What is to be gained by studying visual observation in Mass Observation's COVID-19 collections? What can we see of the pandemic through diarists’ images and words? Visual methods were part of the plural research strategies of social research organisation Mass Observation (MO) in its first phase, when it was established in 1937, but remained marginal in relation to textual research methods. This continues with the post-1981 revival of the Mass Observation Project (MOP), with its emphasis on life writing. With wider (...) shifts in technology and accessibility, however, even when they are not solicited, photographs now accompany MOP correspondents’ submissions. In MO’s substantial COVID-19 collections, images appear in or as diary entries across a range of forms, including hand-drawn illustrations, correspondent-generated photographs, creative photomontages, and screengrabs of memes. In addition, diarists offer textual reflections on COVID-19's image cultures, such as the role of photographs in pandemic news media, as well as considering how the pandemic is intersecting with the visual in more abstract ways, from themes of surveillance and ‘Staying Alert’ in public health messaging to internal pictorial imaginaries produced as a result of isolation and contemplation. Positioning these materials in relation to wider patterns in pandemic visual culture, including public photographic collecting projects that make explicit reference to MO as their inspiration, this article considers the contribution of the visual submissions and image-rich writing in MO's COVID-19 collections to the depiction of a virus commonly characterised as invisible. (shrink)

To explore utopian fashion using a case study of those who have cast off clothes might seem like a deliberately perverse enterprise. The practice of nudism may first appear to be an immaterial culture, a dress study without an object. And yet, as John Berger has so pithily put it in Ways of Seeing, "Nudity is a form of dress."1 Being naked is never without cultural signification, deeply rooted in social and material specificities. In Seeing Through Clothes, dress historian Anne (...) Hollander has emphasized that "the state of undress" has "a constant share" in "the profound and complicated motives governing all types of dress." She asserts, "The more significant clothing is, the more meaning attaches to its absence, and... (shrink)

Libet discovered that a substantial duration (> 0.5-1.0 s) of direct electrical stimulation of the surface of the somatosensory cortex at threshold currents is required before human subjects can report that a conscious somatosensory experience had occurred. Using a reaction time method we confirm that a similarly long stimulation duration at threshold currents is required for activation of elementary visual experiences (phosphenes) in human subjects following stimulation of the surface of the striate cortex. However, the reaction times for the subject (...) to respond to the cessation of the visual experience after the end of electrical stimulation could be as brief as 225-242 ms. We also carried out extensive studies in cats under a variety of anesthetic conditions using the same electrodes and parameters of stimulation employed in the human studies to study the patterns of neuronal activity beneath the stimulating surface electrode. Whereas sufficiently strong currents can activate neurons within milliseconds, stimulating currents close to threshold activate sustained neural activity only after at least 350-500 ms. When currents are close to threshold, some neurons are inhibited for several hundreds of millisecond before the balance between inhibition and excitation shifts towards excitation. These results suggest that the prolonged latencies, i.e., latencies beyond 200-250 ms, for the emergence of conscious experience following direct cortical stimulation result from a delay in the sustained activation of underlying cortical neurons at threshold currents rather than being due to any unusually long duration in central processing time. Intracellular records from cortical neurological cells during repetitive electrical stimulation of the surface of the feline striate cortex demonstrate that such stimulation induces a profound depolarizing shift in membrane potential that may persist after each stimulus train. Such a depolarization is evidence that extracellular K+ concentrations have increased during electrical stimulation. Such an increase in extracellular K+ progressively increases cortical excitability until the threshold for sustained activation of cortical neurons is reached and then exceeded. Consequently, the long latency for threshold activation of cortical neurons depends upon a dynamically increasing cortical facilatory process that begins hundreds of milliseconds before there is sustained activation of such neurons. In some cases, this facilatory process must overcome an initial stimulus-induced inhibition before neuronal firing commences. (shrink)

Libet demonstrated that a substantial duration (>0.5-1.0 s) of direct electrical stimulation of the surface of a sensory cortex at a threshold or liminal current is required before a subject can experience a percept. Libet and his co-workers originally proposed that the result could be due either to spatial and temporal facilitation of the underlying neurons or additionally to a prolonged central processing time. However, over the next four decades, Libet chose to attribute the prolonged latency for evoking conscious experience (...) to a prolonged central processing time. In my view, Libet has not provided any convincing evidence, either on the basis of his own past work or in his critique of my paper, for his hypothesis of a central processing time exceeding 0.5s before conscious experience emerges following direct electrical threshold stimulation of the cortical surface. I stand by my original results and conclusion that such prolonged latencies are largely the consequence of a dynamically increasing cortical facilitatory process that begins hundreds of milliseconds before there is a sustained neuronal activation. In some cases, the facilitatory process must overcome an initial stimulus-induced inhibition before neuronal firing commences. (shrink)

