“I often said before starting, that I had no doubt I should frequently repent of the whole undertaking.” So wrote Charles Darwin aboard The Beagle , bound for the Galapagos Islands and what would arguably become the greatest and most controversial discovery in scientific history. But the theory of evolution did not spring full-blown from the head of Darwin. Since the dawn of humanity, priests, philosophers, and scientists have debated the origin and development of life on earth, and with modern (...) science, that debate shifted into high gear. In this lively, deeply erudite work, Pulitzer Prize–winning science historian Edward J. Larson takes us on a guided tour of Darwin’s “dangerous idea,” from its theoretical antecedents in the early nineteenth century to the brilliant breakthroughs of Darwin and Wallace, to Watson and Crick’s stunning discovery of the DNA double helix, and to the triumphant neo-Darwinian synthesis and rising sociobiology today. Along the way, Larson expertly places the scientific upheaval of evolution in cultural perspective: the social and philosophical earthquake that was the French Revolution; the development, in England, of a laissez-faire capitalism in tune with a Darwinian ethos of “survival of the fittest”; the emergence of Social Darwinism and the dark science of eugenics against a backdrop of industrial revolution; the American Christian backlash against evolutionism that culminated in the famous Scopes trial; and on to today’s world, where religious fundamentalists litigate for the right to teach “creation science” alongside evolution in U.S. public schools, even as the theory itself continues to evolve in new and surprising directions. Throughout, Larson trains his spotlight on the lives and careers of the scientists, explorers, and eccentrics whose collaborations and competitions have driven the theory of evolution forward. Here are portraits of Cuvier, Lamarck, Darwin, Wallace, Haeckel, Galton, Huxley, Mendel, Morgan, Fisher, Dobzhansky, Watson and Crick, W. D. Hamilton, E. O. Wilson, and many others. Celebrated as one of mankind’s crowning scientific achievements and reviled as a threat to our deepest values, the theory of evolution has utterly transformed our view of life, religion, origins, and the theory itself, and remains controversial, especially in the United States (where 90% of adults do not subscribe to the full Darwinian vision). Replete with fresh material and new insights, Evolution will educate and inform while taking readers on a fascinating journey of discovery. (shrink)

At the forefront of international concerns about global legislation and regulation, a host of noted environmentalists and business ethicists examine ethical issues in consumption from the points of view of environmental sustainability, economic development, and free enterprise.

Picturing the Past: Imaging and Imagining the Ancient Middle East. Edited by Jack Green, Emily Teeter, and John A. Larson. Oriental Institute Museum Publications, vol. 34. Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2012. Pp. 184, illus. $29.95. [Distributed by The David Brown Book Co., Oakville, Ct.].

