The philosophical "mind-body problem" and its relevance for the relationship between psychiatry and the neurosciences

Parallel to psychiatry, "philosophy of mind" investigates the relationship between mind (mental domain) and body/brain (physical domain). Unlike older forms of philosophy of mind, contemporary analytical philosophy is not exclusively based on introspection and conceptual analysis, but also draws upon the empirical methods and findings of the sciences. This article outlines the conceptual framework of the "mind-body problem" as formulated in contemporary analytical philosophy and argues that this philosophical debate has potentially far-reaching implications for psychiatry as a clinical-scientific discipline, especially for its own autonomy and its relationship to neurology/neuroscience. This point is illustrated by a conceptual analysis of the five principles formulated in Kandel's 1998 article "A New Intellectual Framework for Psychiatry." Kandel's position in the philosophical mind-body debate is ambiguous, ranging from reductive physicalism (psychophysical identity theory) to non-reductive physicalism (in which the mental "supervenes" on the physical) to epiphenomenalist dualism or even emergent dualism. We illustrate how these diverging interpretations result in radically different views on the identity of psychiatry and its relationship with the rapidly expanding domain of neurology/neuroscience.     

Signs and Instruments: The Convergence of Aristotelian and Kantian Intuitions in Biosemiotics

Biosemiotics—a discipline in the process of becoming established as a new research enterprise—faces a double task. On the one hand it must carry out the theoretical and experimental investigation of an enormous range of semiotic phenomena relating organisms to their internal components and to other organisms (e.g., signal transduction, replication, codes, etc.). On the other hand, it must achieve a philosophical re-conceptualization and generalization of theoretical biology in light of the essential role played by semiotic notions in biological explanation and modeling. This paper attempts to contribute to the second task by tracing some aspects of the historical evolution of explanatory models in biology. In so doing, a parallel can be drawn between the present status of biosemiotics and that of physics during the early decades of the last century. By following the career of the concept instrument (organon) in Aristotelian science, we revisit historical stages of the antithetical (but often complementary) roles of mechanical and teleological forms of explanation. The impact of the introduction of the organic codes in biology is seen to be somewhat analogous to that of the introduction of the quantum of action in physics. Faced with intractable empirical facts, physicists combined experimental results and bold philosophical speculation to create quantum physics—a wider, deeper framework that accommodates the new facts through a wholesale reformulation of the classical ideas. Essential to this development was the articulation of the epistemic functions of instruments, which was absent from classical physics. Similarly, the consideration of the role of instruments in biology may lead to a synthesis of Aristotelian and Kantian intuitions within a wider framework capable of joining now separate perspectives, such as Jablonka’s four-fold view of inheritance information, Barbieri’s theory of artifactual copymakers and codemakers, and recently developed models of causation based on the idea of manipulative interventions.

On adaptation: A reduction of the Kauffman-Levin model to a problem in graph theory and its consequences

It is shown that complex adaptations are best modelled as discrete processes represented on directed weighted graphs. Such a representation captures the idea that problems of adaptation in evolutionary biology are problems in a discrete space, something that the conventional representations using continuous adaptive landscapes does not. Further, this representation allows the utilization of well-known algorithms for the computation of several biologically interesting results such as the accessibility of one allele from another by a specified number of point mutations, the accessibility of alleles at a local maximum of fitness, the accessibility of the allele with the globally maximum fitness, etc. A reduction of a model due to Kauffman and Levin to such a representation is explicitly carried out and it is shown how this reduction clarifies the biological questions that are of interest.Thanks are due to William Wimsatt, James F. Crow, and the referees for Biology and Philosophy for comments on an earlier version of this paper. Remarks by members of the audience, especially Abner Shimony, of a seminar at Boston University, February 19, 1988, were also very helpful. The diagrams were prepared with the assistance of Tracy Lubas.     

Biological complexity,quantum coherent states and the problem of efficient transmission of information inside a cell

The intracellular channel of information transmission was analyzed from the point of view of complexity. The most important steps in the transfer of information within a cell are the folding, transport and recognition of proteins. It was shown that the large number of conformational degrees of freedom that proteins possess can paradoxically lead to an information channel with an exponentially small capacity. To resolve this paradox, a model, which assumes a quantum collective behavior of biologically important molecules, was proposed. Experiments to test the quantum nature of the intracellular transfer of information were also proposed.     