A recent paper(1) describing the stage‐specific loss of ubiquitin (UBQ) and ubiquitinated proteins (UBQ‐Ps) during pollen development has raised some interesting questions regarding our understanding of the regulation of protein turnover during cellular differentiation and the specialized development of the pollen grain. The authors, Callis and Bedinger(1), describe experiments in which the profiles of free and protein‐conjugated ubiquitin were examined during pollen development. UBQ and UBQ‐Ps were immunologically detected in extracts of microspores and maturing pollen of (...) maize at six developmental stages. Their results remarkably demonstrate that UBQ and UBQ‐Ps decline to barely detectable levels during the final stages of pollen development. (shrink)

This article examines how geologists, botanists, and ecologists used pollen as a proxy for past climates in the first half of the twentieth century. It focuses on a particular challenge of measuring climate with pollen: pollen’s mobility. As scientists came to learn, pollen from some vegetation is more mobile than others. Pollen’s differential mobility challenged regional climatic conclusions because of the potential mixing of pollen from various locations. To minimize the effects of this problem, (...) pollen analysts sought to decrease the noise produced by highly local or foreign pollen. Yet, many ground-truthing and calibration methods were not available to pollen analysts because of the temporal separation between the observer and the object of interest. Instead, pollen analysts had to make spatial meaning out of fossil pollen using empirical studies of modern pollen, inferences from macrofossils and successional history, and applying statistical theories to fossil pollen data. Many of these corrections factors relied on pollen analysts’ knowledge of place, including elements like the location’s topography, prevailing winds, and plant cover. These elements were a natural part of vegetation-pollen-climate interactions. Scientists needed to account for them to turn pollen into a proxy for climate. Pollen’s movement was equally natural, but scientists decided to eliminate some pollen to augment the regional climate signal. These selective eliminations of place suggest that not all elements of place are equally important. Scientists had to omit some elements of place to make sense of the complexities of the natural world. (shrink)

The work synthesises in 26 monographic chapters the results of a six-years long (2012 – 2018) interdisciplinary international project whose aim was to present the state of knowledge on today’s Poland during the Migration Period, and to compare the evolution of its settlement with that of its neighbours. One of its main results – the accordance between the palynological evidence of the change of environment (extensive reforestation and drastic reduction of anthropogenic indicators) and the archaeological reconstruction of the change of (...) settlement (disappearance of the Przeworsk, Wielbark and other cultures of the Roman Period by the mid-fifth century) – conclusively confirms the often questioned verdict of a sudden severe depopulation of the lands between the Vistula and the Oder, similar to that revealed in the rest of Central/eastern Europe (disappearance of the Elbe and Chernyakhiv-Sântana de Mureş cultures). An entirely new perspective opened by the project is the survival of enclaves with contacts all round the compass (the Eastern Empire, the Merovingian West, the Danubian lands, Scandinavia, the Western Balts). None of them yielded Slavonic material, even the longest-lived one recently discovered at Gąski-Wierzbiczany in Kujawy, evidently one of the main centres of the European Barbaricum and in the third and fourth century the Roman army’s recruiting station, which continued till the early seventh century; this evidence (or lack of it) is the death-blow to the theory of a supposed continuity of settlement – and so of ethnicity, necessarily Slavonic – from the Bronze Age to the Middle Ages. Through these enclaves, southern cultural influences reached Scandinavia during the Younger Germanic Iron Age; the one at the mouth of the Vistula seems to have been the earliest and greatest recipient of the Imperial solidi in the Baltic zone, from which they were redistributed to the Nordic lands. A sample of other topics: tracing the extent (quite limited) of the Hunnic presence north of the Carpathians; evidence on fugitives from Hermanaric’s realm, including what appears to be the earliest known assemblage of the Dančeny-Brangstrup horizon; the Migration Period among the Western Balts, neighbours and cultural cousins, who did not take part in the Völkerwanderung. In the end, two leitmotifs of the work, one pessimistic, the other optimistic: short-sightedness and harmfulness of the official persecutive policy, in Poland and the majority of other European countries, with regard to amateur metal detecting, which only makes priceless potential evidence disappear without a trace; material remains and relative written sources (in this case Iordanes and Procopius) reflect the same historical reality and can legitimately be used to support one another. (shrink)

