Darwin would have loved DNA: celebrating Darwin 200

Analysis of DNA sequences now plays a key role in evolutionary biology research. If Darwin were to come back today, I think he would be absolutely delighted with molecular evolutionary genetics, for three reasons. First, it solved one of the greatest problems for his theory of evolution by natural selection. Second, it gives us a tool that can be used to investigate many of the questions he found the most fascinating. And third, DNA data confirm Darwin''s grand view of evolution.     

A small world after all: Globalization and the transformation of childhood in India

This essay investigates the phenomenon of global television in India and how Indian children, particularly those from the upper middle class, are being integrated into a global consumer cuitare. I suggest that in spite of the surface homogeneity of children's culture global capitalism mediates experiences of children differentially depending on class and location. It has led to greater class stratification in children's play and Indian children, unlike their American counterparts, are socialized to be producers rather than consumers.     

In the beginning there was babble…

“Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. …Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth…”

Genesis 11:7,9     

EXISTENCE: WHO NEEDS IT? THE NON‐IDENTITY PROBLEM AND MERELY POSSIBLE PEOPLE

In formulating procreative principles, it makes sense to begin by thinking about whose interests ought to matter to us. Obviously, we care about those who exist. Less obviously, but still uncontroversially, we care about those who will exist. Ought we to care about those who might possibly, but will not actually, exist? Recently, unusual positions have been taken regarding merely possible people and the non‐identity problem. David Velleman argues that what might have happened to you – an existent person – often doesn't merit moral consideration since the alternative person one would have been had what might have happened actually happened is a merely possible person about whom one has no reason to care. He argues that his way of thinking can eliminate the non‐identity problem. Caspar Hare argues that merely possible people have interests and are morally relevant. He argues that we can solve the non‐identity problem by rejecting the view that merely possible people are morally irrelevant. Both Hare and Velleman argue that focusing on one's de dicto rather than on one's de re children can help us avoid the non‐identity problem. I analyze the role that merely possible, nonexistent hypothetical entities ought to play in our moral reasoning, especially with regard to procreation. I refute both Velleman's and Hare's views and demonstrate the difficulties we encounter when we try to apply their views to common non‐identity cases. I conclude with the common‐sense view regarding who matters, morally: only those who do, did, or will exist.     

Becoming the image: Words of gold,talk television,and Ramadan nights on the little screen

Tarek ‘Allam is currently the most popular interview broadcaster in Egypt. An impromptu appearance last year on his widely‐watched program, “Word of Gold,” created instant celebrity for the author in Egypt, the Arab world, and among diaspora Arab communities that receive the Egyptian satellite channel. I suddenly became the image I study, simultaneously viewer and viewed, a participant in popular mass culture. The experience underscored the power of television to shape public culture, prompted deeper reflection on the resiliency of particular televised images, and emphasized the advantage of turning our gaze from the established texts of dramatic serials to the numerous “on‐the‐street” interview programs aired on Egyptian television.     

The Moral Lives of Laboratory Monkeys: Television and the Ethics of Care

Why do lab monkeys watch TV? This essay examines the preponderance of televisions in primate housing units based in academic research laboratories. Within such labs, television and related visual media are glossed as part-and-parcel of welfare or species-specific enrichment practices intended for research monkeys, a logic that is simultaneously historically- and ontologically-based. In many research centers, television figures prominently in the two inseparable domains of a lab monkey’s life: as a research tool employed during experiments, and in housing units where captive monkeys are said to enjoy watching TV during “down time.” My purpose is not to determine whether monkeys do indeed enjoy, or need, television; rather, I employ visual media as a means to uncover, and decipher, the moral logic of an ethics of care directed specifically at highly sentient creatures who serve as human proxies in a range of experimental contexts. I suggest that this specialized ethics of animal care materializes Mattingly’s notion of “moral laboratories” (Mattingly in Moral laboratories: family peril and the struggle for a good life, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2014), where television mediates the troublesome boundary of species difference among the simian and human subjects who cohabit laboratory worlds.     

Attitudes Toward Animals: Origins and Diversity

Abstract

It would be difficult to overestimate the significance of animals in the social and psychological life of our species. Images of animals are everywhere: in our language, religions, dreams, television programs, and folklore. The feelings that we exhibit toward our fellow creatures are intense, complex, and paradoxical. Responses to animals range from the disgust we feel when confronted with a bloated tick to the reverence for animals as deities in so-called primitive cultures; from the love of a child for a pet bunny to the paralyzing fear of phobic experiences when confronted by a harmless spider.

