Science News

Thus, the very success of science can be viewed as evidence that free will exists. "In my view, if your theory says we don't have free will, then empirical evidence shows that your theory is wrong and you better go back and come up with a better one. I think that [reductionists] just haven't taken the time to properly look at emergence, complexity and how the mind works because if they had, they would not make such self-defeating statements that undermine the meaning of what they themselves are saying."

Emotional Equations...

Researchers at Carlos III University of Madrid and the University of Zaragoza theoretically predict, in a scientific study, that contact networks have no influence on cooperation among individuals. These researchers have mathematically examined what occurs when groups of people who behave as the experiments say have to decide whether or not to cooperate, and how the existence of cooperation, globally or in the group, depends on the structure of the interactions.

Over a period of 12 years, Andrei Chikatilo murdered at least 53 people before being arrested in Rostov, Russia, in 1990. While Chikatilo’s killings, mainly of women and children, may have been senseless, a new study has found some sense in the distribution of intervals between the murders, which closely follows a power law. The researchers propose that the murder activity can be explained by a model describing neuronal firing in the brain, very similar to the model that describes the distribution of intervals between epileptic seizures.