[1]: meha-haḳdamah ṿe-ʻad pereḳ 19 --.

We construct a new class of 1 categorical structures, disproving Zilber's conjecture, and study some of their properties.

Both von Neumann and Wiener were outsiders to biology. Both were inspired by biology and both proposed models and generalizations that proved inspirational for biologists. Around the same time in the 1940s von Neumann developed the notion of self reproducing automata and Wiener suggested an explication of teleology using the notion of negative feedback. These efforts were similar in spirit. Both von Neumann and Wiener used mathematical ideas to attack foundational issues in biology, and the concepts they articulated had lasting (...) effect. But there were significant differences as well. Von Neumann presented a how-possibly model, which sparked interest by mathematicians and computer scientists, while Wiener collaborated more directly with biologists, and his proposal influenced the philosophy of biology. The two cases illustrate different strategies by which mathematicians, the “professional outsiders” of science, can choose to guide their engagement with biological questions and with the biological community, and illustrate different kinds of generalizations that mathematization can contribute to biology. The different strategies employed by von Neumann and Wiener and the types of models they constructed may have affected the fate of von Neumann’s and Wiener’s ideas – as well as the reputation, in biology, of von Neumann and Wiener themselves. (shrink)

This 2010 text pursues Adam Smith's views on moral judgement, humanitarian care, commerce, justice and international law both in historical context and through a twenty-first-century cosmopolitan lens, making this a major contribution not only to Smith studies but also to the history of cosmopolitan thought and to contemporary cosmopolitan discourse itself. Forman-Barzilai breaks ground, demonstrating the spatial texture of Smith's moral psychology and the ways he believed that physical, affective and cultural distance constrain the identities, connections and ethical obligations (...) of modern commercial people. Forman-Barzilai emphasizes his resistance to the sort of relativism, moral insularity and cultural chauvinism that too often accompany localist critiques of cosmopolitan thought today. This is a fascinating, revisionist study that integrates the perspectives of intellectual history, moral philosophy, political theory, cultural theory, international relations theory and political economy, and will appeal across the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

The notion of structure of evolution is proposed to capture what it means to say that two situations exhibit the same or similar constellations of factors affecting evolution. The key features of holobiont evolution and the hologenome theory are used to define a holobiont structure of evolution. Finally, Cultural Group Selection, a set of hypotheses regarding the evolution of human cognition, is shown to match the holobiont structure closely though not perfectly.

Persistent activity can be the product of mechanisms other than attractor reverberations. The single-unit data presented by Amit cannot discriminate between the different mechanisms. In fact, single-unit data do not appear to be adequate for testing neural network models.

We use a new construction of an o-minimal structure, due to Lipshitz and Robinson, to answer a question of van den Dries regarding the relationship between arbitrary o-minimal expansions of real closed fields and structures over the real numbers. We write a first order sentence which is true in the Lipshitz-Robinson structure but fails in any possible interpretation over the field of real numbers.

We prove (Proposition 2.1) that if $\mu$ is a generically stable measure in an NIP (no independence property) theory, and $\mu(\phi(x,b))=0$ for all $b$ , then for some $n$ , $\mu^{(n)}(\exists y(\phi(x_{1},y)\wedge \cdots \wedge\phi(x_{n},y)))=0$ . As a consequence we show (Proposition 3.2) that if $G$ is a definable group with fsg (finitely satisfiable generics) in an NIP theory, and $X$ is a definable subset of $G$ , then $X$ is generic if and only if every translate of $X$ does not (...) fork over $\emptyset$ , precisely as in stable groups, answering positively an earlier problem posed by the first two authors. (shrink)

A first order theory T of power λ is called unidimensional if any twoλ+-saturated models of T of the same cardinality are isomorphic. We prove here that such theories are superstable, solving a problem of Shelah. The proof involves an existence theorem and a definability theorem for definable groups in stable theories, and an analysis of their relation to regular types.