In recent years there has been increasing interest in human-animal relationships by investigators from a variety of disciplines. We will not attempt a synthesis of the growing literature on attitudes toward animals, but will follow a different course. For the past decade we have been exploring the diversity and origins of human-animal relationships, and our research has taken us into some rather odd places: cockfights in the United States and Latin America, slaughterhouses, and most recently, the world of supermarket check-out-counter magazines. In this article, we will summarize some of our findings and speculations that bear on the subject of attitudes toward animals. We will also briefly examine alternative methods of gathering information that do justice to the richness of human experience with animals.     

Redefining ecological engineering to promote its integration with sustainable development and tighten its links with the whole of ecology

Ecological engineering was defined several decades ago, both in the academic field and in management. However, ecological engineering seems to be re-emerging as an academic field and as a cornerstone concept in French ecologists’ writings. I first summarize Barbault and Pavé's [Barbault, R., Pavé, A., 2003. Territoire de l’écologie et écologie des territoires. In: Caseau, P. (Ed.), Etudes sur l’environnement: de l’échelle du territoire à celle du continent, Tec et Doc Lavoisier, Paris, pp. 1–49] point of view on why ecological engineering now seems rehabilitated in France. I next propose a definition of ecological engineering, in accordance with the two reasons for its French re-emergence, i.e. the prevalence of the concept of sustainable development and the development of applied ecological sub-disciplines. This leads us to suggest that ecological engineering should be ecological in the broad sense, and not only targeted to the ecosystem level. I end the paper by discussing some problems and characteristics of ecological engineering that stem from this definition.     

Global Health Care Justice,Delivery Doctors and Assisted Reproduction: Taking a Note From Catholic Social Teachings

This article will examine the Catholic concept of global justice within a health care framework as it relates to women's needs for delivery doctors in the developing world and women's demands for assisted reproduction in the developed world. I will first discuss justice as a theory, situating it within Catholic social teachings. The Catholic perspective on global justice in health care demands that everyone have access to basic needs before elective treatments are offered to the wealthy. After exploring specific discrepancies in global health care justice, I will point to the need for delivery doctors in the developing world to provide basic assistance to women who hazard many pregnancies as a priority before offering assisted reproduction to women in the developed world. The wide disparities between maternal health in the developing world and elective fertility treatments in the developed world are clearly unjust within Catholic social teachings. I conclude this article by offering policy suggestions for moving closer to health care justice via doctor distribution.     

Comic woman,victim woman: Pushing gender and genre boundaries in popular Hindi Cinema

“Women's film” in Hollywood is associated both with the genre of melodrama, the “weepie”, and with female spectatorship. In the Indian context of popular Hindi cinema, first, genre analysis itself is a questionable line of inquiry since several genres, the melodrama, musical, gangster, or mystery, combine in a single film, known locally as the masala (spicy) film; and second, films are scarcely divided by a gendered viewership. Yet I identify “women's films” as a distinct category in Hindi cinema, emerging around the ‘70s. These women's films typically center on female protagonists, dramatize their victimization and vindication; by the ‘80s under a range of influences these films mutated into rape‐revenge narratives.

However, another strain emerged within the ‘70s’ “women's film,” which drew on cinema's rich visual iconographic tradition of the sight gag, promulgating the comedic/tomboy heroine figure. It favored laughing and mocking patriarchal structures rather than surrendering to them in tears. Focusing on Ramesh Sippy's Sita aur Gita [1972] emblematic of this trend I explore theoretical concerns about associating genres with gender. In keeping with recent poststructuralist theories about gender and media ‘consumption I show how the film destabilized clear‐cut gender identification and stood for a promising trend that was sadly undercut. Thus, while genre might still be a useful analytical tool for Hindi cinema, defining women's film as female‐centered narratives is a viable category as long as we appreciate the instability in gendered viewer identification.     

Public Intellectuals and Biotech Stocks

The stock market is a platform for the transfer of capital from all varieties of clever and avaricious creatures...mega-institutions, fools, ciphers and layabouts lucky enough to be heirs to fortunes...to those who need it to enable productive work.