The kinetoplast DNA of the Australian trypanosome,Trypanosoma copemani,shares features with Trypanosoma cruzi and Trypanosoma lewisi

Kinetoplast DNA (kDNA) is the mitochondrial genome of trypanosomatids. It consists of a few dozen maxicircles and several thousand minicircles, all catenated topologically to form a two-dimensional DNA network. Minicircles are heterogeneous in size and sequence among species. They present one or several conserved regions that contain three highly conserved sequence blocks. CSB-1 (10?bp sequence) and CSB-2 (8?bp sequence) present lower interspecies homology, while CSB-3 (12?bp sequence) or the Universal Minicircle Sequence is conserved within most trypanosomatids. The Universal Minicircle Sequence is located at the replication origin of the minicircles, and is the binding site for the UMS binding protein, a protein involved in trypanosomatid survival and virulence. Here, we describe the structure and organisation of the kDNA of Trypanosoma copemani, a parasite that has been shown to infect mammalian cells and has been associated with the drastic decline of the endangered Australian marsupial, the woylie (Bettongia penicillata). Deep genomic sequencing showed that T. copemani presents two classes of minicircles that share sequence identity and organisation in the conserved sequence blocks with those of Trypanosoma cruzi and Trypanosoma lewisi. A 19,257?bp partial region of the maxicircle of T. copemani that contained the entire coding region was obtained. Comparative analysis of the T. copemani entire maxicircle coding region with the coding regions of T. cruzi and T. lewisi showed they share 71.05% and 71.28% identity, respectively. The shared features in the maxicircle/minicircle organisation and sequence between T. copemani and T. cruzi/T. lewisi suggest similarities in their process of kDNA replication, and are of significance in understanding the evolution of Australian trypanosomes.     

The impairment argument for the immorality of abortion: A reply

In his recent article Perry Hendricks presents what he calls the impairment argument to show that abortion is immoral. To do so, he argues that to give a fetus fetal alcohol syndrome is immoral. Because killing the fetus impairs it more than giving it fetal alcohol syndrome, Hendricks concludes that killing the fetus must also be immoral. Here, I claim that killing a fetus does not impair it in the way that giving it fetal alcohol syndrome does. By examining the reason why giving a fetus this condition is wrong, I conclude that the same reasoning, on common pro‐choice accounts, does not apply to killing the fetus. Accordingly, Hendricks's argument does not succeed in showing abortion is immoral.     

A Universal Method for the Identification of Bacteria Based on General PCR Primers

The Universal Method (UM) described here will allow the detection of any bacterial rDNA leading to the identification of that bacterium. The method should allow prompt and accurate identification of bacteria. The principle of the method is simple; when a pure PCR product of the 16S gene is obtained, sequenced, and aligned against bacterial DNA data base, then the bacterium can be identified. Confirmation of identity may follow. In this work, several general 16S primers were designed, mixed and applied successfully against 101 different bacterial isolates. One mixture, the Golden mixture7 (G7) detected all tested isolates (67/67). Other golden mixtures; G11, G10, G12, and G5 were useful as well. The overall sensitivity of the UM was 100% since all 101 isolates were detected yielding intended PCR amplicons. A selected PCR band from each of 40 isolates was sequenced and the bacterium identified to species or genus level using BLAST. The results of the UM were consistent with bacterial identities as validated with other identification methods; cultural, API 20E, API 20NE, or genera and species specific PCR primers. Bacteria identified in the study, covered 34 species distributed among 24 genera. The UM should allow the identification of species, genus, novel species or genera, variations within species, and detection of bacterial DNA in otherwise sterile samples such as blood, cerebrospinal fluid, manufactured products, medical supplies, cosmetics, and other samples. Applicability of the method to identifying members of bacterial communities is discussed. The approach itself can be applied to other taxa such as protists and nematodes.     