The occurrence of oscillatory behaviours in living cells can be viewed as a visible consequence of stable, regulatory homeostatic cycles. Therefore, they may be used as experimental windows on the underlying physiological mechanisms. Recent studies show that growing pollen tubes are an excellent biological model for these purposes. They unite experimental simplicity with clear oscillatory patterns of both structural and temporal features, most being measurable during real‐time in live cells. There is evidence that these cellular oscillators involve an integrated (...) input of plasma membrane ion fluxes, and a cytosolic choreography of protons, calcium and, most likely, potassium and chloride. In turn, these can create positive feedback regulation loops that are able to generate and self‐sustain a number of spatial and temporal patterns. Other features, including cell wall assembly and rheology, turgor, and the cytoskeleton, play important roles and are targets or modulators of ion dynamics. Many of these features have similarities with other cell types, notably with apical‐growing cells. Pollen tubes may thus serve as a powerful model for exploring the basis of cell growth and morphogenesis. BioEssays 23:86–94, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Many environmental policies seem to rest on an implicit distinction between doing and allowing. For example, it is generally thought worse to drive a speciesto extinction than to fail to save a species that is declining through no fault of our own, and worse to pollute the air with chemicals that trigger asthma attacks thanto fail to remove naturally occurring allergens such as pollen and mold. The distinction between doing and allowing seems to underlie certain versions of the precautionary (...) principle, and insofar as the precautionary principle rests on this distinction, it diverges from direct consequentialist approaches to risk management.There are two ways in which such reliance on the doing/allowing distinction may be defended: by appeal to indirect consequentialist considerations, and by appeal to deontological considerations. Neither approach is unproblematic; however, retention of a distinction between doing and allowing in environmentalpolicy is consistent with the widespread intuition that there is something prima facie valuable about the world as we find it. (shrink)

The nihilists are right, admits philosopher Loyal Rue. The universe is blind and aimless, indifferent to us and void of meaning. There are no absolute truths and no objective values. There is no right or wrong way to live, only alternative ways. There is no correct reading of a text or a picture or a dance. God is dead, nihilism reigns. But, Rue adds, nihilism is a truth inconsistent with personal happiness and social coherence. What we need instead is a (...) new myth, a noble lie. Only a noble lie can save us from the psychological and social chaos now threatened by the spread of skepticism about the meaning of life and the universe. In By the Grace of Guile, Loyal Rue offers a wide ranging look at the importance of deception in nature and in human society, concluding with an argument for a noble lie to replace the religious beliefs rejected by modern thought. Most of the book is a provocative apology for deception, illuminating its role in the shaping of history, evolution, personality, and society. Ranging from the Bible and Greek philosophy, to Saint Augustine and Montaigne, to Galileo, Kirkegaard, and Freud, Rue shows that it may be more accurate to describe the history of our culture as a flight from deception than as a quest for truth. He turns then to the natural world to reveal how deception works at every level of life, ranging from plants that mimic dung, carrion, or prey to lure insects that then spread pollen, to a remarkable African insect (Acanthaspis petax) that bedecks itself with dead ants and enters the ant colony undetected to binge at will. Moreover, he points out that psychological research has shown that strategies of deception and self-deception are essential to our personal well-being, that we sometimes shore up our self-esteem by deceptive means, by leaving others in a state of ignorance, by manipulating others into a state of false belief, by suppressing information from consciousness, and by fabricating or distorting our own sense of reality. And he argues that social coherence is achievable only within certain optimal limits of deception--the social fabric would be threatened by an overabundance of lies and false promises, of course, but it would also collapse if everyone were perfectly honest all the time. Finally, he argues that society is caught up in a Kulturkampf with nihilists promoting intellectual and moral relativism and realists defending objective and universal truths. The noble lie, says Rue, would introduce a third voice, one which first agrees with the nihilists that universal myths are pretentious lies, but then insists, against the nihilists, that without such lies humanity cannot survive. The challenge, he concludes, is ultimately an aesthetic one: it remains for the artists, poets, novelists, musicians, filmmakers, and other masters of illusion to seduce us into an embrace with a noble lie. We need a new myth that tells us where we have come from, what our nature is, and how we should live together--a story with the courage and presumption to say how things really are and what really matters. (shrink)

Commonsense metaphysics populates the world with an enormous variety of macroscopic objects, conceived as being capable of persisting through time and undergoing various changes in their properties and relations to one another. Many of these objects fall under J. L. Austin’s memorable description, “moderate-sized specimens of dry goods.” More broadly, they include, for instance, all of those old favourites of philosophers too idle to think of more interesting examples—tables, books, rocks, apples, cats, and statues. Some of them are natural objects, (...) such as rocks, apples, and cats. Some are artefacts, such as tables, books, and statues. Some are living things, such as apples and cats. Some are inanimate things, such as tables, books, rocks, and statues. To such a list we could add much larger natural objects, such as planets and stars, as well as much smaller ones barely visible to the naked eye, such as mites and pollen grains. Telescopes and microscopes enable us to extend the scale further in both directions, to include such things as galaxies and microbes. To call into question the existence of all or any of these things would appear to be an extravagance of the sort that only a philosopher could indulge. Until fairly recently in the history of philosophy, however, the only way in which their existence would have been called into question was in the context of the debate between realism and idealism. Idealism calls their existence into question by questioning the existence of an “external world” as such, proposing instead that only minds and their experiences exist. What is much more recent is the suggestion that, although there is an external world of entities existing in space and time, it is not in fact populated by most, or perhaps even by any, of the objects recognized by common sense. Instead, it is suggested, the world is populated by submicroscopic entities of a highly esoteric kind best understood by theoretical physicists—entities which may not even qualify as “objects” in anything like the familiar sense because, quite possibly, they should not be thought of as having precise spatiotemporal locations or as persisting over time and through processes of qualitative change. Let us call these putative entities ‘atoms’, without prejudice as to whether they conform to the descriptions currently favoured by physicists in speaking of what they call ‘atoms’. In other words, let us use ‘atom’ as a place-holder for whatever kind or kinds of entities an ideal or completed physics would postulate as the “ultimate” constituents, as opposed to infinitely descending levels of ever more fine-grained physical structure, but let us set aside dispute over these alternatives for the time being, if only because we have little idea as to how to settle it. (shrink)

