Phylogenies are increasingly prominent across all of biology, especially as DNA sequencing makes more and more trees available. However, their utility is compromised by widespread misconceptions about what phylogenies can tell us, and improved tree thinking is crucial. The most-serious problem comes from reading trees as ladders from left to right - many biologists assume that species-poor lineages that appear early branching or basal are ancestral - we call this the primitive lineage fallacy. This mistake causes misleading inferences (...) about changes in individual characteristics and leads to misrepresentation of the evolutionary process. The problem can be rectified by considering that modern phylogenies of present-day species and genes show relationships among evolutionary cousins. Emphasizing that these are extant entities in the 21st century will help correct inferences about ancestral characteristics, and will enable us to leave behind 19th century notions about the ladder of progress driving evolution. (shrink)

Two new modes of thinking have spread through systematics in the twentieth century. Both have deep historical roots, but they have been widely accepted only during this century. Population thinking overtook the field in the early part of the century, culminating in the full development of population systematics in the 1930s and 1940s, and the subsequent growth of the entire field of population biology. Population thinking rejects the idea that each species has a natural type (as the (...) earlier essentialist view had assumed), and instead sees every species as a varying population of interbreeding individuals. Tree thinking has spread through the field since the 1960s with the development of phylogenetic systematics. Tree thinking recognizes that species are not independent replicates within a class (as earlier group thinkers had tended to see them), but are instead interconnected parts of an evolutionary tree. It lays emphasis on the explanation of evolutionary events in the context of a tree, rather than on the states exhibited by collections of species, and it sees evolutionary history as a story of divergence rather than a story of development. Just as population thinking gave rise to the new field of population biology, so tree thinking is giving rise to the new field of phylogenetic biology. (shrink)

Phylogenetic trees are meant to represent the genealogical history of life and apparently derive their justification from the existence of the tree of life and the fact that evolutionary processes are treelike. However, there are a number of problems for these assumptions. Here it is argued that once we understand the important role that phylogenetic trees play as models that contain idealizations, we can accept these criticisms and deny the reality of the tree while justifying the continued use (...) of trees in phylogenetic theory and preserving nearly all of what defenders of trees have called the “importance of tree thinking.”. (shrink)

This paper will compare the concept of nature as it appears in the philosophies of the American pragmatist John Dewey and the Chinese text known as the Zhuangzi, with an aim towards mapping out a heuristic program which might be used to correct various interpretive difficulties in reading each figure. I shall argue that Dewey and Zhuangzi both held more complex and comprehensive philosophies of nature than for which either is typically credited. Such a view of nature turns on the (...) notion of continuity, particularly that between an experiencing organism [Dewey’s “live creature”] and the conditioning environment [Zhuangzi’s “crooked tree”]. Where Dewey’s and Zhuangzi’s ideas about nature converge, one finds similarities in prescriptions made for human action, and in the few places where they differ, one finds mutually complementary insights. (shrink)

138 titles across a wide range of scholarly publications illustrate the conceptual affinities that connect the palaetiological sciences of biological systematics, historical linguistics, and stemmatics. These three fields all have as their central objective the reconstruction of evolutionary "trees of history" that depict phylogenetic patterns of descent with modification among species, languages, and manuscripts. All three fields flourished in the nineteenth century, underwent parallel periods of quiescence in the early twentieth century, and in recent decades have seen widespread parallel revivals. (...) "Tree thinking" (O'Hara, 1988) is now standard within evolutionary biology, and the unity of what William Whewell called palaetiology is being once again appreciated by scholars and scientists in many fields. (shrink)

The scope and significance of lateral gene transfer (LGT) has been discussed periodically since the early twentieth century. In sketching this history here we see that the pendulum of opinion has swung from one extreme that LGT is a rare phenomenon to the other that it is fundamental to evolution. That phages are sources of bacterial evolutionary innovation has been discussed since the 1920s in association with evidence that symbiosis is a major source of evolutionary innovation. Concepts of infectious heredity (...) re-emerged with the rise of bacterial genetics after the Second World War, but LGT was generally discounted as a significant evolutionary force. LGT received increased attention in the 1960s and 1970s because of its role in antibiotic resistance outbreaks. Some speculated that the new molecular approaches to bacterial phylogenetics were ill-conceived because of LGT. With the rise of genomics in the 1990s, it became clear to phylogeneticists that LGT is the principal mode of generating evolutionary novelty in the prokaryotic world. All microbiologists agree today that the Darwinian concept of a bifurcating tree is an inadequate, if not misleading, representation of the evolutionary process in the microbial world. Phages are also reconceived not only as agents of bacterial gene exchange, but also as organisms in their own right, and fundamental in the evolution of new genes. (shrink)

This article aims to rethink the meaning of “nature” and the human in Plato, more specifically through some examples contained in the _Phaedrus_, a rare dialogue further away from the city. Phaedrus and Socrates leave Athens on a path outside the walls, past the Ilisus stream and the breeze of the woods, and end up sitting in the shadows of trees full of singing cicadas. What is the meaning of this scenario in the construction o the text? Is it possible (...) to learn from oak trees or insects? The philosophizing of this dialogue passes through the coolness of the shadows of the trees in the hot summer noon. This sensuous topography through the text reveals the writer Plato wary of the enveloping meaning of the living drama between Phaedrus and Socrates. The audience and participation of natural elements, trees and cicadas in the dialogue reveals an involvement of the discourse with the surrounding atmosphere, a special concern of Socrates in his palinode and in his final prayer to Pan. In this dialogue, more than distinct and removed from nature, we think the human being (and reason) immersed in it - in an attempt to integrate a mythological and dialogical search between river, rock, plants, animals, humans, gods and demigods. The image of an overly rationalist and humanist Plato finds in this text a perspective of an inspired writer, a hybrid poet and philosopher, with a mission to restore language and the city to animal and cosmic life. (shrink)

Accounts of the evolutionary past have as much in common with works of narrative history as they do with works of science. Awareness of the narrative character of evolutionary writing leads to the discovery of a host of fascinating and hitherto unrecognized problems in the representation of evolutionary history, problems associated with the writing of narrative. These problems include selective attention, narrative perspective, foregrounding and backgrounding, differential resolution, and the establishment of a canon of important events. The narrative aspects of (...) evolutionary writing, however, which promote linearity and cohesiveness in conventional stories, conflict with the underlying chronicle of evolution, which is not linear, but branched, and which does not cohere, but diverges. The impulse to narrate is so great, however, and is so strongly reinforced by traditional schemes of taxonomic attention, that natural historians have more often abandoned the diverging tree than they have abandoned the narrative mode of representation. If we are to understand the true nature of the evolutionary past then we must adopt tree thinking, and develop new and creative ways, both narrative and non-narrative, of telling the history of life. (shrink)

