Although we find Gangestad & Simpson's argument intriguing, we question some of its underlying assumptions, including: (1) that fluctuating asymmetry (FA) is consistently heritable; (2) that symmetry is driving the effects; (3) that use of parametric tests with FA is appropriate; and (4) that a short-term mating strategy produces more offspring than a long-term strategy.

Across mammals, when fathers matter, as they did for hunter-gatherers, sex-similar pair-bonding mechanisms evolve. Attachment fertility theory can explain Schmitt's and other findings as resulting from a system of mechanisms affording pair-bonding in which promiscuous seeking is part. Departures from hunter-gatherer environments (e.g., early menarche, delayed marriage) can alter dating trajectories, thereby impacting mating outside of pair-bonds.

The use of multiple means of determination to “triangulate” on the existence and character of a common phenomenon, object, or result has had a long tradition in science but has seldom been a matter of primary focus. As with many traditions, it is traceable to Aristotle, who valued having multiple explanations of a phenomenon, and it may also be involved in his distinction between special objects of sense and common sensibles. It is implicit though not emphasized in the distinction between (...) primary and secondary qualities from Galileo onward. It is arguably one of several conceptions involved in Whewell’s method of the “consilience of inductions” (Laudan 1971) and is to be found in several places in Peirce. (From M. Brewer and B. Collins, eds., (1981); Scientific Inquiry in the Social Sciences (a festschrift for Donald T. Campbell), San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp. 123–162.). (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Some Commonalities Can a Memetic Approach to Cultural Change Work? Memetics and Genetics Memetics and Epidemiology The Myth of Self‐replication An Alternative Approach Differential Dependency and Generative Entrenchment as Bases for a Theory of Evolutionary Change Elements of a Developmental Theory of Cultural Evolution New Predictions of This Theory Conclusion Postscript: Counterpoint Notes References.

Thirty-four states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico have legalized medical cannabis. While no two state medical cannabis programs are alike, public health concerns related to advertising, packaging and labeling, pesticide use, scientific research, and the role of medical cannabis in the opioid crisis are emerging across the country. This article examines these issues, the policy approaches states are adopting to protect patients and the public, and an assessment of the underlying federal legal landscape.

Safe and healthy housing conditions are critical to improving population health, particularly for the most vulnerable – young children, senior citizens, and individuals with chronic illnesses and disabilities – who spend more time at home and are more susceptible to illness and injury. Across the country, millions of Americans are exposed to lead, radon, asbestos, volatile organic compounds, pests, mold, carbon monoxide, and tobacco smoke in the home, affecting the air they breathe and the water they drink. These household hazards (...) are also associated with a wide range of illnesses and injuries, including asthma, cancer, falls, respiratory infections, and mental health issues. Legal and policy interventions can assist communities grappling with the adverse impacts of poor housing conditions and improve the health and safety of all residents, including vulnerable populations. (shrink)

Experimental studies investigating the contribution of conscious intention to the generation of a sense of agency for one’s own actions tend to rely upon a narrow definition of intention. Often it is operationalized as the conscious sensation of wanting to move right before movement. Existing results and discussion are therefore missing crucial aspects of intentions, namely intention as the conscious sensation of wanting to move in advance of the movement. In the present experiment we used an intentional binding paradigm, in (...) which we distinguished between immediate intention, as usually investigated, and longer standing intention. The results showed that the binding effect was significantly enhanced for distal intentions compared to proximal intentions, indicating that the former leads to stronger sense of agency. Our finding provides empirical support for a crucial distinction between at least two types of intention when addressing the efficacy of conscious intentions. (shrink)

This book offers a philosophy for error-prone humans trying to understand messy systems in the real world.

