We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Currently in the United Kingdom, anyone donating gametes has the status of an open-identity donor. This means that, at the age of 18, persons conceived with gametes donated since April 1, 2005 have a right to access certain pieces of identifying information about their donor. However, in early 2015, the UK Parliament approved new regulations that make mitochondrial donors anonymous. Both mitochondrial donation and gamete donation are similar in the basic sense that they involve the contribution of gamete materials to (...) create future persons. Given this similarity, this paper presumes that both types of donor should be treated the same and made open-identity under the law, unless there is a convincing argument for treating them differently. I argue that none of the existing arguments that have been made so far in favor of mitochondrial donor anonymity are convincing and mitochondrial donors should therefore be treated as open-identity donors under UK law. (shrink)

Introduction Few areas of social inquiry are more exciting and important, and yet at the same time more marked by controversy and dispute, than the area ...

This book offers a clear and highly readable introduction to the ethical and social-political philosophy of John Stuart Mill. Dale E. Miller argues for a "utopian" reading of Mill's utilitarianism. He analyses Mill's views on happiness and goes on to show the practical, social and political implications that can be drawn from his utilitarianism, especially in relation to the construction of morality, individual freedom, democratic reform, and economic organization. By highlighting the utopian thinking which lies at the heart of (...) Mill's theories, Miller shows that rather than allowing for well-being for the few, Mill believed that a society must do everything in its power to see to it that each individual can enjoy a genuinely happy life if the happiness of its members is to be maximized. Miller provides a cogent and careful account of the main arguments offered by Mill, considers the critical responses to his work, and assesses its legacy for contemporary philosophy. Lucidly and persuasively written, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars seeking to understand the continued importance of Mill's thinking. (shrink)

IN A RECENT AND PHILOSOPHICALLY RICH STUDY, David Wood has undertaken the deconstruction of time through an engagement with the thought of Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and, of course, Derrida. The present essay is not intended to offer a sustained criticism of Wood's arguments or to canvass what he says about the quartet of philosophers noted above; rather, with his book as background, the essay's purpose is to say something about only one of the four philosophers--Edmund Husserl--and particularly about the place (...) of presence and absence in Husserl's phenomenology of time and the consciousness of time. The results may supply ammunition both to those inclined to criticize Husserl from a deconstructive point of view and to those bold enough to defend him. In any event, what Husserl has to say about these matters is worth considering for its own sake. His discussion of the different ways in which presence and absence enter into our temporal experience is subtle and nuanced. He draws delicate distinctions and points to continuities and discontinuities that deserve the philosopher's careful and sympathetic attention. I will focus on a few of these, hoping that they will suggest something of the rich resources for reflection on this topic that are present in Husserl's texts. (shrink)

Entwhistle and Watt (2013) make an important contribution to the person-centred view of health care by reframing past thinking on the subject in terms of the capability approach. Past thinking about person-centred care employs a range of normative values that are arguably supportive of the concept of a person. But ironically these values are not clearly grounded in any account of what the person is. Thus, it is not clear what anchors these values and so how they are to be (...) interpreted. (shrink)

To a student audience seduced by the claims of a ‘secular Christianity’, Professor Gordon Rupp once urged the combined loyalties of ‘worldmanship’ and ‘other-worldmanship’. The Muslim world shows little friendship to secularist ideologies which explicitly reject the eschatological dimension, but Muslims are increasingly involved in secularising processes; many of these are ‘Islamised’, if they are compatible with Islamic social or political ideals, and the stigma of bid‘ah , innovation, is thereby avoided. A Lebanese author, Muhammad Darwazah, in his Dustūr al-Qur’ (...) ānī , Cairo 1956, advocated a ‘Qur'ānic Constitution’ for the modern world since the Qur'ān’s world-view is both in-worldly and other-worldly: ‘Islam is a religion of the world , of government, society, morals and order, to the same extent as it is a religion of faith and belief and the next world .’. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn “The Politics of Getting It Right,” Russell Muirhead has contended in this journal that democracy is valuable because of its procedural legitimacy rather than because of the epistemic values of “getting things right.” However, pure procedural theories of legitimacy fail. Thus, if democracy is legitimate, it will have to be due partly to its epistemic advantages. There are two ways of thinking about these advantages. One approach, associated most prominently with David Estlund and Hélène Landemore, equates the epistemic advantages (...) of democracy with its ability to approximate a procedure-independent standard of correctness. The other, associated with Fabienne Peter, explicitly rejects that standard. Peter’s view, however, is incapable of answering challenges against pure procedural theories of legitimacy. (shrink)

