In the early 20th century, Marxist theory was enriched and rejuvenated by adopting the concept of reification, introduced by the Hungarian theorist Georg Lukács to identify and denounce the transformation of historical processes into ahistorical entities, human actions into things that seemed part of an immutable "second nature." For a variety of reasons, both theoretical and practical, the hopes placed in de-reification as a tool of revolutionary emancipation proved vain. In these original and imaginative essays, delivered as the Tanner Lectures (...) at the University of California, Berkeley in 2005, the distinguished third-generation Frankfurt School philosopher Axel Honneth attempts to rescue the concept of reification by recasting it in terms of the philosophy of recognition he has been developing over the past two decades. Three distinguished political and social theorists: Judith Butler, Raymond Geuss, and Jonathan Lear, respond with hard questions about the central anthropological premise of his argument, the assumption that prior to cognition there is a fundamental experience of intersubjective recognition that can provide a normative standard by which current social relations can be judged wanted. Honneth listens carefully to their criticism and provides a powerful defense of his position. (shrink)

In this pathbreaking study, Axel Honneth argues that "the struggle for recognition" is, and should be, at the center of social conflicts. Moving smoothly between moral philosophy and social theory, Honneth offers insights into such issues as the social forms of recognition and nonrecognition, the moral basis of interaction in human conflicts, the relation between the recognition model and conceptions of modernity, the normative basis of social theory, and the possibility of mediating between Hegel and Kant.

The first debate in this article has to do with the very possibility of intergenerational justice beyond our obligations towards members of other generations while they coexist with us. Here, we ask ourselves whether we owe anything to people who either have died already, or are not yet born. Differences in temporal location mean that people may not exist at the same time — be it only during part of their life — which raises special ethical challenges. It is one (...) thing to decide whether we owe anything to the next generation(s). It is another to define what we owe them. Most standard theories of justice have tried to answer this difficult question. This article focuses on a comparison between a reciprocity-based and an egalitarian account of justice between generations. It then turns, on the one hand, to a brief discussion of alternative theories and, on the other hand, to implementation issues. (shrink)

The frame problem refers to the fact that organisms must be able to zero in on relevant aspects of the world and intelligently ignore the vast majority of the world that is irrelevant to their goals. In this paper we aim to point out the connection between two leading frameworks for thinking about how organisms achieve this. Predictive processing is a rapidly growing framework within cognitive science which suggests that organisms assign a high ‘weight’ to relevant aspects of the world, (...) effectively treating relevant aspects of the world as if they are more precise. This assignment of weight is called precision-weighting and is the predictive processing account of how organisms allocate their attention. Relevance Realization is a framework that conceptualizes an organism’s ability to realize relevance as resulting from a dynamical system in which a cognitive agent makes use of opponent processing relationships to zero in on relevant aspects of the world. In this paper we use recent work on the diametric model of autism and psychosis to demonstrate that the tradeoffs inherent to precision-weighting are also inherent to relevance realization. This connection will demonstrate that although these frameworks have a different intellectual background and use a different set of concepts and vocabulary, they are both pointing to the same underlying process. The fact that these different frameworks have converged on such a similar solution to the problem of how organisms realize relevance serves to demonstrate the plausibility of that solution. (shrink)

The notion of a genetic program has been widely criticized by both biologists and philosophers. But the debate has revolved around a narrow conception of what programs are and how they work, and many criticisms are linked to this same conception. To remedy this, I outline a modern and more apt idea of a program that possesses many of the features critics thought missing from programs. Moving away from over-simplistic conceptions of programs opens the way to a more fruitful interplay (...) of ideas between the complexity of biology and our most complex engineering discipline. (shrink)

