Waddington’s experiments on genetic assimilation showed that selection on environmentally induced phenotypic variants can cause inherited evolutionary changes in the phenotype. We have recently extended this work by demonstrating that it is possible to select for a polyphenism in a monophenic species . We found that a mutation in the juvenile hormone regulatory pathway in Manduca sexta enabled heat stress to reveal a hidden reaction norm of larval coloration. Artificial selection for increased color change in response to heat-shock resulted in (...) the genetic accommodation of a black/green larval color polyphenism, caused by an environment-sensitive threshold switch mediated by the endocrine system. (shrink)

Bkaḥ-Ḥgyur: ka-ya [volume 1-25], Text number 1-729. Rgyud -- ra-a, kṣa, ki-tsi [volume 26-49], Text number 730-759. Śer-phyin -- tshi-ʼi [volume 50-55], Text number 760. Dkon-brtsegs -- yi-ri [volume 56-61], Text number 761. Phal-chn -- ai, ku-ke [volume 62-93], Text number 762-1029. Mdo-sna-tshogs -- khe-phe [volume 94-106], Text number 1030-1055. Ḥdul-ba.

Unconscious processing of stimuli with emotional content can bias affective judgments. Is this subliminal affective priming merely a transient phenomenon manifested in fleeting perceptual changes, or are long-lasting effects also induced? To address this question, we investigated memory for surprise faces 24 h after they had been shown with 30-ms fearful, happy, or neutral faces. Surprise faces subliminally primed by happy faces were initially rated as more positive, and were later remembered better, than those primed by fearful or neutral faces. (...) Participants likely to have processed primes supraliminally did not respond differentially as a function of expression. These results converge with findings showing memory advantages with happy expressions, though here the expressions were displayed on the face of a different person, perceived subliminally, and not present at test. We conclude that behavioral biases induced by masked emotional expressions are not ephemeral, but rather can last at least 24 h. (shrink)

Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness: Zen Talks on the Sandokai. Shunryu Suzuki, edited by Mel Weitsman and Michael Wenger. University of California Press, Berkeley & Los Angeles 1999. viii, 195 pp. $22.50. ISBN 0-52-21982-1.

These essays were delivered at the Fourth East-West Philosophers conference at the University of Hawaii in 1964. Because the audience was of various traditions, most of the papers contain instruction in rudiments as well as points of more technical interest. The oriental speakers especially take pains not to spring their special terminology on the western listener. The book systematically and thoroughly works through the themes of the individual in Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and western metaphysics, methodology, religion, and ethics. Social, political, (...) and legal thought and practice are also covered. Some of the papers are followed by transcripts of questions and answers. These are often very helpful and revealing as they focus the issues and require the speaker to be specific in summarizing his points. Altogether there are thirty-three contributors, only a minority of whom are westerners. These include: Charles Moore, Wm. E. Hocking, H. E. McCarthy, John Smith, W. H. Werkmeister, E. W. Strong, R. Polin, and R. McKeon. Again and again both East and West stressed the interconnection and interdependence of the individual and the universal, the individual and the community. There is an appendix containing the conference's public lectures, which were given by S. M. McMurrin, C. Regamey, and D. T. Suzuki. The book and the conference end with Moore citing highlights and provocative points from virtually all the lectures. This provides a useful summary and synthesis of what would otherwise be an overwhelming deluge of intellection. There are notes on contributors and an index.--S. O. H. (shrink)

This is a paperback reprint of Suzuki's famous work first published in 1907. Though the work is somewhat outdated, it at least can serve as an introduction to Suzuki. This edition is prefaced with an essay by Alan Watts which includes a bibliography of other works on Buddhism.--P. J. H.