"The Natural System" is the name given to the underlying arrangement present in the diversity of life. Unlike a classification, which is made up of classes and members, a system or arrangement is an integrated whole made up of connected parts. In the pre-evolutionary period a variety of forms were proposed for the Natural System, including maps, circles, stars, and abstract multidimensional objects. The trees sketched by Darwin in the 1830s should probably be considered the first genuine evolutionary diagrams of (...) the Natural System—the first genuine evolutionary trees. Darwin refined his image of the Natural System in the well-known evolutionary tree published in the Origin of Species, where he also carefully distinguished between arrangements and classifications. Following the publication of the Origin, there was a great burst of evolutionary tree building, but interest in trees declined substantially after 1900, only to be revived in recent years with the development of cladistic analysis. ¶ While evolutionary trees are modern diagrams of the Natural System, they are at the same time instances of another broad class of diagrams that may be called "trees of history": branching diagrams of genealogical descent and change. During the same years that Darwin was sketching his first evolutionary trees, the earliest examples of two other trees of history also appeared: the first trees of language evolution and of manuscript genealogy. Though these were apparently independent of evolutionary trees in their origin, the similarities among all these trees of history, and among the historical processes that underlie them, were soon recognized. Darwin compared biological evolution and language evolution several times in the Origin of Species, and both Ernst Haeckel and the linguist August Schleicher made similar comparisons. Both linguists and stemmaticists (students of manuscript descent) understood the principle of apomorphy—the principle that only shared innovations provide evidence of common ancestry—more clearly than did systematists, and if there had been more cross-fertilization among these fields the cladistic revolution in systematics might well have taken place in the nineteenth century. ¶ Although historical linguists and stemmaticists have in some respects had sounder theory than have systematists, at least until recently, they have also had the practical problem of very large amounts of data, a problem not often faced by systematists until the advent of molecular sequencing. The opportunity now exists for systematists to contribute to the theory and practice of linguistics and stemmatics, their sister disciplines in historical reconstruction, through application of our commonly used computer programs for tree estimation. Preliminary results from the application of numerical cladistic analysis to a large stemmatic data set have been very encouraging, and have already generated much discussion in the stemmatics community. (shrink)

Evolutionary and organismal biology have become inundated with data. At the same rate, we are experiencing a surge in broader evolutionary and ecological syntheses for which tree-thinking is the staple for a variety of post-tree analyses. To fully take advantage of this wealth of data to discover and understand large-scale evolutionary and ecological patterns, computational data integration, i.e., the use of machines to link data at large scale, is crucial. The most common shared entity by which evolutionary (...) and ecological data need to be linked is the taxon to which they belong. We propose a set of requirements that a system for defining such taxa should meet for computational data science: taxon definitions should maintain conceptual consistency, be reproducible via a known algorithm, be computationally automatable, and be applicable across the Tree of Life. We argue that Linnaean names, the most prevalent means of linking data to taxa, fail to meet these requirements due to fundamental theoretical and practical shortfalls. We argue that for the purposes of data-integration we should instead use phylogenetic definitions transformed into formal logic expressions. We call such expressions “phyloreferences”, and argue that, unlike Linnaean names, they meet all requirements for effective data-integration. (shrink)

Locke claimed that God superadded various powers to matter, including motion, the perfections of peach trees and elephants, gravity, and that he could superadd thought. Various interpreters have discussed the question whether Locke's claims about superaddition are in tension with his commitment to mechanistic explanation. This literature assumes that for Locke mechanistic explanation involves deducibility. We argue that this is an inaccurate interpretation and that mechanistic explanation involves a different type of intelligibility for Locke.

As a way forward in assessing how the Old Testament wisdom tradition might speak to decisions in a modern medical context, in this paper, I propose exploring the iconographic function of the “tree of life” in the Old Testament, which is consistently associated with both wisdom as well as life and health, in order to tease out two-related issues that can help in providing a Christian theological framework for thinking about the problem of the medicalization of risk: first, (...) how should the natural and good human desire for health and long life be framed in terms of the pursuit of wisdom? And, second, how might a sapientially formed character approach risk and uncertainty in making medical decisions? The answers to these questions help establish a framework in which more specific questions related to the medicalization of risk can be assessed. As such, this paper is deliberately programmatic and perspectival rather than prescriptive. (shrink)

Consider the existence of six identical trees of the same species across a variety of environments. The first tree is in a wild and isolated landscape. The second is in a wilderness park. The third is in a heavily forested “tree plantation” owned by International Paper. The fourth is in the Ramble in Central Park. The fifth is in a suburban yard. The sixth is inside the six-story atrium of a Manhattan skyscraper. This paper begins with the intuition (...) that the identical trees have different values because they exist in different environments and biological-social contexts. To understand the different evaluations of the trees we must think along a spectrum that incorporates both axiology and ontology. This thought experiment is useful in exploring arguments about both the management and the preservation of the natural world. The conclusion is that we must think along a spectrum of natural being and value to understand the dualism between humanity and nature and thereby avoid the domination of the natural environment. (shrink)

Accounts of the evolutionary past have as much in common with works of narrative history as they do with works of science. Awareness of the narrative character of evolutionary writing leads to the discovery of a host of fascinating and hitherto unrecognized problems in the representation of evolutionary history, problems associated with the writing of narrative. These problems include selective attention, narrative perspective, foregrounding and backgrounding, differential resolution, and the establishment of a canon of important events. The narrative aspects of (...) evolutionary writing, however, which promote linearity and cohesiveness in conventional stories, conflict with the underlying chronicle of evolution, which is not linear, but branched, and which does not cohere, but diverges. The impulse to narrate is so great, however, and is so strongly reinforced by traditional schemes of taxonomic attention, that natural historians have more often abandoned the diverging tree than they have abandoned the narrative mode of representation. If we are to understand the true nature of the evolutionary past then we must adopt “tree thinking”, and develop new and creative ways, both narrative and non-narrative, of telling the history of life. (shrink)

