The human genome is not a uniform structure but, instead, is a mosaic of bands. Some of these bands can be seen by the eye. Stained with Giemsa and viewed under the microscope each human chromosome has a prototypical pattern of light and dark bands (G and R bands respectively). Other bands are not so easily viewed. The human genome is, for example, a mosaic of isochores, blocks of DNA within which the proportion of the bases G and C at (...) silent sites (introns, third positions in codons, intergene spacer) is fairly uniform. Recent work by Matassi and colleagues(1) has revealed what might be a new and unexpected banding pattern. They have found that the genes which are close together on the chromosome have similar rates of evolution. BioEssays 22:105–107, 2000. ©2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Robert Cummins has recently used the program of Clark Hull to illustrate the effects of logical positivist epistemology upon psychological theory. On Cummins's account, Hull's theory is best understood as a functional analysis, rather than a nomological subsumption. Hull's commitment to the logical positivist view of explanation is said to have blinded him to this aspect of this theory, and thus restricted its scope. We will argue that this interpretation of Hull's epistemology, though common, is mistaken. Hull's epistemological views were (...) developed independently of, and in considerable contrast to, the principles of logical positivism. (shrink)

This book is a collection of secondary essays on America's most important philosophic thinkers—statesmen, judges, writers, educators, and activists—from the colonial period to the present. Each essay is a comprehensive introduction to the thought of a noted American on the fundamental meaning of the American regime.

This volume is a collection of essays by various contributors in honor of the late Laurence Berns, Richard Hammond Elliot Tutor Emeritus at St. John's College, Annapolis. The essays address the literary, political, theological, and philosophical themes of his life's work as a scholar, teacher, and constant companion of the "great books.".

Né à Cordoue en 1126, mort en 1198, Ibn Rusd (Averroès), juge, médecin et philosophe andalou, a laissé une œuvre considérable : outre des traités polémiques (contre Galien, contre al-Gazâli) et de nombreux essais, il a consacré à Platon, et surtout à Aristote, des commentaires appelés à exercer une influence particulièrement grande dans les domaines de la logique, de la métaphysique, de la noétique. Rédigé dans les dernières années de sa vie, le Grand Commentaire de la Métaphysique marque le couronnement (...) de l'œuvre philosophique d'Averroès. Ce volume présente la première traduction française annotée du texte arabe de Bêta et du commentaire qu'Averroès y consacre. Souvent considéré comme une introduction générale à toute la métaphysique aristotélicienne, le livre Bêta expose une série d'apories que rencontre le philosophe et qu'il doit tâcher de résoudre. La traduction est précédée d'une introduction qui tente de montrer dans quelle perspective Averroès envisage la " problématique " de la métaphysique. Quels sont les principes, les limites, l'objet ou les enjeux de la métaphysique? Voilà les questions, aussi vastes que capitales, auxquelles Averroès tente ici d'apporter une réponse. (shrink)

Résumé Une interprétation gravée des enfers chinois est le volet plastique de l’œuvre analysée sur le plan théorique par R. Duval. Il s’agit de la présentation du travail de gravure en taille-douce réalisé par L. Tuot d’après les mêmes images.

Creations of the Mind presents sixteen original essays by theorists from a wide variety of disciplines who have a shared interest in the nature of artifacts and their implications for the human mind. All the papers are written specially for this volume, and they cover a broad range of topics concerned with the metaphysics of artifacts, our concepts of artifacts and the categories that they represent, the emergence of an understanding of artifacts in infants' cognitive development, as well as the (...) evolution of artifacts and the use of tools by non-human animals. This volume will be a fascinating resource for philosophers, cognitive scientists, and psychologists, and the starting point for future research in the study of artifacts and their role in human understanding, development, and behaviour.Contributors: John R. Searle, Richard E. Grandy, Crawford L. Elder, Amie L. Thomasson, Jerrold Levinson, Barbara C. Malt, Steven A. Sloman, Dan Sperber, Hilary Kornblith, Paul Bloom, Bradford Z. Mahon, Alfonso Caramazza, Jean M. Mandler, Deborah Kelemen, Susan Carey, Frank C. Keil, Marissa L. Greif, Rebekkah S. Kerner, James L. Gould, Marc D. Hauser, Laurie R. Santos, Steven Mithen. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Designing Academic Conferences in the Light of Second-Order Cybernetics” by Laurence D. Richards. Upshot: The aim of this commentary is to emphasize connections between conversation-based conferences and the foundations of radical constructivism. The Richards article needs no defense - everything said here is already implied within his text. Nevertheless, drawing out the context may be helpful in showing how his suggestions are rooted in the constructivist project.