The Reverend Hozen Seki, President of the American Buddhist Academy, says in his two-page preface that this book is the result of the transcription of five lectures given by Suzuki in the New York Buddhist Church in 1958. It is a detailing of Suzuki's own personal view of what Shin Buddhism is. This is the system that stems from the Japanese saint Shinran of the thirteenth century who was a follower of Honen, the founder of the Pure Land (...) doctrine in Japan. The aim of the book is not to trace down the background of the Pure Land teaching in India, nor is it to present Shinran's teaching as is. Rather, it is an expression of Suzuki's own insights into the Pure Land teaching.--P. J. H. (shrink)

Reflections on Science, technology and nature - the pain of animals - genetics and society - our fragile democracy - dancing on racism's grave; The lesson of Japan - the prostitution of Academia - how educators have failed - the ecosystem as capital - the rape of the Amazon; The future; borrowing from the children - showdown in Brazil - Aboriginal people and the land; Acid rain - rain forests - deforestation - population.

30th Nov. and 1st Dec. 2013 at Kyoto University. Organizer: Takeshi Sakon.

The best seller and perennial classic by one of the great Zen Buddhist masters--now available in Spanish. En los más de cuarenta años que han transcurrido desde su publicación original, Mente Zen, mente de principiante se ha convertido en uno de los grandes clásicos de la espiritualidad moderna, muy querido, continuamente releído y profusamente recomendado como el mejor libro que se puede leer sobre el Zen. Suzuki Roshi presenta las bases —desde los detalles de la postura y la respiración (...) en zazen hasta la percepción de la no dualidad— de un modo que, además de ser notablemente claro, resuena con la alegría de la comprensión desde la primera hasta la última página. (shrink)

One criterion of constructive logics is the disjunction, property (DP). The Halldén-completeness is a weak DP, and is related to the relevance principle and variable separation. This concept is well-understood in the case of propositional logics. We extend this notion to predicate logics. Then three counterparts naturally arise. We discuss relationships between these properties and meet-irreducibility in the lattice of logics.

To become more broadly applicable, positions on AI ethics require perspectives from non-Western regions and cultures such as China and Japan. In this paper, we propose that the addition of the concept of harmony to the discussion on ethical AI would be highly beneficial due to its centrality in East Asian cultures and its applicability to the challenge of designing AI for social good. We first present a synopsis of different definitions of harmony in multiple contexts, such as music and (...) society, which reveals that the concept is, at its core, about well-balanced relationships and appropriate actions which give rise to order, balance, and aesthetically pleasing phenomena. The mediator for these well-balanced relationships isTaktwhich is an ability to act thoughtfully and sensibly according to the specific situation and to put things into proportion and order. We propose that the central challenge of building harmonizing AI is to make intelligent systems tactful and also to design and use them tactfully. For an AI system to become tactful, it needs to be able to have an advanced sensitivity to the specific contexts which it is in and their social and ethical implications and have the capability of approximately inferring the emotional and cognitive states of people with whom it is interacting. (shrink)

Extending techniques of Dowd and those of Poizat, we study computational complexity of in the case when is a generic oracle, where is a positive integer, and denotes the collection of all -query tautologies with respect to an oracle . We introduce the notion of ceiling-generic oracles, as a generalization of Dowd's notion of -generic oracles to arbitrary finitely testable arithmetical predicates. We study how existence of ceiling-generic oracles affects behavior of a generic oracle, by which we show that is (...) not a subset of is comeager in the Cantor space. Moreover, using ceiling-generic oracles, we present an alternative proof of the fact (Dowd) that the class of all -generic oracles has Lebesgue measure zero. (shrink)

This note is a continuation of our former paper ''Complexity of the r-query tautologies in the presence of a generic oracle.'' We give a very short direct proof of the nonexistence of t-generic oracles, a result obtained first by Dowd. We also reconstitute a proof of Dowd's result that the class of all r-generic oracles in his sense has Lebesgue measure one.

