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Abstract The brain is a machine that processes information, records it and gives orders like a computer. All its functions, however noble, result exclusively from the assembly of cellular elements, their interactions and the signals received from the …

Abstract It is above all as a historian, concerned with the concrete data of the evolution of Chinese society, that I intend to approach the history of ideas, conceptions and intellectual currents in China. The time has passed when Chinese history was …

In the West of the 16th-18th   centuries, what were the reciprocal relationships between the religious behavior of a community recognized as significant, its mental tools, its conceptual grid, its scale of values, and its type of emotionality  ? The aim …

Abstract The molecular revolution in biology is fourfold  : the chemical identification of hereditary material as polymerized nucleic acid, the elucidation of the structures of biological macromolecules, the proof that the structure and biosynthesis of …

Documents and media Download the full text of the opening lecture …

Abstract The subject of the lecture I'd like to present this year at the Collège de France is the economy-society, or rather the traditional eco-demography of a world that has now disappeared, as it " functioned ", so to speak, from the 14th to the 18th …

Abstract When physicists began to explore the world of the atom more closely, in an attempt to understand its structure and the laws governing its behavior, they soon ran into serious difficulties. Our intuitive concepts, based on our everyday experience …

Abstract "Genetics," a mathematician friend once told me, "smells a bit like apples and snakes." I'm afraid that the smell today is much less poetic, as it has gradually become impregnated with chemistry. At the heart of biology, genetics is currently in …