Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children is a birth cohort study within which the Project to Enhance ALSPAC through Record Linkage was established to enrich the ALSPAC resource through linkage between ALSPAC participants and routine sources of health and social data. PEARL incorporated qualitative research to seek the views of young people about data linkage, including their opinions about appropriate safeguards and research governance. In this paper we focus on views expressed about the purpose and composition of research ethics (...) committees. Digitally recorded interviews were conducted with 48 participants aged 17–19 years. Participants were asked about whether medical research should be monitored and controlled, their knowledge of research ethics committees, who should sit on these committees and what their role should be. Interview recordings were fully transcribed and anonymised. Thematic analysis was undertaken, assisted by the Framework approach to data management. The majority of interviewees had little or no specific knowledge of ethics committees. Once given basic information about research ethics committees, only three respondents suggested there was no need for such bodies to scrutinise research. The key tasks of ethics committees were identified as monitoring the research process and protecting research participants. The difficulty of balancing the potential to inhibit research against the need to protect research participants was acknowledged. The importance of relevant research and professional expertise was identified but it was also considered important to represent wider public opinion, and to counter the bias potentially associated with self-selection possibly through a selection process similar to ‘jury duty’. There is a need for more education and public awareness about the role and composition of research ethics committees. Despite an initial lack of knowledge, interviewees were able to contribute their ideas and balance the rights of individuals with the wider benefits from research. The suggestion that public opinion should be represented through random selection similar to jury duty may be worth pursuing in the light of the need to ensure diversity of opinion and establish trust amongst the general public about the use of ‘big data’ for the wider public good. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art and SelectionBrian BoydArt Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, by Denis Dutton; 279 pp. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009, $25.00. Oxford: Oxford University Press, £16.99.In the interests of full disclosure: Denis Dutton, the author of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, not only edits this journal but has also published here a number of my essays. We share enthusiasms and aversions, but we also now and (...) again disagree. And we both enjoy spirited discussion, which is why I asked him if I might review his book for this journal. Now can we begin?Ellen Dissanayake, the first to take a modern evolutionary approach to art, in her What Is Art For? (1988), doubts that sexual selection can explain much about art. After all, she notes, men can compete about anything, even about who can pee the highest.1 Denis Dutton, the first philosopher to take a sustained evolutionary approach to the arts, suggests that much in art arises from sexual selection—and he spends a good deal of time discussing and dismissing the kind of philosophy of art that orients itself around the urinal that Marcel Duchamp christened Fountain.Dutton begins by reporting recent research into the universality of human landscape preferences. Although these preferences explain little about art in the round, they vividly demonstrate the link between human emotions and preferences across cultures now and human survival [End Page 204] needs thousands of generations ago. In chapter 2, Dutton shows that although recent philosophers of art have not sought to ground art in human nature, that has been an aim of their predecessors from Aristotle to Hume and Kant.But Dutton really starts with the intuitions that art seems a fundamentally similar pursuit around the world, and that artworks like Duchamp's Fountain or Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes should not be central to our thinking about art, even if they have been central for prominent philosophers of art like George Dickie and Arthur Danto. Dutton stresses that we can appreciate art across cultures. He did so himself when he lived in India while in the Peace Corps, and, an accomplished pianist, learned the sitar from a student of Ravi Shankar, or later, when he lived by the Sepik River in northern Papua New Guinea to ascertain whether "local criteria for beautiful art agree with what Western aficionados and connoisseurs of Sepik art call beautiful. My conclusion was unequivocal: Sepik standards of beauty closely match the opinions of Western experts, including curators and collectors who enjoy a wide experience with Sepik museum collections but who have never set foot in the country" (p. 11).As this passage makes clear, Dutton is not your average armchair academic analytical aesthetician—thank goodness. Unlike the typical professional philosopher of art, he does not hide behind the porcupine quills of philosophese, good for defense and a certain kind of bristly display but utterly rebarbative. Like that other maverick philosopher, Daniel Dennett, he instead engages with work, the world, and readers outside his discipline.Dutton argues convincingly for the need to focus first on indisputable examples of art rather than on problematic cases, just as discussions of murder should not begin with assisted suicide, abortion or capital punishment (p. 50). One of his best chapters offers a cluster concept of art, a dozen features shared by the most unequivocal art. Doubtful cases will satisfy fewer than the full checklist, but there is no fixed threshold, no necessary and sufficient number of criteria. And no criterion by itself distinguishes art from non-art. Indeed one of the most fascinating aspects of his cluster concept is that, for each criterion, he parenthetically notes examples elsewhere in human life that would satisfy that criterion but that nobody would consider art. Skill and virtuosity, for instance, he insists on as features of the indisputably artful, but he adds also: "High skill is a source of pleasure and admiration in every area of human activity beyond art, perhaps most notably today in sports. [End Page 205] Almost every regularized human activity can be turned competitive in order to emphasize the development and admiration of its technical, skill aspect. Guinness World Records... (shrink)

