Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are a new, rapidly-growing class of organizations governed by smart contracts. Here we describe how researchers can contribute to the emerging science of DAOs and other digitally-constituted organizations. From granular privacy primitives to mechanism designs to model laws, we identify high-impact problems in the DAO ecosystem where existing gaps might be tackled through a new data set or by applying tools and ideas from existing research fields such as political science, computer science, economics, law, and organizational (...) science. Our recommendations encompass exciting research questions as well as promising business opportunities. We call on the wider research community to join the global effort to invent the next generation of organizations. (shrink)

What is poetry’s so-called ‘form-content unity’? In this paper, I argue that the idea of ‘form-content unity’, as derived from A. C. Bradley’s 1901 lecture, has been misconstrued by Peter Kivy, who believes that it is confused and vague. I argue that it has also been misconstrued, however, by the philosophers who find the idea insightful and instructive and present themselves as defending and developing it against Kivy’s criticisms. Crucially, Bradley’s argument emphasizes that hearing is necessary to any ‘poetic’ reading (...) of a metrical poem, but this focus on sound and metre tends to be ignored. A precision of terminology—particularly a reformulation of the paraphrase ‘form-content unity’—offers an improved understanding of Bradley’s claims. The lecture, I argue, properly understood, in fact supports the call for a shift of attention away from understanding poems as ‘form-content unities’ in the philosophy of poetry. (shrink)

The study aims to measure the link between CSR and economic growth. This study investigates whether CSR expenses shown by the banks are contributing to the sustainability of an emerging economy like India. For this study, CSR spending of 21 commercial banks, on nine development areas of the Indian economy, the human development index of India, and its indicators along with the growth rate of GDP of India and state-wise GDP for the year 2014-2015 to 2017-2018 have been taken as (...) secondary data. The research techniques used are the case analysis method, correlation, and descriptive analysis. The study highlights that CSR activities are more of a myth and a far-reaching possibility in developing nations like India, where most institutions are engrossed in such activities to gain laurels and secure investors from the globe. (shrink)

Recent research into LGBTQ kinship has suggested that reproductive technology might stabilise and/or disrupt dominant ideals about the importance of biogenetic relatedness in family formation. This article examines the way adults raised in lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) households are interested in tracing queer family histories, rather than solely their biological relations. Data comes from biographical narrative interviews with twenty-two adult children raised by LGBTQ parents. The article examines how participants’ kinship stories relate to parents’ identities and journeys (...) to, and through, LGBTQ parenthood. Knowledge of queer kinship was pivotal in the process of self-making and enabled participants to produce and express connections between themselves and their LGBTQ parents. Furthermore, queer social histories allowed them to articulate their affinity to LGBTQ communities and culture more widely, particularly noting their knowledge and experience of socio-legal discrimination against LGBTQ people. Thus, kinship narratives of people raised by LGBTQ parents highlight that the desire to ‘know where we come from’ is not rooted exclusively in biogenetics. In this case, kinship stories disrupted the established biogenetic narrative, stressing the importance of LGBTQ culture and history for constructing a connection between collective and individual identity. (shrink)

Literatura audialna, zarówno fikcjonalna (słuchowiska radiowe), jak i dokumentalna (audycje dokumentalne, feature’y) podejmuje temat Zagłady. Dyskurs postpamięci traktuje o ofiarach i ocalałych, oddaje też głos drugiemu pokoleniu ocalałych i badaczom Zagłady. Celem artykułu jest analiza wybranych dzieł sztuki audio o Holocauście pod kątem ich specyfiki gatunkowej oraz wskazanie pól tematycznych, które znajdują się na peryferiach narracji radiowych. Ma to na celu odpowiedź na pytanie o przyczyny decentralizacji wskazanych tematów. Metodą badawczą jest analiza treści konkretnych tytułów słuchowisk radiowych oraz cech ich (...) dramaturgii i konstrukcji. (shrink)

