Context: The field of psychology consists of many specialist domains of activity, which lack shared foundations. This means that the field as a whole lacks conceptual coherence. Problem: The aim of the article is to show how second-order cybernetics can provide both foundations and a unifying conceptual framework for psychology. Method: The field of psychology is overviewed. There is then a demonstration of how cybernetics can provide both foundations and a unifying conceptual framework. This entails defining some key cybernetics concepts (...) and showing how they have already permeated the field, largely implicitly, and showing how, when made explicit, they can unify the field. Results: I show how concepts from second-order cybernetics can unify “process” and “person” approaches within psychology and can also unify individual psychology and social psychology, a unification that also builds conceptual bridges with sociology. Implications: The results are of value for bringing order to an otherwise inchoate field. They afford better communication between those working in the field, which is likely to give rise to new research questions and more effective ways of tackling them. Constructivist content: Central to the article is a reliance on concepts taken from the constructivist perspective of second-order cybernetics. (shrink)

Do the rich descriptions and narrative shapings of literature provide a valuable resource for readers, writers, philosophers, and everyday people to imagine and confront the ultimate questions of life? Do the human activities of storytelling and complex moral decision-making have a deep connection? What are the moral responsibilities of the artist, critic, and reader? What can religious perspectives—from Catholic to Protestant to Mormon—contribute to literary criticism? Thirty well known contributors reflect on these questions, including iterary theorists Marshall Gregory, James Phelan, (...) and Wayne Booth; philosophers Martha Nussbaum, Richard Hart, and Nina Rosenstand; and authors John Updike, Charles Johnson, Flannery O'Connor, and Bernard Malamud. Divided into four sections, with introductory matter and questions for discussion, this accessible anthology represents the most crucial work today exploring the interdisciplinary connections between literature, religion and philosophy. (shrink)

By establishing the sciences of life while, at the same time, forming a certain self-knowledge, the human being altered itself as a living being by taking on the character of a rational subject acquiring the power to act on itself, changing its living conditions and its own life …. [There is a] kinship between the discourse on limit-experience, when it was a matter of the subject transforming itself, and the discourse on the transformation of the subject itself through the construction (...) of a knowledge. (Foucault, 2000, 296)1. (shrink)

Coral bleaching has impacted reefs worldwide and the predictions of near‐annual bleaching from over two decades ago have now been realized. While technology currently provides the means to predict large‐scale bleaching, predicting reef‐scale and within‐reef patterns in real‐time for all reef users is limited. In 2020, heat stress across the Great Barrier Reef underpinned the region's third bleaching event in 5 years. Here we review the heterogeneous emergence of bleaching across Heron Island reef habitats and discuss the oceanographic drivers that (...) underpinned variable bleaching emergence. We do so as a case study to highlight how reef end‐user groups who engage with coral reefs in different ways require targeted guidance for how, and when, to alter their use of coral reefs in response to bleaching events. Our case study of coral bleaching emergence demonstrates how within‐reef scale nowcasting of coral bleaching could aid the development of accessible and equitable bleaching response strategies on coral reefs. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/N9Tgb8N-vN0. (shrink)

To properly understand behavior, we must obtain both ultimate and proximate explanations. Put briefly, ultimate explanations are concerned with why a behavior exists, and proximate explanations are concerned with how it works. These two types of explanation are complementary and the distinction is critical to evolutionary explanation. We are concerned that they have become conflated in some areas of the evolutionary literature on human behavior. This article brings attention to these issues. We focus on three specific areas: the evolution of (...) cooperation, transmitted culture, and epigenetics. We do this to avoid confusion and wasted effort—dangers that are particularly acute in interdisciplinary research. Throughout this article, we suggest ways in which misunderstanding may be avoided in the future. (shrink)

Studying the similarities and differences in socio-communicative behavior between chimpanzees and bonobos is critical to increasing our understanding of the evolution of human sociality and communication. Both species rely heavily on the use of vocalizations during communicative interactions, although the form and function of these signals may vary between the two ape species. For example, bonobo vocalizations seem to be structurally more complex than those produced by chimpanzees, and calls seem to be directed to individuals not in immediate physical proximity. (...) Both species, however, make use of communicative signals from different modalities concurrently, particularly vocalizations and manual gestures. However, this multimodal communication is more commonly observed in chimpanzees when compared to bonobos, who more frequently use vocalizations exclusively, without signals from additional modalities. In addition, there are a number of marked differences in social characteristics between the two species. Though both species exhibit fission–fusion behavior, chimpanzees do so more often, potentially as a result of their habitat profile and foraging strategies. Differences also exist in terms of dominance and aggression. Chimpanzees live in largely patriarchal societies with strong male–male bonds, whereas bonobos tend to be matriarchal with strong female–female bonds. These differences in communicative and social characteristics are thought to be linked to the ecology of the respective habitats of the two apes and their strategies for resource exploitation. In all likelihood, similarities in feeding ecology played a crucial role in selecting for the advanced cognitive abilities of both species—e.g., producing meaningful communicative signals, regulating competition and group cohesion, and making and utilizing tools to aid in foraging. Similarly, differences in their respective habitats may have led to selection for characteristics resulting in the behavioral differences observed today between the two species. Therefore, a clearer understanding of the similarities and differences between the two species most closely related to humans will provide valuable information into our own evolution by elucidating those characteristics shared among humans and our ape ancestors and those derived in the hominin lineage. (shrink)

