The genome sequencing revolution has revealed that all species possess a large number of unique genes critical for trait variation, adaptation, and evolutionary innovation. One widely used approach to identify such genes consists of detecting protein‐coding sequences with no homology in other genomes, termed orphan genes. These genes have been extensively studied, under the assumption that they represent valid proxies for species‐specific genes. Here, we critically evaluate taxonomic, phylogenetic, and sequence evolution evidence showing that orphan genes belong to a range (...) of evolutionary ages and thus cannot be assigned to a single lineage. Furthermore, we show that the processes generating orphan genes are substantially more diverse than generally thought and include horizontal gene transfer, transposable element domestication, and overprinting. Thus, orphan genes represent a heterogeneous collection of genes rather than a single biological entity, making them unsuitable as a subject for meaningful investigation of gene evolution and phenotypic innovation. (shrink)

Classic texts that define the disjunctivist theory of perception.

This article serves as a brief constellation of thought working towards a ruderal futurism. Proposed as an alternative of the granary logic of state and capital, the ruderal is positioned as a force functioning in the aftermath of – and in opposition to – the composite human/state/cereal-turned-capitalist ordering of nature. The role of agriculture and cereal crop production in early states as well as its exalted status within modern nation state and attendant culture is examined as a departure point for (...) experimental approaches to their negation. (shrink)

Relationalists about episodic memory must endorse a disjunctivist theory of memory-experience according to which cases of genuine memory and cases of total confabulation involve distinct kinds of mental event with different natures. This paper is concerned with a pair of arguments against this view, which are analogues of the ‘causal argument’ and the ‘screening off argument’ that have been pressed in recent literature against relationalist (and hence disjunctivist) theories of perception. The central claim to be advanced is that to deal (...) with these two arguments, memory disjunctivists both can and should draw on resources that are standardly appealed to by rival common factor theories of episodic memory, and, in particular, to the idea that genuine memories and merely apparent ones are to be distinguished, at least in part, in terms of the distinctive ways in which they are caused. On the proposed view, there are substantive causal constraints associated both with cases of genuine memory and with cases of mere confabulation. The resulting theory thus tells us something important about the nature both of genuine memories and of mere confabulations, namely, that such experiences must be caused in certain distinctive ways and cannot occur except as the result of a distinctive sort of causal process. In addition, the theory enables the disjunctivist to offer a unified response to an important pair of arguments against her view. (shrink)

These volumes will serve as useful resources for anyone interested in philosophy of color perception or color science.

Saunders & van Brakel argue, inter alia, that there is for the claim that there are four unique hues (red, green, blue, and yellow), and that there are two corresponding opponent processes. We argue that this is quite mistaken.

When we open our eyes, the world seems full of colored opaque objects, light sources, and transparent volumes. One historically popular view, _eliminativism_, is that the world is not in this respect as it appears to be: nothing has any color. Color _realism_, the denial of eliminativism, comes in three mutually exclusive varieties, which may be taken to exhaust the space of plausible realist theories. Acccording to _dispositionalism_, colors are _psychological_ dispositions: dispositions to produce certain kinds of visual experiences. According (...) to both _primitivism_ and _physicalism_, colors are not psychological dispositions; they differ in that primitivism says that no reductive analysis of the colors is possible, whereas physicalism says that they are physical properties. This paper is a defense of physicalism about color. (shrink)

Palmer's subjectivity barrier seems to be erected on a popular but highly suspect conception of visual experience, and his color room argument is invalid.

Maggie Heartsilver’s “Deflating Byrne’s ‘Are women adult human females?’” subjects the arguments and conclusion of “Are women ...?” to a probing and comprehensive stress ­test. The present paper responds to Heartsilver’s objections, and also discusses the significance of the proposition that trans women are women.

What is medicine? One obvious answer in the context of the contemporary clinical tradition is that medicine is the process of curing sick people. However, this “curative thesis” is not satisfactory, even when “cure” is defined generously and even when exceptions such as cosmetic surgery are set aside. Historian of medicine Roy Porter argues that the position of medicine in society has had, and still has, little to do with its ability to make people better. Moreover, the efficacy of medicine (...) for improving population health has been famously doubted by historians and epidemiologists. The curative thesis demands that we have mostly been stupid, duped, or staggeringly hopeful, given that medicine has not until recently offered more than a handful of effective cures. I suggest, in this article, that the core medical competence is neither to cure, nor to prevent, disease, but to understand and to predict it. I argue that this approach does a better job than the curative thesis at explaining why not all medicine is concerned with curative efforts and that it enjoys historical support from the ancient entanglement of prophecy and medicine and from the fact that medicine thrived for centuries with almost no effective cures and continues to thrive today in various forms that are mostly without curative efficacy. I suggest that this approach grounds a fairer approach to alternative, traditional, and other medical practices, as well as some fresh lessons for the development of mainstream medicine. (shrink)

Why Agamben? -- Key ideas -- Language and the negativity of being -- Infancy and archaeological method -- Potentiality and the task of the coming philosophy -- Politics : bare life and sovereign power -- The homeland of gesture : art and cinema -- The laboratory of literature -- Bearing witness and messianic time -- After Agamben.

