Bringing Pierre Bourdieu to Science and Technology Studies Content Type Journal Article Pages 263-273 DOI 10.1007/s11024-011-9174-2 Authors Mathieu Albert, Wilson Centre and Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, 200 Elizabeth Street , Eaton-South 1-581, Toronto, ON M5G 2C4, Canada Daniel Lee Kleinman, Department of Community and Environmental Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 348 Agricultural Hall 1450 Linden Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA Journal Minerva Online ISSN 1573-1871 Print ISSN 0026-4695 Journal Volume Volume 49 Journal Issue Volume 49, (...) Number 3. (shrink)

This pioneering book demonstrates the crucial importance of Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics to his philosophy as a whole. Marion traces the development of Wittgenstein's thinking in the context of the mathematical and philosophical work of the times, to make coherent sense of ideas that have too often been misunderstood because they have been presented in a disjointed and incomplete way. In particular, he illuminates the work of the neglected 'transitional period' between the Tractatus and the Investigations.

The starting point of this conversation with philosopher Mathieu Triclot is the issue of the causal contribution of video game playing in school shootings. Triclot explains the limitations of current psychological approaches regarding video game violence. He further develops on the peculiar features of the video game medium and how they relate to the problem of violence. Triclot eventually shows that, although players may relate to virtual violence in very different ways, violence in video games is not merely a (...) subjective phenomenon. He highlights that some “regimes of experience,” which got stable in the video game culture, cultivate a toxic relation to violence. (shrink)

ONE of the books that has had a major impact on the field of ethics is Kurt Baier’s The Moral Point Of View. In it Mr Baier attempts many important things, the most important perhaps is to show how we can justify our moral judgments. In fact, the notion of ‘the moral point of view’ for him is simply a standard for justifying moral judgments: ‘I shall argue…that our moral convictions are true if they can be seen to be required (...) or acceptable from the moral point of view’ Much of the book is spent trying to specify the conditions for the moral point of view or, as he says, the defining principle of the moral point of view. (shrink)

ONE of the books that has had a major impact on the field of ethics is Kurt Baier’s The Moral Point Of View. In it Mr Baier attempts many important things, the most important perhaps is to show how we can justify our moral judgments. In fact, the notion of ‘the moral point of view’ for him is simply a standard for justifying moral judgments: ‘I shall argue…that our moral convictions are true if they can be seen to be required (...) or acceptable from the moral point of view’ Much of the book is spent trying to specify the conditions for the moral point of view or, as he says, the defining principle of the moral point of view. (shrink)

In this paper, elementary but hitherto overlooked connections are established between Wittgenstein's remarks on mathematics, written during his transitional period, and free-variable finitism. After giving a brief description of theTractatus Logico-Philosophicus on quantifiers and generality, I present in the first section Wittgenstein's rejection of quantification theory and his account of general arithmetical propositions, to use modern jargon, as claims (as opposed to statements). As in Skolem's primitive recursive arithmetic and Goodstein's equational calculus, Wittgenstein represented generality by the use of free (...) variables. This has the effect that negation of unbounded universal and existential propositions cannot be expressed. This is claimed in the second section to be the basis for Wittgenstein's criticism of the universal validity of the law of excluded middle. In the last section, there is a brief discussion of Wittgenstein's remarks on real numbers. These show a preference, in line with finitism, for a recursive version of the continuum. (shrink)

John Cook Wilson (1849–1915) was Wykeham Professor of Logic at New College, Oxford and the founder of ‘Oxford Realism’, a philosophical movement that flourished at Oxford during the first decades of the 20th century. Although trained as a classicist and a mathematician, his most important contribution was to the theory of knowledge, where he argued that knowledge is factive and not definable in terms of belief, and he criticized ‘hybrid’ and ‘externalist’ accounts. He also argued for direct realism in perception, (...) criticizing both empiricism and idealism, and argued for a moderate nominalist view of universals as being in rebus and only ‘apprehended’ by their particulars. His influence helped swaying Oxford away from idealism and, through figures such as H. A. Prichard, Gilbert Ryle, or J. L. Austin, his ideas were also to some extent at the origin of ‘moral intuitionism’ and ‘ordinary language philosophy’ which defined much of Oxford philosophy until the second half of the twentieth-century. Nevertheless, his name and legacy were all but forgotten for generations after World War II. Still, his views on knowledge are with us today, being in part at work in the writings of philosophers as diverse as John McDowell, Charles Travis, and Timothy Williamson. (shrink)