This paper explores the impacts of neurological intervention on selfhood with reference to recipients’ claims about changes to their self-understanding following Deep Brain Stimulation for treatment of Parkinson’s Disease. In the neuroethics literature, patients’ claims such as: “I don’t feel like myself anymore” and “I feel like a machine”, are often understood as expressing threats to identity. In this paper I argue that framing debates in terms of a possible threat to identity—whether for or against the proposition, is mistaken and (...) occludes what is ethically salient in changes from DBS. Rather, by adopting a relational narrative approach to identity and autonomy, I show that the ethically salient issue from DBS is impacts on autonomous agency—whether one’s actions and beliefs are one’s own, and how DBS may hinder, or foster, embodied, relational autonomy competences. This approach recognizes that if sufficiently significant, impacts on autonomy competences may pose a threat to one’s ability to contribute to the process of authoring one’s own life and so pose a threat to identity formation. I argue this approach resolves the confusion in the literature about whether and how DBS threatens identity and provides a complex picture of how DBS may affect selfhood by disrupting narrative identity formation and revision, distorting agency and/or undermining autonomy. (shrink)

Philosophy, theology and engineering are each characterised by striking, yet similar, low participation rates by female academics. While these disciplines seem very different, and so the diagnosis of the causes of this under-representation might likewise be expected to differ, we show a commonality of analysis in the diagnoses of, and responses to, women's under-representation. In each, we find a shared argument that concepts and methodologies central to that discipline are gendered male. We also find a shared response which urges engagement (...) in projects of critical re-imagination. We conclude with a case study of critical re-imagination in philosophy and draw some lessons from its successes and failures for the potential of gendered innovations to transform male dominated disciplines. While critical re-imagination of key concepts, presuppositions, and methodologies in these disciplines may be a necessary condition for improving participation rates by women, it is by no means sufficient. (shrink)

This article re-contextualizes Sigmund Freud's interest in the idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics in terms of the socio-political connotations of Lamarckism and Darwinism in the 1930s and 1950s. Many scholars have speculated as to why Freud continued to insist on a supposedly outmoded theory of evolution in the 1930s even as he was aware that it was no longer tenable. While Freud's initial interest in the inheritance of phylogenetic memory was not necessarily politically motivated, his refusal to abandon (...) this theory in the 1930s must be understood in terms of wider debates, especially regarding the position of the Jewish people in Germany and Austria. Freud became uneasy about the inheritance of memory not because it was scientifically disproven, but because it had become politically charged and suspiciously regarded by the Nazis as Bolshevik and Jewish. Where Freud seemed to use the idea of inherited memory as a way of universalizing his theory beyond the individual cultural milieu of his mostly Jewish patients, such a notion of universal science itself became politically charged and identified as particularly Jewish. The vexed and speculative interpretations of Freud's Lamarckism are situated as part of a larger post-War cultural reaction against Communism on the one hand, and on the other hand, against any scientific concepts of race in the wake of World War II. (shrink)

This article responds to the phenomenon of Internet cats becoming pervasive in Web 2.0, while at the same time digitally shared self-portraits, commonly called “selfies,” also circulate with extremely high frequency. The author tracks the efficacy of sharing selfies for trans/two Spirit individuals such as artist Kiley May and in trans-centric hashtag campaigns. It shows that trans-animality in digital life can offer sovereign forms of subjectivity and engages response patterns that locate a trans point of regard. Further, it seeks to (...) explain why so many different kinds of cuteness are shared in the intimate superpublics of online trans* communities. Building on classic texts in philosophical cat studies, such as from Jacques Derrida, the concept of the “inappropriate/d other,” and contemporary cuteness theories, the article argues that cute aesthetics provide a sentimental shield, can counter sexual indifference, and often enact a mode of resilience crucial for surviving in cultures that erase the existence of trans people of color. (shrink)

