfillment of the

human instincts, and that all actions in life are results of instincts and in particular reproductive needs.

Evolutionary psychology (EP) (intro) is an approach in the social and natural sciences that

examines psychological traits such asmemory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary

perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations, that is, the

functional products of natural selection or sexual selection. Adaptationist thinking about physiological

mechanisms, such as the heart, lungs, and immune system, is common in evolutionary biology.

Evolutionary psychology applies the same thinking to psychology, arguing that the mind has a modular

structure similar to that of the body, with different modular adaptations serving different functions.

Evolutionary psychologists argue that much of human behavior is the output of psychological

adaptations that evolved to solve recurrent problems in human ancestral environments.[1]

The adaptationist approach is steadily increasing as an influence in the general field of psychology.[2][3]

Evolutionary psychologists suggest that EP is not simply a subdiscipline of psychology but that

evolutionary theory can provide a foundational, metatheoretical framework that integrates the entire

field of psychology, in the same way it has for biology.[4][5]

Evolutionary psychologists hold that behaviors or traits that occur universally in all cultures are good

candidates for evolutionary adaptations[3] including the abilities to infer others' emotions, discern kin

from non-kin, identify and prefer healthier mates, and cooperate with others. They report successful

tests of theoretical predictions related to such topics as infanticide, intelligence, marriage patterns,

promiscuity, perception of beauty, bride price and parental investment.[6]

The theories and findings of EP have applications in many fields,

including economics, law, psychiatry, politics, andliterature.[7][8]

Controversies concerning EP involve questions of testability, cognitive and evolutionary assumptions

(such as modular functioning of the brain or the ancestral environment), importance of non-genetic

and non-adaptive explanations, as well as political and ethical issues due to interpretations of research

results.[9]

The modern evolutionary synthesis (intro) is a union of ideas from several biological specialties

which provides a widely accepted account of evolution. It is also referred to as the new synthesis,

the modern synthesis, the evolutionary synthesis,millennium synthesis and the neo-darwinian

synthesis.

The synthesis, produced between 1936 and 1947, reflects the current consensus.[1] The previous

development of population genetics, between 1918 and 1932, was a stimulus, as it showed that

Mendelian genetics was consistent with natural selection and gradual evolution. The synthesis is still,

to a large extent, the current paradigm in evolutionary biology.[2]

The modern synthesis solved difficulties and confusions caused by the specialisation and poor

communication between biologists in the early years of the 20th century. At its heart was the question

of whether Mendelian genetics could be reconciled with gradual evolution by means of natural

selection. A second issue was whether the broad-scale changes (macroevolution) seen by

palaeontologists could be explained by changes seen in local populations (microevolution).

The synthesis included evidence from biologists, trained in genetics, who studied populations in the

field and in the laboratory. These studies were crucial to evolutionary theory. The synthesis drew

together ideas from several branches of biology which had become separated,

particularly genetics, cytology, systematics, botany, morphology, ecology and paleontology.

Julian Huxley invented the term, when he produced his book, Evolution: The Modern

Synthesis (1942). Other major figures in the modern synthesis include R. A. Fisher, Theodosius

Dobzhansky, J. B. S. Haldane, Sewall Wright, E. B. Ford, Ernst Mayr,Bernhard Rensch, Sergei

Chetverikov, George Gaylord Simpson, and G. Ledyard Stebbins.

[edit]Naturalistic pantheism

According to naturalistic pantheism, the meaning of life is to care for and look after nature and the

environment.

[edit]Eglis Observation

This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this section by

adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may

be challenged and removed. (November 2011)

The physicist David Egli proposes an Observation that there are only two possibilities for the meaning

of life:

1. Everything is the product of coincidence.

2. There is a higher power or, if you want to call it like this, a God who is behind some of the

coincidences, and not everything is coincidence.

The first case leads to Absurdism, meaning that nothing makes sense at all, because coincidences

never make sense. This would mean that every life of every human being is senseless. Also things like

love or preserving human life or a good conscience.

