Search results for " Darwinism"

Die Lust an der Kultur/Theorie. Transdisziplinäre Interventionen. Für Wolfgang Müller-Funk

2013

Social Darwinism, the British Labour Party, and the First World War

2021

This article investigates whether the doctrine of social Darwinism had any bearing on the Labour Party’s decision to support Britain’s participation in the First World War. Many socialist intellect...

La Educación Física Escolar en Tres Centros Educativos de Chile: una Caracterización de sus Prácticas Docentes

2016

Physical Education (PE) generally, and Chilean one, specifically, is in the middle of an identity crisis. There is a vision of the body as a production object. This vision has been generated in the light of social Darwinism, and at the same time there are other more conciliatory and global approaches. This investigation tries, with a holistic approach based on participating observation, to look into the practices carried out in relation to PE in schools in the Chilean context. The main conclusion from the analysis carried out is that in schools, PE is mainly focused on “doing” and on the production of results that can later on be assessed with objectivity. This means that schools are still …

‘Happy amicable co-operation’: mutual aid, anarchism and the image of the bee in the work of Louisa Sarah Bevington

2017

AbstractThe poet and political activist Louisa Sarah Bevington has been largely ignored in accounts of late Victorian literary and cultural history, even though her work presents a singular nexus of scientific, socio-cultural and poetical perspectives. This essay will show how Bevington juxtaposes Social Darwinist interpretations of the theory of evolution, which foreground the idea of human life as a struggle for existence, with the anarcho-communist view proposed by Peter Kropotkin, which foregrounds the human capacity for sympathy and mutual aid as the driving forces in social development. After situating Kropotkin’s ideas within the larger context of anarchist and evolutionist thinking,…

Charles Darwin and ideology : rethinking the Darwinian revolution

2016

This short paper critiques the idea of any coherent Darwinian ideology. Charles Darwin himself did not adopt any obvious ideology, except perhaps that of anti-slavery. However, his published work, and that of other evolutionists, led to the emergence of social Darwinism. Herbert Spencer’s role in fostering social Darwinism, and the rise of eugenics, are briefly described. The connection, if any, between the historical figure of Darwin and the social movement that bears his name is discussed. While Darwin’s On the origin of species or The descent of man can hardly account for all the racial stereotyping, nationalism, or political bigotry seen in the half century after his death, there can be…

Anti-Zeno-based dynamical control of the unfolding of quantum Darwinism

2020

We combine the collisional picture for open system dynamics and the control of the rate of decoherence provided by the quantum (anti-)Zeno effect to illustrate the temporal unfolding of the redundant encoding of information into a multipartite environment that is at the basis of Quantum Darwinism, and to control it. The rate at which such encoding occurs can be enhanced or suppressed by tuning the dynamical conditions of system-environment interaction in a suitable and remarkably simple manner. This would help the design of a new generation of quantum experiments addressing the elusive phenomenology of Quantum Darwinism and thus its characterization.

Role of information backflow in the emergence of quantum Darwinism

2019

Quantum Darwinism attempts to explain the emergence of objective reality of the state of a quantum system in terms of redundant information about the system acquired by independent non interacting fragments of the environment. The consideration of interacting environmental elements gives rise to a rich phenomenology, including the occurrence of non-Markovian features, whose effects on objectification {\it a' la} quantum Darwinism needs to be fully understood. We study a model of local interaction between a simple quantum system and a multi-mode environment that allows for a clear investigation of the interplay between information trapping and propagation in the environment and the emergence…

Witnessing objectivity on a quantum computer

2021

Understanding the emergence of objectivity from the quantum realm has been a long standing issue strongly related to the quantum to classical crossover. Quantum Darwinism provides an answer, interpreting objectivity as consensus between independent observers. Quantum computers provide an interesting platform for such experimental investigation of quantum Darwinism, fulfilling their initial intended purpose as quantum simulators. Here we assess to what degree current NISQ devices can be used as experimental platforms in the field of quantum Darwinism. We do this by simulating an exactly solvable stochastic collision model, taking advantage of the analytical solution to benchmark the experime…

Objective features in quantum states

2023

One of the key features of quantum mechanics is that any superposition of quantum states is in itself a legitimate quantum state. This has far reaching consequences, and is behind the stark difference in behaviour between quantum and classical systems. In particular, quantum systems are not -unlike classical ones- intrinsically objective, that is, different observers are not always able to agree on the properties of the system. Understanding the conditions for objectivity in quantum states is therefore key to address the wider issue of the quantum-to-classical transition. Here, we discuss several aspects of quantum objectivity, and in particular subtleties that arise to the definitions of o…

Naturalism, Science and Literature: Perspectives and Controversies

2001

The article evaluates the impact that the emerging scientific discourses had on the literary production of the second half of the nineteenth century in England