This article offers an overview of cosmological evolution that aims to set in context some further articles in this issue’s Focus. It was originally delivered as the introduction to a session on ‘evolution and emergence’ held at the Liverpool Academia Europaea General Meeting of September 2008.

Charles Darwin has had an extraordinary impact on many aspects of human affairs apart from revolutionizing biology. On the 200th anniversary of his birth, the Cambridge Darwin Festival in July 2009 celebrated these contributions to the humanities, philosophy and religion and the approach to medicine, economics and the social sciences. He is a man to revere. It is no discredit to him that the science of evolutionary biology should continue to evolve. In this article I shall consider some of the ways in which this has happened since his day.

At the end of the Darwin bicentenary year it may be thought that there is little more left to say on the subject of evolution, but there are some aspects that still deserve further elaboration. There are several, largely non-overlapping, sets of evolutionary scientists – for example, the palaeontologists who are particularly interested in fossils and in the evolution of structure; the biochemists and molecular biologists who are interested in the molecular aspects of evolution; and the sociobiologists who include cultural evolution in their field of interest. The Darwin celebrations, reflecting his own scientific interests, have been dominated by the palaeontological approach and other approaches may have been somewhat neglected.

Not only was the year 2009 the year when we celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of the English naturalist Charles Darwin, but it was also the year when we celebrated his greatest book, the Origin of Species, published then 150 years ago. The question I ask here is whether we are really celebrating the Origin of Species, for its own sake, or whether we are using it as a symbol, as a tool – perhaps Darwin himself also – for today’s arguments. Do we really care about the Origin, about what is in it, or is it just a name, standing for ideas we hold dear but which are possibly quite unknown, and perhaps even alien, to Darwin’s thinking?

The reason why I wavered a bit with this topic is that, after all, it has to do with Darwin, after a great Darwin year, as seen by a German scientist. Not that Darwin was very adept in German: Gregor Mendel’s ‘Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden’ (Experiments on Plant Hybrids) was said to have stayed uncut and probably unread on his shelf, which is why he never got it right with heredity in his life – only Gregory Bateson, Ronald A. Fisher, and JBS Haldane, together with Sewall Wright merged evolution with genetics. But Darwin taught us, nevertheless, in essence why the single human species shows such tremendous ethnic diversity, which impresses us above all through a diversity of languages – up to 7000 altogether – and among them, as a consequence, also German, my mother tongue, and English. It would thus have been a truly Darwinian message, if I had written this article in German. I would have called that the discommunication function of the many different languages in humans, which would have been a most significant message of cultural evolution, indeed. I finally decided to overcome the desire to demonstrate so bluntly what cultural evolution is all about, or rather to show that nowadays, with global cultural progress, ‘the world is flat’ indeed – even linguistically. The real sign of its ‘flatness’ is that English is used everywhere, even if Thomas L. Friedman may not have noticed this sign. But I will also come back to that later, when I hope to show how Darwinian principles connect both natural and cultural evolution, and how they first have been widely misunderstood as to their true meaning, and then have been terribly misused – although more so by culturalists, or some self-proclaimed ‘humanists’, rather than by biologists – or at least most of them. Let me, however, quickly add a remark on human languages. That languages even influence our brains and our thinking, that is: how we see the world, has first been remarked upon by Wilhelm von Humboldt and later, more extensively so, by Benjamin Whorf. It has recently been shown by neural imaging – for instance by Angela Friederici – that one’s native language, first as learned from one’s mother and from those around us when we are babies, later from one’s community of speakers, can deeply impinge on a baby’s brain development and stay imprinted in it throughout life, even if language is, of course, learned and not fully genetically preformed. This shows once more how deep the biological roots are that ground our cultures, according to truly Darwinian principles, even if these cultures are completely learned.

This article outlines the lecture presented by Robert Zorec at the Academia Europea meeting in Liverpool on 19 September 2008, four decades after the Sherrington Lecture of Bernard Katz who, together with his colleagues, developed a number of paradigms addressing vesicles in chemical synapses. Vesicles are subcellular organelles that evolved in eukaryotic cells 1000 to 2000 million years ago. They store signalling molecules such as chemical messengers, which are essential for the function of neurons and endocrine cells in supporting the communication between tissues and organs in the human body. Upon a stimulus, the vesicle-stored signalling molecules (neurotransmitters or hormones) are released from cells. This event involves exocytosis, a fundamental biological process, consisting of the merger of the vesicle membrane with the plasma membrane. The two fusing membranes lead to the formation of an aqueous channel – the fusion pore – through which signalling molecules exit into the extracellular space or blood stream. The work of Bernard Katz and colleagues considered that vesicle cargo discharge initially requires the delivery of vesicles to the plasma membrane, where vesicles dock and get primed for fusion with the plasma membrane, and that stimulation initiates the formation of the transient fusion pore through which cargo molecules leave the vesicle lumen in an all-or-none-fashion. However, recent studies indicate that this may not be so simple. Here we highlight the novel findings which indicate that fusion pores are subject to regulations, which affect the release competence of a single vesicle. At least in pituitary lactotrophs, which are the subject of research in our laboratories, single vesicle release of peptide signalling molecules involves modulation of fusion pore diameter and fusion pore kinetics.

