In this paper, using a multilevel approach, we defend the positive role of natural selection in the generation of organismal form. Despite the currently widespread opinion that natural selection only plays a negative role in the evolution of form, we argue, in contrast, that the Darwinian factor is a crucial (but not exclusive) factor in morphological organization. Analyzing some classic arguments, we propose incorporating the notion of ‘downward causation’ into the concept of ‘natural selection.’ In our opinion, this kind of (...) causation is fundamental to the operation of selection as a creative evolutionary process. (shrink)

En este artículo se defiende la necesidad de que el actor de la ciencia, el científico, disponga de suficiente formación filosófica como para analizar críticamente el alcance de su propia actividad especializada, análisis que debiera empezar por entender qué es eso a lo que llamamos ciencia. Se ejemplifica la necesidad de tal formación recurriendo a la biología sintética. Se muestran los peligros que se corren de la derivación hacia campos no científicos si el científico está imbuido de una ciencia fáustica (...) orientada a la obtención del producto –el ente biológico sintético– disminuyendo veladamente el interés por estudiar el mismo desde la óptica de la ciencia prometeica, aquella que se aproxima progresivamente a la comprensión de los entes vivos. (shrink)

El progreso biológico es un tema ampliamente debatido en biología evolutiva que tiene partidarios y detractores. Sin embargo, no es una cuestión, a pesar de su importancia, de la que podamos afirmar que está resuelta desde el punto de vista científico. En este trabajo presento un análisis del concepto basado en la teoría de la evolución por selección natural, sus paralelismos con el también debatido concepto de “progreso” en la historia de la humanidad y, finalmente, se intenta orientarlo hacia formas (...) accesibles a la investigación científica. Para ello, en lugar del concepto de progreso, recurro al de “complejidad biológica”. Si tenemos formas de medirla, podemos comprobar si las supuestas tendencias de la evolución hacia complejidad creciente son producto pasivo, aleatorio e inevitable de la misma, ya que solo puede esperarse algo complejo de algo que inicialmente era simple o, por el contrario, existe alguna fuerza direccional que requeriría interpretar la selección natural en una perspectiva más allá de la de tener efectos locales y microevolutivos. La importancia filosófica que esto tendría si este programa de investigación científica demostrara que la evolución avanza hacia una complejidad creciente es importante. (shrink)

Prokaryotic genomes of endosymbionts and parasites are examples of naturally evolved minimal cells, the study of which can shed light on life in its minimum form. Their diverse biology, their lack of a large set of orthologous genes and the existence of essential linage (and environmentally) specific genes all illustrate the diversity of genes building up naturally evolved minimal cells. This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that sometimes the same essential function is performed by genes from different evolutionary origins. (...) Nevertheless, all cells perform a set of life‐essential functions however different their cell machinery and environment in which they thrive. An upcoming challenge for biologists will be to discern, by studying differences and similarities in current biodiversity, how cells with reduced genomes have adapted while retaining all basic life‐supporting functions. (shrink)

Las ciencias de la vida, a la luz de la teoría de la evolución, están aportando, según A. Moya, un territorio mestizo que obliga a pensar desde la ciencia cuestiones que parecían patrimonio exclusivo de las humanidades: la naturaleza y sentido del ser humano y de la vida. Las preguntas metafísicas sobre el ser humano y la vida, propias de la tradición humanista, pasan ahora inexorablemente por la ciencia, por los hallazgos recientes en biología molecular y evolutiva, biogénetica, bioquímica, (...) neurobiología, sociobiología, psicología evolutiva, biocomputerización, etc. Entre cientificismo antihumanista y humanismo espiritualista, entre el desprecio de las humanidades y el desprecio de las ciencias —desprecio basado en la ignorancia mutua y/o en presupuestos ideológicos—, cabe un cientismo humanista, fiel a la mejor tradición intelectual de nuestra cultura. Contra este desencuentro, poco ilustrado, Moya muestra su convencimiento de que se debe y se puede superar ese hiato profundo, a partir, sobre todo, de los avances que la biología evolutiva, y en general las ciencias de la vida, podrían proporcionar como territorio común sobre el que pensar y desde el que pensar tanto la misma ciencia como la vida, tanto el sentido de la ciencia como el sentido de la vida humana. La aventura intelectual de A. Moya se presenta como un ejemplo de honestidad y de rigor, abogando contra cualquier reduccionismo por mantener abiertas las tensiones creativas entre biología y espíritu. (shrink)

