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1.
Marshall Abrams 《Biology & philosophy》2009,24(4):487-504
It’s recently been argued that biological fitness can’t change over the course of an organism’s life as a result of organisms’
behaviors. However, some characterizations of biological function and biological altruism tacitly or explicitly assume that
an effect of a trait can change an organism’s fitness. In the first part of the paper, I explain that the core idea of changing
fitness can be understood in terms of conditional probabilities defined over sequences of events in an organism’s life. The
result is a notion of “conditional fitness” which is static but which captures intuitions about apparent behavioral effects
on fitness. The second part of the paper investigates the possibility of providing a systematic foundation for conditional
fitness in terms of spaces of sequences of states of an organism and its environment. I argue that the resulting “organism–environment
history conception” helps unify diverse biological perspectives, and may provide part of a metaphysics of natural selection.
相似文献
Marshall AbramsEmail: |
2.
This paper introduces a threshold policy with hysteresis (TPH) for the control of one-predator one-prey models. The models studied are the Lotka–Volterra and Rosenzweig–MacArthur
two species density-dependent predator–prey models and the Arditi–Ginzburg nondimensional ratio-dependent model. The proposed
policy (TPH) changes the dynamics of the system in such a way that a bounded oscillation is achieved confined to a region
that does not allow extinction of either species. The policy can be designed by a suitable choice of so called virtual equilibrium
points in a simple and intuitive manner.
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Amit Bhaya (Corresponding author)Email: |
3.
Patrick Forber 《Biology & philosophy》2009,24(2):247-266
Evolutionary biology, indeed any science that attempts to reconstruct prehistory, faces practical limitations on available
data. These limitations create the problem of contrast failure: specific observations may fail to discriminate between rival evolutionary hypotheses. Assessing the risk of contrast failure
provides a way to evaluate testing protocols in evolutionary science. Here I will argue that part of the methodological critique
in the Spandrels paper involves diagnosing contrast failure problems. I then distinguish the problem of contrast failure from the more familiar
philosophical problem of underdetermination, and demonstrate how contrast failure arises in scientific practice with an investigation
into Lewontin and White’s (Evolution 14:116–129, 1960) estimation of an adaptive landscape.
相似文献
Patrick ForberEmail: |
4.
Chinyere Ohiri-Aniche 《Dialectical Anthropology》2007,31(4):423-436
The paper deplores the increasing practice whereby individuals and groups write Igbo with orthographic conventions that deviate
from those of the official Igbo (Ọnwụ) Orthography. It warns that these divergent acts are steadily dragging Igbo Orthography
into a state of anarchy whose consequences could be more disastrous than those of the earlier orthography controversy of 1929–1961.
The paper briefly traces the history of Igbo orthography from the earliest mention of Igbo in the sixteenth century writings
of European travelers to the present times. Among its recommendations for the restoration of sanity in Igbo orthography are:
the respect of the present official one until new conventions are officially agreed to and sanctioned; the revival of the
Igbo Standardization Committee which formerly regulated and supervised developments in the language; the convening of an international
workshop on Igbo orthography and the production of an enlarged Pan Igbo orthography for writing in dialects while the present
official (Ọnwụ) orthography serves for Standard Igbo.
相似文献
Chinyere Ohiri-AnicheEmail: |
5.
6.
Christine A. James 《Biosemiotics》2009,2(2):151-167
Williams Syndrome provides a striking test case for discourses on disability, because the characteristics associated with
Williams Syndrome involve a combination of “abilities” and “disabilities”. For example, Williams Syndrome is associated with
disabilities in mathematics and spatial cognition. However, Williams Syndrome individuals also tend to “have a unique strength
in their expressive language skills”, and are socially outgoing and unselfconscious when meeting new people. Children with
Williams are said to be “typically unafraid of strangers and show a greater interest in contact with adults than with their
peers.” This apparently keen social knowledge is a counterexample to the discussion of disability among academic philosophers,
especially philosophers in the early modern period. Locke infamously used the example of disability to claim that Descartes’
arguments in favor of innate ideas were incorrect. On the contrary, Williams Syndrome may stand as an example of innate social
knowledge; something that could benefit current discourse in philosophy, disability theory, and medical ethics.