This book is a manifesto for what John Alcock calls “orthodox sociobiology,” the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior following the premise that behaviors and their mechanisms evolve under the primary influence of natural selection acting on individual differences in genetic success. Sociobiology focuses narrowly on finding adaptive explanations for social behaviors while attempting a grand synthesis of biological and social sciences. Alcock's book is largely defensive, aimed at refuting criticisms and a perception that, twenty‐five (...) years after its proclamation, sociobiology is moribund. Alcock's defense relies not on an extensive review of relevant literature but on the persuasiveness of arguments illustrated with favored examples. He emphasizes sociobiology of human cultures and prescribes practical applications for restructuring societal institutions.The major argument against orthodox sociobiology is summarized in Edward O. Wilson's book Consilience : “We know that virtually all of human behavior is transmitted by culture. We also know that biology has an important effect on the origin of culture and its transmission. … Culture allows a rapid adjustment to changes in the environment through finely tuned adaptations invented and transmitted without correspondingly precise genetic prescription. In this respect human beings differ fundamentally from all other animal species” . This argument denies that human social behaviors are best understood as biologically evolved adaptations and places them outside the domain of the genetical theory of natural selection.Alcock's major claim for sociobiology's triumph is its use of comparative methodology to identify ultimate causes of social behaviors. Over the past twenty‐five years, evolutionary biologists have developed rigorous systematic methodologies for making comparative inferences in evolutionary research. Such explicitly phylogenetic approaches provide more powerful tests of ultimate causality in evolution than the comparative methods available when sociobiology was first proposed. Although the success of sociobiology would seem to lie in its ability to use the strongest comparative methods to test its major claims, Alcock's examples rely entirely on archaic methodology that no contemporary evolutionist should accept.The hypothesis of adaptation predicts that a character enhances its possessor's ability to utilize resources for survival or reproduction relative to alternatives against which it has been tested evolutionarily. Phylogenetic analysis of species possessing the character and their closest relatives identifies the comparisons appropriate for testing this hypothesis. Hypothetical adaptations are mapped onto phylogenies to identify their origins, antecedent conditions, associated characters, environmental contexts, and selective regimes. Alcock forfeits the power of evolutionary study by arguing that sociobiologists “can only use data from unrelated species known to experience similar selection pressures” in the “independent convergence test” of adaptation. No animal species are completely unrelated, nor are their behaviors adaptive in an absolute sense. Even comparisons of analogous characters across species must consider phylogeny because homologous genes and developmental programs can be utilized for analogous roles in different species. Without a firm grounding in phylogenetic principles, Alcock's methods cannot effectively test hypotheses of evolutionary causality.Alcock spends much effort defending sociobiology against the criticism that its major claims constitute untestable adaptationist stories. David Barash's sociobiological interpretations of mating behavior in bluebirds receive particular attention because Stephen Jay Gould criticized them as untestable. Alcock shows that Barash and others have empirically rejected some explanations in favor of better ones, although the hypotheses tested and the knowledge gained reside entirely in proximate mechanisms, not the ultimate causes that constitute sociobiology's main challenge. Gould's criticism therefore withstands Alcock's counterarguments.Readers unfamiliar with evolution should consult recent books such as Brian Hall's Evolutionary Developmental Biology , Jeffrey Levinton's Genetics, Paleontology, and Macroevolution , and John Avise's Phylogeography to see evolutionary disciplines that have triumphed over the past twenty‐five years. These disciplines contrast with sociobiology in their methodological rigor and profound reformulation of major theories. By contrast, Alcock's sociobiology seems essentially unchanged from the 1970s. If twenty‐five years of sociobiological study have produced only a repetition of its initial conjectures, their effectiveness as testable hypotheses seems doubtful.Alcock acknowledges “human evolutionary psychology” as a new subdiscipline of sociobiology. Indeed, orthodox sociobiology seems to be relocating from biology to psychology departments. My interpretation of this move is that sociobiology has not kept pace with evolutionary biology and therefore has sought refuge in a traditionally nonevolutionary discipline that has not yet incorporated the current critical standards of comparative evolutionary research.Sociobiology has served evolutionary biology mainly by revealing the limits of reductionist selective arguments, thereby directing us to move beyond them. (shrink)

The presence of temporal adjectives in possessive nominals like John's former car creates two interpretations. On one reading, the temporal adjective modifies the common noun (N-modifying reading). On the other, it modifies the possession relation (POSS-modifying reading). An explanation for this behavior is offered that appeals to what occurs in possessive sentences like John has a former car (N-modifying reading) and John formerly had a car (POSS-modifying reading). In the sentential cases, the source of two readings is (...) two distinct, modifiable phrases. Given the parallels, we propose a structure for possessive nominals analogous to that of possessive clauses. Specifically, we argue that such nominals include a locative small-clause structure, following Freeze (1992), and we explain the ambiguity structurally, as a simple matter of where temporal adjectives attach (NP vs. PP). We show that this analysis provides a straightforward basis for the semantic composition of possessive nominals. (shrink)

SummaryIn developing his claim that meaning cannot be understood independently of truth, Donald Davidson argues that a theory of meaning will take the form of a Tarskian theory of truth. In this essay I seek to describe more fully the structure of a Davidsonian theory of meaning and the extent to which Davidson modifies Tarski's account. 1 consider and reject John Foster's claim that Davidson takes, or should take, truth as a formal primitive, and argue that it is Davidson's (...) principle of charity which plays the essential role in giving theories of truth empirical application. (shrink)

What role do moment‐to‐moment comprehension processes play in visual attentional selection in picture stories? The current work uniquely tested the role of bridging inference generation processes on eye movements while participants viewed picture stories. Specific components of the Scene Perception and Event Comprehension Theory (SPECT) were tested. Bridging inference generation was induced by manipulating the presence of highly inferable actions embedded in picture stories. When inferable actions are missing, participants have increased viewing times for the immediately following critical image (Magliano, (...) Larson, Higgs, & Loschky, ). This study used eye‐tracking to test competing hypotheses about the increased viewing time: (a) Computational Load: inference generation processes increase overall computational load, producing longer fixation durations; (b) Visual Search: inference generation processes guide eye‐movements to pick up inference‐relevant information, producing more fixations. Participants had similar fixation durations, but they made more fixations while generating inferences, with that process starting from the fifth fixation. A follow‐up hypothesis predicted that when generating inferences, participants fixate scene regions important for generating the inference. A separate group of participants rated the inferential‐relevance of regions in the critical images, and results showed that these inferentially relevant regions predicted differences in other viewers’ eye movements. Thus, viewers’ event models in working memory affect visual attentional selection while viewing visual narratives. (shrink)