In this “Reply” paper, the arguments and experimental findings by Pockett, Pollen, and Haggard et al. are analyzed. It had been shown that a 0.5 s duration of repetitive activations of sensory cortex is required to produce a threshold of sensation. The view that this is due to a facilitatory buildup in excitatory state to finally elicit neuronal firing is shown to be incompatible with several lines of evidence. Objections to the phenomenon of subjective referral backwards in time are (...) also untenable. Haggard, Cartledge, Dafydd, and Oakley report that a self-initiated act can, under hypnotic suggestion, appear to the subject to be “involuntary.” The act under hypnosis is better viewed as one initiated unconsciously, not as an act of conscious will. (shrink)

Animal and plant species exhibit an astonishing diversity of sexual systems, including environmental and genetic determinants of sex, with the latter including genetic material in the mitochondrial genome. In several hermaphroditic plants for example, sex is determined by an interaction between mitochondrial cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS) genes and nuclear restorer genes. Specifically, CMS involves aberrant mitochondrial genes that prevent pollen development and specific nuclear genes that restore it, leading to a mixture of female (male‐sterile) and hermaphroditic individuals in the (...) population (gynodioecy). Such a mitochondrial‐nuclear sex determination system is thought to be rare outside plants. Here, we present one possible case of CMS in animals. We hypothesize that the only exception to the strict maternal mtDNA inheritance in animals, the doubly uniparental inheritance (DUI) system in bivalves, might have originated as a mitochondrial‐nuclear sex‐determination system. We document and explore similarities that exist between DUI and CMS, and we propose various ways to test our hypothesis. (shrink)

The social organization of insect colonies has fascinated biologists and natural historians for centuries. Aristotle wrote in History of Animals about a division of labor among workers within the hive that is based on age. He observed that the field bees foraging for nectar and pollen have less “hair” on their bodies than the hive bees that care for young larvae and tend the nest. He concluded that the more pubescent hive bees must be older. We now know that, (...) in fact, the field bees are older and have less hair because the hairs break off as the bees age. The phenomenon of age related changes in behavior, age-polyethism, is now well documented for many social insects (Oster and Wilson 1978).Evidence of the ecological success of social insects is inescapable. Virtually everywhere you look you see them or the results of their activities. (shrink)

Self‐pollination in some groups of plants is prevented by a sophisticated biochemical signalling system. The molecule active in the female emerges as a highly charged glycoprotein, but the identity of the male determinant remains unknown. Studies of both the molecular biology and the physiology of the interaction suggest that the female polypeptide belongs to a family of glycoproteins which may play an additional, and more general, role in pollination. Pollen compatibility is controlled by one of two genetic systems and (...) new information indicates a mechanism by which they may have arisen, together with the different stigma types with which they are correlated. (shrink)

In 1911, Drs John Freeman and Leonard Noon published an account of a novel treatment for hay fever. Their method of desensitisation consisted of injecting increasing doses of an extract of pollen subcutaneously until the hypersensitivity reaction was diminished or abolished. Over subsequent decades, desensitisation established itself as the cornerstone of clinical allergy in both England and the United States, at least until the advent of novel pharmaceutical agents in the 1950s and 1960s. Although British allergists such as Noon (...) and Freeman were aware of conceptual developments within European immunology and pathology (such as the identification of anaphylaxis by Richet and Portier or von Pirquet's coining of the term allergy), their approach to hay fever was driven by more immediate pragmatic, and indeed financial, considerations. Freeman's immersion in the problems of hay fever and asthma and his pioneering use of allergen desensitisation or immunotherapy were shaped by his adherence to the convictions and bacteriological practices of his principal at St Mary's Hospital, Almroth Wright, and by the drive to produce commercial vaccines which would help to subsidise the experimental and therapeutic work at St Mary's. The aim of this paper is to explore early twentieth-century approaches to hay fever and other allergic diseases by tracing the intellectual and institutional origins of clinical allergy in Britain. (shrink)