Truth by convention, once thought to be the foundation of a uniquely promising approach to explaining our access to the truth in nonempirical domains, is nowadays widely considered an absurdity. Its fall from grace has been due largely to the influence of an argument that can be sketched as follows: our linguistic conventions have the power to make it the case that a sentence expresses a particular proposition, but they can’t by themselves generate truth; whether a given proposition is true—and (...) so whether the sentence that expresses it is true—is a matter of what the world is like, which means it isn’t a matter of convention alone. The consensus is that this argument is decisive against truth by convention. Strikingly, though, it has rarely been formulated with much precision. Here I provide a new rendering of the argument, one that reveals its structure and makes transparent just what assumptions it requires, and then I assess conventionalists’ prospects for resisting each of those assumptions. I conclude that the consensus is mistaken: contrary to what is almost universally thought, there remains a promising way forward for the conventionalist project. Along the way, I clarify conventionalists’ commitments by thinking about what truth by convention would need to be like in order for conventionalism to do the epistemological work it’s intended to do. (shrink)

Axel Honneth has been instrumental in advancing the work of the Frankfurt School of critical theorists, rebuilding their effort to combine radical social and political analysis with rigorous philosophical inquiry. These eleven essays published over the past five years reclaim the relevant themes of the Frankfurt School, which counted Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, Franz Neumann, and Albrecht Wellmer as members. They also engage with Kant, Freud, Alexander Mitscherlich, and Michael Walzer, whose work on morality, (...) history, democracy, and individuality intersects with the Frankfurt School's core concerns. Collected here for the first time in English, Honneth's essays pursue the unifying themes and theses that support the methodologies and thematics of critical social theory, and they address the possibilities of continuing this tradition through radically changed theoretical and social conditions. According to Honneth, there is a unity that underlies critical theory's multiple approaches: the way in which reason is both distorted and furthered in contemporary capitalist society. And while much is dead in the social and psychological doctrines of critical social theory, its central inquiries remain vitally relevant. Is social progress still possible after the horrors of the twentieth century? Does capitalism deform reason and, if so, in what respects? Can we justify the relationship between law and violence in secular terms, or is it inextricably bound to divine justice? How can we be free when we're subject to socialization in a highly complex and in many respects unfree society? For Honneth, suffering and moral struggle are departure points for a new "reconstructive" form of social criticism, one that is based solidly in the empirically grounded, interdisciplinary approach of the Frankfurt School. (shrink)

Die Theorie der Gerechtigkeit gehört zu den am intensivsten bestellten Feldern der zeitgenössischen Philosophie. Allerdings haben die meisten Gerechtigkeitstheorien ihr hohes Begründungsniveau nur um den Preis eines schweren Defizits erreicht, denn mit ihrer Fixierung auf rein normative, abstrakte Prinzipien geraten sie in beträchtliche Distanz zu jener Sphäre, die ihr”Anwendungsbereich“ist: der gesellschaftlichen Wirklichkeit. Zur Begründung dieses weitreichenden Unterfangens weist Honneth zunächst nach, daß alle wesentlichen Handlungssphären westlicher Gesellschaften ein Merkmal teilen: Sie haben den Anspruch, einen jeweils besonderen Aspekt von individueller Freiheit (...) zu verwirklichen. Im Geiste von Hegels Rechtsphilosophie und unter anerkennungstheoretischen Vorzeichen zeigt das zentrale Kapitel, wie in konkreten gesellschaftlichen Bereichen - in persönlichen Beziehungen, im marktvermittelten Wirtschaftshandeln und in der politischen Öffentlichkeit - die Prinzipien individueller Freiheit generiert werden, die die Richtschnur für Gerechtigkeit bilden. Das Ziel des Buches ist ein höchst anspruchsvolles: die Gerechtigkeitstheorie als Gesellschaftsanalyse neu zu begründen. (shrink)

Drawing on recent advances in evolutionary biology, prominent scholars return to the question posed in a pathbreaking book: how evolution itself evolved.

The literature contains evidence from some studies of asymmetric patterns of choice cycles in the direction consistent with regret theory, and evidence from other studies of asymmetries in the opposite direction. This article reports an experiment showing that both patterns occur within the same sample of respondents operating in the same experimental environment. We discuss the implications for modelling behaviour in such environments.

