Human beings persist in an extraordinary range of ecological settings, in the process exhibiting enormous behavioural diversity, both within and between populations. People vary in their social, mating and parental behaviour and have diverse and elaborate beliefs, traditions, norms and institutions. The aim of this theme issue is to ask whether, and how, evolutionary theory can help us to understand this diversity. In this introductory article, we provide a background to the debate surrounding how best to understand behavioural diversity using (...) evolutionary models of human behaviour. In particular, we examine how diversity has been viewed by the main subdisciplines within the human evolutionary behavioural sciences, focusing in particular on the human behavioural ecology, evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution approaches. In addition to differences in focus and methodology, these subdisciplines have traditionally varied in the emphasis placed on human universals, ecological factors and socially learned behaviour, and on how they have addressed the issue of genetic variation. We reaffirm that evolutionary theory provides an essential framework for understanding behavioural diversity within and between human populations, but argue that greater integration between the subfields is critical to developing a satisfactory understanding of diversity. (shrink)

Wood, Kressel, Joshi, and Louie thoroughly evaluate the evidence for menstrual cycle shifts in ratings of several male characteristics and conclude that their analyses fail to provide supportive evidence for consistent cycle effects. The topic of menstrual cycle shifts in mate preferences has been strongly debated, with disagreements over both scientific content and practice. Here, we attempt to take a step back from these acrimonious exchanges and focus instead on how to interpret menstrual cycle shifts in mate preference tasks, independently (...) from the question of when, or if, task performance varies with cycle stage. A greater consideration of domain-general mechanisms could provide an opportunity for investigating how evolved predispositions interact with socially transmitted information in biasing women’s responses on mate preference tasks. (shrink)

On November 2019, the world commemorated the 30th anniversary of the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child. The UNCRC noted that “the press and other media have essential fu...

Functional diversity holds the promise of understanding ecosystems in ways unattainable by taxonomic diversity studies. Underlying this promise is the intuition that investigating the diversity of what organisms actually do—i.e. their functional traits—within ecosystems will generate more reliable insights into the ways these ecosystems behave, compared to considering only species diversity. But this promise also rests on several conceptual and methodological—i.e. epistemic—assumptions that cut across various theories and domains of ecology. These assumptions should be clearly addressed, notably for the sake (...) of an effective comparison and integration across domains, and for assessing whether or not to use functional diversity approaches for developing ecological management strategies. The objective of this contribution is to identify and critically analyze the most salient of these assumptions. To this aim, we provide an “epistemic roadmap” that pinpoints these assumptions along a set of historical, conceptual, empirical, theoretical, and normative dimensions. (shrink)

() e fall caused the vase to break. () e fall was the cause of the vase’s breaking. () e fall was a cause of the vase’s breaking. () e fall was causally relevant to the vase’s breaking.

Publics are key stakeholders in population genomic screening and their perspectives on ethical considerations are relevant to programme design and policy making. Using semi-structured interviews, we explored social views and attitudes towards possible future provision of personalised genomic risk information to populations to inform prevention and/or early detection of relevant conditions. Participants were members of the public who had received information on their personal genomic risk of melanoma as part of a research project. The focus of the analysis presented here (...) is participants’ views regarding ethical considerations relevant to population genomic screening more generally. Data were analysed thematically and four key themes related to ethical considerations were identified: personal responsibility for health: ‘forewarned is forearmed’; perceptions of, and responses to, genetic fatalism; implications for parenting and reproduction; divided views on choosing to receive genomic risk information. Ethical considerations underlying these themes include the valorisation of information and choice, paternalism, non-directiveness and increasing responsibilisation of individuals in health and healthcare. These findings arguably indicate a thin public conceptualisation of population genomic testing, which draws heavily on how these themes tend to be described in existing social discourses. Findings suggest that further public engagement is required to increase complexity of debate, to consider the appropriate place of individual and social interests in population genomic testing. Further discernment of relevant ethical approaches, drawing on ethical frameworks from both public health and clinical settings, will also assist in determining the appropriate implementation of population genomic screening for complex conditions. (shrink)

In the original publication of the article, errors in the production stages resulted in Vanessa Munro being listed as sole author.

