Cycles and circulation: a theme in the history of biology and medicine

We invite systematic consideration of the metaphors of cycles and circulation as a long-term theme in the history of the life and environmental sciences and medicine. Ubiquitous in ancient religious and philosophical traditions, especially in representing the seasons and the motions of celestial bodies, circles once symbolized perfection. Over the centuries cyclic images in western medicine, natural philosophy, natural history and eventually biology gained independence from cosmology and theology and came to depend less on strictly circular forms. As potent ‘canonical icons’, cycles also interacted with representations of linear and irreversible change, including arrows, arcs, scales, series and trees, as in theories of the Earth and of evolution. In modern times life cycles and reproductive cycles have often been held to characterize life, in some cases especially female life, while human efforts selectively to foster and disrupt these cycles have harnessed their productivity in medicine and agriculture. But strong cyclic metaphors have continued to link physiology and climatology, medicine and economics, and biology and manufacturing, notably through the relations between land, food and population. From the grand nineteenth-century transformations of matter to systems ecology, the circulation of molecules through organic and inorganic compartments has posed the problem of maintaining identity in the face of flux and highlights the seductive ability of cyclic schemes to imply closure where no original state was in fact restored. More concerted attention to cycles and circulation will enrich analyses of the power of metaphors to naturalize understandings of life and their shaping by practical interests and political imaginations.

TRANSFORMATION OF THE EVOLUTIONARY ECONOMICS THEORY

The evolutionary economics was separated into an independent direction of research only after the appearance of the works of R. Nelson and S. Winter. The theory they propose is based on similar processes in economics and biology. Thus, the evolutionary economic theory was built on the inconsistency of two processes based on Darwin's theory (variability and selection). When transferring this into the economic reality we create the following model: a competitive struggle is created between the firms as a result of which the most adapted ones "survive" in the process of industrial innovation. At the same time, the evolutionary ideas arose much earlier. In the XVIII century B. Mandeville, A. Smith, and later T. Malthus expressed their ideas that could be attributed to the evolutionary approach today in connection with the assertion of a natural-science worldview that undermined the idea of a divine creation, though with some reservations. The purpose of this article is to trace the change in the ideas of "evolutionary economics" in various technological orders.

Measures of Dispersion and Serial Dependence in Categorical Time Series

The analysis and modeling of categorical time series requires quantifying the extent of dispersion and serial dependence. The dispersion of categorical data is commonly measured by Gini index or entropy, but also the recently proposed extropy measure can be used for this purpose. Regarding signed serial dependence in categorical time series, we consider three types of κ -measures. By analyzing bias properties, it is shown that always one of the κ -measures is related to one of the above-mentioned dispersion measures. For doing statistical inference based on the sample versions of these dispersion and dependence measures, knowledge on their distribution is required. Therefore, we study the asymptotic distributions and bias corrections of the considered dispersion and dependence measures, and we investigate the finite-sample performance of the resulting asymptotic approximations with simulations. The application of the measures is illustrated with real-data examples from politics, economics and biology.

ECONOMICS AND BIOLOGY – IN SEARCH OF COMMON GROUND

The article touches on the issues of relations between economics and biology from economic point of view. Its aim is to try to integrate the chosen achievements of both sciences. The author, inspired by statement of Alfred Marshall, supports his position that economics is a branch of biology. Reflections on this topic enhance interdisciplinarity of such fields of study and improve our understanding of the reality. By way of analyzing literature and by using deductive and reductive reasoning relations between economics and biology are pointed out as well as implications. Also, the reasons and indications of the integration are shown as well as existing problems in such approaches.

Causality and Modelling in the Sciences: Introduction

The advantage of examining causality from the perspective of modelling is thus that it puts us naturally closer to the practice of the sciences. This means being able to set up an interdisciplinary dialogue that contrasts and compares modelling practices in different fields, say economics and biology, medicine and statistics, climate change and physics. It also means that it helps philosophers looking for questions that go beyond the narrow ‘what-is-causality’ or ‘what-are-relata’ and thus puts causality right at the centre of a complex crossroad: epistemology/methodology, metaphysics, politics/ethics. This special issue collects nine papers that touch upon various scientific fields, from system biology to medicine to quantum mechanics to economics, and different questions, from explanation and prediction to the role of both true and false assumptions in modelling.