Recently, the development of several strategies based on immunotherapy has raised hopes for a more promising way to treat cancer patients. Here, we describe how interleukin (IL)‐10, a seemingly unlikely candidate, stimulates the immune system in a particularly efficacious way. IL‐10, an omnipotent anti‐inflammatory cytokine, delivers an equally potent immune stimulation in the context of CD8+ T cells and tumor immunity. By activation of tumor‐resident, tumor‐specific CD8+ T cells, pegylated IL‐10 can induce rejection of large and metastasizing tumors in mice. (...) Here, we summarize the mechanisms of action of IL‐10, the reasons why the mechanisms may be crucial for the treatment of cancer patients, and the rationale for applying pegylated IL‐10 in the clinic. (shrink)

This paper offers an account of how individuals act as agents when we employ a narrative approach to explaining their personal identities. It applies Korsgaard's idea of a "reflective structure of consciousness" to provide foundations for a richer account of the individual economic agent, and uses this to explain and distinguish the concepts of personal identity, individual identity, and social identity. The paper argues that individuals' personal identities may be in conflict with their socially constructed individual identities. Individuals' social identities (...) are represented as a link between personal identity and individual identity. The overall framework is proposed as an alternative to the atomistic individual conception and a contribution to the socially embedded individual conception. (shrink)

We evaluate the “story grammar” approach to story understanding from three perspectives. We first examine the formal properties of the grammars and find only one to be formally adequate. We next evaluate the grammars empirically by asking whether they generate all simple stories and whether they generate only stories. We find many stories that they do not generate and one major class of nonstory that they do generate. We also evaluate the grammars' potential as comprehension models and find that they (...) would add nothing to semantic models that focus on the story content. Hence we advocate a story content oriented approach to studying story understanding instead of the structural story grammar approach. (shrink)

This book examines the different conceptions of the individual that have emerged in recent new approaches in economics, including behavioral economics, experimental economics, social preferences approaches, game theory, neuroeconomics, evolutionary and complexity economics, and the capability approach. These conceptions are classified according to whether they seek to revise the traditional atomist individual conception, put new emphasis on interaction and relations between individuals, account for individuals as evolving and self-organizing, and explain individuals in terms of capabilities. The method of analysis uses (...) two identity criteria for distinguishing and re-identifying individuals to determine whether these different individual conceptions successfully identify individuals. Successful individual conceptions account for sub-personal and supra-personal bounds on single individual explanations. The former concerns the fragmentation of individuals into multiple selves; the latter concerns the dissolution of individuals into the social. The book develops an understanding of bounded individuality, seen as central to the defense of human rights. (shrink)

It is important to know as precisely as possible when a human being comes into existence. This can occur in ordinary circumstances after sexual intercourse. It can also occur in a nonsexual manner by various types of cloning and genetic engineering techniques and in naturally occurring monozygotic identical twining in vivo. Many scientists and physicians, in an effort to avoid being accused of abuse of human embryos in their research and in the practice of abortion, have falsified the facts about (...) human conception for many years throughout the world, creating moral confusion and error. This essay is meant to clarify this situation. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 10.2 (Summer 2010): 251–256. (shrink)