Current work in language models (LMs) helps us speed up or even skip thinking by accelerating and automating cognitive work. But can LMs help us with critical thinking -- thinking in deeper, more reflective ways which challenge assumptions, clarify ideas, and engineer new concepts? We treat philosophy as a case study in critical thinking, and interview 21 professional philosophers about how they engage in critical thinking and on their experiences with LMs. We find that philosophers do not find LMs to (...) be useful because they lack a sense of selfhood (memory, beliefs, consistency) and initiative (curiosity, proactivity). We propose the selfhood-initiative model for critical thinking tools to characterize this gap. Using the model, we formulate three roles LMs could play as critical thinking tools: the Interlocutor, the Monitor, and the Respondent. We hope that our work inspires LM researchers to further develop LMs as critical thinking tools and philosophers and other 'critical thinkers' to imagine intellectually substantive uses of LMs. (shrink)

Habit and Embodiment in Merleau-PontyIntroductionMerleau-Ponty (French phenomenological philosopher, born in 1908 and deceased in 1961) refers to habit in various passages of his Phenomenology of Perception as a relevant issue in his philosophical and phenomenological position. Through his exploration of this issue he explains both the pre-reflexive character that our original linkage with the world has, as well as the kind of “understanding” that our body develops with regard to the world. These two characteristics of human existence bear a close (...) relation with the vision of an embodied mind sustained by Gallagher and Zahavi in their work The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. Merleau-Ponty uses concepts like those of the lived or own body and of lived space in order to emphasize, from a first-person perspective, the co-penetration that exists between subject and world.Gallagher and Zahavi have regained the experience of phenomenology, especially that of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, to contribute to the development of the cognitive sciences. Via the phenomenological approach to the reality of habit, a new understanding of the body becomes possible for us, such that it becomes characterized “as subject, as experiencer, as agent”, and at the same time we can understand “the way the body structures our experience” (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008). Additionally, the idea of a pre-reflexive understanding is conceived of by these authors... (shrink)

This reconsideration of Hume’s classic essay “Of Miracles” via the lens of American pragmatist ways of thinking about history and power shifts our attention from Hume’s epistemic concerns about the legitimacy of witnesses and testimony to his distaste for sacred history, his critical stance regarding the social force of revelation, and his disdain for religious authority. To view Hume’s essay both as an articulation of a critical philosophy of history and as an exercise in moral dynamism (social power or, authority, (...) is a result of epistemic transactions), is to intervene in both Hume studies and Contemporary Pragmatism. (shrink)

Under the lig ht of Being and Nothingness’s the o re t ical body – Sartre’s master piece –, it is intended to discuss the essential source of human reality as “n i h i l a t i o n” and ontological lack, as well as manifestations and cons e q u e nces from this primordial human passion to be transformed to coagulated transcendence, to be transformed in Being In-itself-For-itself: to be consciousness and, at the same t i (...) me, to be a complete and finished Being, with infinite de nsity and witho u t fissures. (shrink)

An examination of David Hume's philosophy of religion that situates his conception "true religion" within the context of his overall science of human nature, his rejection of popular religion, and his Ciceronian influence"--Provided by publisher.

Drawing on recent findings, this study examines whether valence concordant electromyography (EMG) responses can be explained as an unconditional effect of mere stimulus processing or as somatosensory simulation driven by task-dependent processing strategies. While facial EMG over the Corrugator supercilii and the Zygomaticus major was measured, each participant performed two tasks with pictures of album covers. One task was an affective evaluation task and the other was to attribute the album covers to one of five decades. The Embodied Emotion Account (...) predicts that valence concordant EMG is more likely to occur if the task necessitates a somatosensory simulation of the evaluative meaning of stimuli. Results support this prediction with regard to Corrugator supercilii in that valence concordant EMG activity was only present in the affective evaluation task but not in the non-evaluative task. Results for the Zygomaticus major were ambiguous. Our findings are in line with the view that EMG activity is an embodied part of the evaluation process and not a mere physical outcome. (shrink)

