ABSTRACT In a series of experiments at the National Institute of Mental Health, the animal ecologist John B. Calhoun offered rats everything they needed, except space. The resulting population explosion was followed by a series of “social pathologies”—violence, sexual deviance, and withdrawal. This essay examines the influence of Calhoun's experiments among psychologists and sociologists concerned with the effects of the built environment on health and behavior. Some saw evidence of the danger of the crowd in Calhoun's “rat cities” and fastened (...) on a method of analysis that could be transferred to the study of urban man. Others, however, cautioned against drawing analogies between rodents and humans. The ensuing dispute saw social scientists involved in a careful negotiation over the structure and meaning of Calhoun's experimental systems and, with it, over the significance of the crowd in the laboratory, institution, and city. (shrink)

At the end of the 1920s, Tanganyika Territory experienced several serious rodent outbreaks that threatened cotton and other grain production. At the same time, regular reports of pneumonic and bubonic plague occurred in the northern areas of Tanganyika. These events led the British colonial administration to dispatch several studies into rodent taxonomy and ecology in 1931 to determine the causes of rodent outbreaks and plague disease, and to control future outbreaks. The application of ecological frameworks to the (...) control of rodent outbreaks and plague disease transmission in colonial Tanganyika Territory gradually moved from a view that prioritised 'ecological interrelations' among rodents, fleas and people to one where those interrelations required studies into population dynamics, endemicity and social organisation in order to mitigate pests and pestilence. This shift in Tanganyika anticipated later population ecology approaches on the African continent. Drawing on sources from the Tanzania National Archives, this article offers an important case study of the application of ecological frameworks in a colonial setting that anticipated later global scientific interest in studies of rodent populations and rodent-borne disease ecologies. (shrink)

Head direction (HD) cells, abundant in the rat postsubiculum and anterior thalamic nuclei, fire maximally when the rat’s head is facing a particular direction. The activity of a population of these cells forms a distributed representation of the animal’s current heading. We describe a neural network model that creates a stable, distributed representation of head direction and updates that representation in response to angular velocity information. In contrast to earlier models, our model of the head direction system accurately tracks a (...) series of actual rat head rotations, and, using biologically plausible neurons, it fits the single-cell tuning curves of real HD cells recorded from rats executing those same rotations. The model makes neurophysiological predictions that can be tested using current technologies. (shrink)

This book is a comprehensive and unique text and reference in medical ethics. By far the most inclusive set of primary documents and articles in the field ever published, it contains over 100 selections. Virtually all pieces appear in their entirety, and a significant number would be difficult to obtain elsewhere. The volume draws upon the literature of history, medicine, philosophical and religious ethics, economics, and sociology. A wide range of topics and issues are covered, such as law and medicine, (...) truth-telling by the physician, research, population policy, genetics, abortion, dying, and individual rights in medical care. The selections span the centuries, beginning with material from the works of Hippocrates, continuing through Thomas Percival, John Stuart Mill, and Claude Bernard, down to modern commentators like Henry K. Beecher, Walsh McDermott, David L. Bazelon, Paul Freund, H. L. A. Hart, John Rawls, Paul Ramsey, Richard McCormick, Rashi Fein, and Bernard Barber. The text has eight major divisions, beginning with sections on the ethical dimensions of the physician-patient relationship in history; the moral bases of medical ethics; and regulation, compulsion, and protection of the consumer in clinical medicine and public health. Each of these sections includes key essays that appear for the first time. All of the book's major divisions contain primary documents: codes such as the Hippocratic Oath, Medieval Law for the Regulation of Medicine, and the first as well as the most recent code of the American Medical Association; court decisions, including those on Karen Quinlan and on abortion in the United States and West Germany; government documents such as the statement of the National Commission on the Protection of Human Subjects, the Tuskegee Syphilis Report, the British Parliamentary debate on euthanasia, and the Council of Europe on rights of the sick and dying; and various published guidelines such as the Harvard Medical School brain death criteria, the American Hospital Association on patient's rights, and Pope Pius XII on the prolongation of life. Cases that illustrate moral dilemmas are provided for discussion purposes. Each section is preceded by a succinct editor's introduction. The documents and essays are of practical value for practitioners and students in medicine, law, ethics, and counselling, and for individual patients and groups concerned with medical care. Through encompassing divergent viewpoints, the essays and primary documents were selected to encourage humane practices and deepen understanding of the multiple traditions that shaped and do shape the development of medicine. (shrink)

This book is a personal history and apology, written by one of this century's most distinguished small mammal ecologists, for a life in science spent working on problems for which no final dramatic conclusion was reached. Included along the way are some important anecdotes and history about Charles Elton and the pioneering work at the Bureau of Animal Population at Oxford University, from which most of modern population ecology has grown, and insigts on the philosophy and practice of science.

