Since the very beginning of science and philosophy, causality has been a basic category of research. In the theory of dynamical systems, different forms of causality can be distinguished depending on different equations of motion. The question arises how causal relationships can be inferred from observational data. Statistic data analysis often yields information on correlations only, but not on causation. Under special conditions probabilistic distributions of data are connected with causal networks. Causal modeling plays an eminent role in the natural sciences (e.g. physics, chemistry, biology). In engineering sciences, causal dependence must not only be recognized, but constructed and controlled, in order to guarantee reliable and desired functions of technical systems. Control is the inverse problem of causality for engineers. In social sciences, causal networks are used to analyze social and economic interactions in, for example, markets, organizations, and institutions. With respect to volatility shocks and financial crashes, it is a challenge to discover the causes of extreme events. From an epistemic and interdisciplinary point of view, complex nonlinear causal networks are distinguished by universal properties, which are true in natural, technical, and social networks (e.g. scale-invariance, power laws).

Although the representation of women in science and research has improved significantly over the past few years, women are still far from enjoying the same presence and visibility as their male colleagues. This article depicts the current situation by providing recent data, and it explains why more efforts are still needed. It introduces key concepts that are important for a better understanding of the situation of women in science. Some special attention is given to the particular state of affairs of female scientists in the former communist countries. Finally, the article introduces networking activities as a key tool for strengthening women’s position in the world of science and research. It presents the main findings of a recent study on women’s engagement in international research networks, which proved to have tangible positive career implications for the researchers involved. Thus, the article calls for further efforts to encourage female scientists, both senior and junior, to actively engage in research networking activities in order to shape their profiles, strengthen their position and contribute their expertise to international research.

From the start, the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health built its case for taking action on the social determinants of health, unashamedly, on principles of social justice. Quite simply, the Commission stated that health inequities in the sense of avoidable and preventable differences in health between countries, and between groups within countries according to income, occupation, education, ethnicity or between men and women, are unjust. Taking this position has brought praise and blame: praise for the Commission’s boldness in putting fairness on the global health agenda1 in the face of the dominant global model of economic growth as an end in itself, and blame for the Commission’s unworldliness in apparently not recognising that economic arguments push the political agenda.

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.

In the Lisbon Agenda, the European Union’s member States have committed themselves to invest in becoming the most competitive economy in the world. In this paper we review the evidence on whether investment in health should be part of this process. Concentrating on microeconomic studies, we show how better health can increase productivity and labour supply. In addition, there is an indirect positive effect through the investment that healthy people make their own education. Governments pursuing sustainable economic growth – broadly defined – should include the health of their population along with education and physical infrastructure in a balanced investment strategy.

The expansion of higher education systems, new demands on institutions and growing pressures on resources have become common trends across most developed countries. They bring increased expectations of academic staff and appear to lead to greater differentiation in their work roles and activities. At the same time, the backgrounds of some academics are changing and they are developing new specialisms and interdisciplinary collaborations, becoming more mobile domestically and internationally and, for some, the profession is becoming increasingly insecure. The Changing Academic Profession study has produced a rich set of data on the preparation of academics for their roles and the individual circumstances of their working lives, among other aspects of the profession. Respondents to the survey reported on the degrees they have attained, the countries in which they studied for them, the age at which they qualified and the nature of the doctoral training they received. This paper explores the early career paths of academics, makes initial comparisons between different higher education systems and begins to explore how some of these national systems interrelate with each other through academic mobility. Respondents also reported on the disciplines they studied and now teach, the number of institutions worked in and their contractual conditions and income. These data give an indication of the various degrees of flexibility and mobility required of – or chosen by – academics in the early and later stages of their careers and the stability, or perhaps rigidity, of different higher education systems and national career patterns. The data also supplement other evidence of the employment conditions and remuneration of scholars in an increasingly globalised academic labour market.1,2 The conditions of academic work are explored through analysis of the views of survey respondents on the facilities, resources and personnel needed to support it and the degree of research collaboration undertaken. Academics from the 17 countries in the study seem more content with the physical and technical resources provided by their institutions than the personnel and funds available to support teaching and research. Finally, it is suggested that the propensity for collaborative or individual research may be partially related to national differences in academics’ mobility during their training for the profession.

This paper examines the potential impact of East–West migration of talent on the innovative capital and hence the long-run growth prospects in Eastern sending countries. Complementing previous studies, we examine the impact of high-skill migration not only on the formation of human capital, but also consider migration’s impact on knowledge capital in the sending countries. In line with previous studies, we find that, in the short- to medium-term, high-skill migration strictly reduces national innovative capital and hence increases the gap between East and West. However, these effects might be mitigated by factors such as reinforced education of workers, productive investment of remittances, return migration and increased knowledge transfer. Given that the emigration of highly skilled labour affects human capital differently than it does knowledge capital, differentiated policies are required for human capital and knowledge capital in order to efficiently address the adverse impact of the most talented and highly skilled workers.

