Surveillance of emerging infectious diseases for biosecurity

Science China Life Sciences - Emerging infectious diseases, such as COVID-19, continue to pose significant threats to human beings and their surroundings. In addition, biological warfare,...     

Blood Drunkenness and the Bloodthirsty Semai: Unmaking Another Anthropological Myth

The Senoi Semai of Malaysia have frequently been cited as examples in the debates over the wellsprings of human violence. Numerous writers have employed selected Semai ethnographic material to support assertions that, their apparent peacefulness notwithstanding, Semai are in reality bloodthirsty killers. This assertion has in turn been used as evidence in support of a variety of approaches whose common thread is a view of aggressiveness and violence as somehow innate in human beings. The authors of this article, whose publications form the basis of most anthropological knowledge of Semai life and culture, draw on their own published and unpublished work as well as on documentation from other sources to refute these interpretations. We hold that Semai life is, as first-hand observers have described it, notably free of interpersonal violence, and we argue that misrepresentations rooted in particular theoretical or philosophical a priori assumptions are scientifically untenable and culturally slanderous.     

Younger brother and fishing hook on Timor: reassessing Mauss on hierarchy and divinity

Marcel Mauss, in two of his most influential papers, proposed conflicting perspectives on the status relationship between gods and human beings. In an earlier study (1888), written in collaboration with Henri Hubert, he contended that the gifts given in ritual sacrifice by human beings to divinity are important, even necessary, for the existence of their gods. Hence the status relationship between the divine and human contains some degree of parity. In his later paper, 'Essai sur le don', however, Mauss emphasized the superiority of divinity, so much so that human beings were now decisively relegated to a condition of subordination. This article argues in support of Mauss's (and Hubert's) original thesis by adducing as evidence a set of five oral narratives from Timor that suggest human beings may in certain circumstances gain a measure of superiority over the divine, and demonstrates that in each narrative the agents by which this superiority is accomplished are the younger brother and a fishing hook or equivalent artefact which intrude from the quotidian world into the realm of spirit. Its findings suggest that recent propositions arguing for the interactive influence of material artefacts on human values are tenable and that the role of narrative as a medium of communication be reaffirmed as a prime forum for religious reflexivity.     

Emotion (or Life,the Universe,Everything)

Emotions are fundamental to human life; they define its quality and motivate action. In the past, social scientists who have studied emotions have treated them as biological, cultural or social phenomena. These approaches have tended to fall on either side of the culturally recognised division between nature and culture, and so have failed to recognise that emotions bridge this division, that they are thought of as both biological and cultural, as consisting of both physical feeling and cultural meaning. In this article, an alternative approach is presented in which emotions are treated as ecological mechanisms that operate in the relationship between an individual human being and their environment. In this approach, which draws on models of emotion proposed by William James and Antonio Damasio, emotions connect individual human beings to their surroundings and play an important role in learning. A focus on the individual as the centre of analytical attention—often referred to as ‘methodological individualism’—is a logical consequence of the ecological approach to emotion, which also has significant implications for the relationships between ecological anthropology and other branches of the discipline, and between anthropology and other disciplines. In the face of an ecological understanding of emotion, all relations, including social relations, become ecological and social anthropology melts into and is subsumed by ecological anthropology. At the same time, anthropology tends to lose its distinctiveness from biology, psychology and other disciplines by focusing on a phenomenon that is of common interest to all the human sciences.     

The adaptive significance of cultural behavior

In this article, I argue that human social behavior is a product of the coevolution of human biology and culture. While critical of attempts by anthropologists to explain cultural practices as if they were independent of the ability of individual human beings to survive and reproduce, I am also leery of attempts by biologists to explain the consistencies between neo-Darwinian theory and cultural behavior as the result of natural selection for that behavior. Instead, I propose that both biological and cultural attributes of human beings result to a large degree from the selective retention of traits that enhance the inclusive fitnesses of individuals in their environments. Aspects of human biology and culture may be adaptive in the same sense despite differences between the mechanisms of selection and regardless of their relative importance in the evolution of a trait. The old idea that organic and cultural evolution are complementary can thus be used to provide new explanations for why people do what they do.This article was prepared from remarks I presented at the Smithsonian Conference on Human Biogeography in April 1974. Help with phenotypic costs came from an NSF Pre-doctoral Fellowship and the University of Michigan Society of Fellows.     