Introduction : aesthetics in the age of consumer culture. Some terms -- Attention and distraction : the billboard as mural form -- Fascination; or, enlightenment in the age of neon light -- Poetry, replication, late capitalism : Octavio Paz as concrete poet -- Lygia Clark, at home with objects -- Conclusion.

hiCLIP (RNA hybrid and individual‐nucleotide resolution ultraviolet cross‐linking and immunoprecipitation), is a novel technique developed by Sugimoto et al. (2015). Here, the use of different adaptors permits a controlled ligation of the two strands of a RNA duplex allowing the identification of each arm in the duplex upon sequencing. The authors chose a notoriously difficult to study double‐stranded RNA‐binding protein (dsRBP) termed Staufen1, a mammalian homolog of Drosophila Staufen involved in mRNA localization and translational control. Using hiCLIP, they discovered a (...) dominance of intramolecular RNA duplexes compared to the total RNA duplexes identified. Importantly, the authors discovered two different types of intramolecular duplexes in the cell: highly translated mRNAs with long‐range duplexes in their 3′‐UTRs and poorly translated mRNAs with duplexes in their coding region. In conclusion, the authors establish hiCLIP as an important novel technique for the identification of RNA secondary structures that serve as in vivo binding sites for dsRBPs. (shrink)

Authors have empirically evidenced that cultural stereotypes influence gender-typed behavior. With the present work, we have added to this literature by demonstrating that gender roles can explain sex differences in risk-taking, a stereotypically masculine domain. Our aim was to replicate previous findings and to analyze what variables affect women making risky decisions in the social domain. A sample composed of 417 Spanish participants, between 17 and 30 years old, answered a set of self-report measures referring to femininity, fear of negative (...) evaluation, and social risk-taking. According to the main results, sex indirectly linked to risk-taking in the social domain, through femininity and fear of negative evaluation. Specifically, women self-reported higher feminine traits, which were associated with increased fear of negative evaluation, which in turn was associated with less risky decisions in the social domain. Thus, we have showed the relationship between gender roles and women’s behaviors in a stereotypically masculine domain. Our findings highlight the necessity of considering a gender-based perspective in the field of risk-taking, showing that not all women make more risky decisions in the social domain. (shrink)

Recent debates in contemporary feminist theory have been dominated by the relation between identity and politics. Beyond Identity Politics examines the implications of recent theorizing on difference, identity and subjectivity for theories of patriarchy and feminist politics. Organised around the three central themes of subjectivity, power and politics, this book focuses on a question which feminists struggled with and were divided by throughout the last decade, that is: how to theorize the relation between the subject and politics. In this thoughtful (...) engagement with these debates Moya Lloyd argues that the turn to the subject in process does not entail the demise of feminist politics as many feminists have argued. She demonstrates how key ideas such as agency, power and domination take on a new shape as a consequence of this radical rethinking of the subject-politics relation and how the role of feminist political theory becomes centred upon critique. A resource for feminist theorists, women's and gender studies students, as well as political and social theorists, this is a carefully composed and wide-ranging text, which provides important insights into one of contemporary feminism's most central concerns. (shrink)

Previous research has focused on the relation between social class and prosocial behavior. However, this relation is yet unclear. In this work, we shed light on this issue by considering the effect of the level of empathy and the social class of the recipient of help on two types of prosociality, namely helping and caring. In one experimental study, we found that for high-class participants, empathy had a positive effect on helping, regardless of the recipient’s social class. However, empathy had (...) no effect for low-class participants. When it comes to caring, empathy had a positive effect for both high and low-class participants, but only when the recipient of help belonged to the same social class. This highlights that empathy by itself is not sufficient to promote cooperative relations and that the social class of the recipient of help should be taken into account to shed light on this issue. (shrink)

Las Conferencias John Dewey marcan el cambio en el pensamiento de Putnam hacia un nuevo realismo naturalista que trataba de ofrecer un camino medio al debate entre realistas y antirrealistas. Este giro vendrá fuertemente influenciado por la corriente pragmatista y, en particular, por los filósofos William James y John Dewey. Estas páginas buscan rastrear las ideas deweyanas que Putnam recoge, enfatizando esa recuperación de la filosofía como disciplina que atienda a los problemas del hombre común.

