I come from a medical family. My father and uncle were physicians, and my father also chaired a department at a West Coast medical school for over 30 years. I am sure I got my interest in teaching from him. My brother is a physician and is currently the safety and quality officer of a Canadian province. My mother operated the last non-automated medical laboratory in my state. I have always understood what sacrifices are made by health care professionals, and (...) I think I have managed to learn a bit about their motivations as well.I was in private practice for ten years with litigation firms, and the last five years of that time I worked for a firm that specialized in professional liability defense and health law. (shrink)

I come from a medical family. My father and uncle were physicians, and my father also chaired a department at a West Coast medical school for over 30 years. I am sure I got my interest in teaching from him. My brother is a physician and is currently the safety and quality officer of a Canadian province. My mother operated the last non-automated medical laboratory in my state. I have always understood what sacrifices are made by health care professionals, and (...) I think I have managed to learn a bit about their motivations as well.I was in private practice for ten years with litigation firms, and the last five years of that time I worked for a firm that specialized in professional liability defense and health law. (shrink)

This latest volume in the Oxford Readings in Feminism series presents the results of the multi-disciplinary feminist exploration of the distinction between public and private. Contributors demonstrate the significance of the distinction in feminist theory, its articulation in the modern and late modern public sphere, and its impact on identity politics within feminism in recent years. Feminism, the Public and the Private offers an essential perspective on feminist theory for students and teachers of women's and gender studies, cultural studies, history, (...) political theory, geography and sociology. (shrink)

Most evolutionary analyses of animal communication suggest that low-cost signals can evolve only when both the signaller and the recipient rank outcomes in the same order. When there is a conflict of interest between sender and receiver, honest signals must be costly. However, recent work suggests that low-cost signals can be evolutionarily stable, even when the sender and the receiver rank outcomes in different orders, as long as the interest in achieving coordination is sufficiently great. In this paper, we extend (...) this body of work by analysing a game theory model that shows that low-cost signals can evolve when there are conflicts of interest and no interest in coordination, as long as individuals interact repeatedly. We also present an empirical example indicating that female rhesus macaques, Macaca mulatta, use honest, low-cost, vocal signals to facilitate interactions when conflicts of interest exist. (shrink)

Nonhuman primates don’t have formal kinship systems, but genetic relatedness shapes patterns of residence, behavior, mating preferences, and cognition in the primate order. The goal of this article is to provide insight about the ancestral foundations on which the first human kinship systems were built. In order for evolution to favor nepotistic biases in behavior, individuals need to have opportunities to interact with their relatives and to be able to identify them. Both these requirements impose constraints on the evolution of (...) kinship bonds in primate species. For nonhuman primates and many other mammals, maternal care generates close ties between mothers and offspring and among littermates. For species in which mother–offspring bonds extend beyond weaning, associations with the mother also generate familiarity among siblings of different ages. For species with female philopatry, mother–offspring ties provide the foundation for lifelong relationships between mothers and daughters, and dense matrilineal kin networks. However, several factors constrain the development of kinship bonds in nonhuman primates. First, dispersal strategies, which are designed to reduce inbreeding, bias kinship networks in favor of the philopatric sex. Second, hostile relationships between groups mean that kin ties are usually severed when individuals move from one group to another. Third, in species with polygynandrous mating systems, uncertainty about paternity and restricted periods of male reproductive monopoly limit the scope for development of ties among fathers and offspring, paternal siblings, or extended paternal kin networks. In this article, I explore the impact of these factors on the evolution of ancestral human kinship systems. (shrink)

Exploitation is a fundamental element of the parental strategies of many species of birds. Cuckoos, for example, lay their eggs in the nest of other birds, who often unwittingly rear the alien nestlings as their own. Nest parasitism is an efficient reproductive strategy for cuckoos, who do not have to worry about building a nest, incubating their eggs, or feeding their nestlings. But not all hosts respond passively to such intrusions. In response to parasitic cowbirds, for example, robins have evolved (...) the ability to detect and selectively eject alien young from their nests. Human parenting strategies differ sharply from the strategies of cuckoos and robins. Unlike cuckoos, we are reluctant to allow our children to be raised by others. Unlike robins, we knowingly rear strange young. What makes human behavior toward children so different from that of cuckoos and robins? Humans seem to share a number of predispositions that facilitate successful adoptive relationships, and the desire to raise children seems to be pervasive among modern humans. Despite these commonalities, patterns of adoption transactions vary greatly among contemporary human societies. This paper considers the origins and causes of cross-cultural variation in human adoptive behavior from an evolutionary perspective. (shrink)

