Adriano Magnani, Il processo di Isidoro. Roma e Alessandria nel primo secolo

57. Adriano Magnani, Il processo di Isidoro. Roma e Alessandria nel primo secolo, 2009, pp. xii-288. [i.s.b.n. 978-88-15-13434-0]. € 34,00.

Edizione e storia degli studi - Acta Isidori. Considerazioni bibliologiche e filologiche - Lo spazio letterario. Tra letteratura di consumo e libellistica - Il problema degli autori o dell'autore - Equilibri politici e gruppi etnici nell'Egitto tardo-tolemaico e protoromano - Due aspetti politico-sociali dell'Egitto provincia dell'Impero: il sistema contributivo e la cittadinanza alessandrina - Antigiudaismo in terra egizia. I papiri come documento di polemica - Alessandria nella prima metà del I secolo d.C. Cronistoria - Il processo: le accuse dei papiri - Le 'altre' voci del dramma . Uno sguardo alla letteratura giudaico-ellenistica - Filone di Alessandria. Un posto per Israele tra le grandi civiltà. La data e i personaggi del processo. Status quaestionis e note di aggiornamento prosopografico - 'Prima' e 'dopo' Filone. La polemica nel suo formarsi e nel suo evolversi nella testimonianza della Lettera di Aristea a Filocrate e del Contra Apionem di Flavio Giuseppe.

CRONACHE ERCOLANESI 39/2009

CRONACHE ERCOLANESI 39/2009

Jeffrey Fish-Kirk Sanders, Introduction, pp. 5-6.

Michael Wigodsky, Horace and (Not Necessarily) Neoptolemus. The Ars Poetica and Hellenistic Controversies, pp. 7- 27.

L. Michael White, Ordering the Fragments of PHerc. 1471. A New Hypothesis, pp. 29-70.

Daniel Delattre, Le Sage épicurien face à la colère et à l’ivresse: une lecture renouvelée du De ira de Philodème, pp. 71-88.

W. Benjamin Henry, New Light on Philodemus’ On Death, pp. 89-102.

Francesca Longo Auricchio, Su alcuni hapax nella Retorica di Filodemo, pp. 103-106.

Dino De Sanctis, Il filosofo e il re: osservazioni sulla Vita Philonidis (PHerc. 1044), pp. 107-118.

Margherita Erbì, Il retore e la città nella polemica di Filodemo verso Diogene di Babilonia (PHerc. 1004, coll. 64-70), pp. 119-140.

Joseph A. Ponczoch, PHerc. 1570: A Treatise on Poverty and Wealth, pp. 141-159.

Holger Essler, Falsche Götter bei Philodem (Di III Kol. 8, 5 – Kol. 10, 6), pp. 161-205.

Laura Giuliano, PHerc. 807: [Filodemo, De morte, libro incerto], pp. 207- 280.

Knut Kleve, Futile Criticism, pp. 281-282.

Gianluca Del Mastro, Osservazioni bibliologiche e paleografiche su alcuni papiri ercolanesi, pp. 283-299.

Martin Ferguson Smith, Diogenes of Oinoanda: News And Notes III (2008), pp. 301-312.

Agathe Antoni, Voyageurs français à la découverte d’Herculanum aux XVIIIème et XIXème siècles, pp. 313-330.

Maria Paola Guidobaldi-Domenico Esposito, Le nuove ricerche archeologiche nella Villa dei Papiri di Ercolano, pp. 331-370.

Notiziario, pp. 371-374.

Source: Papy-L

What Can't You Do in the House of Commons?

 
Almost anything goes in Ontario's House of Commons and debates can be rather lively. However, tradition (and House rules) state that you cannot accuse someone of lying. Here's what happens if you break that rule.



Ted Chudleigh is the Conservative MPP for Halton—a district that includes Oakville and Milton. He's ranting about a proposal to harmonize the GST and PST taxes.

Jennifer Smith lives in Milton and she's on the case. A little digging led her to this quotation from a speech by Ted Chudleigh in the House of Commons only 14 months ago [Ted Chudleigh on the HST: What a Difference a Year Makes].

Taxing businesses for their input costs is also a negative thing to do in an economy. It would be far better if we could find a way to harmonize the PST with the GST." (October 2, 2008 - Legislative Assembly Hansard)

Oh, dear. Is it possible that Mr. Chudleigh is a liar? Or is he just a hypocrite?

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A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme

The Royal Society of Britain has opened access to a number of classic papers that have been published in Proceedings of the Royal Society. One of them is ...

