New definitions are proposed for communication and language. Communication is defined as the evolution of physical, biochemical, cellular, community, and technological information exchange. Language is defined as community communication whereby the information exchanged comprises evolving individual and group-constructed knowledge and beliefs, that are enacted, narrated, or otherwise conveyed by evolving rule-governed and meaningful symbol systems, that are grounded, interpreted, and used from within evolving embodied, cognitive, ecological, sociocultural, and technological niches. These definitions place emphasis on the evolutionary aspects of communication (...) and language, and they are here differentiated from four older paradigms that instead focus either on the referential or social aspects of language, or the informational or semantic aspects of communication. In contrast with these paradigms, the definitions proposed here for communication and language are in line with a pluralistic evolutionary worldview, one that necessitates the recognition that a multitude of units, levels, mechanisms and processes are involved in bringing forth communication and language. (shrink)

Die von der Beobachtung des menschlichen Auges unabhängigen genetischen Relationen zwischen den Individuen sind für die Begründung des Artbegriffs das Wesentliche. Die Tatsache, dass die Systematiker in der Praxis meist rein morphologisch arbeiten und nur in wenigen Ausnahmefällen das Verhalten der Individuen einander gegenüber direkt studieren, ändert daran durchaus nichts.Es gibt zwei grundverschiedene Weisen die Individuen und deren genetische Relationen zu betrachten. Entweder man schaut “horizontal”, d.h. innerhalb einer kurzen Zeitspanne, oder man übersieht das Ganze “vertikal”, d.h. ohne zeitliche Begrenzung.Anhand (...) einer Kombination von Abstammungslehre und Ergebnissen der Genetik wirde in Modell formiert, an dem die mögliche Modell-Objektivität von bestimmten Gruppierungen von Individuen zu Arten abgemessen wird.Bei der horizontalen Betrachtungsweise gibt es modell-objektive Arten nach der DefinitionMayr's : “Species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations, which are isolated from other such groups”. Gruppe A ist so innerhalb der arbiträr begrenzten Periode p eine modell-objektive Art in der Relation zu Gruppe B.Vertikal sind keine modell-objektiven Gruppierungen von Individuen möglich. So müssen Arten einander gegenüber arbiträr abgegrenzt werden.Eine horizontale Art kann manchmal arbiträr in trinominal benannte Unterarten aufgeteilt werden, auf Grund von geographisch lokalisierten morphologischen Merkmalen. Eine analoge trinominale Benennung von stratigraphischen Rassen oder vertikalen Unterarten, nach zeitlich lokalisierten Merkmalen, ist sehr verwirrend. Es gibt keinen einzigen zwingenden Grund vertikal neben Arten, als eine spezielle Kategorie, auch noch Unterarten zu konstruieren. (shrink)

The concept of fitness has generated a lot of discussion in philosophy of biology. There is, however, relative agreement about the need to distinguish at least two uses of the term: ecological fitness on the one hand, and population genetics fitness on the other. The goal of this paper is to give an explication of the concept of ecological fitness by providing a reconstruction of the theory of natural selection in which this concept was framed, that is, based on the (...) way the theory was put to use in Darwin’s main texts. I will contend that this reconstruction enables us to account for the current use of the theory of natural selection. The framework presupposed in the analysis will be that of metatheoretical structuralism. This framework will provide both a better understanding of the nature of ecological fitness and a more complete reconstruction of the theory. In particular, it will provide what I think is a better way of understanding how the concept of fitness is applied through heterogeneous cases. One of the major advantages of my way of thinking about natural selection theory is that it would not have the peculiar metatheoretical status that it has in other available views. I will argue that in order to achieve these goals it is necessary to make several concepts explicit, concepts that are frequently omitted in usual reconstructions. (shrink)

The various behavioral disciplines model human behavior in distinct and incompatible ways. Yet, recent theoretical and empirical developments have created the conditions for rendering coherent the areas of overlap of the various behavioral disciplines. The analytical tools deployed in this task incorporate core principles from several behavioral disciplines. The proposed framework recognizes evolutionary theory, covering both genetic and cultural evolution, as the integrating principle of behavioral science. Moreover, if decision theory and game theory are broadened to encompass other-regarding preferences, they (...) become capable of modeling all aspects of decision making, including those normally considered “psychological,” “sociological,” or “anthropological.” The mind as a decision-making organ then becomes the organizing principle of psychology. (Published Online April 27 2007) Key Words: behavioral game theory; behavioral science; evolutionary theory; experimental psychology; gene-culture coevolution; rational actor model; socialization. (shrink)