In his recent Philosophers’ Imprint paper “The (mostly harmless) inconsistency of knowledge attributions” [Weiner, 2009], Matt Weiner argues that the semantics of the expression “knows that”, as it is used in attributions of knowledge like “Hannah knows that the bank will be open,” are inconsistent, but that this inconsistency is “mostly harmless.” He presents his view as an alternative to the invariantist, contextualist and relativist approaches currently prevalent in the literature, (e.g. [Stanley, 2005], [DeRose, 1995], [Hawthorne, 2006], [MacFarlane, 2005]) and (...) argues that it avoids important disadvantages of each. Yet in calling the supposed inconsistency of knowledge attributions “mostly harmless”, Weiner implies that his view does not have new disadvantages of its own. My purpose in the present paper is to argue that the inconsistency and harmlessness theses cannot be jointly maintained: if we accept that the semantics of ‘know’—or indeed any word—are inconsistent, then we face a dilemma: one horn is dialetheism, the view that there there are true contradictions, the other is the view that that semantic competence in English requires belief in, or similar commitment to, falsehoods. I will argue that neither of these options is well described as “mostly harmless.” The paper is structured as follows: in the first part I present Weiner’s view and his arguments for it. Then in section 2 I compare the question of whether the semantics of ‘knows that’ are inconsistent to the much older controversy over whether the semantics of the expression ‘is true’ are inconsistent. In section 3 I will present Hans Herzberger’s arguments from the 1960s for thinking that no expression in a natural language can have inconsistent semantics. Finally, in section 4 I argue that although Herzberger’s argument seems anachronistic today, both contemporary ways of avoiding his conclusion have significant disadvantages. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to assess patients' recall of their previous research participation. Recall was established during interviews and compared with entries from clinical notes. Participants were 49 patients who had previously participated in different types of research. Of the 49 patients, 45 (92%) interviewees recalled 69 of 109 (63%) study participations. Level of recall varied according to the type of research, some participants clearly recalled the details of research aims, giving consent and research procedures. Others recalled procedures (...) (e.g. DNA testing) but were unclear about their purpose. There was no significant effect of time on recall. Some types of research participation (e.g. DNA testing) may be recalled as clinical care. We argue that such misunderstandings may have the potential to undermine participants' ongoing consent, particularly in ongoing/longitudinal studies. Valid consent may be best achieved by re-assessing the scope of consent and relating it to the nature of the interventions themselves rather than the reasons for undertaking them. (shrink)

What kind of role, if any, can immigration policies play in moving us towards global justice? On one view, the removal of restrictions on immigration might seem to constitute great progress in realizing the desired goal. After all, people want to emigrate mainly because they perceive that their prospects for better lives are more likely to be secured elsewhere. If we remove restrictions on their ability to travel, would this not constitute an advance over the status quo in which people (...) are significantly prevented, through tough immigration restrictions, from seeking a better life for themselves and their dependants? In particular, it might seem that a cosmopolitan must be committed to reducing restrictions on immigration. On one common account of what cosmopolitanism is, the central idea is that every person has global stature as the ultimate unit of moral concern and is therefore entitled to equal respect and consideration no matter what her citizenship status or other affiliations happen to be. It is frequently supposed that a cosmopolitan must be committed to more open borders, and that developed countries restricting entry to people from developing countries is unjust and inconsistent with a commitment to our equal moral worth. However, as I argue, removing restrictions on immigration could constitute a considerable step backward for global justice. In order to appreciate why this is the case, we need to review some relevant empirical evidence that our policy recommendations must take into account. As we see, considerable benefits accrue to the immigrant and host nation, but significant costs must often be born in states of origin. As one example, we consider the effects of remittances often believed to be highly beneficial to the global poor. I discuss evidence indicating that patterns associated with remittances are not always at all desirable. Migration policies need to be better managed so that they do benefit the relevant stakeholders. In section 4 I give examples of how this might work. In section 5 we investigate what kinds of policy recommendations would be best given our findings. (shrink)

Contrary to argument that unique hues are undemonstrated, the World Color Survey shows that speakers of more than 100 minor and tribal languages focus color categories predominantly on 4 of the 40 hue columns of the ethnographic Munsell array. The pattern is not conditioned by saturation levels or other arbitrary structures among the color chips, nor is Western influence likely to be the cause. Moreover, all evidence suggests that color cognition is autonomous despite the connotations and polysemies of color terms.