Although campaigns for universal human rights have been intellectually and emotionally compelling for many anthropologists, they have tended to embroil them in fruitless polemics about cultural relativism with non-Western thinkers and policy-makers. Often “universalist” discourses about “rights” depend on values and distinctions that are far from universal and that stem, in fact, from Christian, secular, or “modernist” notions about punishment, suffering, and redemption. To make some practical contribution to the struggle for human dignity in the Middle East, it may be (...) preferable to aim for a more limited goal: the abolition of torture in the region. Consensus about the illegitimacy of torture is more easily reached, since none of the Middle East's religious or philosophical traditions condone it. What is more, empirical data demonstrate that torture has increased in frequency in the region and is widely perceived, both by insiders and outsiders, as a growing problem. Ethnographers could play a role in documenting incidents of torture and in building coalitions of Middle Eastern and outsider activists who, working together, could expose torture and bring pressure to bear on those who inflict it. (shrink)

Ethical guidelines for multinational corporations are included in several international accords adopted during the past four decades. These guidelines attempt to influence the practices of multinational enterprises in such areas as employment relations, consumer protection, environmental pollution, political participation, and basic human rights. Their moral authority rests upon the competing principles of national sovereignty, social equity, market integrity, and human rights. Both deontological principles and experience-based value systems undergird and justify the primacy of human rights as the fundamental moral authority (...) of these transnational and transcultural compacts. Although difficulties and obstacles abound in gaining operational acceptance of such codes of conduct, it is possible to argue that their guidelines betoken the emergence of a transcultural corporate ethic. (shrink)

In the predicate calculus, variables provide a flexible indexing service which selects the actual arguments to a predicate letter from among possible arguments that precede the predicate letter (in the parse of the formula). In the process of selection, the possible arguments can be permuted, repeated (used more than once), and skipped. If this service is withheld, so that arguments must be the immediately preceding ones, taken in the order in which they occur, the formula is said to be fluted. (...) Quine showed that if a fluted formula contains only homogeneous conjunction (conjoins only subformulas of equal arity), then the satisfiability of the formula is decidable. It remained an open question whether the satisfiability of a fluted formula without this restriction is decidable. This paper answers that question. (shrink)

Exploring what a scientific metaphysics grounded in biological practices could look like and how it might impact the way we investigate the world around us, the contributors to From Biological Practice to Scientific Metaphysics review and discuss long-held objections to metaphysics by natural scientists. They illuminate how, in order to learn about the world as it truly is, we must look not only at what scientists say but also what they do.

Two strategies for using a model as “null” are distinguished. Null modeling evaluates whether a process is causally responsible for a pattern by testing it against a null model. Baseline modeling measures the relative significance of various processes responsible for a pattern by detecting deviations from a baseline model. When these strategies are conflated, models are illegitimately privileged as accepted until rejected. I illustrate this using the neutral theory of ecology and draw general lessons from this case. First, scientists cannot (...) draw certain conclusions using null modeling. Second, these conclusions follow using baseline modeling, but doing so requires more evidence. (shrink)

The study of Social Issues in Management (SIM) has exhausted its primary analytic framework based on corporate social performance (social science), business ethics (philosophy), and stakeholder theory (organizational science), and needs to move to a new paradigmatic level based on the natural sciences. Doing so would expand research horizons to include cosmological perspectives (astrophysics), evolutionary theory (biology, genetics, ecology), and non-sectarian spirituality concepts (theological naturalism, cognitive neuroscience). Absent this shift, SIM studies risk increasing irrelevance for scholars and business practitioners.

Though the phrase 'x is true of x' is well formed grammatically, it does not express any predicate in the logical sense, because it does not satisfy the principle of reduction for statements containing 'x is true of'. recognition of this allows for solution of russell's paradox without his restrictive theory of types.