Every day, new warnings emerge about artificial intelligence rebelling against us. All the while, a more immediate dilemma flies under the radar. Have forces been unleashed that are thrusting humanity down an ill-advised path, one that's increasingly making us behave like simple machines? In this wide-reaching, interdisciplinary book, Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger examine what's happening to our lives as society embraces big data, predictive analytics, and smart environments. They explain how the goal of designing programmable worlds goes hand (...) in hand with engineering predictable and programmable people. Detailing new frameworks, provocative case studies, and mind-blowing thought experiments, Frischmann and Selinger reveal hidden connections between fitness trackers, electronic contracts, social media platforms, robotic companions, fake news, autonomous cars, and more. This powerful analysis should be read by anyone interested in understanding exactly how technology threatens the future of our society, and what we can do now to build something better. (shrink)

This article proposes that Horace's Epodes and Ovid's Metamorphoses open with significant acrostics that comprise the first two letters, in some cases forming syllables, of successive lines: IB-AM/IAMB (Epod. 1.1–2) and IN-CO-(H)AS (Met. 1.1–3). Each acrostic, it will be argued, tees up programmatic concerns vital to the work it opens: generic identity and the interrelation of form and content (Epodes), etymology and monumentality (Metamorphoses). Moreover, as befits their placement at the head of collections, both acrostics negotiate the challenge of literary (...) commencement. The introduction reviews recent developments in acrostic studies and discusses important predecessors and parallels for Horace's and Ovid's ‘two-letter’ and syllabic acrostics. Two subsequent sections examine the acrostics singly, and a conclusion compares the dialogues that these acrostics open between author and reader, underscoring the welcome challenge which Ovid's acrostic offers to the prevailing scholarly view that this form of wordplay is a strictly visual affair. (shrink)

I argue that Quinean naturalists’ holism-based arguments against analyticity and apriority are more difficult to resist than is generally supposed, for two reasons. First, although opponents of naturalism sometimes dismiss these arguments on the grounds that the holistic premises on which they depend are unacceptably radical, it turns out that the sort of holism required by these arguments is actually quite minimal. And second, although it’s true, as Grice and Strawson pointed out long ago, that these arguments can succeed only (...) if there isn’t any principled criterion for meaning change, such a criterion turns out to be hard to come by. David Chalmers has recently argued that such a criterion must exist, since the norms governing belief revision are subject to obvious exceptions that can be explained only by appeal to meaning change. But this, I argue, is incorrect: if choices about how to use language are themselves rationally assessable, then there are no such exceptions to be explained. To show that this is so, I formulate a new kind of coherence norm that may be useful for reasoning formally about the relationship between meaning and evidence. (shrink)

The field of emotion regulation has developed rapidly, and a number of emotion regulatory strategies have been identified. To date, empirical attention has focused on contrasting specific regulatio...

Jakob von Uexküll's theories of life -- Biography and historical background -- Nature's conformity with plan -- Umweltforschung -- Biosemiotics -- Concluding remarks -- Marking a path into the environments of animals -- The essential approach to the organism -- Heidegger and the biologists -- Paths to the world -- Disruptive behavior : Heidegger and the captivated animal -- The worldless stone -- The poor animal -- For example, three bees and a lark -- Animal morphology -- A shocking wealth (...) -- A fine line in the rupture of time -- An affected body -- The theme of the animal melody : Merleau-Ponty and the umwelt -- The structure of behavior -- A pure wake, a quiet force -- A leaf of being -- Interanimality -- The-animal-stalks-at-five-oclock : Deleuze's affection for Uexküll -- Problematic organisms -- Uexküll's ethology of affects -- The body without organs, the embryonic egg, and prebiotic soup -- Nature's refrain sung across milieus and territories -- The animal stalks. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 167-181, July 2022. A growing cadre of influential scholars has converged on a circumscribed definition of empathy as restricted only to feeling the same emotion that one perceives another is feeling. We argue that this restrictive isomorphic matching definition is deeply problematic because it deviates dramatically from traditional conceptualizations of empathy and unmoors the construct from generations of scientific research and clinical practice; insistence on an isomorphic form undercuts much of the functional value (...) of empathy from multiple perspectives of analysis; and combining the opposing concepts of isomorphic matching and self-other awareness implicitly requires motivational content, causing the RIM definition to implicitly require the kind of non-matching emotional content that it explicitly seeks to exclude. (shrink)

