EFFECTS OF ACADEMIC DEGREE AND DISCIPLINE ON RELIGIOUS AND EVOLUTIONARY VIEWS IN CHILE AND COLOMBIA

Relationships between degree/area of academic formation and religious and Darwinian views are controversial. This study aimed to compare the religious beliefs and acceptance of Darwinian evolution between two contrasting South American scientific communities (Chile and Colombia), accounting for different degrees and areas of academic formation. In 2018, 115 last year bachelor students (surveyed as freshmen in 2014 for a previous study) from Chile, and 283 first/last year bachelor students, graduate students, and professors from Colombia, all belonging to biology, chemistry, or physics, were surveyed. Chilean students/faculty were significantly more agnostic/atheist, more accepting of Darwinian evolution, and less creationist than their Colombian counterparts. Academic degree and area differently affected these views in both countries, as only in Chile there was a clear tendency among biologists and physicists with higher degrees to hold less religious and creationist views. Marked differences between the history, socioeconomic contexts, and especially in high school and university curricula of both countries might explain these results.     

傅斯年的心理学探索及其贡献

傅斯年是被忽视的近代中国心理学人, 他与心理学渊源极深, 不仅是近代科学心理学思想的学习者、传播者, 也是科学心理学思想的践行者。傅斯年学习心理学前后共12年, 写有《心理分析导引》专著一部, 最早翻译麦独孤的《群体心理学》, 另有《性命古训辩证》等哲学著作和多篇文章阐述其心理学观点。傅斯年认为中国近代学术包括心理学研究必然走向科学化, 做出“科学化的东方学之正统在中国”的基本判断, 将“有群众无社会的无秩序取向” “心中无主义的心气薄弱性” “万恶之源的家庭教育”作为当时民众心理发展的三大障碍, 并倡导民众确定一个健康的、即物穷理的、积极努力和纪律约束并存的人性观。傅斯年参与了“中研院”心理研究所、中山大学和台湾大学心理系的创建, 与蔡元培、汪敬熙、唐钺、苏芗雨等心理学人关系密切, 共同推动了科学心理学在中国的传播和早期中国心理学学科建设, 其一生中存在一条选择心理学, 学习心理学, 离开心理学又助推心理学和运用心理学的心灵探索之路。     

Legal Innovation for Social Change: Exploring Change and Resistance to Different Types of Sustainability Laws

In this article I argue that a desirable future direction for political psychology would be to pay more attention to social‐psychological processes involved in the response to innovative laws, in particular those devised with sustainability and environmental protection aims. This involves taking into account the following premises: (1) innovation and change are not unitary phenomena; instead there are different types of innovation; (2) legal and policy innovation is a specific type and is highly central in an era when global challenges are increasingly dealt with by global treaties which are then translated into national laws with a call to transform local practices; (3) offering attention to the reception of such innovation involves developing specific conceptual tools; (4) devising a typology of legal innovation is one step in this direction; (5) furthering our comprehension of how people, groups, and institutions receive—i.e., accept, contest—legal innovation for sustainability is important for helping to push forward sustainability goals, which are legislated but far from attained. The present article outlines theoretical tools for addressing psychosocial processes involved in the reception of legal innovation, drawing mostly on the approach of social representations and the literature of environmental psychology, and offers three criteria for a typology of laws. Finally I present some examples of responses to subtypes of legal innovation from the sustainability domain, taken as an illustrative case, and discuss differences and commonalities in the processes of acceptance and resistance that each mobilizes.     

Hypercitizenship and the Management of Genetic Diversity: Sociology of Law and the Key Systemic Bifurcation Between the Ring Singularity and the Neofeudal Age

This article is essentially theoretical and is focused on the allocative function of the legal systems to attract/reject different capitals according to their procedures to shape norms and laws. This function of the legal systems is pivotal in our times as humankind is facing a systemic and evolutionary bifurcation between the heideggerian Gegnet of a strategic, high speed convergence (i.e., Singularity) among robotics, informatics, nanotechnologies, and genetics (RINGs)—which will reshape human life in terms of its life quality styles and standards especially regarding health and environment matters, and the so called Neofeudal Scenario (NS) supported by those for whom the Industrial Model failed and the only way to save humankind and its environment would be a kind return to a Medieval life style based on a slow pace of life and austerity. This article provides an overview of the most important and recent international references regarding the two alternatives of bifurcation and describes a potential paradigm shift inside the systemic approach to reframe the conceptual map of global change through a systemic epistemology of the sociology of law.     