With the rejection of group selectionist derivations of ecological phenomena so incisively given by George Williams in 1966,43 Nicholson's long-ignored messages met with acceptance. Species benefit became, explicitly, incidental. But the reorientation was not just about a point of ecological theory. It was more fundamentally about theoretical style, the element shared by Wynne-Edwards' work and the newer, evolutionary ecology. That current approach is well expressed in an already classic paper by the British plant ecologist John Harper: Ultimately all the discoveries (...) of descriptive, production or population ecology must find their meaning in evolutionary phenomena... Evolutionary thinking concentrates attention on the behaviour of the individual and his descendants. If nothing in biology has meaning except in the light of evolution and if evolution is about individuals and their descendants — i.e. fitness — we should not expect to reach any depth of understanding from studies that are based at the level of the superindividual... What we see as the organised behaviour of systems is the result of the fate of individuals.44The emphasis in this passage is on style of thinking more than on study matter. What is so different from earlier ecologists is the rejection of the superorganism and its associated baggage of selfimposed constraints in an end-oriented process, such as balance of nature or species-level adaptation.The hallmark of post-1959 evolutionary ecology is the recognition, the making explicit of the question that the selective, genetical process of fitness (fates of genes) has to be separated from the observations of different levels of adaptiveness. An easy conflation of cause and result is no longer satisfying; now attempts to disentangle the complex strands tying population phenomena to the different levels of selection are providing the excitement of a new research program. In this program evolutionary theory is used to define the appropriate questions, as exemplified by the organization of the textbook Evolutionary Ecology.45 Our discussion of the invention of a new approach, with a characteristic style and set of interests, must also be about how the practitioners of ecology have perceived themselves. The early attempts of Poulton and Nicholson were not taken up by the vigorously growing science of ecology, which developed first - and intentionally — along a narrower, hierarchically restrained set of questions about population. The depth of Poulton's and Nicholson's submergence is indicated by the fact that even Wynne-Edwards did not argue in the manner of one rescuing a minor tradition. Rather, he thought he had a new approach, that of placing evolution in the foundations of ecology. Although this approach was not exactly original, we should be cautious in grouping all evolutionary concerns within ecology in one intellectual tradition. The particular style of selectionist deduction invigorated by Wynne-Edwards was successful only in the volatile situation of a rapidly growing discipline, full of self-critical examination and new rigor. Whereas in 1930 evolutionary concerns did not provide that rigor, by 1960 they could - and did. (shrink)

What methodological approaches do research programs use to investigate the world? Elisabeth Lloyd’s Logic of Research Questions (LRQ) characterizes such approaches in terms of the questions that the researchers ask and causal factors they consider. She uses the Logic of Research Questions Framework to criticize adaptationist programs in evolutionary biology for dogmatically assuming selection explanations of the traits of organisms. I argue that Lloyd’s general criticism of methodological adaptationism is an artefact of the impoverished LRQ. My Ordered Factors Proposal extends (...) the LRQ to characterize approaches with sequences of questions and factors. I highlight the importance that ordering one’s investigation plays in approaches at the level of adaptationism by analyzing two research programs in community ecology: competitionists and neutralists. Competitionists and neutralists take opposed starting points and use explanatory and developmental heuristics to consider more factors in due time. On the Ordered Factors Proposal, these approaches are not only the ecological factors they are open to considering but also the order in which they will consider them. My disagreement with Lloyd’s over how to characterize methodological approaches reflects different views about methodological monism and pluralism. (shrink)

“The object of this book,” writes William C. Dowling in his preface, “is to make the key concepts of Paul Ricoeur’s _Time and Narrative_ available to readers who might have felt bewildered by the twists and turns of its argument.” The sources of puzzlement are, he notes, many. For some, it is Ricoeur’s famously indirect style of presentation, in which the polarities of argument and exegesis seem so often and so suddenly to have reversed themselves. For others, it is (...) the extraordinary intellectual range of Ricoeur’s argument, drawing on traditions as distant from each other as Heideggerian existentialism, French structuralism, and Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Yet beneath the labyrinthian surface of Ricoeur’s _Temps et récit_, Dowling reveals a single extended argument that, though developed unsystematically, is meant to be understood in systematic terms. __Ricoeur on Time and Narrative_ _presents that argument in clear and concise terms, in a way that will be enlightening both to readers new to Ricoeur and those who may have felt themselves adrift in the complexities of _Temps et récit,_ Ricoeur’s last major philosophical work. Dowling divides his discussion into six chapters, all closely involved with specific arguments in _Temps et récit_: on mimesis, time, narrativity, semantics of action, poetics of history, and poetics of fiction. Additionally, Dowling provides a preface that lays out the French intellectual context of Ricoeur's philosophical method. An appendix presents his English translation of a personal interview in which Ricoeur, having completed _Time and Narrative, _looks back over his long career as an internationally renowned philosopher. __Ricoeur on Time and Narrative___ _communicates to readers the intellectual excitement of following Ricoeur’s dismantling of established theories and arguments—Aristotle and Augustine and Husserl on time, Frye and Greimas on narrative structure, Arthur Danto and Louis O. Mink on the nature of historical explanation—while coming to see how, under the pressure of Ricoeur’s analysis, these ideas are reconstituted and revealed in a new set of relations to one another. "The scholarship in William C. Dowling's __Ricoeur on Time and Narrative____ __is impeccable; Dowling knows Ricoeur inside out. He highlights Ricoeur's most important arguments, presents them in a limpid, concise language, and links them to the relevant nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical developments. Dowling's book provides us with a lucid, intelligible version of Ricoeur's major work, one that will be of considerable significance to philosophers, historians, and literary theorists." —_Thomas Pavel, Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor of French Literature, and the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago_ "William C. Dowling's __Ricoeur on Time and Narrative___ _is a subtle and remarkably well-sustained piece of work. It provides a detailed introduction to a major work of philosophy and narrative theory—already a considerable achievement, given the difficulty of Ricoeur's text. However, Dowling also shows us, sometimes explicitly, sometimes simply through the way he conducts his argument, why we should bother with Ricoeur—what we have to gain from knowing him better than we do, however well we may think we know him." —_Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Princeton University _. (shrink)

