What is fundamental for living objects?

They possess the potential to keep a number of surrounding variables within certain boundaries by using prepared behavior. At first glance, the way in which human behavior is determined reveals an enormous complexity in people. Consider the enormous diversity of cultures and the many ways in which behavior determination – both reactive and proactive – may change and develop throughout one lifetime. How can this great diversity between people as wel...

Since time immemorial, wet rice farming has been practised in Java, the main island of the Indonesian archipelago. For those people there was something divine about running water. Such water was attributed to the gods. The Solo, the biggest river of Java, was for them the Bengawan: the auspicious Lord of the Waters. In the nineteenth century, Dutch irrigation engineers arrived from overseas to subject these water gods to their own technical regimes. In terms of their own religious beliefs, th...