In this article, the authors take up the historical figure of Dr Betty Paërl, who has surprisingly turned up in very different kinds of specialised archives. The white mathematics professor was located in IHLIA LGBT+ Heritage, the largest queer heritage collection in Europe, as a notable SM sexpert and spokesperson on transgender politics, and also found during archival research into the anti-(neo)colonial struggles of Suriname against the Dutch. Upon closer inspection of the materials, the authors find the recurrent image/item of (...) the whip that presses them to carefully think through how the archive of Dr Paërl casts light on a history that Katherine McKittrick calls being ‘in the shadow of the whip’. The article aims to combine an analysis of these versions of the whip in different visual and discursive registers to detect the liberatory politics underlying her activisms. To do so, the authors develop the intersectional model of the kaleidoscope employed by Dutch Black, migrant and refugee (BMR) feminist theorists to grasp the shifting patterns of power that Paërl battled and embodied as an activist of the anticolonial struggle, for sex workers’ rights, for kinky sex and for transgender people. This is all the more important in the historical study of transgender visual materials that most often arrive in archives via medical and police photography or pornographic materials. The historical researcher, the article argues, should be wary of (re)producing a static vision that would reduce transgender figures to sex and gender politics, or eclipse a vision of trans politics that dilates beyond sexuality. (shrink)

Timothy Brown's piece "Building Intricate Partnerships with Neurotechnology" makes a valuable contribution to ethical discussion of questions about human identity and agency raised by Deep Brain Stimulation. The paper brings together a number of relational approaches to narrative identity and autonomy, drawing on first-personal empirical accounts, to extend a relational account of agency to include neurostimulators. In doing so, it builds on the contributions relational approaches have made to making sense of changes to aspects of selfhood following neurological intervention while (...) also helpfully reframing concerns away from the threat that DBS may pose to aspects of self-hood. This approach directs... (shrink)

In this study I examine some uses of connectives, and in particular co-ordinate conjunction, from a critical discourse perspective; these uses, in my view, cannot find a satisfactory explanation within current frameworks. It is suggested that we need to identify a conceptual level at which connectives function as hypo-textual signals, activating systematic law-like conditional statements (IF-THEN), which form default specifications of consistent structured knowledge frames. I argue that an account of connectives at the conceptual level of their function that does (...) not take into consideration such tightly structured background schemata, representing both general knowledge and ideologies, cannot afford any generality. As a result, ¿deviant¿ or ¿subversive¿ uses of these connectives can neither be identified as such nor find an adequately general explication within existing accounts, whereas in the proposed framework such uses find a ready explanation of sufficient generality. This framework lies at the intersection of disciplines: Linguistic pragmatics (empirical pragmatics, critical discourse analysis), on the one hand, and cognitive science, on the other. Consequently, this proposal, too, can be regarded as a plea for crossing boundaries and joining forces. (shrink)

In this study I examine some uses of connectives, and in particular co-ordinate conjunction, from a critical discourse perspective; these uses, in my view, cannot find a satisfactory explanation within current frameworks. It is suggested that we need to identify a conceptual level at which connectives function as hypo-textual signals, activating systematic law-like conditional statements, which form default specifications of consistent structured knowledge frames. I argue that an account of connectives at the conceptual level of their function that does not (...) take into consideration such tightly structured background schemata, representing both general knowledge and ideologies, cannot afford any generality. As a result, ‘deviant’ or ‘subversive’ uses of these connectives can neither be identified as such nor find an adequately general explication within existing accounts, whereas in the proposed framework such uses find a ready explanation of sufficient generality. This framework lies at the intersection of disciplines: Linguistic pragmatics, on the one hand, and cognitive science, on the other. Consequently, this proposal, too, can be regarded as a plea for crossing boundaries and joining forces. (shrink)

Os usos do passado e da tradição em uma sociedade pós-tradicional, na perspectiva de Zygmunt Bauman, é resultado dos desdobramentos da modernidade em sua produção da ambivalência. O objetivo do presente artigo é rastrear esse pensamento na obra de Bauman a partir da suturação do conceito de tradição com a obra mais ampla do filósofo. Buscaremos, então, pontos de contato com outros autores que também trabalharam esta temática – notadamente, Hannah Arendt – a partir da ótica de que a modernidade (...) é marcada pela dependência de um passado ressignificado. (shrink)

