The last several years have seen vibrant debates among policymakers and scholars on whether to craft new human rights (or novel interpretations of existing ones) around neurotechnologies. These con...

With almost incredible rapidity Marxist socialism has spread throughout the world and other forms of socialism have penetrated societies on all continents. Communist governments have not only come to dominate the U.S.S.R. and China but also eastern Europe and Cuba; Africa has not only non-Marxist forms of socialism but is the contending ground for world powers; and Latin America has seen duly elected socialist governments overthrown by rightist forces with the collusion of multinational corporations based in the U.S.A. Socialism has (...) proved itself to be not a monolithic world movement. It is its history of theory and practice. With respect to the future it depends on what organized men and women will make of it. (shrink)

While neurorights are emerging as a potentially novel set of human rights in an age of neurotechnologies, most scholarly and policy debate to date has focused on defining and justifying these norms and their connection to existing rights. This article instead assumes some form of neurorights claims will find recognition in at least some existing or novel law and seeks to anticipate potential legal and regulatory hurdles to the successful implementation of this class of norms. After reviewing the ongoing conversations (...) around neurorights and reflecting on the move towards their legal construction, we draw on insights from fields including international law, political economy, and regulatory theory to identify and consider likely hurdles or coming challenges to implementation, including rights balancing, legal fragmentation, appropriate remedies, and issues around transnational and nonstate action and enforcement. The article then presents a research agenda calling for further analysis of these and other implementation challenges and reflects on how assessing these considerations in advance could inform better policy and advocacy. (shrink)

Ecological theory is built upon assumptions about the fundamental nature of organism-environment interactions. We argue that two mutually exclusive sets of such assumptions are available and that they have given rise to alternative approaches to studying ecology. The fundamentally different premises of these approaches render them irreconcilable with one another. In this paper, we present the first logical formalisation of these two paradigms.The more widely-accepted approach - which we label the demographic paradigm - includes both population ecology and community ecology (...) (synecology). Demographic ecology assumes that the environment is relatively stable and that biotic processes, governed predominantly by resource availability, are the most important of ecological and evolutionary influences. Moreover, ecological processes are assumed to translate into directional selection pressures that drive significant evolutionary change on a local scale through the process of optimisation. (shrink)

Explaining the persistence of populations is an important quest in ecology, and is a modern manifestation of the balance of nature metaphor. Increasingly, however, ecologists see populations (and ecological systems generally) as not being in equilibrium or balance. The portrayal of ecological systems as “non-equilibrium” is seen as a strong alternative to deterministic or equilibrium ecology, but this approach fails to provide much theoretical or practical guidance, and warrants formalisation at a more fundamental level. This is available in adaptation theory, (...) which allows population persistence to be explained as an epiphenomenon stemming from the maintenance, survival, movement and reproduction of individual organisms. These processes take place within a physicochemical and biotic environment that persists through structured annual cycles, but which is also spatiotemporally dynamic and subject to stochastic variation. The focus is thus shifted from the overproduction of offspring and the consequent density dependent population pressure thought to follow, to the adaptations and ecological circumstances that support those relatively few individuals that do survive. (shrink)

Studies of coexistence are based ultimately on the assumption that competitive exclusion is a general and accredited phenomenon in nature. However, the ecological and evolutionary impact of interspecific competition is of questionable significance. Review of three reputed examples of competitive exclusion in the field (Aphytis wasps, red and grey squirrels, and triclads) demonstrates that the widely-accepted competition-based interpretations are unlikely, that alternative explanations are overlooked, and that all other reported cases need critical reinvestigation. Although interspecific competition does undoubtedly occur, the (...) evidence suggests it is usually too weak and intermittent a force to achieve competitive exclusion or any other ecologically-significant result, except perhaps rarely and on a minor scale. Coexistence and community structure are therefore not ecological conditions to be especially accounted for, especially since their inherently comparative methods generate information that is largely superficial. Alternative questions that relate directly to species, the units of diversity, are discussed and they emphasize the primary habitat requirements of species, which are fixed during speciation. Neither the comparative approach of coexistence studies, nor the investigation of pattern is likely to be profitable, since the acquisition of species-specific characteristics during speciation requires historical research. At least one alternative theory of ecology, based on the close adaptation of organisms to the environment, is available. (shrink)

Jeffko utilizes key elements of Macmurray's thought in developing his own viewpoint, and he relates Macmurray's ideas to those of a wide variety of important philosophers, ethicists, and behavioral scientists."--BOOK JACKET.

Amid public health concerns over climate change, “precision public health” is emerging in next generation approaches to practice. These novel methods promise to augment public health operations by using ever larger and more robust health datasets combined with new tools for collecting and analyzing data. Precision strategies to protecting the public health could more effectively or efficiently address the systemic threats of climate change, but may also propagate or exacerbate health disparities for the populations most vulnerable in a changing climate. (...) How PPH interventions collect and aggregate data, decide what to measure, and analyze data pose potential issues around privacy, neglecting social determinants of health, and introducing algorithmic bias into climate responses. Adopting a health justice framework, guided by broader social and climate justice tenets, can reveal principles and policy actions which may guide more responsible implementation of PPH in climate responses. (shrink)