Daniel C. Dennett
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Epigenetics Landscape (Fig
© 2015. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd | The Journal of Experimental Biology (2015) 218, 816-818 doi:10.1242/jeb.120071 CLASSICS Conrad Waddington and ‘decisions’ that could be represented as exploited plasticity that is already ‘valleys’ and ‘forks’ in a developmental present in the population. That strongly the origin of epigenetics landscape (Fig. 1). He knew from his suggests that all the alleles (gene developmental studies that embryo fruit variants) necessary for the inheritance of flies could be persuaded to show different the characteristic were already present in thorax and wing structures, simply by the population, but not initially in any changing the environmental temperature or particular individuals in the correct by a chemical stimulus. In his landscape combination. The experiment simply diagram, this could be represented as a brings them together. This is a small manipulation in slope that would lead modification of the pattern of the genome to one channel in the landscape being in response to the environmental change, favoured over another, so that the adult but not in a way that requires any new could show a different phenotype starting mutations. I came to this conclusion from the same genotype. before reading Waddington’s (1957) Epigenetics book, The Strategy of the Genes. But it is Denis Noble discusses Conrad The next step in his experiment was to in fact one of Waddington’s own ideas! Waddington’s classic paper, ‘The genetic select for and breed from the animals that He writes ‘There is no … reason which ’ assimilation of the bithorax phenotype , displayed the new characteristic. -
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins Is Another
BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT ooks about science tend to fall into two categories: those that explain it to lay people in the hope of cultivat- Bing a wide readership, and those that try to persuade fellow scientists to support a new theory, usually with equations. Books that achieve both — changing science and reach- ing the public — are rare. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) was one. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins is another. From the moment of its publication 40 years ago, it has been a sparkling best-seller and a TERRY SMITH/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTY SMITH/THE LIFE IMAGES TERRY scientific game-changer. The gene-centred view of evolution that Dawkins championed and crystallized is now central both to evolutionary theoriz- ing and to lay commentaries on natural history such as wildlife documentaries. A bird or a bee risks its life and health to bring its offspring into the world not to help itself, and certainly not to help its species — the prevailing, lazy thinking of the 1960s, even among luminaries of evolution such as Julian Huxley and Konrad Lorenz — but (uncon- sciously) so that its genes go on. Genes that cause birds and bees to breed survive at the expense of other genes. No other explana- tion makes sense, although some insist that there are other ways to tell the story (see K. Laland et al. Nature 514, 161–164; 2014). What stood out was Dawkins’s radical insistence that the digital information in a gene is effectively immortal and must be the primary unit of selection. -
Service History July 2012 AGM - September 2018 AGM
Service History July 2012 AGM - September 2018 AGM The information in this Service History is true and complete to the best of The Society’s knowledge. If you are aware of any errors please let the Governance and Risk Manager know by email: [email protected] Service History Index DATES PAGE # 5 July 2012 – 24 July 2013 Page 1 24 July 2013 – 1 July 2014 Page 14 1 July 2014 – 7 July 2015 Page 28 7 July 2015 – 31 July 2016 Page 42 31 July 2016 – 12 July 2017 Page 60 12 July 2017 – 16 September 2018 Page 82 Service History: July 2012 AGM – Sept 2018 AGM Introduction Up until 2006 the service history of The Society’s members was captured in Grey Books. It was also documented between 1990-2013 in The Society’s old database iMIS, which will be migrated to the CRM member directory adopted in 2016. This document collates missing service history data from July 2012 to September 2018. Grey Books were relaunched as ‘Grey Records’ in 2019 beginning with the period from the September AGM 2018 up until July AGM 2019. There will now be a Grey Record published every year reflecting the previous year’s service history. The Grey Record will now showcase service history from Member Forum to Member Forum (typically held in the Winter). 5 July 2012 – 24 July 2013 Honorary Officers (and Trustees) POSITION NAME President Jonathan Ashmore Deputy President Richard Vaughan-Jones Honorary Treasurer Rod Dimaline Education & Outreach Committee Chair Blair Grubb Meetings Committee Chair David Wyllie Policy Committee Chair Mary Morrell Membership & Grants Committee -
Can Systems Medicine Integrate Scientific and Humanistic
