Albion College

About: Albion College is a education organization based out in Albion, Michigan, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Higher education. The organization has 485 authors who have published 754 publications receiving 20907 citations.

Monistic Visions and Colonial Consciousness: Ernst Haeckel's Indische Reisebriefe

Abstract: As Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), Germany’s leading proponent of Darwin’s theories of evolution during the latter half of the nineteenth century, set off on his Bildungsreise to the East in the fall of 1881, his hopes and dreams of finding new scientific truths in the data of exploration were expressed in terminology echoing his emerging monistic Weltanschauung, in which all material forms are seen as constituted by a soul (Geist), by a single creative principle. His report, collected as the Indische Reisebriefe (1882),1 depicts the experiences of his journey through the Suez Canal, a week in Bombay, and several months in Ceylon, today’s Sri Lanka, and reflects his growing conviction that the sciences converge with other forms of empirical analysis. In the second half of the nineteenth century, evolving philosophical and scientific models, primarily Marxism and Darwinism, had begun to reshape the intellectual landscape – debates about human knowledge and its social and political repercussions became linked with the status and political agency of the academic community. Thus Haeckel’s trip to India occurs at a time of acute intellectual challenge, a challenge to those Enlightenment precepts to which he and others adamantly adhered. Yet Haeckel and others, such as Carus Sterne, Adolf Bastian, and Rudolf Virchow, were beginning to reconsider how to apply these precepts in this new era, beyond the kind of social exclusions that various scientific debates of the times showed were threatening the German university’s role as a continued force in Enlightenment, as discussed briefly in the first section of this article. As a result, Haeckel’s Indische Reisebriefe, though it rarely receives more than brief mention among biographers and critics, offers unique insight into how a major German intellectual projects his Enlightenment values. While Haeckel’s report exhibits many characteristics of the explorer thoroughly analyzed in Johannes Fabian’s work, this article emphasizes how Haeckel’s travel narrative projects an emerging German identity onto a foreign culture, a new “imagined community” that would purportedly allow for the evolution of reason and society rather than restricting it (Anderson).

Rop, the Sec1/Munc18 homolog in Drosophila, is required for furrow ingression and stable cell shape during cytokinesis

Abstract: Physically separating daughter cells during cytokinesis requires contraction of an actin-myosin ring and vesicle-mediated membrane addition at the cleavage furrow. To identify vesicle trafficking proteins that function in cytokinesis, we screened deficiencies and mutations of candidate genes by live imaging the mitotic domains of the Drosophila embryo. In embryos homozygous for some of these deficiencies, we observed several cytokinesis phenotypes, including slow furrow ingression and increased membrane blebbing. We also found that cytokinesis required the Sec1/Munc18 homolog Rop, which interacts with syntaxin and mediates exocytosis at the plasma membrane. In a temperature-sensitive Rop mutant (Rop(TS)), the contractile ring disassembled during furrow ingression, indicating that maintenance of the ring required vesicle addition. Furthermore, in some dividing Rop(TS) cells, the shape of the daughter cells became unstable, causing cytokinesis failure. These results further highlight the importance of vesicle trafficking in animal cytokinesis and show that vesicle fusion influences cell shape during cytokinesis.

Colonial consciousness: Rudolf Steiner’s Orientalism and German cultural identity

Abstract: Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), founder of Anthroposophy and the Waldorf schools, is one of many German intellectuals who have turned to the Orient in pursuit of poetic and philosophical inspiration, a...

Patterns from Archimedean Tilings Using Generalized Truchet Tiles Decorated with Simple B´ ezier Curves

Abstract: Decorated tiles with simple motifs have been used to enhance the visual appeal of tilings by infusing the underlying tessellation with additional patterns. This paper explores a generalization of Truchet tiles by decorating tiles made from regular polygons with simple B´ ezier curves and considering more than one arc per side. Examples of the generalized tilings for each of the Archimedean tilings are presented using one and two arcs per side. The tension present between the global irregularity and both the local similarity and positional regularity of the generated curves provides excitement and movement not present in the underlying tessellations.