The terminology surrounding the dispute between higher-order and first-order theories of consciousness is piled so high that it sometimes obscures the view. When the debris is cleared away, there is a real prospect.

Anomaloscope An instrument used for detecting anomalies of color vision. The test subject adjusts the ratio of two monochromatic lights to form a match with a third monochromatic light. The most common form of this procedure involves a Rayleigh match: a match between a mixture of monochromatic green and red lights, and a monochromatic yellow light. Normal subjects will choose a matching ratio of red to green light that falls within a fairly narrow range of values. Subjects with anomalous color (...) vision will choose a ratio of red to green that falls outside this range, and red-green dichromats will accept any ratio of red to green as forming a match. (shrink)

This essay surveys the varieties of disjunctivism about perceptual experience. Disjunctivism comes in two main ?avours, metaphysical and epistemological. Metaphysical disjunctivism is the view usually associated with the disjunctivist label, and whenever.

The Dangerous Book for Boys Abstract: Seventeenth and eighteenth century discussions of the senses are often thought to contain a profound truth: some perceptible properties are secondary qualities, dispositions to produce certain sorts of experiences in perceivers. In particular, colors are secondary qualities: for example, an object is green iff it is disposed to look green to standard perceivers in standard conditions. After rebutting Boghossian and Velleman’s argument that a certain kind of secondary quality theory is viciously circular, we discuss (...) three main lines of argument for the secondary quality theory. The first is inspired by an intuitively compelling picture of perception articulated by Reid; the second is that the secondary quality theory is a conceptual truth; the third line of argument is presented in Johnston’s influential paper ‘How to speak of the colors’. We conclude that all these arguments fail, and that the secondary quality theory is unmotivated. Keywords: color, secondary quality, disposition, vision, perception.. (shrink)

Comment on David Papineau's _The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience_.

This article offers commentary on a work in the same journal issue. I argue that the authors, Entwistle and Watt, approach person-centered care in health care with a questionable focus on the understanding of concepts as the primary causal mechanism and bracket-out considerations of the structural conditions of medical practice. I argue that the challenges in implementing person-centered care have not been from a difficulty articulating and/or understanding such goals, but from failing to address existing systemic pressures that are preventing (...) health care and health care professionals from addressing patients as persons in the fullest sense. Any examination of person-centered care and its challenges should consider the co-determining nature of the material and the conceptual/ethical. (shrink)

Agamben's vocabulary is both expansive and idiosyncratic, with words such as 'infancy', 'gesture' and 'profanation' given specific and complex meanings that can bewilder the new reader. Bringing together leading scholars in the field, including Steven DeCaroli, Justin Clemens, Claire Colebrook and Steven DeCaroli the 150 entries explain the key concepts in Agamben's work and his relationship with other thinkers, from Aristotle to Aby Warburg.

I argue that the use of heritable modifications for psychology, personality, and behavior should be limited to the reversal or prevention of relatively unambiguous instances of pathology or likely harm (e.g. sociopathy). Most of the likely modifications of psychological personality would not be of this nature, however, and parents therefore should not have the freedom to make such modifications to future children. I argue by examining the viewpoints of both the individual and society. For individuals, modifications would interfere with their (...) capacity for self-determination in a way that undermines the very concept of self-determination. I argue that modification of psychology and personality is unlike present parenting in morally significant ways. For society, modification offers a medium for power to manipulate the makeup of persons and populations, possibly causing biological harm to the species and altering our conceptions of social responsibility. (shrink)

Philosophers have devoted a great deal of discussion to the question of whether an inverted spectrum thought experiment refutes functionalism. (For a review of the inverted spectrum and its many philosophical applications, see Byrne, 2004.) If Ho?man is correct the matter can be swiftly and conclusively settled, without appeal to any empirical data about color vision (or anything else). Assuming only that color experiences and functional relations can be mathematically represented, a simple mathematical result.

Neste artigo, buscaremos discutir o modo pelo qual a literatura pode conduzir – e, talvez, mesmo exigir – uma mudança no próprio estatuto da filosofia, especialmente no caso da fenomenologia, ao tornar explícita a existência de um outro modelo de racionalidade, distinto de sua concepção clássica. Para isso, trabalharemos a partir das descrições propostas por Merleau-Ponty sobre o tema, concentrando-nos, nesse artigo, no período de sua obra entre o final dos anos quarenta e início dos anos cinquenta. Ao lado da (...) questão da literatura, a correlata recompreensão da noção de metafísica terá papel central nessa investigação. (shrink)

Pelluchon, Corine Manifest animalista: La causa animal com a camí per a un nou humanismeBarcelona: Rosa dels Vents, 141 p.ISBN 978-84-16930-41-8.