Axel Gosseries1 | : À la suggestion de Jefferson,3 nous nous proposons de prendre au sérieux la comparaison entre nations et générations dans le cadre d’une théorie philosophique de la justice et de la démocratie préoccupée par nos devoirs envers les membres d’autres générations. Nous nous concentrons ici sur trois des caractéristiques propres aux relations intergénérationnelles, à travers une comparaison avec des situations internationales spécifiques. La première a trait à l’immobilité temporelle des personnes au delà de la période s’étendant (...) de leur naissance à leur mort. Cette immobilité rend certaines ressources qui sont spécifiques à des périodes données, inaccessibles aux générations des autres périodes, ce qui peut importer pour certaines théories de la justice. Nous nous intéressons ensuite au caractère enclavé de chaque génération. La transmission intergénérationnelle des biens dépend alors de la collaboration tant passive qu’active des générations de transit. Nous montrons en quoi cela importe pour la définition de nos obligations de justice intergénérationnelle. Enfin, nous insistons sur le caractère unidirectionnel de l’écoulement du temps — cette fois à travers l’analogie avec les nations riveraines d’un fleuve — et son effet sur la distribution temporelle des coûts et bénéfices, et des vulnérabilités. Nous en examinons les implications normatives possibles pour la définition de la juste distribution du pouvoir entre générations. À travers ces trois illustrations, nous espérons montrer la pertinence de cette approche anatomico-analogique pour la compréhension de ce que nous devons aux autres générations, et en particulier aux générations futures. | : Following Jefferson’s suggestion, I take seriously the promises of a comparison between nations and generations, as part of a philosophical theory of justice and of democracy concerned with our obligations towards members of other generations. I focus here on three of the features that are specific to intergenerational relations, through a comparison with corresponding international situations. The first feature has to do with people’s temporal immobility beyond the lapse of time that extends from their birth to their death. Such immobility renders some period-specific resources inaccessible to generations from other periods, which may have implications for some theories of justice. The second feature that I look into is the period-locked nature of the members each generation. The intergenerational transfer of goods to future generations then depends on the passive as well as active collaboration of transit generations. I show why and to what extent this matters to the definition of our intergenerational obligations. Finally, I insist on the one-directional feature of time’s passage — through an analogy with the situation of riparian nations along a river — and on its effect on the temporal distribution of costs and benefits, as well as of vulnerabilities. I explore the potential normative implications of such one-directionality for the definition of a fair distribution of power between generations. Through looking at these three features and closely examining their implications, I also hope to stress the relevance of an anatomico-analogical method for the understanding of what we owe other generations, and especially future ones. (shrink)

"In 2003 the Getty Museum, which holds a collection of about 240 Weston prints, hosted a colloquium on the photographer. This volume in the In Focus series records remarks by the author, Brett Abbott, along with those of six other participants: William Clift, Amy Conger, David Featherstone, Weston Naef, David Travis, and Jennifer Watts. Context for their conversation is provided by the author's introduction, plate texts, and chronology. Approximately fifty of Weston's images demonstrate why his work continues to resonate (...) with a contemporary public and serves as a model for a host of photographers active today."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

When epistemologists talk about knowledge, the discussions traditionally include only a small class of other epistemic notions: belief, justification, probability, truth. In this paper, we propose that epistemologists should include an additional epistemic notion into the mix, namely the notion of assuming or taking for granted.

Sensitivity has sometimes been thought to be a highly epistemologically significant property, serving as a proxy for a kind of responsiveness to the facts that ensure that the truth of our beliefs isn’t just a lucky coincidence. But it's an imperfect proxy: there are various well-known cases in which sensitivity-based anti-luck conditions return the wrong verdicts. And as a result of these failures, contemporary theorists often dismiss such conditions out of hand. I show here, though, that a sensitivity-based understanding of (...) epistemic luck can be developed that respects what was attractive about sensitivity-based approaches in the first place but that's immune to these failures. (shrink)

"Accompanies the exhibition Engaged Observers: Documentary Photography since the Sixties, held at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, June 29-November 17, 2010.".