In the second case, the question remains of what nature this God is in order to speculate what the

meaning of life could be. If this God is a person, it implies, that the meaning of life is, what this God

intends it to be. In this case it is also natural to suppose that all life came into existence by intention of

that God. It then is quite obvious, that the meaning of life must have something to do with this God, or

that even He himself is the meaning of life. But still the question of the character of that God remains.

The first conclusion could be that God is a devil because of all the terrible things in this world. But

there are also things in this world only a loving and holy God would create like love, forgiveness,

mercy, grace, joy, beauty, nature. Suppose God is evil, then the meaning of live would be to be evil. It

is quite natural to conclude that this can't be the meaning of life, and if it would be, life would not be

worth living, and therefore the conclusion is that God is perfectly good and there is absolutely no evil in

the character of God, because otherwise God would still be evil. But if God is absolutely good, why

does He expose man to evil, or what is the meaning of this life where both the good and the evil

coexist? Obviously if God is perfectly good, then the evil cannot be the final thing, but still the evil is

here, why? If we think further, even we ourselves are evil, because we all do evil things everyday. So if

we are evil and God is perfectly good, it is obvious that God wants to deliver us from evil, but there

must be a purpose in creating us evil first. If God is perfectly good, He wants us to love him. But love is

based on free will. A robot cannot have true love. Therefore love cannot exist, if there is not the

possibility for hatred. Even our love will be proven the most, if we love in spite of evil. Like the love of

Jesus for God and mankind in spite of his crucifixion. It seems natural, that the meaning of life is to

choose. Either choose evil or either choose love and good. In this case the meaning of life is to choose

the good in spite of evil. If God is perfectly good, then the good is actually God. This means the sense

of life is to choose God in spite of evil. This also explains the purpose of evil. The purpose of evil is to

prove and mature our love and our mercy.

Scientific inquiry and perspectives

DNA, the substance containing the genetic instructions for the development and functioning of all knownliving

organisms.

Members of the scientific community and philosophy-of-science communities believe that science may

be able to provide some context, and set some parameters for conversations on topics related to

meaning in life. This includes offering insights from the science of happiness or studies of death

anxiety. This also means providing context for, and understanding of life itself through explorations of

the theories related to the big bang, abiogenesis and evolution.

[edit]Psychological significance and value in life

Science may or may not be able to tell us what is of essential value in life (and various materialist

philosophies such as dialectical materialism challenge the very idea of an absolute value or meaning

of life), but some studies definitely bear on aspects of the question: researchers in positive

psychology (and, earlier and less rigorously, in humanistic psychology) study factors that lead to life

satisfaction,[90]full engagement in activities,[91] making a fuller contribution by utilizing one's personal

strengths,[92] and meaning based on investing in something larger than the self.[93]

One value system suggested by social psychologists, broadly called Terror Management Theory,

states that all human meaning is derived out of a fundamental fear of death, whereby values are

selected when they allow us to escape the mental reminder of death.

Neuroscience has produced theories of reward, pleasure, and motivation in terms of physical entities

such as neurotransmitter activity, especially in the limbic system and the ventral tegmental area in

particular. If one believes that the meaning of life is to maximize pleasure, then these theories give

normative predictions about how to act to achieve this. Likewise, some ethical naturalists advocate

a science of morality - the empirical pursuit of flourishing for all conscious creatures.

Sociology examines value at a social level using theoretical constructs such as value theory,

norms, anomie, etc.

[edit]Origin and nature of biological life

The exact mechanisms of abiogenesis are unknown: notable theories include the RNA world

hypothesis (RNA-based replicators) and theiron-sulfur world theory (metabolism without genetics). The

theory of evolution does not attempt to explain the origin of life but the process by which different

lifeforms have developed throughout history via genetic mutation and natural selection.[94] At the end of

the 20th century, based upon insight gleaned from the gene-centered view of evolution,

biologists George C. Williams, Richard Dawkins, David Haig, among others, conclude that if there is a

primary function to life, it is the replication of DNA and the survival of one's genes.[95][96]

