A tribute to vision boards evaluates their creative, motivational, and inspirational role in providing visual life and career maps for famous and everyday ...

The failure to maintain a canonical Christian understanding of the family as a microcosm of the church oriented toward deification instead of a microcosm of society aimed at social ends has opened Christians up to an uncritical adoption of non-Christian approaches in medical decision making. This article begins by identifying the Christian family crisis not as a liberal versus conservative debate centered on the form and function of the family, but more fundamentally as an ecclesial versus sociological understanding of the (...) Christian family. The article presents a historical sketch of the circumstances that have led to this contemporary crisis in the Western Christian family, followed by an analysis that provides a canonical account of the Christian family as exemplified in the thought of Gregory the Theologian. This article concludes by looking at the specific issue of labor and delivery in the United States, and the implications for a canonical Christian understanding of labor and delivery in light of contemporary medical practices. (shrink)

A number of recent discussions have argued that George Price's equationfor representing evolutionary change is a powerful and illuminatingtool, especially in the context of debates about multiple levels ofselection. Our paper dissects Price's equation in detail, and comparesit to another statistical tool: the calculation and comparison ofaverage fitnesses. The relations between Price's equation and equationsfor evolutionary change using average fitness are closer than issometimes supposed. The two approaches achieve a similar kind ofstatistical summary of one generation of change, and they (...) achieve thisvia a similar loss of information about the underlying fitnessstructure. (shrink)

Objective: To examine lay persons’ ability to identify methods of random allocation and their acceptability of using methods of random allocation in a clinical trial context.Design: Leaflets containing hypothetical medical, non-medical, and clinical trial scenarios involving random allocation, using material from guidelines for trial information leaflets.Setting and participants: Adults attending further education colleges , covering a wide range of ages, occupations, and levels of education.Main measures: Judgements of whether each of five methods of allocation to two groups was random in (...) a medical or non-medical scenario. Judgements of whether these allocation methods were acceptable in a randomised clinical trial scenario, with or without a scientific justification for randomisation.Results: The majority of our group of participants judged correctly that allowing people their preference was not random, and that the following were random: using a computer with no information about the individual , tossing a coin, drawing a name out of a hat. Judgements were split over allocating people in turn . Judgements were no different in medical and non-medical scenarios. Few of the correctly identified random methods were judged to be acceptable in a clinical trial scenario. Inclusion of a scientific justification for randomising significantly increased the acceptability of only one random method: allocation by computer.Conclusions: Current UK guidelines’ recommended description of random allocation by computer seems warranted. However, while potential trial participants may understand what random allocation means, they may find it unacceptable unless offered an acceptable justification for its use. (shrink)

Despite the fact that animal behavior involves a particularly powerful form of niche construction, few researchers have considered how the environmental impact of behavior may feed back to influence the evolution of the cognitive underpinnings of behavior. I explore a model that explicitly incorporates niche construction while tracking cognitive evolution. Agents and their stimuli are modeled as coevolving populations. The agents are born with “weights” attached to behaviors in a repertoire. Further, these agents are able to change these weights based (...) on previous success and an inherited learning parameter. Both the agent and the stimulus receive payoffs through a behavioral interaction . The behaving agent exhibits niche construction through its effects on stimuli , which can feed back to influence the value of different cognitive strategies. Here I focus on two forms of niche construction: the stimulus and responding agent have common interests and the stimulus and agent have dissimilar interests . The form of niche construction qualitatively affects cognitive evolution . Given a mutualism between the stimulus and responding agent, rapid learning and “fixed” behavioral distributions evolve. Given an antagonism between the stimulus and agent, slower learning and “flexible” behavioral distributions evolve. I discuss these results in light of findings from the fields of ethology, psychology, and evolutionary ecology. (shrink)

Although ever-increasing numbers of women in the United States have been choosing small-business ownership in an apparent attempt to escape their well-documented inequality in the labor market, in this country, small businesses owned by women tend to be less successful than those owned by men. This article brings together the scattered pieces of data available in order to shed light on women's inability to gain greater parity with men in the small-business arena in the United States. Analysis suggests that U.S. (...) women's influx into small capitalism results from their movement into expanding, but highly competitive, industrial niches that are relatively unattractive to men. The authors find that these woman-owned businesses are concentrated within traditionally female-typed fields with lower average business receipts than male-typed fields. Moreover, even within the same industrial subcategories, women owners achieve less economic success than men owners. Although some of the immediate barriers faced by U.S. women in the small-business arena-such as lack of access to capital and government contracts-differ from those that confront women employees, the underlying causes are similar. The authors' discussion suggests that women in the United States carry their labor market disadvantage with them to the small-business sphere, where it is compounded by new manifestations of the same institutional barriers. (shrink)