Beginning in the nineteenth century, scientists speculated that the Pleistocene megafauna—species such as the giant ground sloth, wooly mammoth, and saber-tooth cat—perished because of rapid climate change accompanying the end of the most recent Ice Age. In the 1950s, a small network of ecologists challenged this view in collaboration with archeologists who used the new tool of radiocarbon dating. The Pleistocene overkill hypothesis imagined human hunting, not climate change, to be the primary cause of megafaunal extinction. This article situates the (...) Pleistocene overkill hypothesis in a broader history of the emergence of historical ecology as a distinct sub-discipline of paleoecology. Tracing the work of the Yale Geochronometric Laboratory and an interdisciplinary research network that included Paul Sears, Richard Foster Flint, Edward Deevey, Kathryn Clisby, and Paul S. Martin, it reveals how both the methods and the meaning of studying fossil pollen shifted between the 1910s and 1960s. First used as a tool for fossil fuel extraction, fossil pollen became a means of envisioning climatic history, and ultimately, a means of reimagining global ecological history. First through pollen stratigraphy and then through radiocarbon dating, ecologists reconstructed past biotic communities and rethought the role of humans in these communities. By the 1980s, the discipline of historical ecology would reshape physical environments through the practice of ecological restoration. (shrink)

Dicotyledons are polarly organised in several ways. In plant morphology polarity, a principle allowing comparison of different plant structures has until yet not been studied. A division** of the vegetative plant in shoot and root as polar structures leads to the distinction of four instead of three basic organs: leaf, shoot axis, root axis and root cap together with the root hairs. The flower is also polarly organised, its poles are formed by the carpels and the stamens. The foliage leaves (...) are also polarly organised which is reflected by the morphological relationship of foliage leaf, stamen and carpel. The stamen uses the hypophyll*** as base of construction and the carpel uses the epiphyll**** as base of construction. Hypophyll and epiphyll are the two poles of the foliage leaf. Root and shoot, the polar entities of the vegetative plant and stamen and carpel, the polar entities of the generative plant, are morphologically correlated. Stamen and carpel can be understood as a combination of the basic organs of vegetative and generative parts of the plant. The basic organs of the generative plant are pollen grain and embryo sack with their gametophytes. The quantitative comparison of variable proportions is supplemented by a qualitative comparison of polarities. The result is, that the organisation type of the dicotyledons can yet be understood as constituted of morphological related parts.* in german Grundorgane. (shrink)

The trend of emerging biorefineries is to process the harvest as efficiently as possible and without any waste. From the most valuable phytomass, refined medicines, enzymes, dyes and other special reactants are created. Functional foods, food ingredients, oils, alcohol, solvents, plastics, fillers and a wide variety of other chemical products follow. After being treated with nutrient recovery techniques, biofuels or soil improvers are produced from the leftovers. Economic optimization algorithms have confirmed that such complex biorefineries can be financially viable only (...) when a high degree of feedstock concentration is included. Because the plant material is extremely voluminous before processing, the farming intensity of special plants increases in the nearest vicinity of agglomerations where the biorefineries are built for logistical reasons. Interdisciplinary analyses revealed that these optimization measures lead to significantly increased pollen levels in neighbouring urban areas and subsequently an increased risk of allergies, respectively costs to the national health system. A new moral dilemma between the shareholder’s profit and public interest was uncovered and subjected to disputation. (shrink)

Some recent trends of modern biology, which seem to have a most consequential influence to the further treatment of the problem of the origin and evolution of flowering plants, are shortly reviewed in this article.Several new discoveries and observations about pollinating insects revealed to some extent the mystery of the evolution of flower types. The deciphering of the definite signs and codes of communication among social insects and the interpretation of a well developed sign language of bees belong to the (...) most remarkable achievements of modern biology indeed. Besides its revolutionary impulse in the field of animal behavior these discoveries helped to solve several problems in the evolution of flowering plants.An attempt is made in this article to classify the existing main flower types according to their evolutionary tendency from primitive → simple → radiate → protected → zygomorphic flowers In this assortment of flower types is reflected the historical development of flowering plants since their early beginning in Cretaceous period till their domination in the recent world vegetation .In this evolution of flower types is mirrored further the progressive evolvement of numerous senses of the pollinating insects. The pollinators of the Middle Mesozoicum were surrounded by primitive flower types and could distinguish but some primitive colors like white, yellow and green.Two different methods of classification of flowering plants are used in this study. A typological assortment of flowers according to their ecological characteristics is co-ordinated with the taxonomic classification of phylogenetic groups . The evolution of angiosperms can be studied more successfully, if both the typological and taxonomic trends of this groups are analyzed.Quelques nouvelles découvertes et essais sur la dissémination du pollen par les insectes sont discutés du point de vue de l'évolution des types de fleur. L'activité sélective et la stabilité de ces insectes se trouvent être des facteurs les plus conséquents dans l'évolution des types de fleurs.Deux méthodes différentes de classification des plantes angiospermes sont employées dans cette étude. Un assortiment typologique de fleurs suivant leurs caractéristiques écologiques est coordiné avec la classification systématique des groupes phylogénétiques . L'évolution des angiospermes peut être étudiée avec plus de succès si les méthodes typologiques et systématiqes sont appliquées.Es werden in diesem Aufsatz einige neue Versuchsergebnisse über die wechselseitigen Beziehungen zwischen den pollenübertragenden Insekten und der Entwicklungsgeschichte der Blütentypen näher erörtert.Es sind unter diesen Umständen zwei verschiedene Arbeitsverfahren für die Klassifikation der Blütenpflanzen angewandt worden. Eine typologische Einteilung nach den ökologischen Merkmalen und eine systematische Schilderung nach den phylogenetischen Gruppen . Die Anwendung von diesen beiden Methoden gestattet uns eine bessere Übersicht über die Entwicklungsgeschichte der Blütenpflanzen. (shrink)