The importance of the Tree of Life when looked at from its negative side will give the reader new perspective of the spiritual path. Ignorance of universal law can mean that when you think you are doing "good", you may actually be doing "evil". Consciousness is the key. This is an important book for students on any path.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 255-268 [Access article in PDF] The Tree of Knowledge and Darwinian Literary Study Jonathan Gottscha I THE BRANCHES OF KNOWLEDGE are not strewn randomly on the ground; they are part of a coherent, interconnected tree. Physics is the most fundamental of all the sciences, so it is the trunk of the tree. The branch of chemistry emerges from physics, because the (...) laws of chemistry depend on the laws of physics: chemical reactions occur the way they do because of the physical properties of atoms. Biology's branch splits off from chemistry's: the molecules that comprise living things are bound by the rules of chemistry. Scientists, while grasping this fundamental interconnection of the broad boughs of the natural sciences, 1 have rarely craned their necks sufficiently to glimpse the upper reaches of the tree of knowledge: the green canopy of human culture that is the traditional jurisdiction of the social sciences and humanities. In fact, scholars from all disciplines have mostly proceeded as though the greenery above was the outgrowth of a neighboring tree from a fundamentally different species.Since the 1960s, however, a maverick band of Darwinian neck-craners have been demonstrating that the stuff of human culture, studied in the humanities and social sciences, is a contiguous part of the tree of knowledge: human culture and behavior grow out of human biology. 2 These scholars and scientists continue to define themselves by different names depending on subtleties in their particular approaches: Darwinian psychology, sociobiology, Darwinian anthropology, biosociology, human behavioral ecology, human ethology, and evolutionary psychology. 3 However, sacrificing some precision on the alter of clarity, I will refer to all of the above approaches with the umbrella term of human [End Page 255] behavioral biology, understood in its most expansive sense as the study of how millions of years of evolution shaped the human mind, and thus human behavior, and thus human culture. No matter how human behavioral biologists define their work, they all share the conviction that human behavior, psychology, and culture cannot be fully understood separate from human bio-evolutionary history.Darwinian excavation of the foundations of human nature has inspired a revolutionary movement in the social sciences that proceeds to this day. Like most revolutions, this one has seen its share of rolling heads and intellectual bloodshed. Starting with the "sociobiology debates" of the late 1970s through mid-80s and continuing through the "science wars" of the early-mid 1990s allegations and recriminations of the most serious sort have been almost casually poured into the air: racism, sexism, Social Darwinism, biological determinism, disciplinary colonialism, disciplinary xenophobia, and "biophobia." 4 However, despite entrenched, sometimes zealous opposition, evolutionary thinking has firmly established itself in the social sciences. Thumbing through leading social science journals, it is no longer a shock to encounter articles exploring traditional topics with shiny new Darwinian tools. This stands in stark contrast to the situation in the decades immediately following World War II, where applying biology to human behavior and culture was virtually taboo. In fact, the UNESCO statement of 1952 explicitly tabooed human behavioral biology as scientifically and politically incorrect. Moreover, this phenomenon is in marked contrast to the mainstream social science of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which was in the midst of a wicked backlash against the resurgence of biological inquiry into behavior represented in sociobiology.Currently, while human behavioral biology retains many social scientist critics, and while certain social science fields remain largely hostile or indifferent, invoking biology to explain social behavior is moving toward the mainstream. Almost thirty years after E. O. Wilson made, in Sociobiology (1975), his first call for a merger of disciplines under a new biological synthesis, biology-savvy social scientists and social-science-savvy biologists have provided startling new insights into a host of topics traditionally examined in isolation from biology: gender differences, criteria for mate choice, resource acquisition and allocation, aggression, cooperation, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, sexual politics, religious sensibilities, social hierarchy, moral codes, etc. 5Though one must be careful not to overstate the progress, we are [End Page 256] witnessing... (shrink)

This article reads the photo album, The ‘Life and Times’ of an American Called Pauli Murray as an archive of anti-lynching pasts and futures. While scholarly discourses have leveraged Murray’s archive for evidence of her ‘true’ gender and sexual orientation, this article uses the reading practice of ‘accompaniment’ to reframe investigations of Murray’s identity into thinking with and learning from the strategies she archived in the album for living in atmospheres of antiblackness. Working with Christina Sharpe’s (2016) concept of (...) ‘weathering’, I read several photographs in Murray’s album as burgeoning ecologies of repair in relation to visual technologies of racial capture, particularly that of lynching photography. Reading passages in which Murray talks about lynching and race as atmospheric from Proud Shoes (1999 [1956]) and Song in a Weary Throat (1987) alongside The ‘Life and Times’, I read Murray’s portraits as rupturing white property relations through turning lynching photography’s scripts inside out. (shrink)

In this article the author claims that Waluchow’s “living tree constitutionalism” constitutes a “copernican revolution in our thinking”, because it provides not a mere common law theory of judicial review but a general theory of judicial review and of constitutional democracy. Although agrees that something like the common law methodology is at play here, disagrees on characterizing it as bottom-up. Accordingly, intends to praise the main aspiration of A Common Law Theory of Judicial Review: The Living Tree, (...) i.e. to provide a better understanding of charters and judicial re- view in a constitutional democracy by “the living tree” metaphor; to appraise an unwarranted claim, i.e. to reduce it to the common law bottom-up methodology; and, to raise the alternative with a friendly amendment, i.e. to identify the community’s constitutional political morality via, a method that is both bottom-up and top-down, which is already explicit —or at least implicit— in his account.Resumen:En este artículo el autor sostiene que el “constitucionalismo del árbol viviente” de Waluchow constituye una “revolución copernicana en nuestro pensamiento”, dado que proporciona no sólo una teoría del judicial review, sino una teoría general del judicial review y de la democracia. No obstante que el autor coincide en que en esta teoría de Waluchow existe un lugar para una metodología del common law, discrepa en caracterizarla como una que va de “abajo hacia arriba”. Por lo tanto, el objetivo del artículo es resaltar la importancia del argumento principal del libro A Common Law Theory of Judicial Review: The Living Tree por medio del cual se intenta proporcionar un mejor entendimiento de las garantías individuales y del judicial review, pero advertir una consecuencia innecesaria, es decir, reducir la explicación a una metodología del common law de “abajo hacia arriba”. A su vez el autor pretende proporcionar una corrección amigable: identificar la moralidad política constitucional de la comunidad a través de un método que es tanto de “abajo hacia arriba” como de “arriba hacia abajo”, metodología que se encuentra implícita en el libro de Waluchow. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to point the way to the money tree. Currently, almost all investment professionals think that outperformance requires an “edge,” that is, the ability to predict the future to some degree. In this paper, I suggest that money can be made in a 0, or even slightly negative, expected value environment by carefully choosing investment/bet sizes. Philosophical considerations are found mainly in Section 4.