This book contains a collection of selected papers from the 2017 Farm-to-Plate: Uniting for a Just and Sustainable Food System conference in Ithaca, New York, which explored what different advocates, stakeholders, growers, and community members today prioritize when it comes to justice, action, and transformation in the agri-food system. The research presented at this symposium shows the diverse range of approaches scientists have taken to investigate this aforementioned question. The papers represent a combined effort to creatively educate, share, and connect (...) work being done by stakeholders on food system transformation. Previously published in Agriculture and Human Values Volume 36, issue 4, December 2019. (shrink)

Following Kripke and Putnam, the received view of chemical kinds has been a microstructuralist one. To be a microstructuralist about chemical kinds is to think that membership in said kinds is conferred by microstructural properties. Recently, the received microstructuralist view has been elaborated and defended, but it has also been attacked on the basis of complexities, both chemical and ontological. Here, I look at which complexities really challenge the microstructuralist view; at how the view itself might be made more complicated (...) in order to accommodate such challenges; and finally, at what this increasingly complicated picture implies for our standard assessment of chemical kindhood—primarily, for the widespread assumption that chemical kinds in general are more neat and tidy than those messy biological ones. _1_ The Received View _2_ A Taxonomy of Chemical Kinds _3_ Atomic Number _4_ H2O, H3O+, OH−, and More _5_ Complicating the Microstructuralist Picture _6_ Concrete and Other Mixtures _7_ Macromolecules, Especially Proteins _8_ Abandoning Sameness of Elemental Composition _9_ Not So Different after All. (shrink)

More than a decade of exacting scientific research involving paleontological fragments and ancient DNA has lately produced a series of pronouncements about a purportedly novel population of archaic hominins dubbed “the Denisova.” The science involved in these matters is both technically stunning and, socially, at times a bit reckless. Here I discuss the responsibilities which scientists incur when they make inductively risky pronouncements about the different relative contributions by Denisovans to genomes of members of apparent subpopulations of current humans. This (...) science is sensational: it is science which empirically speculates, to the public delight’s and entertainment, about scintillating topics such as when humans evolved, where we came from, and who else we were having sex with during our early hominin history. An initial characterization of sensational science emerges from my discussion of the case, as well as a diagnosis of an interactive phenomenon termed amplified inductive risk. (shrink)

New Blackfriars, Volume 102, Issue 1101, Page 772-794, September 2021.

Positive education seeks to enhance wellbeing in schools by establishing a culture where success is measured in terms of happiness. This goal aligns well with Dewey’s educational philosophy, which espouses the importance of a positive school experience in the nurturing of good citizenship and the creation of a harmonious community. Dewey’s ideas and those expressed within the field of positive education, however, diverge on some aspects of their approach to education and, importantly, in their perspective on the role of philosophy (...) in science. This thesis explores the possibility of a Deweyan contribution to positive education and advances the argument that embracing Dewey’s ethics and epistemology will augment efforts to create a culture of wellbeing in schools. Specifically, this thesis argues that Dewey’s work may contribute a perspective on the complementary role of philosophy and science; suggest an experiential pedagogy that contends with the nature of subjective experience; contribute a social focus that prioritizes the common good; and provide a unified philosophical stance on the purpose of schooling. These contributions may, however modestly, address concerns expressed by writers from within and outside of positive psychology about challenges such as a need for a more philosophical approach, the effects of psychology in education, the difficulties with avoiding normative content in order to remain scientific, the problem of subjective experience, the perceived focus on individualism, and the implication that positive psychology may be a fad. Ultimately, by creating a dialogue between positive education and the work of Dewey, this thesis seeks to elicit thinking about the possibility of a Deweyan contribution to both the theory and practice of positive education. (shrink)