Dance receives relatively little attention in the history of philosophy. My strategy for connecting that history to dance consists in tracing a genealogy of its dance-relevant moments. In preparation, I perform a phenomenological analysis of my own eighteen years of dance experience, in order to generate a small cluster of central concepts or “Moves” for elucidating dance. At this genealogical-phenomenological intersection, I find what I term “positure” most helpfully treated in Plato, Aristotle and Nietzsche; “gesture” similarly in Condillac, Mead and (...) Kristeva; “grace” in Avicenna, Schiller and Dewey; and “resilience” in Fanon, (Judith) Butler and Deleuze. With these analyses in place, I apply the four Moves in analyzing various forms of dancing (including salsa dancing and the pollen dance of the honeybee) and coordinate them to outline a comprehensive philosophy of dance. This philosophy points to certain conditions for an ideally flourishing, dancing society. And these conditions create the possibility for a coalition of sympathetic discourses (including critical race theory, queer theory, disability studies and democratic theory) united in pursuit of political virtue. The development of a philosophy of dance offers a deeper understanding of the intellectual values of a practice often identified with bodily immediacy and therefore judged uninteresting. It also reinvigorates philosophy with the dynamism and bodily relevance of the practice of dancing. Most important, it demonstrates the meaningful intersection of aesthetics and political ethics, by exploring how aesthetic practices underlie and inspire human flourishing. (shrink)

According to the traditional account Mendel's paper on pea hybrids reported a study of inheritance and its laws. Hence, Mendel came to be known as The Father of Genetics. This paper demonstrates that, in fact, Mendel's objective in his research was finding the empirical laws which describe the formation of hybrids and the development of their offspring over several generations. Having found these laws (and not the laws of inheritance that he is generally credited with) he proposed a theoretical scheme (...) involving the formation of germinal and pollen cells in hybrids and their combination in fertilization competent to explain why his laws took the form that they did. Mendel's research shows a pattern of development closely paralleling the stages of empirical investigation beginning at the level of qualitative description in common language rising through four levels of increasing abstraction and culminating in a fifth level, his simple mechanical theory. This mechanism met all the tests that a theory of this type must pass. In that respect Mendel was highly successful and this success might be the reason why he did not push his theory to a higher level, a sixth level involving the use of particulate determiners; despite this fact, Mendel was credited with having taken exactly that step. (shrink)

Long-term vegetation dynamics based on paleo-pollen data display transient behaviour, often alternating in phase between predominant determinism and predominant 'turbulence', when viewed as a trajectory in a multivariate phase space. Given this, the metaphor of vegetation dynamics as a 'flowing stream', first introduced by Cooper in his classic 1926 paper entitled "The fundamentals of vegetation change", is re-examined and revealed to be not only useful, but strikingly realistic. Vegetation dynamic theory is reviewed and classic theories are found to reflect (...) reality poorly. It is suggested that vegetation dynamics is a far from equilibrium system, and that the application of nonequilibrium thermodynamic theory is appropriate. (shrink)

The aim of the Nordic Network for the Archaeology and Archaeobotany of Gardening (NTAA), as it was phrased those first days in Alnarp in the beginning of March 2010, is to: ”bring researchers together from different disciplines to discuss the history, archaeology, archaeobotany and cultivation of gardens and plants”. We had no idea, then, how widely appreciated this initiative would become. The fifth seminar in five years was held on Visingsö June 1-3, 2014 and the sixth seminar will take place (...) in Kristiansand, Norway, June 12-14, 2015. We are very pleased to be able to publish this report, Sources to the History of Gardening: Four Interdisciplinary Seminars 2010–2013, Arranged By the Nordic Network for the Archaeology and Archaeobotany of Gardening (NTAA), based on the first four themes and seminars, in total 26 articles. Most of them origins from one of the seminar contributions 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 respectively. However, the editorial group has taken the opportunity, with the aim of the network in mind, to add supplementing contributions on some subjects. The articles are arranged in four themes according to the themes of the seminars. The first theme Archaeological Sources to the History of Gardens and the Cultural Landscape is linked to the first seminar in Alnarp, Sweden, 2010 which had a focus on method, the important connections between archaeology and archaeobotany and the interesting progress within garden archaeology during the last decade. The second theme Cabbage Patches and Kitchen Gardens deals with the second seminar in Norrköping, Sweden, 2011. Its focus was on historical, cultural geographical, archaeological and archaeobotanical research concerning utility gardens or kitchen gardens as well as the concept ‘kålgård’ (cabbage patch or kale yard), its shape and content over time. The third theme Cultural and Garden plants: Under Ground, Above Ground, In Herbariums and Archives connects to the third seminar in Uppsala, Sweden, 2012. It focused on sources, source criticism and interdisciplinary research to gain knowledge on the history of garden cultivation and cultural plants. The articles discuss, among other things, herbariums, written sources, DNA and molecular markers, pollen analysis and georadar. The fourth theme for NTAA’s annual seminar was Cultural Relict Plants and was held on Bornholm, Denmark, 2013. The focus on the seminar was on research and conservation of cultural relict plants, that is cultural plants which have survived in the same place for a long time after the actual cultivation has ceased. We dedicate this report to Kjell Lundquist (1955-2011) who were one of the initiators to this network and we hope it will inspire continuous research and new methodological discussions. (shrink)