However, though scientists have intensively studied life on Earth, defining life in unequivocal terms is

still a challenge.[97][98] Physically, one may say that life "feeds onnegative entropy"[99][100] which refers to

the process by which living entities decrease their internal entropy at the expense of some form

of energy taken in from the environment.[101][102] Biologists generally agree that lifeforms are self-

organizing systems regulating the internal environment as to maintain this organized

state,metabolism serves to provide energy, and reproduction causes life to continue over a span of

multiple generations. Typically, organisms are responsive to stimuli and genetic information tends to

change from generation to generation resulting in adaptation through evolution, these characteristics

optimizing the chances of survival for the individual organism and its descendants respectively.[103]

Non-cellular replicating agents, notably viruses, are generally not considered to be organisms because

they are incapable of "independent" reproduction or metabolism. This controversy is problematic,

though, since some parasites and endosymbionts are also incapable of independent

life. Astrobiology studies the possibility of different forms of life on other worlds, such as replicating

structures made from materials other than DNA.

[edit]Origins and ultimate fate of the universe

The metric expansion of space. The inflationary epoch is the expansion of the metric tensor at left.

Though the Big Bang model was met with much skepticism when first introduced, partially because it

appears to contradict some models of the religious concept of creation, it has become well-supported

by several independent observations.[104] However, current physics can only describe the early

universe from 10−43 seconds after the Big Bang (where zero time corresponds to infinite temperature);

a theory of quantum gravity would be required to go further back in time. Nevertheless, many

physicists have speculated about what would have preceded this limit, and how the universe came

into being.[105] Some physicists think that the Big Bang occurred coincidentally, and when considering

the anthropic principle, it is most often interpreted as implying the existence of a multiverse.[106]

The ultimate fate of the universe, and implicitly humanity, is hypothesized as one in which biological

life will eventually become unsustainable, be it through a Big Freeze, Big Rip, or Big Crunch. However,

there are conceivable ways in which these fates can be avoided, as it may be possible given

sufficiently advanced technology to survive indefinitely by directing the flow of energy on a cosmic

scale and altering the fate of the universe.[105][page needed]

[edit]Scientific questions about the mind

The true nature and origin of consciousness and the mind itself are also widely debated in science.

The explanatory gap is generally equated with the hard problem of consciousness, and the question

of free will is also considered to be of fundamental importance. These subjects are mostly addressed

in the fields of cognitive science,neuroscience (e.g. the neuroscience of free will) and philosophy of

mind, though some evolutionary biologists and theoretical physicists have also made several allusions

to the subject.[107][108]

Hieronymus Bosch's Ascent of the Blessed depicts a tunnel of light and spiritual figures, often described in reports

ofnear-death experiences.

Reductionistic and eliminative materialistic approaches, for example the Multiple Drafts Model, hold

that consciousness can be wholly explained by neuroscience through the workings of the brain and

its neurons, thus adhering to biological naturalism.[108][109][110]

On the other hand, some scientists, like Andrei Linde, have considered that consciousness, like

spacetime, might have its own intrinsic degrees of freedom, and that one's perceptions may be as real

as (or even more real than) material objects.[111] Hypotheses of consciousness and spacetime explain

consciousness in describing a "space of conscious elements",[111] often encompassing a number of

extra dimensions.[112] Electromagnetic theories of consciousness solve the binding problem of

consciousness in saying that the electromagnetic field generated by the brain is the actual carrier of

conscious experience, there is however disagreement about the implementations of such a theory

relating to other workings of the mind.[113][114] Quantum mind theories use quantum theory in explaining

certain properties of the mind. Explaining the process of free will through quantum phenomena is a

popular alternative todeterminism, such postulations may variously relate free will to quantum

fluctuations,[115] quantum amplification,[116] quantum potential[115] and quantum probability.[117]

Based on the premises of non-materialistic explanations of the mind, some have suggested the

existence of a cosmic consciousness, asserting that consciousness is actually the "ground of all

being".[15][116][118] Proponents of this view cite accounts of paranormalphenomena,

primarily extrasensory perceptions and psychic powers, as evidence for an incorporeal higher

consciousness. In hopes of proving the existence of these phenomena, parapsychologists have

orchestrated various experiments. Meta-analyses of these experiments indicate that the effect size