Acknowledgments 1. Culture Is Essential 2. Culture Exists 3. Culture Evolves 4. Culture Is an Adaptation 5. Culture Is Maladaptive 6. Culture and Genes Coevolve 7. Nothing about Culture Makes Sense except in the Light of Evolution.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 31.1 (2007) 189-196MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Fiction and Theory of Mind: An ExchangeLisa Zunshine University of KentuckyBrian Boyd's review of my new book, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Ohio State University Press, 2006) engages a large variety of issues.1 I would like to address an important question about the integration of scientific methodology with literary analysis suggested by Boyd's (...) discussion.2 As I argue below, two different perspectives of this integration may mark two different—indeed, incompatible—ways of formulating the disciplinary goals and philosophy of the new field of cognitive literary theory.Why We Read Fiction makes a case for admitting the recent findings of cognitive psychologists into literary studies by showing how their research into the ability to explain behavior in terms of the underlying states of mind can furnish us with a series of surprising insights into our interaction with literary texts. Using as my case studies novels ranging from Richardson's Clarissa, Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, and Austen's Pride and Prejudice to Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Nabokov's Lolita, and Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, I advance and explore a series of hypotheses about cognitive cravings that are satisfied—and created!—when we read fiction.Although my study draws on the already well-established as well as forthcoming work of numerous cognitive scientists (including Simon Baron-Cohen, Clark H. Barrett, Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Christopher Frith, Uta Frith, Paul Bloom, Susan Carey and Elizabeth Spelke, Peter Carruthers, Andy Clark, Antonio Damasio, Daniel Dennett, Alison Gopnik, Francesca Happe, Paul [End Page 189] Harris, Lawrence Hirschfeld, Stanley Klein, Alan Leslie, Andrew Meltzoff, Robert Mitchell, Keith Oatley, Gloria Origgi, Oliver Sacks, Dan Sperber, James Stiller, and Endel Tulving), it makes a point of being accessible to non-specialist readers. Cognitive science can be incredibly complicated and so can literary criticism, but I wanted to write a book on cognitive literary theory that does not scare anybody away with unnecessary jargon, knotty sentences, and overlong quotations. (Ironically, I must have succeeded too well in making my book reader-friendly and tucking my references in the endnotes since Boyd observes that I rely on only "a few findings" of cognitive scientists in my discussion.)The book consists of three parts. The first part, "Attributing Minds," introduces the first key theoretical concept of this book: mind-reading, also known as Theory of Mind. Drawing on the work of Simon Baron-Cohen (Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind), I suggest that fiction engages, teases, and pushes to its tentative limits our mind-reading capacity. Building on the recent research of Robin Dunbar and his colleagues, I then consider one particular aspect of Woolf's prose as an example of spectacular literary experimentation with our Theory of Mind. Finally, I turn to Steven Pinker's controversial analysis of Woolf in The Blank Slate to discuss the possibilities of a more profitable dialogue between cognitive science and literary studies.Of particular importance to this part of my argument is my belief that fictional narratives endlessly experiment with rather than automatically execute our evolved cognitive adaptations. When cognitive scientists succeed in isolating a certain regularity of our information-processing—for example, a constraint on the number of mutually reflecting minds that we can process with ease—we can take that constraint and see how it plays itself out in a fictional narrative. What we discover is that where there is a cognitive constraint, there is a "guarantee" of sorts that writers will intuitively experiment in the direction of challenging that constraint, probing and poking it and getting around it. The exact forms of such probing and poking will depend on specific cultural circumstances, including the mind-reading profiles of individual writers and their readers. The cognitive "limits" thus present us with creative openings rather than with a promise of stagnation and endless replication of established forms. This realization marks the possibility of a genuine interaction between cognitive psychology and... (shrink)