The Talking-Tree or Palaver Tree is a designated location in many African traditions where the community comes together to discuss, in a peaceful and constructive manner, issues of common interest. It is conceived as an open gathering space of interactive communication led by the stance that finding a compromise or common solution is the best way to consolidate a community. At times, the interchange taking place at a Talking-Tree may also transform into conflict management. Conflict management unfolds (...) into several specific patterns of argumentation including those that aim at deciding if some given accusation is justified or not. The main aim of this chapter is to study, within the Baule tradition of Talking-Tree debates involving accusations of wrongdoing, the meaning explanation underlying proverbs, which constitute the most fundamental elements of these debates. More precisely our study, based on a pragmatic approach to meaning, will focus on the distinction drawn by linguist Kouadio between ascertainment, logical and moral Baule proverbs by distinguishing their different role in a Talking-Tree debate. One of the main results of our approach is that it makes it patent that drawing a conclusion from a Talking-Tree debate is grounded on contentual functional links, rather than on the analysis of logical constants. This research should set the basis for a larger epistemological research on the structure of argumentation patterns born and developed in Africa, where meaning and knowledge are constituted during dialogical interaction. The dialogical system underlying such form of argumentation, that we call Dialogues of functional reasoning by proverbs, we think provides a general instrument for the study of patterns of argumentation beyond the African tradition. (shrink)

Traditionally, the story that opens chapter three of Genesis is called The Fall . David Daube, who was the greatest authority on ancient law in his generation, and a biblical scholar of exceptional brilliance, said that it should be called The Rise . I shall explain why shortly, but first let me remind you of the orthodox interpretation of the story.

Frequent lateral genetic transfer undermines the existence of a unique “tree of life” that relates all organisms. Vertical inheritance is nonetheless of vital interest in the study of microbial evolution, and knowing the “tree of cells” can yield insights into ecological continuity, the rates of change of different cellular characters, and the evolutionary plasticity of genomes. Notwithstanding within-species recombination, the relationships most frequently recovered from genomic data at shallow to moderate taxonomic depths are likely to reflect cellular inheritance. (...) At the same time, it is clear that several types of ‘average signals’ from whole genomes can be highly misleading, and the existence of a central tendency must not be taken as prima facie evidence of vertical descent. Phylogenetic networks offer an attractive solution, since they can be formulated in ways that mitigate the misleading aspects of hybrid evolutionary signals in genomes. But the connections in a network typically show genetic relatedness without distinguishing between vertical and lateral inheritance of genetic material. The solution may lie in a compromise between strict tree-thinking and network paradigms: build a phylogenetic network, but identify the set of connections in the network that are potentially due to vertical descent. Even if a single tree cannot be unambiguously identified, choosing a subnetwork of putative vertical connections can still lead to drastic reductions in the set of candidate vertical hypotheses. (shrink)

This paper both welcomes and explores the recent article in Nursing Philosophy by Dave Holmes and Denize Gastaldo. Holmes and Gastaldo's paper introduced us to Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical concepts of ‘arborescent thought’ and ‘rhizomatic thought’, respectively. These concepts were used to illuminate and critique certain aspects of contemporary nursing theory and educational practice. Arborescent thought is held to stifle and constrain the development of the discipline of nursing, while rhizomatic thought is presented as a more fitting way forward across (...) a diversity of knowledges and methods of inquiry. We are thus urged to engage in a metamorphosis from an arborescent way of thinking to a rhizomatic one. The paper below, while applauding the introduction of these concepts into nursing thought, raises some questions as to their proposed utility and relationship as given in the paper by Holmes and Gastaldo. This is done in a spirit of collaboration, motivated by a desire to further explore the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (and Felix Guattari). (shrink)

When people understand a counterfactual such as “if the flowers had been roses, the trees would have been orange trees,” they think about the conjecture, “there were roses and orange trees,” and they also think about its opposite, the presupposed facts. We test whether people think about the opposite by representing alternates, for example, “poppies and apple trees,” or whether models can contain symbols, for example, “no roses and no orange trees.” We report the discovery of an inference‐to‐alternates effect—a tendency (...) to make an affirmative inference that refers to an alternate even from a negative minor premise, for example, “there were no orange trees, therefore there were poppies.” Nine experiments show the inference‐to‐alternates effect occurs in a binary context, but not a multiple context, and for direct and indirect reference; it can be induced and reduced by prior experience with similar inferences, and it also occurs for indicative conditionals. The results have implications for theories of counterfactual conditionals, and of negation. (shrink)

Twenty-two years after Charles Darwin began to think of character divergence from a common ancestor in his Notebook B, the now famous and iconic branching diagram appeared in the fourth chapter of On the Origin of Species.

This chapter focuses on the different styles of moral relativism. The history of moral relativist thinking features different branches to the family tree, each representing a different impetus to relativism, and so producing a different style of moral relativist thought. At the root, however, is a broadly subjectivist parent idea that morality is at least in part the upshot of a shared way of life, and shared ways of life tend to vary markedly from culture to culture. The (...) discussions cover the branches of moral historicism, moral reasons, moral truth, and moral plurality. (shrink)

This innovative text is psychologically informed, both in its diagnosis of inferential errors, and in teaching students how to watch out for and work around their natural intellectual blind spots. It also incorporates insights from epistemology and philosophy of science that are indispensable for learning how to evaluate premises. The result is a hands-on primer for real world critical thinking. The authors bring a fresh approach to the traditional challenges of a critical thinking course: effectively explaining the nature (...) of validity, assessing deductive arguments, reconstructing, identifying and diagramming arguments, and causal and probabilistic inference. Additionally, they discuss in detail, important, frequently neglected topics, including testimony, including the evaluation of news and other information sources, the nature and credibility of science, rhetoric, and dialectical argumentation. The treatment of probability uses frequency trees and a frequency approach more generally, and argument reconstruction is taught using argument maps; these methods have been shown to improve students’ reasoning and argument evaluation. (shrink)

It is often said that there is just one “objective” tree of life: a single accurate branching hierarchy of species reflecting order of descent. For any two species, there is a single correct answer as to whether one is a “daughter” of the other, whether the two are “sister species” by virtue of their descent from a common parental species, whether they belong to a family line that excludes any given third species, and so on. The idea is intrinsically (...) interesting. It has consequences for what we should think about the evolutionary origins of Homo sapiens as well as other species.The idea also has important connections to the scientific discipline of systematics, which classifies organisms into related groups. The connection to systematics is what has made objectivity a topic of discussion for biologists and philosophers of biology. Cladism, now the dominant school of systematics, places organisms into groups depending just on their place in the tree of life. That is supposed to render classifica- tion objective. In section i, I recite claims to objectivity. In sections ii–v, I argue that the apparent objectivity is not what it seems to be. In section vi, I briefly revisit systematics. (shrink)