El presente capítulo tiene como pretensión tanto ilustrar los momentos primordiales del apartado sobre administración de justicia al interior de los Lineamientos de la Filosofía del derecho, como exponer algunos elementos conflictivos en su comprensión. Este capítulo se separa en tres momentos: i) tematiza la tarea de la administración de justicia como salvaguardia del derecho; ii) caracteriza la cohesión narrativa de la administración de justicia al interior de la sociedad civil y su tensión con el concepto de Estado y, finalmente, (...) iii) la problemática de la personalización al interior del sistema de leyes y la interpelación de Marx. La hipótesis que aparece, entonces, es que Hegel intenta probar la necesidad de la codificación del derecho en virtud la defensa de la libertad personal y de la propiedad, pero la cual solo es posible mediante el poder o violencia judicial. (shrink)

En el presente artículo se analizan las representaciones del sujeto-ciudadano que se articulan en los discursos sobre la ciudadanía del saber experto chileno. El enfoque metodológico es el estudio de caso y el análisis crítico del discurso, analizando una muestra de documentos institucionales de tres Think Tank de gran influencia nacional: “Instituto Libertad y Desarrollo”, “Centro de Estudios Públicos” y “Fundación Chile 21”. El análisis identifica dos posiciones de sujeto-ciudadano en los discursos: el “sujeto post-ciudadano” y el “sujeto neo-ciudadano”, proponiendo (...) como conclusión, que ambas representaciones están articuladas a partir de una racionalidad política común. (shrink)

A Black feminist disability framework allows for methodological considerations of the intersectional nature of oppression. Our work in this article is twofold: to acknowledge the need to consider disability in Black Studies and race in Disability Studies, and to forward an intersectional framework that considers race, gender, and disability to address the gaps in both Black Studies and Disability Studies. By employing a Black feminist disability framework, scholars of African American and Black Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Disability (...) Studies have a flexible and useful methodology through which to consider the historical, social, cultural, political, and economic reverberations of disability. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to examine both the work of Judith Butler on gender performativity and examples of how Butler's writings have been appropriated by certain other writers. I explore three areas in particular: the relation between performance and performativity in the work of Butler and her `adherents'; the developmental changes in Butler's argument between Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter; and the question of the effectiveness of the politics of parody. I argue that it is the ambiguities (...) in Butler's own several accounts of the distinction between performance and performativity that fuel the readings of the politics of performance as the province of the autonomous subject - a perspective at variance with Butler's own. In addition, I explore the deficiencies in Butler's account of politics, especially her denial of the significance of the context on the efficacy of political interventions. (shrink)

Many accounts of ethnic phenomena imply that processes such as stereotyping, essentialism, ethnocentrism, and intergroup hostility stem from a unitary adaptation for reasoning about groups. This is partly justified by the phenomena’s co-occurrence in correlational studies. Here we argue that these behaviors are better modeled as functionally independent adaptations that arose in response to different selection pressures throughout human evolution. As such, different mechanisms may be triggered by different group boundaries within a single society. We illustrate this functionalist framework using (...) ethnographic work from the Quechua-Aymara language boundary in the Peruvian Altiplano. We show that different group boundaries motivate different ethnic phenomena. For example, people have strong stereotypes about socioeconomic categories, which are not cooperative units, whereas they hold fewer stereotypes about communities, which are the primary focus of cooperative activity. We also show that, despite the cross-cultural importance of ethnolinguistic boundaries, the Quechua-Aymara linguistic distinction does not strongly motivate any of these intergroup processes. (shrink)

El artículo hace una lectura naturalizada y novedosa del transcendentalismo kantiano, a partir de la idea de epigénesis, una idea, extraída del campo embriológico, que Kant utiliza no sólo para plantear una interesantísima teoría de la evolución natural, sino también para explicar el origen y validez de los conocimientos a priori.