Although there is no questioning the heroism of those who “rebel against the selfish replicators” their task seems very nearly insurmountable. I question whether anyone can formulate a broadly acceptable moral system that will not in some respects be constrained by the legacy of generations spent as selfish and kin‐selected replicators.

Sociobiologists and feminists agree that men in patriarchal social systems seek to control females, but sociobiologists go further, using Darwin’s theory of sexual selection and Trivers’s ideas on parental investment to explain why males should attempt to control female sexuality. From this perspective, the stage for the development under some conditions of patriarchal social systems was set over the course of primate evolution. Sexual selection encompasses both competition between males and female choice. But in applying this theory to our “lower (...) origins” (prehominid ancestors), Darwin assumed that choices were made by essentially “coy” females. I argue here that female solicitation of multiple males (either simultaneously or sequentially, depending on the breeding system) characterized prehominid females; this prehominid legacy of cyclical sexual assertiveness, itself possibly a female counter-strategy to male efforts to control the timing of female reproduction, generated further male counter-strategies. This dialectic had important implications for emerging hominid mating systems, human evolution, and the development of patriarchal arrangements in some human societies. For hominid males who will invest in offspring, there would be powerful selection for emotions, behaviors, and customs that ensure them certainty of paternity. The sexual modesty that so struck Darwin can be explained as a recent evolved or learned (perhaps both) adaptation in women to avoid penalties imposed by patrilines on daughters and mates who failed to conform to the patriline’s prevailing norms for their sex. Other supposedly innate universals, such as female preferences for wealthy husbands, are also likely to be facultative accommodations by women to constraints set up when patrilines monopolized resources needed by females to survive and reproduce, and passed on intergenerational control of these resources preferentially to sons. (shrink)

A historical survey of the inheritance practices of farming families in North America and elsewhere indicates that resource allocations among children differed through time and space with regard to sex bias and equality. Tensions between provisioning all children and maintaining a productive economic entity (the farm) were resolved in various ways, depending on population pressures, the family’s relative resource level, and the number and sex of children.Against a backdrop of generalized son preference, parents responded to ecological circumstances by investing in (...) offspring differentially within and between the sexes. Vesting the preponderance of family resources in one heir increased the likelihood of at least one line surviving across several generations, whereas varying degrees of parental investment in emigrating sons or out-marrying daughters might yield boom or bust harvests of grandchildren according to circumstances in more remote locales. Primogeniture (eldest son as primary heir) allowed early identification of heirs and appropriate socialization, as well as more time for parents to contribute to the heir’s reproductive success. Son bias and unigeniture decreased as numbers of children per family declined, as land became less critical to economic success, and as legal changes improved the resource-holding potential of females. We suggest that changing ecological conditions affected parental decisions regarding resource allocation among children at least as much as did changing ideologies of parent-child relations. (shrink)

Early studies of primate social behavior were distorted by observational, methodological, and ideological biases that caused researchers to overlook active roles played by females in the social lives of monkeys. Primatology provides a particularly well documented case illustrating why research programs in the social and natural sciences need multiple studies that enlist researchers from diverse backgrounds.

Sarah Hrdy argues that women (1) possess a reproductive behavioral strategy including infanticide, (2) that this strategy is an adaptation and (3) arose as a response to stresses mothers faced with the agrarian revolution. I argue that while psychopathological and cultural evolutionary accounts for Hrdy's data fail, her suggested psychological architecture for the strategy suggests that the behavior she describes is really only the consequence of the operation of practical reasoning mechanism(s) – and consequently there is no (...) reproductive strategy including infanticide as such, nor could the alleged strategy be sufficiently mosaic to count as an adaptation. What might count as an adaptation is a ‘window’ before bonding that permits practical reasoning about the reproductive value of infants and hence variable maternal investment, and which, contra (3) arose early in hominid history due to a combination of increases in infant dependency and increased human abilities for conditional practical reasoning. (shrink)