The field of cognitive modeling has progressed beyond modeling cognition in the context of simple laboratory tasks and begun to attack the problem of modeling it in more complex, realistic environments, such as those studied by researchers in the field of human factors. The problems that the cognitive modeling community is tackling focus on modeling certain problems of communication and control that arise when integrating with the external environment factors such as implicit and explicit knowledge, emotion, cognition, and the cognitive (...) system. These problems must be solved in order to produce integrated cognitive models of moderately complex tasks. Architectures of cognition in these tasks focus on the control of a central system, which includes control of the central processor itself, initiation of functional processes, such as visual search and memory retrieval, and harvesting the results of these functional processes. Because the control of the central system is conceptually different from the internal control required by individual functional processes, a complete architecture of cognition must incorporate two types of theories of control: Type 1 theories of the structure, functionality, and operation of the controller, and type 2 theories of the internal control of functional processes, including how and what they communicate to the controller. This book presents the current state of the art for both types of theories, as well as contrasts among current approaches to human-performance models. It will be an important resource for professional and student researchers in cognitive science, cognitive-engineering, and human-factors.Contributors: Kevin A. Gluck, Jerry T. Ball, Michael A. Krusmark, Richard W. Pew, Chris R. Sims, Vladislav D. Veksler, John R. Anderson, Ron Sun, Nicholas L. Cassimatis, Randy J. Brou, Andrew D. Egerton, Stephanie M. Doane, Christopher W. Myers, Hansjorg Neth, Jeremy M Wolfe, Marc Pomplun, Ronald A. Rensink, Hansjorg Neth, Chris R. Sims, Peter M. Todd, Lael J. Schooler, Wai-Tat Fu, Michael C. Mozer, Sachiko Kinoshita, Michael Shettel, Alex Kirlik, Vladislav D. Veksler, Michael J. Schoelles, Jerome R. Busemeyer, Eric Dimperio, Ryan K. Jessup, Jonathan Gratch, Stacy Marsella, Glenn Gunzelmann, Kevin A. Gluck, Scott Price, Hans P. A. Van Dongen, David F. Dinges, Frank E. Ritter, Andrew L. Reifers, Laura Cousino Klein, Michael J. Schoelles, Eva Hudlicka, Hansjorg Neth, Christopher W. Myers, Dana Ballard, Nathan Sprague, Laurence T. Maloney, Julia Trommershauser, Michael S. Landy, A. Hornof, Michael J. Schoelles, David Kieras, Dario D. Salvucci, Niels Taatgen, Erik M. Altmann, Richard A. Carlson, Andrew Howes, Richard L. Lewis, Alonso Vera, Richard P. Cooper, and Michael D. Byrne. (shrink)

"By combining recent advances in the physical sciences with some of the novel ideas, techniques, and data of modern biology, this book attempts to achieve a new and different kind of evolutionary synthesis. I found it to be challenging, fascinating, infuriating, and provocative, but certainly not dull."--James H, Brown, University of New Mexico "This book is unquestionably mandatory reading not only for every living biologist but for generations of biologists to come."--Jack P. Hailman, Animal Behaviour , review of the first (...) edition "An important contribution to modern evolutionary thinking. It fortifies the place of Evolutionary Theory among the other well-established natural laws."--R.Gessink, TAXON. (shrink)