毒素战剂的生防疫苗简

毒素战剂是重要的生物战剂之一,其最大的威胁来自它的高毒性和缺乏有效的防治手段。在毒素战剂中,肉毒毒素、志贺毒素、蓖麻毒素、相思子毒素等属于致死性生物战剂,葡萄球菌肠毒素B属于失能性生物战剂。生防疫苗作为毒素战剂的一种重要的有效预防手段,一直备受关注,但目前绝大部分毒素战剂的疫苗都还在研制中,随着分子生物学技术的快速发展,几种重要毒素战剂的重组疫苗研究已获得重要突破。我们重点介绍肉毒毒素、志贺毒素、蓖麻毒素、相思子毒素、葡萄球菌肠毒素B等毒素战剂生防疫苗的研究与发展。     

Warfare and hominid brain evolution.

This paper reviews literature on the evolutionary effects of warfare upon the hominid brain. Alexander &; Tinkle (1968) and Bigelow (1969) are found to be the first to propose that warfare was the principle evolutionary pressure that created the novel substance of the human brain, and that it acted at least from the early Pleistocene. These writers are distinguished from Darwin (1871), Keith (1947) and Wilson (1975) who saw warfare influencing the development of the brain only in historical or near-historical times.The warfare hypothesis of Alexander &; Tinkle is found to be an excellent explanation of the evolution of the human brain, but to be unsatisfactory from a biological viewpoint because they do not explain how warfare evolved in the first place, nor do they attempt to account for the apparent absence of warfare as a behavioral adaptation in species other than some eusocial insects.This author underpins the warfare hypothesis, arguing that it evolved as a necessary consequence of the circumstances of early hominids. Proficient tool use gave domination over predators and opened up new food resources, thereby diminishing two population controls. A population explosion resulted and, at critical densities, when starvation threatened, warfare was the genetically most successful behavioral adaptation. Alternative hypotheses are shown to be inadequate. Finally, the author asks why such an important hypothesis has been ignored for almost a decade.     

Concepts of Spiritual Nourishment in the Andes And Europe: Rosaries in Cross-Cultural Contexts

This article explores visual imagery connected with the Christian rosary and its connotations of spiritual nourishment in European art and Andean ritual practices. Early eighteenth-century religious art inspired by a vision received by Isidoro of Seville, a Capuchin friar, presented the Virgin Mary as the Divine Shepherdess with her flock of Christians, depicted as sheep with roses in their mouths. This imagery resonates in the flowering ceremony practised by Aymara pastoralists in Isluga, Chile. The floreo serves as a rite of passage for herd animals, its intention being to enhance their fertility by making them 'flower'. However the congruence between the visual codes produced by Europeans and Andeans conveys related but different social and moral messages. Whereas sheep can represent human beings in Christian art, they cannot stand in for human beings in Isluga, since Isluga people recognize that both human and herd animals require spiritual nourishment.     

A turn‐on luminescence probe for highly selective detection of an anthrax biomarker

Highly selective detection of Bacillus anthrax spores has attracted worldwide attention because Bacillus anthrax spores not only are harmful to the health of human beings and animals, but also can be used as biological warfare agents. Here, we report a simple platform by mixing EuCl₃·6H₂O and sodium polyacrylate in aqueous solution and further investigate its luminescence response towards Bacillus anthrax biomarker dipicolinic acid (DPA) as a turn‐on luminescence probe. Importantly, our probe has good sensitivity, lower detection limit, excellent selectivity as well as great anti‐interference ability due to the great luminescence enhancement of Eu³⁺. Moreover, a test paper is constructed to realize the purpose of portable detection. These results indicate that our probe is an excellent candidate for sensing DPA.     

The Right Kind of Women Things: Changing Compositions of Gendered Subjectivity in New Caledonia

Drawing upon life histories compiled in New Caledonia, this article examines the ways in which some women inscribed and contested their gendered subjectivities. Anchored in the perception that ‘gender’ can be recognised as historically and culturally constituted in contingent human practices, it proffers testimonies to reason that women's composition and expression of their lived experience can be understood as modes of embodied consciousness. By situating each woman's discursive strategy into the complex interplay of historical processes, structured social organisations, and the anomalies, ambiguities and contradictions revealed through their conversations, the relationships and practices which inscribed the self-making of some Kanak and Caledonienne women are explored.     

