The summary of the lectures at the "Evolution in Science and Art" conference that opened the Darwin exhibition at the Science Museum

An interesting conference that dealt with evolution in science and art was held last Thursday, May 14 at the Science Museum in Jerusalem on the occasion of the Darwin exhibition that opened at the Science Museum under the auspices of the British Council

This year the world celebrates the year of Darwin on the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his book On the Origin of Species. Darwin studied the flora and fauna during his world travels. His observation of nature brought him to the understanding of the principle of natural selection, a principle that is still valid today in modern biology and arouses no less fierce controversy than when it was published 150 years ago. An exhibition for the whole family about evolution and Darwin will be presented at the museum in collaboration with the British Council.

Conference - "Evolution in Science and Art"
In honor of the Year of Evolution, which is being held this year on the 150th anniversary of the publication of the book On the Origin of Species, and the 200th anniversary of the birth of its author, Charles Darwin, a conference will be held at the Bloomfield Jerusalem Science Museum on the theme: "Evolution in Science and Art".

The conference is the result of a joint initiative of the Department of History and Theory at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, and the Bloomfield Science Museum in Jerusalem. It is a continuation of the tradition of cooperation between the two institutions.

The conference will be held on Thursday, May 14.5.2009, XNUMX at the Science Museum for the entire day.

The conference will deal with the concept of evolution in art, science, philosophy and the history of science, museology and the interfaces between them.

During it, researchers, artists, designers and curators will meet, with the aim of tracing the characteristics of the concept of evolution in various fields, bringing to the surface hidden and visible aspects of evolution through expressions in art and science, discussing evolution as a language, revealing the relationship between evolution and different modes of investigation and representation, and more.

An exhibition built and curated in Britain and translated into Hebrew, dealing with Darwin and his teachings, will open on the day of the conference at the Science Museum, under the auspices of the British Council.

Algorithms, evolution, and creative design: is insight a necessary ingredient?
Gabi Kadama, Ben Gurion University

Can creative processes be mechanized? The immediate answer is "no". The first to say this was Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage's partner in the development of the "analytical engine" (the grandfather of multipurpose computers), who stated in 1843 that "it will be able to do [only] what we know how to tell it to do". Alan Turing, the father of computational theory, saw this question as the most important and interesting challenge and linked it to the question of the ability to learn something new (1950) and to change while learning (1948) or while handling a new problem. At the same time, in the early fifties, Johann von Neumann showed that self-replication of automata is possible. During the decades that have passed since then, various paradigms of "artificial life", genetic algorithms and the like have appeared. This activity accelerated as the gross computing power available to the software increased, and especially when parallel computing became an available resource. In recent decades, genetic algorithms and the like have been adopted as a solution to engineering design problems of various kinds, and have also been adopted in the field of computer art. There are also attempts to use such methods in architectural design.

It seems to me that the difficult questions, when we refer to "really creative" design, are these: (a) Are algorithms able to "get out of the box"? (b) Are algorithms capable of revealing insight and understanding of the design problem? Both questions embody a hidden assumption about what algorithms cannot do by their very nature. In the second question we will also have to stop and ask if insight is a necessary element in creative design.

Evolution in the information age: an adequate model for deepening the complexity of a city - a mix of the physical city and its culture

Ze'ev Posner, Cohen Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Opinion - Tel Aviv University