Afbeeldingen zijn belangrijke objecten. Ze zijn een rijke bron van informatie, onmisbaar voor een effectieve communicatie. Afbeeldingen zijn ook bijzondere objecten. Ze bestaan uit verf- of inktvlekken maar we zien er dingen in: mensen, bomen, huizen enz. Dit is vreemd want we weten allemaal dat er op het doek geen bomen zijn en geen huizen, en toch zien we ze. We vinden dit zo vanzelfsprekend dat niemand zich echt afvraagt hoe het komt. En dit is juist wat afbeeldingen wezenlijk onderscheidt (...) van al de andere objecten. De hamvraag is dan ook hoe enkele verfvlekken of potloodlijnen onmiskenbaar een boom kunnen betekenen. Met De kunst van het afbeelden presenteert J.B. Vert een samenhangende en overzichtelijke theorie over afbeeldingen. Zijn benadering is niet zoals gebruikelijk alleen vanuit de kunst maar vooral vanuit de cognitieve psychologie. Afbeeldingen zijn er immers om te worden gezien en we zien afbeeldingen met dezelfde ogen als waarmee we de wereld zien. We herkennen een object in een schilderij op dezelfde manier als we het herkennen in de wereld. Het effect van een afbeelding wordt vooral bepaald door de wijze waarop ons waarnemingssysteem is gebouwd en opereert. De lezer krijgt een uniek, uitgebreid, hanteerbaar en helder gestructureerd begrippenapparaat om afbeeldingen te beschrijven en erover te communiceren. De focus van het boek ligt weliswaar op de vlakke afbeelding, de begrippen zijn echter voor een groot deel ook op ruimtelijke en op abstracte beelden van toepassing. Joan B. Vert is 32 jaar werkzaam geweest als docent tekenen, eerst aan de Pedagogische Academie St.-Jozef te Zeist en later aan de Hogeschool Domstad te Utrecht. Hij heeft deelgenomen aan diverse ontwikkelgroepen van de Stichting Leerplanontwikkeling. (shrink)

I draw from my papers and oral presentations to address several issues of Core and Neo‐shamanism. These include clarification of definitions and distinctions between traditional shamans, Core shamanism, Neo‐shamanism, and urban shamanism. Finally I propose an evaluation of Core and Neo‐shamanism.

Conflict is an integral, and potentially disruptive, element in the lives of humans and other group-living animals. But conflicts are often settled, sometimes within minutes after the altercation has ended. The goal of this paper is to understand why primates, including humans, make amends. Primatologists have gathered an impressive body of evidence which demonstrates that monkeys and apes use a variety of behavioral mechanisms to resolve conflicts. Peaceful post-conflict interactions in nonhuman primates, sometimes labeled "reconciliation," have clear and immediate effects (...) upon former adversaries, relieving uncertainty about whether aggression will continue, reducing stress, increasing tolerance, and reducing anxiety about whether aggressors will resume aggression toward former victims. However, the long-term effects of these interactions are less clearly established, leaving room to debate the adaptive function of conflict resolution strategies among primates. It is possible that reconciliatory behavior enhances the quality of valued, long-term social relationships or that reconciliatory interactions are signals that the conflict has ended and the actor’s intentions are now benign. Both of these hypotheses may help us to understand how and why monkeys, apes, and humans make amends. (shrink)

Humans are an exceptionally cooperative species, but there is substantial variation in the extent of cooperation across societies. Understanding the sources of this variability may provide insights about the forces that sustain cooperation. We examined the ontogeny of prosocial behavior by studying 326 children 3–14 y of age and 120 adults from six societies (age distributions varied across societies). These six societies span a wide range of extant human variation in culture, geography, and subsistence strategies, including foragers, herders, horticulturalists, and (...) urban dwellers across the Americas, Oceania, and Africa. When delivering benefits to others was personally costly, rates of prosocial behavior dropped across all six societies as children approached middle childhood and then rates of prosociality diverged as children tracked toward the behavior of adults in their own societies. When prosocial acts did not require personal sacrifice, prosocial responses increased steadily as children matured with little variation in behavior across societies. Our results are consistent with theories emphasizing the importance of acquired cultural norms in shaping costly forms of cooperation and creating cross-cultural diversity. (shrink)

Humans are obligate cooperative breeders, relying heavily on support from kin to raise children. To date, most studies of cooperative breeding have focused on help that supplements rather than replaces parental care. Here we propose that fosterage can act as a form of dispersed cooperative breeding, one that enhances women’s fitness by allowing them to disinvest in some children and reallocate effort to others. We test this hypothesis through a series of predictions about the costs and benefits of fosterage for (...) mothers, foster parents, and foster children using data from the Himba, a group of Namibian agro-pastoralists. We show that fostering out children enhances mothers’ fitness, and we provide evidence for a causal link from fosterage to enhanced fitness by showing that fosterage of early-born children is associated with greater maternal reproductive success. Foster parents minimize the costs of fosterage by skewing their care toward their postreproductive years, and by mainly fostering close kin. However, the system is associated with some detrimental effects on foster children, who are more likely to be stunted and underweight than their non-fostered counterparts. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Ethics in Obstetrics and Gynecology. By Laurence B. McCullough and Frank A. Chervenak.

It has long been known that the red blood cell contains a membrane skeleton that stabilizes the plasma membrane, determines its shape, and regulates the lateral distribution of the membrane glyco‐proteins to which it is attached. The way in which these functions are regulated in other cells has not been understood. It has now been shown that platelets also contain a membrane skeleton. In contrast to the membrane skeleton of the red blood cell, the platelet membrane skeleton has actin‐binding protein, (...) not spectrin, as a major component. The platelet membrane skeleton regulates the same cellular functions as the red blood cell membrane skeleton. Other cells may contain a membrane skeleton that is critical to their viability and normal functioning. (shrink)