In search for the “missing links” of queer posthumanist discourses, some nonhuman animals play a crucial role in setting up new possible ontologies of sexual diversity. However, the desire to trace “natural” evidence for sexual diversity and a non-binary gender system that goes beyond the simplistic “social constructionism” vs. “biological essentialism” dichotomy in the nonhuman world should be critically examined. In this article I analyze both the scientific and popular representations of “wild and weird” nonhuman animals that became rich semiotic-material (...) referents to human sexuality and gender diversity in order to propose “transpecies intimacies” as a strategy for overcoming the deadlock present in naturalizing and essentializing discourses. This essay focuses on the case of the spotted hyena, because this nonhuman animal functions as an important signifier and material resource for sexual differences on multiple levels of power relations – institutional, scientific, educational, somatic, discursive, and even affective. I consider how biomedical narratives on sexualized nonhuman animals employ hegemonic economies of sexual difference to build stories of a naturalized sexuality and an embodied gender difference wherein some chemical substances, like hormones, and some body parts, like genitals, serve as primary actors in this semiotic-material system. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Radical Change Theory and Synergistic Reading for Digital Age YouthEliza T. Dresang (bio) and Bowie Kotrla (bio)Books with digital age characteristics... stimulate curiosity and foster community.—Elizabeth Lennox Keyser, 1999Today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors.—Marc Prensky, 2001PrologueOne of our favorite books is McGillis’s The Nimble Reader: Literary Criticism and Children’s Literature.1 McGillis applies various literary theories—among them the New Criticism, structuralism, feminism, and postmodernism—to much-loved, (...) time-honored books such as E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952), in each case coming up with a fresh interpretation of a well-known text. The Nimble Reader makes the point that the meaning of any object, experience, or creative endeavor can be evasive and changes according to the lens through which it is viewed. Theory uncovers, illuminates, reveals, explains, predicts, and adds value and dimensions to what otherwise might have been overlooked. [End Page 92]That is what we hope Radical Change Theory does—we hope that it stimulates thinking, brings new perspectives, and adds value to what is already recognized as an immense treasure: the body of children’s literature and the young (and old) readers who love and appreciate it. As an addition to the assortment of approaches McGillis covered, we anticipate that Radical Change Theory is a way to see the mosaic of contemporary children’s literature in a new light, to examine and explain some parts of it that may have gone unnoticed. We offer it as a way to think about contemporary youth in relation to their literature, and we suggest applying Radical Change Theory in retrospect in order to highlight and appreciate “radical” authors and illustrators of the past who wrote for “radical readers” in their times. Radical Change Theory is only one perspective among many, and we realize that the phenomena it addresses could be explained or augmented in other ways, as McGillis demonstrated.IntroductionThe 2008 Caldecott Award for the most outstanding picture book for children published in the United States in the previous year was presented to Brian Selznick, author and illustrator of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which is hundreds of pages longer than an ordinary picture book.2 Approximately 300 of its 533 pages are wordless black and white sketches that tell the story—not illustrating the text but replacing it. Hugo Cabret is a twelve-year-old boy living in the walls of a Paris train station in 1931; he becomes involved in a mystery adventure with the pioneer silent film maker George Méliès, a fitting element for a largely visual book. Selznick notes that he thinks of the book as somewhere between a graphic novel, a picture book, and a film.3 Each sequence of drawings can itself become a miniature silent move if the reader employs a flipbook technique. Hugo Cabret offers a highly interactive reading experience with vivid visual appeal, intertextuality, and multiple layers of meaning. It also provides a dramatic departure from the typical picture-book tradition and joins a number of other radically changed books that have special appeal for digital age youth.While it was perfectly clear to almost everyone during the 1990s that technology was changing, almost no one acknowledged the concomitant change in a sizeable and growing cadre of handheld books for youth. Some of those who did notice expressed puzzlement and regret at the break from a more traditional form and format; others expressed curiosity. Some others sought explanations.4 One purpose of this essay is to provide one explanation for the nature and character of these “changed” books and to demonstrate that they are somewhat different from but firmly rooted in more traditional children’s literature.But not only are books changing—at least some young readers are as well. In the 1990s, as youth who were born in the late 1970s began to mature, [End Page 93] we, along with some other educators and scholars, noted what seemed to be a change from previous generations in how many youth approached thinking, learning, creating, and engaging with media, including reading handheld books. Various terms, including the net generation, digital natives... (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