Historiographical accounts typically place the formulation of the first embryological theory of the evolutionary origin of vertebrates after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. However, the French naturalist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire developed an embryological evolutionary model in the 1820s that followed the Lamarckian theory. Geoffroy was the first to establish a direct embryological relationship between vertebrates and invertebrates. This idea was not forgotten, and the embryologists Anton Dohrn and Carl Semper subsequently updated it in their annelid theory (...) as part of a debate about the origin of vertebrates that occurred during the latter part of the nineteenth century. This paper reviews the traditional historiography, analyzing and integrating Geoffroy’s model into the current body of ideas. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the impact that Lamarckian evolutionary theory had in the scientific community during the period between the advent of Zoological Philosophy and the publication Origin of Species. During these 50 years Lamarck’s model was a well known theory and it was discussed by the scientific community as a hypothesis to explain the changing nature of the fossil record throughout the history of Earth. Lamarck’s transmutation theory established the foundation of an evolutionary model introducing a new way to research (...) in nature. Darwin’s selectionist theory was proposed in 1859 to explain the origin of species within this epistemological process. In this context, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology and Auguste Comte’s Cours de Philosophie Positive appear as two major works for the dissemination of Lamarck’s evolutionary ideology after the death of the French naturalist in 1829. (shrink)

En términos evolutivos, la vida es, simplemente, una manifestación particular de la materia expresada en forma de organismos variantes durante una secuencia temporal inmemorial. El ser vivo la representa y continúa desde aquel pasado remoto hacia un futuro ignorado. El conjunto se denomina naturaleza. Frente a la vida, la muerte constituye una etapa necesaria para que el proceso biológico siga su curso expresando nuevas formas y aconteceres. En este contexto, avanzamos una reflexión que busca dar sentido al concepto de individuo (...) como manifestación real de la vida frente al valor colectivo de una naturaleza abstracta. (shrink)

Lateral gene transfer, the exchange of genetic information between lineages, not only makes construction of a universal Tree of Life difficult to achieve, but calls into question the utility and meaning of any result. Here I review the science of prokaryotic LGT, the philosophy of the TOL as it figured in Darwin’s formulation of the Theory of Evolution, and the politics of the current debate within the discipline over how threats to the TOL should be represented outside it. We could (...) encourage a more realistic and supportive public understanding of evolution by admitting that what we believe in is not a unified meta-theory but a versatile and well-stocked explanatory toolkit. (shrink)

It has become apparent that the debate between scientific realists and constructive empiricists has come to a stalemate. Neither view can reasonably claim to be the most rational philosophy of science, exclusively capable of making sense of all scientific activities. On one prominent analysis of the situation, whether we accept a realist or an anti-realist account of science actually seems to depend on which values we antecedently accept, rather than our commitment to “rationality” per se. Accordingly, several philosophers have attempted (...) to argue in favour of scientific realism or constructive empiricism by showing that one set of values is exclusively best, for anyone and everyone, and that the downstream choice of the philosophy of science which best serves those values is therefore best, for anyone and everyone. These efforts, however, seem to have failed. In response, I suggest that philosophers of science should suspend the effort to determine which philosophy of science is best for everyone, and instead begin investigating which philosophy of science is best for specific people, with specific values, in specific contexts. I illustrate how this might be done by briefly sketching a single case study from the history of science, which seems to show that different philosophies of science are better at motivating different forms of scientific practice. (shrink)

James V. Neel, one of the leading human geneticists of the 21st Century, has long been concerned about the consequences of human overpopulation and the accompanying destruction of the earth's ecosystem. His point of view, summarized in this paper, is contrasted with some recent optimistic projections presented by demographers and population biologists who believe the population bomb has been defused by evidence of a decrease in worldwide fertility along with a significant increase in food production. The authors of this paper (...) are not so optimistic and see a continuing need for concern rather than complacency based on ever increasing human wants and aspirations together with the minimal results of recent environmental summits. The case of HIV/aids is used to illustrate the evolutionary implications of the interaction between population dynamics and genetic change based on the concepts of population bottlenecks, genetic drift and founder effects. What becomes evident from this illustration is that epidemics by viral and other pathogens in the 21st Century can affect the size of human populations and thereby the course of the species' evolutionary makeup. The potential of evolutionary medicine and in particular molecular biology to improve our prediction capabilities and modulate some of the possible consequences is discussed. (shrink)