Technological advancement has an ambivalent character concerning the impact on biodiversity. It accounts for major detrimental environmental impacts and aggravates threads to biodiversity. On the other hand, from an application perspective of environmental science, there are technical advancements, which increase the potential of analysis, detection and monitoring of environmental changes and open a wider spectrum of sustainable use strategies.The concept of biodiversity emerged in the last two decades as a political issue to protect the structural and functional basis of earthbound (...) life. In this respect, it represents a great challenge for science, in particular for ecology, which is the scientific discipline mainly involved in contributing to understand biodiversity issues.In this paper, we state a strong necessity for ecologists to work in close connection with other disciplines and within their own discipline across the different organisation levels. Each level has some specific properties to which ecological terminology has been adapted, and joint views are necessary to understand complex networks. In this context, ecological theory provides the background to analyse biological complexity and the relationship of structure and dynamics on different integration levels and provides the interface to mediate social and political issues.Important features of new technologies for advances in ecological theory refer to an increase in information processing capacities, more efficient automatic data acquisition and device operation, and an increase in resolution.One crucial consideration we analyse is the trend that a quantitative development in one particular discipline may open a new potential for qualitative advancement in other disciplines when the quantitative advancement is applied in a new disciplinary context.We illustrate these qualitative developments that are based on technological advancements and which helped to advance ecological theory qualitatively with two examples: The underlying mechanisms causing regularly oscillating rodent populations are subject to a decade long discussion in ecology. Using the possibilities of modern information processing, it is possible to represent the discussed hypotheses in an integrative object oriented model and analyse how the underlying causal net works. The second example originates from biosafety research dealing with the environmental impact of genetically modified organisms. The project GenEERA develops a complex up-scaling procedure from below field-level information to the landscape scale in order to investigate spread and persistence of GM oil seed rape under different scenarios. The approach gives an example, how ecological modelling can be used to combine different information levels to derive conclusions on a higher spatial scale.In an overall conclusion we relate the described approaches to a wider system analytical context in which we interpret theory developments and biodiversity issues with a system theoretical description of growth processes. We obtain the view that in self-organising systems there is a tendency for autonomous development which tends to be dominating far away from capacity limitations. However, while approaching capacity limitations, a tendency towards closer coupling of internal and external cause-effect networks emerges. We also find that the relation of biodiversity, ecosystem services, and social dynamics can be interpreted in this framework. In this context, the demand for closer interdisciplinary cooperation to solve existing problems appears as an indication of emerging capacity limitations both, in the theoretical as well as in the physical domain. (shrink)

The claim of consistent hemispheric specialisations across classes of chordates is undermined by the absence of population-based directional asymmetry of paw/hand use in rodents and primates. No homologue of the cerebral torque from right frontal to left occipital has been established in a nonhuman species. The null hypothesis that the torque is the sapiens-specific neural basis of language has not been disproved.

From 1942 to 1952, a programme took place at Johns Hopkins to devise new methods of controlling Baltimore’s rat population. This article focuses on three individuals closely connected to this project at various stages of its development: psycho-biologist Curt Richter, animal ecologist David E. Davis, and ecologist and psychologist John B. Calhoun. For all three, the challenges of controlling rat numbers highlighted the significance of stress – a homeostatic mechanism critical to the survival of the animal. This was a process (...) that was analyzed and manipulated by (re)introducing the wild rat into the laboratory. Here the rat not only contributed to new methods of rodent control, but offered new possibilities for the control and improvement of humankind. Yet it was not just the animal, but the physical structure of the laboratory that came to model the world outside. Through examining the experimental systems of the three scientists, this article will trace a series of transgressions between laboratory and field, urban and wild, animal and human. The result was that while animals were used to model the behaviour and pathologies of human city dwellers, the laboratory spaces in which they existed came to model the urban environment. We shall also see how differing perspectives on the value and uses of animal models and environments encouraged and reinforced alternative visions as to the role of science in the service of the city. (shrink)