In the world and culture after what is commonly called: the 'information revolution', the flux of information (as well as knowledge and economic assets) occurs over considerable parts of the earth. The formation and dissolution of contexts in culture and the delineation of relevant environments no longer depend on physical proximity between people over time; Whereas the dynamics of every culture, including of course the Israeli one, takes place over an environment, which is a mix in a varying ratio of a physical-tangible environment and an electronic-virtual environment. In this reality, a significant part of Israeli culture's images of the environment have been lost (where the environment is seen as a unity (wholeness) of elements from the real space and the information space); For example, Israel is no longer an 'island', as was commonly thought in the past.
Therefore, the activity of spatial planning has been consistently losing for several decades its ability to influence what is being done (whatever the purpose of this influence may be); For, it mediates between economic life, which is governed by neoclassical economics and professional management theory that are no longer suitable for the economy of the information age (as the current crisis has shown) and the government institutions, which continues to make propaganda use of spatial images (such as that of the island), whose connection to reality is becoming more and more loose.
Due to its spatial-cultural location, because the management of the environment in Israel is meticulous and relied from the beginning on planning knowledge, and because Israeli culture in the past 'knew' how to prepare an appropriate spatial-cultural infrastructure in advance, the great risk lies in the loss of the ability of Israeli culture to adapt to change (including the loss of the relevance of spatial planning ) precisely in Israel.

However, all planning - anticipating the future and attempting to change it - is based on knowledge, and the information revolution has also changed the characteristics of the interactions between the environment and the rational thinking about its properties - the scientific activity, which produces knowledge in the form of models (which, among other things, enable prediction).

The research under the complex systems method has opened up in recent decades a 'new world' of the ability to understand evolution through experimentation on models, operating on a computer, and not just through thinking. Thus, the need to find a purpose, such as fitness, and convert a complex system into a purpose-controlled system, in order to create a model of it, was lost. Today, a complex system (whose scope is greater than the human ability to calculate and remember) can be replaced by a model that is also a complex system, operating in the real world on a computer (and not only in our minds). This knowledge environment, although it has existed for only a few decades, has already produced new knowledge in many fields, such as: immune systems, decoding the genome and the function of RNA in biology, understanding the Internet in computer science, the economics of the rising marginal value, etc. It is therefore already today at the forefront and at the center of scientific activity; For example, because the constant addition of capabilities for computer networks of enormous dimensions and integrated with each other - complex systems - while maintaining their stability and durability, is essential today for the continued existence of the developed world, literally.

Summary

Although gates are a 'product of culture' like computer networks, they also have features of a complex system. In any given city, there are a great many interactions, so that it is not possible to collect data on the behavior of each of them for the purpose of creating a model (for example, to rationally discuss the problem of the 'explosion' of the rate of urban sprawl in Third World cities, such as there are in and around the State of Israel). Therefore, it should have been, intuitively and in the opinion of all complexity researchers for generations, a suitable object for understanding as the dynamics of a complex system - as evolution.

Evolution is seen in this knowledge environment as a dynamic, the maximum possible reduction of which (for the purpose of creating a model) is to two opposing change trends of the amount of information stored in a complex system, and which always exist in it.

amount of information stored in the system (forms that evolved in it in the past); However, and because of this, it inevitably produces additional information (alternative forms), which means that a system is usually in a phase of increasing the amount of information (also because some of the systems contained in it must break down and disappear). This dynamic is an expression of the second law of thermodynamics - order / form / information tends to spontaneously disintegrate, i.e. to change in the direction of entropy / noise (in forgetting processes and transfer processes, two types of processes that are essential for the continued existence of a system). Therefore, if the system has the ability to copy information, that is, forms, then the amount of information in it necessarily increases. Therefore, according to the concept of complexity, culture, and the entire context in any culture (including each city and each of its parts), is nothing but a system that behaves according to the aforementioned dynamics - a biological system whose evolution consistently creates new and different information environments.

The city (especially the Israeli city) is a relatively convenient object for understanding and performing the reverse engineering of evolution, because some of those forms are inherent in a material medium as geometric forms, and therefore their appearance, the changes that occur in them, and their disappearance can sometimes be measured and tracked. But until my research, a satisfactory modeling feature has not been achieved for city dynamics, as has been done in the aforementioned fields and others. Therefore, for example, at the time of the research, there were no adequate analytical tools to discuss the problem of the decline of the spatial-cultural self-organization capacity of the Israeli city. I claim that the reason for this lies in the features necessary for a model of a city (or part of it) which must be built specifically for a certain process in a certain city, these are: proliferation, based as mentioned on a redundancy mechanism, and the existence of an 'inner world' , based on a specific meaning-making mechanism, during its actions a part of a system creates for itself only a 'partial image' of other parts, thus making decisions that enable the continued existence of the entire system.
These two features exist among other things in the spatial component of the culture that exists in every city.
The inclusion of the information space - the spatial component of culture - in a model of the evolution of a city, is therefore not an 'unnecessary complication', as claimed, but an essential component, without which a model cannot function (in the same way that these features are an essential component of models of the immune system, of The nervous system and the brain, etc. as recently discovered in fields of research associated with biology).