There is a perennial philosophical dream of a certain natural order for the natural kinds. The name of this dream is ‘the hierarchy requirement’. According to this postulate, proper natural kinds form a taxonomy which is both unique and traditional. Here I demonstrate that complex scientific objects exist: objects which generate different systems of scientific classification, produce myriad legitimate alternatives amongst the nonetheless still natural kinds, and make the hierarchical dream impossible to realize, except at absurdly great cost. Philosophical hopes (...) for a certain order in nature cannot be fulfilled. Natural kinds crosscut one another, ubiquitously so, and this crosscutting spells the end of the hierarchical dream. (shrink)

Is there a compensation gap between female CEOs and male CEOs? If so, are there mechanisms to mitigate the compensation gap? Extending role congruity theory, we argue that the perception mismatch between the female gender role and the leadership role may lead to lower compensation to female CEOs, resulting in a gender compensation gap. Nevertheless, the compensation gap may be narrowed if female CEOs display agentic traits through risk-taking, or alternatively, work in female-dominated industries where communal traits are valued. Additionally, (...) we expect that female CEOs’ risk-taking is less effective in reducing the gender compensation gap in female-dominated industries due to the conflicting emphases on agentic and communal traits. Leveraging a sample of Chinese publicly listed firms, we find support for our hypotheses. Overall, this study contributes to the ethics literature on income inequality issues, by highlighting the effectiveness of potential mechanisms to close the gender compensation gap between female and male CEOs. (shrink)

Interprofessional collaboration has become accepted as an important component in today’s health care and has been guided by concerns with patient safety, quality health-care outcomes, and economics. It is widely accepted that interprofessional collaboration improves patient outcomes through enhanced communication among health-care providers and increased accessibility to services. Although there is a paucity of research that provides confirmatory evidence, interprofessional competencies continue to be incorporated into the curricula of health-care students. This article examines the ethics of interprofessional collaboration and ethical (...) issues that arise from the mainstream adoption of interprofessional competencies and the potential for moral distress in nursing. (shrink)

Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence supports an innate basis to human morality. As a moral philosopher, Joyce is interested in whether any (...) implications follow from this hypothesis. Might the fact that the human brain has been biologically prepared by natural selection to engage in moral judgment serve in some sense to vindicate this way of thinking--staving off the threat of moral skepticism, or even undergirding some version of moral realism? Or if morality has an adaptive explanation in genetic terms--if it is, as Joyce writes, "just something that helped our ancestors make more babies"--might such an explanation actually undermine morality's central role in our lives? He carefully examines both the evolutionary "vindication of morality" and the evolutionary "debunking of morality," considering the skeptical view more seriously than have others who have treated the subject.Interdisciplinary and combining the latest results from the empirical sciences with philosophical discussion, The Evolution of Morality is one of the few books in this area written from the perspective of moral philosophy. Concise and without technical jargon, the arguments are rigorous but accessible to readers from different academic backgrounds. Joyce discusses complex issues in plain language while advocating subtle and sometimes radical views. The Evolution of Morality lays the philosophical foundations for further research into the biological understanding of human morality. (shrink)

Introduction to "A World without Values....".

Many male traits are well explained by sexual selection theory as adaptations to mating competition and mate choice, whereas no unifying theory explains traits expressed more in females. Anne Campbell's “staying alive” theory proposed that human females produce stronger self-protective reactions than males to aggressive threats because self-protection tends to have higher fitness value for females than males. We examined whether Campbell's theory has more general applicability by considering whether human females respond with greater self-protectiveness than males to other threats (...) beyond aggression. We searched the literature for physiological, behavioral, and emotional responses to major physical and social threats, and found consistent support for females' responding with greater self-protectiveness than males. Females mount stronger immune responses to many pathogens; experience a lower threshold to detect, and lesser tolerance of, pain; awaken more frequently at night; express greater concern about physically dangerous stimuli; exert more effort to avoid social conflicts; exhibit a personality style more focused on life's dangers; react to threats with greater fear, disgust, and sadness; and develop more threat-based clinical conditions than males. Our findings suggest that in relation to threat, human females have relatively heightened protective reactions compared to males. The pervasiveness of this result across multiple domains suggests that general mechanisms might exist underlying females' unique adaptations. An understanding of such processes would enhance knowledge of female health and well-being. (shrink)

