Biopolitics: the newest synthesis?

On first impression, the disciplines of genetics and political science would appear to be unrelated. And yet, commencing more than 30 years ago, the interdisciplinary field known as Biopolitics has now taken hold. This essay traces the central thrust of the biopolitical research agenda. It describes, analyzes, and assesses how political scientists have sought to show connections between our species' genetic constitution and our species' political behavior. Important bridges between the two are the neurophysiology of the human brain and the role of evolutionary theory in charting man's adaptational political profile. The parameters of the emerging biopolitical literature raise profound policy questions, some of which are also characterized. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

View on donated life: Construction of philosophical ethics on human organ donation

With the emergence of organ donation and donation technology, the previous indivisibility of the human body becomes divisible, and different human organs form a new life subject. With reference to specific case studies in China, a new life, consisting of donated organs from different bodies by donation, can be called “donated life.” Donated life is a win-win action between altruism and egoism, that is, to save the lives of others and to regenerate the organs of donors or their relatives. Due to the emergence of this kind of life, traditional social ethics theories based on the marriage-related family find it difficult to difficult to explain the new realities. Thus, new thinking about social ethics is necessary.     

The language of systematics,and the philosophy of ‘total evidence’

This contribution analyses the primacy of classification over generalization, and the philosophy of total evidence that emerges from the relation of homology to character statements. Primary conjectures of homology are basic character statements, i.e. statements that predicate properties of organisms, properties that are instantiated by those organisms and/or their parts. Secondary conjectures of homology are embedded in a second‐level (metalinguistic) discourse that turns on the coherence or incoherence of those basic character statements relative to a hierarchy. The coherence or incoherence of character statements is a logical relation between statements, not a causal (historical) relation between organisms. The choice of the hypothesis of relationships that is supported by the largest set of coherent basic character statements is based on the empirical presupposition that the properties referred to by the set of coherent character statements are grounded in causally efficacious relations of inheritance and ontogeny, and co‐instantiated because they are inherited through common ancestry (Hennig's auxiliary principle). Unless that empirical presupposition is causally grounded, phylogeny reconstruction is of an inherently probabilistic nature, whether under parsimony or other models of analysis. The causal grounding of a coherent set of character statements typically seeks a link between character statements and causally efficacious generative mechanisms for morphological characters (as is defeasibly indicated by topology and connectivity), or secondary structure information for molecular characters.     

Distinguishing ecological from evolutionary approaches to transposable elements

Considerable variation exists not only in the kinds of transposable elements (TEs) occurring within the genomes of different species, but also in their abundance and distribution. Noting a similarity to the assortment of organisms among ecosystems, some researchers have called for an ecological approach to the study of transposon dynamics. However, there are several ways to adopt such an approach, and it is sometimes unclear what an ecological perspective will add to the existing co‐evolutionary framework for explaining transposon‐host interactions. This review aims to clarify the conceptual foundations of transposon ecology in order to evaluate its explanatory prospects. We begin by identifying three unanswered questions regarding the abundance and distribution of TEs that potentially call for an ecological explanation. We then offer an operational distinction between evolutionary and ecological approaches to these questions. By determining the amount of variance in transposon abundance and distribution that is explained by ecological and evolutionary factors, respectively, it is possible empirically to assess the prospects for each of these explanatory frameworks. To illustrate how this methodology applies to a concrete example, we analyzed whole‐genome data for one set of distantly related mammals and another more closely related group of arthropods. Our expectation was that ecological factors are most informative for explaining differences among individual TE lineages, rather than TE families, and for explaining their distribution among closely related as opposed to distantly related host genomes. We found that, in these data sets, ecological factors do in fact explain most of the variation in TE abundance and distribution among TE lineages across less distantly related host organisms. Evolutionary factors were not significant at these levels. However, the explanatory roles of evolution and ecology become inverted at the level of TE families or among more distantly related genomes. Not only does this example demonstrate the utility of our distinction between ecological and evolutionary perspectives, it further suggests an appropriate explanatory domain for the burgeoning discipline of transposon ecology. The fact that ecological processes appear to be impacting TE lineages over relatively short time scales further raises the possibility that transposons might serve as useful model systems for testing more general hypotheses in ecology.     