How can humanist principles of respect, dignity, and care inform and improve design for non-human lifeforms? This paper uses ageing and dying urban trees to understand how architectural, urban, and landscape design respond to nonhuman concerns. It draws on research in plant sciences, environmental history, ethics, environmental management, and urban design to ask: how can more-than-human ethics improve multispecies cohabitation in urban forests? The paper hypothesises that concepts of dignity and respect can underline the capabilities of nonhuman lifeforms and lead (...) to improved designs for multispecies cohabitation. To investigate the implications of this ethical framework, we 1) indicate injustices of current management in relation to natural and cultural histories of trees; 2) outline a conceptual framework that includes large old trees as stakeholders in urban communities; and 3) use this framework in a thought experiment with urban trees in Melbourne, outlining comparative design outcomes. Our findings show that the expansion of dignity to include nonhuman life is possible and plausible. Such an extension can justify and encourage design innovation for multiple species and sites. The resulting design practices will lead to improvements by supporting communities of trees at all stages of their life-cycles, including old age, death, and rebirth. This approach requires substantial shifts in accepted thinking and practices including history, ethics, aesthetics, regulation, and education. Design can play a significant role in the necessary transitions by demonstrating tangible and positive outcomes. In this context, history emerges as an essential tool that can extend societal imagination by situating possible future places in the context of ancient and ongoing geological, evolutionary, ecological, and cultural processes. (shrink)

‘‘Adaptive radiation’’ is an evocative metaphor for explosive evolutionary divergence, which for over 100 years has given a powerful heuristic to countless scientists working on all types of organisms at all phylogenetic levels. However, success has come at the price of making ‘‘adaptive radiation’’ so vague that it can no longer reflect the detailed results yielded by powerful new phylogeny-based techniques that quantify continuous adaptive radiation variables such as speciation rate, phylogenetic tree shape, and morphological diversity. Attempts to shoehorn (...) the results of these techniques into categorical ‘‘adaptive radiation: yes/no’’ schemes lead to reification, in which arbitrary quantitative thresholds are regarded as real. Our account of the life cycle of metaphors in science suggests that it is time to exchange the spent metaphor for new concepts that better represent the full range of diversity, disparity, and speciation rate across all of life. (shrink)

The quality of Innovation and Entrepreneurship Education in higher institutions is closely related to the degree to which the undergraduates absorb relevant innovation and entrepreneurship knowledge and their entrepreneurial motivation. Thus, an effective Evaluation of Educational Quality is essential. In particular, fault tree analysis, a common EEQ approach, has some disadvantages, such as fault data reliance and insufficient uncertainties handleability. Thereupon, this article first puts forward a theoretical model based on the deep learning method to analyze the factors of (...) IEE quality; consequently, based on the traditional FTA, fuzzy fault tree analysis is proposed to evaluate the reliability of IEE classroom teaching for college teachers and students. Finally, based on the top event of entrepreneurial teaching failure, the hyper-ellipsoid model is implemented to restrict the interval probability of basic events and describe the deviation of uncertain events. Furthermore, the model accuracy is verified by a questionnaire survey, based upon which the factors of IEE quality are analyzed. The results show that the designed QS has good reliability, validity, and fitness; the path coefficients of cooperative ability to critical thinking and innovative thinking are 0.9 and 0.66, respectively, indicating that the students’ cooperative ability plays a vital role in the classroom teaching. By calculation, the probability of “teaching failure” in entrepreneurial classroom teaching is 0.395, 3, 0.462, and 5. To sum up, the proposed method can effectively and quantitatively evaluate the quality of IEE in higher institutions, thus providing a certain basis for formulating relevant improvement strategies. The purpose is to provide important technical support for improving the IEE quality. (shrink)

People frequently see design in nature that reflects intuitive teleological thinking– that is, the order in nature that supports life suggests it was designed for that purpose. This research proposes that inferences are stronger when nature supports human life in particular. Five studies (total N = 1788) examine evidence for an anthro-teleological bias. People agreed more with design statements framed to aid humans (e.g., “trees produce oxygen so that humans can breathe”) than the same statements framed to aid other (...) targets (“trees produce oxygen so that leopards can breathe”). The bias was greatest when advantages for humans were well-known and salient (e.g., the ozone layer) and decreased when advantages for other targets were made explicit. The bias was not eliminated by highlighting the benefits for other species, however, and emerged spontaneously for novel phenomena (Jupiter’s gravity protects Earth from asteroids). We conclude that anthropocentric biases enhance existing teleological biases to see stronger design in phenomena where it enables human survival. (shrink)

This new volume on logic follows a recognizable format that deals in turn with the topics of mathematical logic, moving from concepts, via definitions and inferences, to theories and axioms. However, this fresh work offers a key innovation in its ‘pyramidal’ graph system for the logical formalization of all these items. The author has developed this new methodology on the basis of original research, traditional logical instruments such as Porphyrian trees, and modern concepts of classification, in which pyramids are the (...) central organizing concept. The pyramidal schema enables both the content of concepts and the relations between the concept positions in the pyramid to be read off from the graph. Logical connectors are analyzed in terms of the direction in which they connect within the pyramid. Additionally, the author shows that logical connectors are of fundamentally different types: only one sort generates propositions with truth values, while the other yields conceptual expressions or complex concepts. On this basis, strong arguments are developed against adopting the non-discriminating connector definitions implicit in Wittgensteinian truth-value tables. Special consideration is given to mathematical connectors so as to illuminate the formation of concepts in the natural sciences. To show what the pyramidal method can contribute to science, a pyramid of the number concepts prevalent in mathematics is constructed. The book also counters the logical dogma of ‘false’ contradictory propositions and sheds new light on the logical characteristics of probable propositions, as well as on syllogistic and other inferences. (shrink)

There is a moment in Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth’s Khadak (2006) when the image of a tree is rotated 180 degrees [...].