(though very small) has been relatively consistent, resulting in an overall statistical significance.[119][120]

[121] Although some critical analysts feel that parapsychological study is scientific, they are not satisfied

with its experimental results.[122][123] Skeptical reviewers contend that apparently successful results are

more likely due to sloppy procedures, poorly trained researchers, or methodological flaws than to

actual effects.[124][125][126][127]

[edit]In popular culture

Charles Allan Gilbert's All is Vanity,an example of vanitas,depicts a youngwoman gazing at her reflection in

a mirror, but all is positioned in such a way as to make the image of a skullappear.

The mystery of life and its meaning is an often recurring subject in popular culture, featured

in entertainment media and various forms ofart.

In Douglas Adams' popular comedy book, movie, television, and radio series The Hitchhiker's Guide to

the Galaxy, the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is given the

numeric solution "42", after seven and a half million years of calculation by a

giant supercomputer called Deep Thought. When this answer is met with confusion and anger from

humanity, Deep Thought explains that "I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've

never actually known what the question is."[5][7][11][128] In the continuation of the book, the question is

proposed to be the song of Bob Dylan "How many roads must a man walk down, before you can call

him a man.". The book later states that the question is 6x9 which of course does not equal 42 and

does in fact answer 54. Coincidentally, in the genealogy of Jesus from Matthew 1 in the Christian Bible

states that there were 42 generations from Abraham to Jesus.

Hamlet with Yorick's skull

In Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, there are several allusions to the meaning of life. At the end of

the film, a character played by Michael Palin is handed an envelope containing "the meaning of life",

which he opens and reads out to the audience: "Well, it's nothing very special. Uh, try to be nice to

people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try to live

together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations."[129][130][131] Many other Python

sketches and songs are also existential in nature, questioning the importance we place on life

("Always Look on the Bright Side of Life") and other meaning-of-life related questioning. John Cleese

also had his sit-com character Basil Fawlty contemplating the futility of his own existence in Fawlty

Towers.

In The Simpsons episode "Homer the Heretic", a representation of God agrees to tell Homer what the

meaning of life is, but the show's credits begin to roll just as he starts to say what it is.[132]

Sociocultural evolution(ism) is an umbrella term for theories of cultural evolution and social

evolution, describing how culturesand societies have changed over time. Note that "sociocultural

evolution" is not an equivalent of "sociocultural development" (unified processes of differentiation and

integration involving increases in sociocultural complexity), as sociocultural evolution also

encompasses sociocultural transformations accompanied by decreases of complexity (degeneration)

as well as ones not accompanied by any significant changes of sociocultural complexity

(cladogenesis).[1] Thus, sociocultural evolution can be defined as "the process by which structural

reorganization is affected through time, eventually producing a form or structure which is qualitatively

different from the ancestral form.

Most 19th century and some 20th century approaches aimed to provide models for the evolution

of humankind as a whole, arguing that different societies are at different stages of social development.

The most comprehensive attempt to develop a general theory of social evolution centering on the

development of socio-cultural systems was done by Talcott Parsons on a scale which included a

theory of world-history. Another attempt both on a less systematic scale was attempted by World

System approach.

Many of the more recent 20th-century approaches focus on changes specific to individual societies

and reject the idea of directional change, or social progress. Most archaeologists and cultural

anthropologists work within the framework of modern theories of sociocultural evolution. Modern

approaches to sociocultural evolution include neoevolutionism, sociobiology, the theory of

modernization and the theory of postindustrial society.