This volume considers how current transitions in postsecondary education are impacting Higher Education institutions and subjects in a number of Northern nations, as well as how these transitions are indicative of the wider shift from the welfare to the market state. The university is now considered a key site for training and wealth generation in the so-called 'knowledge economy' that operates in a globalising, high tech world. Further, these transitions are underpinned by neo-liberal economic ideas that assume that the public (...) sector is a drag on the economy unless it is subject to the rules, regulations and assumptions that govern the private sector. This excellent volume - an important contribution to Education as well as Economics and Politics - furthers our understandings of universities as marketable entities as part of the globalized economy. (shrink)

Skipper and Millstein analyze natural selection and mechanism, concluding that natural selection is not a mechanism in the sense of the new mechanistic philosophy. Barros disagrees and provides his own account of natural selection as a mechanism. This discussion identifies a missing piece of Barros's account, attempts to fill in that piece, and reconsiders the revised account. Two principal objections are developed: one, the account does not characterize natural selection; two, the account is not mechanistic. Extensive and persistent variability causes (...) both of these difficulties, so further attempts to describe natural selection as a mechanism are also unlikely to succeed. (shrink)

Es posible apreciar una serie de factores que han debilitado al contexto democrático, específicamente, la actividad legislativa, que encuentra diversos desafíos que se suman a la problematización del estudio. Es en el contexto de Parlamento Abierto que la participación ciudadana cobra relevancia científica en el marco de la teoría de la democracia representativa. Mediante metodología mixta se responderá la siguiente pregunta de investigación: ¿cómo se generan espacios democratizados en la actividad legislativa del Parlamento Abierto? Este artículo es una primera aproximación (...) a una investigación doctoral en curso, cuyos resultados y conclusiones serán presentados en un próximo congreso del CUICIID. (shrink)

In The Myth of Morality, Richard Joyce argues that moral discourse is hopelessly flawed. At the heart of ordinary moral judgements is a notion of moral inescapability, or practical authority, which, upon investigation, cannot be reasonably defended. Joyce argues that natural selection is to blame, in that it has provided us with a tendency to invest the world with values that it does not contain, and demands that it does not make. Should we therefore do away with morality, (...) as we did away with other faulty notions such as witches? Possibly not. We may be able to carry on with morality as a 'useful fiction' - allowing it to have a regulative influence on our lives and decisions, perhaps even playing a central role - while not committing ourselves to believing or asserting falsehoods, and thus not being subject to accusations of 'error'. (shrink)

Globalisation has accelerated economic development in emerging economies through the outsourcing of their supply chains and at the same time has accelerated the degradation of environmental and social conditions. Society expects corporations to play an essential role in creating economic, environmental and social prosperity beyond their country of origin. In order to regulate outsourcing activities in the supply chain, many multinationals are constantly searching for ways to manage their indirect environmental and social impacts accordingly, as well as to meet their (...) stakeholder expectations. Because expectations of stakeholders vary widely across different regions, this study intends, by engaging with major stakeholders, to identify what are the local and regional supply chain stakeholders' perceptions and expectations. The findings would help in building consensus, strengthening the implementation and establishing the future corporate social responsibility (CSR) frame-work. This study collects and analyses data from 21 major stakeholders in Hong Kong and Mainland China. The results indicate that local and regional stakeholders perceive that CSR is fairly significant to largely export-oriented businesses, but it is lagging behind the West due to the fact that most local/regional companies only become involved in CSR when this is a client requirement. They see responsible corporations as meeting the local legislative requirement; going beyond this requirement is unnecessary. A voluntary approach favours multi-party partnership initiatives with pilot trust programmes aimed at managers' and workers' capacity building. Most stakeholders favour the proposed regional partnership initiative, supply chain task forces aimed at bringing together relevant organisations and people with different sets of skills. Distinct roles of different organisations are identified to assist suppliers to understand CSR, and only this will bring about long-term sustainable change. (shrink)

Ulysses is certainly the greatest novel in the English language, and one might argue for its being the greatest single work of art in our tradition. How significant, then, and how teasing, that this masterwork should be a comedy, and that its creator should have explicitly valued the comic "vision" over the tragic—how disturbing to our predilection for order that, with an homage paid to classical antiquity so meticulous that it is surely a burlesque, Joyce's exhibitionististicicity is never so (...) serious as when it is most outrageously comic. Joyce might have been addressing his readers when he wrote to Nora in 1909: "Now . . . I want you to read over and over all I have written to you. Some of it is ugly, obscene, and bestial, some of it is pure and holy and spiritual: all of it is myself." Joyce Carol Oates is the author of, among others, them, Wonderland, and The Assassins. "Jocoserious Joyce" is part of a book on tragedy and comedy. Her contributions to Critical Inquiry, include "Lawrence's Gotterdammerung" and “The Picture of Dorian Gray: Wilde's Parable about the Fall". (shrink)