La thèse que présuppose ce livre est la suivante : la modernité, que l'on dit "désenchantée", est triste, parce que désenchantée. Les textes qui y sont rassemblés veulent mettre en présence, mais aussi en question, les deux sens du mot "désenchantement" : l'idée que l'avancement de la "raison instrumentale" (C Taylor)s'est accompagné du recul du domaine du magique, du merveilleux, du mythe, et celle selon laquelle la modernité est morose. Mais il s'agit ici de penser moins la morosité que la (...) joie liée à ce que pourrait être une philosophie du réenchantement du monde. Non pas tant, donc, replonger dans les thèses sur le désenchantement qu'imaginer ce que pourrait être un certain réenchantement. A cet égard, on a voulu porter un regard privilégié sur l'enfance, "terre de l'humain" (T De Koninck), comme sur une manière d'idéal qui pointerait vers la question du sens d'une existence qui vaille d'être vécue. Le pari de ce projet est en définitive qu'une philosophie du réenchantement du monde témoignera que la vie peut être une aventure exaltante, passionnante, un parcours sensé et par conséquent rempli d'espoir, comme dans ces contes pour enfants qui jadis faisaient notre joie. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a summary of the philosophical relationship betweenWittgenstein and Brouwer, taking as my point of departure Brouwer's lecture onMarch 10, 1928 in Vienna. I argue that Wittgenstein having at that stage not doneserious philosophical work for years, if one is to understand the impact of thatlecture on him, it is better to compare its content with the remarks on logics andmathematics in the Tractactus. I thus show that Wittgenstein's position, in theTractactus, was already quite close to (...) Brouwer's and that the points of divergence are the basis to Wittgenstein's later criticisms of intuitionism. Among the topics of comparison are the role of intuition in mathematics, rule following, choice sequences, the Law of Excluded Middle, and the primacy of arithmetic over logic. (shrink)

La multiplication des très grands corpus en linguistique historique a entraîné des discussions nombreuses sur les procédures d’annotation et les métadonnées associées, notamment concernant les questions relevant de l’étiquetage morphosyntaxique et de la tokenisation. D’autres sujets cruciaux, en revanche, semblent moins abordés, comme la question de la découpe en propositions ou en « phrases » des données linguistiques, la préservation des informations philologiques ou, encore, la question de l’encodage et des formats de données. Notre contribution explore ces thématiques en prenant (...) exemple sur le corpus MICLE, qui a dû résoudre des difficultés inédites au long de sa constitution. (shrink)

It is first argued that dialectic was a form of regimented debate, which grew out of public debates in Ancient Greece. A set of rules for dialectical bouts is then given and their meaning explained. The transition from oral to written arguments is briefly examined, leading to the formulation of a delimitation problem in Plato’s dialogues, as he inserted dialectical arguments within ordinary dialogue contexts, turning them into discussions where one of the participants reasons hypothetically to make the other realize (...) that they are not entitled to their view. Doing so, Plato adjusted dialectic to a variety of dialogue purposes and in order to explore this variety, a study of the early tradition of classifying Plato’s dialogues in terms of their ‘character’ is suggested, the results of which are then compared with types of dialogues in contemporary Argumentation Theory. (shrink)

“Exercise starts and ends in the brain”: this was the title of a review article authored by Dr. Bengt Kayser back in 2003. In this piece of work, the author highlights that pioneer studies have primarily focused on the cardiorespiratory-muscle axis to set the human limits to whole-body exercise tolerance. In some circumstances, however, exercise cessation may not be solely attributable to these players: the central nervous system is thought to hold a relevant role as the ultimate site of exercise (...) termination. In fact, there has been a growing interest relative to the “brain” response to exercise in chronic cardiorespiratory diseases, and its potential implication in limiting the tolerance to physical exertion in patients. To reach these overarching goals, non-invasive techniques, such as near-infrared spectroscopy and transcranial magnetic stimulation, have been successfully applied to get insights into the underlying mechanisms of exercise limitation in clinical populations. This review provides an up-to-date outline of the rationale for the “brain” as the organ limiting the tolerance to physical exertion in patients with cardiorespiratory diseases. We first outline some key methodological aspects of neuromuscular function and cerebral hemodynamics assessment in response to different exercise paradigms. We then review the most prominent studies, which explored the influence of major cardiorespiratory diseases on these outcomes. After a balanced summary of existing evidence, we finalize by detailing the rationale for investigating the “brain” contribution to exercise limitation in hitherto unexplored cardiorespiratory diseases, an endeavor that might lead to innovative lines of applied physiological research. (shrink)