Evolutionary processes in industrial design

Zamir ST - Department of Industrial Design, Bezalel

On the exclusion of the 'ugly' as an evolutionary selection process, on random desecration of forms and its role in the release of creativity, on algorithmic methods for automatic desecration of forms, on the contribution and meaning of the creator in the process, on logical languages ​​and formal languages ​​and uses in algorithmic creation processes, on the human interpretation of meaning/form structures, and a little On the differences between form and non-form.

The lecture will focus on the evolutionary meanings in the process, and link between the evolutionary mechanisms and other mechanisms in creative culture, consciousness and meaning.

In the lecture I will review a number of examples from different worlds (industrial design, architecture, music, animation, biology and more), compare them, and visually illustrate the guiding principles.

The lecture will be based on my research paper "Diagram of a Chair" written at Bezalel in 2006, and will detail the logical processes accompanying the random algorithmic creation, its advantages and disadvantages.

Approaches to Marxism in modern Darwinism
Chava Yablonka - Cohen Institute, Tel Aviv University

The Darwinian theory of evolution faces many challenges today. One of the most important of them is the inclusion of considerations concerning the development of the individual (ontogenesis) within the thinking frameworks of heredity and Darwinian evolution. The inclusion of these developmental considerations requires a serious consideration of Markian inheritance: the inheritance of acquired variations, oriented towards the environment and mediated through the development of the individual. I will point out different types of this developmental-structured heredity, and some of its implications for the dynamics of Darwinian evolution.

Origin of species - visual aspects
Sarah Shortz - Life Sciences, The Open University

The book The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1859) and the theory of evolution by natural selection presented in it make unnecessary an explanation through a superior force for the variety of biological species existing in nature. The book and its author have become assets of the iron sheep of secular culture and the focus of attacks by various religious groups.
The covers I will discuss are a small fraction of all the illustrated covers of the origin of species ever published. On the internet alone you can find about one hundred and fifty illustrated covers. It is possible to look at these covers from two points of view, which are not mutually exclusive. On the one hand, one can be impressed by the abundance, variety and creativity of the designers. On the other hand, it is possible to examine how the covers infuse the Darwinian motifs into the wider culture. The covers of the Origin of Species are only a window into the extensive "Darwin industry", which in 2009 reaches its peak in a variety of conferences, exhibitions, festivals and other projects. The extent of these celebrations can also be attributed to the "right" of the creationists, or rather to the confrontation with them. Darwin became one of the symbols of secular culture in the Western world.

In 1967, the American sociologist Robert Bellah published an article entitled "Civil Religion in America". The concept of "civil religion" and later "secular religion" became a tool for analyzing social phenomena and transformations. At the same time, this is a very controversial tool since the concept of "secular religion" includes a thing and its opposite.

The definition that guides me is the following: [...] a comprehensive system of myths, rituals and symbols, aimed at defining the domains and meaning of the moral community, confirming its vision, educating the population to the values ​​inherent in it and mobilizing them for the effort necessary for its realization. This system of beliefs and symbols, which give them sacred validity, is within the scope of "civil religion" (Don-Yachia and Liebman, 1984, p. 462).
In my lecture I will show how the Darwinian symbols on the covers of the book Origin of the Species, as part of the Darwin industry, are part of Western secular religion.

Can evolution outgrow the scientific study of evolution?
Yossi Nosboim - Department of Natural Sciences, Jerusalem College

Evolution is a central element in the paradigm of modern biology and it is currently impossible to imagine another paradigm that can lead and promote biological research.