This paper corrects a historical injustice that has been perpetrated against Kant for some time now. Mostly on good grounds, Kantian ethics have been accused of neglecting the role played by the emotions in moral deliberation and in morally informed action. However, the contemporary moral philosophers who have put forth such a claim tend to bypass textual sources, on the one hand, and to downplay the role played by the anthropological writings on Kant’s practical philosophy as a whole, on the (...) other. Relying on highly relevant pre-critical texts in which Kant sketches future argumentative patterns and discusses the role of negative emotions like shame on the improvement of the human species, I address a mistaken conclusion about Kantian ethics as a whole that is common in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. Finally, I raise some paradoxical conclusions that follow from Kant’s argument, once its implicit premises have been brought to light. (shrink)

Have the large-scale evolutionary patterns illustrated by the fossil record been driven by fluctuations in environmental opportunity, by biotic factors, or by changes in the types of phenotypic variants available for evolutionary change? Since the Modern Synthesis most evolutionary biologists have maintained that microevolutionary processes carrying on over sufficient time will generate macroevolutionary patterns, with no need for other pattern-generating mechanisms such as punctuated equilibrium or species selection. This view was challenged by paleontologists in the 1970s with proposals that the (...) differential sorting and selection of species and clades, and the effects of biotic crises such as mass extinctions, were important extensions to traditional evolutionary theory. More recently those interested in macroevolution have debated the relative importance of abiotic and biotic factors in driving macroevolutionary patterns and have introduced comparative phylogenetic methods to analyze the rates of change in taxonomic diversity. Applying Peter Godfrey-Smith’s distinction between distributional explanations and explanations focusing on the origin of variation, most macroevolutionary studies have provided distributional explanations of macroevolutionary patterns. Comparative studies of developmental evolution, however, have implicated the origin of variants as a driving macroevolution force. In particular, the repatterning of gene regulatory networks provides new insights into the origins of developmental novelties. This raises the question of whether macroevolution has been pulled by the generation of environmental opportunity, or pushed by the introduction of new morphologies. The contrast between distributional and origination scenarios has implications for understanding evolutionary novelty and innovation and how macroevolutionary process may have evolved over time. (shrink)

This article provides a reading and analysis of Foucault’s 1973-4 lecture course Le pouvoir psychiatrique. It begins by situating the course within the wider context of Foucault’s work, notably in relation to Histoire de la folie and the move of the early 1970s to the conceptual tools of power and genealogy. It is argued that Le pouvoir psychiatrique is a rewriting of the last part of Histoire de la folie from the perspective of these new conceptual tools. Analysis then moves (...) to more thematic concerns, showing how this course enriches our understanding of Foucault’s work on the sources of power, the individual and the family, and the spaces of the disciplinary society. Particular focus is given to the role of the army, public health, the hospital, children, women and hospital architecture. The article concludes by showing how the themes of this course, while not worked up for publication themselves, point the way to concerns in Foucault’s later work, notably The History of Sexuality and collaborative work on urban medicine and habitat. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the concept of complexity. I show that the principle of natural selection as acting on complexity gives a solution to the problem of reconciling the seemingly contradictory notion of generally increasing complexity and the observation that most species don’t follow such a trend. I suggest the process of evolution to be illustrated by means of a schematic diagram of complexity versus time, interpreted as a form of the Tree of Life. The suggested model implies that (...) complexity is cumulatively increasing, giving evolution a direction, an arrow of time, thus also implying that the latest emerging species will be the one with the highest level of complexity. Since the human species is the last species evolved in the evolutionary process seen at large, this means that we are the species with the highest complexity. The model implies that the human species constitutes an integral part of organic evolution, yet rendering us the exclusive status as the species of the highest complexity. (shrink)