During gestation, fetomaternal exchange occurs in the villous tree (labyrinth) of the placenta. Development of this structure depends on tightly coordinated cellular processes of branching morphogenesis and differentiation of specialized trophoblast cells. The basal chorionic trophoblast (BCT) cell layer that localizes next to the chorioallantoic interface is of critical importance for labyrinth morphogenesis in rodents. Gcm1‐positive cell clusters within this layer initiate branching morphogenesis thereby guiding allantoic fetal blood vessels towards maternal blood sinuses. Later these cells differentiate and contribute to (...) the syncytiotrophoblast of the fetomaternal barrier. Additional cells within the BCT layer sustain continued morphogenesis, possibly through a repopulating progenitor population. Several mouse mutants highlight the importance of a structurally intact BCT epithelium, and a growing number of studies addresses its patterning and epithelial architecture. Here, we review and discuss emerging concepts in labyrinth development focussing on the biology of the BCT cell layer. (shrink)

The data analyzed in this paper are part of the results described in Bueno et al. (2000). Three cytogenetics endpoints were analyzed in three populations of a species of wild rodent – Akodon montensis – living in an industrial, an agricultural, and a preservation area at the Itajaí Valley, State of Santa Catarina, Brazil. The polychromatic/normochromatic ratio, the mitotic index, and the frequency of micronucleated polychromatic erythrocites were used in an attempt to establish a genotoxic profile of each (...) area. It was assumed that the three populations were in the same conditions with respect to the influence of confounding factors such as animal age, health, nutrition status, presence of pathogens, and intra- and inter-populational genetic variability. Therefore, any differences found in the endpoints analyzed could be attributed to the external agents present in each area. The statistical models used in this paper are mixtures of negative-binomials and Poisson variables. The Poisson variables are used as approximations of binomials for rare events. The mixing distributions are beta densities. The statistical analyzes are under the bayesian perspective, as opposed to the frequentist ones often considered in the literature, as for instance in Bueno et al. (2000). (shrink)

Comparative mapping and sequencing show that turnover of sex determining genes and chromosomes, and sex chromosome rearrangements, accompany speciation in many vertebrates. Here I review the evidence and propose that the evolution of therian mammals was precipitated by evolution of the male‐determining SRY gene, defining a novel XY sex chromosome pair, and interposing a reproductive barrier with the ancestral population of synapsid reptiles 190 million years ago (MYA). Divergence was reinforced by multiple translocations in monotreme sex chromosomes, the first of (...) which supplied a novel sex determining gene. A sex chromosome‐autosome fusion may have separated eutherians (placental mammals) from marsupials 160 MYA. Another burst of sex chromosome change and speciation is occurring in rodents, precipitated by the degradation of the Y. And although primates have a more stable Y chromosome, it may be just a matter of time before the same fate overtakes our own lineage. (shrink)

The role of individual factors in behavioral neuroscience is an important, but still neglected, area of research. For example, the Elevated Plus-Maze Test has been one of the most used paradigms to gauge unconditioned aversively motivated behavior in rodents. However, despite a great number of experiments with this test there have been only few efforts to assess systematic individual variations in the elevated plus-maze and related neurobiological functions. The present review aims to give, first, a general overview and introduction about (...) the test, and second, an animal model of anxiety based on natural variance of plus-maze behavior within a given unselected population of rats. Finally, critical aspects of such approaches in animal research are discussed, and suggestions are given as to where to go from here. (shrink)

In this paper, I plan to show that the use of a specific population concept—Millstein’s Causal Interactionist Population Concept (CIPC)—has interesting and counter-intuitive ramifications for discussions of the reality of biological race in human beings. These peculiar ramifications apply to human beings writ large and to individuals. While this in and of itself may not be problematic, I plan to show that the ramifications that follow from applying Millstein’s CIPC to human beings complicates specific biological racial realist accounts—naïve or otherwise. (...) I conclude with the notion that even if biological races do exist—by fulfilling all of the criteria needed for Millstein’s population concept (which, given particular worries raised by Gannett (Synthese 177:363–385, 2010), and Winther and Kaplan (Theoria 60:54–80, 2013) may not)—the lower-bound limit for the scope of biological racial realism is at the level of populations, and as such they cannot say anything about whether or not individual organisms themselves have races. (shrink)