When government actors seek to restrict the sale of hazardous substances, industry actors tend to intervene, deploying coordinated strategies aimed at delaying, preventing or weakening attempts to regulate their products. In many cases, this has involved deliberate efforts to obfuscate science, mislead the public and manipulate political actors in order to ensure desired policy outcomes. Strategies of regulatory obstructionism have resulted in the prolonged dispersal of harmful chemical substances with tangible impacts on public health. This article proposes that this behavior (...) should be interpreted as a form of violence. Examining the regulatory histories of lead, benzene, asbestos and PCBs, the article demonstrates how regulatory obstructionism and violence have become intractable characteristics of the chemical industry. (shrink)

Dictionary-making is an increasingly important avenue for cultural preservation and maintenance for Aboriginal people. It is also one of the main jobs performed by linguists working in Aboriginal communities. However, current tools for making dicitionaries are either not specifically designed for the purpose (Word, Nisus), with the result that dictionaries written in them are difficult to maintain, to keep consistent, and to manipulate automatically, or are too complex for many people to use (Shoebox), and are thereby wasted as potential resources. (...) Moreover, neither of these sets of tools provides a suitable user interface for people who simply want to browse or find words in a dictionary. We set out to design a dictionary 'template', written in software that was easy (and fun!) for people to use, and that maintained a consistent relationship among the information in the dictionary. (shrink)

A funny, sharp and smart picture book to help mommy and daddy through difficult moments.

Which rules should guide our reasoning? Human reasoners often use reasoning shortcuts, called heuristics, which function well in some contexts but lack the universality of reasoning rules like deductive implication or inference to the best explanation. Does it follow that human reasoning is hopelessly irrational? I argue: no. Heuristic reasoning often represents human reasoners reaching a local rational maximum, reasoning more accurately than if they try to implement more “ideal” rules of reasoning. I argue this is a genuine rational achievement. (...) Our ideal rational advisors would advise us to reason with heuristic rules, not more complicated ideal rules. I argue we do not need a radical new account of epistemic norms to make sense of the success of heuristic reasoning. (shrink)

Cognitive niche construction is the process whereby organisms create and maintain cause–effect models of their niche as guides for fitness influencing behavior. Extended mind theory claims that cognitive processes extend beyond the brain to include predictable states of the world. Active inference and predictive processing in cognitive science assume that organisms embody predictive (i.e., generative) models of the world optimized by standard cognitive functions (e.g., perception, action, learning). This paper presents an active inference formulation that views cognitive niche construction as (...) a cognitive function aimed at optimizing organisms' generative models. We call that process of optimization extended active inference. (shrink)

This paper describes a pattern of explanation prevalent in the biological sciences that I call a ‘lineage explanation’. The aim of these explanations is to make plausible certain trajectories of change through phenotypic space. They do this by laying out a series of stages, where each stage shows how some mechanism worked, and the differences between each adjacent stage demonstrates how one mechanism, through minor modifications, could be changed into another. These explanations are important, for though it is widely accepted (...) that there is an ‘incremental constraint’ on evolutionary change, in an important class of cases it is difficult to see how to satisfy this constraint. I show that lineage explanations answer important questions about evolutionary change, but do so by demonstrating differences between individuals rather than invoking population processes, such as natural selection.1. Introduction2. Turning a ‘Scale’ into a ‘Plume’3. Lineage Explanations in Biology3.1. The evolution of eyes3.2. The evolution of feathers4. The Two Dimensions of a Lineage Explanation4.1. The production dimension4.2. The continuity dimension4.3. The dual role of the parts5. Constraining the Explanations6. Operational and Generative Lineages7. Explaining Change Without Populations8. Conclusion. (shrink)

A Benacerraf–Field challenge is an argument intended to show that common realist theories of a given domain are untenable: such theories make it impossible to explain how we’ve arrived at the truth in that domain, and insofar as a theory makes our reliability in a domain inexplicable, we must either reject that theory or give up the relevant beliefs. But there’s no consensus about what would count here as a satisfactory explanation of our reliability. It’s sometimes suggested that giving such (...) an explanation would involve showing that our beliefs meet some modal condition, but realists have claimed that this sort of modal interpretation of the challenge deprives it of any force: since the facts in question are metaphysically necessary and so obtain in all possible worlds, it’s trivially easy, even given realism, to show that our beliefs have the relevant modal features. Here I show that this claim is mistaken—what motivates a modal interpretation of the challenge in the first place also motivates an understanding of the relevant features in terms of epistemic possibilities rather than metaphysical possibilities, and there are indeed epistemically possible worlds where the facts in question don’t obtain. (shrink)