Stock markets have been so exhaustively analyzed that it is inconceivable that you will find anything new here. Yet I'll take a stab at it: I am interested to know if bioscientists, whose opinions of technologies that drive biotech companies are informed by deep knowledge and analytical capabilities, might have an edge in stock picking. To find out about this, I propose an experiment.

Landes Bioscience will fund a biotech investment account. Investment decisions will be made solely by me with the advise of the stock market equivalent of the bioscience College of Cardinals [bCoC]: simply the first 20 bioscientists who sign on. Here are the terms of the experiment.

* The fund will start out with $20,000.

* The duration of the fund will be five years.

* When the fund ceases operation, whatever assets are in it will be disbursed equally to the bCoC.

* Stock decisions of the fund will be published regularly in Cell Cycle.

* The identity of the bCoC will not be disclosed.

Few things in life are quite as gratifying as living well, especially if it is managed off the ideas and effort of others. Clearly, this is what investing capital is all about, and it is a particularly attractive pursuit when investing someone else's money.

I like the idea of public intellectuals at the interface between science and commerce. This is the call for 20 bioscientists throughout the world to join me in that space.

Ronald G. Landes

rgl@eurekah.com

     

Preliminary studies of Eutorna phaulocosma (Lepidoptera: Oecophoridae) in New Zealand

Abstract

In 1978 George C. Williams predicted that the last two decades of this century would be a fabulous age, and that evolutionary biology would provide critical insights into the processes of change in the biological world. He suggested that these might come to be described as the “good old days”. I am not so sure that this is likely, but I am very sure that it will be a turbulent time. I think also that those biologists who attended the recent SYSTANZ meeting on evolution must by now be equally convinced. The conference was punctuated by heated debates on major topics such as Darwinian and neo-Darwinian theory, vicariance biogeography, and teleology, to mention but a few.     

The television and the shrine: Towards a theoretical model for the study of mass communications in Nigeria 1

The context in which the new mass media are produced, distributed, and consumed in Nigeria differs as radically from the everyday world of the “developed” nations as it does from traditional Nigerian societies of a century ago. Many sociologists of mass communication have failed to address the issue of cultural difference in their accounts of media and their role in the third world. It is suggested that Weber's concepts of “enchantment” and “rationalization” should both be re‐examined if one wishes to better understand a world in which television and the ancestral shrine exist in both spatial and ideological proximity to one another.     

Authenticating Geographies and Temporalities: Representations of Chinese Rock in China

ABSTRACT

Since the mid-1980s the Chinese rock singer Cui Jian has stirred up the arguably tranquil waters of Chinese popular music. In his wake, a rock culture emerged in China, especially Beijing. Whereas earlier generations of Chinese rock were characterized by rather clearly rebellious poses, poses that resonate the spirit of the Great Cultural Debate that characterized Chinese culture over the 1980s, the more recent music scenes employ a wider range of visual tactics. Threading through various generations and scenes within Beijing rock culture, however, has been a quest for authenticity. In this article I will present an overview of the authenticating aspirations of Beijing rock culture. I will start off by sketching a brief history of Chinese rock, and argue that, compared to the Western claim to the origin—and therefore to the continual making—of rock, Chinese rock musicians must bear the burden of providing authenticating proof in order to avoid being labeled mere copycats.

Apart from the West versus Rest distinction, a second dichotomy that propels the politics of rock in China is Beijing rock versus pop from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Rock is constructed as the authentic voice of a new generation, whereas pop is interpreted as an overtly commercialized sound produced by the music industry. These dichotomies underlie the five authenticating tactics that I distinguish: representing what I call the rebellious, the ancient China, the communist China, the scenic, and, finally, the new China. This article will provide ample visual evidence of these authenticating tactics, and analyze critically the politics behind these tactics. I will in particular interrogate the insistence on articulations of time and place that prevail in (discourses on) Chinese rock culture and argue for a cultural studies approach that resists rather than reifies either time or place.     

Surfing in the Third Millennium: Commodifying the Visual Argot

The practice of surfing has often been at odds with the mores of wider society, to the point where surfers have been described in the media as rotten, long‐haired, unwashed drug addicts, or as jobless junkies. However, in recent years there has been an increase in the popularity of surfing and an increase in the consumption of surfing related commodities. This increase in popularity is largely due to the marketing practices of the business interests that are involved in surfing, which has appropriated its images and sold them to a rapidly expanding and lucrative market. This paper will outline how the commodification of surfing's visual style, and the meanings that are symbolised by this development, have had a three‐fold effect on the sport. First, surfing has been shifted away from the beach into quite different contexts; second, surfing as understood by the wider society has been altered and; third, the commodifying practices of business interests have transferred the symbolic ownership of the sport from surfers to surfing capital.     