Michael Marder, a well-known specialist in environmental philosophy and political theory, studied at universities in Canada and the United States, received a Ph. D. from the New School of Social Research in New York, and taught at the Universities of Georgetown, Saskatchewan, and Washington. He conducted research at the University of Lisbon and served as an associate professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh before becoming a research professor at the University of the Basque Country. M. Marder is a (...) member of the editorial board of journal «Telos» (New York), as well as the editor of four book series: «Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy», «Critical Plant Studies», «Future Perfect: Images of the Time to Come in Philosophy, Politics, and Cultural Studies» and «Palgrave Studies in Postmetaphysical Thought». Michael Marder works in the phenomenological tradition of continental philosophy. He is the author of books «Grafts: Writings on Plants» (2016), «The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness» (2016), «Heidegger: Phenomenology, Ecology, Politics» (2018) и «Dump Philosophy: A Phenomenology of Devastation» (2020). Most of his philosophical works are focused on constructing a concept in which plants are viewed as beings with their own form of subjectivity. He is best known for the monograph «Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life» (2013). Marder's book «The Philosopher’s Plant (Intellectual Herbarium)» (2014), from which the prologue «Philosophical Herbarium» and the first chapter «Plato's Plane Tree» are taken for translation, is devoted to the relationship between philosophy and plants. The author believes that philosophy did not pay due attention to plants, and seeks to fill this gap. The book contains twelve stories, each of which relates a famous philosopher to a plant or flower (Plato’s Plane Tree, Avicenna’s Celery, Kant’s Tulip etc.), which, according to Marder, allows a deeper understanding of his philosophical ideas. (shrink)

Interest in philosophical anthropology in the early twelfth century was limited to the logical question of how to think and speak about dead humans. This question was prompted by the logic of living and dead humans based on the doctrine of substance found in Aristotle’s Categories and in the division of substance, as outlined by Porphyry to exemplify the logic of genus and species relations in the Isagoge. Abelard held the view that there is no such thing as a dead (...) human, and this provoked an intense response from his contemporaries. Abelard’s contemporaries, including Alberic of Paris and other anonymous authors, mounted a number of arguments against Abelard’s views. The stakes were high for them: as realists about species and genera, Abelard’s denial that there are dead humans threatened their entire interpretation of the structure of species and genera, and thereby their theory of universals. (shrink)

Reframing reveals possibilities. This article highlights how conceptual shifts regarding ‘sustainability’ occurring inside China’s municipalities and major corporations are opening the way for new collaborations with technology companies and technology artists. These shifts – from predetermined accounting to systems thinking – reveal new opportunities to intervene in the biophysical and economic challenges facing China today. In companies, this shift implies placing financially relevant environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors at the core of business strategy. In municipalities, this shift necessitates (...) designing and implementing systems that track ecosystem services rather than simply stocks of natural resources and recognizing interdependencies between these services and economic development. This article suggests that this sustainability reframing can draw heavily on systems thinking from environmental science, technology companies’ drive to develop products that meet these emerging demands, corporations’ need to compete in an uncertain developing market and the reframing skills of artists, particularly digital artists. This article concludes with opportunities for digital artists to intervene and collaborate with sustainability practitioners to open new directions for cities and companies in China. (shrink)

Critical thinking is often described by philosophers of education as a process of transcendence: a way to take one’s beliefs, values, and actions as objects of thought, and to reflect on them for the sake of evaluation and possible transformation. John Dewey argues, for example, that “the essence of critical thinking is suspended judgment”; it involves a pause that allows us to stand back to reflect, to “metaphori- cally climb a tree...[to get] a more commanding view of (...) the situation.”1 This process calls for a difficult balancing act between commitment and suspicion. Effective transcendence requires recognition of one’s fallibility, a degree of suspicion regarding one’s views and methods of thinking as a motivation for distancing oneself from these in order to evaluate them. Yet distancing must not be taken too far — one must trust in and remain committed to certain beliefs and methods as criteria for judgment in order to ground the evaluation made possible by stepping back to reflect. Critical thinkers must recognize their own fallibility without being paralyzed by it, and must commit to evaluative criteria without losing the suspicion that motivates reflection and revision. Teachers who work to promote critical thinking as transcendence must find a way to negotiate this balance, avoiding too much emphasis on either extreme. (shrink)

Review article referring to my prior work in many contexts with the upshot that: Subject to an /extremely/ limited set of exceptions, /all/ sting operations are /per se/ gravely and deeply immoral for the simplest and plainest of reasons: They are calculated and deliberate attempts to bring out the worst in a fellow human being, to play to their weaknesses, and to pander to their blind spots. Whether performed by the government, the media, or other private organizations (for-profit or not-for-profit), (...) makes no ethical difference whatsoever, except one: When the government does it, everyone begins to think that such egregious behavior is just fine, although /it is anything but/. (shrink)

How do creative people think? Do great works of the imagination originate in words or in images? Is there a rational explanation for the sudden appearance of geniuses like Mozart or Einstein? Such questions have fascinated people for centuries; only in recent years, however, has cognitive psychology been able to provide some clues to the mysterious process of creativity. In this revised edition of Notebooks of the Mind, Vera John-Steiner combines imaginative insight with scientific precision to produce a startling account (...) of the human mind working at its highest potential. To approach her subject John-Steiner goes directly to the source, assembling the thoughts of "experienced thinkers"--artists, philosophers, writers, and scientists able to reflect on their own imaginative patterns. More than fifty interviews, along with excerpts from the diaries, letters, and autobiographies of such gifted giants as Leo Tolstoy, Marie Curie, and Diego Rivera, among others, provide illuminating insights into creative activity. We read, for example, of Darwin's preoccupation with the image of nature as a branched tree while working on his concept of evolution. Mozart testifies to the vital influence on his mature art of the wondrous "bag of memories" he retained from childhood. Anais Nin describes her sense of words as oppressive, explaining how imagistic free association freed her as a writer. Adding these personal accounts to laboratory studies of thought process, John-Steiner takes a refreshingly holistic approach to the question of creativity. What emerges is an intriguing demonstration of how specific socio-cultural circumstances interact with certain personality traits to encourage the creative mind. Among the topics examined here are the importance of childhood mentor figures; the lengthy apprenticeship of the talented person; and the development of self- expression through highly individualistic languages, whether in images, movement or inner speech. Now, with a new introduction, this award-winning book provides an uniquely broad-based study of the origins, development and fruits of human inspiration. (shrink)

Mystic -- Grundriss -- Breath -- The poem as a visual opening -- Silences of depth -- Multiple meanings of the heart -- Ariel -- The sacramental value of colors -- The turning -- Performing the feminine -- Bodies in poetry, bodies in the world -- White as lighting and depth -- In her own voice -- Striking a balance -- The moon and the yew tree -- A heavy light-ing -- Opening onto the feminine body -- Other ways (...) of listening and seeing the poem -- In the name of the mother -- Inside the suicidal body -- Facing the other -- Engendering sexes -- The arrival of the bee box -- Arriving -- Tensions and resistance -- The blond colonnades -- Swarms: plath's stereotypes -- Plath and racial imagery -- Plath's racism, beyond the bee box -- Letting be(e) -- Appropriation and releasement -- The box is only temporary -- Epilogue: Performing the spiritual for Plath, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

