With the progress of science we become more and more aware of the undiscovered, and of our feebleness to visualize or express what is dimly known to us. Geologists estimate that man evolved some 1,000,000 years ago on an earth which astronomers say is some 2,000,000,000 years old. Caution is required in accepting such figures, for we must remember how far out Lord Kelvin was in estimating the age of the earth—before the discovery of radium. Man has been civilized for (...) some 5,000 years, and Galileo, with his telescope and revolutionary ideas, lived some 300 years ago. There may be, we are told, a million million years before the sun grows weak and the earth becomes farther from the sun so that all life freezes. Long before this man may use up the metals available for his machines, and those ready sources of energy now so wastefully used, by which he at present multiplies and swarms in cities. In such case he will return through birth control or famine, or both, to a simple, uncrowded, pastoral existence. There is little likelihood of his being able to use atomic energy, other than that which reaches the earth as sun radiation and is available directly or as energy stored in water-power, wood, coal, and oil. (shrink)

The annual cost of healthcare in the United States reached $2.5 trillion in 2009 (about 17.6% of GDP) with projections to 2019 of about $4.5 trillion (about 20% of likely GDP).

A new era has emerged in research on entheogens largely due to clinical trials conducted at Johns Hopkins University and similar studies sponsored by the Council for Spiritual Practices. In these notes and queries, I reflect on implications of these developments for psychological studies of religion and on what this research may mean for Christian churches in the United States. I conclude that the aims and methods of this research fit well within Jamesian efforts of contemporary psychology of religion to (...) assess religious practices by their fruits for life. Furthermore, some communitarian religious concerns that religious experiences occasioned by entheogens pose risks to the integrity of religious community are shown to be largely unfounded. However, it is suggested that certain risks for religious life posed by all investigations/interventions by knowledge experts—in particular, the colonization of the religious life world and the commodification of its practices—also attend these developments for Christian churches. Additionally, risks of individual harm in the use of entheogens appear to be significant and, therefore, warrant earnest ethical study. (shrink)

I agree with Professor ter Meulen that there is no need to make a forced choice between “justice” and “solidarity” when it comes to determining what should count as fair access to needed health care. But he also asserts that solidarity is more fundamental than justice. That claim needs critical assessment. Ter Meulen recognizes that the concept of solidarity has been criticized for being excessively vague. He addresses this criticism by introducing the more precise notion of “humanitarian solidarity.” However, I (...) argue that these notions are still not precise enough and are in need of behavioral translation, especially in relation to the problem of fair health care rationing. More specifically, I argue that translation ought to take the form of a well-ordered process of rational democratic deliberation, which I describe and defend in this essay. Such a process is what is required to construct a working model of just solidarity as opposed to a merely abstract idealization of just solidarity. (shrink)

At the turn of the last century, paleontologists wagered that they could find the missing link between lobe-finned fish and early terrestrial vertebrates. Given how these evolutionary relatives are distributed in the fossil record, Daeschler et al. predicted that some transitional form awaited discovery in late Devonian outcrops of the Canadian Arctic. It was there that they won their bet: the team soon found Tiktaalik roseae, a “fishopod” with a mix of aquatic and terrestrial traits. Tiktaalik’s discovery now stands as (...) paleontologists’ textbook case of scientific reasoning done right. (shrink)

Organisms leave a variety of traces in the fossil record. Among these traces, vertebrate and invertebrate paleontologists conventionally recognize a distinction between the remains of an organism’s phenotype and the remains of an organism’s life activities. The same convention recognizes body fossils as biological structures and trace fossils as geological objects. This convention explains some curious practices in the classification, as with the distinction between taxa for trace fossils and for tracemakers. I consider the distinction between “parallel taxonomies,” or parataxonomies, (...) which privileges some kinds of fossil taxa as “natural” and others as “artificial.” The motivations for and consequences of this practice are inconsistent. By comparison, I examine an alternative system of classification used by paleobotanists that regards all fossil taxa as “artificially” split. While this system has the potential to inflate the number of taxa with which paleontologists work, the system offers greater consistency than conventional practices. Weighing the strengths and weaknesses of each system, I recommend that paleontologists should adopt the paleobotanical system more broadly. (shrink)

