A striking feature of human female sexual reproduction is the high level of gametes that exhibit an aberrant number of chromosomes (aneuploidy). A high baseline observed in women of prime reproductive age is followed by a dramatic increase in older women. Proper chromosome segregation requires one or more DNA crossovers (COs) between homologous maternal and paternal chromosomes, in combination with cohesion between sister chromatid arms. In human females, CO designations occur normally, according to the dictates of CO interference, giving early (...) CO-fated intermediates. However, ≈25% of these intermediates fail to mature to final CO products. This effect explains the high baseline of aneuploidy and is predicted to synergize with age-dependent cohesion loss to explain the maternal age effect. Here, modern advances in the understanding of crossing over and CO interference are reviewed, the implications of human female CO maturation inefficiency are further discussed, and areas of interest for future studies are suggested. (shrink)

This paper addresses the just distribution of vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus and sets forth an ethical framework that prioritises frontline and essential workers, people at high risk of severe disease or death, and people at high risk of infection. Section I makes the case that vaccine distribution should occur at a global level in order to accelerate development and fair, efficient vaccine allocation. Section II puts forth ethical values to guide vaccine distribution including helping people with the greatest need, (...) reducing health disparity, saving the most lives and promoting narrow social utility. It also responds to objections which claim that earlier years have more value than later years. Section III puts forth a practical ethical framework to aid decision-makers and compares it with alternatives. (shrink)

Physically frail, badly educated girls, brought up to lead useless lives as idle gentlewomen, married to dominant husbands, and relegated to "separate spheres" of life—these phrases have often been used to describe Victorian upper-middle-class women. M. Jeanne Peterson rejects such formulations and the received wisdom they embody in favor of a careful examination of Victorian ladies and their lives. Focusing on a network of urban professional families over three generations, this book examines the scope and quality of gentlewomen's education, their (...) physical lives, their relationship to money, their experience of family illness and death, and their relationships to men (brothers and friends as well as fathers and husbands). Peterson also examines the prominent place of work in the lives of these "leisured" Victorian ladies, both single and married. Far from idle, the mothers, wives, and daughters of Victorian clergymen, doctors, lawyers, university dons, and others were accomplished and productive members of society who made substantial public and private contributions to virtually every sphere of Victorian life. (shrink)

In the course of the last 30 years, feminist theories of gender have shifted from quasi-Marxist, labor-centered conceptions to putatively ‘post-Marxist’ culture-and identity-based conceptions. Reflecting a broader political move from redistribution to recognition, this shift has been double edged. On the one hand, it has broadened feminist politics to encompass legitimate issues of representation, identity and difference. Yet, in the context of an ascendant neoliberalism, feminist struggles for recognition may be serving less to enrich struggles for redistribution than to displace (...) the latter. Thus, instead of arriving at a broader, richer paradigm that could encompass both redistribution and recognition, feminists appear to have traded one truncated paradigm for another – a truncated economism for a truncated culturalism. This article aims to resist that trend. I propose an anaysis of gender that is broad enough to house the full range of feminist concerns, those central to the old socialist-feminism as well as those rooted in the cultural turn. I also propose a correspondingly broad conception of justice, capable of encompassing both distribution and recognition, and a non-identitarian account of recognition, capable of synergizing with redistribution. I conclude by examining some practical problems that arise when we try to envision institutional reforms that could redress gender maldistribution and gender misrecognition simultaneously. (shrink)

The essays in this anthology explore the full spectrum of Plato's philosophy and are representative of the variety of perspectives within feminist criticism.

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 7, Page 802-808, September 2022.

Global scarcity of COVID-19 vaccines raises ethical questions about their fair allocation between nations. Section I introduces the question and proposes that wealthy nations have a duty of justice to share globally scarce COVID-19 vaccines. Section II distinguishes justice from charity and argues that beneficiaries of unjust structures incur duties of justice when they are systematically advantaged at others expense. Section III gives a case-based argument describing three upstream structural injustices that systematically advantaged wealthy countries and disadvantaged poorer countries, contributing (...) to global disparities of COVID-19 vaccines. Section IV examines more closely the duties of justice owed, including a duty to relinquish holdings, restitute victims, and restore relationships. Section V concludes that wealthy nations have a duty of justice to share COVID-19 vaccines with poor nations and to restore relationships damaged by injustice. All nations should take steps to transform unjust structures. (shrink)

Designing, building, and experimenting with physical simulation models are central problem‐solving practices in the engineering sciences. Model‐based simulation is an epistemic activity that includes exploration, generation and testing of hypotheses, explanation, and inference. This paper argues that to interpret and understand how these simulation models function in creating knowledge and technologies requires construing problem solving as accomplished by a researcher–artifact system. It draws on and further develops the framework of “distributed cognition” to interpret data collected in ethnographic and cognitive‐historical studies (...) of two biomedical engineering research laboratories, and articulates the notion of distributed model‐based cognition to answer the question posed in the title. (shrink)

Virtue ethics enjoys a resurgence, yet the topic of virtue cultivation has been largely neglected. This volume remedies this gap, featuring mostly new essays, commissioned for this collection, by philosophers, theologians, and psychologists at the forefront of research into virtue.