The notion of the internal and external limitations of monotonic growth functions. A reformulation of the logistic equation

The boundary value (plateau) of non-periodic growth functions constitutes one of the parameters of various usual models such as the logistic equation. Its double interpretation involves either a limit of an internal or endogenous nature or an external environment-dependent limit. Using the autocatalytic model of structured cell populations (Buis, model II, 2003), a reformulation of the logistic equation is put forward and illustrated in the case of three cell classes (juvenile, mature, senescing). The agonistic component corresponds exactly to the only active fraction of the population (non-senescing mature cells), whereas the antagonistic component is interpreted in terms of an external limit (available substrate or source). The occurrence and properties of an external limit are investigated using the same autocatalytic model with two major modifications: the absence of competition (non-limiting source) and the occurrence of a maximum number of mitoses per cell filiation (Lück and Lück, 1978). The analysis, which is carried out according to the principle of deterministic cell automata (L-systems), shows the flexibility of the model, which exhibits a diversity of kinetic properties: shifts from the sigmoidal form, number and position of growth rate extremums, number of phases of the temporal structure. These characteristics correspond to the diversity of the experimental growth curves where the singularities of the growth rate gradient are often not accounted for satisfactorily by the usual global models.     

如何提高学术论文投稿录用率

探讨了如何提高学术论文投稿录用率;从论文选题、题名、内容、格式、参考文献等方面阐述论文录用应注意的一些问题;从选刊、投稿后的注意事项等方面提出了提高投稿录用率的建议。     

Even if the fetus is not a person,abortion is immoral: The impairment argument

Much of the debate about the ethics of abortion has centered on whether the fetus is a person. In an attempt to sidestep this complex issue, I argue that, even if the fetus is not a person, abortion is immoral. To arrive at this conclusion, I argue that giving a fetus fetal alcohol syndrome is immoral, and that if this is so, then killing the fetus is immoral. Roughly, this is because killing the fetus impairs it more than giving it fetal alcohol syndrome. Since abortion (in most cases) amounts to killing the fetus, this means that abortion (in most cases) is immoral. I defend the premises of this argument against a plethora of objections, concluding that they either do not work, or commit their proponent to a controversial position.     

A self-referential model for the formation of the genetic code

A model for the formation of the genetic code is presented where protein synthesis is directed initially by tRNA dimers. Proteins that are resistant to degradation and efficient RNA-binders protect the RNAs. Replication becomes elongational producing poly-tRNAs from which the mRNAs and ribosomes are derived. Attributions are successively fixed to tRNAs paired through the perfect palindromic anticodons, with the same bases at the extremities (5′ANA: UNU 3′; GNG: CNC; principal dinucleotides, pDiN). The 5′ degeneracy is then developed. The first pairs to be encoded correspond to the hydropathy correlation outliers (Gly-CC: Pro-GG and Ser-GA: Ser-CU) and to the sector of homogeneous pDiN, composed by two pyrimidines or two purines. These amino acids are preferred in the N-ends of proteins, stabilizers of proteins against catabolism and strong RNA-binders. The next pairs complete the sector of homogeneous pDiN (Asp, Glu-UC: Leu-AG and Asn, Lys-UU: Phe-AA). This set of nine amino acids forms the protein cores with the predominant aperiodic conformation. Next enter the pairs with mixed pDiN (one purine and one pyrimidine), the RY attributions composing the protein N-ends and the YR attributions the C-ends. The last pair contains the main punctuation signs (Ile, Met, iMet-AU: Tyr, Stop-UA). The model indicates that genetic information emerged during the process of formation of the coding/decoding system and that genes were defined by the proteins. Stable proteins constructed the nucleoprotein system by binding to the RNAs that produced them. In this circular rationale, genes are memories in a metabolic system for production of proteins that stabilize it. The simplicity and the highly deterministic character of the process suggest that the Last Universal Common Ancestor populations could be composed, in early stages, of lineages bearing similar genetic codes.     

The problem of the poor reader

Children who are retarded readers may present a complex problem involving physical impediments, emotional distress, or teaching methods. A child with specific reading disability has spatial confusion, an exaggeration or persistence of a normal childhood tendency to reversal of letters and symbols, ambidexterity, normal intelligence, and poor visual recall of words. Children with these characteristics fail to learn to read in a teaching system in which the main emphasis is on visual associations. Treatment of such reading difficulties, as well as prophylactic measures, is outlined.