Niche construction refers to the activities of organisms that bring about changes in their environments, many of which are evolutionarily and ecologically consequential. Advocates of niche construction theory (NCT) believe that standard evolutionary theory fails to recognize the full importance of niche construction, and consequently propose a novel view of evolution, in which niche construction and its legacy over time (ecological inheritance) are described as evolutionary processes, equivalent in importance to natural selection. Here, we subject NCT to critical evaluation, in (...) the form of a collaboration between one prominent advocate of NCT, and a team of skeptics. We discuss whether niche construction is an evolutionary process, whether NCT obscures or clarifies how natural selection leads to organismal adaptation, and whether niche construction and natural selection are of equivalent explanatory importance. We also consider whether the literature that promotes NCT overstates the significance of niche construction, whether it is internally coherent, and whether it accurately portrays standard evolutionary theory. Our disagreements reflect a wider dispute within evolutionary theory over whether the neo-Darwinian synthesis is in need of reformulation, as well as different usages of some key terms (e.g., evolutionary process). (shrink)

This paper analyzes the reasons behind what it calls the erosion of democracy under George W. Bush's presidency since September 11, 2001, and claims that they are twofold: first, the erosion in question can be attributed to a crisis of the state and the belief that security is its only genuine function. In other words, the erosion of democracy is an erosion of the very idea of the public sphere beyond security and war. Secondly, the erosion of the ethical sphere (...) goes hand in hand with an extraordinary resurgence of what, still following Hegel, I call "morality," and which privileges the subjective over the objective, or moral feeling over institutions and the law. (shrink)

Reduced Environmental Stimulation Therapy (REST) alters the balance of sensory input to the nervous system by systematically attenuating sensory signals from visual, auditory, thermal, tactile, vestibular, and proprioceptive channels. Previous research from our group has shown that REST via floatation acutely reduces anxiety and blood pressure while simultaneously heightening interoceptive awareness in clinically anxious populations. Anorexia nervosa (AN) is an eating disorder characterized by elevated anxiety, distorted body representation, and abnormal interoception, raising the question of whether REST might positively impact (...) these symptoms. However, this approach has never been studied in eating disorders and it is unknown whether exposure to REST might worsen AN symptoms. To examine these possibilities we conducted an open-label study to investigate the safety and tolerability of REST in AN. We also explored the impact of REST on affective symptoms, body image disturbance, and interoception. Twenty-one partially weight-restored AN outpatients completed a protocol involving four sequential sessions of REST: reclining in a zero-gravity chair, floating in an open pool, and two sessions of floating in an enclosed pool. All sessions were 90 minutes, approximately one week apart. We measured orthostatic blood pressure before and immediately after each session (primary outcome), in addition to collecting blood pressure readings every 10 minutes during the session using a wireless waterproof system as a secondary outcome measure. Each participant's affective state, awareness of interoceptive sensations, and body image was assessed before and after every session (exploratory outcomes). There was no evidence of orthostatic hypotension following floating, and no adverse events (primary outcome). Secondary analyses revealed that REST induced statistically significant reductions in blood pressure, anxiety and negative affect, heightened awareness of cardiorespiratory but not gastrointestinal sensations, and reduced body image dissatisfaction. The findings from this initial trial suggest that individuals with AN can safely tolerate the physical effects of REST via floatation. Future randomized controlled trials will need to investigate whether these initial observations of improved anxiety, interoception, and body image disturbance can be effectively extended to acutely ill AN populations. (shrink)

Psychiatry is rapidly adopting digital phenotyping and artificial intelligence/machine learning tools to study mental illness based on tracking participants’ locations, online activity, phone and text message usage, heart rate, sleep, physical activity, and more. Existing ethical frameworks for return of individual research results (IRRs) are inadequate to guide researchers for when, if, and how to return this unprecedented number of potentially sensitive results about each participant’s real-world behavior. To address this gap, we convened an interdisciplinary expert working group, supported by (...) a National Institute of Mental Health grant. Building on established guidelines and the emerging norm of returning results in participant-centered research, we present a novel framework specific to the ethical, legal, and social implications of returning IRRs in digital phenotyping research. Our framework offers researchers, clinicians, and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) urgently needed guidance, and the principles developed here in the context of psychiatry will be readily adaptable to other therapeutic areas. (shrink)

Ontology is one strategy for promoting interoperability of heterogeneous data through consistent tagging. An ontology is a controlled structured vocabulary consisting of general terms (such as “cell” or “image” or “tissue” or “microscope”) that form the basis for such tagging. These terms are designed to represent the types of entities in the domain of reality that the ontology has been devised to capture; the terms are provided with logical defi nitions thereby also supporting reasoning over the tagged data. Aim: This (...) paper provides a survey of the biomedical imaging ontologies that have been developed thus far. It outlines the challenges, particularly faced by ontologies in the fields of histopathological imaging and image analysis, and suggests a strategy for addressing these challenges in the example domain of quantitative histopathology imaging. The ultimate goal is to support the multiscale understanding of disease that comes from using interoperable ontologies to integrate imaging data with clinical and genomics data. (shrink)

Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution’s creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal (...) creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems. (shrink)