This study investigates the performance of psychopathic individuals on tasks believed to be sensitive to dorsolateral prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) functioning. Psychopathic and non-psychopathic individuals, as defined by the Hare psychopathy checklist revised (PCL-R) [Hare, The Hare psychopathy checklist revised, Toronto, Ontario: Multi-Health Systems, 1991] completed a gambling task [Cognition 50 (1994) 7] and the intradimensional/extradimensional (ID/ED) shift task [Nature 380 (1996) 69]. On the gambling task, psychopathic participants showed a global tendency to choose disadvantageously. Specifically, they showed an (...) impaired ability to show learning over the course of the task. On the ID/ED task, the performance of psychopathic individuals was not significantly different from incarcerated controls on attentional set-shifting, but significant impairments were found on response reversal. These results are interpreted with reference to an OFC and amygdala dysfunction explanation of psychopathy. (shrink)

Reform of the federal income tax system has become a perennial item on the domestic policy agenda of the United States, although there is considerable uncertainty over specifics. Indeed the recent report of the President's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform recommended not one but two divergent policy directions. In Fundamental Tax Reform, top experts in tax policy discuss a wide range of issues raised by the prospect of significant tax reform, identifying the most critical questions and considering whether the (...) answers are known, unknown--or unknowable. The debates over tax reform usually concern the advantages and disadvantages of income-based taxation as opposed to any of the several alternative forms of consumption-based taxation. The book opens with chapters that discuss the strengths, weaknesses, and political feasibility of these options. Other chapters consider the effect of tax reform on businesses, especially their investment behavior, and include a discussion of possible problems in any transition to a consumption-based tax; international taxation issues arising in an era of globalization; and individual behavioral response to tax reform, including a view of the topic from the perspective of the relatively new field of behavioral economics. ContributorsRosanne Altshuler, Alan J. Auerbach, John W. Diamond, Harry Grubert, Arnold C. Harberger, Kevin A. Hassett, Thomas J. Kniesner, Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Edward J. McCaffery, Kathryn Newmark, David Rapson, Daniel Shaviro, Joel Slemrod, James P. Ziliak, George R. ZodrowDiscussants James Alm, Henry J. Aaron, Charles L. Ballard, Leonard E. Burman, Robert S. Chirinko, Robert D. Dietz, Malcolm Gillis, Roger H. Gordon, Jane G. Gravelle, Timothy S. Gunning, James M. Poterba, Thomas S. Neubig, Alan Viard, George Yin John W. Diamond is Edward and Hermena Kelly Fellow in Tax Policy and Adjunct Professor of Economics at the Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University. George R. Zodrow is Professor of Economics and Rice Scholar at the Baker Institute and International Research Fellow at the Centre for Business Taxation, Oxford University. (shrink)

Patient self-management of disease is increasingly supported by technologies that can monitor a wide range of behavioural and biomedical parameters. Incorporated into everyday devices such as cell phones and clothes, these technologies become integral to the psychosocial aspects of everyday life. Many technologies are likely to be marketed directly to families with ill members, and families may enlist the support of clinicians in shaping use. Current ethical frameworks are mainly conceptualised from the perspective of caregivers, researchers, developers and regulators in (...) order to ensure the ethics of their own practices. This paper focuses on families as autonomous decision-makers outside the regulated context of healthcare. We discuss some morally relevant issues facing families in their decisions to monitor the health-related behaviours of loved ones. An example – remote parental monitoring of adolescent blood glucose – is presented and discussed through the lens of two contrasting accounts of ethics; one reflecting the predominant focus on health outcomes within the health technology assessment (HTA) framework and the other that attends to the broader sociocultural contexts shaping technologies and their implications. Issues discussed include the focus of assessments, informed consent and child assent, and family co-creation of system characteristics and implications. The parents’ decisions to remotely monitor their child has relational implications that are likely to influence conflict levels and thus also health outcomes. Current efforts to better integrate outcome assessments with social and ethical assessments are particularly relevant for informed decision-making about health monitoring technologies in families. (shrink)

The general thesis which I should wish to sustain on this topic is by no means new. It is, briefly, that even in the Republic , where the views on art which Plato propounds are notoriously unsatisfactory to the modern mind, this unsatisfactoriness is not due to any lack of aesthetic sympathy on Plato's part, but on the contrary to what is almost an excess of it. The position as far as I can understand it is this: the true artist (...) is the philosopher, and true artistic insight is episteme . The work of art par excellence is primarily the philosopher's own life-that is, the philosopher himself. (shrink)