I develop a phenomenological hermeneutics of four poems by Sylvia Plath: 'Mystic,' 'Ariel,' 'The Moon and the Yew Tree,' and 'The Arrival of the Bee Box.' Inspired by the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I illustrate how we can experience individual poems through the multiple aspects of our embodiment. Importantly, single artworks are treated here with the same respect as single philosophical texts. Heidegger treats poems similarly in his "later" philosophy, which also influenced this dissertation. This emphasis on embodiment does (...) not mean to privilege the body over the cognitive. Instead, the cognitive is revealed as one aspect of our bodily existence. ;Plath's poetic themes intertwine with philosophical questions, such as the difference between instituted and creative language, the nature of gender, and the ethical status of the non-human. For example, Plath's work offers new ways of addressing feminist concerns over essentialism, identity, and spirituality. Plath's emerging notion of a feminine divine resonates with Luce Irigaray's call for a philosophical revisioning of the God of Western metaphysics. Plath's articulations of the body as it lives through pain contribute to the existentialist task of drawing us closer to an authentic experience of death. I show how pain possesses a spiritual dimension for Plath and connect this phenomenon with the act of writing poetry. ;The poetic dimension of language has been suppressed by reductive accounts that theorize language and the body's involvement in language in terms of representation rather than embodiment. I reveal the non-linguistic meanings within the lines and silences of poetic space that impact and alter our bodily being. Poetry allows us to experience, among other things, the flow of lived time, the colors of sounds, and our body's fusion with the world. Significantly, phenomenology bends with these issues in a chiasmic gathering where we can experience the affinity between these two discourses. Phenomenological hermeneutics uncovers the depth of language that is usually suppressed in calculative-rational discourses. ;Through these poetic phenomenological meditations, I open up ways of understanding spiritual and poetic language that impact our ethical encounters with one another, the environment, and the divine. (shrink)

An original deep history of the internet that tells the story of the centuries-old utopian dreams behind it—and explains why they have died today Many think of the internet as an unprecedented and overwhelmingly positive achievement of modern human technology. But is it? In The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, Justin Smith offers an original deep history of the internet, from the ancient to the modern world—uncovering its surprising origins in nature and centuries-old dreams of radically improving (...) human life by outsourcing thinking to machines and communicating across vast distances. Yet, despite the internet’s continuing potential, Smith argues, the utopian hopes behind it have finally died today, killed by the harsh realities of social media, the global information economy, and the attention-destroying nature of networked technology. Ranging over centuries of the history and philosophy of science and technology, Smith shows how the “internet” has been with us much longer than we usually think. He draws fascinating connections between internet user experience, artificial intelligence, the invention of the printing press, communication between trees, and the origins of computing in the machine-driven looms of the silk industry. At the same time, he reveals how the internet’s organic structure and development root it in the natural world in unexpected ways that challenge efforts to draw an easy line between technology and nature. Combining the sweep of intellectual history with the incisiveness of philosophy, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is cuts through our daily digital lives to give a clear-sighted picture of what the internet is, where it came from, and where it might be taking us in the coming decades. (shrink)

Words like well, oh, and you know have long been observed and studied in spontaneous speech. With the proliferation of on-line dialogues, such as instant messaging between friends or back-and-forth postings at websites, there are increasing opportunities to observe them in spontaneous writing. In Experiment 1, the interpretation of discourse markers in on-line debates was compared to proposed functions of those markers identified in other settings. In Experiment 2, the use of discourse markers in spontaneous speech was compared to their (...) uses in spontaneous writing. Results support the conclusion that although they vary in frequency in spoken versus written domains, discourse markers are used similarly across domains, but with particular communicative functions that make them non-interchangeable. (shrink)

The discourse marker use of the word like is considered by many to be superfluously sprinkled into talk, a bad habit best avoided. But a comparison of the use of like in successive tellings of stories demonstrates that like can be anticipated in advance and planned into stories. In this way, like is similar to other words and phrases tellers recycle during story telling. The anticipation of like contrasted with the uses of other discourse markers such as oh, you know, (...) and well, which almost never re-occurred in similar locations across tellings. Um and uh did sometimes re-occur; these uses are contrasted with like. Although discourse markers are generally used on the fly to handle various issues that come up in coordinating talk as it unfolds, like can be used as an integral part of the story -a marked contrast to the prevalent idea that likes are speech tics. (shrink)