Over a four-decade long period, a health gap has opened up between European countries, in particular along the East/West dimension. One could speak of a European health divide. The divide is growing larger and, at the same time, shifting eastwards, leaving countries such as Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova at an increasing health disadvantage. Health inequalities, or differences between social classes, within European countries also seem to have been growing for the last couple of decades. Those countries that were previously led by communist regimes today show larger health inequalities than do countries in Western Europe. The countries that were once part of the Soviet Union demonstrate the most alarming health trends, with large segments of the population actually experiencing falling life expectancies. Reducing global and European health inequalities so that the health chances of a newborn child are not dependent on which country and social class he or she is born in, is a truly formidable task, which implies an entirely new way of seeing human development.

Despite the tendency to create a European Higher Education and Research area, academic systems are still quite different across Europe. We selected five countries (Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway and the UK) to investigate how the differences have an impact on a number of aspects of the working conditions of academic staff. One crucial aspect is the growing diversification of professional activity: reduction of tenured and tenure tracked position, the growing number of fixed-term contracts for both teaching and research, including the growing recruitment of academic staff from external professional fields. These changes are connected with the changing functions of higher education systems and signal the growing openness of higher education institutions to their outside social and economic environment. To understand these trends one has to take into consideration the different degree in which systems distinguish between teaching and research functions. A second aspect has to do with career paths, their regulation, their length and speed. Here, the history of recruitment and career mechanisms in different countries are of particular importance because the different systems went through different periods of change and stability. Also connected to career is the willingness and the opportunity to move from one position to another, both within and outside the academic world. A third aspect deserving attention that is connected to mobility is the professional satisfaction among academic staff in the five systems considered.

General figures indicate stark differences between both cross-country and cross-party groups in MEPs’ activity. Our attempt to explain this variation accounts for five variables (plus age for control): (1) the background of the MEPs, (2) their political experience, (3) belonging to a European party group, (4) the duration of their mandate, and (5) their status (i.e. elected versus appointed). Using statistical techniques and original data, we focus on the representatives coming from the most recent EU member state (i.e. Romania) as activity differences are most likely to occur at their level. Results indicate that, in essence, the socialization with the EP workings (duration of term in office) considerably shapes newcomers’ performance.

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.

This article considers the academic profession and academic freedom in light of the results of the Changing Academic Profession (CAP) survey in Finland and four other European countries. Academic freedom is examined as a phenomenon that provides a setting for goal determination by members of the academic profession. It has a bearing on both institutional autonomy and individual academic freedom, i.e. the freedom of research and teaching. Academic freedom can be examined on the basis of material from the CAP survey through the questions about the freedom of teaching, the definition of work, working as a member of a community, the power of influence, funding, and the evaluation of quality. The concept of academic freedom varies slightly between countries, in part because of the growth of higher education systems and because of the increasing demand for ‘relevance’ being imposed on universities.

The Liverpool City-region Health is Wealth Commission was established to examine the growing divergence between the City-region’s public health status and its marked economic growth, specifically looking at links between health and productivity, identifying knowledge-gaps, and encouraging a more focused and collaborative alignment between the business, research and public health agendas. Over 18 months of investigation, Commissioners considered a wide range of research-based and plenary evidence from a number of key witnesses. The Commission made 12 final recommendations within six core themes: Alcohol, Smoking & Obesity; Incapacity Benefit; Wellbeing at Work; Beyond the Built Environment; Procurement; and Knowledge Capital. The Commission’s findings were published in September 2008, as part of Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture programme.

The end of Putin’s presidency – or at least what one could regard as the end of his presidency – was marked by several major riots between ethnic Russians and people from the Caucasus of various ethnic and religious backgrounds. ‘Caucasians’ are usually seen as awry by the majority of Russians. Chechens are often singled out as the symbol of all the negative effects that the presence of ‘Caucasians’ and, in fact, all minorities, brings with it: domination of the market, crime, and changes in the demographic/cultural balance of the country. In more general terms, ‘Caucasians,’ especially Chechens, have coalesced in the minds of many Russians as responsible for all the ills of the post-Soviet era and which have continued through Putin’s tenure. There is increasing social as well as regional division. In fact, the gap between prosperous Moscow and a few other big cities and the small towns and cities and rural areas of the Russian heartland continues to be quite wide. All of this social and social/regional tension has manifested itself not so much in social/class animus, as was the case at the beginning of the 20th century, but in increasing ethnic tension. This has led to several major ethnic riots in the last years of Putin’s tenure, with those in Kondopoga, a small city in Karelia in the northern part of European Russia, as the best known. These riots, in which hundreds of people were involved, left several dead, and many injured. They received much coverage in the Russian press and stuck in the mind of the public as few events in recent Russian history have done. While, in themselves, the Kondopoga events have not led to any major upheaval, their occurrence indicates the serious tension in Russian society, which plays an important role in the case of major crises. The Kondopoga violence also indicates that Russia has the same problems as most countries of the West, which recently have experienced changes in demographic and social/cultural composition due to waves of immigrants, mostly from non-European countries.

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?