As a Humanist, Dr. Huxley interests himself in the possibilities of human development, and one thing we can say about this suggestion, which comes from a leading zoologist, is that, so far as he is concerned, the scientific outlook places no rigid limitation upon the idea of future human evolution.

Outstanding among these is the idea of human nature itself, including the many definitions that have been advanced over the centuries ; ;

I mean such concepts as the presence of the supernatural in human affairs, the sacraments of grace and divine retribution, the idea of preordainment ( the oracle over Oedipus, the prophecy of the witches to Macbeth, or God's covenant with His people in Athalie ).

In his analysis, however, he touches upon but fails to explore an idea, generally neglected in discussions of the book, which I believe is central to its art -- the importance of human hands as a recurring feature of the narrative.

but why did the Old Chinese postulate five elements, when the Ancient Near East -- which may have initiated the idea that natural elements exerted influence in human life and activities -- recognized only four??

He then proposed the idea that it might be possible to create chemicals that would act as a selective drug that would bind to and kill bacteria without harming the human host.

Aesthetic ethics refers to the idea that human conduct and behaviour ought to be governed by that which is beautiful and attractive.

In it Heschel forwards what would become a central idea in his theology: that the prophetic ( and, ultimately, Jewish ) view of God is best understood not as anthropomorphic ( that God takes human form ) but rather as anthropopathic — that God has human feelings.

Specifically, in one of his last works, De scientia divina, he concludes that the idea of plurality itself is strictly temporal, a human notion.

However, to Cranmer is ' credited the overall job of editorship and the overarching structure of the book ' including the systematic amendment of his materials to remove any idea that human merit contributed to their salvation.

Scanlon advances the idea that human rights, which are commonly considered a " deontological " concept, can only be justified with reference to the consequences of having those rights.

This idea may be traced back to early Chinese shamanistic beliefs, such as the king being the axle between the sky, human beings, and the Earth.

Proponents of this idea argue either that such diversity is valuable in itself, to preserve human historical heritage and knowledge, or instrumentally valuable because it makes available more ways of solving problems and responding to catastrophes, natural or otherwise.

From this idea the dual inheritance theory is based, and in this theory biology and the arts work together to explain the growth of human behavior.

Discordianism is centered on the idea that both order and disorder are illusions imposed on the universe by the human nervous system, and that neither of these illusions of apparent order and disorder are any more accurate or objectively true than the other.

The idea of dharma as duty or propriety derives from an idea found in India's ancient legal and religious texts that there is a divinely instituted natural order of things ( rta ) and justice, social harmony and human happiness require that human beings discern and live in a manner appropriate to the requirements of that order.

Hofstadter's 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop carries his vision of consciousness considerably further, including the idea that each human " I " is distributed over numerous brains, rather than being limited to precisely one brain.

He puts forward the idea that when men have the opportunity to possess property and work on it, they will “ learn to love the very soil which yields in response to the labor of their hands, not only food to eat, but an abundance of the good things for themselves and those that are dear to them .” He states also that owning property is not only beneficial for a person and their family, but is in fact a right, due to God having “... given the earth for the use and enjoyment of the whole human race ”.

The idea that even if the animal were conscious nothing would be added to the production of behavior, even in animals of the human type, was first voiced by La Mettrie ( 1745 ), and then by Cabanis ( 1802 ), and was further explicated by Hodgson ( 1870 ) and Huxley ( 1874 ).

In the 1970s the term Neo-Evolutionism was used to describe the idea " that human beings sought to preserve a familiar style of life unless change was forced on them by factors that were beyond their control ".

However, the idea that electrons might revolve around a compact nucleus with definite angular momentum was convincingly argued at least 19 years earlier by Niels Bohr, and the Japanese physicist Hantaro Nagaoka published an orbit-based hypothesis for electronic behavior as early as 1904.

For example, abstracting a leather soccer ball to the more general idea of a ball retains only the information on general ball attributes and behavior, eliminating the other characteristics of that particular ball.

Le Chatelier's principle ( 1884 ) gives an idea of the behavior of an equilibrium system when changes to its reaction conditions occur.

Unlike many children, Simon was exposed to the idea that human behavior could be studied scientifically at a relatively young age due to the influence of his mother ’ s younger brother, Harold Merkel, who had studied economics at the University of Wisconsin – Madison under John R. Commons.

A meme (; ) is " an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.

The idea is to count the primes ( or a related set such as the set of prime powers ) with weights to arrive at a function with smoother asymptotic behavior.

Persuasion is a process aimed at changing a person's ( or a group's ) attitude or behavior toward some event, idea, object, or other person ( s ), by using written or spoken words to convey information, feelings, or reasoning, or a combination of them.

Based on the idea of converting heat into mechanical energy, he proposed psychic energy could be converted into behavior.

The basic idea of rational choice theory is that patterns of behavior in societies reflect the choices made by individuals as they try to maximize their benefits and minimize their costs.

All of these methods were based on the idea that homosexuality is a learned behavior that can be reconditioned.

Environmental sustainability is the process of making sure current processes of interaction with the environment are pursued with the idea of keeping the environment as pristine as naturally possible based on ideal-seeking behavior.

For example, describing a transformation as a rotation by a certain angle with respect to a certain axis is easier to get an idea of the overall behavior of the transformation than describing it as a combination of a translation and a rotation.

Most incompatibilists reject the idea that freedom of action consists simply in " voluntary " behavior.

Behaviorism is the idea that all behavior can be traced to specific causes — either environmental or reflexive.

The idea that behavior is learned by observing others has influenced debates on the effect of television violence and parental role models.

This idea forms a key component of the " two-stage memory " theory, advocated by Buzsáki and others, which proposes that memories are stored within the hippocampus during behavior, and then later transferred to the neocortex during sleep: sharp waves are suggested to drive Hebbian synaptic changes in the neocortical targets of hippocampal output pathways.

These data support the idea that non-breeding birds combine adrenal and / or gonadal DHEA synthesis with neural DHEA metabolism to maintain territorial behavior when gonadal testosterone secretion is low.

Work concerning female behavior in many species of animals has sought to confirm Darwin ’ s basic idea of female preference for males with certain characteristics as a major force in the evolution of species.

Apart from the behavioral theory of the firm, Applications of the idea of satisficing behavior in economics include the Akerlof and Yellen model of Menu costs popular in New Keynesian macroeconomics.

Stoic philosophers further developed this idea, reading into the poets not only allegories of natural phenomena, but allegories of ethical behavior.

The two characters resemble each other both in appearance and behavior though their main common point seems to be that they are extremely competitive and neither of them can accept the idea of someone else being superior or equal to them.

Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has argued that the game theoretic advantages of ethical behavior support the idea that morality is " out there " in a certain sense ( as part of the evolutionary fitness landscape ).