In the last 60,000 years humans have expanded across the globe and now occupy a wider range than any other terrestrial species. Our ability to successfully adapt to such a diverse range of habitats is often explained in terms of our cognitive ability. Humans have relatively bigger brains and more computing power than other animals and this allows us to figure out how to live in a wide range of environments. Here we argue that humans may be smarter than other (...) creatures, but none of us is nearly smart enough to acquire all of the information necessary to survive in any single habitat. In even the simplest foraging societies, people depend on a vast array of tools, detailed bodies of local knowledge, and complex social arrangements, and often do not understand why these tools, beliefs, and behaviors are adaptive. We owe our success to our uniquely-developed ability to learn from others. This capacity enables humans to gradually accumulate information across generations, and develop well-adapted tools, beliefs, and practices that are too complex for any single individual to invent during their lifetime. (shrink)

(i) Scientific realism is primarily a metaphysical doctrine about the existence and nature of the unobservables of science. (ii) There are good explanationist arguments for realism, most famously that from the success of science, provided abduction is allowed. Abduction seems to be on an equal footing, at least, with other ampliative methods of inference. (iii) We have no reason to believe a doctrine of empirical equivalence that would sustain the underdetermination argument against realism. (iv) The key to defending realism from (...) the pessimistic meta-induction is that we have greatly improved our capacity to understand the unobservable world over recent centuries. (shrink)

A realistic and dialectical conception of the epistemology of science is advanced according to which the acquisition of instrumental knowledge is parasitic upon the acquisition, by successive approximation, of theoretical knowledge. This conception is extended to provide an epistemological characterization of reference and of natural kinds, and it is integrated into recent naturalistic treatments of knowledge. Implications for several current issues in the philosophy of science are explored.

In a previous paper (Moore, 2001), the headline findings from a study of social and financial performance over three years of eight firms in the UK supermarket industry were reported. These were based on the derivation of a 16‐measure social performance index and a 4‐measure financial performance index. This paper discusses the formulationof the indices and then reports on: discussions with two supermarket firms concerning the overall results; inter‐relationships between individual financial performance measures; inter‐relationships between individual social performance measures; stakeholder (...) group analysis; and inter‐relationships between turnover, age and gearing with social performance measures. The paper discusses these inter‐relationships, incorporating comments from the interviews with the two supermarket firms, and reports on both factor and cluster analysis. The interviews lend support for Preston and O’Bannon’s (1997) Available Funding Hypothesis in both its positive and negative form. The findings show that there are individual or combinations of related measures that could be used as surrogate measures for social and financial performance, instead of deriving a full index. However, the recommendation is that a full index continues to be used until there is further corroboration of these results. The findings also provide statistically significant support for the Negative Synergy Hypothesis (Preston and O’Bannon, 1997), show a statistically significant association between pre‐tax profits (both lagged and contemporaneous) with community contributions, and show that all statistically significant associations between individual social performance measures are positive – suggesting that they are mutually reinforcing. The association of size with social performance, noted in the previous paper, is also reinforced. Findings in relation to the proportion of women managers and the number of women on the Board and positive associations with other social and environmental performance measures raise interesting gender issues for business ethics. Factor analysis leads to no clear conclusions but cluster does show two or three clear clusters of firms, where size would seem to be the main but not sole factor. Further areas of research are noted. (shrink)

If culture is defined as variation acquired and maintained by social learning, then culture is common in nature. However, cumulative cultural evolution resulting in behaviors that no individual could invent on their own is limited to humans, song birds, and perhaps chimpanzees. Circumstantial evidence suggests that cumulative cultural evolution requires the capacity for observational learning. Here, we analyze two models the evolution of psychological capacities that allow cumulative cultural evolution. Both models suggest that the conditions which allow the evolution of (...) such capacities when rare are much more stringent than the conditions which allow the maintenance of the capacities when common. This result follows from the fact that the assumed benefit of the capacities, cumulative cultural adaptation, cannot occur when the capacities are rare. These results suggest why such capacities may be rare in nature. (shrink)

It is often argued that culture is adaptive because it allows people to acquire useful information without costly learning. In a recent paper Rogers analyzed a simple mathematical model that showed that this argument is wrong. Here we show that Rogers ' result is robust. As long as the only benefit of social learning is that imitators avoid learning costs, social learning does not increase average fitness. However, we also show that social learning can be adaptive if it makes individual (...) learning more accurate or less costly. (shrink)

Human societies are based on cooperation among large numbers of genetically unrelated individuals. This behavior is puzzling from an evolutionary perspective. Because cooperators are..