Population axiology concerns how to evaluate populations in terms of their moral goodness, that is, how to order populations by the relations “is better than” and “is as good as”. The task has been to find an adequate theory about the moral value of states of affairs where the number of people, the quality of their lives, and their identities may vary. So far, this field has largely ignored issues about uncertainty and the conditions that have been discussed (...) mostly pertain to the ranking of risk-free outcomes. Most public policy choices, however, are decisions under uncertainty, including policy choices that affect the size of a population. Here, we shall address the question of how to rank population prospects—that is, alternatives that contain uncertainty as to which population they will bring about—by the relations “is better than” and “is as good as”. We start by illustrating how well-known population axiologies can be extended to population prospect axiologies. And we show that new problems arise when extending population axiologies to prospects. In particular, traditional population axiologies lead to prospect-versions of the problems that they praised for avoiding in the risk-free settings. Finally, we identify an intuitive adequacy condition that, we contend, should be satisfied by any population prospect axiology, and show how given this condition, the impossibility theorems in population axiology can be extended to (non-trivial) impossibility theorems for population prospect axiology. (shrink)

This book of selected papers covers population research and banking as well as accompanying confidentiality, and governance concerns.

This book presents an exploration of the idea of the common or social good, extended so that alternatives with different populations can be ranked. The approach is, in the main, welfarist, basing rankings on the well-being, broadly conceived, of those who are alive. The axiomatic method is employed, and topics investigated include: the measurement of individual well-being, social attitudes toward inequality of well-being, the main classes of population principles, principles that provide incomplete rankings, principles that rank uncertain alternatives, best (...) choices from feasible sets, and applications. The chapters are divided, with mathematical arguments confined to the second part. The first part is intended to make the arguments accessible to a more general readership. Although the book can be read as a defense of the critical-level generalized-utilitarian class of principles, comprehensive examinations of other classes are included. (shrink)

The Islamic government of Iran recently passed and announced a new law titled “Rejuvenation of the Population and Protection of the Family.” This legislation is a noteworthy example of biopolitics‐influenced biolaw. In terms of abortion, contraception, prenatal screening, and population control, this law clearly contrasts with women's fundamental rights and freedoms and has significant health‐related consequences for different sectors of the population. A historical review of the population policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran shows the occurrence of multiple abrupt (...) and radical changes in such policies over the past four decades. This new law, promoted by religious biopolitics, is the most recent example, and places stringent limits on abortion. According to it, all decisions concerning abortion must be made in courts rather than in health clinics. Such courts are typically presided over by male religious scholars. This law also limits prenatal screening to the degree that will increase the rate of genetic defects, especially in the population's lower socioeconomic strata. By strictly limiting access to contraception, this law will increase the rate of unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. This paper argues that such an influence of biopolitics on biolaw contrasts with the principles of bioethics. Still, Iran's current institution of bioethics cannot address it effectively. Therefore, a new model of interaction between bioethics, biopolitics, and biolaw is needed to prevent the detrimental consequences of such pieces of legislation. Such a paradigm shift is demanded by the current “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement of the Iranian people. (shrink)

According to the person-affecting restriction, one distribution of welfare can be better than another only if there is someone for whom it is better. Extant problems for the person-affecting restriction involve variable-population cases, such as the nonidentity problem, which are notoriously controversial and difficult to resolve. This paper develops a fixed-population problem for the person-affecting restriction. The problem reveals that, in the presence of incommensurable welfare levels, the person-affecting restriction is incompatible with minimal requirements of impartial beneficence even in fixed-population (...) contexts. (shrink)

Critical-Range Utilitarianism is a variant of Total Utilitarianism which can avoid both the Repugnant Conclusion and the Sadistic Conclusion in population ethics. Yet Standard Critical-Range Utilitarianism entails the Weak Sadistic Conclusion, that is, it entails that each population consisting of lives at a bad well-being level is not worse than some population consisting of lives at a good well-being level. In this paper, I defend a version of Critical-Range Utilitarianism which does not entail the Weak Sadistic Conclusion. This is made (...) possible by a fourth category of absolute value in addition to goodness, badness, and neutrality. (shrink)

