Given that I’m about to become the father of a little girl I found this interesting: Bribery or Just Desserts? Evidence on the Influence of Congressional Voting Patterns on PAC Contributions from Exogenous Variation in the Sex Mix of Legislator Offspring

It should really be titled “If you’re a politician then having daughters makes you more likely to be receive contributions from Women’s Polictial Action Committees and this is because it makes you a more “feminist” voter on these issues”. Actually a really interesting causal analysis of the influence of money on legislation and politicians.

The piece of gold hidden in a footnote is that Democrats are more likely to have daughters than Republicans (significant at the 0.05 level on a t-test). This isn’t affected by the number of children. So why? Having daughters makes you more aligned with the platform of the Democratic Party? Having more daughters makes you more likely to go into Politics if you’re already of the Democratic Party persuasion?

Most interesting. Makes me want to be contrary and abandon the Greens and join the Republicans. Nah, not really.

Biodiversity: Understanding Complex Ecological Systems as Bifurcations of the Species World Line

Wallace, A. R., and Malcolm, I., Posthumous Preprints in Emergence 1:2 (1998)

Abstract: By utilising an observational approach we are able to contextualise the current debate on the origins of biodiversity, particularily the present amorphous definitions of species and their stability, and place these concepts in their proper emergent framework. Returning to first principles and characterising life as a “struggle for existence” we are able to show how speciation events should be considered as the bifurcation of a representational dynamical system i.e. an environmentally mediated feedback effect with long term consequences for the diversity of life on earth. Finally we consider the lessons to be learnt through studies of captive breeding programs and discuss the Lamarckian implications of recent advances in genetic knowledge vis a vis this paper.

PDF of the paper is here

Yet more thrills from the archives to follow. Really, the big one on why and how it (Complexity Theory) all matters (to the Mind-Body Problem).

Bill asked, and so I scoured the archives of a journal long quiescent… Posthumous Preprints in Emergence. More specifically the papers of the well known and redoubtable movie star cum complexity theorist Ian Malcolm, late of the Santa Fe Institute.

On the Deterministic Origins of Frequentist Stochasticity

Poincare, H, and Malcolm, I, Posthumous Preprints in Emergence 1:1 (1998)

Abstract: We examine the origins of probability in fully deterministic systems. We show probabilities to be a necessary consequence of the dynamical instability of complex systems, combined with the finite computational capacity of all observers. We thus ground probability in uncertainty, but in a fundamentally ob jective, anti-Bayesian sense. Applications of our approach to the theory of statistical inference are considered.

PDF of the paper is here

More from the archives to follow.