BackgroundThe highly sensitive nature of genomic and associated clinical data, coupled with the consent-related vulnerabilities of children together accentuate ethical, legal and social issues (ELSI) concerning data sharing. The Key Implications of Data Sharing (KIDS) framework was therefore developed to address a need for institutional guidance on genomic data governance but has yet to be validated among data sharing practitioners in practice settings. This study qualitatively explored areas of consensus and dissensus of the KIDS Framework from the perspectives of Canadian (...) clinician-scientists, genomic researchers, IRB members, and pediatric ethicists.MethodsTwelve panelists participated in a three-round online policy Delphi to determine the desirability, feasibility, relative importance and confidence of twelve individual statements of the KIDS Framework. Mean and IQR were calculated from panelists’ ratings to determine the strength of consensus and polarity. Qualitative content analysis of panelists’ written responses was used to assess degree of support. Statements were validated when their combined ratings and qualitative rationales indicated high-moderate consensus (at least 70% agreement across two contiguous categories), low to no polarity (IQR at least 1.0) and strong support.ResultsNine original, and one new statement reached consensus. These statements outlined essential elements of the informed consent process, including a realistic evaluation of benefits and risks and assurance of future ethics oversight for secondary data use. Discrepant views on appropriate protections for anonymized and coded i.e. de-identified genomic data were primary sources of dissensus.ConclusionsThe validated statements provide institutions with empirically supported best practices for sharing genomic and associated clinical data involving children from the perspectives of key stakeholders. Concerted efforts to quantify informational risks that can be conveyed to patients and families are further needed to align data sharing policy with stakeholder priorities. (shrink)

In Reference re E.I. the Supreme Court of Canada was asked to assess the constitutionality of the federally administered maternity and parental leave benefit regime. This social programme has been a key site of feminist struggle in Canada, with attention focused in recent years on whether the benefit, as delivered, was an equality-enhancing regime. This note examines the way in which the questions posed to the Supreme Court of Canada were framed in a manner that obscured the essential equality dimensions (...) of the issue before the Court. It is argued, however, that, notwithstanding the relatively formal division of powers answer that the Court was called upon to give, the decision is a promisingly substantive reflection on the debate over the most effective means to recognize the care-giving labour of Canadian parents through the delivery of this benefit. (shrink)

O confucionismo existe, na vida espiritual do povo vietnamita, desde muito tempo. A parte positiva do Confucionismo pode-se dizer que é o fato de ele contribuir para o fortalecimento das relações familiares, entre os parentes, bem como nas relações sociais de um modo geral; outra parte positiva consiste em motivar as pessoas a desenvolverem o gosto pela leitura e aprendizagem. Estima-se que a ética confucionista precisa ser provocada, a fim de contribuir para a construção da sociedade nos dias atuais. Na (...) contramão dessa positividade, pode-se afirmar que o confucionismo, de maneira geral, não valoriza, na medida necessária, o papel das mulheres na sociedade; na realidade, ele as classifica como pessoas insignificantes. É digno de se observar, entretanto, que, no contexto social específico do Vietnã, as mulheres encontram um lugar próprio na sociedade. Nossa pesquisa visa mostrar exatamente essa diferente concepção do papel da mulher na socidade vietnamita. (shrink)

We use a transmission chain method to establish how context and category salience influence the formation of novel stereotypes through cumulative cultural evolution. We created novel alien targets by combining features from three category dimensions—color, movement, and shape—thereby creating social targets that were individually unique but that also shared category membership with other aliens (e.g., two aliens might be the same color and shape but move differently). At the start of the transmission chains each alien was randomly assigned attributes that (...) described it (e.g., arrogant, caring, confident). Participants were given training on the alien‐attribute assignments and were then tested on their memory for these. The alien‐attribute assignments participants produced during test were used as the training materials for the next participant in the transmission chain. As information was repeatedly transmitted an increasingly simplified, learnable stereotype‐like structure emerged for targets who shared the same color, such that by the end of the chains targets who shared the same color were more likely to share the same attributes (a reanalysis of data from Martin et al., which we term Experiment 1). The apparent bias toward the formation of novel stereotypes around the color category dimension was also found for objects (Experiment 2). However, when the category dimension of color was made less salient, it no longer dominated the formation of novel stereotypes (Experiment 3). The current findings suggest that context and category salience influence category dimension salience, which in turn influences the cumulative cultural evolution of information. (shrink)