Table of Contents I. WHO ARE THE SCIENTISTS? Historically. Women in the Origins of Modern Science, Londa Schiebinger. Women of Third World Descent in the Sciences, Sandra Harding. Recently. Women in Science: Half In Half Out, Vivian Gornick.”How Can a Little Girl Like You Teach a Great Big Class of Men?’ the Chairman Said, and Other Adventures of a Woman in Science, Naomi Weisstein. The Anomaly of a Woman in Physics, Evelyn Fox Keller. Currently. Women Join the Ranks of Science (...) but Remain Invisible at the Top, Natalie Angier. Creeping Toward Inclusivity in Science, Phyllis Goldberg. II. WHAT KIND OF ENTERPRISE IS SCIENCE? Science’s Aims, Methods, and Norms of Behavior. Patriarchy, Scientists, and Nuclear Warriors, Brian Easlea. Culturally Inclusive Chemistry, Catherine Hurt Middlecamp. A World of Difference, Evelyn Fox Keller. Interviewing Women: A Contradiction in Terms, Ann Oakley. Science’s Subject Matter. Have Only Men Evolved?, Ruth Hubbard. Empathy, Polyandry, and the Myth of the Coy Female, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. The Importance of Feminist Critique for Contemporary Cell Biology, The Biology and Gender Study Group. The Engendering of Archaeology: Refiguring Feminist Science Studies, Alison Wylie. Still Seeking Transformation: Feminist Challenges to Psychology, Sue Wilkinson. Science’s Social Effects. Androcentric Bias in Clinical Research, Sue Rosser. Man-Made Medicine and Women’s Health, Nancy Krieger and Elizabeth Fee. The New Procreative Technologies, Ruth Hubbard. A Question of Genius: Are Men Really Smarter Than Women?, Anne Fausto-Sterling. III. WHAT KIND OF ENTERPRISE OUGHT SCIENCE TO BE? Feminist Empiricism. Subjects, Power, and Knowledge: Description and Prescription in Feminist Philosophies of Science, Helen Longino. Epistemological Communities, Lynn Hankinson Nelson. Feminist Standpoint Theory. ”Strong Objectivity’: A Response to the New Objectivity Question, Sandra Harding. Introduction to Tomorrow’s Tomorrow: The Black Woman, Joyce Ladner. Feminist Postmodernism. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, Donna Haraway. Though This Be Method, Yet There Is Madness in It: Paranoia and Liberal Epistemology, Naomi Scheman. (shrink)

Through a close analysis of socio-biologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s work on motherhood and ‘mirror neurons’ it is argued that Hrdy’s claims exemplify how research that ostensibly bases itself on neuroscience, including in literary studies ‘literary Darwinism’, relies after all not on scientific, but on political assumptions, namely on underlying, unquestioned claims about the autonomous, transparent, liberal agent of consumer capitalism. These underpinning assumptions, it is further argued, involve the suppression or overlooking of an alternative, prior tradition of (...) feminist theory, including feminist science criticism. (shrink)

This is a joint review of Shirley Strum and Linda Fedigan's Primate Encounters: Models of Science, Gender, and Society (Chicago, 2000) and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection (Pantheon, 1999).

Developmental psychologists identify propensities for social engagement in human infants that are less evident in other apes; Sarah Hrdy links these social propensities to novel features of human childrearing. Unlike other ape mothers, humans can bear a new baby before the previous child is independent because they have help. This help alters maternal trade-offs and so imposes new selection pressures on infants and young children to actively engage their caretakers’ attention and commitment. Such distinctive childrearing is part of (...) our grandmothering life history. While consequences for other cooperative activities must surely follow, the novel rearing environments set up by helpful grandmothering can explain why natural selection escalated preferences and motivations for interactivity in our lineage in the first place, and why, unlike other aspects of infant development, social sensitivities are not delayed in humans compared with genus Pan. (shrink)

I agree with comments suggesting that humans must make an unremitting effort to expand a circle of sympathy for others. However, I disagree with the idea, expressed by everyone except Sarah Hrdy, that evolution is in some sense consistently good.