Sociobiology

Main article: Sociobiology

Sociobiology departs perhaps the furthest from classical social evolutionism.[20] It was introduced

by Edward Wilson in his 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis and followed his adaptation of

evolutionary theory to the field of social sciences. Wilson pioneered the attempt to explain the

evolutionary mechanics behind social behaviours such as altruism, aggression, and nurturance.[20] In

doing so, Wilson sparked one of the greatest scientific controversies of the 20th century.[20]

The current theory of evolution, the modern evolutionary synthesis (or neo-darwinism), explains

that evolution of species occurs through a combination of Darwin's mechanism of natural

selection and Gregor Mendel's theory of genetics as the basis for biological inheritance and

mathematical population genetics.[20] Essentially, the modern synthesis introduced the connection

between two important discoveries; the units of evolution (genes) with the main mechanism of

evolution (selection).[20]

Due to its close reliance on biology, sociobiology is often considered a branch of the biology and

sociology disciplines, although it uses techniques from a plethora of sciences,

including ethology, evolution, zoology, archaeology, population genetics, and many others. Within the

study of human societies, sociobiology is closely related to the fields of human behavioral

ecology and evolutionary psychology.

Sociobiology has remained highly controversial as it contends genes explain specific human

behaviours, although sociobiologists describe this role as a very complex and often unpredictable

interaction between nature and nurture. The most notable critics of the view that genes play a direct

role in human behaviour have been biologists Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould.

Since the rise of evolutionary psychology, another school of thought, Dual Inheritance Theory, has

emerged in the past 25 years that applies the mathematical standards ofPopulation genetics to

modeling the adaptive and selective principles of culture. This school of thought was pioneered

by Robert Boyd at UCLA and Peter Richerson at UC Davis and expanded by William Wimsatt, among

others. Boyd and Richerson's book, Culture and the Evolutionary Process (1985),[6] was a highly

mathematical description of cultural change, later published in a more accessible form in Not by

Genes Alone (2004). [7] In Boyd and Richerson's view, cultural evolution, operating on socially learned

information, exists on a separate but co-evolutionary track from genetic evolution, and while the two

are related, cultural evolution is more dynamic, rapid, and influential on human society than genetic

evolution. Dual Inheritance Theory has the benefit of providing unifying territory for a "nature and

nurture" paradigm and accounts for more accurate phenomenon in evolutionary theory applied to

culture, such as randomness effects (drift), concentration dependency, "fidelity" of evolving information

systems, and lateral transmission through communication.[21]

Contemporary discourse about sociocultural evolution

The Cold War period was marked by rivalry between two superpowers, both of which considered

themselves to be the most highly evolved cultures on the planet. The USSR painted itself as

a socialistsociety which emerged out of class struggle, destined to reach the state of communism,

while sociologists in the United States (such as Talcott Parsons) argued that the freedom and

prosperity of the United States were a proof of a higher level of sociocultural evolution of its culture

and society. At the same time, decolonization created newly independent countries who sought to

become more developed—-a model of progress and industrialization which was itself a form of

sociocultural evolution.

There is, however, a tradition in European social theory from Rousseau to Max Weber arguing that

this progression coincides with a loss of human freedom and dignity. At the height of the Cold War,

this tradition merged with an interest in ecology to influence an activist culture in the 1960s. This

movement produced a variety of political and philosophical programs which emphasized the

importance of bringing society and the environment into harmony.

Current political theories of the new tribalists consciously mimic ecology and the life-ways

of indigenous peoples, augmenting them with modern sciences. Ecoregional Democracy attempts to

confine the "shifting groups", or tribes, within "more or less clear boundaries" that a society inherits

from the surrounding ecology, to the borders of a naturally occurring ecoregion.

Progress can proceed by competition between but not within tribes, and it is limited by ecological

borders or by Natural Capitalism incentives which attempt to mimic the pressure of natural

selection on a human society by forcing it to adapt consciously to scarce energy or

materials. Gaians argue that societies evolve deterministically to play a role in the ecology of

their biosphere, or else die off as failures due to competition from more efficient societies exploiting

nature's leverage.

Thus, some have appealed to theories of sociocultural evolution to assert that optimizing the ecology

and the social harmony of closely knit groups is more desirable or necessary than the progression to

"civilization." A 2002 poll of experts on Neoarctic and Neotropic indigenous peoples (reported

in Harper's magazine) revealed that all of them would have preferred to be a typical New World person

in the year 1491, prior to any European contact, rather than a typical European of that time.