May 9, 2010, marks the 60th anniversary of what is arguably the boldest and ostensibly the most successful experiment in the history of international politics. On that date, in 1950, the Schuman Declaration1 was issued, seeking to release Europe from its centuries of fratricidal war, those conflagrations having just previously reached near suicidal proportions. The process of European integration – culminating in today’s European Union – was launched by six states at the heart of the continent, for the purposes of making war ‘not only unthinkable, but materially impossible.’ There is today little empirical question of Europe’s success. War between former bitter enemies has never been even remotely near the horizon during the period that has now become known as ‘The Long Peace,’ and, looking forward, such militarized conflict remains all but inconceivable. But was it the process of European integration that produced this achievement? And if so, is the model exportable to other regions? This essay catalogues the factors that account for Europe’s success in ending the scourge of war on a continent where it had been a commonly employed extension of politics for centuries. I conclude that the integration process represents an important contribution, but is only one of a plethora of causal factors that massively over-determined Europe’s long peace of our time, and that the European experiment is mostly non-exportable to other parts of the world.

What happened 20 years ago in the region formerly ruled by a communist regime was a velvet revolution. And even if it was a revolution without bloodshed, it is a legitimate question to ask what was realized of the revolutionary motto: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité? Liberty is a bundle of rights, composed of at least three sets: (1) political rights; (2) rights of free entrepreneurship, free entry to the market; and (3) freedom of choice between alternative goods and services. There is great progress in achieving all three categories of liberty. As for egalitarian values, inequality rapidly increased, causing aversion against the new order in a large fraction of society. Fraternité, in other words solidarity, is a widely accepted value, but there are great difficulties in its implementation. Post-socialist countries inherited a premature welfare state. The majority of people would prefer universal social entitlements, while the necessary material resources are not sufficient for these ambitious goals. This paper concludes with a discussion of various policy options for easing the contradictions between conflicting and inconsistent objectives.

COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) is one of the longest-running European instruments supporting cooperation among scientists and researchers across Europe. COST is an intergovernmental framework composed of 35 countries, allowing the coordination of research that is otherwise funded on a European level, through the provision of platforms for European scientists to cooperate on a particular project and exchange expertise. As a precursor of advanced multidisciplinary research, COST contributes to reducing the fragmentation in European research investments and to opening the European Research Area to cooperation worldwide. It anticipates and complements the activities of the EU Framework Programmes, constituting a ‘bridge’ towards the scientific communities of emerging countries. It also increases the mobility of researchers across Europe, fostering the establishment of scientific excellence (see www.cost.esf.org). COST Foresight 2030 was an initiative designed to explore a broadly-shared vision for a future world beyond 2030, permeated and shaped by the digital revolution. It consisted of a set of events presenting long-term perspectives in the selected fields – Information and Communication Technologies/Computer and Communication Sciences and Technologies (ICT/CCST), Energy, Food Security, Natural Resources Management, Life Enhancement and Society – which play fundamental roles in human life and which are envisaged to be highly influenced by ICT/CCST-enabling technologies. The workshop ‘Living the Digital Revolution: The European Society in 2030’, the concluding one of the six workshops of the initiative, gathered 20 distinguished scholars and experts from Europe and beyond (AU, NZ, US) for an exploratory brainstorming session. Representing various fields in the social sciences and humanities, such as sociology, education and learning, future studies, law and ethics, economics and business, demography and ICT, the experts focused on the possible trajectories of European societies with regard to the accelerating advancements in ICT/CCST leading up to 2030.

The following is a slightly revised version of a lecture presented at the RIA/IUA/HRB workshop ‘Research Integrity: Promoting and Building Trust’ at the Royal Irish Academy of Sciences, Dublin, on 24 September 2009. Various thoughts and arguments presented in this paper are also discussed in the advisory report of Working Group 2 (Code of Conduct) to the ESF Member Forum on Research Integrity.