Daniel Dor | |
---|---|
דניאל דור | |
Nationality | Israeli |
Alma mater | Stanford University |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Linguistics |
Institutions | Tel Aviv University |
Daniel Dor is an Israeli linguist, media researcher and political activist. He is a professor in the Dan Department of Communication in Tel Aviv University. He has written extensively on language and its evolution, as well as on the role of the media in the construction of political hegemony. His theory of language is described in The Instruction of Imagination: Language as a Social Communication Technology (2015).
Dor received his PhD in linguistics from Stanford University in 1996. [1] [2] He started teaching in the Department of Communication in Tel Aviv University in 1998. [1] Since 2000, he has published a series of articles with Eva Jablonka on the evolution of language, describing a complex co-evolutionary relationship cultural evolution of language as a technology and the cognitive and biological evolution of humans. [3] [4] In 2004, he published Intifada Hits the Headlines: How the Israeli Press misreported the Outbreak of the Second Palestinian Uprising, which was chosen as book of the year in communication by Choice Magazine. [5] [1] In 2014, he co-edited “The Social Origins of Language” with Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis. [6] In 2015, he published The Instruction of Imagination: Language as a Social Communication Technology, which presented a new framework for the description and analysis of language and its evolution. [7]
Between 2004 and 2007, Dor served as Chairman and Academic Supervisor of Keshev, the Center for the Protection of Democracy in Israel. [1] [8] [9] In 2011, he founded together with Lia Nirgad The Social Guard, an NGO that maintains a civic presence in the Knesset, monitors the MKs work, and informs the public about every discussion bearing on issues of social justice in Israel. [1] [9]
Evolutionary linguistics or Darwinian linguistics is a sociobiological approach to the study of language. Evolutionary linguists consider linguistics as a subfield of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. The approach is also closely linked with evolutionary anthropology, cognitive linguistics and biolinguistics. Studying languages as the products of nature, it is interested in the biological origin and development of language. Evolutionary linguistics is contrasted with humanistic approaches, especially structural linguistics.
A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures. In popular language, a meme may refer to an Internet meme, typically an image, that is remixed, copied, and circulated in a shared cultural experience online.
The handicap principle is a disputed hypothesis proposed by the Israeli biologist Amotz Zahavi in 1975. It is meant to explain how sexual selection may lead to "honest" or reliable signalling between male and female animals which have an obvious motivation to bluff or deceive each other. The handicap principle suggests that secondary sexual characteristics are costly signals which must be reliable, as they cost the signaller resources that individuals with less of a particular trait could not afford. The handicap principle further proposes that animals of greater biological fitness signal this through handicapping behaviour, or morphology that effectively lowers overall fitness. The central idea is that sexually selected traits function like conspicuous consumption, signalling the ability to afford to squander a resource. Receivers then know that the signal indicates quality, because inferior-quality signallers are unable to produce such wastefully extravagant signals.
Media coverage of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict by journalists in international news media has been said to be biased by both sides and independent observers. These perceptions of bias, possibly exacerbated by the hostile media effect, have generated more complaints of partisan reporting than any other news topic and have led to a proliferation of media watchdog groups.
Amotz Zahavi was an Israeli evolutionary biologist, a Professor in the Department of Zoology at Tel Aviv University, and one of the founders of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel. His main work concerned the evolution of signals, particularly those signals that are indicative of fitness, and their selection for "honesty".
The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries. Scholars wishing to study the origins of language must draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of communication existing among animals. Many argue that the origins of language probably relate closely to the origins of modern human behavior, but there is little agreement about the facts and implications of this connection.
Levantine Arabic, also called Shami, is an Arabic variety spoken in the Levant: in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and southern Turkey. With over 54 million speakers, Levantine is, alongside Egyptian, one of the two prestige varieties of spoken Arabic comprehensible all over the Arab world.
A metasystem transition is the emergence, through evolution, of a higher level of organization or control.