The development of symbolic logic is often presented in terms of a cumulative story of consecutive innovations that led to what is known as modern logic. This narrative hides the difficulties that this new logic faced at first, which shaped its history. Indeed, negative reactions to the emergence of the new logic in the second half of the nineteenth century were numerous and we study here one case, namely logic at Oxford, where one finds Lewis Carroll, a mathematical teacher who (...) promoted symbolic logic, and John Cook Wilson, the Wykeham Professor of Logic who notoriously opposed it. An analysis of their disputes on the topic of logical symbolism shows that their opposition was not as sharp as it might look at first, as Cook Wilson was not so much opposed to the « symbolic » character of logic, but the intrusion of mathematics and what he perceived to be the futility of some of its problems, for logicians and philosophers alike. (shrink)

According to Clifford Geertz, the purpose of anthropology is not to explain culture but to explicate it. That should cause us to rethink our relationship with machine learning. It is, we contend, perfectly possible that machine learning algorithms, which are unable to explain, and could even be unexplainable themselves, can still be of critical use in a process of explication. Thus, we report on an experiment with anthropological AI. From a dataset of 175K Facebook comments, we trained a neural network (...) to predict the emoji reaction associated with a comment and asked a group of human players to compete against the machine. We show that a) the machine can reach the same accuracy as the players, b) it fails in roughly the same ways as the players, and c) easily predictable emoji reactions tend to reflect unambiguous situations where interpretation is easy. We therefore repurpose the failures of the neural network to point us to deeper and more ambiguous situations where interpretation is hard and explication becomes both necessary and interesting. We use this experiment as a point of departure for discussing how experiences from anthropology, and in particular the tension between formalist ethnoscience and interpretive thick description, might contribute to debates about explainable AI. (shrink)

After presenting the rules of Eleatic antilogic, i.e., dialectic, I argue that Zeno was a practitioner, and, on the basis of key passages from Plato’s Parmenides (127e-128e and 135d-136c), that his paradoxes of divisibility and movement were notreductio ad absurdum, but simple derivation of impossibilities (adunaton) meant to ridicule Parmenides’ adversaries. Thus, Zeno did not try to prove that there is no motion, but simply derived this consequence from premises held by his opponents. I argue further that these paradoxes were (...) devised, in accordance with Eleatic antilogic, following a scheme that included hypotheses and their contradictories, within which the subject is to be treated both “in relation to itself,” and “in relation to other things”. (shrink)

High-fidelity cultural transmission, rather than brute intelligence, is the secret of our species’ success, or so many cultural evolutionists claim. It has been selected because it ensures the spread, stability and longevity of beneficial cultural traditions, and it supports cumulative cultural change. To play these roles, however, fidelity must be a causally-efficient property of cultural transmission. This is where the grain problem comes in and challenges the explanatory potency of fidelity. Assessing the degree of fidelity of any episode or mechanism (...) of cultural transmission always depends upon an investigator’s choice of grain of description at which cultural traditions are being studied. The fidelity of cultural transmission then appears to be relative to the granularity at which one approaches cultural variation, and since there is a multiplicity of grains of description by which the same tradition can be studied, there results a multiplicity of measures of fidelity for a same event or mechanism of cultural transmission. If this is correct, because fidelity is always relative to the grain of description dictated by the local and specific research interests of the investigator, then there seems to be no fact of the matter as to whether cultural transmission is faithful or not, independently from a researcher’s framework of analysis. The aims of this paper are to offer a conceptual clarification of the grain problem in cultural evolution, to assess its causes, to unpack its epistemological implications, and to examine its reach and consequences for a science of cultural evolution. (shrink)

