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Recruitment in behavioral ecology. In behavioral ecology and studies of animal communication, recruitment is the process by which individuals in a social group direct other individuals to do certain tasks. [2] This is often achieved through the use of recruitment pheromones that direct anywhere from one to several hundred individuals to ...
Basilica di San Marco, Venice. In evolutionary biology, a spandrel is a phenotypic trait that is a byproduct of the evolution of some other characteristic, rather than a direct product of adaptive selection. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin brought the term into biology in their 1979 paper "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian ...
The Necker cube is an optical illusion that was first published as a rhomboid in 1832 by Swiss crystallographer Louis Albert Necker. It is a simple wire-frame , two dimensional drawing of a cube with no visual cues as to its orientation , so it can be interpreted to have either the lower-left or the upper-right square as its front side.
Squaring the circle is a problem in geometry first proposed in Greek mathematics. It is the challenge of constructing a square with the area of a given circle by using only a finite number of steps with a compass and straightedge. The difficulty of the problem raised the question of whether specified axioms of Euclidean geometry concerning the ...
Nominalism. William of Ockham. In metaphysics, nominalism is the view that universals and abstract objects do not actually exist other than being merely names or labels. [1] [2] There are at least two main versions of nominalism. One version denies the existence of universals – things that can be instantiated or exemplified by many particular ...
Coherentism is a view about the structure and system of knowledge, or else justified belief. The coherentist's thesis is normally formulated in terms of a denial of its contrary, such as dogmatic foundationalism, which lacks a proof-theoretical framework, or correspondence theory, which lacks universalism.
Natural philosophy or philosophy of nature (from Latin philosophia naturalis) is the philosophical study of physics, that is, nature and the physical universe. It was dominant before the development of modern science . From the ancient world (at least since Aristotle) until the 19th century, natural philosophy was the common term for the study ...
Indeterminism. Indeterminism is the idea that events (or certain events, or events of certain types) are not caused, or are not caused deterministically . It is the opposite of determinism and related to chance. It is highly relevant to the philosophical problem of free will, particularly in the form of libertarianism.