This book defends the view that any adequate account of rational decision making must take a decision maker's beliefs about causal relations into account. The early chapters of the book introduce the non-specialist to the rudiments of expected utility theory. The major technical advance offered by the book is a 'representation theorem' that shows that both causal decision theory and its main rival, Richard Jeffrey's logic of decision, are both instances of a more general conditional decision theory. The book solves (...) a long-standing problem for Jeffrey's theory by showing for the first time how to obtain a unique utility and probability representation for preferences and judgements of comparative likelihood. The book also contains a major new discussion of what it means to suppose that some event occurs or that some proposition is true. The most complete and robust defence of causal decision theory available. (shrink)

Globalisation has accelerated economic development in emerging economies through the outsourcing of their supply chains and at the same time has accelerated the degradation of environmental and social conditions. Society expects corporations to play an essential role in creating economic, environmental and social prosperity beyond their country of origin. In order to regulate outsourcing activities in the supply chain, many multinationals are constantly searching for ways to manage their indirect environmental and social impacts accordingly, as well as to meet their (...) stakeholder expectations. Because expectations of stakeholders vary widely across different regions, this study intends, by engaging with major stakeholders, to identify what are the local and regional supply chain stakeholders’ perceptions and expectations. The findings would help in building consensus, strengthening the implementation and establishing the future corporate social responsibility framework. This study collects and analyses data from 21 major stakeholders in Hong Kong and Mainland China. The results indicate that local and regional stakeholders perceive that CSR is fairly significant to largely export-oriented businesses, but it is lagging behind the West due to the fact that most local/regional companies only become involved in CSR when this is a client requirement. They see responsible corporations as meeting the local legislative requirement; going beyond this requirement is unnecessary. A voluntary approach favours multi-party partnership initiatives with pilot trust programmes aimed at managers’ and workers’ capacity building. Most stakeholders favour the proposed regional partnership initiative, supply chain task forces aimed at bringing together relevant organisations and people with different sets of skills. Distinct roles of different organisations are identified to assist suppliers to understand CSR, and only this will bring about long-term sustainable change. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to Alexandra Kertz-Wezel, “The Magic of Music”Joyce Eastlund GromkoIn her paper, "The Magic of Music," Kertz-Wezel proposes that music be "a means to transform emotions and experience life more intensely." She goes on to speculate that "not only the way of listening and performing Western European art music in educational settings, but also the music itself may prevent individuals from further involvement in classical music." Her goals (...) are involvement [End Page 117] in art music and a deepening and enhancing of individuals' lives through aesthetic experience. Kertz-Wezel grants as reasonable the idea that education should start with an individual's experience 1 and should follow with a series of "intensive musical experiences." With all of this, I can agree.However, whereas we share the goal of transformative music education through aesthetic experience, we differ in the means by which we would accomplish our goal and we differ for philosophical reasons. Kertz-Wezel promotes an approach to music experience that celebrates individuality and a return to Romanticism.2 By contrast, I have developed an approach to music experience that depends on collaborative music-making and that emphasizes the social and interpersonal context, as opposed to the individual. I would like to describe how my approach, contrary to the individualistic approach espoused by Kertz-Wezel, nevertheless accomplishes the goal of transformative music education.My approach is grounded in principles abstracted from the writings of John Dewey.3 Like Dewey, I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of an individual's powers by the demands of the social situations in which individuals find themselves.4 Therefore, in the schools that serve as field and research sites for our university, we create communities of musical practice in which individuals gain the full and ready use of all their capacities while performing newly composed art music.5 Every year a set of new works are composed especially for our students by composers at our university. Through the process of actualizing a piece of art, our students are "stimulated to act as member(s) of a unity, to emerge from (their) narrowness of action and feeling, to conceive of (themselves) from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which (they) belong."6 The image of a fully engaged community member stands in stark contrast to that of the young woman in Kertz-Wezel's paper who, in describing her experience at the rock concert, said, "You don't think about what you are doing. You do what you feel like, without even thinking about it." When in a trance, individuals are detached from, not connected to, their physical surroundings.7 When in a state of ecstasy, individuals are carried beyond rational thought and self-control.8 It is impossible for me to imagine how an individual in a state of semi-conscious detachment, lacking in rational thought and self-control, can be learning.9Students in communities of musical practice are fully conscious of the value that they have to the group and "the value is reflected back into them."10 They learn to listen intently to other performers within the ensemble. They learn to communicate with one another in the symbol system of music and their musical babblings are transformed into articulate language.11 They become literate when they actualize into musical art what is embedded in the abstract symbols in a score. Through the process of actualizing pieces of musical art, students [End Page 118] heighten their perceptions and strengthen their connections. They have the kind of aesthetic experience described by Dewey:The material of esthetic experience in being human—human in connection with the nature of which it is a part—is social. Esthetic experience is a manifestation, a record and celebration of the life of a civilization, a means of promoting its development, and is also the ultimate judgment upon the quality of a civilization. For while it is produced and is enjoyed by individuals, those individuals are what they are in the content of their experience because of the cultures in which they participate.12The active, social, music-making approach to music education has considerable resource implications for... (shrink)