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE bs_bs_banner provided by NORA - Norwegian Open Research Archives Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice ISSN 1365-2753 Getting personal: can systems medicine integrate scientific and humanistic conceptions of the patient? Henrik Vogt MD,1 Elling Ulvestad MD Dr Med,3,4 Thor Eirik Eriksen Cand Polit5,6 and Linn Getz MD PhD2 1PhD Candidate, 2Professor, General Practice Research Unit, Department of Public Health and General Practice, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway 3Professor, Department of Microbiology, The Gade Institute, Haukeland University Hospital, Bergen, Norway 4Professor, Department of Clinical Science, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway 5PhD Candidate, Department of Work and Environmental Medicine, Hospital of North Norway, Tromsø, Norway 6Senior Advisor, Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education, Department of Philosophy, UiT – The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway Keywords Abstract agency, biopsychosocial medicine, downward causation, emergence, Rationale, aims and objectives The practicing doctor, and most obviously the primary experience, free will, general practice, care clinician who encounters the full complexity of patients, faces several fundamental but generalism, holism, humanistic medicine, intrinsically related theoretical and practical challenges – strongly actualized by so-called intentionality, medically unexplained medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) and multi-morbidity. Systems medicine, which is symptoms, mind-body problem, the emerging application of systems biology to medicine and a merger of molecular multi-morbidity, narrative medicine, biomedicine, systems theory and mathematical modelling, has recently been proposed as a ontology, patient-centred medicine, primary care-centered strategy for medicine that promises to meet these challenges. -
Obituary Notice
Obituary Notice Susan Noble 1940-2015 Susan Noble, who died on October 4th 2015 at the funding for graduate work and provided space in age of 75, had worked for many years in the Oxford a corner of her own lab. Here Susan worked with cardiac group led by her husband, Denis. others (Hilary Brown, Anne Clark and Wayne Giles) investigating the membrane currents in strips of Susan’s parents were both schoolteachers (of frog atrial muscle voltage clamped using the double mathematics) and she was the eldest of their three sucrose gap technique. Of particular interest was children. Although always keenly interested in the the induced pacemaking that resulted from applying arts, the theatre and literature, she specialized in steady depolarizing currents to atrial muscle. This science at school. In 1959 she was accepted at type of pacemaking was shown to depend on the Somerville College, Oxford, to read for a degree in decay of outward potassium currents, though in Physiology. After two years of the course, however, multicellular preparations things are complicated by she became ill and had to withdraw from Oxford. slow current changes caused by the accumulation of potassium ions in extracellular spaces. On recovery, she completed her undergraduate studies at University College London. Shortly In 1972, Susan was awarded her D.Phil. for a thesis after she graduated, she and Denis Noble were entitled ‘Membrane currents in frog atrial muscle’. married and in 1965, when Denis was appointed She went on to study potassium ion accumulation to a University Lectureship in Physiology and in detail (Noble, S.J. -
Harman, G. & Gordon, D., Philosophy 380, Princeton University
PHI 380 Explaining Values Syllabus Fall Term 2003-04 Instructors • Gilbert Harman, Philosophy, 118 1879 Hall, x4301, [email protected] • David Gordon, Philosophy, 227 1879 Hall, x1486, [email protected] Description and Objectives Why do many people even today condemn promiscuity in women more than similar promiscuity in men? What explains seemingly altruistic motivation? Where do moral rules come from and why are they followed? What accounts for how people think about abortion? Do people act morally as a result of moral reasoning, or is moral reasoning simply a rationalization of emotions? Do people suppose that a person’s moral worth can be a matter of “moral luck”? How does a child develop a conscience? Do some people have better characters than others? How do the moralities of different cultures vary? Are there moral universals? Various explanations might be offered of ordinary moral values: that they are based in reason, that they are based in emotion, that they are the result of social pressures, that they are the result of biological evolution, that they are the result of more or less arbitrary historical facts. In this course we consider a variety of things about morality that might be explained and a variety of explanations of them. Our goal is to try to assess these explanations, to decide how plausible they are, when they compete and when they are complementary, what evidence is relevant to them, and what normative implications they would have if true. 1 Course Requirements Lectures are Monday and Wednesday at 1:30-2:20 p.m. in Jones 113, plus one precept to be assigned. -
Why You Do What You Do -- Printout -- TIME 3/30/11 4:33 PM