Eva Jablonka is an Israeli evolutionary theorist and geneticist, known especially for her interest in epigenetic inheritance. Born in 1952 in Poland, she emigrated to Israel in 1957. She is a professor at the Cohn Institute for the History of Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. In 1981 she was awarded the Landau prize of Israel for outstanding Master of Science (M.Sc.) work and in 1988, the Marcus prize for outstanding Ph.D. work. She is a proponent of academic freedom, recognising that on such matters, "academic and political issues cannot really be kept apart", although she is not a proponent of simplistic solutions, and shows a preference to describe her own position.
The theory of facilitated variation demonstrates how seemingly complex biological systems can arise through a limited number of regulatory genetic changes, through the differential re-use of pre-existing developmental components. The theory was presented in 2005 by Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart.
Genetic assimilation is a process described by Conrad H. Waddington by which a phenotype originally produced in response to an environmental condition, such as exposure to a teratogen, later becomes genetically encoded via artificial selection or natural selection. Despite superficial appearances, this does not require the (Lamarckian) inheritance of acquired characters, although epigenetic inheritance could potentially influence the result. Waddington stated that genetic assimilation overcomes the barrier to selection imposed by what he called canalization of developmental pathways; he supposed that the organism's genetics evolved to ensure that development proceeded in a certain way regardless of normal environmental variations.
Marion Julia Lamb was Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London, before her retirement. She studied the effect of environmental conditions such as heat, radiation and pollution on metabolic activity and genetic mutability in the fruit fly Drosophila. From the late 1980s, Lamb collaborated with Eva Jablonka, researching and writing on the inheritance of epigenetic variations, and in 2005 they co-authored the book Evolution in Four Dimensions, considered by some to be in the vanguard of an ongoing revolution within evolutionary biology.
The following list of publications by Richard Dawkins is a chronological list of papers, articles, essays and books published by British ethologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.
Amit Schejter is Professor of Communication Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and Visiting Professor of Communications and co-director of the Institute for Information Policy at the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications of the Pennsylvania State University. He is the former President of Oranim College.
Lisa Taraki is an Afghan-born Palestinian journalist, teacher and sociologist. She is an associate professor of sociology at Birzeit University in the West Bank and former Dean of its graduate students. She is the co-founder of the university's Institute of Women's Studies and founding Director of the doctoral program in social sciences. Taraki is also the co-founder of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), a campaign that spearheaded the BDS movement and advocates for academic and cultural boycotts of Israel until it stops what they see as violations of the Palestinians' human rights. She has also served as the director of the board of trustees for Al Haq.
Cultural evolution is an evolutionary theory of social change. It follows from the definition of culture as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation and other forms of social transmission". Cultural evolution is the change of this information over time.
Kevin Neville Lala is an English evolutionary biologist who is Professor of Behavioural and Evolutionary Biology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Educated at the University of Southampton and University College London, he was a Human Frontier Science Program fellow at the University of California, Berkeley before joining the University of St Andrews in 2002. He is one of the co-founders of niche construction theory and a prominent advocate of the extended evolutionary synthesis. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Society of Biology. He has also received a European Research Council Advanced Grant, a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, and a John Templeton Foundation grant. He was the president of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association from 2007 to 2010 and a former president of the Cultural Evolution Society. Lala is currently an external faculty of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research.
Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life is a book by Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb about evolutionary biology. First published by the MIT Press imprint Bradford Books in 2005, the book challenges the gene-centric view of evolution for what the authors consider its excessive focus on the role of DNA sequences in evolution and biological inheritance. The book's title refers to the argument made by the authors that evolution by natural selection, rather than only acting on DNA sequence variation, acts on four different systems or "dimensions": genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic. It includes cartoon illustrations by Anna Zeligowski, an artist and physician.
The Instruction of Imagination: Language as a Social Communication Technology is a 2015 book by Daniel Dor. In it, Dor proposes a new theoretical characterization of language as a social communication technology, collectively constructed for the specific function of the instruction of imagination. It makes four foundational arguments:
Limor Shifman is a professor of communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is the Vice Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences. Her work has been in researching and developing an area of study surrounding Internet memes, a subarea of digital culture and digital media research. Since the late 2000s she has been an active contributor to the research area of memetics, a more broad area of research interested in cultural evolution of ideas. She is married to neurogeneticist Sagiv Shifman.