Developments that suggest the universe is full of life make the Fermi paradox increasingly pressing, but our search for an extraterrestrial technological civilization (“ETC”) is handicapped by our ignorance of its probable nature and behavior. This paper offers a way around this problem by drawing on information theoretical concepts, including game theory and Bayesian probability. It argues that, whatever its ultimate goals, an ETC would have the same instrumental goals as other intelligent agents. Generically, these are self-preservation and the acquisition (...) of resources. For an advanced ETC, these generic goals imply the objectives of removing existential threats and acquiring strategic and non-strategic information. Since the most problematic existential threats for any ETC would be from other civilizations and planets hosting such civilizations would also be copious sources of information, these objectives would lead it to gather information from these locations and to protect itself against them. This dual-goals hypothesis resolves the Fermi paradox, redirects the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and makes testable predictions regarding ETC’s behavior on Earth if it is here. (shrink)

This paper attempts to provide a conceptual underpinning for codes of ethics in business and the professions. Rule-utilitarianism is a theory of ethics which I believe can successfully do this. Business persons and professionals, hopefully, will be able to develop codes of ethics in a manner consistent with a well-formulated general ethical theory. This will help enable codes of ethics to be a bridge between general ethical theory and specific ethical decisions made in business and the professions.

The corporation's social role is usually presented as a cultural phenomenon in which the corporation learns socially acceptable behaviors through voluntary social responsibility, government regulations/public policies, and/or acceptance of ethics principles. This article presents an alternative view of corporationcommunity relations as a natural phenomenon based on complexity-chaos theory and a biological-physical conception of corporate values. Corporation and community are depicted as interacting nonlinear adaptive systems having unpredictable futures, the corporate social role is depicted as largely indeterminate, and competing values are (...) depicted as key factors driving change in corporationcommunity linkages. Normative duties of corporate and community leaders are described. (shrink)

Fluted Logic is essentially first-order predicate logic deprived of variables. The lack of variables results in reduced expressiveness. Nevertheless, many logical problems that can be stated in natural language, such as the famous Schubert's Steamroller, can be rendered in fluted logic. Further evidence of the expressiveness of fluted logic is its close relation to description logics. Already it has been shown that fluted logic is decidable and has the finite-model property. This paper shows that fluted logic has the exponential-model property (...) and that deciding satisfiability is NEXPTIME-complete. It is shown further that fluted logic is 'nice, that is, it shares with first-order predicate logic the interpolation property and model preservation properties. (shrink)

Fluted Logic is essentially first-order predicate logic deprived of variables. The lack of variables results in reduced expressiveness. Nevertheless, many logical problems that can be stated in natural language, such as the famous Schubert's Steamroller, can be rendered in fluted logic. Further evidence of the expressiveness of fluted logic is its close relation to description logics. Already it has been shown that fluted logic is decidable and has the finite-model property. This paper shows that fluted logic has the exponential-model property (...) and that deciding satisfiability is NEXPTIME-complete. It is shown further that fluted logic is 'nice’, that is, it shares with first-order predicate logic the interpolation property and model preservation properties. (shrink)