This article argues that Foucault’s account of the intersection between population, liberal economy, and biopolitics needs to be reconstructed in light of Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population. Taking Malthus into account brings to the fore how deeply the question of population is tied to a colonial hierarchy that differentiates between dangerous ‘savage’ and economic ‘civilized’ life. ‘Savage life’ is depicted as a catastrophic form of life, which uses resources in a non-economic way due to its forgetfulness of the (...) future. The article shows how this notion of ‘savage life’ broadens the concept of liberal economic governmentality. Most importantly, it highlights the role of passions and futurity for liberal governmentality. As the discussion of Malthus’ texts demonstrates, the passions of hope and fear assume a crucial role for engendering futurity in the economic subject. As will be shown, while the more ‘savage life’ is considered to be made governable through fear, the more civilized life is supposed to be allured by hope. The article points out the implication of this analysis for Foucault’s notion of biopolitics in relation to liberal economy. (shrink)

Recently, in his Rolf Schock Prize Lecture, Derek Parfit has suggested a novel way of avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion by introducing what he calls “imprecision” in value comparisons. He suggests that in a range of important cases, populations of different sizes are only imprecisely comparable. Parfit suggests that this feature of value comparisons opens up a way of avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion without implying other counterintuitive conclusions, and thus solves one of the major challenges in ethics. In this article, (...) I try to clarify Parfit's proposal and evaluate whether it will help us with the paradoxes in population ethics. (shrink)

Since the introduction of mathematical population genetics, its machinery has shaped our fundamental understanding of natural selection. Selection is taken to occur when differential fitnesses produce differential rates of reproductive success, where fitnesses are understood as parameters in a population genetics model. To understand selection is to understand what these parameter values measure and how differences in them lead to frequency changes. I argue that this traditional view is mistaken. The descriptions of natural selection rendered by population genetics models are (...) in general neither predictive nor explanatory and introduce avoidable conceptual confusions. I conclude that a correct understanding of natural selection requires explicitly causal models of reproductive success. *Received May 2006; revised December 2006. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, Kansas State University, 201 Dickens Hall, Manhattan, KS 66506; e‐mail: [email protected] . (shrink)

Population axiology is the study of the conditions under which one state of affairs is better than another, when the states of affairs in ques- tion may differ over the numbers and the identities of the persons who ever live. Extant theories include totalism, averagism, variable value theories, critical level theories, and “person-affecting” theories. Each of these the- ories is open to objections that are at least prima facie serious. A series of impossibility theorems shows that this is no coincidence: (...) it can be proved, for various sets of prima facie intuitively compelling desiderata, that no axiology can simultaneously satisfy all the desiderata on the list. One’s choice of population axiology appears to be a choice of which intuition one is least unwilling to give up. (shrink)

I defend a radical interpretation of biological populations—what I call population pluralism—which holds that there are many ways that a particular grouping of individuals can be related such that the grouping satisfies the conditions necessary for those individuals to evolve together. More constraining accounts of biological populations face empirical counter-examples and conceptual difficulties. One of the most intuitive and frequently employed conditions, causal connectivity—itself beset with numerous difficulties—is best construed by considering the relevant causal relations as ‘thick’ causal (...) concepts. I argue that the fine-grained causal relations that could constitute membership in a biological population are huge in number and many are manifested by degree, and thus we can construe population membership as being defined by massively multidimensional constructs, the differences between which are largely arbitrary. I end by showing that positions in two recent debates in theoretical biology depend on a view of biological populations at odds with the pluralism defended here. (shrink)

This article postulates a method of determining the date of human settlement in the Canary Islands by establishing when species of mice, which are commensal with human beings and hence in all likelihood migrated with them, arrived in the archipelago. At the same time, the extinction of several species of endemic rodents may also correlate with such arrivals. The study establishes the outer limits for the arrival of the mouse species, between the 5th millennium BCE and the 15th century CE, (...) but, while indicative archaeological evidence indicates human settlement was established by around the middle of the 1st millennium BCE, the absence of conclusive dating of fossil mice remains leaves a definitive conclusion for the start of such settlement still open. (shrink)