What are the causes of the evolution of complex cognition? Discussions of the evolution of cognition sometimes seem to assume that more complex cognition is a fundamental advance over less complex cognition, as evidenced by a broad trend toward larger brains in evolutionary history. Evolutionary biologists are suspicious of such explanations since they picture natural selection as a process leading to adaptation to local environments, not to progressive trends. Cognitive adaptations will have costs, and more complex cognition will evolve only (...) when its local utility outweighs them. (shrink)

E.O. Wilson (1975) described humans as one of the four pinnacles of social evolution. The other pinnacles are the colonial invertebrates, the social insects, and the non-human mammals. Wilson separated human sociality from that of the rest of the mammals because, with the exception of the social insect like Naked Mole Rats, only humans have generated societies of a grade of complexity that approaches that of the social insects and colonial invertebrates. In the last few millennia, human societies have even (...) begun to exceed, in numbers of individuals and degree of complexity, the societies of ants, termites, and corals. (shrink)

Human migration is nonrandom. In small scale societies of the past, and in the modern world, people tend to move to wealthier, safer, and more just societies from poorer, more violent, less just societies. If immigrants are assimilated, such nonrandom migration can increase the occurrence of culturally transmitted beliefs, values, and institutions that cause societies to be attractive to immigrants. Here we describe and analyze a simple model of this process. This model suggests that long run outcomes depend on the (...) relative strength of migration and local adaptation. When local adaption is strong enough to preserve cultural variation among groups, cultural variants that make societies attractive always predominate, but never drive alternative variants to extinction. When migration predominates, outcomes depend both on the relative attractiveness of alternative variants and on the initial sizes of societies that provide and receive immigrants. (shrink)

The application of phylogenetic methods to cultural variation raises questions about how cultural adaption works and how it is coupled to cultural transmission. Cultural group selection is of particular interest in this context because it depends on the same kinds of mechanisms that lead to tree-like patterns of cultural variation. Here, we review ideas about cultural group selection relevant to cultural phylogenetics. We discuss why group selection among multiple equilibria is not subject to the usual criticisms directed at group selection, (...) why multiple equilibria are a common phenomena, and why selection among multiple equilibria is not likely to be an important force in genetic evolution. We also discuss three forms of group competition and the processes that cause populations to shift from one equilibrium to another and create a mutation-like process at the group level. (shrink)

Darwin believed that his theory of evolution would stand or fall on its ability to account for human behavior. No species could be an exception to his theory without imperiling the whole edifice. The ideas in the Descent of Man were widely discussed by his contemporaries although they were far from being the only evolutionary theories current in the late nineteenth century. Darwin's specific evolutionary ideas and those of his main followers had very little impact on the social sciences as (...) they emerged as separate disciplines in the early Twentieth Century. Not until the late twentieth century were concerted, sophisticated efforts made to apply Darwinian theory to human behavior. Why such a long delay? We argue that Darwin's theory was rather modern in respects that conflicted with Victorian sensibilities and that he and his few close followers failed to influence any of the social sciences. The late Twentieth Century work takes up almost exactly where James Baldwin left off at the turn of the century. (shrink)

A growing body of research suggests that students achieve learning outcomes at higher rates when instructors use active-learning methods rather than standard modes of instruction. To investigate how one such method might be used to teach philosophy, we observed two classes that employed Reacting to the Past, an educational role-immersion game. We chose to investigate Reacting because role-immersion games are considered a particularly effective active-learning strategy. Professors who have used Reacting to teach history, interdisciplinary humanities, and political theory agree that (...) it engages students and teaches general skills like collaboration and communication. We investigated whether it can be effective for teaching philosophical content and skills like analyzing, evaluating, crafting, and communicating arguments in addition to bringing the more general benefits of active learning to philosophy classrooms. Overall, we find Reacting to be a useful tool for achieving these ends. While we do not argue that Reacting is uniquely useful for teaching philosophy, we conclude that it is worthy of consideration by philosophers interested in creative active-learning strategies, especially given that it offers a prepackaged set of flexible, user-friendly tools for motivating and engaging students. (shrink)