Richard Heck, in "The Sense of Communication" (Mind, 104, pp. 79-106, 1995), argues against the "Hybrid View"--the claim, roughly, that names are Millian while beliefs are Fregean. We argue that Heck's argument fails.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Fear And BeliefAlex NeillIn his recent article “Fear Without Belief,” 1 John Morreall argues that once we have an adequate understanding of fear—and in particular, once we understand that not all fears are based on or conceptually involve beliefs—Kendall Walton’s well-known “puzzle” concerning whether we can fear what we know to be fictional “dissolves.” 2 I would like here to point to some questions and difficulties raised by Morreall’s (...) article.Walton’s puzzle is based on what is often described as a “cognitive” account of the emotions, according to which emotional states, including fear, are founded on beliefs and judgments. Thus he writes, “It seems to be a principle of common-sense, which ought not to be abandoned if there is any reasonable alternative, that fear [for oneself] must be accompanied by, or must involve, a belief that one is in danger” (Walton, p. 7). Radford has made a similar point about other sorts of emotional state: “Roughly speaking,” he argues, “... for someone’s pity for another to be unproblematic, the pitier has to believe that the pitied third-party [is] suffering in some way.” 3 Elsewhere he says, “we have to believe in [a person’s] torment to be tormented by it.” 4 Given that we do not believe in the reality of fictional suffering or torment, nor that we are threatened by fictional beings, it would seem to follow that our affective responses to fictional characters cannot properly be described as states of pity or fear. As Walton says, describing a person watching a horror movie, “Charles does not believe that he is in danger, so he is not afraid” (Walton, p. 7). [End Page 94]Morreall challenges this conclusion, which has been the subject of a great deal of debate over the last fifteen years or so, by attacking the cognitive account of fear. He takes that account to involve two central claims; namely (1) that “fear must have an intentional object,” and (2) that “in order to fear something, one must believe that it is dangerous to her” (p. 360). In response to (1), he offers a number of counterexamples, which he suggests represent “cases of instinctive fear without intentional objects.” How effective are these counterexamples? First, Morreall notes that we may be frightened by loud noises. Yet, “when some joker sneaks up behind us and pops a balloon or shouts ‘Boo!’ we do not have to think of a gunshot or rapist to be scared” (p. 361). Now, suppose that some joker does sneak up behind you and pops a balloon. Your heart leaps, you shriek, you jump. Delighted, the joker says “Got you! You were really afraid that time!” One response to the joker would be this: “I wasn’t afraid; you simply startled me.” I take it that there is a real difference between being afraid and being startled. 5 But what exactly is that difference? It would surely be implausible to try to make it out in phenomenological terms, for one state may feel very like the other. And given Morreall’s account of the physiology of fear (the release of epinephrine into the blood causing a faster and stronger heartbeat, a redistribution of the blood away from the skin and extremities towards the muscles and head, and so on) it looks very unlikely that we shall be able to make out the difference in terms of physiology. In fact, I suggest, the difference between being afraid and being startled is a cognitive difference. A person who is simply startled by a loud noise doesn’t have any thoughts or beliefs about it; a person who is made afraid by the noise is a person who has thoughts about it, thoughts in which the noise is in one way or another associated with danger or harm. These thoughts need not be “occurrent,” nor even conscious. However, unless we suppose that a person does have thoughts in which the noise is associated with danger, we have no reason to describe her as “afraid” rather than “startled.” If we abandon the idea that the fear which a loud noise may arouse in us is intentional, that is... (shrink)

The principle of suspension says that when you disagree with an epistemic peer about p, you should suspend judgment about p. In “Epistemic Abstainers, Epistemic Martyrs, and Epistemic Converts,” Scott F. Aikin, Michael Harbour, Jonathan Neufeld, and Robert B. Talisse argue against the principle of suspension, claiming that it “is deeply at odds with how we view ourselves as cognitive agents.” I argue that their arguments do not succeed.

This essay surveys the varieties of disjunctivism about perceptual experience. Disjunctivism comes in two main flavours, metaphysical and epistemological. Metaphysical disjunctivism is the view usually associated with the disjunctivist label, and whenever ‘disjunctivism’ occurs here unprefixed, it refers to this view. After some initial discussion of (metaphysical) disjunctivism (sections 1–3), we explain epistemological disjunctivism in section 4. The rest of the essay is solely concerned with explaining and assessing metaphysical disjunctivism, a theory of the nature of perceptual experience. Our main (...) (and provisional) conclusion is that although there is considerable insight in the vicinity, metaphysical disjunctivism is false. (shrink)