Perhaps it has always been so, but certainly in the post-Enlightenment era there are inevitable linkages between the fields of law, medicine, and science. Each of these realms of activity is embedded in the social milieu of the era, with practitioners emerging from families, communities, regions, and nations bearing deep unexamined assumptions about what is natural and normal. Equally important, these fields’ theoretical accounts of natural behavior will tend to dovetail and fit each other's – most especially as they pertain (...) to the grand social issues of the period.For the last century and a half, a conversation with a cross-section of lawyers, scientists, and physicians at any given historical juncture would produce a remarkable pattern, consistently repeated: There would be strong enthusiasm for the idea that the “current state of knowledge and practice” is both objective and transcends the current social milieu. (shrink)

In recent times evolutionary psychologists have offered adaptation explanations for a wide range of human psychological characteristics. Critics, however, have argued that such endeavors are problematic because the appropriate evidence required to demonstrate adaptation is unlikely to be forthcoming, therefore severely limiting the role of the adaptationist program in psychology. More specifically, doubts have been raised over both the methodology employed by evolutionary psychologists for studying adaptations and about the possibility of ever developing acceptably rigorous evolutionary explanations of human psychological (...) phenomena. We argue that by employing a wide range of methods for inferring adaptation and by adopting an inference to the best explanation strategy for evaluating adaptation explanations, these two doubts can be adequately addressed. We illustrate how this approach can be fruitfully employed in evaluating claims about the evolutionary origins of language, and conclude with a brief discussion of the future of evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to defend, contra Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini (F&PP), that the theory of natural selection (NS) is a perfectly bona fide empirical unified explanatory theory. F&PP claim there is nothing non-truistic, counterfactual-supporting, of an “adaptive” character and common to different explanations of trait evolution. In his debate with Fodor, and in other works, Sober defends NS but claims that, compared with classical mechanics (CM) and other standard theories, NS is peculiar in that its explanatory models are (...) a priori (a trait shared with few other theories). We argue that NS provides perfectly bona fide adaptive explanations of phenotype evolution, unified by a common natural-selection guiding principle. First, we introduce the debate and reply to F&PP’s main argument against NS. Then, by reviewing different examples and analyzing Fisher’s model in detail, we show that NS explanations of phenotypic evolution share a General Natural Selection Principle. Third, by elaborating an analogy with CM, we argue against F&PP’s claim that such a principle would be a mere truism and thus explanatorily useless, and against Sober’s thesis that NS models/explanations have a priori components that are not present in CM and other common empirical theories. Irrespective of differences in other respects, the NS guiding principle has the same epistemic status as other guiding principles in other highly unified theories such as CM. We argue that only by pointing to the guiding principle-driven nature that it shares with CM and other highly unified theories, something no-one has done yet in this debate, one can definitively show that NS is not defective in F&PP’s sense: in the respects relevant to the debate, Natural Selection is as defective and as epistemically peculiar as Classical Mechanics and other never questioned theories. (shrink)

Although classical evolutionary theory, i.e., population genetics and the Modern Synthesis, was already implicitly ‘gene-centred’, the organism was, in practice, still generally regarded as the individual unit of which a population is composed. The gene-centred approach to evolution only reached a logical conclusion with the advent of the gene-selectionist or gene’s eye view in the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas classical evolutionary theory can only work with fitness differences between individual organisms, gene-selectionism is capable of working with fitness differences among genes (...) within the same organism and genome. Here, we explore the explanatory potential of ‘intra-organismic’ and ‘intra-genomic’ gene-selectionism, i.e., of a behavioural-ecological ‘gene’s eye view’ on genetic, genomic and organismal evolution. First, we give a general outline of the framework and how it complements the—to some extent—still ‘organism-centred’ approach of classical evolutionary theory. Secondly, we give a more in-depth assessment of its explanatory potential for biological evolution, i.e., for Darwin’s ‘common descent with modification’ or, more specifically, for ‘historical continuity or homology with modular evolutionary change’ as it has been studied by evolutionary developmental biology during the last few decades. In contrast with classical evolutionary theory, evo-devo focuses on ‘within-organism’ developmental processes. Given the capacity of gene-selectionism to adopt an intra-organismal gene’s eye view, we outline the relevance of the latter model for evo-devo. Overall, we aim for the conceptual integration between the gene’s eye view on the one hand, and more organism-centred evolutionary models on the other. (shrink)

In this paper, we distinguish two different approaches to cultural evolution. One approach is meme-centered, the other organism-centered. We argue that in situations in which the meme- and organism-centered approaches are competing alternatives, the organism-centered approach is in many ways superior. Furthermore, the organism-centered approach can go a long way toward understanding the evolution of institutions. Although the organism-centered approach is preferable for a broad class of situations, we do leave room for super-organismic or sub-organismic explanations of some cultural phenomena.

