The Secular Beyond: Free Religious Dissent and Debates over the Afterlife in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Toward the end of the first third of the nineteenth century, German writers began to favor a new metaphor for the afterlife: “das Jenseits” (“the Beyond”). At first glance, the emergence of such a term may appear to have little bearing on our understanding of the history of religious thought. However, as the late historian Reinhart Koselleck maintained, the study of semantic changes can betray tectonic shifts in the matrix of ideas that underpin the worlds of politics, learning, and religion. Drawing on Koselleck's method of conceptual history, the following essay takes the popularization of “the Beyond” as a point of departure for investigating secularization and secularism as two linked, yet distinct, sources of pressure on the fault lines of nineteenth-century German religious thought.

Analysis of multiple aspects of a repeated signal: power and rate of rapping during shell fights in hermit crabs

Repeated activities used by animals during contests are assumed to act as signals advertising the quality of the sender. However, their exact functions are not well understood and observations fit only a limited set of the predictions made by models of signaling systems. Experimental studies of contest behavior tend to focus on analysis of the rate of signaling, but individual performances may also vary in magnitude. Both of these features can vary between outcomes and within contests. We examined changes in the rate and power of shell rapping during shell fights in hermit crabs. We show that both rate and power decline during the course of the encounter and that the duration of pauses between bouts of shell rapping increases with an index of the total effort put into each bout. This supports the idea that the vigor of shell rapping is regulated by fatigue and could therefore act as a signal of stamina. By examining different interacting components of this complex activity, we gain greater insight into its function than would be achieved by investigating a single aspect in isolation.