Western societies today are coming unmoored in the face of an earth-shaking ethical and cultural paradigm shift. At its core is the question of what it means to be human and how we are meant to live. The old answers are no longer accepted; a dizzying array of options are offered in their stead. Underpinning this smorgasbord of lifestyles is a thicket of unquestioned assumptions, such as the separation of gender from biological sex, which not so long ago would have (...) been universally rejected as radical notions. In the spring of 2019, a group of Orthodox Christian scholars drawn from a wide variety of academic disciplines met together to offer responses to the moral crisis our generation faces, elaborating upon its various forms and facilitating a fuller understanding of some of its theological and philosophical foundations. In doing so they offer support to all those who question the claims that are so forcefully insisted upon today--a clarity that will aid them in standing up and resisting trends that have already shown to be the cause of great suffering and unhappiness. (shrink)

Whoever hesitates to utter that which he thinks the highest truth, lest it should be too much m advance of the time, may reassure himself by looking at his act DEGREES from an impersonal point of view.... It is not for nothing that he has in him these sympathies with some principles and repugnance to others. He, with all his capacities, and aspirations, and beliefs, is not an accident, but a product of the time. He must remember that while he (...) is a descendant of the past he is a parent of the future; and that his thoughts are as children born to him, which he may not carelessly let die. Herbert S. (shrink)

The ‘adjustment strategy’ currently seems to be the most common approach to incorporating objective elements into one's theory of well‐being. These theories face a certain problem, however, which can be avoided by a different approach – namely, that employed by ‘partially objective multi‐component theories.’ Several such theories have recently been proposed, but the question of how to understand their mathematical structure has not been adequately addressed. I argue that the most mathematically simple of these multi‐component theories fails, so I proceed (...) to investigate more sophisticated ways to formulate such a theory. I conclude that one of these – the Discount/Inflation Theory – is particularly promising. (shrink)

Six years ago, the Singer lab published a landmark paper which described how individual mRNA particles cross the nuclear pore complex in mammalian tissue culture cells. This involved the simultaneous imaging of mRNAs, each labeled by a large number of tethered fluorescent proteins and fluorescently tagged nuclear pore components. Now two groups have applied this technique to the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Their results indicate that in the course of nuclear export, mRNAs likely engage complexes that are present on either (...) side of the pore and that these interactions are modulated by proteins present in the messenger ribonucleoprotein (mRNP) complex. These findings lend support to the notion that just before and/or after the completion of nuclear export, mRNPs undergo one or more maturation steps that prepare the packaged mRNAs for translation. These results represent new and exciting insights into the mechanism of mRNA nuclear export. (shrink)

Hausman and McPherson defend welfare economics by claiming that even if welfare does not consist in preference satisfaction, preferences still provide good, if fallible, evidence of welfare. I argue that this strategy does not yet fully solve the problems for welfare economics stemming from the preference satisfaction theory of welfare. More work is needed to show that our self-interested preferences are sufficiently reliable, or in some other sense our best, evidence of well-being. Thus, my aim is to identify the challenges (...) that remain and clarify what additional work is needed before Hausman and McPherson's defence of welfare economics succeeds. (shrink)

It has long been observed that human protein‐coding genes have a particular distribution of GC‐content: the 5′ end of these genes has high GC‐content while the 3′ end has low GC‐content. In 2012, it was proposed that this pattern of GC‐content could act as an mRNA identity feature that would lead to it being better recognized by the cellular machinery to promote its nuclear export. In contrast, junk RNA, which largely lacks this feature, would be retained in the nucleus and (...) targeted for decay. Now two recent papers have provided evidence that GC‐content does promote the nuclear export of many mRNAs in human cells. (shrink)

"As Eastern Europe struggles to emerge from its communist past, the public moral witness of its Orthodox Churches has assumed a special importance for those seeking a truly just world order. Yet few Americans know what these vast and ancient Christian bodies stand for, especially on crucial issues of freedom, human rights, and war and peace. In this compelling look at the Orthodox Churches in Russia, Ukraine, Romania, and the United States, Alexander F. C. Webster mines the primary sources (...) to reveal a story of both betrayal of the Church and fidelity to its moral tradition. He reflects on what is needed for these churches to become forceful and consistent voices of moral witness in society."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

