The privacy of the dead might be thought to be violated by, for instance, the disinterment for research purposes of human physical remains or the posthumous revelation of embarrassing facts about people's private lives. But are there any moral rights to privacy which extend beyond the grave? Although this notion can be challenged on the ground that death marks the end of the personal subject, with the consequent extinction of her interests, I argue that a right to privacy belongs to (...) deceased persons in virtue of their moral status while alive and reflects their interest in the preservation of their dignity. The paper investigates what prima-facie privacy rights and interests may plausibly be ascribed to the dead and why these need to be taken seriously by those, such as archaeologists or biographers, who have "dealings with the dead.". (shrink)

A primary proposal of the Cowan target article is that capacity limits arise in working memory because only 4 chunks of information can be attended at one time. This implies a single, unitary attentional focus or resource; we instead propose that relatively independent attentional mech- anisms operate within different cognitive subsystems depending on the demands of the current stimuli and tasks.

Because commemorations of historic events say as much about the present as the past, it is important to think carefully about how and why we should remember the Great War in the centenary year of its outbreak. Commemoration must not be allowed to degenerate into mere mass entertainment, thoughtless celebration of martial valour, an occasion for chauvinism, or an advertisement for the merits of war as a means of settling international disputes. More respectable reasons for commemorating the Great War are (...) that it provides opportunities to learn from past mistakes, to reaffirm some common core values, and to pay our respects to those who died in their country’s service. I argue, however, that each of these justifications raises serious problems of interpretation and application, and that careful thought and moral sensitivity are needed if our efforts at commemoration are not to send out the wrong messages. (shrink)

The Müller & Schumann (M&S) view of drug use is courageous and compelling, with radical implications for drug policy and research. It implies that most nations prohibit most drugs that could promote happiness, social capital, and economic growth; that most individuals underuse rather than overuse drugs; and that behavioral scientists could use drugs more effectively in generating hypotheses and collaborating empathically.

Madole & Harden develop some good ideas about how to understand genetic causality more clearly, but they frame the benefits of behavior genetics research at a largely collective level, focused on the pros and cons of different ways to engineer the gene pool or social behavior. This neglects the individual benefits of hereditarian insights for mate choice and parenting.

A nontechnical review is given of a topological bootstrap theory, with emphasis on theraison d'être for an electromagnetism whose fine-structure constant is of order10 −2.

Male provisioning ability may have evolved as a “good dad” indicator through sexual selection, whereas male creativity may have evolved partly as a “good genes” indicator. If so, women near peak fertility (midcycle) should prefer creativity over wealth, especially in short-term mating. Forty-one normally cycling women read vignettes describing creative but poor men vs. uncreative but rich men. Women’s estimated fertility predicted their short-term (but not long-term) preference for creativity over wealth, in both their desirability ratings of individual men (r=.40, (...) p<.01) and their forced-choice decisions between men (r=.46, p<.01). These preliminary results are consistent with the view that creativity evolved at least partly as a good genes indicator through mate choice. (shrink)

To understand the possible forms of extraterrestrial intelligence, we need not only astrobiology theories about how life evolves given habitable planets, but also evolutionary psychology theories about how intelligence emerges given life. Wherever intelligent organisms evolve, they are likely to face similar behavioral challenges in their physical and social worlds. The cognitive mechanisms that arise to meet these challenges may then be copied, repurposed, and shaped by further evolutionary selection to deal with more abstract, higher-level cognitive tasks such as conceptual (...) reasoning, symbolic communication, and technological innovation, while retaining traces of the earlier adaptations for solving physical and social problems. These traces of evolutionary pathways may be leveraged to gain insight into the likely cognitive processes of ETIs. We demonstrate such analysis in the domain of search strategies and show its application in the domains of emotional aversions and social/sexual signaling. Knowing the likely evolutionary pathways to intelligence will help us to better search for and process any alien signals from the search for ETIs and to assess the likely benefits, costs, and risks of humans actively messaging ETIs. (shrink)

Critics of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology have advanced an adaptationists-as-right-wing-conspirators (ARC) hypothesis, suggesting that adaptationists use their research to support a right-wing political agenda. We report the first quantitative test of the ARC hypothesis based on an online survey of political and scientific attitudes among 168 US psychology Ph.D. students, 31 of whom self-identified as adaptationists and 137 others who identified with another non-adaptationist meta-theory. Results indicate that adaptationists are much less politically conservative than typical US citizens and no more (...) politically conservative than non-adaptationist graduate students. Also, contrary to the “adaptationists-as-pseudo-scientists” stereotype, adaptationists endorse more rigorous, progressive, quantitative scientific methods in the study of human behavior than non-adaptationists. (shrink)

Despite the importance of extrapair copulation (EPC) in human evolution, almost nothing is known about the design features of EPC detection mechanisms. We tested for sex differences in EPC inference-making mechanisms in a sample of 203 young couples. Men made more accurate inferences (φmen = 0.66, φwomen = 0.46), and the ratio of positive errors to negative errors was higher for men than for women (1.22 vs. 0.18). Since some may have been reluctant to admit EPC behavior, we modeled how (...) underreporting could have influenced these results. These analyses indicated that it would take highly sex-differentiated levels of underreporting by subjects with trusting partners for there to be no real sex difference. Further analyses indicated that men may be less willing to harbor unresolved suspicions about their partners’ EPC behavior, which may explain the sex difference in accuracy. Finally, we estimated that women underreported their own EPC behavior (10%) more than men (0%). (shrink)