Le revenu d’existence sort du ghetto des utopies. Cet article formule sept caractéristiques qui doivent présider aux mises en œuvre de cette nouvelle base d’un système de protection sociale adéquat aux transformations de l’activité, du travail rétribué et de l’emploi salarié – trois notions qui ne se recouvrent que partiellement. Quelques principes peuvent servir de guide pour l’action : un montant bas ou même moyen du revenu de base en ferait volens nolens un auxiliaire d’une politique néolibérale ; un montant (...) élevé qui supprime vraiment la pauvreté est la clé de l’acceptation sociale d’une telle réforme révolutionnaire auprès des principaux intéressés ; le financement du revenu de base serait au mieux assuré par l’instauration d’une taxe Pollen. (shrink)

Through the early twentieth century, asthmatics were advised to move to a more suitable climate, or to vacation in one during their worst season. In the late nineteenth century, physicians sought to quantify the ideal temperature, humidity, altitude, and pollen count to help travellers to select a suitable place, but these investigations led some physicians to question contradictions between expected and actual conditions. Given that even the best climate was not perfect at all times, and that many patients could (...) not afford to travel or relocate, a group of physicians-who came to be known as allergists-sought ways to adapt their patients to any climate through changes in their indoor environments and treatments to manage their symptoms. Their approach included changes in household design, furnishings, and cleaning techniques, especially a strict avoidance of dust, which could carry feathers, animal hair, skin debris, pollen, moulds, and an unknown 'dust' allergen. Air filtering and air conditioning were also promoted as ways to protect asthmatics and hay fever sufferers. These modifications of patients and their microenvironments signalled both a move away from climactic approaches to asthma and toward the sanitary, modernist home of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Through the early twentieth century, asthmatics were advised to move to a more suitable climate, or to vacation in one during their worst season. In the late nineteenth century, physicians sought to quantify the ideal temperature, humidity, altitude, and pollen count to help travellers to select a suitable place, but these investigations led some physicians to question contradictions between expected and actual conditions. Given that even the best climate was not perfect at all times, and that many patients could (...) not afford to travel or relocate, a group of physicians—who came to be known as allergists—sought ways to adapt their patients to any climate through changes in their indoor environments and treatments to manage their symptoms. Their approach included changes in household design, furnishings, and cleaning techniques, especially a strict avoidance of dust, which could carry feathers, animal hair, skin debris, pollen, moulds, and an unknown ‘dust’ allergen. Air filtering and air conditioning were also promoted as ways to protect asthmatics and hay fever sufferers. These modifications of patients and their microenvironments signalled both a move away from climactic approaches to asthma and toward the sanitary, modernist home of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Food products with genetically modified ingredients are common, yet many consumers are unaware of this. When polled, consumers say that they want to know whether their food contains GM ingredients, just as many want to know whether their food is natural or organic. Informing consumers is a major motivation for labeling. But labeling need not be mandatory. Consumers who want GM-free products will pay a premium to support voluntary labeling. Why do consumers want to know about GM ingredients? GM foods (...) are tested to ensure safety and have been on the market for more than a decade. Still, many consumers, including some with food allergies, want to be cautious. Also, GM crops may affect neighboring plants through pollen drift. Despite tests for environmental impact, some consumers may worry that GM crops will adversely effect the environment. The study of risk and its management raises questions not settled by the life sciences alone. This book surveys various labeling policies and the cases for them. It is the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary treatment of the debate about labeling genetically modified food. The contributors include philosophers, bioethicists, food and agricultural scientists, attorneys/legal scholars, and economists. (shrink)

The multi‐allelic self‐incompatibility polymorphisms in angiosperms have long interested geneticists and population geneticists, but the limits of classical genetic resolution were reached many years ago. In recent years, new progress has been made by molecular genetic approaches. Intriguing similarities to and differences from the fungal systems are emerging. The polymorphism at these loci is now known to be even more baroque than appeared from classical genetic studies. Alleles differ so much at the level of both the DNA and protein sequence (...) that they would be difficult to recognise as products of the same locus, were it not for the presence of certain conserved regions. Despite the successes of the recent work, the locus responsible for the specificity of the incompatibility reaction in pollen, and the mechanism of self‐incompatibility, remain elusive. (shrink)

