Seventeen-year-old David is a perfect organ match for his younger brother, Ken, who has kidney failure. David understands that the procedure presents some risk for him and that after surgery he may no longer be able to continue playing football. His idols all have been football players and he now plays on his high school's team. Nevertheless, he wants to donate a kidney to his brother and agrees to being a donor as soon as the option is mentioned. He never (...) displays any ambivalence and says, I want to donate my kidney because then I'll be a hero to my family. This close family - of two parents and five older siblings — strongly supports the seventeen-year-old's decision, especially after an older brother, who was also a perfect organ match, is found medically (anatomically) unsuitable.The parents and two of the older siblings could still be medically acceptable donors: their organs are likely to be better grafts (one haplotype matches) than a non-related cadaveric kidney would be, but less compatible than the perfect organ match (haploidentical) that could be provided by David, the adolescent brother. Studies have shown that in the short run there is little difference in the survivability of organs from different classes of donors. After several years, however, there is a significant difference with perfectly matched kidneys being much less prone to rejection than the less ideally matched organs (1, p. 118). (shrink)

This has been an excellent opportunity for me to get a sense of what scholars in fields other than my own (viz., theological social ethics) think I am trying to do, and whether there might be some sense in it. But in all honesty, I must say that the experience of reading and pondering the articles by Lewis Baldwin and Dwayne Tunstall in this issue of The Pluralist has been both enlightening and a joy, inasmuch as it has been (...) an opportunity for me to find out what I have been doing in the academy for the last twenty-five years and where might be some of the limitations as well as promise in my work.When I read these articles, I recalled an experience that second-generation personalist Francis J. McConnell reported .. (shrink)

Much attention has been devoted in recent years to the personal idealism of Martin Luther King, Jr. Among the major contributors to the scholarship in this area is Rufus Burrow, Jr., who places King firmly in the tradition of personal idealism, or personalism, while also uncovering the intellectual unease that made King both a deep and creative thinker and a committed and effective social activist.1 Clearly, Burrow's own sense of his role as a personalist informs his approach to the life (...) and thought of King. Although philosophical personalism figures prominently in Burrow's treatment of King in his writings, ethical and social personalism provides the primary theoretical framework for both Burrow's exploration of .. (shrink)

Drawing together researchers from diverse theoretical positions, the aim of this book is to work towards a coherent and unified account of how we develop an understanding of one's and others' mental states.

CLASSICAL THEISM HAS USED THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY TO EXPRESS GOD’S SIMULTANEOUS TRANSCENDENCE OF, AND IMMANENCE WITHIN, THE WORLD, BUT HERE A TWOFOLD DISTINCTION, SUCH AS THAT PROPOSED BY RICHARDSON OR HARTSHORNE, WILL DO: GOD AS ABSOLUTE AND GOD AS RELATED. WHITEHEAD HAS SEEN A DOUBLE PROBLEM, FOR THE WORLD ALSO TRANSCENDS, AND IS IMMANENT WITHIN, THE WORLD. FOR THIS DOUBLE PROBLEM A THREEFOLD DISTINCTION IS NECESSARY: THE PRIMORDIAL ENVISAGEMENT, THAT DIVINE INSTANTIATION OF CREATIVITY WHICH UTTERLY TRANSCENDS THE WORLD, (...) THE PRIMORDIAL NATURE OR LOGOS, PART OF WHICH IS INDIVIDUALLY IMMANENT WITHIN EACH CREATURE AS ITS INITIAL AIM, AND THE CONSEQUENT NATURE, WHICH IS THE WAY EACH CREATURE, TRANSCENDENT TO GOD IN ITS BECOMING, IS ULTIMATELY INCLUDED WITHIN THE ONGOING TEMPORAL EXPERIENCE OF GOD. (shrink)

The 5000 bristles that protrude from the cuticle of a Drosophila adult function as either mechanosensors or chemosensors, and they are arranged in surprisingly intricate patterns. Development of the patterns appears to involve five stages: (1) establishment of a coordinate system of ‘positional information’; (2) partitioning of the epidermis into areas where bristles either can or cannot originate; (3) selection of one or more bristle mother cells within each permissible area; (4) suppression of bristle development in the neighborhood of each (...) mother cell; and (5) differentiation of the mother cell to produce four or more descendant cells, each of which forms part of the bristle apparatus. Some of the genes that control these events participate in more than one stage, and others play key roles in roles in seemingly unrelated developmental pathways, including embryonic neurogenesis, body segmentation, and sex determination. (shrink)

The hypothesis that play behavior is more prevalent in larger-brained animals has recently been challenged. It may be, for example, that only certain brain structures are related to play. Here, we analyze social play behavior with regards to the cerebellum: a structure strongly implicated in motor-development, and possibly also in cognitive skills. We present an evolutionary analysis of social play and the cerebellum, using a phylogenetic comparative method. Social play frequency and relative cerebellum size are positively correlated. Hence, there appears (...) to be a link between the evolutionary elaboration of social play and the cerebellum. (shrink)

Discusses revolution, Bolshevism, liberal democracy, political decay, liberty, feminism, the family, socialism, and intellectual life.