The goal of this paper is two-fold: first, to emphasize causality in disease ontology and knowledge representation, presenting a general and cursory discussion of causality and causal chains; and second, to clarify and develop the River Flow Model of Diseases (RFM). The RFM is an ontological account of disease, representing the causal structure of pathology. It applies general knowledge of causality using the concept of causal chains. The river analogy of disease is explained, formal descriptions are offered, and the RFM (...) disease definition is refined by describing causal chains in terms of causal relations. The definition is updated to coincide with the actual RFM classes found in its upper-level ontology, YAMATO, which brings to light some challenges in developing both YAMATO and the RFM. The RFM is also discussed in relation to another ontological account of disease. Strategies are offered toward interoperability between these theories. (shrink)

Patterns of human kinship commonly involve preferential treatment of relatives based on lineal descent (lineages) rather than degree of genetic relatedness (kindreds), presenting a challenge for inclusive fitness theory. Here, we examine effects of lineage and kindred characteristics on reproductive success (RS) and number of grandchildren for 130 men and 124 women in a horticultural community on Dominica. Kindreds had little effect on fitness independently of lineage characteristics. Fitness increased with the number of lineal relatives residing in the community but (...) decreased beyond an apparently optimal lineage size, suggesting resource enhancement and competition among kin. Female-biased patrilineage sex ratio was positively associated with men’s fitness, while male-biased matrilineage sex ratio was positively associated with women’s fitness. Number of brothers in the community was negatively associated with men’s, but not women’s, fitness. Parents and number of sisters had no effect on either male or female reproduction; however, women with younger sisters had higher RS, suggesting benefits of kin support for childcare. In sum, imposed norms for lineage social organization may enhance lineal ancestors’ inclusive fitness at a cost to individual inclusive fitness. (shrink)

This article is a synopsis of a triarchic theory of human intelligence. The theory comprises three subtheories: a contextual subtheory, which relates intelligence to the external world of the individual; a componential subtheory, which relates intelligence to the individual's internal world; and a two-facet subtheory, which relates intelligence to both the external and internal worlds. The contextual subtheory defines intelligent behavior in terms of purposive adaptation to, shaping of, and selection of real-world environments relevant to one's life. The normal course (...) of intelligent functioning in the everyday world entails adaptation to the environment; when the environment does not fit one's values, aptitudes, or interests, one may attempt to shape the environment so as to achieve a better person-environment fit; when shaping fails, an attempt may be made to select a new environment that provides a better fit. The two-facet subtheory further constrains this definition by regarding as most relevant to the demonstration of intelligence contextually intelligent behavior that involves either adaptation to novelty, automatization of information processing, or both. Efficacious automatization of processing allows allocation of additional resources to the processing of novelty in the environment; conversely, efficacious adaptation to novelty allows automatization to occur earlier in one's experience with new tasks and situations. The componential subtheory specifies the mental mechanisms responsible for the learning, planning, execution, and evaluation of intelligent behavior. Metacomponents of intelligence control one's information processing and enable one to monitor and later evaluate it; performance components execute the plans constructed by the metacomponents; knowledge-acquisition components selectively encode and combine new information and selectively compare new information to old so as to allow new information to be learned. (shrink)

I argue that certain kinds of luck can partially determine an agent’s praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. To make this view clearer, consider some examples. Two identical agents drive recklessly around a curb, and one but not the other kills a pedestrian. Two identical corrupt judges would freely take a bribe if one were offered. Only one judge is offered a bribe, and so only one judge takes a bribe. Put in terms of these examples, I argue that the killer driver and (...) bribe taker are more blameworthy than their counterparts. I offer three arguments for that view, and, in doing so, I exemplify a general way to advance the moral luck debate. First, I argue against an account of moral responsibility that implies that the judges are equally blameworthy. Second, I argue that the killer driver is more blameworthy than the merely reckless driver. Third, I locate an alternative sense in which the agents in each case pair are morally on par. (shrink)

Darwin's theory of natural selection and its moral purpose -- Appendix 1: the logic of Darwin's long argument -- Appendix 2: the historical ontology and location of scientific theories -- Darwin's principle of divergence: why Fodor was almost right -- Darwin's romantic quest: mind, morals, and emotions -- Appendix: assessment of Darwin's moral theory -- The relation of Spencer's evolutionary theory to Darwin's -- Ernst Haeckel's scientific and artistic struggles -- Haeckel's embryos: fraud not proven -- The linguistic creation of (...) man: August Schleicher and the missing link in Darwinian theory -- Was Hitler a Darwinian? (shrink)

By studying Lucretius’ poem De Rerum Nature and its impact on literary and political circles in Machiavelli’s Florence, this book examines the way that the Lucretian concepts served Machiavelli as revolutionary new materials for the creation of his infamously brutal political science.