This essay will criticize Peter Lamarque’s claim in The Opacity of Narrative that reading for ‘opacity’ is the way to read literature as literature. I will summarize the idea of ‘opacity’ and consider the plausibility of this claim through an examination of Lamarque’s related comments on translation. The argument for ‘opacity’, although it insists on the importance of attention to a work’s form in the apprehension of its content, involves, at the same time, a certain obliviousness to form, indicated in (...) the first instance by an unpersuasive conflation of lyric poetry and prose fiction. Through a comparison of opposing approaches to the translation of a novel written in verse, and an analysis of why the translation of poetry is generally understood to be more challenging than the translation of prose, I will argue that reading for ‘opacity’ does not adequately capture what it means to read literature as literature. (shrink)

This article aims to show how discourse analysis can help identify and reinterpret the communicative practices of individuals with autism spectrum disorder, presenting them as co-constructed by the neurotypical interlocutor. The data described in the article come from three interviews with autistic adolescents. The participants completed two tasks: picture description and narrative production. The interviews were further analysed with the use of discourse analysis. The study demonstrates how the participants oriented to the interviewer’s utterances and what communicative strategies they used (...) throughout the interview. Discourse analysis is presented as an approach to the study of autistic communication, which can substantially contribute to the current state of knowledge about autism spectrum disorder, and be an invaluable help for practitioners. (shrink)

The Modern Synthesis has dominated biology for 80 years. It was formulated in 1942, a decade before the major achievements of molecular biology, including the Double Helix and the Central Dogma. When first formulated in the 1950s these discoveries and concepts seemed initially to completely justify the central genetic assumptions of the Modern Synthesis. The Double Helix provided the basis for highly accurate DNA replication, while the Central Dogma was viewed as supporting the Weismann Barrier, so excluding the inheritance of (...) acquired characteristics. This article examines the language of the Modern Synthesis and reveals that it is based on four important misinterpretations of what molecular biology had shown, so forming the basis of the four Illusions: 1. Natural Selection; 2. The Weismann Barrier; 3. The Rejection of Darwin’s Gemmules; 4. The Central Dogma. A multi-level organisation view of biology avoids these illusions through the principle of biological relativity. Molecular biology does not therefore confirm the assumptions of the Modern Synthesis. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Due to investments in interdisciplinary research endeavors, the number and variety of interdisciplinary research centers have grown exponentially during the past decades. While interdisciplinary research centers rely on varied organizational arrangements, we know little about the conditions and processes that mediate collaborative arrangements and interdisciplinary research outcomes. This study examines how different collaborative arrangements shape scholars’ experiences of interdisciplinary research and understandings of interdisciplinary knowledge culminations in the context of university-based research centers. We conducted three in-depth qualitative case studies on (...) different centers, which recruited researchers from natural sciences, medicine, and social sciences. We refer to them as the Biotech Center, the Environmental Center, and the Premature Birth Center. Our analysis of 53 interviews with interdisciplinary scholars across the three centers demonstrates that the scholars perceive particular features of the centers’ collaborative arrangements as meaningful for interdisciplinary collaboration. Specifically, the center’s mission, physical architecture, and leadership and task structure were seen as affecting scholars’ motivation, interaction, and inclusion in the centers, which then shaped the interdisciplinary knowledge culminations. At the Biotech Center, knowledge was translated towards concrete products, at the Environmental Center knowledge was pooled together from varied fields to create new problem framings, and at the Premature Birth Center, interdisciplinary collaboration was crafted through top-down knowledge brokerage. (shrink)

Impostor syndrome or Impostor phenomenon is a belief that a person thinks their success is due to luck or external factors, not their abilities. This psychological trait is present in certain groups like women. In this paper, we propose a neutrosophic trait measure to represent the psychological concept of the trait-anti trait using refined neutrosophic sets. This study analysed a group of 200 undergraduate students for impostor syndrome, perfectionism, introversion and self-esteem: after the COVID pandemic break in 2021. Data labelling (...) was carried out using these neutrosophic trait measures. Machine learning models like Support Vector Machine(SVM), K-nearest neighbour (K-NN), and random forest were used to model the data; SVM provided the best accuracy of 92.15%. (shrink)