Gould, S. J. and Lewontin, R.C. (1979) The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 205:581-598. [doi: 10.1098/rspb.1979.0086]

Abstract: An adaptationist programme has dominated evolutionary thought in England and the United States during the past 40 years. It is based on faith in the power of natural selection as an optimizing agent. It proceeds by breaking an organism into unitary 'traits' and proposing an adaptive story for each considered separately. Trade-offs among competing selective demands exert the only brake upon perfection; non-optimality is thereby rendered as a result of adaptation as well. We criticize this approach and attempt to reassert a competing notion (long popular in continental Europe) that organisms must be analysed as integrated wholes, with Bauplane so constrained by phyletic heritage, pathways of development and general architecture that the constraints themselves become more interesting and more important in delimiting pathways of change than the selective force that may mediate change when it occurs. We fault the adaptationist programme for its failure to distinguish current utility from reasons for origin (male tyrannosaurs may have used their diminutive front legs to titillate female partners, but this will not explain why they got so small); for its unwillingness to consider alternatives to adaptive stories; for its reliance upon plausibility alone as a criterion for accepting speculative tales; and for its failure to consider adequately such competing themes as random fixation of alleles, production of non-adaptive structures by developmental correlation with selected features (allometry, pleiotropy, material compensation, mechanically forced correlation), the separability of adaptation and selection, multiple adaptive peaks, and current utility as an epiphenomenon of non-adaptive structures. We support Darwin's own pluralistic approach to identifying the agents of evolutionary change.

If you haven't read this paper by now then download it and read it carefully. It's the most important paper to read if you are interested in evolution.

Jerry Coyne agrees, "Read the rest; it’s certainly one of the most important papers in modern evolutionary biology." [It’s a spandrel (sort of . . .)!].

He also says,

This paper is famous because the authors were famous, because it’s very well written, but most of all because it posed a direct attack on the “Panglossian paradigm”: the view that sociobiology wants to explain all traits, particularly human behaviors, as the direct products of selection. This paper has been the subject of furious discussion and at least one book. In my view, the paper made some valid points but went overboard in its criticism of the adaptationist program, which, after all, has produced lots of insights about evolution. I knew Gould, who was on my thesis committee, and it always seemed like pulling teeth to get him to admit that natural selection was even a relatively important force in evolution. If pressed, he would, but Gould always preferred (perhaps for political reasons) to emphasize the limitations of selection. Lewontin was not nearly so extreme.

It's true that the adaptationists have produced some valuable insights when the problem they are examining is actually an adaptation. However, this isn't as significant as you might imagine. Think of it like this. Everything looks like a nail when you have a large hammer in your hand. The fact that some things actually turn out to be nails is no excuse for blindly whacking at everything that sticks up.

Gould and Lewontin advocated a pluralist position where many different kinds of explanations should be considered. They note that Darwin himself was not committed to natural selection as the only possible mechanism of evolution.

Since Darwin has attained sainthood (if not divinity) among evolutionary biologists, and since all sides invoke God's allegiance, Darwin has often been depicted as a radical selectionist at heart who invoked other mechanisms only in retreat, and only as a result of his age's own lamented ignorance about the mechanisms of heredity. This view is false. Although Darwin regarded selection as the most important of evolutionary mechanisms (as do we), no argument from opponents angered him more than the common attempt to caricature and trivialize his theory by stating that it relied exclusively upon natural selection. In the last edition of the Origin, he wrote (1872, p. 395):

"As my conclusions have lately been much misrepresented, and it has been stated that I attribute the modification of species exclusively to natural selection, I may be permitted to remark that in the first edition of this work, and subsequently, I placed in a most conspicuous position-namely at the close of the introduction-the following words: "I am convinced that natural selection has been the main, but not the exclusive means of modification." This has been of no avail. Great is the power of steady misinterpretation."

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[Hat Tip: Pharyngula: Oldie moldies that are pretty darned fascinating]

On Determining the Structure of a Protein

Michael Clarkson is a biotech postdoc who blogs at Discount Thoughts. One of his recent thoughts is Don't look for "the" structure. He is referring to the fact that the crystal structure of a protein doesn't actually represent the only structure that the protein can adopt.

The figure shown here illustrates one of the problems with referring to the structure of a protein. This is a representation of an NMR structure of bovine ribonuclease A. It shows that various parts of the protein exist in several different conformations. The actual protein structure is a composite of all these structures in equilibrium with each other.

These conformation could be considered "breathing" and you may think they're not important. However, there are many cases where the conformations of a protein are quite different. We are familiar with allostery, where the conformation of a protein changes when it's bound to a ligand, but the are also examples where two very different structures exist in equilibrium in the absence of ligand.

Read his blog posting and keep in mind that proteins are dynamic structures and not static rigid crystals.

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FOX News Pie Chart

 
One of Ms. Sandwalk's ancestors was William Playfair who invented the pie chart [Bar Graphs, Pie Charts, and Darwin]. That was in 1786.

FOX News has heard of the concept but they don't quite seem to have mastered the technique.

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[Hat Tip: GrrlScientist]

The Cutest of all Invertebrates

Catalogue of Organisms features these cute little animals on "Taxon of the Week."

If you follow the link on that blog to a more detailed overview of the taxon you get a bonus—a description of why Christopher Taylor didn't make it to the International Conference of Arachnology in Brazil.

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