Two kinds of factors set the tempo and direction of organic and cultural evolution, those external to biotic evolutionary process, such as changes in the earth’s physical and chemical environments, and those internal to it, such as the time required for chance factors to lead lineages across adaptive valleys to a new niche space (Valentine 1985). The relative importance of these two sorts of processes is widely debated. Valentine (1973) argued that marine invertebrate diversity patterns responded to seafloor spreading as (...) this process generated more or less niche space. He suggested that natural selection is a powerful force and that earth’s biota are in near equilibrium with the niches available on the geological time scale. Walker and Valentine (1984) modeled the evolution of species assuming a logistic speciation rate limited by internal factors and a diversity-independent death rate caused by ongoing environmental change. Fitting this model to the observed evolution of shelled marine invertebrates suggests that the lag between extinctions and the evolution of new species leaves perhaps 30% of ecological niches unfilled. In this model, the biota lag environmental change by perhaps a few million years. However, as Valentine (1985) notes, if adaptive landscapes have whole suites of niches protected by deep maladaptive valleys, the waiting time for some pioneering species to cross the divide may be very long, generating the rare events that set new body plans and generate major adaptive radiations. Eldredge and Gould (1972) and Gould (2002) championed the idea that internal processes such as genetic and developmental constraints, coupled with the complexity of the adaptive landscape, resulted in a highly historically contingent evolutionary process. On Gould’s account, most of the history of life had to do not with a relatively close tracking of a changing environment but with the halting evolutionary exploration a deeply fissured niche space, mostly by rapid bursts of evolution as a fissure was crossed, followed by long periods of stasis.. (shrink)

Is society an organic whole with each of its many components working together like the organs in a body? Like organisms, societies are composed of many parts which seem to work together enhance their survival. Different people fulfill different, necessary role—subsistence, reproduction, coordination, and defense. Regular exchange of matter and energy guarantees that each component has the resources it needs. Norms, laws and customs regulate virtually every aspect of social interaction, who may marry who, how disputes are resolved, and how (...) verbs should be conjugated. Ritual and religion provide comfort to the sick and fearful, maintain a feeling of solidarity and belonging, and serve to preserve and transmit knowledge through time. Even the simplest human societies seem like complex machines designed for growth and survival. (shrink)

A practical and thought provoking introduction to the most important ethical issues in medicine today. Over 700 entries, from short essays to brief definitions of key terms and concepts, have been contributed by leading clinicians and medical ethicists.

Version 4.4 October, 1994 Introduction When explaining human behavior, anthropologists frequently distinguish the things that people do of their own free will from the things they do because they have to. In much of anthropology, and most American archaeology, this is the difference between style and function. Functional behaviors are the things people are constrained to do; stylistic behaviors are the things people do when unconstrained. Where necessity stops and free choice begins is, of course, a classic problem of social (...) science theory, but wherever the boundary is placed, it is generally implied that the domains thus divided are not of equal importance (Bettinger 1991:49-50). Few straddle this fence: Materialists emphasize function and downplay style; structuralists and postmodernists do the opposite. Recent attempts to apply neo- Darwinian concepts to the archaeological record predictably side with materialist tradition, repeating the premise that it is most important to explain functional behavior; stylistic behavior is interesting only for localizing social units in time and space. (shrink)

In this article we argue that the legitimacy and stability of the social and political order in Britain is undermined by persistent inequalities of skills and opportunities. We first contend that British society is characterised by a liberal regime of social cohesion. Crucial to such a regime is the belief in individual opportunity and rewards based on merit. We demonstrate, through comparative analysis, that skills inequality is actually higher and social mobility lower in Britain than in other western countries. Also (...) the perception of equal opportunities is lower. In Britain there is thus a mismatch between the cherished ideal of meritocracy and the reality of a stratified society, both objectively and perceived. This, we postulate, is likely to contribute to the political alienation of disadvantaged groups. We argue that in theory adult learning could reduce the skills gap but that in reality it only magnifies skills inequality since in Britain the well educated and people in work have higher participation rates than the poorly educated and unemployed. (shrink)