A leading idea of cultural evolutionary theory is that for human cultures to undergo evolutionary change, cultural transmission must generally serve as a high-fidelity copying process. In analogy to genetic inheritance, the high fidelity of human cultural transmission would act as a safeguard against the transformation and loss of cultural information, thus ensuring both the stability and longevity of cultural traditions. Cultural fidelity would also serve as the key difference-maker between human cumulative cultures and non-human non-cumulative traditions, explaining why only (...) us humans, with our uniquely high-fidelity transmission capabilities, are capable of evolving and sustaining complex traditions. But what does it mean for cultural transmission to be more or less faithful? This article has two objectives. The first is to clarify the meaning and uses of the concept of cultural fidelity and to evaluate their explanatory import. I argue that cultural evolutionists use several fidelity concepts (episodic, propensity, and generalized fidelity), concepts that I will define and clarify. The second objective is to challenge the explanatory significance of a general notion of fidelity (generalized fidelity) as being both explanatorily meaningful and operationalizable. I conclude that if fidelity is to serve as an explanation of the key differences between human cumulative cultures and non-human non-cumulative traditions, then the concept will have to be redesigned and rely on different assumptions. 1Introduction 2Generalized Fidelity 2.1The need for an explanatory concept of fidelity 2.2Three conditions for a general notion of cultural fidelity 3Episodic Fidelity 3.1Measuring episodic fidelity 3.2The relevance problem 3.3Explanatory pluralism 3.4The incommensurability of fidelity metrics 4Propensity Fidelity 5Fidelity as an Explanatory Concept 5.1Explaining cultural stability 5.2Explaining human distinctiveness 6Conclusion. (shrink)

A Polish space is not always homeomorphic to a computably presented Polish space. In this article, we examine degrees of non-computability of presenting homeomorphic copies of compact Polish spaces. We show that there exists a $\mathbf {0}'$ -computable low $_3$ compact Polish space which is not homeomorphic to a computable one, and that, for any natural number $n\geq 2$, there exists a Polish space $X_n$ such that exactly the high $_{n}$ -degrees are required to present the homeomorphism type of $X_n$. (...) Along the way we investigate the computable aspects of Čech homology groups. We also show that no compact Polish space has a least presentation with respect to Turing reducibility. (shrink)

Background The American Association of Medical Colleges has called for incorporation of the health humanities into medical education, and many medical schools now offer formal programs or content in this field. However, there is growing recognition among educators that we must expand beyond empathy and wellness and apply the health humanities to questions of social justice – that is, critical health humanities. In this paper we demonstrate how this burgeoning field offers us tools for integrating social justice into medical education, (...) utilizing the frameworks of critical consciousness and structural competency. Practice of health humanities Critical health humanities can be applied at multiple levels of learners, and in a variety of contexts. We are two physician-writers who have developed several educational programs that demonstrate this. We taught a seminar that introduced first-year and second-year undergraduates to concepts such as social determinants of health, intergenerational trauma, intersectionality, resilience, and cross-cultural care through works of fiction, poetry, film, podcasts, stand-up comedy, and more. Through creative projects and empathic reflection, students engaged with the complexities of structural forces that create and maintain health disparities. Medical students in their clinical years can engage in critical health humanities learning experiences as well. We teach several multidisciplinary electives that address social (in)justice in medicine, as well as mentor fourth-year students engaged in independent electives that foster critical awareness around health equity and ethics. Beyond the classroom, we have actively engaged in critical health humanities practices through story slams, literary journal clubs, conference presentations, and Grand Rounds. Through these activities we have included learners at GME and CME levels. These examples also demonstrate how community engagement and multidisciplinary partnerships can contribute to the practice of critical health humanities. Conclusion In this paper, we explore the growing field of critical health humanities and its potential for teaching health equity through narrative practices. We provide concrete examples of educational activities that incorporate critical consciousness and structural competency – frameworks we have found useful for conceptualizing critical health humanities as a pedagogical practice. We also discuss the strengths and challenges of this work and suggest future directions. (shrink)

The study of ergodic theorems from the viewpoint of computable analysis is a rich field of investigation. Interactions between algorithmic randomness, computability theory and ergodic theory have recently been examined by several authors. It has been observed that ergodic measures have better computability properties than non-ergodic ones. In a previous paper we studied the extent to which non-ergodic measures inherit the computability properties of ergodic ones, and introduced the notion of an effectively decomposable measure. We asked the following question: if (...) the ergodic decomposition of a stationary measure is finite, is this decomposition effective? In this paper we answer the question in the negative. (shrink)