The DNA in human cells is continuously undergoing damage as consequences of both endogenous processes and exposure to exogenous agents. The resulting structural changes can be repaired by a number of systems that function to preserve genome integrity. Most pathways are multicomponent, involving incision in the damaged DNA strand and resynthesis using the undamaged strand as a template. In contrast, O6-alkylguanine-DNA alkyltransferase is able to act as a single protein that reverses specific types of alkylation damage simply by removing the (...) offending alkyl group, which becomes covalently attached to the protein and inactivates it. The types of damage that ATase repairs are potentially toxic, mutagenic, recombinogenic and clastogenic. They are generated by certain classes of carcinogenic and chemotherapeutic alkylating agents. There is consequently a great deal of interest in this repair system in relation to both carcinogenesis and cancer chemotherapy. BioEssays 24:255–266, 2002. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.; DOI 10.1002/bies.10063. (shrink)

It has recently emerged that malarial, toxoplasmodial and related parasites contain a vestigial plastid (the organelle in which photosynthesis occurs in plants and algae). The function of the plastid in these obligate intracellular parasites has not been established. It seems likely that modern apicomplexans derive from photosynthetic predecessors, which perhaps formed associations with protists and invertebrates and abandoned autotrophy in favour of parasitism. Recognition of a third genetic compartment in these parasites proffers alternative strategies for combating a host of important (...) human and animal diseases. It also poses some fascinating questions about the evolutionary biology of this important group of pathogens. (shrink)

This paper describes the application of eight statistical and machine-learning methods to derive computer models for predicting mortality of hospital patients with pneumonia from their findings at initial presentation. The eight models were each constructed based on 9847 patient cases and they were each evaluated on 4352 additional cases. The primary evaluation metric was the error in predicted survival as a function of the fraction of patients predicted to survive. This metric is useful in assessing a model’s potential to assist (...) a clinician in deciding whether to treat a given patient in the hospital or at home. We examined the error rates of the models when predicting that a given fraction of patients will survive. We examined survival fractions between 0.1 and 0.6. Over this range, each model’s predictive error rate was within 1% of the error rate of every other model. When predicting that approximately 30°K of the patients will survive, all the models have an error rate of less than 1.5%. The models are distinguished more by the number of variables and parameters that they contain than by their error rates; these differences suggest which models may be the most amenable to future implementation as paper-based guidelines. (shrink)

In this volume, Geoffrey Madell develops a revised account of the self, making a compelling case for why the "simple" or "anti-criterial" view of personal identity warrants a robust defense. Madell critiques recent discussions of the self for focusing on features which are common to all selves, and which therefore fail to capture the uniqueness of each self. In establishing his own view of personal identity, Madell proposes that there is always a gap between ‘A is f and g’ (...) and ‘ I am f and g’ ; , that a complete description of the world offered without recourse to indexicals will fail to account for the contingent truth that I am one of the persons described; and , that an account of conscious perspectives on the world must take into account what it means for an apparently arbitrary one of these perspectives to be mine . Engaging with contemporary positions on the first person, embodiment, psychological continuity, and other ongoing arguments, Madell contends that there can be no such thing as a criterion of personal identity through time, that no bodily or psychological continuity approach to the issue can succeed, and that personal identity through time must be absolute, not a matter of degree. Madell’s view that the nature of the self is substantively different from that of objects in the world will generate significant discussion and debate among philosophers of mind. (shrink)

In the United States, approximately 2.53 million people sustain a concussion each year. Relative to adults, youth show greater cognitive deficits following concussion and a longer recovery. An accurate and reliable imaging method is needed to determine injury severity and symptom resolution. The primary objective of this study was to characterize concussions with diffusion tensor imaging. This was performed through a normative Z-scoring analysis of DTI metrics, fractional anisotropy, axial diffusivity, and radial diffusivity, to quantify patient-specific injuries and identify commonly (...) damaged brain regions in paediatric concussion patients relative to healthy controls. It was hypothesized that personalizing the detection analysis through normative Z-scoring would provide an understanding of trauma-induced microstructural damage. Concussion patients were volunteers recruited from the Emergency Department of the McMaster Children’s Hospital with a recent concussion, 9 males and 17 females, mean age 14.22 ± 2.64, while healthy paediatric brain DTI datasets were obtained from an MRI data repository. Significant abnormalities were commonly found in the longitudinal fasciculus, fronto-occipital fasciculus, and corticospinal tract, while unique abnormalities were localized in a number of other areas reflecting the individuality of each child’s injury. Total injury burden, determined by the number of regions containing outliers per DTI metric per patient, was used as the metric to quantify the overall injury severity of each patient. The primary outcome of this analysis found that younger patients experienced a significantly greater injury burden when measured using fractional anisotropy. These results show that DTI was able to detect microstructural changes caused by concussion, on a per-person basis, and has the potential to be a useful tool for improving diagnostic accuracy and prognosis of a concussion. (shrink)