Human syntactic language has no close parallels in other systems of animal communication. Yet it seems to be an important part of the cultural adaptation that serves to make humans the earth’s dominant organism. Why is language restricted to humans given that communication seems to be so useful? We argue that language is part of human cooperation. We talk because others can normally trust what we say to be useful to them, not just to us. Models of gene-culture coevolution give (...) one plausible explanation for how language, cooperative institutions, and the genetic basis for both could have evolved. Why did the coevolutionary process come to rest leaving a huge space for the cultural evolution of language? We argue that language diversity functions to limit communication between people who cannot freely trust one another or where even truthful communications from others would result in maladaptive behavior on the part of listeners. (shrink)

Criticisms of John Locke as a ‘bourgeois’ or ‘possessive individualist’ have been hotly contested since their appearance in the 1950s and 1960s. Locke's defenders have countered that his economic thought was governed by doctrines of charity, community and the public good. This project of recovering a kinder, gentler Locke has brought with it an emphasis on the centrality of Grotius and Pufendorf to seventeenth-century discussions of natural law. Still, the emergence of the ‘Grotius-Pufendorf thesis’ may have eclipsed other sources of (...) Locke's political economy. I will suggest that Locke's writings on trade and economic accumulation are better understood in light of a seventeenth-century economic discourse of pamphlets, tracts and sermons rooted in the practical theology of Calvinism. (shrink)

Rates of violence in the American South have long been much greater than in the North. Accounts of duels, feuds, bushwhackings, and lynchings occur prominently in visitors’ accounts, newspaper articles, and autobiography from the 18th Century onward. According to crime statistics these differences persist today. In their book, Culture of Honor, Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen argue that the South is more violent than the North because Southerners have different, culturally acquired beliefs about personal honor than Northerners. The South was (...) disproportionately settled by Protestant Scotch-Irish, people with an animal herding background, whereas Northern settlers were English, German and Dutch peasant farmers. Most herders live in thinly settled, lawless regions. Since livestock are easy to steal, herders seek reputations for willingness to engage in violent behavior as a deterrent to rustling and other predatory behavior. Of course, bad men come to subscribe to the same code, the better to intimidate their victims. As this arms race proceeds, arguments over trivial acts can rapidly escalate if a man—less often a woman—thinks his honor is at stake, and the resulting “culture of honor” leads to high rates of violence. Nisbett and Cohen support their hypothesis with an impressive range of data including, laboratory data, attitude surveys, field experiments, data on violence, and differences in legal codes. (shrink)

Altruistic punishment has been shown to invade when rare if individuals are allowed to opt out of cooperative ventures. Individuals that opt out do not contribute to the common enterprise or derive benefits from it. This result is potentially significant because it offers an explanation for the origin of large-scale cooperation in oneshot interactions among unrelated individuals. Here, we show that this result is not a general consequence of optional participation in cooperative activities, but depends on special assumptions about cooperative (...) pay-offs. We extend the pay-off structure of optional participation models to consider the effects of economies and diseconomies of scale in public-goods production, rival and non-rival consumption of goods, and different orderings of the pay-offs of freeriding and opting out. This more general model highlights the kinds of pay-offs for which optional participation favours cooperation, and those in which it does not. (shrink)

We contend that the talk of therapy, like everyday talk, is where and how people construct their understandings and ways of living. This is the fundamental insight of the social constructionist, or discursive, therapies. ‘Meaning’ is not some pre-given ‘thing’ that is communicated more or less successfully from one individual to another. Rather, ‘meanings’ are negotiated or constructed in the process of communication until each party is clear that they have a grasp of what they are ‘talking about’. Similarly, ‘meanings’ (...) are not universal, nor necessarily arranged in a given ethical hierarchy, with some absolutely superior to others: ‘meanings’ are local and accountable in their locality. Yet, meanings, and actions following from them, are central to the conversations of therapy. In our view, the social constructionist or discursive therapies point to enhanced possibilities for collaborative and relevant conversations with clients. In this article we summarize themes common to contemporary discursive approaches to therapy. (shrink)

Free enterprise economic systems evolved in the modern period as culturally transmitted values related to honesty, hard work, and education achievement emerged. One evolutionary puzzle is why most economies for the past 5,000 years have had a limited role for free enterprise given the spectacular success of modern free economies. Another is why if humans became biologically modern 50,000 years ago did it take until 11,000 years ago for agriculture, the economic foundation of states, to begin. Why didn’t free enterprise (...) evolve long ago and far away? (shrink)

Health care services today lack the resources to meet everybody's exspectations. Patients, professional workers and trade unions have legitimate but frequently conflicting claims, and so too have the different interest groups and specialties within medicine. This book provides an account of how resource allocation dilemmas appear to those confronted by them, in the hospital, on health boards and in the community, and it offers a critique of the moral and political arguments most commonly employed in discussing them.