Prior work on weakness of will has assumed that it is a thoroughly psychological phenomenon. At least, it has assumed that ordinary attributions of weakness of will are purely psychological attributions, keyed to the violation of practical commitments by the weak-willed agent. Debate has recently focused on which sort of practical commitment, intention or normative judgment, is more central to the ordinary concept of weakness of will. We report five experiments that significantly advance our understanding of weakness of will attributions (...) by showing that the ordinary concept of weakness of will is less thoroughly psychological than the philosophical debate has assumed. We begin by showing that a sizable minority of people attribute weakness of will even in the absence of a violated commitment (Experiment 1). We then show that weakness of will attributions are sensitive to two important non-psychological factors. First, for actions stereotypically associated with weakness of will, the absence of certain commitments often triggers weakness of will attributions (Experiments 2–4). Second, the quality of an action’s outcome affects the extent to which an agent is viewed as weak-willed: actions with bad consequences are more likely to be viewed as weak-willed (Experiment 5). Our most important finding is that the ordinary concept of weakness of will is sensitive to two non-psychological factors and is thus much broader than philosophers have thus far imagined. We conclude by suggesting a two-tier model that unites our findings with traditional philosophical theorizing about weakness of will. (shrink)

The case study presented by Winch and Sinnott (2011) shows not only how difficult it is for clinicians and researchers to identify conflicts of interest (COI), but also how damaging it can be when there are unin- formed and uncoordinated policy responses by senior administrators.

On a vu apparaître, avec la mondialisation, de nouveaux métiers de la traduction qui sont tous fondés sur une prise en compte du multilinguisme et du plurilinguisme, devenus caractéristiques des individus, des supports et des outils. Dans la course à l’intégration des médias et à la maîtrise de l’information diffusée dans toutes les langues du monde, le traducteur a ainsi gagné ses lettres de noblesse langagière en devenant un acteur stratégique au sein des institutions et des entreprises d’envergure internationale. L’extraordinaire (...) succès d’Internet n’a fait que conforter cette position stratégique en élargissant davantage l’éventail des compétences du traducteur et le champ de ses interventions. Désormais, il est tantôt « communicateur » en plusieurs langues, tantôt « médiateur » en zone de crise ou de conflit et, parfois, « veilleur multilingue » à la recherche d’informations stratégiques.With the advent of globalisation, translation has branched out into new professions that are all based on recognition of multilingualism as a characteristic of individuals, media and tools. In the race towards media integration and information management in each of the world’s languages, translators have gained status as strategic players within institutions and companies operating, or aiming to operate, on an international scale. The phenomenal success of the Internet has strengthened this strategic position by broadening the range of translating skills and their fields of application. Nowadays, translators may be “communicators” in several languages, “mediators” in crises or conflict zones and sometimes multilingual “intelligence gatherers” of strategic information. (shrink)

For a little over a decade we have been witnessing a profusion of discourses on autochthony — that is, an original belonging to a group or territory — in many parts of the world. A global approach to this question first requires a look at the principle of autochthony and its genealogy. Starting from African examples, places of prolific expression of the phenomenon, this article shows how autochthony plays the role of capital that can be invested, valued and profited from. (...) The structure of this capital carries within itself the seeds of conflict. The article analyses how the stabilization of its value requires the execution of specific strategies. Among these strategies, I will focus in greater depth on voting. The relationship between capital, autochthony and elections will thus bring us back to debates that animate political science: in new municipalities, autochthony as capital is at the heart of candidate selection, suffrage, political participation and citizenship. (shrink)