A Crítica de Hume ao Argumento do Desígnio José Oscar de Almeida Marques Dep. de Filosofia – UNICAMP -/- RESUMO: É comum considerar que o chamado “argumento do desígnio” (o argumento a posteriori para provar a existência de Deus a partir da ordem e funcionalidade do mundo) teria sido refutado ou seriamente abalado por Hume. Mas a natureza e o alcance dessa alegada refutação são problemáticos, pois Hume muitas vezes expressou suas críticas através de seus personagens e evitou assumi-las diretamente (...) enquanto autor. Em vez de supor que Hume procedeu dessa forma apenas para disfarçar suas verdadeiras convicções e evitar um conflito com as autoridades eclesiásticas, proponho que sua posição nesse assunto não é tão categórica como às vezes se supõe, e que os famosos argumentos de Filo nos Diálogos mostram apenas que é possível que a ordem e funcionalidade do mundo tenham surgido sem a intervenção de um desígnio consciente, mas não podem por si sós dar a essa hipótese o mínimo grau de plausibilidade necessário para torná-la digna de uma séria consideração. De fato, antes da revolução explicativa operada por Darwin um século depois, ninguém estava realmente em condições de vislumbrar uma alternativa plausível à atuação de algum tipo de inteligência na geração da ordem e funcionalidade do mundo. ------------ Some Remarks on Hume’s Critique of the Argument from Design José Oscar of Almeida Marques Dep. of Philosophy - UNICAMP -/- ABSTRACT: The so-called “argument from design” (the a posteriori argument to prove the existence of God from the order and functionality of the world) is commonly considered to have been refuted or seriously impaired by Hume. But the nature and scope of this alleged refutation is problematic because Hume often expressed his critics through other characters’ mouth and avoided to assume them directly as author. Contrarily to the supposition that Hume proceeded in this way only to disguise his true convictions and to avoid a confrontation with the ecclesiastical authorities, I propose that his stance on the matter is not, in fact, as clear-cut as it is sometimes supposed, and that Philo’s famous arguments in the Dialogues show only that it is possible for the order and functionality of the world to have arisen without the intervention of an intelligent design, but cannot by themselves lend to this hypothesis the least degree of plausibility needed to make it worthy of serious consideration. In fact, before the explanatory revolution inaugurated by Darwin a century later, nobody was in position to envisage a plausible alternative to the operation of some sort or other of intelligence in the generation of the order and functionality of the world. (shrink)

History and the modern sciences are characterized by what is sometimes called a methodological naturalism that disregards talk of divine agency. Some religious thinkers argue that this reflects a dogmatic materialism: a non-negotiable and a priori commitment to a materialist metaphysics. In response to this charge, I make a sharp distinction between procedural requirements and metaphysical commitments. The procedural requirement of history and the sciences—that proposed explanations appeal to publicly-accessible bodies of evidence—is non-negotiable, but has no metaphysical implications. The metaphysical (...) commitment is naturalistic, but is both a posteriori and provisional, arising from the fact that for more than 400 years no proposed theistic explanation has been shown capable of meeting the procedural requirement. I argue that there is nothing to prevent religious thinkers from seeking to overturn this metaphysically naturalistic stance. But in order to do so they would need to show that their proposed theistic explanations are the best available explanations of a range of phenomena. Until this has been done, the metaphysical naturalism of history and the sciences remains defensible. (shrink)