This article re-contextualizes Sigmund Freud's interest in the idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics in terms of the socio-political connotations of Lamarckism and Darwinism in the 1930s and 1950s. Many scholars have speculated as to why Freud continued to insist on a supposedly outmoded theory of evolution in the 1930s even as he was aware that it was no longer tenable. While Freud's initial interest in the inheritance of phylogenetic memory was not necessarily politically motivated, his refusal to abandon (...) this theory in the 1930s must be understood in terms of wider debates, especially regarding the position of the Jewish people in Germany and Austria. Freud became uneasy about the inheritance of memory not because it was scientifically disproven, but because it had become politically charged and suspiciously regarded by the Nazis as Bolshevik and Jewish. Where Freud seemed to use the idea of inherited memory as a way of universalizing his theory beyond the individual cultural milieu of his mostly Jewish patients, such a notion of universal science itself became politically charged and identified as particularly Jewish. The vexed and speculative interpretations of Freud's Lamarckism are situated as part of a larger post-War cultural reaction against Communism on the one hand (particularly in the 1950s when Lamarckism was associated with the failures of Lysenko), and on the other hand, against any scientific concepts of race in the wake of World War II. (shrink)

I discuss an argument given by Dorothy Edgington for the conclusion that indicative conditionals cannot express propositions. The argument is not effective against Robert Stalnaker's context-dependent propositional theory. I isolate and defend the feature of Stalnaker's theory that allows it to evade the argument.

Plotinus maintains that there is a single first principle, the One (or the Good), from which all other things derive. He is usually thought to hold this view on the grounds that any other thing’s existence depends on its participation in a paradigm of unity. This paper argues that Plotinus has a further, independent argument for adopting a single first principle, according to which principle pluralism is committed (unacceptably) to attributing good cosmic states of affairs to chance. This argument exhibits (...) similarities to ancient design arguments, but is used to draw the more radical conclusion that there is only one non-derivative existent. (shrink)

In Ennead 3.6, Plotinus maintains that the soul is unaffectable. This thesis is widely taken to imply that his soul is exempt from change and free from emotional ‘affections’. Yet these claims are difficult to reconcile with evidence that Plotinian souls acquire dispositional states, such as virtues, and are subjects of emotional ‘affections’, such as anger. This paper offers an alternative account that aims to address these difficulties. In denying affections to soul, Plotinus is offering a distinction between the soul’s (...) self-actuated motions (or "activities") and the passive motions (or "affections") of bodies. But this distinction does not imply the soul’s changelessness, since Plotinus regards psychic motions that culminate in the soul’s acquisition of new dispositional states as changes. As for emotional ‘affections’, these (as activities) are merely homonymous with the affections denied to soul, and so do not violate the ban on the soul’s affectability. (shrink)

The phenomenological effects of deep brain stimulation (DBS) on the self of the patient remains poorly understood and under described in the literature, despite growing evidence that a significant number of patients experience postoperative neuropsychiatric changes. To address this lack of phenomenological evidence, we conducted in-depth, semistructured interviews with 17 patients with Parkinson's disease who had undergone DBS. Exploring the subjective character specific to patients' experience of being implanted gives empirical and conceptual understanding of the potential phenomenon of DBS-induced self-estrangement. (...) Our study concluded that (1) the more patients preoperatively felt alienated by their illness, the more they experienced postoperative self-estrangement, and (2) the notion of self-estrangement seems to exist in association with certain common qualitative characters, namely, loss of control, which reflects a deteriorative estrangement, and distorted perception of capacities, which reveals a restorative estrangement. These findings indicate that subjective self-reports help us to understand some aspects of the potential phenomenon of DBS-induced self-estrangement. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that Plotinus denies deliberative forethought about the physical cosmos to the demiurge on the basis of certain basic and widely shared Platonic and Aristotelian assumptions about the character of divine thought. We then discuss how Plotinus can nonetheless maintain that the cosmos is «providentially» ordered.

Conscious Agency is a major driver of evolution. Artificial Selection (i.e. Conscious Selection by human breeders) was the foil against which Charles Darwin defined Natural Selection. In later work, he extended Artificial Selection to other species. That ability for social (e.g. sexual) selection must have evolved. Jablonka and Ginsburg identify markers of conscious agency, such as Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL), and show that it must have existed at the time of the Cambrian Explosion. To their insights, my commentary argues that (...) the harnessing of stochasticity was also involved in the evolution of the faculty of choice in organisms. (shrink)