This dissertation is structured in such a way as to gradually home in on the true theory of welfare. I start with the whole field of possible theories of welfare and then proceed by narrowing down the options in a series of steps. The first step, undertaken in chapter 2, is to argue that the true theory of welfare must be what I call a partly response independent theory. First I reject the entirely response independent theories because there are widely-shared (...) intuitions suggesting that some psychological responses are indeed relevant to welfare. Then I reject the entirely response dependent theories because there are other central intuitions suggesting that our welfare is not determined solely by our psychological responses. Thus I reach the preliminary conclusion that welfare must involve some response independent (or objective) component. The next step is to consider the most promising theories in the partly response independent category. In particular, I formulate, refine and ultimately reject what seem to be the main monistic theories that have been proposed in this category. In chapter 4, I reject the Adjusted-Enjoyment Theories of Welfare because they cannot account for the claim that a life containing no pleasure or pain can still contain a positive amount of welfare (e.g. if it’s a particularly successful life). Then in chapters 5-7, I discuss Desire Satisfaction theories of welfare. I argue that even the most promising of these theories – e.g. Worthiness Adjusted Desire Satisfactionism – are problematic because they cannot accommodate the claim that a life containing no success with respect to worthwhile projects can still contain a positive amount of welfare (e.g. if it’s a particularly pleasant life). Finally, I suggest that in order to accommodate the intuitions that led to the rejection of all these other theories of welfare, what is needed is a multi-component theory. In the final chapter, I formulate a multi-component theory that is particularly promising. Not only does it avoid the problems of the monistic theories discussed earlier, but, by incorporating a number of novel mathematical devices, it avoids problems that undermine several other initially promising multi-component theories of welfare. (shrink)

It is often thought that non-junk or coding DNA is more significant than other cellular elements, including so-called junk DNA. This is for two main reasons: because coding DNA is often targeted by historical or current selection, it is considered functionally special and because its mode of action is uniquely specific amongst the other actual difference makers in the cell, it is considered causally special. Here, we challenge both these presumptions. With respect to function, we argue that there is previously (...) unappreciated reason to think that junk DNA is significant, since it can alter the cellular environment, and those alterations can influence how organism-level selection operates. With respect to causality, we argue that there is again reason to think that junk DNA is significant, since it too is remarkably causally specific. As a result, something is missing from the received view of significance in molecular biology—a view which emphasizes specificity and neglects something we term ‘reach’. With the special case of junk DNA in mind, we explore how to model and understand the causal specificity, reach, and corresponding efficacy of difference makers in biology. The account contains implications for how evolution shapes the genome, as well as advances our understanding of multi-level selection. (shrink)

Workplace bullying is a phenomenon that can have serious detrimental effects on health, work-related attitudes, and the behavior of the target. Particularly, workplace bullying exposure has been linked to lower level of general well-being, job satisfaction, vigor, and performance and higher level of burnout, workplace deviance, and turnover intentions. However, the psychological mechanisms behind these relations are still not well-understood. Drawing on psychological contract and self-determination theory (SDT), we hypothesized that perceptions of contract violation and the frustration of basic needs (...) mediate the relationship between workplace bullying exposure and well-being, attitudinal, and behavioral outcomes. Self-reported data were collected among employees with different working backgrounds (N= 1,257)viaAmazon's Mechanical Turk in an online survey. Results showed that feelings of contract violation and frustration of basic needs accounted for unique variation in well-being, work satisfaction, burnout, vigor, and turnover intentions, pointing to individual contributions of both psychological mechanisms. However, when controlled for frustration of basic needs, feelings of psychological contract violation were no longer a mediator between workplace bullying exposure and work performance. Helping employees to deal effectively with workplace bullying exposure might buffer its negative effects and reduce their experienced frustration of basic needs, preserving their well-being, vigor, and work performance and, eventually, prevent burnout. The present study is the first to concurrently elucidate the proposed psychological mechanisms and unique contributions of psychological contract violation and frustration of basic needs in the context of workplace bullying. (shrink)

Over the past decade, high‐throughput studies have identified many novel transcripts. While their existence is undisputed, their coding potential and functionality have remained controversial. Recent computational approaches guided by ribosome profiling have indicated that translation is far more pervasive than anticipated and takes place on many transcripts previously assumed to be non‐coding. Some of these newly discovered translated transcripts encode short, functional proteins that had been missed in prior screens. Other transcripts are translated, but it might be the process of (...) translation rather than the resulting peptides that serves a function. Here, we review annotation studies in zebrafish to discuss the challenges of placing RNAs onto the continuum that ranges from functional protein‐encoding mRNAs to potentially non‐functional peptide‐producing RNAs to non‐coding RNAs. As highlighted by the discovery of the novel signaling peptide Apela/ELABELA/Toddler, accurate annotations can give rise to exciting opportunities to identify the functions of previously uncharacterized transcripts. (shrink)