Summary New scientific work on the ancient landscapes of Germany and Britain makes it very likely that the Roman decision to abandon attempts to conquer Germany as far as the Elbe, most clearly expressed by Tiberius in 16 AD, was strongly influenced by perceptions of the heavily wooded landscape of that region. There were other reasons too: the concern of emperors to hinder potential rivals; the sheer difficulty of advancing to the Elbe; and the increasing concern of the emperor and (...) his advisers for the fiscal effects of this and other potential conquests. But what is new is that the evidence of arboreal and non-arboreal pollen shows that Germany was a less attractive target than agrarian England. (shrink)

There are a growing number of examples where naturally occurring mutations disrupt an established physiological or developmental pathway to yield a new condition that is evolutionary favored. Asexual reproduction by seed in plants, or apomixis, occurs in a diversity of taxa and has evolved from sexual ancestors. One form of apomixis, diplospory, is a multi‐step development process that is initiated when meiosis is altered to produce an unreduced rather than a reduced egg cell. Subsequent parthenogenetic development of the unreduced egg (...) yields genetically maternal progeny. While it has long been apparent from cytological data that meiosis in apomicts was malfunctional or completely bypassed, the genetic basis of the phenomenon has been a long‐standing mystery. New data from genetic analysis of Arabidopsis mutants1 in combination with more sophisticated molecular understanding of meiosis in plants indicate that a weak mutation of the gene SWI, called DYAD, interferes with sister chromatid cohesion in meiosis I, causes synapsis to fail in female meiosis and yields two unreduced cells. The new work shows that a low percentage of DYAD ovules produce functional unreduced egg cells (2n) that can be fertilized by haploid pollen (1n) to give rise to triploid (3n) progeny. While the DYAD mutants differ in some aspects from naturally occurring apomicts, the work establishes that mutation to a single gene can effectively initiate apomictic development and, furthermore, focuses efforts to isolate apomixis genes on a narrowed set of developmental events. Profitable manipulation of meiosis and recombination in agronomically important crops may be on the horizon. BioEssays 30:798–801, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This paper challenges the presumed triumph of laboratory life in the history of twentieth-century biomedical research through an exploration of the relationships between laboratory, clinic, and field in the regional understanding and treatment of allergy in America. In the early establishment of allergy clinics, many physicians opted to work closely with botanists knowledgeable about the local flora in the region to develop pollen extracts in desensitization treatments, rather than rely upon pharmaceutical companies that had adopted a principle of standardized (...) vaccines beholden to bacteriology that gave no thought to the particularities of place where their products were to be sold. Natural historical sciences like plant ecology and systematics furnished important knowledge, resources, and practices in establishing a medical marketplace for allergy in America. And botanists similarly profited from biomedicine and allergic bodies in extending their network of knowledge about the plant world. (shrink)

Este artigo estabelece algumas relações fundamentais entre evolução, a teoria do cérebro triuno e a relevância que esta pode ter para a fundamentação empírica de uma filosofia da mente e das emoções. Inicialmente, será especialmente considerada a posição do filósofo Ronald de Sousa no seu já clássico artigo “The Mind’s Bermuda Triangle: Philosophy of Emotions and Empirical Science”, parte do Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotions. A segunda seção discute a validade da teoria do “cérebro triuno” como abordagem neuroetológica evolutiva, (...) delineando sua divisão tripartite do cérebro e analisando críticas e elogios às suas ideias, além de considerações de neurocientistas importantes no campo do estudo das emoções como Ledoux e Panksepp sobre tal tema. Na terceira seção, trato de um trabalho de Pollen e Hofmann que nos serve de apresentação de novas abordagens contemporâneas para a compreensão da evolução do cérebro. Como conclusão delineio um marco de trabalho na forma de uma agenda de pesquisa para as relações entre biologia evolutiva, neurociência e o estudo filosófico das emoções. (shrink)

Les discours lénifiants promettant de résoudre tous les problèmes sociaux et écologiques par une « reprise de la croissance », synonyme de « retour au plein emploi », sonnent de plus en plus creux. Nous vivons une deuxième vague de déploiement du capitalisme cognitif, caractérisée par l’automatisation de tâches intellectuelles bien plus complexes, dont les études les plus sérieuses montrent qu’elle annonce une explosion spectaculaire des chiffres du chômage (jusqu’au sein des classes les mieux éduquées). Les leçons de la première (...) vague d’industrialisation du début du XIX e siècle enseignent que seuls des combats idéologiques et politiques peuvent conduire les logiques économiques à s’adapter à ces nouvelles dynamiques. Les mesures préconisées depuis 15 ans par Multitudes (revenu universel garanti, taxe pollen, réforme de l’éducation) sont plus urgentes que jamais. (shrink)