Academics are falsely rumored to have a low regard for religion. Although Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, authors of The God Delusion and God Is Not Great , respectively, made atheism a best-selling subject in the United States, it is not coincidental that Hitchens and Dawkins are English. They were educated in a country where a strident antipathy toward religion is not unpatriotic. American atheists with as much brass are rare. Kicking religion around cannot be an American sport because, from (...) colonial to contemporary times, religion has been a central component of American culture. To be sure, a lot of scholarly criticism has been directed at right-wing Christian and Islamic movements. But scholars whose personal views on faith incline them to echo Hitchens's mordant formula that “religion poisons everything” should probably look for a country other than the United States to study. The recent books of historians and sociologists of American religion have taken a tone toward the subject that has ranged from gentle to friendly. (shrink)

The main theoretical issues in the study of the history of the Archaean Controversy in Britain, which arose in the first three papers of the present series, are summarized and discussed—in particular the problem of stratigraphical work in rocks where no fossils can be discerned. The ‘Archaean’ geologists showed some leanings towards Neo-Neptunism and this, together with the fact that their work challenged the Murchison/Survey view of British geology, was one of the reasons for the controversy. At a deeper level, (...) however, the question concerned the doctrine of uniformitarianism: Were metamorphic rocks to be found at any part of the stratigraphical column, or were they confined to the earliest period of the Earth's history? The establishment of the concept of Precambrian rocks and a suitable stratotype boundary is essentially a social question that has to be determined within the geological community. Some of the social processes whereby these matters are decided internationally are considered, and it is noted that the best location of the ‘Golden Spike’ for the Precambrian/Cambrian boundary has only just been settled . The paper also explores some nineteenth-century ideas about the nature of metamorphism, and the early conditions of the world. (shrink)

The work of the lay Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain continues to provoke and inspire readers to engage in a Thomistic approach to many of the questions facing the world today. Maritain’s wide-ranging thought touched on many fields, including aesthetics, anthropology, educational theory, moral philosophy, and ethics, as well as Thomism and its relationship to other philosophical stances._ In _Being in the World: A Quotable Maritain Reader_, Mario O. D’Souza, C.S.B., has selected seven hundred and fifty of the most salient quotations (...) found in the English translations of fifty-four works by Jacques Maritain. Organized into forty thematic chapters, ordered alphabetically, the book serves as an overview of the areas that Maritain's writings addressed. By referring to entries in _Being in the World_, readers can quickly locate key passages in Maritain’s writing on a given topic and then turn elsewhere to the full texts for more in-depth study. Complete with a detailed index of key terms, the _Reader _will be an essential reference tool for the study of Maritain in English. "Fr. Mario O. D'Souza's careful selection from the works of Jacques Maritain provides the reader with an invaluable sampling of Maritain's extensive philosophical work. In it, we find examples of Maritain's almost lyrical gift of expression as well as of his trenchant wit. More than a scholarly contribution, the volume also ably serves as an introduction and entrance into Maritain's corpus." — William Sweet, St. Francis Xavier University, Canada_. (shrink)

This article examines the meaning and role of conscience in the political theology of John Calvin. It argues that the focus in Calvin scholarship on whether conscience makes political order possible without the aid of scripture is misplaced. Although Calvin views conscience as a providential gift that restrains evil to some degree, he puts forth this claim only as part of his defence of God's right to punish all humans eternally. Conscience, that is, renders humans 'inexcusable' before God. Thus, to (...) ask whether conscience makes political order possible in and of itself is to ask a question with which Calvin does not concern himself. Doing so obscures the real significance of conscience for Calvin's political theory: conscience as the starting point for the construction of a Christian polity. The torments of conscience prompt individuals to seek relief, driving them to Christ for salvation and forgiveness of their sins. This, in turn, leads them to submit willingly to the 'external aids' or 'outward helps' of the church and civil government in order to live just and virtuous lives. (shrink)