Alex Levine

Treatments of the reception of Darwinism have focused on Western Europe and North America. This book turns to Argentina in the second half of the nineteenth century. Having hosted Darwin during the voyage of the Beagle, Argentina had a claim to being the cradle of Darwinism. Such claims, together with other cultural currents placed the appropriation or rejection of Darwinism at the center of the struggle to articulate the national identity of the emerging Argentine Republic. Two chapters of original historiography are followed by eight chapters of new English translations of primary sources from the Argentine reception of Darwinism, including texts (by Domingo Sarmiento, Eduardo Holmberg, and others) well known to students of Latin American letters, but never before published in English.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Xe4xAQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=inauthor:%22Adriana+Novoa%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=8gtYU5KBKISR2QW42YDoCA&ved=0CDcQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

""Upon its publication, The Origin of Species was critically embraced in Europe and North America. But how did Darwin’s theories fare in other regions of the world? Adriana Novoa and Alex Levine offer here a history and interpretation of the reception of Darwinism in Argentina, illuminating the ways culture shapes scientific enterprise.  In order to explore how Argentina’s particular interests, ambitions, political anxieties, and prejudices shaped scientific research, From Man to Ape focuses on Darwin’s use of analogies. Both analogy and metaphor are culturally situated, and by studying scientific activity at Europe’s geographical and cultural periphery, Novoa and Levine show that familiar analogies assume unfamiliar and sometimes startling guises in Argentina. The transformation of these analogies in the Argentine context led science—as well as the interaction between science, popular culture, and public policy—in surprising directions. In diverging from European models, Argentine Darwinism reveals a great deal about both Darwinism and science in general.

From Man to Ape reveals a new way of understanding Latin American science and its impact on the scientific communities of Europe and North America.""

http://books.google.com/books?id=JGeAGIipEQEC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

In conceptualizing social robotics it is tempting to view the social dimension as simply an additional layer, overlaid upon the motility and autonomy of individual robots. This paper problematizes such an approach, arguing instead for treating the process of interaction as, in a sense, prior to both individuality and sociality. After analyzing the notion of priority at work in claims of the form, " individuality is prior to sociality, " we turn to lacunae in enactivist approaches to sociality exemplified by the work of De

Citing the failure of AI researchers armed with the most sophisticated symbolic and connectionist models of representation to build intelligent systems, Rodney Brooks in his classic paper “Intelligence without Representation” suggested that perhaps, “Representation is the wrong unit of abstraction in building the bulkiest parts of intelligent systems” (Brooks 1991, p. 139).  Here, by analogy, we want to suggest that perhaps the atomic human subject is the wrong sort of entity to presuppose in building social systems.  Treating it as such can lead to the vacuous individuality of atoms that, while numerically distinct, might in most respects be interchangeable.  But it is not enough to simply turn the tables, beginning instead with the social.  To do so is to run the risk of exchanging vacuous individuality for hollow collectivism.