The what,how and why of doing macroecology

Macroecology is a growing and important subdiscipline of ecology, but it is becoming increasingly diffuse, without an organizing principle that is widely agreed upon. I highlight two main current views of macroecology: as the study of large‐scale systems and as the study of emergent systems. I trace the history of both these views through the writings of the founders of macroecology. I also highlight the transmutation principle that identifies serious limitations to the study of large‐scale systems with reductionist approaches. And I suggest that much of the underlying goal of macroecology is the pursuit of general principles and the escape from contingency. I highlight that there are many intertwined aspects of macroecology, with a number of resulting implications. I propose that returning to a focus on studying assemblages of a large number of particles is a helpful view. I propose defining macroecology as “the study at the aggregate level of aggregate ecological entities made up of large numbers of particles for the purposes of pursuing generality”.     

Reimagining policy: Power,problems, and public stories

The authors of various practitioner and scholarly documents suggest markedly contrasting understandings about the nature of “policy.” These divergent conceptions raise the question: What is at stake by understanding the nature of policy in one way as opposed to another? The purpose of this philosophical inquiry is to interrogate the nature of “policy” as it relates to music education and to question the values that do and might underlie and propagate through contrasting understandings of “policy.” Subsequently, I examine two aspects of policy, problem identification and meaning-making, that have gone largely unexplored in the arts education literature.

Using Foucault's writings, I argue that power-laden policy texts often have the greatest impact, not when they are mandated, but when they go misrecognized as common sense. I also advocate for the consistent use of the terms “policy texts” and “policy actions,” including as an alternative to the imbalanced designations of “soft policies” and “hard policies.” Drawing on Dewey arts educators might form “publics” around problems having consequences that they deem far-reaching, recurrent, and irreparable. Individual and collective political narratives, including what Ganz explains as “stories of self,” “stories of us,” and “stories of now,” can foster the meaningful connections necessary for forming “publics” who address pressing problems in arts education.     

The concept of mental disorder: diagnostic implications of the harmful dysfunction analysis

What do we mean when we say that a mental condition is a medical disorder rather than a normal form of human suffering or a problem in living? The status of psychiatry as a medical discipline depends on a persuasive answer to this question. The answers tend to range from value accounts that see disorder as a sociopolitical concept, used for social control purposes, to scientific accounts that see the concept as strictly factual. I have proposed a hybrid account, the harmful dysfunction (HD) analysis, that incorporates both value and scientific components as essential elements of the medical concept of disorder, applying to both physical and mental conditions. According to the HD analysis, a condition is a disorder if it is negatively valued ("harmful") and it is in fact due to a failure of some internal mechanism to perform a function for which it was biologically designed (i.e., naturally selected). The implications of this analysis for the validity of symptom-based diagnostic criteria and for challenges in cross-cultural use of diagnostic criteria are explored, using a comparison of the application of DSM diagnostic criteria in the U.S. and Taiwan.     

Assessing overmedication: biology,philosophy and common sense

Overmedication is nowadays a serious problem in health care due to influences from the pharmaceutical industry and agencies responsible for regulation. The situation has indeed become appalling in psychiatry, where both theories and treatments have deteriorated under the impact of the industry. The overmedication problem is associated with biased biology in medicine. Adequate biological approaches would indicate that drug therapies must yield to diet therapies, particularly treatments involving omega-3 fatty acids, in many cases. To the extent that philosophy of science adapts to mainstream medicine in analyses of the current situation, it may reinforce the existing bias. To redress imbalances in health care, we ultimately have to rely on common sense.     

Last judgment: the visionary biology of J.B.S. Haldane

This paper seeks to reinterpret the life and work of J. B. S. Haldane by focusing on an illuminating but largely ignored essay he published in1927, “The Last Judgment” – the sequel to his better known work, Daedalus (1924). This astonishing essay expresses a vision of the human future over the next 40,000,000 years, one that revises and updates Wellsian futurism with the long range implications of the “new biology” for human destiny. That vision served as a kind of lifelong credo, one that infused and informed his diverse scientific work, political activities, and popular writing, and that gave unity and coherence to his remarkable career. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Other Side of Sacrifice: Introduction

While contemporary philosophers have been content to declare the logical possibilities of sacrifice exhausted, to have finally ‘sacrificed sacrifice,’ for many people around the world the notion of sacrifice – whether religious, secular, or somewhere in between – remains absolutely central to their understanding of themselves, their relations with others, and their place in the world. From religion to economics, and from politics to the environment, sacrificial tropes frequently emerge as key means of mediating and propagating various forms of power, moral discourse, and cultural identity. This paper lays out reasons for retaining sacrifice as an analytical concept within anthropology, and argues for the importance of a renewed focus on the ‘other side of sacrifice’, as a means of understanding better how sacrifice emerges beyond ritual and enters into the full gamut of social life.