BackgroundLiving labs are realistic environments designed to create links between technology developers and end-users (i.e. mostly older adults). Research in LLH (Living labs in health) covers a wide range of studies from non-interventional studies to CT (clinical trials) and should involve patients with neurocognitive disorders. However, the ethical issues raised by the design, development, and implementation of research and development projects in LLH have been the subject of only little interest thus far.ObjectiveOur aim was to determine a pragmatic, ethical and (...) regulatory correct approach to seek the informed consent of patients with neurocognitive disorders according to the different types of studies carried out in European LLH, with a focus on the French context.MethodsA narrative review of regulatory texts and clinical articles was conducted, and a pragmatic procedure to determine the decision-making capacity of older adults in LLH was proposed.ResultsIndividuals must be adequately informed and freely agree to participate in CT. The capacity to consent should be assessed in CT including cognitively impaired older adults. We propose the following steps: first to assess for delirium using the 4 ‘A’s Test (4AT) or the 3-min Diagnostic interview for Confusion Assessment Method (3D-CAM), second to search for medical history of major neurocognitive disorder, and third to assess the decision capacity using the University of California, San Diego Brief Assessment of Capacity to Consent (UBACC).ConclusionsIncluding individuals with neurocognitive disorders in research implies using an efficient and pragmatic strategy to inform participants and obtain their consent. The tool we offer here may be useful in the routine operation of LLH but can also be extended to all CT with this population. (shrink)

The perceptual circularity demonstrated by R. Shepard with respect to hue turns out to be a sphericity of color perception based on color excitation vectors of neuronal level. The spherical color model implicitly contains information concerning generalization under color learning. Subjective color differences are “computed” in neuronal nets being represented by amplitudes of evoked potentials triggered by color change. [Shepard].

Is color experience cognitively penetrable? Some philosophers have recently argued that it is. In this paper, we take issue with the claim that color experience is cognitively penetrable. We argue that the notion of cognitive penetration that has recently dominated the literature is flawed since it fails to distinguish between the modulation of perceptual content by non-perceptual principles and genuine cognitive penetration. We use this distinction to show that studies suggesting that color experience can be modulated by factors of the (...) cognitive system do not establish that color experience is cognitively penetrable. Additionally, we argue that even if color experience turns out to be modulated by color-related beliefs and knowledge beyond non-perceptual principles, it does not follow that color experience is cognitively penetrable since the experiences of determinate hues involve post-perceptual processes. We conclude with a brief discussion of the implications that these ideas may have on debates in philosophy. (shrink)

Purest points of Hering's six primary colors reside at different levels of lightness such that inversion of each hue pair would be detectable in subjects' choice of foci on the Munsell array. An inverted spectrum would not impose the isomorphism constraint on a contrast of red-green or yellow-blue, whatever we conclude about inference in functionalism.

Originating as a proponent of U.S. exceptionalism during the Cold War, American Studies has now reinvented itself, vigorously critiquing various kinds of critical hegemony and launching innovative interdisciplinary endeavors. _The Futures of American Studies_ considers the field today and provides important deliberations on what it might yet become. Essays by both prominent and emerging scholars provide theoretically engaging analyses of the postnational impulse of current scholarship, the field's historical relationship to social movements, the status of theory, the state of higher (...) education in the United States, and the impact of ethnic and gender studies on area studies. They also investigate the influence of poststructuralism, postcolonial studies, sexuality studies, and cultural studies on U.S. nationalist—and antinationalist—discourses. No single overriding paradigm dominates the anthology. Instead, the articles enter into a lively and challenging dialogue with one another. A major assessment of the state of the field, _The Futures of American Studies_ is necessary reading for American Studies scholars. _Contributors._ Lindon Barrett, Nancy Bentley, Gillian Brown, Russ Castronovo, Eric Cheyfitz, Michael Denning, Winfried Fluck, Carl Gutierrez-Jones, Dana Heller, Amy Kaplan, Paul Lauter, Günter H. Lenz, George Lipsitz, Lisa Lowe, Walter Benn Michaels, José Estaban Muñoz, Dana D. Nelson, Ricardo L. Ortiz, Janice Radway, John Carlos Rowe, William V. Spanos. (shrink)