相似文献
Christine A. JamesEmail: |
7.
Michael Weisberg 《Biology & philosophy》2006,21(5):623-645
This paper is an interpretation and defense of Richard Levins’ “The Strategy of Model Building in Population Biology,” which
has been extremely influential among biologists since its publication 40 years ago. In this article, Levins confronted some
of the deepest philosophical issues surrounding modeling and theory construction. By way of interpretation, I discuss each
of Levins’ major philosophical themes: the problem of complexity, the brute-force approach, the existence and consequence
of tradeoffs, and robustness analysis. I argue that Levins’ article is concerned, at its core, with justifying the use of
multiple, idealized models in population biology.
相似文献
Michael WeisbergEmail: |
8.
Anthropologists and psychiatrists traditionally have used the salience of a mind–body dichotomy to distinguish Western from
non-Western ethnopsychologies. However, despite claims of mind–body holism in non-Western cultures, mind–body divisions are
prominent in non-Western groups. In this article, we discuss three issues: the ethnopsychology of mind–body dichotomies in
Nepal, the relationship between mind–body dichotomies and the hierarchy of resort in a medical pluralistic context, and, finally,
the role of mind–body dichotomies in public health interventions (biomedical and psychosocial) aimed toward decreasing the
stigmatization of mental illness. We assert that, by understanding mind–body relations in non-Western settings, their implications,
and ways in which to reconstitute these relations in a less stigmatizing manner, medical anthropologists and mental health
workers can contribute to the reduction of stigma in global mental health care.
相似文献
Brandon A. KohrtEmail: |
9.
Studies on the effects of a variety of exogenous and anthropogenic environmental factors, including endocrine disruptors,
heavy metals, UV light, high temperature, and others, on marine organisms have been presented at the 2nd Bilateral Seminar
Italy–Japan held in November 2006. Reports were discussed in order to reveal the current situation of marine ecosystems, aiming
at evaluation and prediction of environmental risks.
相似文献
V. MatrangaEmail: |
10.
John S. Wilkins 《Biology & philosophy》2008,23(5):659-671
In 1988, David Hull presented an evolutionary account of science. This was a direct analogy to evolutionary accounts of biological
adaptation, and part of a generalized view of Darwinian selection accounts that he based upon the Universal Darwinism of Richard
Dawkins. Criticisms of this view were made by, among others, Kim Sterelny, which led to it gaining only limited acceptance.
Some of these criticisms are, I will argue, no longer valid in the light of developments in the formal modeling of evolution,
in particular that of Sergey Gavrilets’ work on adaptive landscapes. If we can usefully recast the Hullian view of science
as being driven by selection in terms of Gavrilets’ and Kaufmann’s view of there being “giant components” of high-fitness
networks through any realistic adaptive landscape, we may now find it useful to ask what the adaptive pressures on science
are, and to extend the metaphor into a full analogy. This is in effect to reconcile the Fisherianism of the Dawkins–Hull approach
to selection and replicators, with a Wrightean drift account of social constructionist views of science, preserving, it is
to be hoped, the valuable aspects of both.
相似文献
John S. WilkinsEmail: |
11.
Peter Godfrey-Smith 《Biology & philosophy》2007,22(3):429-437
Jablonka and Lamb's claim that evolutionary biology is undergoing a ‘revolution’ is queried. But the very concept of revolutionary
change has uncertain application to a field organized in the manner of contemporary biology. The explanatory primacy of sequence
properties is also discussed.
相似文献
Peter Godfrey-SmithEmail: |
12.
Jay Odenbaugh 《Biology & philosophy》2006,21(5):607-621
In this essay, I argue for four related claims. First, Richard Levins’ classic “The Strategy of Model Building in Population
Biology” was a statement and defense of theoretical population biology growing out of collaborations between Robert MacArthur,
Richard Lewontin, E. O. Wilson, and others. Second, I argue that the essay served as a response to the rise of systems ecology
especially as pioneered by Kenneth Watt. Third, the arguments offered by Levins against systems ecology and in favor of his
own methodological program are best construed as “pragmatic”. Fourth, I consider limitations of Levins’ arguments given contemporary
population biology.