In this issue we include contributions from the individuals presiding at the panel All in a Jurnal's Work: A BABEL Wayzgoose, convened at the second Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group. Sadly, the contributions of Daniel Remein, chief rogue at the Organism for Poetic Research as well as editor at Whiskey & Fox , were not able to appear in this version of the proceedings. From the program : 2ND BIENNUAL MEETING OF THE BABEL WORKING GROUP CONFERENCE “CRUISING IN (...) THE RUINS: THE QUESTION OF DISCIPLINARITY IN THE POST/MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY” SEPTEMBER 21ST, 2012: SESSION 13 MCLEOD C.322, CURRY STUDENT CENTER NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY, BOSTON, MA. Traditionally, a wayzgoose was a celebration at the end of a printer’s year, a night off in the late fall before the work began of printing by candlelight. According to the OED, the Master Printer would make for the journeymen “a good Feast, and not only entertains them at his own House, but besides, gives them Money to spend at the Ale-house or Tavern at Night.” Following in this line, continent. proposes in its publication(s) a night out and a good Feast, away from the noxious fumes of the Academy and into a night of revelry which begins, but does not end, at the alehouse or Tavern. continent. proposes that the thinking of the Academy be freed to be thought elsewhere, in the alleys and doorways of the village and cities, encountered not in the strictly defined spaces of the classroom and blackboard (now white) but anticipated and found where thinking occurs. Historically, academic journals have served a different purpose than the Academy itself. Journals (from the Anglo-Fr. jurnal , "a day," from O.Fr. jornel , "day, time; day's work," hence the journalist as writer of the news of the day ) have served as privileged sites for the articulation and concretization of specific modes of knowledge and control (insemination of those ideas has been formalized in the classroom, in seminar). In contrast, the academic journal is post-partum and has been an old-boys club, an insider trading network in which truths are (re)circulated against themselves, forming a Maginot Line against whatever is new, or the distinctly challenging. All in a Jurnal’s Work will discuss (in part) the ramifications of cheap start-up publications that are challenging the traditional ensconced-in-ivory academic journals and their supporting infrastructures. The panel will be seeking a questioning (as a challenging) towards the discipline of knowledge production/fabrication (of truth[s]) and the event of the Academy (and its publications) as it has evolved and continues to (d)evolve. Issues to be discussed will revolve around the power of academic publishing and its origins, hierarchical versus horizontal academic modules (is there a place for the General Assembly in academia?) and the evolving idea of the Multiversity as a site(s) of a (BABELing) multivocality in the wake of the University of Disaster. STAGE NOTES AND/AS/OR TRACK CHANGES: INTRODUCTORY REMARKS AND MAGICAL THINKING ON PRINTING: AN ELECTION AND A PROVOCATION Isaac Linder “Of course most people don’t think of editing/publishing as theatre but as something boring or parasitical (vis-à-vis a ‘source’ text), a textual backwater populated by people with glasses. But I think publishing a book today is theatre, socially networked theatre…. Facebook and Flickr are our era’s administered and generic version of sixties happenings!” — Tan Lin 1 ELECTING A MASCOT: THE BARNACLE GOOSE After pitching the idea for this panel with the editorial help of my continental cohorts I became fascinated with the image of the goose—dead and roasted as it may be—and its relationship to the space of the printing press. For a long while after proposing this gathering I was seriously under the sway of delusions of grandeur, imagining that we might roast a goose (or goosefu) and, preparing a meal as one prepares a text for publication, feast in something approaching a warm and well-nourished revelry. I should note, by way of introduction, that a substantial part of my undergraduate experience involved learning to typeset and work as a devil, as typesetters mischievously call it, in a letterpress studio. This accounts in part for my fascination and helps to explain the fact that, when I began to leaf around in medieval beastiaries in lieu of being able to procure a goose, I was almost immediately struck by a fantastic monster that I hereby elect to be the mascot for our so-called para-academic practice(s) the relatively famed, but no less fabulous for it, barnacle goose. The barnacle goose is a creature that first makes its way into 12th century manuscripts with Giraldus Cambrensis in 1186. Phenomenologically speaking the monster is a tree, a tree which, when approached closer is seen to be birthing geese budding from the buds that hang like ripe fruit from its branches. As the story goes these trees were found over water; the fledgling geese, once wrested from their pods would take off in flight or fall to their watery death, where they would be transformed into driftwood. In retrospect we presume the barnacle goose was posited as a consequence of the fact that geese born in more northern regions, migrating to Ireland and western Europe at large, were never seen to give birth. And I should note that this is far from the only other animal posited to be born from trees at around this time, my other favorite being medieval accounts of Moroccan tree-climbing goats. 2 In particular I’ve thrown up the mascot of the barnacle goose and singled it out from the quires of its beatiaries because its thoroughly hybrid origins lead us to name two very real creatures we can find point to in abundance; discrete materialities of the world cobbled together in textual fancy: on the one hand, the modern day barnacle goose , a common species of goose and, on the other, goose barnacles , a particular type of crustacean with incredible feathery tendrils and—I can't help but mention—one of the largest body mass to penis size ratios of all of the animals in the kingdom. Why is this bit of genital trivia relevant? Because they’re all hermaphroditic and in rare cases have been found to reproduce just with themselves—to inseminate themselves and give birth to their kin. So I think it must be stressed, as a symbol for what we’re really here to talk about, it's not a boy’s club thing so much as a very queer thing and, I contend, para - in every perfect sense of the word... Alongside the natural world, a monstrous imaginary concatenation; Alongside the hulls of so many institutional structures, funding sources and resources, Serresian parasites in all manner of mutualist, symbiotic, or properly parasitic positions; migratory and adrift; The tree, center stage in the 21st century adaptation of Waiting for Godot that is unraveling in ateliers across the world, is a barnacle goose birthing a flurry of miscegenous texts beyond medium and genre. PROVOCATION 1: CHAOSMOSIS “Genre is obsolete.” — Ray Brassier 3 And so, here I was getting carried away in daydreams about this generative and genealogical symbol under which to think all of the diverse projects we are all involved in as architects of the dressed word, (well dressed, bespoke, mansy, butch, careless, or roguishly punk attired as those words may be), when it also dawned on me, mid-flight here from Denver, that we are, even in lieu of being able to roast geese together, very much so literalizing what was never just the metaphor of the wayzgoose—a tradition, as you know, celebrated to mark the crepuscular turn into fall—as we are poised here, tomorrow being the first official day of fall on our calendars in the US marking the seasonal change from at which point it will no longer be possible to print without the aid of candlelight. A beautiful thought, that tipped into magical thinking on account of a little quick math I was able to do to come to the conclusion that we can all be delighted to know that as we proceed into the autumn with our printing projects always ahead of us and still to be set, we will tonight be bathed not only by the artificial candlelight of our screens, but also in part by photons raining down on us at 186,282 miles per second—photons from an aspect of 9 cyg, a stereoscopic binary deep within Cygnus, the swan but not-so-distant-relative of the goose, with a distance of 572 Light years away; photons that are raining down on us, will rain down on us all winter, have been raining down on us all year, and which had their origin in the combustion cores at a center of 9 cyg 572 years ago, in 1440, the year which we point to today as the common year in which, as we all know, Gutenberg is said to have brought the movable type to the western world, inaugurating an era that stretches farther into the past and future than McLuhan could justify; the proliferation of so much ambient text; insurrectionary coups on (and re-crystallizations of) genre—perceived amidst so much ambient light—enveloping this campus, just now. So, with that thought, and perhaps a new mascot, Nico Jenkins... NOTES “ Writing as Metadata Container, An Interview with Tan Lin ,” Chris Alexander, Kristen Gallagher, Danny Snelson, Gordon Tapper, Tan Lin, Jacket 2. January 20, 2012. To explore Lin’s notion of ambient textuality, plagiarism, and parallel, cross­platform publication in the 21st century, also see Lin’s sampled novel, “ The Patio and the Index ,” Triple Canopy 14, October 24, 2011, as well as the Edit event, organized at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, April, 2010 . For a fascinating and fecund exploration of medieval plant­animal hybrids in relation to media ecology, see Whitney Trettien, “ Becoming Plant: Magnifying a Microhistory of Media Circuits in Nehemiah Grew’s Anatomy of Plants (1682) .” postmedieval 3.1 (2012):97. See also the crowd­review version of the essay. “ Genre Is Obsolete .” Compléments de Multitudes . 28 (2007). (shrink)