Exploring Recent Trends in Youth Justice Reconvictions: A Challenge to the Complexity Thesis

In recent years, it has become accepted wisdom that children subject to youth justice intervention, in England and Wales, are more complex than previously, as a consequence of a substantial rise in diversion from the system that filters out children with lower levels of need and less entrenched offending. This ‘complexity’ thesis has been used to explain rises in rates of reoffending. This article demonstrates that the patterns shown in the reoffending data are not those that would be predicted by the complexity thesis. Indeed the data suggest that some groups of children may be less entrenched in offending than hitherto.

Science

This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the ways religion and science have been related to each other since the nineteenth century, taking into account contemporary debates on the role of the church in society and of the professionalization of science. There are at least four different positions on how to conceptualize the relationship: the conflict thesis, the complexity thesis, the dynamism thesis, and the discursive perspective. Most discussions of the relationship between religion and science operate with a conceptual distinction that defines ‘religion’ and ‘science’ as clear, separate categories, which then are related to each other, creating rigid dichotomies. The chapter discusses integrative and discursive approaches that are more suitable to capture the complexity of meanings of ‘religion’ and ‘science’ and that attempt to move beyond problematic dichotomous constructions. Two case studies demonstrate the usefulness of discursive approaches for the study of religion and science.

Selection for Reinforcement-Free Learning Ability as an Organizing Factor in the Evolution of Cognition

This research explores the relation between environmental structure and neurocognitive structure. We hypothesize that selection pressure on abilities for efficient learning (especially in settings with limited or no reward information) translates into selection pressure on correspondence relations between neurocognitive and environmental structure, since such correspondence allows for simple changes in the environment to be handled with simple learning updates in neurocognitive structure. We present a model in which a simple form of reinforcement-free learning is evolved in neural networks using neuromodulation and analyze the effect this selection for learning ability has on the virtual species' neural organization. We find a higher degree of organization than in a control population evolved without learning ability and discuss the relation between the observed neural structure and the environmental structure. We discuss our findings in the context of the environmental complexity thesis, the Baldwin effect, and other interactions between adaptation processes.