In late winter of 1864, Charles Darwin received two folio volumes on radiolarians, a group of one-celled marine organisms that secreted siliceous skeletons of unusual geometry. The author, the young German biologist Ernst Haeckel (fig. 1), had himself drawn the figures for the extraordinary copper-etched illustrations that filled the second volume.1 The gothic beauty of the plates astonished Darwin (fig. 2 ), but he must also have been drawn to passages that applied his theory to construct the descent relations of (...) these little known creatures. He replied to Haeckel that the volumes "were the most magnificent works which I have ever seen, & I am proud to possess a copy from the author."2 Emboldened by his own initiative in contacting the famous naturalist, Haeckel, a few days later, sent Darwin a newspaper clipping that described a meeting of the Society of German Naturalists and Physicians at Stettin, which occurred during the previous autumn. The article gave an extended and laudatory account of Haeckel's lecture defending Darwin's theory.3 Darwin immediately replied in his second letter: "I.. (shrink)

Many revolutionary proposals entered the biological disciplines during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, theories that provided the foundations for today’s science and gave structure to its various branches. Cell theory, evolutionary theory, and genetics achieved their modern form during this earlier time. The period also saw a variety of new, auxiliary hypotheses that supplied necessary supports for the more comprehensive theories. These included ideas in morphology, embryology, systematics, language, and behavior. These scientific developments forced a reconceptualization of nature and (...) the place of human beings therein. The legacy for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been a materialization and mechanization of the most fundamental processes of life. From our current perspective, it’s easy to look back and assume that the foundational ideas of our contemporary science must have had the same character as they now seem to manifest. I think a closer inspection of biological science of this earlier period will reveal a discipline whose philosophic assumptions are quite different from those of its present incarnation. This becomes especially vivid when 1 we focus on the contributions of German Idealism and Romanticism to the biology of the earlier dispensation. (shrink)

Two new modes of thinking have spread through systematics in the twentieth century. Both have deep historical roots, but they have been widely accepted only during this century. Population thinking overtook the field in the early part of the century, culminating in the full development of population systematics in the 1930s and 1940s, and the subsequent growth of the entire field of population biology. Population thinking rejects the idea that each species has a natural type (as the earlier essentialist view (...) had assumed), and instead sees every species as a varying population of interbreeding individuals. Tree thinking has spread through the field since the 1960s with the development of phylogenetic systematics. Tree thinking recognizes that species are not independent replicates within a class (as earlier group thinkers had tended to see them), but are instead interconnected parts of an evolutionary tree. It lays emphasis on the explanation of evolutionary events in the context of a tree, rather than on the states exhibited by collections of species, and it sees evolutionary history as a story of divergence rather than a story of development. Just as population thinking gave rise to the new field of population biology, so tree thinking is giving rise to the new field of phylogenetic biology. (shrink)

We analyze the effects of uncertainty on WTA, WTP and the WTA–WTP gap. Extending the approach of Weber (Econom Lett 80:311–315, 2003) to the case of lotteries, we develop an exact expression for the WTA–WTP gap that allows identification of its magnitude under different utility specifications. Reinterpreting and extending results by Gabillon(Econom Lett 116:157–160, 2012), we also identify generally the relationship between an agent’s utility of income and the gap’s algebraic sign, as well as the effects of risk increases on (...) WTA and WTP. Finally, we derive the limit behavior of the gap as income or risk increase. (shrink)

"The Natural System" is the name given to the underlying arrangement present in the diversity of life. Unlike a classification, which is made up of classes and members, a system or arrangement is an integrated whole made up of connected parts. In the pre-evolutionary period a variety of forms were proposed for the Natural System, including maps, circles, stars, and abstract multidimensional objects. The trees sketched by Darwin in the 1830s should probably be considered the first genuine evolutionary diagrams of (...) the Natural System—the first genuine evolutionary trees. Darwin refined his image of the Natural System in the well-known evolutionary tree published in the Origin of Species, where he also carefully distinguished between arrangements and classifications. Following the publication of the Origin, there was a great burst of evolutionary tree building, but interest in trees declined substantially after 1900, only to be revived in recent years with the development of cladistic analysis. ¶ While evolutionary trees are modern diagrams of the Natural System, they are at the same time instances of another broad class of diagrams that may be called "trees of history": branching diagrams of genealogical descent and change. During the same years that Darwin was sketching his first evolutionary trees, the earliest examples of two other trees of history also appeared: the first trees of language evolution and of manuscript genealogy. Though these were apparently independent of evolutionary trees in their origin, the similarities among all these trees of history, and among the historical processes that underlie them, were soon recognized. Darwin compared biological evolution and language evolution several times in the Origin of Species, and both Ernst Haeckel and the linguist August Schleicher made similar comparisons. Both linguists and stemmaticists (students of manuscript descent) understood the principle of apomorphy—the principle that only shared innovations provide evidence of common ancestry—more clearly than did systematists, and if there had been more cross-fertilization among these fields the cladistic revolution in systematics might well have taken place in the nineteenth century. ¶ Although historical linguists and stemmaticists have in some respects had sounder theory than have systematists, at least until recently, they have also had the practical problem of very large amounts of data, a problem not often faced by systematists until the advent of molecular sequencing. The opportunity now exists for systematists to contribute to the theory and practice of linguistics and stemmatics, their sister disciplines in historical reconstruction, through application of our commonly used computer programs for tree estimation. Preliminary results from the application of numerical cladistic analysis to a large stemmatic data set have been very encouraging, and have already generated much discussion in the stemmatics community. (shrink)

Sport and Religion by Shirl J. Hoffman, Editor (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1992) Religion and Sport: The Meeting of Sacred and Profane by Charles S. Prebish, Editor (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993).

This volume traces the influence of the British Empiricists--John Locke and David Hume--upon the American pragmatists--Charles S Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. But there are significant differences between the two traditions so that it can be said that the pragmatists gave the classical empirical tradition new directions. Heretofore these lines of influence and divergence have been recognized but not sufficiently developed. This movement is illustrated in chapters on experience, necessary connection, personal identity, and moral, social, and political theory. A (...) final chapter indicates the challenges that are still to be addressed by pragmatism. (shrink)

In discussing the origin of the ancient doctrine of substance, Hume makes the following remark.