The dominant values of the business system-economizing and power-aggrandizing-are manifestations of natural evolutionary forces to which sociocultural meaning has been assigned. Economizing tends to slow life-negating entropic processes, while power-aggrandizement enhances them. Both economizing and power-aggrandizing work against a third (non-business) value cluster- ecologizing-which sustains community integrity. The contradictory tensions and conflicts generated among these three value clusters define the central normative issues posed by business operations. While both economizing and ecologizing are antientropic and therefore life-supporting, power augmentation, which negates (...) the other two value clusters, is pro-entropic and therefore life-defeating. Business ethicists, by focusing on the contradictions between personal values, on the one hand, and both economizing and power-aggrandizing, on the other hand, have tended to overlook the normative significance of nature-based value systems. Learning to reconcile economizing and ecologizing values is the most important theoretical task for business ethicists. (shrink)

Rhetorical Structure Theory has enjoyed continuous attention since its origins in the 1980s. It has been applied, compared to other approaches, and also criticized in a number of areas in discourse analysis, theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics. In this article, we review some of the discussions about the theory itself, especially addressing issues of the reliability of analyses and psychological validity, together with a discussion of the nature of text relations. We also propose areas for further research. A follow-up (...) article will discuss applications of the theory in various fields. (shrink)

In a 1969 paper, Quine coined the term 'limits of decision'. This term evidently refers to limits on the logical vocabulary of a logic, beyond which satisfiability is no longer decidable. In the same paper. Quine showed that not only monadic formulas, but homogeneous k-adic formulas for arbitrary k lie on the decidable side of the limits of decision. But the precise location of the limits of decision has remained an open question. The present paper answers that question. It addresses (...) the question of decidability of those sublogics of first-order logic that are defined in terms of their logical vocabularies. A complete answer is obtained, thus locating exactly Quine's limits of decision. (shrink)

William C. Gentry was both an academic philosopher, perfectly willing to engage in the philosophical 'conversations' of the written word and, more importantly, a true philosopher, in the Platonic and Socratic style. Engaging with those around him in discourse, in live conversations, which are the vehicle of actual philosophical inquiry and discovery. These essays are the product of those conversations. Gentry's thoughts consisted of investigations into the deepest and most profound questions of human nature, ethics, and knowledge. This volume (...) is a tribute both to his role as a teacher and philosopher. As a teacher, friend, and colleague, Gentry was the epitome of the philosopher: questioning, exploring, critiquing, discovering. (shrink)

To say ‘mysticism versus philosophy’ in the context of Islamic civilization means something far different from what it has come to signify in the West, where many philosophers have looked upon mysticism as the abandonment of any attempt to reconcile religious data with intelligent thought. Certainly the Muslim mystics and philosophers sometimes display a certain mutual opposition and antagonism, but never does their relationship even approach incompatibility.

The dominant values of the business system-economizing and power-aggrandizing-are manifestations of natural evolutionary forces to which sociocultural meaning has been assigned. Economizing tends to slow life-negating entropic processes, while power-aggrandizement enhances them. Both economizing and power-aggrandizing work against a third (non-business) value cluster- ecologizing-which sustains community integrity. The contradictory tensions and conflicts generated among these three value clusters define the central normative issues posed by business operations. While both economizing and ecologizing are antientropic and therefore life-supporting, power augmentation, which negates (...) the other two value clusters, is pro-entropic and therefore life-defeating. Business ethicists, by focusing on the contradictions between personal values, on the one hand, and both economizing and power-aggrandizing, on the other hand, have tended to overlook the normative significance of nature-based value systems. Learning to reconcile economizing and ecologizing values is the most important theoretical task for business ethicists. (shrink)

Business ethics in the new millennium will confront both new and old questions that are being transformed by the changed pace and direction of human evolution. These questions embrace human nature, values, inquiring methods, technological change, geopolitics, natural disasters, and the moral role of business in all of these. The emergence and acceptance of technosymbolic phenomena may signal a slow transition of carbon-based human life toward greater dependence upon silicon-based virtualities across a wide range ofhuman possibilities. The resultant moral issues (...) call for a renewal and redefinition of business ethics theories and methods. (shrink)