The study of landscape and place has become an increasingly fertile realm of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. In this new book of essays, selected from presentations at the first annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Geography, scholars investigate the experiences and meanings that inscribe urban and suburban landscapes. Gary Backhaus and John Murungi bring philosophy and geography into a dialogue with a host of other disciplines to explore a fundamental dialectic: while our collective and (...) personal activity modifies the landscape, in turn, the landscape modifies human identities, and social and environmental relations. Whether proposing a peripatetic politics, conducting a sociological analysis of building security systems, or critically examining the formation of New York City's municipal parks, each essay sheds distinctive light on this fascinating and engaging aspect of contemporary environmental studies. (shrink)

Nine leading scholars explore some of the most important minds behind the new political economy of the American Founding and engage with the foundational work of Ralph Lerner. In his 1979 article, "Commerce and Character: The Anglo-American as New-Model Man," Ralph Lerner argued that the American Founders and the political theorists of the commercial republic were charting a new basis for society that broke with the "old order," which was "preoccupied with intangible goods to an extent we now hardly ever (...) see. The king had his glory, the nobles their honor, the Christians their salvation, the citizens of pagan antiquity their ambition to outdo others in serving the public good." By contrast, the commercial republic was a regime based on the belief that human behavior is best understood as driven by physical wants and tangible goods. A government grounded on this understanding of humanity would be a more stable system and thus more conducive to human flourishing. Lerner's article thus interpreted the Founding as a revolution in political philosophy that must be understood against the backdrop of the Enlightenment. Commerce and Character brings together nine distinguished scholars who explore individual Enlightenment or American thinkers who made important philosophical or political contributions to the new political economy of modern republicanism. Each contributor uses Lerner's essay as the jumping-off point, and at the end, Lerner provides a detailed response to each of his interlocutors where he carefully examines each chapter and reconsiders his arguments a half century later. (shrink)

The contributors to this volume address global, regional, and local landscapes, cosmopolitan and indigenous cultures, and human and more-than-human ecology as they work to reveal place-specific tensional dynamics. This unusual book, which covers a wide-ranging array of topics, coheres into a work that will be a valuable reference for scholars of geography and the philosophy of place.

Ernest Gellner was a multilingual polymath who set the agenda in the study of nationalism and the sociology of Islam for an entire generation of academics and students. This definitive biography follows his trajectory from his early years in Prague, Paris and England to international success as a philosopher and public intellectual. Known both for his highly integrated philosophy of modernity and for combining a respect for nationalism with an appreciation for science, Gellner was passionate in his defence of reason (...) against every for of relativism. (shrink)

Schumaker (philosophy, science and technology department, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) examines how the terms of posture encompass all the major disciplines and investigates a variety of philosophical topics: abstract thought, ...

This is a translation of the chapter on perception of Kumarilabhatta's magnum opus, the Slokavarttika, one of the central texts of the Hindu response to the criticism of the logical-epistemological school of Buddhist thought. In an extensive commentary, the author explains the course of the argument from verse to verse and alludes to other theories of classical Indian philosophy and other technical matters. Notes to the translation and commentary go further into the historical and philosophical background of Kumarila's ideas. The (...) book provides an introduction to the history and the development of Indian epistemology, a synopsis of Kumarila's work and an analysis of its argument. (shrink)

Abstract:I argue for taking John Dewey's pluralistic ethics as a starting point, or embedded practice, from and in which technological innovations are conceptualized, critiqued, designed, tested, and eventually implemented. Dewey reconstructs human reason into operational intelligence where all behavior becomes gradually imaginative. I take Dewey's view of moral deliberation as a basis for a responsible process-based methodology combining creative technological design with the training of imaginative prospection. I further use Dewey's conception of technology that holds that implements, but also (...) ideas and concepts are tools, forms of technology. I end by looking at the educational impact for the creative industries. (shrink)

The Concordance is designed around units of philosophical sense whose limits in the text are indicated to the line. Unlike research tools based merely on the occurrence of key words (e.g., cause), it provides precise and complete information about not only the location but also the diversity of content in all the items covered by its survey. Furthermore it provides the capability for tracing the family of topics to which a particular text may belong. In short, the Concordance tells you (...) as much as possible about a text before you look it up. (shrink)

Prologue: Quest for the Personal In the lectures which formed the basis of this book I began, as Chapter i indicates, with a brief review of how the current ...