Ernst Mayr has argued that Darwinian theory discredited essentialist modes of thought and replaced them with what he has called "population thinking". In this paper, I characterize essentialism as embodying a certain conception of how variation in nature is to be explained, and show how this conception was undermined by evolutionary theory. The Darwinian doctrine of evolutionary gradualism makes it impossible to say exactly where one species ends and another begins; such line-drawing problems are often taken to be the decisive (...) reason for thinking that essentialism is untenable. However, according to the view of essentialism I suggest, this familiar objection is not fatal to essentialism. It is rather the essentialist's use of what I call the natural state model for explaining variation which clashes with evolutionary theory. This model implemented the essentialist's requirement that properties of populations be defined in terms of properties of member organisms. Requiring such constituent definitions is reductionistic in spirit; additionally, evolutionary theory shows that such definitions are not available, and, moreover, that they are not needed to legitimize population-level concepts. Population thinking involves the thesis that population concepts may be legitimized by showing their connections with each other, even when they are not reducible to concepts applying at lower levels of organization. In the paper, I develop these points by describing Aristotle's ideas on the origins of biological variation; they are a classic formulation of the natural state model. I also describe how the development of statistical ideas in the 19th century involved an abandoning of the natural state model. (shrink)

This thesis consists of several independent papers in population ethics. I begin in Chapter 1 by critiquing some well-known 'impossibility theorems', which purport to show there can be no intuitively satisfactory population axiology. I identify axiological vagueness as a promising way to escape or at least mitigate the effects of these theorems. In particular, in Chapter 2, I argue that certain of the impossibility theorems have little more dialectical force than sorites arguments do. From these negative arguments I move to (...) positive ones. In Chapter 3, I justify the use of a 'veil of ignorance', starting from three more basic normative principles. This leads to positive arguments for various kinds of utilitarianism - the best such arguments I know. But in general the implications of the veil depend on how one answers what I call 'the risky existential question': what is the value to an individual of a chance of non-existence? I chart out the main options, and raise some puzzles for non-comparativism, the view that life is incomparable to non-existence. Finally, in Chapter 4, I consider the consequences for population ethics of the idea that what is normatively relevant is not personal identity, but a degreed relation of psychological connectedness. In particular, I pursue a strategy based in population ethics for understanding the controversial 'time-relative interests' account of the badness of death. (shrink)

Nearly all large policy decisions influence not only the quality of life for existing individuals but also the number-and even identities-of yet-to-exist individuals. Accounting for these effects in a policy evaluation framework requires taking difficult stances on concepts such as the value of existence. These issues are at the heart of a literature that sits between welfare economics and philosophical population ethics. Despite the inherent challenges of these questions, this literature has produced theoretical insights and subsequent progress on variable-population welfare (...) criteria. A surprisingly bounded set of coherent alternatives exists for practitioners once a set of uncontroversial axioms is adopted from the better-studied welfare criteria for cases where populations are assumed to be fixed. Although consensus has not yet been reached among these remaining alternatives, their recommendations often agree. The space has been sufficiently restricted and well explored that applications of the theoretical insights are possible and underway in earnest. (shrink)

Recently, in his Rolf Schock Prize Lecture, Derek Parfit has suggested a novel way of avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion by introducing what he calls “imprecision” in value comparisons. He suggests that in a range of important cases, populations of different sizes are only imprecisely comparable. Parfit suggests that this feature of value comparisons opens up a way of avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion without implying other counterintuitive conclusions, and thus solves one of the major challenges in ethics. In this article, (...) I try to clarify Parfit’s proposal and evaluate whether it will help us with the paradoxes in population ethics. (shrink)

I defend a radical interpretation of biological populations—what I call population pluralism—which holds that there are many ways that a particular grouping of individuals can be related such that the grouping satisfies the conditions necessary for those individuals to evolve together. More constraining accounts of biological populations face empirical counter-examples and conceptual difficulties. One of the most intuitive and frequently employed conditions, causal connectivity—itself beset with numerous difficulties—is best construed by considering the relevant causal relations as ‘thick’ causal (...) concepts. I argue that the fine-grained causal relations that could constitute membership in a biological population are huge in number and many are manifested by degree, and thus we can construe population membership as being defined by massively multidimensional constructs, the differences between which are largely arbitrary. I end by showing that positions in two recent debates in theoretical biology depend on a view of biological populations at odds with the pluralism defended here. 1 Introduction2 Biological Population, Broad and Narrow3 Difficulties with Narrow Biological Population Conditions3.1 Against the genealogical condition3.2 Against the conspecificity condition3.3 Against the proximity condition3.4 Against the typology condition4 Causal Connectivity5 Massively Multidimensional Population Constructs6 Population Uniqueness and Natural Selection6.1 Statisticalism and its discontents6.2 Price at what price?7 Conclusion. (shrink)

The book presents a new way of understanding Darwinism and evolution by natural selection, combining work in biology, philosophy, and other fields.

