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In the 18th century, the Marquis de Condorcet was a political scientist who correctly perceived obscurantism as a contributing cause of the French Revolution in 1789.. In restricting education and knowledge to a ruling class, obscurantism is anti-democratic in its components of anti-intellectualism and social elitism, which exclude the majority of the people, deemed unworthy of knowing the ...
The opposite of reductionism is holism, a word coined by Jan Smuts in Holism and Evolution, that understanding a system can be done only as a whole.One form of antireductionism (epistemological) holds that we simply are not capable of understanding systems at the level of their most basic constituents, and so the program of reductionism must fail.
Meaning: a prefix used to make words with a sense opposite to that of the root word; in this case, meaning "without" or "-less". This is usually used to describe organisms without a certain characteristic, as well as organisms in which that characteristic may not be immediately obvious.
Objections to evolution have been raised since evolutionary ideas came to prominence in the 19th century. When Charles Darwin published his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, his theory of evolution (the idea that species arose through descent with modification from a single common ancestor in a process driven by natural selection) initially met opposition from scientists with different ...
Defensive Batesian mimics, like this bumblebee-mimicking hoverfly, are the antithesis of aggressive mimics.. Aggressive mimicry stands in semantic contrast with defensive mimicry, where it is the prey that acts as a mimic, with predators being duped.
René Descartes, in De homine (1662), claimed that non-human animals could be explained reductively as automata; meaning essentially as more mechanically complex versions of this Digesting Duck. Reductionism is any of several related philosophical ideas regarding the associations between phenomena which can be described in terms of simpler or ...
Absurdism is the philosophical thesis that life, or the world in general, is absurd. There is wide agreement that the term "absurd" implies a lack of meaning or purpose but there is also significant dispute concerning its exact definition and various versions have been suggested.
Poikilotherm is the opposite of homeotherm – an animal which maintains thermal homeostasis. In principle, the term could be applied to any organism, but it is generally only applied to vertebrate animals. Usually the fluctuations are a consequence of variation in the ambient environmental temperature.