Fetal alcohol syndrome , the most common avoidable human birth defect, is the extensive irreversible brain damage caused by heavy prenatal alcohol exposure. Following the discovery of FAS in 1973, a multidisciplinary research community began applying discipline-specific methods to investigate the mechanisms underlying FAS and its consequences for the victims’ cognition and social behavior. An academic biomathematician and statistician, since 1984 I have collaborated with one American research group studying this condition.

It is far from obvious that outside of highly specialized domains such as commercial agriculture, the methodology of biometrics—quantitative comparisons over groups of organisms—should be of any use in today’s bioinformatically informed biological sciences. The methods in our biometric textbooks, such as regressions and principal components analysis, make assumptions of homogeneity that are incompatible with current understandings of the origins of developmental or evolutionary data in historically contingent processes, processes that might have come out otherwise; the appropriate statistical methods are (...) those suited to random walks, not normal distributions. A valid methodology would further require that especially close attention be paid to the difference between aspects of processes that are plastic, those that encode their own histories or biographies, and the very small fraction of quantifications that can usefully and realistically be modeled as varying by colored noise around a central tendency that itself has some quantitative meaning. This point of view—that only a vanishingly small fraction of the quantitative information borne by any living organism is worth quantifying—is illustrated by some data on a human birth defect, namely, fetal alcohol syndrome. In a suggestive metaphor, the biometrician is like the pilgrim in Friedrich’s painting Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, uncertain as to whether to measure the mountains or the clouds. The mountains stand for contingent history, the clouds for the subset of the data most closely matching controlled experiments suitable for quantitative biometric summary. Biometrics applies to the clouds, not the mountains. The success of statistical methods comes at the expense of all the theories that we simultaneously hold to be true about the biological materials to which they both pertain. Biometrics is thus complementary to all of the emerging reductionist sciences of biological structure. (shrink)

Although Harry Woolf’s great collective volume Quantification mostly overlooked biology, Thomas Kuhn’s chapter there on the role of quantitative measurement within the physical sciences maps quite well onto the forms of reasoning that actually persuade us as biologists 50 years later. Kuhn distinguished between two contexts, that of producing quantitative anomalies and that of resolving them. The implied form of reasoning is actually C. S. Peirce’s abduction or inference to the best explanation: “The surprising fact C is observed; but if (...) A were true, C would be a matter of course; hence there is reason to suspect that A is true.” This article reviews abduction and the Kuhnian dichotomy in a range of classic examples where quantitative reasoning has ended arguments in the natural sciences. Included are John Snow’s discovery of the cause of cholera, Jean Perrin’s proof that atoms exist, the discovery of the double helix, the Alvarezes’ explanation of the extraterrestrial origin of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction, and current examples in passive smoking, ulcers, and the anthropogenicity of global warming. Modern biology is a quantitative science to the extent that we operate by “strong inference,” the insistence that our data are surprising on everybody else’s hypotheses but follow as a matter of course from our own, and that we demand numerical consilience whenever we infer across levels of analysis or across disciplines. (shrink)

The current literature that attempts to bridge between geometric morphometrics (GMM) and finite element analyses (FEA) of CT-derived data from bones of living animals and fossils appears to lack a sound biotheoretical foundation. To supply the missing rigor, the present article demonstrates a new rhetoric of quantitative inference across the GMM–FEA bridge—a rhetoric bridging form to function when both have been quantified so stringently. The suggested approach is founded on diverse standard textbook examples of the relation between forms and the (...) way strains in them are produced by stresses imposed upon them. One potentially cogent approach to the explanatory purposes driving studies of this class arises from a close scrutiny of the way in which computations in both domains, shape and strain, can be couched as minimizations of a scalar quantity. For GMM, this is ordinary Procrustes shape distance; in FEA, it is the potential energy that is stored in the deformed configuration of the solid form. A hybrid statistical method is introduced requiring that all forms be subjected to the same detailed loading designs (the same “probes”) in a manner careful to accommodate the variations of those same forms before they were stressed. The proper role of GMM is argued to be the construction of regressions for strain energy density on the largest-scale relative warps in order that biological explanations may proceed in terms of the residuals from those regressions: the local residual features of strain energy density. The method, evidently a hierarchical one, might be intuitively apprehended as a geometrical approach to a formal allometric analysis of strain. The essay closes with an exhortation. (shrink)

Neural organization attempts to thwart, at least in part, modern neuroscientists' tendency to focus reductionistically on ever smaller microsystems. But although emphasizing higher levels of systems organization, the authors end up enforcing reductionisms of their own, principally the reduction of their domain to the study of invariable normal functioning, without explicit modeling of the deviations that constitute disease states or aging. This reductionism seriously weakens the authors' claims about the truth of their quantitative models.