Why You Do What You Do -- Printout -- TIME 3/30/11 4:33 PM Back to Article Click to Print Monday, Aug. 01, 1977 Why You Do What You Do The concepts are startling—and disturbing. Conflict between parents and children is biologically inevitable. Children are bora deceitful. All human acts—even saving a stranger from drowning or donating a million dollars to the poor—may be ultimately selfish. Morality and justice, far from being the triumphant product of human progress, evolved from man's animal past, and are securely rooted in the genes. These are some of the teachings of sociobiology, a new and highly controversial scientific discipline that seeks to establish that social behavior—human as well as animal—has a biological basis. Its most striking tenet: human behavior is genetically based, the result of millions of years of evolution. Some sociobiologists go so far as to suggest that there may be human genes for such behavior as conformism, homosexuality and spite. Carried to an extreme, sociobiology holds that all forms of life exist solely to serve the purposes of DNA, the coded master molecule that determines the nature of all organisms and is the stuff of genes. As British Ethologist Richard Dawkins describes the role and drive of the genes, they "swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence we are their survival machines." Sociobiologists—whose growing ranks include some 250 biologists, zoologists and social scientists— argue that without consideration of biology, the study of human culture makes no sense. -
Editor Denis Noble Publishing Editor Tim Holt
RSFS_4_5_Cover_RSFS_4_5_Cover 13/08/14 7:03 PM Page 2 GUIDANCE FOR AUTHORS Selection criteria Articles Editor The criteria for selection for both theme issues and their constituent Articles are contributions containing original scientific research. articles are scientific excellence, originality and interest across the Denis Noble physical sciences / life sciences interface. The Editor is responsible Reports Publishing Editor for all editorial decisions, in part based on the reports received from Reports are short, letter-style contributions which are published the referees. Many more good proposals and articles are submitted rapidly. Preliminary and more speculative work of high quality is Tim Holt to us than we have space to print; we give preference to those that strongly encouraged. are of broad interest and of high scientific quality. Reviews Editorial Board Reviews are articles of the highest quality and aim to be of interest Publishing format to communities working at the physical sciences / life sciences Along with all Royal Society journals, we are committed to archiving Denis Noble – Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford interface. Reviews cover the latest developments in an area of cross- and providing perpetual access. The journal also offers the facility for disciplinary research. They put such research into a broader context including Electronic Supplementary Material to papers free of charge. Fraser A. Armstrong – Department of Chemistry, University of Oxford and are written in a style that makes them accessible to readers in a Sheng He – Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences wide range of disciplines. Complete literature surveys are not Conditions of publication Clemens Kaminski – Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Cambridge encouraged. -
The Evolution and Psychology of Self-Deception
BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2011) 34,1–56 doi:10.1017/S0140525X10001354 The evolution and psychology of self-deception William von Hippel School of Psychology, University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia [email protected] http://www.psy.uq.edu.au/directory/index.html?id¼1159 Robert Trivers Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901 [email protected] http://anthro.rutgers.edu/ index.php?option¼com_content&task¼view&id¼102&Itemid¼136 Abstract: In this article we argue that self-deception evolved to facilitate interpersonal deception by allowing people to avoid the cues to conscious deception that might reveal deceptive intent. Self-deception has two additional advantages: It eliminates the costly cognitive load that is typically associated with deceiving, and it can minimize retribution if the deception is discovered. Beyond its role in specific acts of deception, self-deceptive self-enhancement also allows people to display more confidence than is warranted, which has a host of social advantages. The question then arises of how the self can be both deceiver and deceived. We propose that this is achieved through dissociations of mental processes, including conscious versus unconscious memories, conscious versus unconscious attitudes, and automatic versus controlled processes. Given the variety of methods for deceiving others, it should come as no surprise that self-deception manifests itself in a number of different psychological processes, and we discuss various types of self-deception. We then discuss the interpersonal versus intrapersonal nature of self-deception before considering the levels of consciousness at which the self can be deceived. -
Evolutionary Psychology – 2011
