“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)

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.].

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.

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)

This article illustrates how axiomatic social choice theory can be used in the evaluation of measures of group fitness for a biological hierarchy, thereby contributing to the dialogue between the philosophy of biology and social choice theory. It provides an axiomatic characterization of the ordering underlying the MichodSolariNedelcu index of group fitness for a multicellular organism. The MVSHN index has been used to analyse the germ-soma specialization and the fitness decoupling between the cell and organism levels that takes place during (...) the evolutionary transition to multicellularity. It is argued that some of the axioms satisfied by the MVSHN group fitness ordering are not appropriate for all stages in this transition. (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)

Countable homogeneous relational structures have been studied by many people. One area of focus is the Ramsey theory of such structures. After a review of background material, a partition theorem of Laflamme, Sauer, and Vuksanovic for countable homogeneous binary relational structures is discussed with a focus on the size of the set of unavoidable colors.

Extent health humanities readings of Gabriel García Márquez’s _Love in the Time of Cholera_ have focused on the doctor-patient relationship, the physician-scientist as a model for aspiring practitioners, and how individuals relate to the novel’s health themes of death, disease, and disability. However, such medicine-focused readings neglect the population-level public health concerns of the novel as they relate to contagion, community, and quarantine. This paper contributes to the growing field of public health humanities by using a close reading method to (...) explore how the competing endemic and epidemic public health issues shape the plot and metaphors of the novel. (shrink)

A fundamental issue concerning the treatment of meaning in context is how to deal with the extremely flexible relationship that appears to hold between descriptions, which are taken as the exchange...

The phenomenology of controlled action depends on comparisons between predicted and actually perceived sensory feedback called action-effects. We investigated if intervening task-irrelevant but semantically related information influences monitoring processes that give rise to a sense of control. Participants judged whether a moving box “obeyed” or “disobeyed” their own arrow keystrokes or visual cues representing the computer’s choices . During 1 s delays between keystrokes/cues and box movements, participants vocalized directions cued by letters inside the box. Congruency of cued vocalizations was (...) manipulated relative to previously selected keystrokes and upcoming box movements. In Experiment 1, reported obey moves and feelings of control reflected the true frequency of obey moves, but were also modulated by vocalizations. Incongruent vocalizations reduced reported obey moves, whereas congruent vocalizations increased them. In Experiment 2, vocalizations had stronger effects when their congruence with primary-task box movement was consistent for several consecutive moves before congruence changed. In Experiment 3, analogous impacts of vocalizations occurred when the computer selected the directions and participants judged whether the computer had control of the box. We conclude that predicted and perceived action-effects associated with semantically related but separate and ostensibly irrelevant actions can be conflated with one another. This interference is not restricted to actions performed with the same effector or within the same modality, or even by the same actor. Thus in estimating degrees of control, the mind integrates across ongoing action systems, whether or not they are logically task-relevant. (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, ...

The Vivekacudamani is one of the most important texts in the Advaita tradition and the most popular philosophical work ascribed to the great Indian philosopher, Sankara. This book presents an accessible translation of the entire text and also includes Upanisadic cross-referencing to most of its 580 verses, extensive notes, a lengthy Introduction, list of variant readings, an extensive bibliography, and an index to the verses.

Since difficult ideas are best understood when they wear a human face, in these six stories the main characters personify several 'isms' the author has written and taught about during his academic career. These 'isms' include German-Americanism, idealism, positivism or realism, and experimentalism. Several 'special relationships' in the stories are based on the author's experiences over many years in the United Kingdom and in teaching the liberal arts."--Back cover.