Darwin's theory of evolution can be succinctly described as a combination of two essential natural principles: 'necessity' and 'randomness' (Chance and Neccessity). 'Randomness' in the appearance of genetic changes (mutations) and 'necessity' in the result of the meeting between the genetic traits of the organism and the changing environmental conditions (the war of existence and survival).

In his theory of evolution, Darwin connected with the mechanistic concept in biology, which developed in those years and occupied its central and exclusive place in biological thinking.

Mechanistic thinking is the only one that allows alternative hypotheses to be raised (all based on mechanistic mechanisms) and tested one by one. In contrast, vitalist thinking - which assumes the existence of non-material entities that manage organisms, does not provide a basis for research, because those non-material entities - by definition - are not subject to the laws of material nature, are not predictable and are not part of the deterministic system of nature. Therefore, from a methodological point of view, it is impossible to conduct research that considers these immaterial entities as relevant factors.

In mechanistic thinking, there is no place for basic assumptions and arguments that see 'purposefulness' in the activity of a single organism, nor in the activity of societies of organisms of the present or the past. The impression of such a prominent purposefulness in evolutionary development is explained today in biology as an "optical illusion" - as pseudo-purposefulness, and is called by the alternative term: 'teleonomy'.

A scientific theory cannot remain indifferent to various contradictions that appear in the empirical world. During the last one hundred and fifty years, various difficulties have been presented to the researchers of evolution. These difficulties are of different types: from (1) technical difficulties, such as - the absence of paleontological findings of various intermediate vertebrae; through (2) difficulties on the development mechanisms of central functional organs, such as - the development of functional wings through intermediate stages that do not yet function and are even the heaviest in the war of existence; And (3) to essential questions, such as - is it possible that there really is no real 'purposefulness' in the world at all.

In the lecture we will raise the essential question: is it even possible for research that is not the product of true 'purposefulness'? If there is no purposefulness in the living world then every biological activity is automatic, albeit with extremely complex mechanisms but still automatic. Man's activity should also be explained in the same way. Let's think about the European particle accelerator project that will be launched in a few months. Can we claim that the raising of the ideas, the overall planning, the planning of the team's work, the calculation of the schedule and the budgets that will be required, the construction of all the elaborate constructions and electronic components, all of these are the result of an automatic process by a group of people who automatically (randomly and necessarily) fell into the world of science and then acted in management The research under the combination of 'randomness and necessity'. Is all this a 'teleonomic' - pseudo-purposive process?

Similar to the last move, we can ask about the human genome mapping project: does the idea, planning and execution not have any real purpose but only "purposefulness in retrospect". That is teleonomy?

We will argue that the genome project was a 'super purposeful' human project that came to convince us that man is a sophisticated machine that has no purpose. Is there not a contradiction here or at least a fundamental problem? These questions have implications for the relationship between the humanities - in which teleology is at the center of the working paradigm, and the natural sciences - in which teleology is forbidden.

On the ecology and evolution of the movement of living beings
Ran Natan - ASA Department, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Animal movement is one of the most distinct signs of life on Earth. Movement characterizes all living things, and has a crucial part in ecological and evolutionary processes, including crucial problems arising from climate change, invasion of alien species, fragmentation of the environment and the spread of diseases. The research is a broad and branching topic, and its importance is increasing especially in recent years. At the same time, this research is characterized by the separation between many fields of specialization, without integration between them and without a common theoretical basis. In this lecture, the "ecology of movement" approach that was recently developed at the Hebrew University will be presented. This approach is intended to fill in the gaps, and to offer the conceptual and practical basis for the development of a new scientific branch that focuses on the movement of living beings, on the causes, mechanisms, models and consequences of all types of movement.