The emergence of individuality during the evolutionary transition from single cells to multicellularity poses a range of problems. A key issue is how variation in lower‐level individuals generates a corporate (collective) entity with Darwinian characteristics. Of central importance to this process is the evolution of a means of collective reproduction, however, the evolution of a means of collective reproduction is not a trivial issue, requiring careful consideration of mechanistic details. Calling upon observations from experiments, we draw attention to proto‐life cycles (...) that emerge via unconventional routes and that transition, in single steps, individuality to higher levels. One such life cycle arises from conflicts among levels of selection and invokes cheats as a primitive germ line: it lays the foundation for collective reproduction, the basis of a self‐policing system, the selective environment for the emergence of development, and hints at a plausible origin for a soma/germ line distinction. (shrink)

Working at The Hastings Center has been a tremendous professional stepping stone for me. I have long wanted to work in publishing, and I'm leaving the Center to work for America's oldest publisher, John Wiley and Sons. But I feel that my time here has been more than that‐that it has truly continued my education in ways I could not have anticipated. Thank you for letting me be part of your intellectual lives.

The world’s current model for economic development is unsustainable. It encourages high levels of resource extraction, consumption, and waste that undermine positive environmental outcomes. Transitioning to a circular economy (CE) model of development has been proposed as a sustainable alternative. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a crucial enabler for CE. It can aid in designing robust and sustainable products, facilitate new circular business models, and support the broader infrastructures needed to scale circularity. However, to date, considerations of the ethical implications of (...) using AI to achieve a transition to CE have been limited. This article addresses this gap. It outlines how AI is and can be used to transition towards CE, analyzes the ethical risks associated with using AI for this purpose, and supports some recommendations to policymakers and industry on how to minimise these risks. (shrink)

Watch a three-year-old play. As she enacts Ariel and Barbie’s judo match over which will marry Prince, or trudges through the living room scolding a pink polka-dotted bunny in a stroller, or explains to you that four-foot-tall Dora is in time out because she’s been hitting the other kids with a hammer—well, you may be laughing, but chances are she’s not. When you’re three, play is a serious, cathartic process aimed at sorting out and bringing under tenuous control the often (...) overwhelming emotional cues thrown at you each day. Children tease out what scares them—say, jealousy, or blame, or violent anger—and nail it down in particular scenarios that allow them to follow a feeling to its natural conclusions .. (shrink)

It has been almost twenty‐five years since Huberman and Riggs first showed that there are multiple bidirectional origins of replication scattered at ∼100 kb intervals along mammalian chromosomal fibers. Since that time, every conceivable physical property unique to replicating DNA has been taken advantage of to determine whether origins of replication are defined sequence elements, as they are in microorganisms. The most thoroughly studied mammalian locus to date is the dihydrofolate reductase domain of Chinese hamster cells, which will be used (...) as a model to discuss the various methods of investigation. While several laboratories agree on the rough location of the [initiation locus] in this large chromosomal domain, different experimental approaches paint different pictures of the mechanism by which initiation occurs. However, a variety of new techniques and synchronizing agents promises to clarify the picture for this particular locus, and to provide the means for identifying and isolating other origins of replication for comparison. (shrink)