This approach has been criticised by pointing out that there are a number of historical examples of

indigenous peoples doing severe environmental damage (such as thedeforestation of Easter

Island and the extinction of mammoths in North America) and that proponents of the goal have been

trapped by the European stereotype of the noble savage.

Today, postmodernists question whether the notions of evolution or society have inherent meaning

and whether they reveal more about the person doing the description than the thing being described.

Observing and observed cultures may lack sufficient cultural similarities (such as a

common foundation ontology) to be able to communicate their respective priorities easily. Or, one may

impose such a system of belief and judgment upon another, via conquest or colonization. For

instance, observation of very different ideas of mathematics and physics in indigenous peoples led

indirectly to ideas such as George Lakoff's "cognitive science of mathematics", which asks if

measurement systems themselves can be objective.

Keith E. Stanovich is the Canada Research Chair of Applied Cognitive Science at the Department of

Human Development and Applied Psychology, University of Toronto. His research areas are

the psychology of reasoning and the psychology of reading. His research in the field of reading was

fundamental to the emergence of today's scientific consensus about what reading is, how it works and

what it does for the mind. His research on the cognitive basis of rationality has been featured in the

journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences and in recent books by Yale University Press and University of

Chicago Press. His book, What Intelligence Tests Miss, won the 2010 Grawemeyer Award in

Education.

[edit]Academic career

Cognitive scientist and psychologist Keith E. Stanovich has done extensive research on reading,

language disabilities and the psychology of rational thought. His classic article on the Matthew

Effect in Education has been cited over 1000 times in the scientific literature. He is the author of over

175 scientific articles, several of which have become Current Contents Citation Classics. Stanovich

coined the term dysrationalia to refer to the tendency toward irrational thinking and action despite

adequate intelligence. In several recent books he has explored the concept as well as the relation

between rationality and intelligence.

In a three-year survey of citation rates during the mid-1990s (see Byrnes, J. P. (1997). Explaining

citation counts of senior developmental psychologists. Developmental Review, 17, 62-77), Stanovich

was listed as one of the 50 most-cited developmental psychologists. Recently, he was named one of

the 25 most productive educational psychologists (see Smith, M. C., et al., Productivity of educational

psychologists in educational psychology journals, 1997-2001. Contemporary Educational Psychology,

28, 422-430). In a citation survey of the period 1982-1992, he was designated the most cited reading

disability researcher in the world (Nicolson, R. I. Developmental dyslexia: Past, present and future.

Dyslexia, 1996, 2, 190-207).

Stanovich is the only two-time winner of the Albert J. Harris Award from the International Reading

Association for influential articles on reading. In 1995 he was elected to the Reading Hall of Fame as

the youngest member of that honorary society. In 1996 he was given the Oscar Causey Award from

the National Reading Conference for contributions to research, in 1997 he was given the Sylvia

Scribner Award from the American Educational Research Association, and in 2000 he received the

Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading.

Stanovich is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (Divisions 3 [experimental], 7

[developmental], 8 [Personality & Social], & 15 [Educational]), the American Psychological Society, the

International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities, and is a Charter Member of the Society

for the Scientific Study of Reading. He was a member of the Committee on the Prevention of Reading

Difficulties in Young Children of National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences. From

1986-2000 Stanovich was the Associate Editor of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, a leading journal of human

development.

He has had two long-term collaborators in his career, Anne Cunningham and Richard West. Stanovich

and West were graduate students at the University of Michigantogether. These relationships had their

roots in the 1970s and the three of them still work together. Another longstanding colleague is Maggie

Toplak, of York University in Toronto.

Neural Darwinism, a large scale theory of brain function by Gerald Edelman, was initially published in

1978, in a book called The Mindful Brain (MIT Press). It was extended and published in the 1989

book Neural Darwinism – The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection.