The analogy between the processes of cultural evolution and the processes of design creation
Sefi Hefetz - Department of Industrial Design, Bezalel

On the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth on February 12 and on the 150th anniversary of the publication of the theory of evolution
Evolution is a biological theory that has "survived" for about 150 years and explains the biological changes and adaptations of animals and plants in accordance with environmental changes. This theory, which caused quite a bit of controversy from the day it appeared, grew a parallel branch called "cultural evolution". This branch tries to explain the culture and behavior of man and human society on the basis of evolutionary processes or at least use the rationale of evolutionary thinking. For example, a comparison is made between human society and biological organisms and biological terms such as "diversity", "natural selection", "heredity" and "survival of the fittest" are used regarding cultural behavior patterns.
Design as a very young profession emerged as a distinct product of the industrial revolution.
It is also possible to define fundamental "gardens" of art, craft, architecture and thinking in terms of reproduction and mass production.
In addition, the design works to create aesthetics with cultural values.
Design as a discipline of thinking, planning and creation, has a mechanism of change and innovation built into it.
Is it possible to make a comparison between the mechanisms of cultural evolution and industrial design?
Man is a biological creature that lives and functions as a cultural creature, he is limited by his biological abilities, but most of his choices throughout life are cultural choices.
Design, as one of the products of thinking and human development, is a method for creating tools designed to serve us, perfect our lives and adapt to the environment in which we function and which changes all the time.
Can the design products be seen as products of "cultural evolution"?
The basis of biological evolution is the mutation - a change in the genetic structure that causes the appearance of a feature (anatomical-structural, physiological-systemic or behavioral) that increases the chance of the bearer to survive and produce offspring.

In design, the change ("mutation") is of course not biological but happens, probably always, as a response to an external ("environmental") change. Such a change can result from changing needs, from a change in style and era, or from an "artificial" need such as the designer's internal need to innovate and be different from others (test different formulas of the same model).
In design, there is a central place for "mutations" in a structured way in the creative process. There is no side or feature of the designed object that should not be re-examined and perhaps changed and become more "adapted". This is how the change and innovation were built that set out on an evolutionary path that will test their "survival". Because also in design, as in evolution, there is a process of selection or "survival of the most suitable ideas". In our case selection works not only on one level (adaptation that increases survival and number of offspring) but on at least two levels: aesthetics and efficiency.
Aesthetics as an evolutionary criterion also exists in nature and expresses the attractiveness of one individual to his partner. The peacock for example succeeds in the wild even though it is not too fast to escape from madmen by attracting the most females because it is beautiful and attractive and will therefore have more offspring in the next generation.
The beauty in this case is a guarantee of the quality of the product even though it is to some extent defective. The challenge in design is finding the right balance between beauty and efficiency or usability.
In design, again similar to evolution, there is also a process of gradual change from object to object (or from generation to generation). The feature does not develop from scratch to a final state but undergoes a process of constant refinement and improvement. It is a continuous process of optimization. This can also be seen in the development of a product from generation to generation.
But in evolution, and also in design, there are situations of creation "from nothing". This is a situation of dramatic change in the genetic material - a leap forward. This happens in both cultural evolution and design.
The lecture will try to discuss all the same questions or at least flood some of the analogies through design works done by my fellow designers and myself.
"Darwin's creativity was not limited to the field of biology, as the diaries show. Apparently, the father of the theory of evolution is also the developer of the first office chair. The diaries describe how Darwin attached wheels to his work chair, in order to move quickly from the writing desk to the tables on which he placed his scientific findings."

Evolution of representations in Israeli cinema
Michal Pick Hamo - Department of Industrial Design, Bezalel