Complexity in our universe, Herbert Simon once noted, generally takes a hierarchical, nearly decomposable form. If our purpose as biologists is to "carve Nature at the joints," then the quantitative biologist's pattern questions must embody some tentative claim of where the explanatory joints are—only after meaningful qualifications can notions of variance and covariance make sense. In morphometrics, specimens and variables alike can be "carved at the joints," with a correspondingly great gain in explanatory power in both versions. Simon's advice is (...) that the competent biologist's measurements should lie entirely within a single organismal component or else deal entirely with one of the joints. In either context, our best contemporary rhetorics of explanation in biology may resemble morphometrics in their frank combination of carefully supervised parallel quantifications that, taken together, result in new qualifications, leading in turn to new quantifications, and so on. In short, the relation between qualitative and quantitative in the organismal biological sciences is not an opposition but a complementarity, and the modern biometrical statistics of organismal form may be a particularly apposite praxis for exploring it. (shrink)

Back in 1987 the physicist/theoretical biologist Walter Elsasser reviewed a range of philosophical issues at the foundation of organismal biology above the molecular level. Two of these are particularly relevant to quantifications of form: the concept of ordered heterogeneity and the principle of nonstructural memory, the truism that typically the forms of organisms substantially resemble the forms of their ancestors. This essay attempts to weave Elsasser’s principles together with morphometrics for one prominent data type, the representation of animal forms by (...) positions of landmark points. I introduce a new spectrum of pattern descriptors of the shape variation of landmark configurations, ranging from the most homogeneous through growth gradients and focal features to a model of totally disordered heterogeneity incompatible with the rhetoric of functional explanation. An investigation may end up reporting its findings by one of these descriptors or by several. These descriptors all derive from one shared diagrammatic device: a log–log plot of sample variance against one standard formalism of today’s geometric morphometrics, the bending energies of the principal warps that represent all the scales of variability around the sample average shape. The new descriptors, which I demonstrate over a variety of contemporary morphometric examples, may help build the bridge we urgently need between the arithmetic of today’s burgeoning image-based data resources and the rhetoric of biological explanations aligned with the principles of Elsasser along with an even earlier philosopher of biology, the Viennese visionary Hans Przibram. (shrink)

Chow sets his version of statistical significance testing in an impoverished context of “theory corroboration” that explicitly excludes well-posed theories admitting of strong support by precise empirical evidence. He demonstrates no scientific usefulness for the problematic procedure he recommends instead. The important role played by significance testing in today's behavioral and brain sciences is wholly inconsistent with the rhetoric he would enforce.

Several disciplines share an interest in the evolutionary selection pressures that shaped human physical functioning and appearance, psyche, and behavior. The methodologies invoked from the disciplines studying these domains are often based on different rhetorics, and hence may conflict. Progress in one field is thereby hampered from effective transfer to others. Topics at the intersection of anthropometry and psychometry, such as the impact of sexual selection on the hominin face, are a typical example. Since the underlying theory explicitly places facial (...) form in the middle of a causal chain as the mediating variable between biological causes and psychological effects, a particularly convenient conceptual and analytic scenario arises as follows. Modern morphometrics allows analysis of shape both “backwards” and “forwards” . The two computations are commensurate, hence the two kinds of effects can be compared and evaluated as directions in the same morphospace. We suggest translating the morphometric methodology of “Darwinian aesthetics” into this space, where psychological and other processes of interest can be coded commensurately. Such a translation permits researchers to relate the effects of biological processes on form to the perceptions of the same processes in one unified “psychomorphospace.”. (shrink)

"This anthology of writings by prominent black thinkers from antiquity to the present makes the case for a central tradition of black philosophy, rooted in Africa and distinct from the intellectual heritage of the West."--From publisher description.

For much of its history, philosophy was not merely a theoretical discipline but a way of life, an "art of living." This practical aspect of philosophy has been much less dominant in modernity than it was in ancient Greece and Rome, when philosophers of all stripes kept returning to Socrates as a model for living. The idea of philosophy as an art of living has survived in the works of such major modern authors as Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Each of (...) these writers has used philosophical discussion as a means of establishing what a person is and how a worthwhile life is to be lived. In this wide-ranging, brilliantly written account, Alexander Nehamas provides an incisive reevaluation of Socrates' place in the Western philosophical tradition and shows the importance of Socrates for Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Why does each of these philosophers—each fundamentally concerned with his own originality—return to Socrates as a model? The answer lies in the irony that characterizes the Socrates we know from the Platonic dialogues. Socratic irony creates a mask that prevents a view of what lies behind. How Socrates led the life he did, what enabled or inspired him, is never made evident. No tenets are proposed. Socrates remains a silent and ambiguous character, forcing readers to come to their own conclusions about the art of life. This, Nehamas shows, is what allowed Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault to return to Socrates as a model without thereby compelling them to imitate him. This highly readable, erudite study argues for the importance of the tradition within Western philosophy that is best described as "the art of living" and casts Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault as the three major modern representatives of this tradition. Full of original ideas and challenging associations, this work will offer new ways of thinking about the philosophers Nehamas discusses and about the discipline of philosophy itself. (shrink)