Transhumanism and moral equality

Conservative thinkers such as Francis Fukuyama have produced a battery of objections to the transhumanist project of fundamentally enhancing human capacities. This article examines one of these objections, namely that by allowing some to greatly extend their capacities, we will undermine the fundamental moral equality of human beings. I argue that this objection is groundless: once we understand the basis for human equality, it is clear that anyone who now has sufficient capacities to count as a person from the moral point of view will continue to count as one even if others are fundamentally enhanced; and it is mistaken to think that a creature which had even far greater capacities than an unenhanced human being should count as more than an equal from the moral point of view.     

Normal vaginal flora in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes): qualitative and quantitative study

Lactobacilli are the predominant microorganisms in the vaginal flora of human beings, and are known to play an important role in protecting them from genital infections. On the other hand, the composition of the vaginal flora differs among laboratory animal species, and lactobacilli are not the predominant vaginal microorganism in many laboratory animals. We speculated that the vaginal flora of chimpanzees would be more similar to those of human beings than to those of other animal species, because chimpanzees are phylogenetically close to human beings, and their reproductive physiology is similar to that of human beings. To clarify our speculation, we examined the development of the vaginal flora in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Streptococci, lactobacilli, and members of the family Bacteroidaceae were the most predominant bacteria in the vagina of mature chimpanzees (9 to 22 years old). During development of the vaginal flora of chimpanzees, the total number of bacteria increased with age and reached a plateau just before sexual maturity (5 to 7 years of age; juvenile period). Lactobacilli were already one of the predominant bacteria before sexual maturity. In mature chimpanzees, the total number of bacteria (aerobes and anaerobes) in the vagina was highest during the swelling phase of the menstrual cycle. During the swelling phase in mature chimpanzees, streptococci, lactobacilli, and Bacteroidaceae were the most frequently isolated (100%) organisms, and the total number of organisms recovered from vaginal specimens from these three groups was the highest. In mature chimpanzees in which the number of bacteria was the highest, lactobacilli were the predominant bacteria. Taken together, these results suggest that these three bacterial groups (streptococci, lactobacilli, and Bacteroidaceae) are indigenous to the vagina of chimpanzees, and chimpanzees would be the most suitable laboratory animals for studying the role of lactobacilli in the vagina of human beings.     

Relations between Funerary Cannibalism and Warfare Cannibalism: The Question of Predation

The Wari’, a southern Amazonian group of the Txapakura linguistic family, ate their dead and their enemies until at least the beginning of the 1960s. This article argues the continuity between these two forms of cannibalism by demonstrating that the Wari’ conceive the ingestion of the dead as a means of transforming them into prey. Predation – a defining characteristic of Amerindian warfare cannibalism – comprises a crucial means of differentiating two terms set in relationship, whether these terms be allies and enemies, the Wari’ and animals, or the living and the dead. In a world peopled by actual or potential human subjects, to transform the other into prey is to guarantee oneself the exclusive position of human, despite this being an essentially temporary position.     

Warfare in an evolutionary perspective

The importance of warfare for human evolution is hotly debated in anthropology. Some authors hypothesize that warfare emerged at least 200,000–100,000 years BP, was frequent, and significantly shaped human social evolution. Other authors claim that warfare is a recent phenomenon, linked to the emergence of agriculture, and mostly explained by cultural rather than evolutionary forces. Here I highlight and critically evaluate six controversial points on the evolutionary bases of warfare. I argue that cultural and evolutionary explanations on the emergence of warfare are not alternative but analyze biological diversity at two distinct levels. An evolved propensity to act aggressively toward outgroup individuals may emerge irrespective of whether warfare appeared early/late during human evolution. Finally, I argue that lethal violence and aggression toward outgroup individuals are two linked but distinct phenomena, and that war and peace are complementary and should not always be treated as two mutually exclusive behavioral responses.     

What Justifies a Future with Humans in It?

Antinatalist commentators recommend that humanity bring itself to a close, on the theory that pain and suffering override the value of any possible life. Other commentators do not require the voluntary extinction of human beings, but they defend that outcome if people were to choose against having children. Against such views, Richard Kraut has defended a general moral obligation to people the future with human beings until the workings of the universe render such efforts impossible. Kraut advances this view on the grounds that we are obliged to exercise beneficence toward others and on the grounds that the goods available in human lives are morally compelling. This account ultimately succeeds in making no more than a prima facie defense of human perpetuation because considerations of beneficence could override – in some cases probably should – override any duty to perpetuate human beings. While the goods of human life may be distinctive, they cannot serve as reason‐giving in regard to their own perpetuation. Ironically, the exercise of beneficence may authorize the extinction of human beings, if it becomes possible to enhance the goods available to human descendants in a way that moves them away from human nature as now given. The defense of a morally obligatory and strictly human future remains elusive, even as it becomes morally desirable to work against Fateful Catastrophes, those human‐caused events that threaten to extinguish existing lives already good and enriching for their bearers.     