From its beginning, Israeli cinema expresses the tensions and changes experienced by Israeli society and develops in accordance with socio-political developments and prominent psycho-ideological processes. One of the clear manifestations of this conduct arises in terms of the historical changes taking place in the "visual archive" of the Israeli media.
The proposed lecture will examine the changes that apply in the variety of representations in Israeli cinema and suggest seeing them as an evolutionary-visual expression of the hidden changes that apply in the Israeli social structure. These changes involve ideological and intellectual changes that characterize the historical period in which they occur.
I will divide the proposed lecture into three parts - in the first part I will present the Israeli visual archive as it emerges from the studies of the main researchers in the field, among them: Dafna Lamish, Ella Shohat, Nurit Gertz, Orli Lubin and Nitzen Ben-Shaul. In this part I will review the representations that characterized Israeli cinema at the beginning and among them distinct but one-dimensional characters such as: the Saber character, the Mizrahi character, the pan-Arab character. These representations, which are based on founding myths and socio-historical and ideological concepts that perceived Israeli nationalism as primordial and hegemonic, were challenged in the 1977s following historical and political changes, among them: the clear victory in the "Six Day War", the anxiety and sense of national rupture following the "Yom Kippur War", the political upheaval which pushed the hegemony and historical consensus in favor of the right-wing parties and the voice of the eastern voice in 1977, the peace initiative of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat at the end of 1979 and the establishment of peace between Israel and Egypt in XNUMX which included the evacuation of the Israeli settlements in the Sinai Peninsula and in the Rafah area.
In the second part of the lecture, I will point out the way in which, in addition to intra-Israeli developments, the Israeli visual archive was also influenced by intra-Israeli intellectual developments, such as studies and thoughts stemming from the post-Zionist concept, and also by the infiltration of global intellectual thought, such as: Orientalism according to A. Said, studies Post-colonialists and more. These changes were a catalyst for pluralistic changes that took place in the Israeli visual archive, including the representations prevalent in the Israeli media and among them: the representation of the woman, the representation of the Palestinian, the representation of the Mizrachi, representations expressing different genders and more.
If in the first two periods the Israeli visual archive contained representations that drew from the primordial and hegemonic perception and in the second period adapted themselves to the new perceptions, in the third period that I will review, the representations in Israeli cinema and the Israeli media after the year XNUMX are driven by resistance to these changes but also by the inability to contain the historical events (the Rabin assassination, Lebanon War, Intifada, terrorist attacks) as well as the discovery of the difficulty of containing the diversity and difference that characterizes the Israeli identity. During this period the prominent representations in the Israeli visual archive are universal. The heroes behave in a dichotomous manner as they struggle to deal with the double dilemma: on the one hand - the need to overcome contradictions and gaps and on the other hand - the desire to break away from them. Be that as it may, if in the beginning Israeli cinema offered one-dimensional characters that sought to represent time and space, the visual archive after the year of Alfiim returns and offers one-dimensional characters, but this time they seek to detach themselves from space.

Evolution: From Noah's Ark to Modern Times
Ila King – University of Glasgow

Museums are the fruit of the transition from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment period and they reflect this in the way their contents are organized and in the ideology behind the initial museum concept. Museums constituted a developmental leap from exclusive family collections towards a universal public collection, which supported both the survival of the items themselves and their preservation as a collection under a declared roof while fixing the term museum. The first public museum opened at the end of the seventeenth century in Basel, and almost immediately duplicates of the form appeared in major European cities.

The Enlightenment period was characterized by a push towards a phenotype of differentiation and since then professional fields have gone and split into even more focused fields with less contact with each other (speciation). This is true both for the fields of pure science and for the social sciences and thought. Thus, while initially museums constituted eclectic collections, in the second half of the eighteenth century focused museums were already opened, although especially central places constitute a supportive environment for museums such as the Metropolitan, which are spread over several areas. The feverish differentiation over 250 years of economic prosperity, colonialism and immigration movements has led to the fact that in the field of art alone today you can find on the same boulevard (in Paris for example) museums for different types of art. This proliferation towards different audiences on the one hand and the "recycling" of the audience across several sites ensured survival and allowed museums, as a family, to take phenotypic forms and exist in different environments and/or reproduce in the same environment. If at the beginning of their journey museums were separated, then soon they began to form mutually fertile relationships.

