The impacts of early fishing on aquatic ecosystems were minimal, as primitive technologies were used to harvest fish primarily for food. As fishing technology grew more sophisticated and human populations dispersed and expanded, local economies transitioned from subsistence to barter and trade. Expanded trade networks and mercantilization led to surplus catches becoming tradable commodities. Today, global export fish commodities, including fresh, frozen, cured, and canned fish, are valued at over US$ 100 billion, but commoditization loses the ecological (...) imperative, with overfishing the result. To sustain global fisheries, human and ecosystem relationships with living fish need to be valued, as fish landed for both food and profit. Toward this end, we propose two decommoditization strategies: (a) valuing cultural property, the intergenerational relationships of people to places, in environmental policy and (b) instituting social subsidies that reward or enable local communities to cooperate in sustaining aquatic living resources, such as with marine protected areas. (shrink)

Some factors affecting marital distances have been studied in two Outer Hebridean islands, Harris (843 marriages) and Barra (444 marriages), over the period 1855-1990. In each island marital distances fell before 1900, but then rose to their greatest values after the 1950s. Fishermen generally married at the shortest distances and men in land-based occupations at the longest. The depression in the fishing industry during the 1880s and early 1890s was associated with reductions in marital distances, especially among fishermen. In the (...) different regions of Harris, marital distances were least in the south-east, where settlement was most dense, and greatest in the south-west where it was most sparse. (shrink)

Different authors offer subtly different characterizations of naïve realism. We disentangle the main ones and argue that illusions provide the best proving ground for naïve realism and its main rival, representationalism. According to naïve realism, illusions never involve per- ceptual error. We assess two leading attempts to explain apparent perceptual error away, from William Fish and Bill Brewer, and conclude that they fail. Another lead- ing attempt is assessed in a companion paper, which also sketches an alternative representational account.

Certain species of fish have recently become important model systems in comparative genomics and in developmental biology, in certain instances because of their small genome sizes (e.g., in the pufferfish) and, in other cases, because of the opportunity they provide to combine an easily accessible and experimentally manipulable embryology with the power of genetic approaches (e.g., in the zebrafish). The resulting accumulation of genomic information indicates that, surprisingly, many gene families of fish consist of more members than in (...) mammals. Most modern fish, including the zebrafish and medakka, are diploid organisms; however, the greater number of genes in fish was possibly caused by additional ancient genome duplications which happened in the lineage leading to modern ray-finned fishes but not along the lineage leading to tetrapods. Since these two lineages shared their last common ancestor (in the Devonian about 360 million years ago) individual duplicated members of gene families were later lost in fish. Interestingly, comparative data indicate that, in some cases, genes in mammals even serve somewhat different functions than their homologues in fish, highlighting that the degree of evolutionary relatedness of genes is not always a reliable predictor of their evolutionary conservation and their similarity of function. Since fish are phenotypically probably not more complex than mammals, it is possible that evolution took alternative paths to the “economics of genomics” through alternative solutions to gene regulation. It is suggested that the more complex genomic architecture of fish permitted them to adapt and speciate quickly in response to changing selective regimes. BioEssays 20:511–515, 1998. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Different authors offer subtly different characterizations of naïve realism. We disentangle the main ones and argue that illusions provide the best proving ground for naïve realism and its main rival, representationalism. According to naïve realism, illusions never involve perceptual error. We assess two leading attempts to explain apparent perceptual error away, from William Fish and Bill Brewer, and conclude that they fail. Another leading attempt is assessed in a companion paper, which also sketches an alternative representational account.

It is not uncommon to hear that poor school performance, welfare dependancy, youth unemployment, and criminal activity result more from shortcomings in the personal makeup of individuals than from societal forces beyond their control. Are American values declining as so many suggest? And are those values at the root of many social problems today?Shaped by experience and public policies, people's values and social norms do change. What role can or should a democratic government play in shaping values? And how do (...) these values conditon the efficacy of public policy?In this book, six distinguished social scientists identify trends in America's values and their consequences, and consider public policy tools with which some of those values might be changed.Daniel Yankelovich begins with a discussion of how American values have shifted in the last half-century, and argues that affluence is the driving force behind these changes in values. James Q. Wilson argues that destructive habits which can lead to social pathologies, like crime and drug use, are set early in life; he examines how public policy might intervene when children are young to promote better values. David Popenoe maintains that America has veered too far towards industrialist values, and explores the resulting decline of families and many attendant social ills. Nathan Glazer describes the history and present status of the dispute over multicultural education. Jane Mansbridge examines the process of building cooperation, consensus, and public spirit. And George Akerlof and Janet L. Yellen discuss the problem of gang criminality.Inthe past, social scientists have often sidestepped questions about values as undefinable, unquantifiable, and somehow unscientific. The essays in this volume address these questions at last.Henry J. Aaron, director of the Economic Studies program at Brookings, is the authorof numerous books, including most recently Serious and Unstable Condition: Financing America's Health Care (1991), and coeditor of Setting Domestic Priorities (1992). Thomas E. Mann is director of the Brookings Governmental Studies program, coeditor of Media Polls in American Politics (1992), and coauthor of the Renewing Congress series (1993). Timothy Taylor is managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives at Stanford University. (shrink)

This paper discusses the role of Hume’s “Natural History of Religion” (NHR) in his campaign against the rational acceptability of religious belief by discussing and rebutting some objections have been lodged to my previous presentations of my reading of the NHR. In earlier work I argued that the causal account of religious belief offered therein, if accepted as the best account, rationally destabilizes that belief. By this, I mean that acknowledging that the account is the best of the belief provides (...) a reason to suspend the belief unless and until some further epistemic justification is given for that belief. As such, the account leaves those who think that the belief can be given some epistemic justification unmoved, but has a particular force against the fideist who holds that justification is not required. In this paper I show in more detail than in previous work its relevance to a particular form of fideism, and rebut objections to my reading offered by Jennifer Marušic. (shrink)

This volume marks a unique collaboration by internationally distinguished scholars in the history, rhetoric, philosophy, and sociology of science. Converging on the central issues of rhetoric of science, the essays focus on figures such as Galileo, Harvey, Darwin, von Neumann; and on issues such as the debate over cold fusion or the continental drift controversy. Their vitality attests to the burgeoning interest in the rhetoric of science.

This article analyses the conception of virtue and vice in early modern Europe. It explains that there were two movements in conceptions of virtue during this period. The first is the Cartesian tradition wherein virtue is intimately related to the control of the passions and the other is the continuation of this theme in Britain in a more aesthetic version. This article describes how the concepts of virtue and vice were softened by an awakening interest in the social emotions and (...) in the relationship between moral goodness and happiness. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 6, June 2022.

There are methodological problems with the new techniques reviewed by Posner & Raichle. Some brain mechanisms are not detected by the temporal and spatial resolution. Questions are also raised by the stimulation paradigms.