New Horizons In Evolution

New Horizons in Evolution is a compendium of the latest research, analyses, and theories of evolutionary biology. Chapters are collected from the international symposium held by the Board of Governors of the University of Haifa to honor Dr. Eviatar Nevo, founder and director of the Institute of Evolution. This book includes material written by top global scientists. Such detailed summaries and recent advances include topics like genomics, epigenetics, evolutionary theory, and the evolution of cancer. This book analyzes evolutionary biology of animals, such as lizards and subterranean mammals. It also discusses agricultural evolution, specifically the vital wheat crop in various climates and locations. Each chapter contributes the most up-to-date knowledge of evolution’s role in speciation, adaptation, and regulation. New Horizons in Evolution is a valuable resource for researchers involved in evolution, evolutionary biology, and evolutionary theory. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students in evolutionary biology courses will also find this useful due to the high expertise level and latest knowledge available through this resource. Examines the evolution of species in extreme conditions Discusses the role of evolution in medicine and cancer research Features the latest data and advances in evolution theory

Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) now provide mature optimization tools that have successfully been applied to many problems, from designing antennas to complete robots, and provided many human-competitive results. In robotics, the integration of EAs within the engineer’s toolbox made tremendous progress in the last 20 years and proposes new methods to address challenging problems in various setups: modular robotics, swarm robotics, robotics with non-conventional mechanics (e.g. high redundancy, dynamic motion, multi-modality), etc. This book takes its roots in the workshop on "New Horizons in Evolutionary Design of Robots" that brought together researchers from Computer Science and Robotics during the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS-2009) in Saint Louis (USA). This book features extended contributions from the workshop, thus providing various examples of current problems and applications, with a special emphasis on the link between Computer Science and Robotics. It also provides a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to Evolutionary Robotics after 20 years of maturation as well as thoughts and considerations from several major actors in the field. This book offers a comprehensive introduction to the current trends and challenges in Evolutionary Robotics for the next decade.

Once perceived as distant, cold, dark, and seemingly unknowable, Pluto had long been marked as the farthest and most unreachable frontier for solar system exploration. The Pluto System After New Horizons is the benchmark research compendium for synthesizing our understanding of the Pluto system. This volume reviews the work of researchers who have spent the last five years assimilating the data returned from New Horizons and the first full scientific synthesis of this fascinating system.

. . . the book is excellent in setting out and explaining a fundamental critique of economics one moreover that has been missed by most other current critics of the field. Making this case is an achievement. Hopefully, it will have a greater impact than its author probably expects. Journal of Cultural Economics Economics evolved by perfecting the taking of culture out of its reductionist and virtual world. But culture has recently been reintroduced, both as a sphere of application for an otherwise unchanging methodology and as a weak form of acknowledging that the economic alone is inadequate as the basis even for explaining the economy. This volume is an essential critical starting point for understanding the changing relationship between economics and culture and in offering a more satisfactory and stable union between the two. Ben Fine, University of London, UK Economics, Culture and Social Theory examines how culture has been neglected in economic theorising and considers how economics could benefit by incorporating ideas from social and cultural theory. Orthodox economics has prompted a long line of cultural criticism that goes back to the origins of economic theory and extends to recent debates surrounding postmodernism. William A. Jackson discusses the cultural critique of economics, identifies the main arguments, and assesses their implications. Among the topics covered are relativism and realism, idealism and materialism, agency and structure, hermeneutics, semiotics, and cultural evolution. Drawing from varied literatures, notably social and cultural theory, the book stresses the importance of culture for economic behaviour and looks at the prospects for a renewed and culturally informed economics. The book will be invaluable to heterodox economists and to anyone interested in the links between culture and the economy. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, arguing against the isolation of economics, and will therefore hold wide appeal for social scientists working in related fields, as well as for economists specialising in cultural economics and economic methodology.

The notion and interpretation of path dependence have been discussed and utilized in various social sciences during the last two decades. This innovative book provides significant new insights onto how the different applications of path dependence have developed and evolved. The authors suggest that there has been a definite evolution from applications of path dependence in the history of technology towards other fields of social science. They also discuss the various definitions of path dependence (strong or weak) and explore the potential applications of path dependence in new areas such as political economy and economic geography. With new perspectives on how the debate surrounding path dependence has evolved, this book will strongly appeal to postgraduate students and scholars of economic history, economic geography, political science and business studies.

This book examines how two distinct strands of research on autonomous robots, evolutionary robotics and humanoid robot research, are converging. The book will be valuable for researchers and postgraduate students working in the areas of evolutionary robotics and bio-inspired computing.

The past decade and a half has witnessed a great deal of renewed interest in the study of Chinese linguistics, not only in the traditional areas of philological studies and in theoretically oriented areas of syn chronic grammar and language change but also in the cultivation of new frontiers in related areas of the cognitive sciences. There is a significant increase in the number of students studying one area or another of the linguistic structure of Chinese in various linguistic programs in the United States, Europe, Australia and in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and other parts of Asia. Several new academic departments devoted to the study of linguistics have been established in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the past few years. The increasing research and study activities have also resulted in a number of national and international conferences, including the North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL), which has been held annually in the United States; the International Symposium on Chinese Languages and Linguistics (IsCLL), which has had its fourth meeting since it was launched by Academia Sinica in Taiwan in 1990; the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (lACL), created in Singapore in 1992 and now incorporated in Irvine, California, which has held its annual meetings at major institutions in Asia, Europe, and the US.

The overall structure of this new edition is three-tier: Part I presents the basics, Part II is concerned with methodological issues, and Part III discusses advanced topics. In the second edition the authors have reorganized the material to focus on problems, how to represent them, and then how to choose and design algorithms for different representations. They also added a chapter on problems, reflecting the overall book focus on problem-solvers, a chapter on parameter tuning, which they combined with the parameter control and "how-to" chapters into a methodological part, and finally a chapter on evolutionary robotics with an outlook on possible exciting developments in this field. The book is suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses in artificial intelligence and computational intelligence, and for self-study by practitioners and researchers engaged with all aspects of bioinspired design and optimization.