The present paper focuses on essentialism about natural kinds as a case study in order to illustrate this more general point. Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam famously argued that natural kinds have essences, which are discovered by science, and which determine the extensions of our natural kind terms and concepts. This line of thought has been enormously influential in philosophy, and is often taken to have been established beyond doubt. The argument for the conclusion, however, makes critical use of intuitions, (...) and I note that the intuitions are of the sort had by preschool children, and that they are traceable to a deep-seated cognitive outlook, which is often called “psychological essentialism.” Further, if we did not have such a cognitive outlook or implicit belief set—a belief set which is in fact in place by at least age 4—then we would not have the relevant philosophical intuitions. In light of this, I consider the question of whether natural kinds actually have scientifically discovered or discoverable essences, and whether these putative essences could determine the extensions of our terms and concepts as Kripke, Putnam, and many others have supposed. In fact, a number of philosophers of biology and chemistry have argued that biological and chemical kinds do not have such essences, yet these arguments—particularly in the case of chemistry—have not been assimilated by philosophers more generally. The reason for this poor assimilation is, I suggest, that the Kripke/Putnam view is just so intuitive. But this fact, I argue, is due to a deep-seated cognitive bias, rather than to any special insight into the nature of reality. (shrink)

We sometimes strive to achieve difficult goals when our evidence suggests that success is unlikely – not just because it will require strength of will, but because we are targets of prejudice and discrimination or because success will require unusual ability. Optimism about one’s prospects can be useful for persevering in these cases. That said, excessive optimism can be dangerous; when our evidence is unfavourable, we should be at most agnostic about whether we will succeed. This paper explores the nature (...) and rational significance of agnostic practical commitments. Most importantly, the rationality of striving against the odds can depend on investing in a plan for failure: a plan B. I aim to make headway on an account of what backup plans are, how they are related to primary plans, and whether the standard norms of plan rationality apply to our agnostic commitments. (shrink)

In order to be a self-governing agent, a person must govern the process by means of which she acquires the intention to act as she does. But what does governing this process require? The standard compatibilist answers to this question all assume that autonomous actions differ from nonautonomous actions insofar as they are a more perfect expression of the agent’s agency. I challenge this conception of autonomous agents as super agents. The distinguishing feature of autonomous agents is, I argue, the (...) nonagential role they play in the formation of their intentions. I offer an account of the relevant role. (shrink)

In a series of recent articles, Robin Jeshion has developed a theory of singular thought which she calls ‘cognitivism’. According to Jeshion, cognitivism offers a middle path between acquaintance theories—which she takes to impose too strong a requirement on singular thought, and semantic instrumentalism—which she takes to impose too weak a requirement. In this article, I raise a series of concerns about Jeshion's theory, and suggest that the relevant data can be accommodated by a version of acquaintance theory that distinguishes (...) unsuccessful thoughts of singular form from successful singular thoughts, and in addition allows for ‘trace-based’ acquaintance. (shrink)

This paper discusses the possibility of autonomy in our epistemic lives, and the importance of the concept of the first person in weathering fluctuations in our epistemic perspective over time.

In her thought-provoking symposium contribution, ‘What Is Impostor Syndrome?’, Katherine Hawley fleshes out our everyday understanding of that concept. This response builds on Hawley’s account to ask the ameliorative question of whether the everyday concept best serves the normative goals of promoting social justice and enhancing well-being. I raise some sceptical worries about the usefulness of the notion, in so far as it is centred on doxastic attitudes that include doubt about one’s own talent or skill. I propose instead that (...) a narrower conception emphasizing the debilitating emotional and behavioural consequences of such beliefs might be preferable, and that the causes of such consequences would be better thought of as unjustified rather than false beliefs about one’s own competence. (shrink)

This paper offers observations on people’s lived experience of the food system in Michigan during the early Covid-19 pandemic as an initial critical foray into the everyday pandemic food world. The Covid-19 crisis illuminates a myriad of adaptive food behaviors, as people struggle to address their destabilized lives, including the casual acknowledgement of the pandemic, then anxiety of the unknown, the subsequent new dependency, and the possible emergence of a new normal. The pandemic makes the injustices inherent in the food (...) system apparent across communities, demonstrating that food injustice destabilizes all members of the food system, regardless of their social location. The challenges of eating in a pandemic also reinforce the importance of building a sustainable food system; the challenges of food sovereignty and food sustainability are inextricably linked, and the pandemic lays this bare. (shrink)