Public Entrepreneurship as Social Creativity

The article begins with an overview of the innovation process and the entrepreneurial process, each treated as separate but interrelated phenomena. The innovation process tracks the evolution of a new idea through time, whereas the entrepreneurial process tracks the activities that entrepreneurs develop to promote and defend the idea against its detractors. The model of innovation and entrepreneurship introduced distinguishes between individual and collective entrepreneurship and identifies two types of collective entrepreneurship: team entrepreneurship and functional entrepreneurship. A Minnesota case study demonstrates the power of both team and functional entrepreneurship. It also illustrates how important the linkages are between the entrepreneurs and their larger community. An innovative idea's development and survival depends on an “ecology of organizations” that provide “venture” capital for analysis and experimentation. The vast networks of contacts and associations represent a form of social capital just as important as the community's economic capital. In this case, both aspects of social creativity—the community resources and the network of social relations—were found to be instrumental in passing and implementing the first public school choice program in the country.     

A Unifying Principle Of Biological And Cultural Evolution And Its Implications For The Future

In this article I analyze a regular pattern in the developmental and evolutionary processes, formed by a gradual shortening of developmental stages. This shortening is the expected result of a selection process, in the biological as well as in the cultural evolutionary process. Biology and culture are in this way unified by a common mechanism. A mathematical analysis further indicates a vital condition for a continued progress of human culture, especially for a continued progressive scientific evolution, implying continued shortening of mental developmental stages by means of enhanced education.     

A Complexity Approach To Co-Creating An Innovative Environment

The distinguishing characteristic of complex co-evolving systems is their ability to create new order. In human systems this may take the form of new ways of working or relating, new ideas for products, procedures, artefacts, or even the creation of a different culture or a new organizational form. This article will explore the creation of new order using the principles of complexity and the concepts of creativity and innovation. It will argue that innovation can be facilitated by an enabling environment based on the logic of complexity and describe how one organization (the Humberside Training and Enterprise Council) co-created an innovative environment and changed its culture, ways of working, thinking, and relating.     

Prehistoric artifact invention,value, and change

The evolution of artifacts has been accretive in ideas, materials, energy, and function, resulting in increasing numbers and kinds of artifacts, whereas ideological and social evolution has largely been substitutive and slower. Innovations in caloric, chemic and biologic energies may have been initiated by women, with elaborations by men resulting in specialization. Evolution of materials used in the manufacture of the food, shelter, tool, and toy functions now puts us firmly in the Synthetic Stage, preceded by half a million years of the Natural Stage of human artifact evolution. The toy function is being increasingly interwoven with other functions. Trade in techniques, materials, and finished artifacts has resulted in artifactual similarities around the world, giving hope for a true unification of mankind.     

Toward a Theory of Progressive Evolution (Large-Scale Stages of Evolutionary Progress)

Here I discuss the basic elements, major stages, and completion of progressive evolution. The cosmic world of self-realization is based on extensive self-development within a closed contour: temporal counter-transitions of spatial counter-elements (energy bonds and media and, basically, substance structures) form of local worlds within it through evolution of informational structures.

• The organic world of reproduction develops through the open informational path: the initial substance, through energy exchange and metabolism, reproduces similar substance; the latter interacts with the environment and, subsequently, reproduces its like, and so on.

• The animal world of self-regulation builds up a closed informational contour in the environment through the informational input and command output.

• The human world of self-cognition forms the intensive type of development within the internal closed informational contour of cognition. Counter-transitions of ideal images and signs relate to their real prototypes. In the course of cognition, abstractive thinking develops and brings man to the possibility of reflection of the initial world in its integrity (thus, elevates man to the infinite, by Hegel).