Where are we to look for the unique hues? Out in the world? In the eye? In more central processing? 1. There are difficulties looking for the structure of the unique hues in simple combinations of cone-response functions like ( L − M ) and ( S − ( L + M )): such functions may fit pretty well the early physiological processing, but they don’t correspond to the structure of unique hues. It may seem more promising to look to, (...) e.g., Hurvich & Jameson’s ‘chromatic response functions’; but these report on psychophysical behaviour, not on underlying physiology. So ‘opponent processing’ isn’t any particular help on the unique hues—and even physiology in general seems not to have come up with any good correlate or explanation. 2. Wright ( Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2: 1–17, 2011 ) looks in a different place: to (a) magnitude of total visual response that a stimulus light provokes, the maxima and minima of which, he thinks, give us the boundaries of the main hue categories (Wright connects these with Thornton’s ‘prime’ and ‘antiprime’ colours in an illuminant: Journal of the Optical Society of America 61 ( 1971 ): 1155–1163); and (b) the ratio of chromatic to achromatic response, the maxima and minima of which, he suggests, give us the focal points of the unique hues. The suggestions are extremely interesting; but the desired correspondences have some counterexamples; and where they hold, one could wonder how much they depend upon the particular choice of functions to measure (a) and (b); and one could hope for more of an explanatory linkage between the sets of items in question. 3. Could the unique hues come from, so to speak, the external world? White and black can easily be defined as particular kinds of reflectance. What of the standard four unique hues? Variation in kinds of sunlight and skylight coincides well with variation along a line from unique yellow to unique blue (cf. Shepard 1992 , Mollon 2006 ). If we wanted something to calibrate our standards for unique yellow and blue as the lens of the eye changes with age, and despite interpersonal cone differences, this would be a good basis—and there are several ways this can be extended to surface colours. But is there any essential connection between these things: is there any rationale why the light of the sun and the sky should be counted as unique hued ? An answer may be: because in our environment, these illuminants are as close to white (or the natural illuminant colour) as you can get—to see things tinged with sunlight or skylight should be to see them minimally tinged with any alien colour. Whereas other hues in an illuminant would be treated as tinging with a more alien colour the thing seen. (shrink)

本书记述了历史上两个幽默大师,即战国时期的齐国人淳于髡和西汉武帝时期的东方朔的生平事迹。.

Gillian Rose here follows her masterful critical exposition of Adorno and the Frankfurt School, The Melancholy Science, with a broad interpretation of Hegel focused on contemporary problems of method in the social sciences. Rose aims to retrieve the Hegelian speculative experience, and the first chapter is devoted to the discovery, analysis and unmasking of the barriers which stand in the way of any such rereading. Rose argues that all forms of sociology operate within the narrow limits of a neo-Kantian (...) paradigm of validity and value, first formulated by Lotze. In this, Lotze attempted a Kantian grounding of knowledge via the dual criteria of validity and values; i.e., either theory may be grounded in the validity of necessary truths and given facts, or theory may be grounded in the values of absolute standards. Rose suggests that each of these criteria was later given primacy. In late nineteenth century philosophy the criterion of validity was developed by the Marburg school of neo-Kantian philosophers. The criterion of values was given priority in the work of the Heidelberg school. (shrink)

Anti-exceptionalism about logic is the Quinean view that logical theories have no special epistemological status, in particular, they are not self-evident or justified a priori. Instead, logical theories are continuous with scientific theories, and knowledge about logic is as hard-earned as knowledge of physics, economics, and chemistry. Once we reject apriorism about logic, however, we need an alternative account of how logical theories are justified and revised. A number of authors have recently argued that logical theories are justified by abductive (...) argument (e.g. Gillian Russell, Graham Priest, Timothy Williamson). This paper explores one crucial question about the abductive strategy: what counts as evidence for a logical theory? I develop three accounts of evidential confirmation that an anti-exceptionalist can accept: (1) intuitions about validity, (2) the Quine-Williamson account, and (3) indispensability arguments. I argue, against the received view, that none of the evidential sources support classical logic. (shrink)

English summary: Marc Andre Wiegand analyzes the neo-Kantian premises of Gustav Radbruch's legal philosophy.