Chance has somewhat different meanings in different contexts, and can be taken to be either ontological or epistemological . Here I argue that, whether or not it stems from physical indeterminacy, chance is a fundamental biological reality that is meaningless outside the context of knowledge. To say that something happened by chance means that it did not happen by design. This of course is a cornerstone of Darwin’s theory of evolution: random undirected variation is the creative wellspring upon which natural (...) selection acts to sculpt the functional form of organisms. In his essay Chance & Necessity, Jacques Monod argued that an intellectually honest commitment to objectivity requires that we accord chance a central role in an otherwise mechanistic biology, and suggested that doing so may well place the origin of life outside the realm of scientific tractability. While that may be true, ongoing research on the origin of life problem suggests that a biogenesis may have been possible, and perhaps even probable, under the conditions that existed on primordial earth. Following others, I argue that the world should be viewed as causally open, i.e. primordially indeterminate or vague. Accordingly, chance ought to be the default scientific explanation for origination, a universal ‘null hypothesis’ to be assumed until disproven. In this framework, creation of anything new manifests freedom , and causation manifests constraint, the developmental emergence of which establishes the space of possibilities that may by chance be realized. (shrink)

In 1975, the English evolutionist William Donald Hamilton held in Brazil a series of lectures entitled “Population genetics and social behaviour”. The unpublished notes of these conferences—written by Hamilton and recently discovered at the British Library—offer an opportunity to reflect on some of the author’s ideas about evolution. The year of the conference is particularly significant, as it took place shortly after the applications of the Price equation with which Hamilton was able to build a model that included several levels (...) of selection. In this paper I mainly analyse the inaugural lecture in which Hamilton proposes a simple model to disprove the hypothesis supported by the British zoologist C. Vero Wynne-Edwards regarding mechanisms to prevent “over-exploitation of the food supply” in “the interests of the survival of the group”. The document presented here is of great historical interest. Not only because manuscript offers a model that—since it was intended for teaching purposes—had never before appeared in the published version, but also because of the general index of the lectures that accompanies it. The latter allows us to make some hypothetical considerations on the relationship and differences between kin-selection, group-selection and inclusive fitness that Hamilton wanted to present to the attentive, well-prepared audience of the foreign university that had invited him. (shrink)

Do multi-level selection explanations of the evolution of social traits deepen the understanding provided by single-level explanations? Central to the former is a mathematical theorem, the multi-level Price decomposition. I build a framework through which to understand the explanatory role of such non-empirical decompositions in scientific practice. Applying this general framework to the present case places two tasks on the agenda. The first task is to distinguish the various ways of suppressing within-collective variation in fitness, and moreover to evaluate their (...) biological interest. I distinguish four such ways: increasing retaliatory capacity, homogenising assortment, and collapsing either fitness structure or character distribution to a mean value. The second task is to discover whether the third term of the Price decomposition measures the effect of any of these hypothetical interventions. On this basis I argue that the multi-level Price decomposition has explanatory value primarily when the sharing-out of collective resources is `subtractable'. Thus its value is more circumscribed than its champions Sober and Wilson (1998) suppose. (shrink)

Proposed here is that an overriding principle of nature governs all population behavior; that a single tenet drives the many regimes observed in nature—exponential-like growth, saturated growth, population decline, population extinction, and oscillatory behavior. The signature of such an all embracing principle is a differential equation which, in a single statement, embraces the entire panoply of observations. In current orthodox theory, this diverse range of population behaviors is described by many different equations—each with its own specific justification. Here, a single (...) equation governing all the regimes is proposed together with the principle from which it derives. The principle is: The effect on the environment of a population’s success is to alter that environment in a way that opposes the success. Experiments are suggested which could validate or refute the theory. Predictions are made about population behaviors. (shrink)

This book brings together papers from a conference that took place in the city of L'Aquila, 4–6 April 2019, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the earthquake that struck on 6 April 2009. Philosophers and scientists from diverse fields of research debated the problem that, on 6 April 1922, divided Einstein and Bergson: the nature of time. For Einstein, scientific time is the only time that matters and the only time we can rely on. Bergson, however, believes that scientific time (...) is derived by abstraction, even in the sense of extraction, from a more fundamental time. The plurality of times envisaged by the theory of Relativity does not, for him, contradict the philosophical intuition of the existence of a single time. But how do things stand today? What can we say about the relationship between the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of time in the light of contemporary science? What do quantum mechanics, biology and neuroscience teach us about the nature of time? The essays collected here take up the question that pitted Einstein against Bergson, science against philosophy, in an attempt to reverse the outcome of their monologue in two voices, with a multilogue in several voices. (shrink)