The Bianchi Identities relating asymmetric curvature to torsion are obtained as a new set of equations governing second-order curvature tensors. The usual contribution of symmetric curvature to the gravitational field is found to be a subset of these identities though with an added contribution due to torsion gradients. The antisymmetric curvature two-tensor is shown to be related to the divergence of the torsion. Using a model of particle-antiparticle pair production, identification of certain torsion components with electroweak fields is proposed. These (...) components obey equations, similar to Maxwell's, that are subsets of these linear Bianchi identities. These results are shown to be consistent with gauge and other previous analyses. (shrink)

Cet article présente mes réflexions en leur état au début de l’année 2020 quant à la situation de la méthodologie économique et de la philosophie de l’économie (ou philosophie économique), après quinze années passées à la co-direction (avec Wade Hands) du Journal of Economic Methodology. J’y constate les changements des méta-champs de recherche que sont la méthodologie et la philosophie de l’économie, depuis leur surgissement comme sous-domaines au sein des sciences économiques durant les années 1980. En usant d’une analyse qui (...) prend en considération l’évolution technologique, j’y distingue deux scenarii envisageables pour l’avenir du champ, en rapport aux facteurs de l’environnement l’impactant, et quant à l’influence de la spécialisation croissante de la recherche, à la fois sur ce champ même et sur les sciences économiques ; j’élabore enfin une argumentation transdisciplinaire touchant son évolution future vers la diversité et la pluralité dans la recherche académique. (shrink)

This paper discusses how Mark Blaug reversed his thinking about the historiography of economics, abandoning 'rational' for 'historical' reconstruction, and using an economics of scientific knowledge argument against Paul Samuelson and others that rational reconstructions of past ideas and theories in the "marketplace of ideas" were Pareto inefficient. Blaug's positive argument for historical reconstruction was built on the concept of "lost content" and his rejection of the end-state view of competition in favor of a process view. He used these ideas (...) to emphasize path dependency in the development of economic thinking, thereby advancing an evolutionary view of economics that has connections to a Lakatosian understanding of economic methodology. The paper argues that Blaug was essentially successful in criticizing the standard rational reconstructionist view of the history of economic thought in economics, and that this is borne out by the nature of the change in recent economics. (shrink)

Among industrialized nations the United States is relatively unique in relying on a mix of public and private financing and delivery of healthcare: federal and federal-state programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid; employment-based health insurance ; and state-subsidized insurance pools for high-risk individuals. In recent years, however, there have been efforts to apply the principles of private employment-based health insurance to the other forms of healthcare, and there is speculation that rising healthcare costs can only be addressed by further extending (...) capitated payment plans. This suggests that U.S. healthcare may increasingly be organized according to market principles. For some, this represents a historic departure from an emphasis on public responsibility for healthcare and a sacrifice of the value principles embodied in health relationships between patient and provider. But defenders of HMOs and a larger role for markets argue that managed care allows for a more rational allocation of scarce healthcare resources by minimizing inefficient low-benefit–high-cost care. More individuals receive essential care if inessential care is eliminated. HMOs are also said to encourage non-HMOs to provide lower priced healthcare. (shrink)

When the first edition ofA Christian Natural Theologyappeared in 1965, it was a groundbreaking work that incorporated Alfred North Whitehead's metaphysical philosophy as a framework for developing a Christian natural theology. The work was so significant it helped to launch process theology as a leading alternative to neo-orthodox theology and has since become a classic in the literature of process theology. This new edition by one of America's preeminent theologians is an essential work for all those interested in process theology.

A collection of essays by prominent physicists, biologists, geneticists, zoologists, philosophers and other thinkers about the relationship between science and philosophy, particularly the teleological versus the mechanistic explanation of the universe.

Gordon Kaufmann's recent book, God the Problem, provokes reflection on the notion of the world os God's body. He is concerned to indicate the intelligibility in a secular age of discourse about God's transcendence. The thrust of his position is clearly toward the concept that the world is God's body, but he rejects abruptly any suggestion that this is acceptable. In the following pages I will look briefly at Kaufmann's own position, raise some questions about it, and propose Whiteheadian thought (...) as being more faithful to some of Kaufmann's intentions. (shrink)