Materialism and Sensuality: Visualizing the Devil in the Festival of Our Lady of Urkupiña

During the Festival of Our Lady of Urkupin ¨ a, held every August in Quillacollo, Bolivia, an estimated half million pilgrims petition Our Lady for wealth and material goods. The festival has become a national event and now includes the participation of government officials, including the President, as well as widespread coverage by the media. The festival has also become a point of controversy and contestation over the meanings of Bolivian nationalism, commercialism, and economic development. These issues, as I will show, have been articulated through criticisms of the festival as being too sensuous and overly commercialized. Through an examination of media coverage of the festival of Urkupiña, this article focuses on the ways that "evils" of materialism and sensuality are represented visually. The Bolivian state and the Catholic Church have sought to define the meaning of the festival in terms of devotion and national identity while criticizing some festival practices associated with gaining wealth. Here I show how the folkloric and devotional elements of the festival are embodied in the dancers while the visual referent for the materialism of the festival is street vendors. I also discuss how the festival transforms the meanings of the ch'alla and other Andeanpractices that anthropologists have traditionally associated with resistance to capitalism (as found for example in the work of June Nash and Michael Taussig). The article concludes by noting that, rather than mapping these meanings ontogeneralized resistance, anthropologists must be prepared fully to engage contestations over devotion, material gain, sensuousness, and economic development. In short, we should also be prepared to dance with the devil.     

舟曲藏文化生态环境观对比分析

采用资料分析和指数分析两种方法对舟曲县3个藏汉村寨的生态环境进行了差异分析,从生态观的角度分析了导致这种差异性的原因,说明舟曲县3个村寨村民不同的生态观是决定其生态环境质量差异的关键因素。分析了舟曲藏文化的生态环境观与当地生态环境之间良性循环、相互影响的作用机理,并挖掘了这种生态观背后特定的文化内涵,总结了舟曲藏族生态文化主要包括苯教生态文化和藏传佛教生态文化。从地理学角度进行了思考,阐述了舟曲藏族生态文化与当地地理环境之间相互作用、相互影响的关系,指出要从根本上解决当前生态危机,应当将藏族传统生态文化与现代文化有机结合,树立合理的生态观。     

L'adolescence: une épreuve psychique particulière

The problematics of adolescence brings into play, through what we have termed the body circle, the family circle, and the social circle, a series of paradoxes conflicts/oppoisitions, where each time a conquest is possible but where also there is potential risk. This permanent conflictuality, is characteristic of adolescence. confronted with this conflictuality, the capacity to assume the psychic conflict is therefore an essential factor in the development of the adolescent. From this point of view, cathexis of the internal psychic space is an essential element of an adolescent's capacity to deal with this psychic working-through. It is this cathexis that allows a reinforcement of the internal working-through and a better tolerance to expectation and psychic conflictuality. On the other hand, anything that runs in the sence of a diminution of this psychic functioning: projection, acting out, etc … reduces the adolescent's capacities of adaptation with regard to his internal psychic world as well his environment.     

The Goldwyn diary of November and December 1960, at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital, Lambaréné, Gabon

Through unexpected circumstances, I went to Lambaréné, in Gabon, to be Dr. Albert Schweitzer's surgeon for 2 months, November and December of 1960.This diary I can honestly say I never thought would become public. The years have passed; I am now 77. I realize that not many of those who served in a medical capacity at his hospital are still alive and not everyone will share his or her experiences.I want to make clear that I was with Dr. Schweitzer only 2 months. I would not want anyone to think that I played a strategic role at the hospital. I did not, but I helped as best I could.Although I have traveled throughout the world and have been a surgeon in many out-of-the-way places, I have not returned to Lambaréné. The reason, I confess, is that I wanted it to remain in my mind as it was. For Dr. Schweitzer and those who served there, his hospital was a way of life. It was a world of its own and, though small, it came into being because of the arching ideals and unflagging dedication of a remarkable man. His example should inspire us to enlarge our personal horizons, not just to recognize the less fortunate but to act without delay on their behalf. For each of us, there is an Ogowe waiting to be crossed.