A second initiative, called Breakthrough Message, establishes an international competition open to all-comers to create digital messages, encoding a description of humans, our civilisation, and planet.
Because genetics has come to dominate much of the life sciences, for many biologists organisms have become almost irrelevant, save as instruments serving the purposes of their genes - splendidly encapsulated in Richard Dawkins' famous description of humans as "lumbering robots" - the gene's way of making copies of itself.
The problem is, this individualist description of human nature seems to be wrong, and it is the main impediment to Republican modernization.
The Anatome Corporis Humani (1672) of Isbrand van Diemerbroeck, professor at Utrecht, appears to have been the last textbook of anatomy that discussed the soul within a routine description of human parts.
Toril Moi, in her searching and splendid book, Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism, takes us back to Hegel, whose description of human society had one set of ethical imperatives for males, as social beings, and another for women, whose ethical imperatives are seen entirely inside the small structure of the home, where they are wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, and not really individuals.
Hobbes and La Rochefoucauld and the other moral skeptics, it turns out, were partly right in their description of human nature, but, in the end, paradoxically, a moral code is created, not defeated, by self-interest: we create a code precisely because we have mutually opposed interests but must learn to live with one another.
ICPR contest on Semantic Description of Human Activities (SHDA).
For example, he considers whether there is some description of human DNA.
A concept of human redundancy is proposed, including a description of human redundancy forms.
Fuzzy functions and rules are designed for the ambiguous description of human states.
The Big Five framework examines five factors that represent a description of human personality.