Edelman won the Nobel Prize in 1972 for his work in immunology showing how the population

of lymphocytes capable of binding to a foreign antigen is increased by differential clonal multiplication

following antigen discovery. Essentially, this proved that the human body is capable of

creating complex adaptive systems as a result of local events with feedback. Edelman's interest in

selective systems expanded into the fields of neurobiology and neurophysiology, and in Neural

Darwinism, Edelman puts forth a theory called "neuronal group selection". It contains three major

parts:

1. Anatomical connectivity in the brain occurs via selective mechanochemical events that take

place epigenetically during development. This creates a diverse primary repertoire by

differential reproduction.

2. Once structural diversity is established anatomically, a second selective process occurs

during postnatal behavioral experience through epigenetic modifications in the strength

of synaptic connections between neuronal groups. This creates a diverse secondary

repertoire by differential amplification.

3. Reentrant  signaling between neuronal groups allows for spatiotemporal continuity in response

to real-world interactions.

[edit]Degeneracy

With neuronal heterogeneity (by Edelman called degeneracy), it is possible to test the many circuits

(on the order of 30 billion neurons with an estimated one quadrillion connections between them in the

human brain) with a diverse set of inputs, to see which neuronal groups respond "appropriately"

statistically. Functional "distributed" (widespread) brain circuits thus emerge as a result.

Edelman goes into some detail about how brain development depends on a variety of cell adhesion

molecules (CAMs) and substrate adhesion molecules (SAMs) on cell surfaces which allow cells to

dynamically control their intercellular binding properties. This surface modulation allows cell collectives

to effectively "signal" as the group aggregates, which helps govern morphogenesis. So morphology

depends on CAM and SAM function. And CAM and SAM function also depend on developing

morphology.

Edelman theorized that cell proliferation, cell migration, cell death, neuron arbor distribution,

and neurite branching are also governed by similar selective processes.

[edit]Synaptic modification

Once the basic variegated anatomical structure of the brain is laid down during early development, it is

more or less fixed. But given the numerous and diverse collection of available circuitry, there are

bound to be functionally equivalent albeit anatomically non-isomorphic neuronal groups capable of

responding to certain sensory input. This creates a competitive environment where circuit groups

proficient in their responses to certain inputs are "chosen" through the enhancement of the

synaptic efficacies of the selected network. This leads to an increased probability that the same

network will respond to similar or identical signals at a future time. This occurs through the

strengthening of neuron-to-neuron synapses. And these adjustments allow for neural plasticity along a

fairly quick timetable.

[edit]Reentry

Main article: Reentry (neural circuitry)

The last part of the theory attempts to explain how we experience spatiotemporal consistency in our

interaction with environmental stimuli. Edelman called it "reentry" and proposes a model of reentrant

signaling whereby a disjunctive, multimodal sampling of the same stimulus event correlated in time

leads to self-organizing intelligence. Put another way, multiple neuronal groups can be used to sample

a given stimulus set in parallel and communicate between these disjunctive groups with incurred

latency.

[edit]Support for the theory

It has been suggested that Friedrich Hayek had earlier proposed a similar idea in his book The

Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology, published in 1952

(Herrmann-Pillath, 1992). Other leading proponents include Jean-Pierre Changeux, Daniel

Dennett, William H. Calvin, and Linda B. Smith.

[edit]Criticism of the theory

Criticism of Neural "Darwinism" was made by Francis Crick who pointed to the absence of replication

in the theory, a requirement for natural selection. Recent work has proposed means by which true

replication may take place in the brain (Fernando, Karishma & Szathmary, 2008). Furthermore, by

adding Hebbian learning to neuronal replicators the power of neuronal evolutionary computation may

actually be greater than natural selection in organisms (Fernando, Goldstein & Szathmary, 2010).

Freedom Evolves is a 2003 popular science and philosophy book by Daniel C. Dennett. Dennett

describes the book as an installment of a life-long philosophical project, earlier parts of which

were The Intentional Stance, Consciousness Explained andElbow Room. It attempts to give an

account of free will and moral responsibility which is complementary to Dennett's other views

on consciousness and personhood.