Why can I not appropriately utter ‘It must be raining’ while standing outside in the rain, even though every world consistent with my knowledge is one in which it is raining? The common response to this problem is to hold that epistemic must, in addition to quantifying over epistemic possibilities, carries some additional evidential information concerning the source of one'S evidence. I argue that this is a mistake: epistemic modals are mere quantifiers over epistemic possibilities. My central claim is that (...) the seeming anomaly of the data above arises from a mistaken conception of what a possibility is. Instead of conceiving of possibilities as possible worlds, I argue that we should conceive of possibilities as answers to open questions. (shrink)

69 Thompson-Schill, S.L. _et al. _(1997) Role of left inferior prefrontal cortex 59 Buckner, R.L. _et al. _(1996) Functional anatomic studies of memory in retrieval of semantic knowledge: a re-evaluation _Proc. Natl. Acad._ retrieval for auditory words and pictures _J. Neurosci. _16, 6219–6235 _Sci. U. S. A. _94, 14792–14797 60 Buckner, R.L. _et al. _(1995) Functional anatomical studies of explicit and 70 Baddeley, A. (1992) Working memory: the interface between memory implicit memory retrieval tasks _J. Neurosci. _15, 12–29 and cognition (...) _J. Cogn. Neurosci. _4, 281–288 61 Bäckman, L. _et al. _(1997) Brain activation in young and older adults 71 Petrides, M. (1994) Frontal lobes and behavior _Curr. Opin. Neurobiol._ during implicit and explicit retrieval _J. Cogn. Neurosci. _9, 378–391. (shrink)

It is commonly held that the context with respect to which an indexical is interpreted is determined independently of the interpretation of the indexical. This view, which I call Context Realism, has explanatory significance: it is because the context is what it is that an indexical refers to what it does. In this paper, I provide an argument against Context Realism. I then develop an alternative that I call Context Constructivism, according to which indexicals are defined not in terms of (...) features of utterance situations, but rather in terms of roles that objects could play. (shrink)

Like Laland et al., I think Mayr’s distinction is problematic, but I identify a further problem with it. I argue that Mayr’s distinction is a false dichotomy, and obscures an important question about evolutionary change. I show how this question, once revealed, sheds light on some debates in evo-devo that Laland et al.’s analysis cannot, and suggest that it provides a different view about how future integration between biological disciplines might proceed.

Understanding how cooperation evolves is central to explaining some core features of our biological world. Many important evolutionary events, such as the arrival of multicellularity or the origins of eusociality, are cooperative ventures between formerly solitary individuals. Explanations of the evolution of cooperation have primarily involved showing how cooperation can be maintained in the face of free-riding individuals whose success gradually undermines cooperation. In this paper I argue that there is a second, distinct, and less well explored, problem of cooperation (...) that I call the generation of benefit. Focusing on how benefit is generated within a group poses a different problem: how is it that individuals in a group can (at least in principle) do better than those who remain solitary? I present several different ways that benefit may be generated, each with different implications for how cooperation might be initiated, how it might further evolve, and how it might interact with different ways of maintaining cooperation. I argue that in some cases of cooperation, the most important underlying “problem” of cooperation may be how to generate benefit, rather than how to reduce conflict or prevent free-riding. (shrink)

While research has focused on why certain entrepreneurs elect to create innovative solutions to social problems, very little is known about why some social entrepreneurs choose to scale their solutions while others do not. Research on scaling has generally focused on organizational characteristics often overlooking factors at the individual level that may affect scaling decisions. Drawing on the multidimensional construct of moral intensity, we propose a theoretical model of ethical decision making to explain why a social entrepreneur’s perception of moral (...) intensity of the social problem, coupled with their personal desire for control, can significantly influence scaling decisions. Specifically, we propose that higher levels of perceived moral intensity will positively influence the likelihood of scaling through open as opposed to closed modes in order to achieve greater speed and scope of social impact. However, we also propose this effect will be negatively moderated by a social entrepreneur’s higher levels of desire for control. Our model has implications for research and practice at the interface of ethics and social entrepreneurship. (shrink)