The second half of the third/ninth and the fourth/tenth centuries are of particular importance for the development of the judiciary in the central lands of the Abbasid caliphate. At the end of the mihna period and the victory of Sunnism under al-Mutawakkil (r. 232-247/847-861), the caliphate agreed not to interfere further within the legal sphere, thus allowing the principal schools of law to complete their development toward their classical structure. In Iraq, thanks to the growing independence of the legal sphere (...) and to the political weakness of the caliphate, the qadis increased their judicial freedom. Meanwhile, the political situation in Egypt was very different. The provincial rulers and two successive dynasties, the Tulunids (254-292/868-905) and the Ikhshidids (323-358/935-969), profited from the weakness of the caliphate, and imposed their autonomy de facto. The role played by the judiciary in this process is still unclear, as is the impact of Egyptian autonomy on the development of the local judiciary. In this paper, I discuss the evolution of the relationship between the Egyptian governors and the judiciary, from the accession of Ahmad b. Tulun in 254/868 until the arrival of the Fatimids in 358/969. Several elements are taken into consideration: (1) The institutional links between political power and the judiciary: Who appointed the qadis? How were they selected? Did the government choose to rely on local scholars or did the qadis come from outside the province? (2) The financial connection between the governors and the qadis, which was not only symbolic of the delegation of power, but could also denote the submission of the judiciary to the government. (3) The daily interactions between the qadis and the governors. (4) The judicial practice of the qadis. (5) Their reputation. I study to what extent the judiciary and its control was a political issue for the Tulunids and the Ikhshidids, and how the efforts of these two dynasties to build an Egyptian autonomy had important consequences on the structure of the legal milieu. (shrink)

In this paper, I stress the utility of employing test-driven development (TDD) for conceiving logical systems. TDD, originally invented in the context of Extreme Programming, is a methodology widely used by software engineers to conceive and develop programs. Its main principle is to design the tests of the expected properties of the system before the development phase. I argue that this methodology is especially convenient in conceiving applied logics. Indeed, this technique is efficient with most decidable logics having a software (...) implementation. Having a clear list of the desired inferences right from the beginning makes it possible to refine the properties of the system step by step until its completion. I distinguish and detail seven advantages of the usage of TDD for the conception of a logical theory. Most importantly, this methodology increases the predictability of the inferential power of the theory. A second important benefit is that the time required for the conception of the logic goes down dramatically. This methodology will change both ideas and practices. Logic is no longer considered to be a formal science, but rather to be an empirical one. Research in the field is geared toward specific and concrete goals. Programs are considered tools used to verify the conformity of formal theories. To sum up, I defend the view that, in some situations, this way of designing a formal system brings significant benefits, and that the construction of new logics can be conducted similarly to the development of open source software. (shrink)

In this short paper we analyse some paradoxical aspects of France’s Foucauldian heritage: while several French scholars claim the COVID-19 pandemic is a perfect example of what Foucault called biopolitics, popular reaction instead suggests a biopolitical failure on the part of the government; One of these failures concerns the government’s inability to produce reliable biostatistical data, especially regarding health inequalities in relation to COVID-19. We interrogate whether Foucaldianism contributed, in the past as well today, towards a certain myopia in France (...) regarding biostatistics and its relation to social inequalities in health. One might ask whether this very data could provide an appropriate response to the Foucauldian question: What kind of governance of life is the pandemic revealing to us? (shrink)

What may we learn about the life of human beings with Evolutionary Biology? In order to answer this question, without taking a distrustful stance, I think that Daniel Dennett’s evolutionary cognitivism and Foucault s archaeological approach are not unreconciliable but complementary traditions. Indeed, Derrnett’s originality, thanks to his interpretation of the Baldwin Effect and his thesis of Self as a Narrative Center of Gravity, manages to present the human being’s world as the living fulfilment of a set of historical products, (...) without giving up the properly creative dimension of the individual . In this way, devices of domination and processes of « subjectivisation » belong to the broader transfornzative process of the evolution of life on Earth. In return, Dennett s philosophy, rightfully careful when it comes to political questions, should be complemented by a critical analysis. (shrink)

In fungi, cell fusion between genetically unlike individuals triggers a cell death reaction known as the incompatibility reaction. In Podospora anserina, the genes controlling this process belong to a gene family encoding STAND proteins with an N‐terminal cell death effector domain, a central NACHT domain and a C‐terminal WD‐repeat domain. These incompatibility genes are extremely polymorphic, subject to positive Darwinian selection and display a remarkable genetic plasticity allowing for constant diversification of the WD‐repeat domain responsible for recognition of non‐self. Remarkably, (...) the architecture of these proteins is related to pathogen‐recognition receptors ensuring innate immunity in plants and animals. Here, we hypothesize that these P. anserina incompatibility genes could be components of a yet‐unidentified innate immune system of fungi. As already proposed in the case of plant hybrid necrosis or graft rejection in mammals, incompatibility could be a by‐product of pathogen‐driven divergence in host defense genes. (shrink)