This book presents a radical new picture of natural order. The Newtonian idea of a cosmos ruled by universal and exceptionless laws has been superseded; replaced by a conception of nature as a realm of diverse powers, potencies, and dispositions, a 'dappled world'. There is order in nature, but it is more local, diverse, piecemeal, open, and emergent than Newton imagined. In each chapter expert authors expound the historical context of the idea of laws of nature, and explore the diverse (...) sorts of order actually presupposed by work in physics, biology, and the social sciences. They consider how human freedom might be understood, and explore how Newton's idea of a 'universal designer' might be revised, in this new context. They argue that there is not one unified totalizing program of science, aiming at the completion of one closed causal system. We live in an ordered universe, but we need to rethink the classical idea of the 'laws of nature' in a more dynamic and creatively diverse way. (shrink)

This article presents an architecture for natural language generation of biomedical argumentation. The goal is to reconstruct the normative arguments that a domain expert would provide, in a manner that is transparent to a lay audience. Transparency means that an argument's structure and functional components are accessible to its audience. Transparency is necessary before an audience can fully comprehend, evaluate or challenge an argument, or re-evaluate it in light of new findings about the case or changes in scientific knowledge. The (...) architecture has been implemented and evaluated in the Genetics Information Expression Assistant, a prototype system for drafting genetic counselling patient letters. Argument generation makes use of abstract argumentation schemes. Derived from the analysis of arguments used in genetic counselling, these mainly causal argument patterns refer to abstract properties of qualitative causal domain models. (shrink)

The needless proliferation of virtues is a possible pitfall of the explosion of work in virtue ethics. I discuss two positions on proliferation and offer my own. Russell takes the first approach, arguing that virtue ethical right action is impossible unless we adopt a finite and specifiable list of the virtues. I argue against this. Hursthouse offers a second perspective, looking first to standard Aristotelian virtues, and adding virtues only when the standard list fails to capture something of moral importance. (...) Like Hursthouse, I believe that questions arising from applied ethics present the real challenge to the adequacy of traditional lists of virtues. These challenges are becoming increasingly urgent. Technologies are not only shaping our conceptions of ourselves, the human good, and virtues, but also, through germline gene editing, have the potential to change human nature. My position takes its cue from Hursthouse but goes beyond her by arguing for an “anthropological turn” in virtue ethics. The anthropological turn examines forms of life, especially those influenced by technology and science, and how they affect articulations of the human good and the virtues needed to attain it. Any new virtues, I argue, should be identified through study of how dispositions conducive to human good arise organically within forms of life. In this way, virtues remain grounded in what is good for humans, yet the anthropological turn recognizes that what counts as human good is now in flux because of science and technology. (shrink)

Feminist scholars reacted to news of Beauvoir's death in 1986 by initiating a reevaluation of her life's work, a task encouraged by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, her adopted daughter, who edited for posthumous publication many of Beauvoir's personal notebooks and letters to Sartre. Some of the most exciting new interpretations of Beauvoir's philosophy that have resulted are brought together here for the first time; many of them, indeed, were written expressly for this first volume of essays on Beauvoir's philosophy (...) written since her death. (shrink)

Misrecognition, taken seriously as unjust social subordination, cannot be remedied by eliminating prejudice alone. In this rejoinder to Richard Rorty, it is argued that a politics of recognition and a politics of redistribution can and should be combined. However, an identity politics that displaces redistribution and reifies group differences is deeply flawed. Here, instead, an alternative 'status' model of recognition politics is offered that encourages struggles to overcome status subordination and fosters parity of participation. Integrating this politics of recognition with (...) redistribution enables a coherent Left vision that could redress injustices of culture and of political economy simultaneously. (shrink)

Paid care services such as child care, elder care, teaching, and nursing are vulnerable to competitive pressures that often generate low-pay/low-quality outcomes. Both workers and consumers suffer as a result. This article develops an economic analysis of the “care sector” that emphasizes the potential to build political coalitions that could push for a high-pay/high-quality alternative.

Cutting edge feminist investigations of rationality.