In this essay the author explores the relation between sympathy and proximity in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. The essay proceeds in two parts. First, the author demonstrates that Smith's description of our various attachments and affections, and the inevitable conflicts among them, draws us into the rich spatial texture of sympathetic response and stimulates further inquiry into a variety of spaces in which sympathetic activity takes place. In the second part, the author explores three such spaces-the physical, the (...) affective, and the historical/cultural-to critique the way that some contemporary moral and political theorists have appropriated Smith's account of sympathy as a tool for cosmopolitan aspirations. To what extent can Smith's sympathy model detach us from and get us beyond the partiality and particularity generated by our physical, affective, and cultural entanglements? (shrink)

We examine the problem of generating definite noun phrases that are appropriate referring expressions; that is, noun phrases that (a) successfully identify the intended referent to the hearer whilst (b) not conveying to him or her any false conversational implicatures (Grice, 1975). We review several possible computational interpretations of the conversational implicature maxims, with different computational costs, and argue that the simplest may be the best, because it seems to be closest to what human speakers do. We describe our recommended (...) algorithm in detail, along with a specification of the resources a host system must provide in order to make use of the algorithm, and an implementation used in the natural language generation component of the IDAS system. (shrink)

In this Article we examine Israel’s ongoing process of bank privatization to explore the link between privatization programs and the ownership structure of public companies. Our thesis is that concentrated ownership provides regulators with a platform for exerting informal influence over corporate decision-making. This platform serves regulators as a safety valve when all else fails, especially when they would like firms to terminate senior executives or board members. Communicating with controlling shareholders increases the likelihood that both the regulatory intervention and (...) the reasons underlying it will remain confidential. Moreover, controlling shareholders can make swift decisions and implement them quickly, with no need for formal group deliberation. When informal influence is important — as in the case of banks — the government may prefer firms with controlling shareholders to widely held firms. It may therefore prefer to sell a control block in the firm undergoing privatization rather than distribute its shares through the stock market. (shrink)

Reviewed Works:B. I. Zil'ber, L. Pacholski, J. Wierzejewski, A. J. Wilkie, Totally Categorical Theories: Structural Properties and the Non-Finite Axiomatizability.B. I. Zil'ber, Strongly Minimal Countably Categorical Theories.B. I. Zil'ber, Strongly Minimal Countably Categorical Theories. II.B. I. Zil'ber, Strongly Minimal Countably Categorical Theories. III.B. I. Zil'ber, E. Mendelson, Totally Categorical Structures and Combinatorial Geometries.B. I. Zil'ber, The Structure of Models of Uncountably Categorical Theories.

In this essay the author explores the relation between sympathy and proximity in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. The essay proceeds in two parts. First, the author demonstrates that Smith’s description of our various attachments and affections, and the inevitable conflicts among them, draws us into the rich spatial texture of sympathetic response and stimulates further inquiry into a variety of spaces in which sympathetic activity takes place. In the second part, the author explores three such spaces—the physical, the (...) affective, and the historical/cultural—to critique the way that some contemporary moral and political theorists have appropriated Smith’s account of sympathy as a tool for cosmopolitan aspirations. To what extent can Smith’s sympathy model detach us from and get us beyond the partiality and particularity generated by our physical, affective, and cultural entanglements. (shrink)

We attempt to formulate issues around modularity and Zilber’s trichotomy in a setting that intersects additive combinatorics. In particular, we update the open problems on quasi-finite structures from [9].

The emerging discipline of complexity science, applied to the social sciences, seeks to study the rise of human civilization as a part of a natural, evolving biological system that exploits energy resources to fuel its growth into a complex social system. In order to understand the whole system, the reductionist approach, typical to Western science, must be supplanted. The atomistic study of various scientific fields as separate mechanical parts of the system must be broadened, creating a more holistic view of (...) human culture as an integral part of larger universal process of evolution and creation. In this article I wish to integrate the various scientific fields, including physics, chronobiology, biology, evolutionary psychology, and the social sciences, to achieve a unified understanding of our cultural evolution. (shrink)

Using methods of geometric stability , we determine the structure of Abelian groups definable in ACFA, the model companion of fields with an automorphism. We also give general bounds on sets definable in ACFA. We show that these tools can be used to study torsion points on Abelian varieties; among other results, we deduce a fairly general case of a conjecture of Tate and Voloch on p-adic distances of torsion points from subvarieties.

This study compares the argumentative writing characteristics of students from different sociocultural backgrounds. We focused on Jewish ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) students, educated in a segregated religious school for boys (yeshiva), who are now attempting to integrate in secular higher education in Israel. To better understand the unique characteristics of this population, we reviewed 92 essays written by Haredi students, and compared them with 76 essays by public education (PE) graduates. Our analysis was based on the cognitive and sociocultural perspectives of argumentation. (...) Both bottom-up and top-down criteria were used to elicit the argumentative writing characteristics either emerging from the data or based on existing theories. Our primary findings indicate that Haredi students have distinct argumentative characteristics, including the use of more complex and dialectic arguments and unique persuasive tactics. These findings are discussed in light of previous research on yeshiva learning methods and recommendations are provided for adjusting the existing higher education curricula to suit both PE and Haredi students. (shrink)

Kueker's conjecture is proved for stable theories, for theories that interpret a linear ordering, and for theories with Skolem functions. The proof of the stable case involves certain results on coordinatization that are of independent interest.