The dual-use issue is often framed as a series of paralyzing ‘dilemmas’ facing the scientific community as well as institutions which support innovation. While this conceptualization of the dual-use issue can be useful in certain contexts its usefulness is more limited when reflecting on the governance and politics of the dual-use issue. Within this paper, key shortcomings of the dilemma framing are outlined. It is argued that many of the issues raised in the most recent debates about ‘dual-use’ bird flu (...) research remain unresolved. This includes questions about the trajectories of certain lines of research, as well as broader trends in the practice and governance of science. This leads to difficult questions about current approaches to the dual-use issue within the US, as well as internationally. (shrink)

Comparing engineering to evolution typically involves adaptationist thinking, where well-designed artifacts are likened to well-adapted organisms, and the process of evolution is likened to the process of design. A quite different comparison is made when biologists focus on evolvability instead of adaptationism. Here, the idea is that complex integrated systems, whether evolved or engineered, share universal principles that affect the way they change over time. This shift from adaptationism to evolvability is a significant move for, as I argue, we can (...) make sense of these universal principles without making any adaptationism claims. Furthermore, evolvability highlights important aspects of engineering that are ignored in the adaptationist debates. I introduce some novel engineering examples that incorporate these key neglected aspects, and use these examples to challenge some commonly cited contrasts between engineering and evolution, and to highlight some novel resemblances that have gone unnoticed. (shrink)

Humans’ indigenous microbes strongly influence organ functions in an age‐ and diet‐dependent manner, adding an important dimension to aging biology that remains poorly understood. Although age‐related differences in the gut microbiota composition correlate with age‐related loss of organ function and diseases, including inflammation and frailty, variation exists among the elderly, especially centenarians and people living in areas of extreme longevity. Studies using short‐lived as well as nonsenescent model organisms provide surprising functional insights into factors affecting aging and implicate attenuating effects (...) of microbes as well as a crucial role for certain transcription factors like forkhead box O. The unexpected beneficial effects of microbes on aged animals imply an even more complex interplay between the gut microbiome and the host. The microbiome constitutes the major interface between humans and the environment, is influenced by biosocial stressors and behaviors, and mediates effects on health and aging processes, while being moderated by sex and developmental stages. (shrink)

I use some recent formal work on measuring causation to explore a suggestion by James Woodward: that the notion of causal specificity can clarify the distinction in biology between permissive and instructive causes. This distinction arises when a complex developmental process, such as the formation of an entire body part, can be triggered by a simple switch, such as the presence of particular protein. In such cases, the protein is said to merely induce or "permit" the developmental process, whilst the (...) causal "instructions" for guiding that process are already prefigured within the cells. I construct a novel model that expresses in a simple and tractable way the relevant causal structure of biological development and then use a measure of causal specificity to analyse the model. I show that the permissive-instructive distinction cannot be captured by simply contrasting the specificity of two causes as Woodward proposes, and instead introduce an alternative, hierarchical approach to analysing the interaction between two causes. The resulting analysis highlights the importance of focusing on gene regulation, rather than just the coding regions, when analysing the distinctive causal power of genes. (shrink)

Autism Spectrum Condition presents a challenge to social and relational accounts of the self, precisely because it is broadly seen as a disorder impacting social relationships. Many influential theories argue that social deficits and impairments of the self are the core problems in ASC. Predictive processing approaches address these based on general purpose neurocognitive mechanisms that are expressed atypically. Here we use the High, Inflexible Precision of Prediction Errors in Autism approach in the context of cultural niche construction to explain (...) atypicalities of the relational self, specifically its minimal, extended, and intersubjective aspects. We contend that the social self in ASC should not be seen as impaired, but rather as an outcome of atypical niche construction. We unpack the scientific, ethical, and practical consequences of this view, and discuss implications for how the challenges that autistic persons face should be approached. (shrink)