Geron recently announced that it had begun enrolling patients in the world's first-in-human clinical trial involving cells derived from human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). This trial raises important questions regarding the future of hESC-based therapies, especially in spinal cord injury (SCI) patients. We address some safety and efficacy concerns with this research, as well as the ethics of fair subject selection. We consider other populations that might be better for this research: chronic complete SCI patients for a safety trial, (...) subacute incomplete SCI patients for an efficacy trial, and perhaps primary progressive multiple sclerosis (MS) patients for a combined safety and efficacy trial. (shrink)

Future population growth is uncertain and matters for climate policy: higher growth entails more emissions and means more people will be vulnerable to climate-related impacts. We show that how future population is valued importantly determines mitigation decisions. Using the Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy model, we explore two approaches to valuing population: a discounted version of total utilitarianism (TU), which considers total wellbeing and is standard in social cost of carbon dioxide (SCC) models, and of average utilitarianism (AU), which ignores population size (...) and sums only each time period’s discounted average wellbeing. Under both approaches, as population increases the SCC increases, but optimal peak temperature decreases. The effect is larger under TU, because it responds to the fact that a larger population means climate change hurts more people: for example, in 2025, assuming the United Nations (UN)-high rather than UN-low population scenario entails an increase in the SCC of 85% under TU vs. 5% under AU. The difference in the SCC between the two population scenarios under TU is comparable to commonly debated decisions regarding time discounting. Additionally, we estimate the avoided mitigation costs implied by plausible reductions in population growth, finding that large near-term savings ($billions annually) occur under TU; savings under AU emerge in the more distant future. These savings are larger than spending shortfalls for human development policies that may lower fertility. Finally, we show that whether lowering population growth entails overall improvements in wellbeing—rather than merely cost savings—again depends on the ethical approach to valuing population. (shrink)

What are the prospects for using population policy as tool to reduce carbon emissions? In this paper, we review evidence from population science, in order to inform debates in population ethics that, so far, have largely taken place within the academic philosophy literature. In particular, we ask whether fertility policy is likely to have a large effect on carbon emissions, and therefore on temperature change. Our answer is no. Prospects for a policy of fertility-reduction-as-climate-mitigation are limited by population momentum, a (...) demographic factor that limits possible variation in the size of the population, even if fertility rates change very quickly. In particular, a hypothetical policy that instantaneously changed fertility and mortality rates to replacement levels would nevertheless result in a population of over 9 billion people in 2060. We use a leading climate-economy model to project the consequence of such a hypothetical policy for climate change. As a standalone mitigation policy, such a hypothetical change in the size of the future population-much too large to be implementable by any foreseeable government programme-would reduce peak temperature change only to 6.4°C, relative to 7.1°C under the most likely population path. Therefore, fertility reduction is unlikely to be an adequate core approach to climate mitigation. (shrink)

Consider Phoebe and Daphne. Phoebe has credences in 1 million propositions. Daphne, on the other hand, has credences in all of these propositions, but she's also got credences in 999 million other propositions. Phoebe's credences are all very accurate. Each of Daphne's credences, in contrast, are not very accurate at all; each is a little more accurate than it is inaccurate, but not by much. Whose doxastic state is better, Phoebe's or Daphne's? It is clear that this question is analogous (...) to a question that has exercised ethicists over the past thirty years. How do we weigh a population consisting of some number of exceptionally happy and satisfied individuals against another population consisting of a much greater number of people whose lives are only just worth living? This is the question that occasions population ethics. In this paper, I go in search of the correct population ethics for credal states. (shrink)

Among mycologists, questions persist about what entities should be treated as the fundamental units of fungal populations. This article articulates a coherent view about populations of heterokaryotic fungi and the individuals that comprise them. Using Godfrey-Smith’s minimal concept of a Darwinian population, I argue that entities at two levels of the biological hierarchy satisfy the minimal concept in heterokaryotic fungi: mycelia and nuclei. I provide a preliminary answer to the question of how to understand the relation between these (...) two populations. This article contributes to discussions about the nature of biological individuality, organismality, and evolutionary transitions. (shrink)