While all other fields differentiated while converging and shrinking, art went through a different process. Mafinia began to undergo hypermutations so that the ability to define (by genetic markers) becomes more difficult (although there are different types of art), in a way reminiscent of the hypermutability of certain viruses. Similar to viruses, art is supported by the sorted fields around it and tends to change shape and jump between a variety of fields in order to survive while using the "genome" of these fields (biology, various technologies, medicine). Of these, it mutates rapidly and today anything can be called art if it is placed in an "artistic" context or in a supportive environment, and if it has no purpose (in a museum of design or technology, a tree that lights up in response to the touch of a hand has a purpose, but not in an art museum). The penetration and adaptation of art made possible, unlike what happens with pathological viruses in nature, the creation of a symbiotic network with museums. The title art supports the title museum and since everything is art, the Metropolitan (and not the Natural History Museum) can display a 12-meter shark in formalin and the British Museum (and not the Science Museum) can display an exhibition on modern medicine with pills arranged as a kind of mosaic work.

Museums are a group in a social system and a group is also an environmental factor: while the modern environment pushed for the creation of public collections, from the moment they are created they have an impact on the society that created them. First, it allows people exposure, even a feeling of ownership, towards items that were previously the property of a few lucky people. Secondly, the array of museums - the methods of classification and division, the quantity and variety, the selection and reduction of the accompanying information and of course the selection process behind the scenes - has an effect on the way of thinking and the level and type of knowledge of the audience. In the field of art, museums determine what art is considered and accepted in the mainstream (while galleries also represent the avant-garde). Museums have an impact on the perception of one's own identity and that of the other, on the understanding of history and the world and the way in which a non-expert audience meets the fields of science, nature, archeology and art. Museums have the role of a strong and indoctrinative environmental factor and a selection role in choosing the public's general knowledge, similar to an education system.

Today, museums are undergoing a kind of devolution with the help of all-embracing art - a return to the Renaissance period (which they just missed) like land mammals growing fins and returning to the sea to survive. Since museums, because of their size, need a large audience to exist, and since the audience itself is more educated, broad-minded and richer (a kind of Renaissance audience...), the successful museum undergoes adaptation. While the Tate Museum arose as a philanthropic gesture to allow the proletariat to "improve" itself and feel valuable, today the people ask museums to improve, entertain and diversify and offer great events and fine coffee to justify their existence and cost. There is a demand for sensation, for grandiose performances and prestigious exhibitions that appeal to an audience that has already seen and learned everything. Today the audience is also the selective environment of the museums, and a museum with a large audience is a museum that has undergone several mutations. In many museums they ask not to keep the silence.

The presentation will focus on presenting what is happening in museums, especially in Britain, in recent years - it is a total riot and there are many things that are interesting in terms of the directions of museums and artists now.

Memes, genes, the good and the real

Ile Donnenfeld - Department of Philosophy, Hebrew University

The biggest revolution in the presentation of the evolutionary way of thinking is the rejection of the Aristotelian image according to which there is a long-term planning of nature with the goal of it being good. This meant that nature had to be thought of as one organism and the various organisms should be planned so that the whole nature would function well. The answer to the question of why nature is like this is that it is good.
Darwinist thinking explains the harmony that exists in nature, the adaptation of the organism to its environment, as a blind development according to which the adaptation of the organism to the environment "selects" those organisms that have an advantage in this environment. The main point is that a successful gene is one that, on the one hand, was capable of self-replication and, on the other hand, as a survival advantage in its contribution to the development of traits of the phenotype that is used to reproduce it. (I am using here the image of the relationship between the gene and the phenotype as described in Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene".)

A meme is an idea capable of replicating itself. Its survivability is the ability to reproduce itself in a mimetic environment.

In order for there to be a fruitful analogy between the gene and the meme there needs to be a non-random connection between the following two claims:

A) An idea survives because it is good and true.
b) An idea survives because it replicates well.

Dent claims that such a connection does exist because we would not survive if we usually "choose" the memes that are good for us. Thus the memes that are good replicators are usually the memes that benefit us.
(Consciousness Explained pp 205)

In the lecture I will argue that this claim is false and expresses optimism that has no scientific basis.
Therefore I will try to emphasize the dis-analogy that exists between cultural development and biological development.