相似文献
Jay OdenbaughEmail: |
13.
J. R. Martin 《Journal of bioethical inquiry》2008,5(1):41-55
In this paper I focus on the limits of narrative by asking what kinds of things narratives do, and what kinds of texts do
related things in other ways. In particular I focus on how narrative genres organise time in relation to value, drawing on
functional linguistic models of temporality and evaluation. From a linguistic perspective, the various narrative genres negotiate
different kinds of solidarity with listeners, and so the limits of narrative materialise various possibilities for communing
in a culture, alongside the potentialities for construing community through related and other genres of discourse—since in
general, the limits/possibilities of our language (and attendant modalities of communication) are the limits/possibilities
of our social world.
相似文献
J. R. MartinEmail: |
14.
Russell Powell 《Biology & philosophy》2007,22(4):565-578
A number of authors have pointed to “convergent evolution” as evidence for the central role of natural selection in shaping
predictable trajectories of macroevolution. However, there are numerous conceptual and empirical difficulties that arise in
broadly appealing to the frequency of homoplasy as evidence for a non-contingently constrained adaptational design space.
Most important is the need to distinguish between convergent (externally constrained) and parallel (internally constrained)
evolution, and to consider how the respective frequencies of these significantly different sources of homoplasy affect a strong
adaptationist view of life. In this paper, I critically evaluate Simon Conway Morris’s use of the homoplasy literature to
support his argument for a non-contingent, counterfactually stable account of macroevolutionary pattern. In so doing, I offer
a conception of parallelism which avoids the charge that it differs from convergence merely in degree and not in kind. I argue
that although organisms sharing a homoplastic trait will also share varying degrees of homology, it is the underlying developmental
homology with respect to the generators directly causally responsible for the homoplastic event that defines parallel evolution
and non-arbitrarily distinguishes it from convergence. The notion of “screening-off” is used to distinguish the proximal generators
of a homoplastic trait from its more distal genetic causes (such as a master control gene).
相似文献
Russell PowellEmail: |
15.
Georgy S. Levit 《Theorie in den Biowissenschaften》2007,126(4):131-148
This paper raises the general question of whether there are any national peculiarities that characterize the scientific and
philosophical roots of Russian-language evolutionary developmental biology. The researchers and theories are surveyed which,
with hindsight, have been crucial for the Russian tradition when it comes to general methodological principles and constituting
concepts. Based on published works and archival documents the main concepts of the “founding fathers” of the Russian tradition
with their “Western analogues” are compared. The focus is on A. O. Kowalevsky (1840–1901), I. I. Metschnikov (1945–1916),
A. N. Sewertzoff (1866–1936), I. I. Schmalhausen (1884–1963) and the parallelisms between them and E. Haeckel (1834–1919),
V. Franz (1883–1950), and C. H. Waddington (1905–1977). In addition, the problem of specific influences constituting the Russian-language
context of the Modern Synthesis is addressed. The major thesis of this paper is that the very character of the Russian developmental
biology and its intellectual environment predisposed a strong bias towards environmentalist interpretations and thus anticipated
what we now call “ecological developmental biology”.
This paper is an extended version of my talk delivered to the First and founding meeting of the European Society for Evolutionary Developmental Biology (EDD), 16–19 August (Prague, Czech Republic). I thank Scott Gilbert for inviting me to this meeting
相似文献
Georgy S. LevitEmail: |
16.
Community Attachment: The Complexity and Consequence of the Natural Environment Facet 总被引:1,自引:0,他引:1
Joan M. Brehm 《Human ecology: an interdisciplinary journal》2007,35(4):477-488
The primary objective of this paper is to examine more closely the complex nature of the natural environment dimension of
community attachment using the narratives of local community members. This work seeks to build and elaborate on previous quantitative
analyses that demonstrated two distinct dimensions of community attachment––social and natural environment. The findings reveal
several distinct facets of the natural environment dimension of community attachment and demonstrate both a discreet perception
of the natural environment in terms of community attachment as well as one that is more embedded within the social context
of a particular lifestyle. The findings further demonstrate the need to include consideration of the natural environment in
the broader assessment of community attachment and bolster previous quantitative research findings.