The primary task confronting an examination of the claimed connection between Kant's general theory of cognition and his account of aesthetic judgment requires clarifying perhaps the most obscure component of that account, the doctrine of the harmony of the faculties. Kant's presentation of this doctrine makes it notoriously difficult to penetrate. Much of what Kant says about the harmony of the faculties – perhaps the very phrase “the harmony of the faculties” – is rather imprecise and metaphorical. Yet, the importance (...) of a correct understanding of the harmony of the faculties to assessing both the merits of Kant's aesthetic theory and his claims for the epistemological significance of reflection is difficult to overstate, for it is precisely this state of harmony that ultimately grounds the validity of judgments of taste and does so in virtue of being a state in which the most general prerequisites to conceptual judgment are present. (shrink)

Contemporary psychoanalytic thinking about the interdependence of subjectivity and intersubjectivity has reenvisioned the analytic process, and with it the very nature of creative and engaged psychoanalytic listening. Yet few systematic writings on psychoanalytic listening or technique provide comprehensive instruction that would prepare the analyst for the kind of analytic listening needed to participate imaginatively in this sort of intersubjective experience.Offering a short course in analytic listening, _Creative Listening and the Psychoanalytic Process_ provides a guide for the clinical uses of imaginative (...) literature. Outside the psychoanalytic literature, extraordinary pieces of imaginative literature exist that provide the kind of experience in analytic listening that can guide clinicians in their work with patients. Certain works of fiction create textured, sensory worlds in which complex characters possessing shifting states of consciousness live within fluid emotional atmospheres. In this book, Fred Griffin demonstrates that by entering the worlds that original writers create in their texts, the psychoanalytic therapist will learn to attend more closely to varying emotional states that generate nuanced, multidimensional views of the analysand’s internal and relational worlds. He illustrates how these works capture more fully the sensory experience encountered by the analyst themselves when taking in what the patient communicates within the analytic space. _Creative Listening and the Psychoanalytic Process_ presents case material alongside selected passages from works of fiction written by a range of creative writers, each of which stimulates analytic sensibility about this clinical experience. A conceptual framework is provided that makes these and other original works of fiction more accessible for these purposes. This book will be essential reading for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as professors and graduate students studying psychoanalysis and literature. It will also appeal to literary scholars and those teaching and practicing in the field of narrative medicine. (shrink)

Much critical attention to the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason is devoted to two related concerns. The first is Kant's skeptical attack on the claims of pure reason to epistemic authority, where the focus is on the paralogisms and the antinomies of pure reason. The second involves Kant's refutation of idealism. These two concerns are of course intimately connected with one another and there are various ways to express that interconnection. Perhaps most generally it can be said that (...) Kant's assessment of reason in these two contexts is negative: it argues for the limitation of reason's claim to unbridled application and views reason as a faculty whose native propensity to seek such employment must be checked. Reason, as it turns out, is the great metaphysical impostor, whose representations, the ideas, have no epistemic warrant whatsoever. For it is the essence of Kant's position in the Dialectic that metaphysical conundra cannot be solved so long as reason arrogates to itself a direct and unrestricted epistemic or cognitive role and that reason ought to forebear from assigning itself any such status. Such a self-restriction of reason is, additionally, transcendentally necessary because it is that very limitation, Kant argues, that constitutes transcendental critique. (shrink)

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society at Saint Xavier University in Chicago, Illinois. This paper examines factors in college student confidence in using electronic books as learning tools between 2007 and 2009. The study was done in response to the growing concern over the cost of textbooks and the increase in the use of e-textbooks to counteract that cost. This study shows that despite a lack of a gap (...) between comfort of use of computers, students whose parents income is above the national median income are more confident in learning from electronic books than students whose parents income is not. Not only is this gap existent but it widened between 2007 and 2009 despite the growing confidence in the use of electronic books by both groups. The results of this study suggests that this gap, and its concomitant widening, could be associated with exposure to computer classes in high school and the choice of major. (shrink)

Fichte was at the height of his philosophical activity and influence during the last decade of the eighteenth century in Jena. It was during this period that he developed his idea of a Wissenschaftslehre or a “science of knowledge.” A Wissenschaftslehre is an ongoing investigation by subjects of their subjectivity which may be captured only imperfectly in medias res in the form of a written document, but which is crucially not identical with any written philosophical text. So Fichte distinguishes between (...) Wissenschaftslehre and its presentations. In the Jena period Fichte completed two such presentations. The first, the Grundlage der gesammten Wis-senschaftslehre [WL], contains the famous analysis of the preconditions for consciousness in terms of the posits of I and not-I and their reciprocal limitation. Fichte became dissatisfied with his treatment of the central problems in the 1794 version and began working on a second version in 1796. Only two introductions and the first chapter of this new presentation appeared in print. Due to his dawning belief that philosophy was appropriately done solely in oral or dialogic form and the psychic toll of the “atheism controversy” that led to his dismissal from Jena in 1799, by the early 1800's Fichte abandoned plans to publish the entire second presentation. Lectures on the entire second presentation given in 1796-9, the Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo [WLnm], are preserved, however, in two sets of student notes. The importance of the discovery of these notes is difficult to overestimate. WLnm develops new and more convincing positions on such fundamental issues as the nature of subjectivity, the unity of reason, and the relation between self-consciousness and intersubjectivity that greatly enhance Fichte's historical status and his relevance to contemporary debates on a variety of philosophical concerns. (shrink)