Feinberg and Mallatt, in their presentation of neurobiological naturalism, have suggested that visual consciousness was acquired by early vertebrates and inherited by a wide range of descendants, and that its neural basis has shifted to nonhomologous nervous structures during evolution. However, their evolutionary scenario of visual consciousness relies on the assumption that visual consciousness is closely linked with survival, which is not commonly accepted in current consciousness research. We suggest an alternative idea that visual consciousness is linked to a specific (...) class of agency, consequently justifying their phylogenetic claim. We also examine the implication of their phylogenetic claim: visual consciousness is homologous across vertebrates, but its neural basis is not. This apparent incongruence illustrates a general phenomenon of homology, and that the resulting hierarchical view of visual consciousness and its neural basis can be straightforwardly accommodated by neurobiological naturalism. Throughout these discussions, we aim to address the potential theoretical issues in neurobiological naturalism and refine the picture illustrated by Feinberg and Mallatt regarding phylogenetic distribution and trajectories of visual consciousness. (shrink)

"Using hundreds of examples from newsrooms large and small, author Ron F. Smith challenges readers to determine how they would face moral dilemmas on the job. Chapters evaluate the search for principles, accountability, truth and objectivity, errors and corrections, diversity, "faking" the news, reporters and their sources, privacy, the government watch, deception, compassion, the business of news, journalists and their communities, and financial concerns. New to this edition: a chapter on improving coverage of minorities, expanded discussion of broadcast journalism and (...) reporting on the Internet, and stories from recent front pages and TV news programs."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

This paper presents a cross-cultural study on peoples’ negative attitude toward robots. 467 participants from seven different countries filled in the negative attitude towards robots scale survey which consists of 14 questions in three clusters: attitude towards the interaction with robots, attitude towards social influence of robots and attitude towards emotions in interaction with robots. Around one half of them were recruited at local universities and the other half was approached through Aibo online communities. The participants’ cultural background had a (...) significant influence on their attitude and the Japanese were not as positive as stereotypically assumed. The US participants had the most positive attitude, while participants from Mexico had the most negative attitude. The participants from the online community were more positive towards robots than those not involved. Previous experience in interacting with Aibo also had a positive effect, but owning an Aibo did not improve their attitude. (shrink)

Targeted gene alteration (TGA) is a strategy for correcting single base mutations in the DNA of human cells that cause inherited disorders. TGA aims to reverse a phenotype by repairing the mutant base within the chromosome itself, avoiding the introduction of exogenous genes. The process of how to accurately repair a genetic mutation is elucidated through the use of single‐stranded DNA oligonucleotides (ODNs) that can enter the cell and migrate to the nucleus. These specifically designed ODNs hybridize to the target (...) sequence and act as a beacon for nucleotide exchange. The key to this reaction is the frequency with which the base is corrected; this will determine whether the approach becomes clinically relevant or not. Over the course of the last five years, workers have been uncovering the role played by the cells in regulating the gene repair process. In this essay, we discuss how the impact of the cell on TGA has evolved through the years and illustrate ways that inherent cellular pathways could be used to enhance TGA activity. We also describe the cost to cell metabolism and survival when certain processes are altered to achieve a higher frequency of repair. (shrink)

The idea that the thalamo-cortical system is the crucial constituent of the neurobiological mechanisms of consciousness has a long history. For the last few decades, however, consciousness research has to a large extent overlooked the interplay between the cortex and thalamus. Here we revive an integrated view of the neurobiology of consciousness by presenting and discussing several recent major findings about the role of the thalamocortical interactions in consciousness. Based on these findings we propose a specific cellular mechanism how thalamic (...) nuclei modulate the integration of different processing streams within single cortical pyramidal neurons. This theory is inspired by recent work done in rodents, but it integrates decades of work conducted on various species. We illustrate how this new view readily explains various properties and experimental phenomena associated with conscious experience. We discuss the implications of this idea and some of the experiments that need to be done in order to test it. Our view bridges two long-standing perspectives on the neural mechanisms of consciousness and proposes that cortical and thalamo-cortical processing interact at the level of single pyramidal cells. (shrink)