相似文献
Joan M. BrehmEmail: |
17.
Following the methodology of K. F. Huemmrich and colleagues [Huemmrich et al. (1999) J Geophys Res 104:27,935–27,944], agrometeorological
standard radiation sensors, i.e. two photosynthetically active radiation sensors and an albedometer, were used to measure
the broadband visible and optical–infrared reflectance of an oat plot during its whole growth period. From these reflectance
data – recorded as 15-min averages and pooled to daily means – the seasonal cycle of the normalised difference vegetation
index (NDVI) was calculated. In addition, a ground-based multi-channel spectroradiometer was used as a reference to estimate
narrowband “green” and “red” NDVIs at weekly intervals near noon. The narrowband “green” NDVI was shown to be consistent with
the simultaneous broadband 15-min NDVI. This shows that the configuration of agrometeorological radiation sensors is suitable
to adequately track phenological crop dynamics.
相似文献
Martin KraftEmail: |
18.
Hanno Sandvik 《Biology & philosophy》2009,24(4):425-440
Both written and graphic accounts of history can be biased by the perspective of the historian. O’Hara (Biol Philos 7:135–160,
1992) has demonstrated that this also applies to evolutionary history and its historians, and identified four narrative devices
that introduce anthropocentricisms into accounts of phylogeny. In the current paper, I identify a fifth such narrative device,
viz. the left–right ordering of the taxa at the tips of cladograms. I define two measures that make it possible to quantify
the degree of anthropocentricism of cladograms, the human attention score and human rightness score. I then carry out an analysis
of the presence of the different distorting mechanisms in phylogenetic textbooks. I deliberately chose two textbooks that
adopted a cladistic perspective, since their authors can be assumed to be more conscious about the aim of avoiding anthropocentricisms.
Three of the narrative devices are thus absent from cladistic works. However, there is a weak tendency that the resolution
of cladogram branches is biased in favour of Homo sapiens. Furthermore, the human perspective is clear and highly significant in the positioning of taxa along the left–right axis
of cladograms. I discuss the reasons for and implications of these biased presentations.
相似文献
Hanno SandvikEmail: |
19.
Adam M. Goldstein 《Evolution》2009,2(3):548-559
A weblog (“blog”) is an publication on the WorldWideWeb in which brief entries are displayed in date order, much like a diary
or journal. I describe the general characteristics of blogs, contrasting blogs with other of WWW formats for self-publishing.
I describe four categories for blogs about evolutionary biology: “professional,” “amateur,” “apostolic,” and “imaginative.”
I also discuss blog networks. I identify paradigms of each category. Throughout, I aim to illuminate blogs about evolutionary
biology from the point of view of a user looking for information about the topic. I conclude that blogs are not the best type
of source for systematic and authoritative information about evolution, and that they are best used by the information-seeker
as a way of identifying what issues are of interest in the community of evolutionists and for generating research leads or
fresh insights on one’s own work.
相似文献
Adam M. GoldsteinEmail: |
20.
Angela Potochnik 《Biology & philosophy》2009,24(2):183-197
The fate of optimality modeling is typically linked to that of adaptationism: the two are thought to stand or fall together
(Gould and Lewontin, Proc Relig Soc Lond 205:581–598, 1979; Orzack and Sober, Am Nat 143(3):361–380, 1994). I argue here that
this is mistaken. The debate over adaptationism has tended to focus on one particular use of optimality models, which I refer
to here as their strong use. The strong use of an optimality model involves the claim that selection is the only important
influence on the evolutionary outcome in question and is thus linked to adaptationism. However, biologists seldom intend this
strong use of optimality models. One common alternative that I term the weak use simply involves the claim that an optimality
model accurately represents the role of selection in bringing about the outcome. This and other weaker uses of optimality
models insulate the optimality approach from criticisms of adaptationism, and they account for the prominence of optimality
modeling (broadly construed) in population biology. The centrality of these uses of optimality models ensures a continuing
role for the optimality approach, regardless of the fate of adaptationism.
相似文献
Angela PotochnikEmail: |