Developments in genetic engineering may soon allow biologists to clone organisms from extinct species. The process, dubbed “de-extinction,” has been publicized as a means to bring extinct species back to life. For theorists and philosophers of biology, the process also suggests a thought experiment for the ongoing “species problem”: given a species concept, would a clone be classified in the extinct species? Previous analyses have answered this question in the context of specific de-extinction technologies or particular species concepts. The thought (...) experiment is given more comprehensive treatment here. Given the products of three de-extinction technologies, twenty-two species concepts are “tested” to see which are consistent with the idea that species may be resurrected. The ensuing discussion considers whether or not de-extinction is a conceptually coherent research program and, if so, whether or not its development may contribute to a resolution of the species problem. Ultimately, theorists must face a choice: they may revise their commitments to species concepts or they may recognize de-extinction as a means to make progress in the species problem. (shrink)

This article probes the relationship among constitutionalism, extra-legal prerogative power, and citizen judgment. While much has been written about the nature of Lockean prerogative, and while his theory serves as a direct inspiration for contemporary "normative extra-legalists," key participants in the debate over emergency powers, less attention has been paid to how the people judge prerogative. Attention to this issue is useful because an examination of the process of political judgment of extra-legalism in Locke leads to a complication of the (...) current extra-legalist vision of democratic mechanisms of accountability. The author argues that the extra-legal approach is right to consider the role of democratic publics in potentially constraining the exercise of emergency powers but wrong to formulate that role as one extra-constitutional power checking another extra-constitutional power. The author situates both prerogative power and citizen judgment of it at the threshold of the constitutional order. (shrink)

Using possibly infinite computations on universal monotone Turing machines, we prove Martin-Löf randomness in ∅' of the probability that the output be in some set.

In his 1970s work Chance and Necessity, Jacques Monod provided an explanatory framework not only for the biological evolution of species, but, as has become recently apparent, for the evolutionary development of cancers. That is, contemporary oncological research has demonstrated that cancer is an evolutionary disease that develops according to the same dynamics of chance and necessity at work in all evolutionary phenomena. And just as various challenges are raised for religious thought by the operations of chance and necessity within (...) biological evolution, so this particular theological question is raised by the findings of contemporary cancer science: Where is love, divine and human, within the evolutionary chance and necessity operative in all dimensions of cancer? In this article, we contribute to the dialogue in science and religion by offering the following responses to this question: the thought of Arthur Peacocke to claim that divine love may be understood to be at work in, with, and under our very efforts to make theological meaning of the chance and necessity that inform the evolution of cancers; and Charles Sanders Peirce's evolutionary philosophy to make this claim: that the work of scientific communities of inquiry to understand and to find better ways to cope with the disease of cancer is itself the work of divine love amid the chance and necessity of cancer. (shrink)

If we accept the premise that some sort of rationing of access to health care resources is necessary to contain escalating health care costs effectively, then we need to ask how that rationing might be accomplished most fairly. Calabresi and Bobbitt have argued in their book Tragic Choices that there is no 'perfectly fair' or even 'reasonably fair' way to bring this about.

This ambitious literary history traces the American novel from its emergence in the late eighteenth century to its diverse incarnations in the multi-ethnic, multi-media culture of the present day. In a set of original essays by renowned scholars from all over the world, the volume extends important critical debates and frames new ones. Offering new views of American classics, it also breaks new ground to show the role of popular genres - such as science fiction and mystery novels - in (...) the creation of the literary tradition. One of the original features of this book is the dialogue between the essays, highlighting cross-currents between authors and their works as well as across historical periods. While offering a narrative of the development of the genre, the History reflects the multiple methodologies that have informed readings of the American novel and will change the way scholars and readers think about American literary history. (shrink)