Cases where analogy has played a significant role in the formation of a new scientific concept are well-documented. Yet, how is it that genuinely new representations can be constructed from existing representations? It is argued that the process of ‘generic modeling’ enables abstraction of features common to both the domain of the source of the analogy and of the target phenomena. The analysis focuses on James Clerk Maxwell's construction of the electromagnetic field concept. The mathematical representation Maxwell constructed turned out (...) to be a system of abstract laws that when applied to electromagnetic systems yield laws of a dynamical system that will not map back onto the mechanicals domains used in their construction. (shrink)

Knowledge of causal laws is expensive and hard to come by. But we work hard to get it because we believe that it will reduce contingency in planning policies and in building new technologies: knowledge of causal laws allows us to predict reliably what the outcomes will be when we manipulate the factors cited as causes in those laws. Or do they? This paper will argue that causal laws have no special role here. As economists from JS Mill to Robert (...) Lucas and David Hendry stress, along recently with philosophers like James Woodward and Sandra Mitchell, they can do the job only if they are invariant under the manipulations proposed. But then, I shall argue, anything that is invariant under the proposed manipulations will do this job equally well. There seems to be nothing special about causal-law knowledge in and of itself that makes it particularly valuable for policy and technology prediction. What seems to matter is invariance alone, not causality. But what guarantees invariance and how do we know when it will obtain? Here certain kinds of causal laws do have a special place – those underwritten either by what I have called ‘nomological machines’ or by what I have called ‘capacities’. Capacities and nomological machines have a double virtue that makes them invaluable for policy planning. First, the causal laws they give rise to will be invariant so long as they obtain; and second, they typically have visible markers we can come to recognize that tell us when they obtain. The markers for nomological machines are shakier than those for capacities, though, since capacities are often tied to markers by well-established empirical laws. Capacities have their own drawback however, which is the final topic of this paper: the causal laws that are guaranteed by a capacity connect the obtaining of a capacity with its exercise. But Hume argued that no distinction can be made between the obtaining of a power and its exercise. (shrink)

Cases where analogy has played a significant role in the formation of a new scientific concept are well-documented. Yet, how is it that genuinely new representations can be constructed from existing representations? It is argued that the process of ‘generic modeling’ enables abstraction of features common to both the domain of the source of the analogy and of the target phenomena. The analysis focuses on James Clerk Maxwell's construction of the electromagnetic field concept. The mathematical representation Maxwell constructed turned out (...) to be a system of abstract laws that when applied to electromagnetic systems yield laws of a dynamical system that will not map back onto the mechanicals domains used in their construction. (shrink)

Reichenbach worked in an era when philosophers were hopeful about the unity of science, and particularly about unity of method. He looked for universal tests of causal connectedness that could be applied across disciplines and independently of specific modeling assumptions. The hunt for quantum causes reminds us that his hopes were too optimistic. The mark method is not even a starter in testing for causal links between outcomes in E.P.R., because our background hypotheses about these links are too thin to (...) supply the kind of information we need to put the method into play. When we turn to conventional statistical methods, we have seen that one test proposed — robustness of the conditional probabilities — can be conclusive only when we know that there are no other causal factors at work. In the particular case of E.P.R., it has often been assumed that this antecedent question can be settled by applying Reichenbach's conjunctive fork condition. But that application is in no way free of further modeling assumptions. Cartwright (1989) has shown that the conjunctive fork is only a necessary condition on a common cause under very limiting restrictions (restrictions that take one far from the case of maximal commonality); and she has argued that these special conditions are not satisfied in E.P.R.Finally, even given the assumption that there are no other causes at work, the significance of robustness for E.P.R. is unclear. We need a model which tells us how one outcome would influence the other; without that, there is no way of interpreting the results of the robustness test so that it is decisive. In each of the approaches we discussed, Reichenbach provided the crucial guiding ideas that underlay our construction of a causality test; but the articulation of a specific criterion depends on the other details of the model. What is a criterion for a specific kind of link in one model need not be in another. We have illustrated with robustness and E.P.R., but we take the point to be perfectly general: there are no tests of causality outside of models which already have significant causal structure built in. (shrink)

Concept formation in science is a reasoned process, commensurate with ordinary problem-solving processes. An account of how analogical reasoning and reasoning from imagistic representations generate new scientific concepts is presented. The account derives from case studies of concept formation in science and from computational theories of analogical problem solving in cognitive science. Concept formation by analogy is seen to be a process of increasing abstraction from existing conceptual structures.

From the earliest photographic attempts to represent tropical hybrid races to depictions of disease in new tropical medicines, Picturing Tropical Nature offers ...

The paper develops a positive account of the representational capacity of cognitive systems: simple, associationist learning mechanisms and an architecture that supports bootstrapping are sufficient conditions for symbol tool use. In terms of the debates within the philosophy of mind, this paper offers a plausibility account of representation externalism, an alternative to the reductive, computational/representational models of intentionality that still play a leading role in the field. Although the central theme here is representation, methodologically this view complements embodied, enactivist approaches (...) to studying cognition. (shrink)