Introduction The purpose of this study is to characterize a conception of prayer that plays an important role in the religious thought of the medieval ...

In the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith observed that we live in a fundamentally conflictual world. Although he held that we are creatures who sympathize, he also observed that our sympathy seems to be constrained by geographical limits. Accordingly, traditional theories of cosmopolitanism were implausible; yet, as a moral philosopher, Smith attempted to reconcile his bleak description of the world with his eagerness for international peace. Smith believed that commercial intercourse among self‐interested nations would emulate sympathy on a global (...) scale, balancing national wealth and international peace without a coercive apparatus to enforce compliance with international law. (shrink)

In this article, I address Rousseau's evolution as a political thinker between the years 1750 and 1753, during which time his critics challenged him to square the radical implications of his Discours sur les sciences et les arts with the realities of eighteenth-century European life. It was in the course of replying to his critics that Rousseau first adopted what I refer to as a more contextual orientation to political institutions. I argue that Rousseau's ostensibly Montesquieuian turn in the replies (...) sustained his claim in the Lettre a d'Alembert that theatre, the scourge of Geneva's republican simplicity, might nevertheless serve a useful function in Paris, where meurs, in Rousseau's estimation, had lapsed already to a point of irreversible corruption. I conclude that this contextual orientation to institutions guided much of Rousseau's subsequent thought about political reform in the modern republic. (shrink)

The dichotomy between Nature and Nurture, which has been dismantled within the framework of development, remains embodied in the notions of plasticity and evolvability. We argue that plasticity and evolvability, like development and heredity, are neither dichotomous nor distinct: the very same mechanisms may be involved in both, and the research perspective chosen depends to a large extent on the type of problem being explored and the kinds of questions being asked. Epigenetic inheritance leads to transgenerationally extended plasticity, and developmentally-induced (...) heritable epigenetic variations provide additional foci for selection that can lead to evolutionary change. Moreover, hereditary innovations may result from developmentally induced large-scale genomic repatterning events, which are akin to Goldschmidtian “systemic mutations”. The epigenetic mechanisms involved in repatterning can be activated by both environmental and genomic stress, and lead to phylogenetic as well as ontogenetic changes. Hence, the effects and the mechanisms of plasticity directly contribute to evolvability. (shrink)

Finitely axiomatizable ℵ 1 categorical theories are locally modular.

A stable theory is finitely based if every set of indiscernibles is based on a finite subset. This is a common generalization of superstability and 1-basedness. We show that if such theories have more than one model they must have infinitely many, and prove some other conjectures.

We are concerned with identifying by how much a finite cover of an 0-categorical structure differs from a sequence of free covers. The main results show that this is measured by automorphism groups which are nilpotent-by-abelian. In the language of covers, these results say that every finite cover can be decomposed naturally into linked, superlinked and free covers. The superlinked covers arise from covers over a different base, and to describe this properly we introduce the notion of a quasi-cover.These results (...) generalise results of the second author obtained in the case where the base of the cover is a grassmannian of a disintegrated set. They also give a complete proof of a statement of the second author extending this case to the case of a grassmannian of a modular set. To do this, we need to analyse the possible superlinked covers of such a set.We also give a combinatorial condition on the base of a cover which guarantees various chain conditions on finite covers over this base, and introduce a pregeometry which is useful in the analysis of finite covers with simple fibre groups. (shrink)

The aim of the book is to explore common concerns regarding methodological individualism in different fields of the life sciences broadly construed. It will address conceptual problems regarding individuals and their relation and dependence on the collectivities they are part of and consider innovative new viewpoints, grounded in specific scientific projects that question the present descriptions and understanding and raise challenges. A wide variety of recent, influential contributions in the life sciences utilize notions of collectivity, sociality, rich interactions and emergent (...) phenomena, as essential explanatory tools to handle numerous persistent scientific questions in the life sciences. -/- Examples range from gene expression and regulation, the dynamics of bacterial populations, the ecological developmental biology of symbiosis, levels of selection, to communication, motion and patterns of behavior in diverse life forms, the role of social institutions and cultural dynamics in human evolution, and the psychological basis for social norms. The book is being structured so that fruitful and rewarding disciplinary interactions take place among researchers and scholars who have been concerned with overcoming methodological individualism. -/- The books includes a section of four papers on holobionts and the hologenome theory and a special memorial article on the work of the late Prof. Eshel Ben-Jacob authored by Herbert Levine. (shrink)