It is useful on the occasion of the 21st anniversary of the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ not only to reconsider its lessons in the context of what is frequently described as the re-engineering of ‘life itself’, but to look at Haraway’s earlier work on embryos. In this article I begin with Haraway’s analysis of embryology in the 1970s to suggest her cyborg embryo was already there, and has, if anything, gained relevance in today’s embryo-strewn society. I argue further, as the title suggests, (...) that the cyborg embryo has been crucial in defining our path to what I am calling here, building on Haraway’s notion of trans from Modest_Witness, ‘transbiology’ - broadly meaning stem cell research, cloning, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. To illustrate this argument I draw on recent ethnographic fieldwork in a new stem cell derivation facility in the UK built adjacent to an IVF surgery. Using this example, I explore the important and paradoxical role of IVF in the emergence of stem cell science, cloning and transbiology, suggesting that Haraway’s analysis remains crucial to understanding the ironic and contradictory, and unexpectedly generative, circumstances through which the IVF-stem cell interface - the door to transbiology - came into being. (shrink)

Dance as a complex human activity is a rich test case for exploring perception in action. In this article, we explore a 4E approach to perception/action in dance, focussing on the intersubjective and ecological aspects of kinaesthetic attunement and their capacity to expand empathic and perceptive experience. We examine the question: what are the ways in which the performance ecology co-created in different dance practices influences empathic and perceptive experience? We adopt an enactive ethnographic and phenomenological approach to explore two (...) distinct dance forms: Contact Improvisation [CI], a duet-system based practice aimed at fostering interkinaesthetic awareness and challenging habits of movement; and Body Weather [BW], an anti-hierarchical movement practice sensitive to the surrounding environment. We argue that through intersubjective kinaesthetic attunement, CI scaffolds the development of perceptive awareness of subtle shifts within ourselves and others, allowing the cultivation of a capacity for flexibly traversing between conscious initiation of action, attuned responding, and the intersection between them. Similarly, we investigate the expansion of perceptive experience through kinaesthetic attunement in BW. We suggest that the capacity for empathy is enhanced in BW through drawing attention to, and perception of, the fullness of a place in a way that we do not typically experience. By focussing on the variations in which embodied perceptual skills are enacted in specific dance forms and the expansion of perceptive experience through kinaesthetic attunement, we stress the potential of the performing arts to cultivate and create new ways of empathic engagement with the world in which we find ourselves. (shrink)

This volume examines the pilgrimage image in order to develop an unprecedented account of moral and aesthetic formation in Augustine's thought. In so doing, it will shed new light on enduring ethical debates regarding neighbourly love.

In light of Jacques Derrida’s writings on death and mourning, it may seem that the Christian teaching that the dead will be raised is a betrayal of others, a failure to take up one’s responsibility to testify to those who have died. In conversation with Emmanuel Falque’s work on finitude, Martin Heidegger’s reading of 1 Thessalonians, and Søren Kierkegaard’s reading of Abraham, I respond in two movements to this objection to faith that God will raise the dead. First, I propose (...) that even for the Christian, the death of the other remains a loss, since the Christian must surrender the other to God. It is, however, this very surrender of the other to God that seems to be an abdication of responsibility. Second, therefore, I argue that faith in the resurrection decenters the self and challenges our understanding of responsibility even more than does Derrida’s own analysis. Faith, I conclude, means giving up the desire to cling to one’s own responsibility. (shrink)

En este artículo se desarrolla el marco conceptual del “contextualismo sexual” para el estudio de las variables relacionadas con el sexo en la investigación biomédica. El contextualismo sexual ofrece una alternativa a los enfoques sexuales binarios y esencialistas del estudio del sexo como variable biológica. Específicamente, el contextualismo sexual reconoce el pluralismo y la especificidad contextual que tienen las operacionalizaciones de “sexo” a través de la investigación experimental de laboratorio. A la luz de recientes normativas para la consideración del sexo (...) como variable biológica, el contextualismo sexual ofrece una guía constructiva a los/as investigadores/as biomédicos/as para abordar la variación biológica relacionada con el sexo. En tanto alternativa y crítica al esencialismo binario del sexo biológico, el contextualismo sexual contribuye a los debates actuales en filosofía de la biología, estudios feministas de la ciencia y ontología social en torno a la construcción de categorías de la diferencia sexual/genérica en la investigación científica. (shrink)