Japan has often been regarded as an ethnically homogeneous society whose restrictive immigration policies reflect the deep-seated cultural peculiarities of this ‘island nation’. By contrast, I shall argue that Japan’s post- 1945 cultural separation from the other countries of East Asia, and its strict border controls, were to a large extent products of Cold War politics. The postwar democratization of Japan went hand in hand with the introduction of tight restrictions on cross-border mobility: restrictions which had profound consequences for the (...) rights of ethnic minorities in Japan (particularly Koreans and Taiwanese). An exploration of the emergence and impact of this border control regime casts new light, not just on Japan’s role in the Northeast Asian region, but also on key limitations of nation-state centred notions of liberal democracy. (shrink)

Introduction: Platonic dramatology -- The political and philosophical problems. Using pre-Socratic philosophy to support political reform: the Athenian stranger ; Plato's Parmenides: Parmenides' critique of Socrates and Plato's critique of Parmenides ; Becoming Socrates ; Socrates interrogates his contemporaries about the noble and good -- Paradigms of philosophy. Socrates' positive teaching ; Timaeus-Critias: completing or challenging Socratic political philosophy? ; Socratic practice -- The trial and death of Socrates. The limits of human intelligence ; The Eleatic challenge ; The trial (...) and death of Socrates -- Conclusion: Why Plato made Socrates his hero. (shrink)

Many people are worried about the harmful effects of climate change but nevertheless enjoy some activities that contribute to the emission of greenhouse gas (driving, flying, eating meat, etc.), the main cause of climate change. How should such people make choices between engaging in and refraining from enjoyable greenhouse-gas-emitting activities? In this chapter, we look at the answer provided by decision theory. Some scholars think that the right answer is given by interactive decision theory, or game theory; and moreover think (...) that since private climate decisions are instances of the prisoner’s dilemma, one rationally should engage in these activities provided that one enjoys them. Others think that the right answer is given by expected utility theory, the best-known version of individual decision theory under risk and uncertainty. In this chapter, we review these different answers, with a special focus on the latter answer and the debate it has generated. (shrink)

In this philosophically sophisticated and historically significant work, John H. Zammito reconstructs Kant's composition of The Critique of Judgment and reveals that it underwent three major transformations before publication. He shows that Kant not only made his "cognitive" turn, expanding the project from a "Critique of Taste" to a Critique of Judgment but he also made an "ethical" turn. This "ethical" turn was provoked by controversies in German philosophical and religious culture, in particular the writings of Johann Herder and the (...) Sturm und Drang movement in art and science, as well as the related pantheism controversy. Such topicality made the Third Critique pivotal in creating a "Kantian" movement in the 1790s, leading directly to German Idealism and Romanticism. The austerity and grandeur of Kant's philosophical writings sometimes make it hard to recognize them as the products of a historical individual situated in the particular constellation of his time and society. Here Kant emerges as a concrete historical figure struggling to preserve the achievements of cosmopolitan Aufkl-rung against challenges in natural science, religion, and politics in the late 1780s. More specifically Zammito suggests that Kant's Third Critique was animated throughout by a fierce personal rivalry with Herder and by a strong commitment to traditional Christian ideas of God and human moral freedom. "A work of extraordinary erudition. Zammito's study is both comprehensive and novel, connecting Kant's work with the aesthetic and religious controversies of the late eighteenth century. He seems to have read everything. I know of no comparable historical study of Kant's Third Critique."-Arnulf Zweig, translator and editor of Kant's ;IPhilosophical Correspondence, 1759-1799;X "An intricate, subtle, and exciting explanation of how Kant's thinking developed and adjusted to new challenges over the decade from the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason to the appearance of the Critique of Judgment. "--John W. Burbidge, Review of Metaphysics "There has been for a long time a serious gap in English commentary on Kant's Critique of Judgment Zammito's book finally fills it. All students and scholars of Kant will want to consult it."--Frederick Beiser, Times Literary Supplement. (shrink)