Evolutionary scholars advance two major sorts of hypotheses to explain big events, such as the origin of agriculture. One hypothesis assumes that natural selection is so powerful that organisms are always close to an evolutionary equilibrium with current environment. Thus, any major changes will be a result of external processes having to do with the environment. The other camp imagines that evolution is a slow, halting, and biased process that is limited and directed by internal obstacles that thwart what natural (...) selection favors, for example, a particular somatic arrangement that is difficult to “engineer” quickly. Both kinds of constraints were probably involved in the trajectory leading to agriculture but perhaps at different timescales. (shrink)

As cultural evolutionists interested in how culture changes over the long term, we've thought and written a lot about migration, but only recently tumbled to an obvious idea: migration has a profound effect on how societies evolve culturally because it is selective. People move to societies that provide a more attractive way of life, and all other things being equal, this process spreads ideas and institutions that lead to economic efficiency, social order and equality.

Approach and avoidance motivation may represent important explanatory constructs in understanding how individuals differ. Such constructs have primarily been assessed in self-reported terms, but there are limitations to self-reports of motivation. Accordingly, the present review concentrates on the potential utility of implicit cognitive-behavioral probes of approach and avoidance motivation in modeling and understanding individual differences. The review summarizes multiple lines of research that have documented the utility of such probes to the personality-processing interface. Although multiple gaps in our knowledge exist, (...) and are acknowledged, the value of such implicit cognitive-behavioral assessments is emphasized both in modeling multiple subcomponents of approach and avoidance motivation and in showing that such tendencies matter in ways that transcend momentary experiences or manipulations. (shrink)

What is Reflection? -- Human Factors -- Models of Reflection -- Reflection and NMC Revalidation -- Writing Reflectively -- Improving Care Through Reflection -- Critical Reflection -- Reflective Assignments -- Case Study 1 - Reflection in Practice - Newly Qualified Nurse (using Through the looking glass model of reflection) -- Case Study 2 - Reflection in Practice - Nursing Associate (using ERA Model of reflection) -- Case Study 3 - Reflection in Practice - Mental Health Nurse (using Rolf et al (...) Model of reflective practice) -- Case Study 4 - Reflection in practice - Qualified Nurse (using the REFLECT Model of reflection) -- Case Study 5 - Reflection in Practice - Learning Disability Nurse (using the Gibbs Model of Reflection) -- Case Study 6 - Reflection in Practice - Midwife (using the NMC Reflective accounts model) -- Reflection in Practice - Reflective Journal extract. (shrink)

The data were collected during 9.5 months of field work by Sarah Mathew from 2008– 2010. Participants were a representative sample of adult men reliant on nomadic pastoralism for their livelihood. We recruited them in a town close to the ethnic border frequented by nomadic Turkana who live in the surrounding 50 km radius. Recruitment was done with the help of trained local Turkana research assistants. The RA approached potential participants, briefly introduced them to the study, and then asked them (...) to participate. If they agreed, they were brought to the study site described below. We conducted the study in the town center because the risk of raids in the surrounding nomadic settlements was high. We did not recruit from the settled Turkana population in this town center as they are Turkana who have actively pursued schooling and professions outside the pastoral sector, or were forced out of subsistence pastoralism after droughts, epidemics or raids. Nomadic Turkana frequent the perimeter of the town center for a variety of reasons as it is an important trading center and is adjacent to dry season watering holes. Herders from surrounding nomadic settlements frequent the market to sell an animal and purchase tobacco, tea, sugar and flour. Turkana women come to sell milk and collect relief food. Nomadic Turkana periodically come to town to visit their settled relatives. A river runs along the perimeter of town. The wells dug in the dry bed of the river provide water for 1 surrounding nomadic settlements and so herdsmen frequently bring their livestock for watering to the perimeter of town from where we can recruit them.To ensure that our sample is representative of herders within the town perimeter on a given day, we aimed to recruit using the following procedure to the extent that circumstances allowed: First, we specified the age-group that the participant should belong to. Then the RA went to one of the locations where nomadic herders visiting town are found.. (shrink)