One of the most important lessons the work of Marilyn Strathern has taught us about knowledge practices is how they stand alone or intersect according to their context. In turn, this has helped us to develop a more dynamic account of knowledge formations as they both travel and stand still. Indeed it is the vacillation between movement and stasis that explains how essentialisms can either anchor cultural systems of thought or become unmoored – a process Strathern has tracked across both (...) cultural and epistemological contexts. In this paper I use the biological sciences as a context in which to track the process by which analogies ‘travel back’ to remake both their object and its epistemology, or ‘habits of thought’. Indeed, context itself can change, and be changed by, what I am calling analogic return – something we might also consider in relation to scale or perception, or as one of the world-making practices out of which we constantly remake ourselves, now more literally than ever in the context of new genetic technologies and stem cell science. (shrink)

In three studies, we explored the retention and transfer of tool-making knowledge, learnt from an adult demonstration, to other temporal and task contexts. All studies used a variation of a task in which children had to make a hook tool to retrieve a bucket from a tall transparent tube. Children who failed to innovate the hook tool independently saw a demonstration. In Study 1, we tested children aged 4 to 6 years (N = 53) who had seen the original demonstration (...) 3 months earlier. Performance was excellent at the second time, indicating that children’s knowledge was retained over the 3 month period. In Studies 2 and 3 we explored transfer of the new knowledge to other tasks. In Study 2, children were given two variants of the apparatus that differed in surface characteristics (e.g. shape and colour). Participants generalised their knowledge to these new apparatuses even though the new pipecleaner also differed in size and colour. Five- to 6-year-olds (n = 22) almost always transferred their knowledge to problems where the same tool had to be made. Younger, 3- to 5-year-olds’ (n = 46), performance was more variable. In Study 3, 4- to 7-year-olds (N = 146) saw a demonstration of hook making with a pipecleaner, but then had to make a tool by combining pieces of wooden dowel (or vice versa: original training on dowel, transfer to pipecleaner). Children did not transfer their tool-making knowledge to the new material. Children retained tool-making knowledge over time and transferred their knowledge to new situations in which they needed to make a similar tool from similar materials, but not different materials. We concluded that children’s ability to use tool-making knowledge in novel situations is likely to depend on memory and analogical reasoning, with the latter continuing to develop during middle childhood. (shrink)

This paper considers the obligation higher income countries have to lower and middle income countries during a global pandemic. Further considers which reforms are needed to the global supply-chain of medical resources. The short-comings in distribution and medical infrastructure have exacerbated the health crisis in developing countries. Global justice demands radical redistribution of medical resources in order to prevent mass casualties. This is argued first by highlighting that the COVID-19 pandemic should be acknowledged as an issue of global justice, secondly, (...) higher income countries ought to account for distribution inequity as a matter of rectifying past injustices, and thirdly argue for reform in distribution while considering the vaccine rollout as a prime example. We aim to show how the differences from country to country in response capabilities are a result of the economic foundation colonialism established and a direct result of cyclical poverty, which wealthy countries perpetuate to this day. (shrink)

Many if not all evidential languages have a mirative evidential: an indirect evidential that can, in some contexts, mark mirativity (the expression of speaker surprise) instead of indirect evidence. We address several questions posed by this systematic polysemy: What is the affinity between indirect evidence and speaker surprise? What conditions the two interpretations? And how do mirative evidentials relate to other mirative markers? We propose a unified analysis of mirative evidentials where indirect evidentiality and mirativity involve a common epistemic component. (...) A mirative interpretation requires a close temporal proximity between the speech event and the event of the speaker's learning the at-issue content. (shrink)

Bodily methodologies that engage with the affective, rhythmic, and temporal dimensions of movement have altered the landscape of social science and humanities research. Walking is one such methodology by which scholars have examined vital, sensory, material, and ephemeral intensities beyond the logics of representation. Extending this rich field, this article invokes the concept trans to reconceptualize walking research through theories that attend to the vitality and agency of matter, the interconnectedness between humans and non-humans, the importance of mediation and bodily (...) affect, and the necessity of acknowledging ethico-political responsibility. While theoretical and empirical research about embodied, emplaced, and sensorial relations between moving bodies and space are well developed in the field of walking studies, their entanglements become profoundly altered by theories of trans – transcorporeality, transspecies, and transmaterialities. Taking up trans theories we experiment in thinking-with a sonic art performance, Walking to the Laundromat, which probes bodily, affective, and gendered labour. (shrink)