[edit]Synopsis

As in Consciousness Explained, Dennett advertises the controversial nature of his views extensively in

advance. He expects hostility from those who fear that a skeptical analysis of freedom will undermine

people's belief in the reality of moral considerations; he likens himself to an interfering crow who

insists on telling Dumbo he doesn't really need the feather he believes is allowing him to fly.

[edit]Free will and altruism

Dennett's stance on free will is compatibilism with an evolutionary twist – the view that, although in the

strict physical sense our actions might be pre-determined, we can still be free in all the ways that

matter, because of the abilities we evolved. Free will, seen this way, is about freedom to make

decisions without duress, as opposed to an impossible and unnecessary freedom from causality itself.

To clarify this distinction, he coins the term 'evitability' as the opposite of 'inevitability', defining it as the

ability of an agent to anticipate likely consequences and act to avoid undesirable ones. Evitability is

entirely compatible with, and actually requires, human action being deterministic. Dennett moves on

to altruism, denying that it requires acting to the benefit of others without gaining any benefit yourself.

He argues that it should be understood in terms of helping yourself by helping others, expanding the

self to be more inclusive as opposed to being selfless. To show this blend, he calls such actions

'benselfish', and finds the roots of our capacity for this in the evolutionary pressures that produced kin

selection. In his treatment of both free will and altruism, he starts by showing why we should not

accept the traditional definitions of either term. This strategy comes down to dissolving problems,

instead of solving them. Rather than try to answer certain flawed questions, he questions the

assumptions of the questions themselves and undermines them.

[edit]Beneficial mutual arrangements

Dennett also suggests that adherence to high ethical standards might pay off for the individual,

because if others know your behaviour is restricted in these ways, the scope for certain beneficial

mutual arrangements is enhanced. This is related to game theoretical considerations: in the

famous Prisoner's Dilemma, 'moral' agents who cooperate will be more successful than 'non-moral'

agents who do not cooperate. Cooperation wouldn't seem to naturally arise since agents are tempted

to 'defect' and restore a Nash equilibrium, which is often not the best possible solution for all involved.

Dennett concludes by contemplating the possibility that people might be able to opt in or out of moral

responsibility: surely, he suggests, given the benefits, they would choose to opt in, especially given

that opting out includes such things as being imprisoned or institutionalized.

[edit]Libet's experiments

Daniel Dennett also argues that no clear conclusion about volition can be derived from Benjamin

Libet's experiments supposedly demonstrating the non-existence of conscious volition. According to

Dennett, ambiguities in the timings of the different events involved. Libet tells when the readiness

potential occurs objectively, using electrodes, but relies on the subject reporting the position of the

hand of a clock to determine when the conscious decision was made. As Dennett points out, this is

only a report of where it seems to the subject that various things come together, not of the objective

time at which they actually occur.

Suppose Libet knows that your readiness potential peaked at millisecond 6,810 of the experimental

trial, and the clock dot was straight down (which is what you reported you saw) at millisecond 7,005.

How many milliseconds should he have to add to this number to get the time you were conscious of it?

The light gets from your clock face to your eyeball almost instantaneously, but the path of the signals

from retina through lateral geniculate nucleus to striate cortex takes 5 to 10 milliseconds — a paltry

fraction of the 300 milliseconds offset, but how much longer does it take them to get to you. (Or are

you located in the striate cortex?) The visual signals have to be processed before they arrive at

wherever they need to arrive for you to make a conscious decision of simultaneity. Libet's method

presupposes, in short, that we can locate the intersection of two trajectories: • the rising-to-

consciousness of signals representing the decision to flick • the rising to consciousness of signals

representing successive clock-face orientations so that these events occur side-by-side as it were in

place where their simultaneity can be noted.

[1][2]

[edit]Robert Kane

Dennett spends a chapter criticising Robert Kane's theory of libertarian free will. Kane believes

freedom is based on certain rare and exceptional events, which he calls self-forming actions or SFA's.

Dennett notes that there is no guarantee such an event will occur in an individual's life. If it does not,

the individual does not in fact have free will at all, according to Kane. Yet they will seem the same as

anyone else. Dennett finds an essentially indetectable notion of free will to be incredible.