Cultural and reproductive success and the causes of war: A Yanomamö perspective

Inter-group competition including warfare is posited to be a key force in human evolution (Alexander, 1990; Choi & Bowles, 2007; Wrangham, 1999). Chagnon's research on the Yanomamö is seminal to understanding warfare in the types of societies characteristic of human evolutionary history. Chagnon's empirical analyses of the hypothesis that competition for status or cultural success is linked to reproduction (Irons, 1979) and warfare attracted considerable controversy. Potential causal factors include “blood revenge”, mate competition, resource shortages or inequality, and peace-making institutions (Boehm, 1984; Keeley's (1997); Meggitt, 1977; Wiessner and Pupu, 2012; Wrangham et al., 2006). Here we highlight Chagnon's contributions to the study of human warfare.     

The biological roots of morality

The question whether ethical behavior is biologically determined may refer either to thecapacity for ethics (e.i., the proclivity to judge human actions as either right or wrong), or to the moralnorms accepted by human beings for guiding their actions. My theses are: (1) that the capacity for ethics is a necessary attribute of human nature; and (2) that moral norms are products of cultural evolution, not of biological evolution.Humans exhibits ethical behavior by nature because their biological makeup determines the presence of the three necessary, and jointly sufficient, conditions for ethical behavior: (i) the ability to anticipate the consequences of one's own actions; (ii) the ability to make value judgements; and (iii) the ability to choose between alternative courses of action. Ethical behavior came about in evolution not because it is adaptive in itself, but as a necessary consequece of man's eminent intellectual abilities, which are an attribute directly promoted by natural selection.Since Darwin's time there have been evolutionists proposing that the norms of morality are derived from biological evolution. Sociobiologists represent the most recent and most subtle version of that proposal. The sociobiologists' argument is that human ethical norms are sociocultural correlates of behaviors fostered by biological evolution. I argue that such proposals are misguided and do not escape the naturalistic fallacy. The isomorphism between the behaviors promoted by natural selection and those sanctioned by moral norms exist only with respect to the consequences of the behaviors; the underlying causations are completely disparate.This article is based on a paper presented at the International Symposium onBiological Models of Human Action, Palma de Mallorca, Spain, 16–18 December 1985.     

副溶血性弧菌耐热性直接溶血素(TDH)的研究进展

副溶血性弧菌(Vibrio parahaemolyticus)是海产品中一种常见的食源性致病菌,常导致水产养殖动物患病或者引起食物中毒。耐热性直接溶血素(thermotolerant direct hemolysin,TDH)是副溶血性弧菌最为重要的致病因子之一。本文围绕tdh基因在弧菌属中的广泛分布与传播、tdh基因的多样性及其表达调控、TDH的蛋白结构及其生物活性进行了综述,并对未来TDH的研究方向进行了展望。旨在进一步了解由副溶血性弧菌感染所引起的病症,为预防副溶血性弧菌的感染和临床治疗提供理论支撑。     

Trophy‐taking and dismemberment as warfare strategies in prehistoric central California

We document evidence for trophy‐taking and dismemberment with a new bioarchaeological database featuring 13,453 individuals from prehistoric central California sites. Our study reveals 76 individuals with perimortem removal of body parts consistent with trophy‐taking or dismemberment; nine of these individuals display multiple types of trophy‐taking and dismemberment for a total of 87 cases. Cases span almost 5,000 years, from the Early Period (3000–500 BC) to the Late Period (AD 900–1700). Collectively, these individuals share traits that distinguish them from the rest of the population: a high frequency of young adult males, an increased frequency of associated trauma, and a tendency towards multiple burials and haphazard burial positions. Eight examples of human bone artifacts were also found that appear related to trophy‐taking. These characteristics suggest that trophy‐taking and dismemberment were an important part of the warfare practices of central Californian tribes. Temporally, the two practices soared in the Early/Middle Transition Period (500–200 BC), which may have reflected a more complex sociopolitical system that encouraged the use of trophies for status acquisition, as well as the migration of outside groups that resulted in intensified conflict. Overall, trophy‐taking and dismemberment appear to have been the product of the social geography of prehistoric central California, where culturally differentiated tribes lived in close proximity to their enemies. Am J Phys Anthropol, 2010. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.