Evolutionary Psychology www.epjournal.net – 2011. 9(4): 526-531 ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ Book Review All the Better to Fool You With, My Dear A review of Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. Basic Books: New York, 2011, 397 pp., US$28.00, ISBN 978-0-465-02755-2. David P. Barash, University of Washington, Department of Psychology, Seattle, WA, USA, Email: [email protected]. I well remember the revolutionary fervor of the late 1960s and early 1970s when I was a graduate student in zoology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1966-1970). I’m not thinking of the anti-war political turmoil – although my grad school memories are thoroughly infused with the mordant odor of tear gas – but rather, of what Thomas Kuhn famously labeled “revolutionary science.” Jump-started by George C. Williams’ book, Adaptation and Natural Selection, and especially William D. Hamilton’s seminal work on inclusive fitness, we nascent sociobiologists found ourselves riding a truly [r]evolutionary scientific and intellectual tsunami, and without a doubt the biggest wave-maker was a young rebel named Robert Trivers. In a handful of truly extraordinary, paradigm-shifting papers, Trivers laid out many of the paths that the rest of us have subsequently followed, and which for some involved morphing into “evolutionary psychology” (a term I accept, incidentally, but only grudgingly, for several reasons: 1. Despite efforts at disciplinary hair-splitting, evolutionary psychology to my mind is nothing but sociobiology applied to Homo sapiens, and 2. I look forward to the time when the designation itself goes extinct, attendant upon the recognition that all psychology is and must be evolutionary). -
Flattering to Deceive the Second Half
BOOKS ET AL. EVOLUTIONARY BEHAVIOR ary interpretation of self- The Folly of Fools contentious topic could deception, the book takes a The Logic of Deceit and be seen as mere opinion, dramatic change of tack in Self-Deception in Human Life the behavioral ecologist Flattering to Deceive the second half. There the Trivers makes a surpris- by Robert Trivers author presents a number of ing comeback by suggest- Basic Books (Perseus), Johan J. Bolhuis sociopolitical applications of ing a signifi cant relation- New York, 2011. 413 pp. $28, his ideas. He discusses a baf- C$32.50. ISBN 9780465027552. ship between parasite load iko Tinbergen presaged it, E. O. Wil- fl ing scope of topics, ranging and the number of reli- son started it, but the two towering from the Challenger disaster gions “per unit area.” The Nfi gures in the behavioral ecology rev- to the confl ict in the Middle East. An engag- underlying idea is that the need for protec- olution of the 1970s were undoubtedly Robert ing writer, Trivers provides many interesting tion against parasites will promote within- Trivers and Bill Hamilton. Trivers, an evolu- ideas. But if they constitute science, it is of a group cohesion and hostility toward out- tionary biologist now at Rutgers University, rather unconventional, democratic nature. siders. Religion then provides “substitute begins The Folly of Fools reminiscing about Unlike many evolutionary psychologists, logics with similar effects”—or, as Trivers his seminal theoretical work from the early who seem to hold that their favored theories formulates it in characteristic fashion, “We days of behavioral ecology. -
Parental Investment and Sexual Selection
II l'.tlcnl.tl jnvcsllncnt and scxlIO!I )c!Cl:lion !J3 Variance in reproductive succe~s Parental investment and Darwin defined sexual selection as ( I) competition within one sex for members of the opposite sex anel (2) differential choice by sexual selection members of one sex for members of the opposite sex, and he pointed out that this usuaIIy meant males competing Wilh each ROBERT L. TRIVERSt other for females and females choosing some males rathcr than. others. To study these phenomena one needs accurate data on differential rcproductive success analysed by sex. Accurale data on female reproductive success are available for many species, but Introduction similar data on males are very difficult 10 gather, even in those Charles Darwin's (1871) treatment of lhe topic of sex ual selection species that tend towards monogamy. The human species ilhrslrates was sometimes confused because he lacked a general framework this point. In any society it is rdatively easy to assign accurately within whidl to relate the variables he pcrccived to be important: the children to their biological mothers, but an element of uncer· sex-linked inheritance, sex ratio at conception, differential mortal tainty attaches 10 the assignment of children to their biological ily, parental care, and the form of the breeding system (mono· fathers. For example, Henry Harpending (personal communication) gamy, polygyny, polyandry, or promiscuity). This confusion has gathered biochemical data on the Kalahari Bushmen showing permitted others to attempt to show that Darwin's terminology that about two per cent of the children in that society do not was imprecise, that he misinterpreted the function of some struc belong to the falher to whom they are commonly attribuled.