One argument Robert and Baylis do not raise in their article on the creation of interspecies chimeras using human cellular material is that the creation of these chimeras would, or could, offend human dignity. Yet, human dignity is one of the most common concerns raised in public debates, academic arguments, and policy documents regarding biotechnology in general, and the creation animal-human chimeras in particular. … The concept is ill-defined within bioethics and … risks being dismissed as meaningless or uselessly vague. (...) However, this lack of definition should not yet cause us to abandon or ignore human dignity. At least in arguments about creating chimeras, an examination of what may be meant by appeals to human dignity can uncover important concerns or arguments that are not captured by other formulations of the debate. (shrink)

To generate explanatory theory, ecologists must wrestle with how to represent the extremely many, diverse causes behind phenomena in their domain. Early twentieth-century plant ecologists Frederic E. Clements and Henry A. Gleason provide a textbook example of different approaches to explaining vegetation, with Clements allegedly committed, despite abundant exceptions, to a law of vegetation, and Gleason denying the law in favor of less organized phenomena. However, examining Clements's approach to explanation reveals him not to be expressing a law, and instead (...) to be developing an explanatory structure without laws, capable of progressively integrating causal complexity. Moreover, Clements and Gleason largely agree on the causes of vegetation; but, since causal understanding here underdetermines representation, they differ on how to integrate recognized causes into general theory---that is, in their methodologies. Observers of the case may have mistakenly assumed that scientific representation across the disciplines typically aims at laws like Newton's, and that representations always reveal scientists' metaphysical commitments. Ironically, in the present case, this assumption seems to have been made even by observers who regard Clements as naı¨ve for his alleged commitment to an ecological law. (shrink)