The objectives of this study were to develop a high-density chromosome bin map of homoeologous group 7 in hexaploid wheat, to identify gene distribution in these chromosomes, and to perform comparative studies of wheat with rice and barley. We mapped 2148 loci from 919 EST clones onto group 7 chromosomes of wheat. In the majority of cases the numbers of loci were significantly lower in the centromeric regions and tended to increase in the distal regions. The level of duplicated loci (...) in this group was 24% with most of these loci being localized toward the distal regions. One hundred nineteen EST probes that hybridized to three fragments and mapped to the three group 7 chromosomes were designated landmark probes and were used to construct a consensus homoeologous group 7 map. An additional 49 probes that mapped to 7AS, 7DS, and the ancestral translocated segment involving 7BS also were designated landmarks. Landmark probe orders and comparative maps of wheat, rice, and barley were produced on the basis of corresponding rice BAC/PAC and genetic markers that mapped on chromosomes 6 and 8 of rice. Identification of landmark ESTs and development of consensus maps may provide a framework of conserved coding regions predating the evolution of wheat genomes. (shrink)

Many have argued against the claim that Plato posited the mathematical objects that are the subjects of Metaphysics M and N. This paper shifts the burden of proof onto these objectors to show that Plato did not posit these entities. It does so by making two claims: first, that Plato should posit the mathematical Intermediates because Forms and physical objects are ill suited in comparison to Intermediates to serve as the objects of mathematics; second, that their utility, combined with Aristotle’s (...) commentary on Plato’s posit of Intermediates, provides good reason to conclude that Plato did posit them. (shrink)

This comment on the case presented in ‘Cholera and Nothing More’ argues that the physicians at this public-health centre did not have an ordinary clinician's obligations to promote the health of the people who came to them for care, as they were instead set up to serve a laudable and urgent public-health goal, namely, controlling a cholera outbreak. It argues that, nonetheless, these physicians did have some limited moral duties to care for other diseases they encountered—some ancillary-care duties—arising from their (...) voluntarily entering into a kind of intimate relationship with the patients they took in, one in which those patients effectively waive certain rights to bodily and medical privacy. (shrink)

In this paper, perhaps the first of its kind, an attempt is made to elucidate and examine the Vedantic theory of soul constructed on the basis of the experience of dreamless sleep which, being radically and qualitatively different from waking and dreaming states, is considered by the Vedantins as a state of temporarily purified individual soul (atman), a state of pure substantial consciousness. They take the experience of dreamless sleep as a model experience of the soul's final liberation from the (...) body and its internal as well as external faculties. The ultimate liberation, according to the Vedantins, is a state of total identification of the individual soul with the Universal Soul (Brahman), the summum bonum of every Vedantin. The paper also includes a critique of the Vedantic soul theory by the Buddhists who vehemently deny any autonomous and substantial soul whose essence is unchangingly permanent, pure consciousness and self-illuminating knowledge. The soul is instead interpreted by the Buddhists as a product of the functioning of a person's psycho-physical organism and a mere subject of knowing, thinking, desiring, etc. The analysis further shows that the Vedanta, especially the Advaita Vedanta, metaphysics of soul is inadequate in many respects and mainly based on a priori and scriptural arguments and emotive appeals, whereas the Buddhists deny any kind of autonomous and permanent agent of knowing, thinking and desiring by successfully reducing substantial consciousness to mere acts of knowing. (shrink)