Utvidet returrett til 31. januar 2024

Bøker i Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology-serien

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  • - Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life
    av Eva (Professor Jablonka
    509,-

    A pioneering proposal for a pluralistic extension of evolutionary theory, now updated to reflect the most recent research. This new edition of the widely read Evolution in Four Dimensions has been revised to reflect the spate of new discoveries in biology since the book was first published in 2005, offering corrections, an updated bibliography, and a substantial new chapter. Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb's pioneering argument proposes that there is more to heredity than genes. They describe four "dimensions” in heredity—four inheritance systems that play a role in evolution: genetic, epigenetic (or non-DNA cellular transmission of traits), behavioral, and symbolic (transmission through language and other forms of symbolic communication). These systems, they argue, can all provide variations on which natural selection can act. Jablonka and Lamb present a richer, more complex view of evolution than that offered by the gene-based Modern Synthesis, arguing that induced and acquired changes also play a role. Their lucid and accessible text is accompanied by artist-physician Anna Zeligowski's lively drawings, which humorously and effectively illustrate the authors' points. Each chapter ends with a dialogue in which the authors refine their arguments against the vigorous skepticism of the fictional "I.M.” (for Ipcha Mistabra—Aramaic for "the opposite conjecture”). The extensive new chapter, presented engagingly as a dialogue with I.M., updates the information on each of the four dimensions—with special attention to the epigenetic, where there has been an explosion of new research. Praise for the first edition"With courage and verve, and in a style accessible to general readers, Jablonka and Lamb lay out some of the exciting new pathways of Darwinian evolution that have been uncovered by contemporary research.”—Evelyn Fox Keller, MIT, author of Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines"In their beautifully written and impressively argued new book, Jablonka and Lamb show that the evidence from more than fifty years of molecular, behavioral and linguistic studies forces us to reevaluate our inherited understanding of evolution.”—Oren Harman, The New Republic"It is not only an enjoyable read, replete with ideas and facts of interest but it does the most valuable thing a book can do—it makes you think and reexamine your premises and long-held conclusions.”—Adam Wilkins, BioEssays

  • av Paul (Professor Thagard
    608,-

    Paul Thagard proposes a general theory of coherence as the satisfaction of multiple interacting constraints, and discusses the theory's numerous psychological and philosophical applications.

  • - A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept
    av Maria (Associate Professor Kronfeldner
    559,-

    A philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against dehumanization, Darwinian, and developmentalist challenges.Human nature has always been a foundational issue for philosophy. What does it mean to have a human nature? Is the concept the relic of a bygone age? What is the use of such a concept? What are the epistemic and ontological commitments people make when they use the concept? In What's Left of Human Nature? Maria Kronfeldner offers a philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against contemporary criticism. In particular, she takes on challenges related to social misuse of the concept that dehumanizes those regarded as lacking human nature (the dehumanization challenge); the conflict between Darwinian thinking and essentialist concepts of human nature (the Darwinian challenge); and the consensus that evolution, heredity, and ontogenetic development result from nurture and nature.After answering each of these challenges, Kronfeldner presents a revisionist account of human nature that minimizes dehumanization and does not fall back on outdated biological ideas. Her account is post-essentialist because it eliminates the concept of an essence of being human; pluralist in that it argues that there are different things in the world that correspond to three different post-essentialist concepts of human nature; and interactive because it understands nature and nurture as interacting at the developmental, epigenetic, and evolutionary levels. On the basis of this, she introduces a dialectical concept of an ever-changing and "looping” human nature. Finally, noting the essentially contested character of the concept and the ambiguity and redundancy of the terminology, she wonders if we should simply eliminate the term "human nature” altogether.

  • - Proponent Meets Skeptic
    av Russell (Professor of Psychology Hurlburt
    427,-

    A psychologist and a philosopher with opposing viewpoints discuss the extent to which it is possible to report accurately on our own conscious experience, considering both the reliability of introspection in general and the particular self-reported inner experiences of "Melanie," a subject interviewed using the Descriptive Experience Sampling method.Can conscious experience be described accurately? Can we give reliable accounts of our sensory experiences and pains, our inner speech and imagery, our felt emotions? The question is central not only to our humanistic understanding of who we are but also to the burgeoning scientific field of consciousness studies. The two authors of Describing Inner Experience disagree on the answer: Russell Hurlburt, a psychologist, argues that improved methods of introspective reporting make accurate accounts of inner experience possible; Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosopher, believes that any introspective reporting is inevitably prone to error. In this book the two discuss to what extent it is possible to describe our inner experience accurately. Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel recruited a subject, "Melanie," to report on her conscious experience using Hurlburt's Descriptive Experience Sampling method (in which the subject is cued by random beeps to describe her conscious experience). The heart of the book is Melanie's accounts, Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel's interviews with her, and their subsequent discussions while studying the transcripts of the interviews. In this way the authors' dispute about the general reliability of introspective reporting is steadily tempered by specific debates about the extent to which Melanie's particular reports are believable. Transcripts and audio files of the interviews will be available on the MIT Press website. Describing Inner Experience? is not so much a debate as it is a collaboration, with each author seeking to refine his position and to replace partisanship with balanced critical judgment. The result is an illumination of major issues in the study of consciousness—from two sides at once.

  • av Scott (University of Michigan) Atran
    494,-

    An analysis of the cognitive consequences of diminished contact with nature examines the relationship between how people think about the natural world and how they act on it, and how these are affected by cultural differences.

  • - The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered
     
    368,-

  • - Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement
    av Nicholas (Professor & Victoria University of Wellington) Agar
    488,-

    An argument that achieving millennial life spans or monumental intellects will destroy values that give meaning to human lives.

  • - How Gene Regulation Networks Evolve to Control Development
    av Roger Sansom
    128,-

  •  
    729,-

    Essays from a range of disciplinary perspectives show the central role that cooperation plays in structuring our world.

  • - Developmental Systems and Evolution
     
    745,-

    The nature/nurture debate is not dead. Dichotomous views of development still underlie many fundamental debates in the biological and social sciences. Developmental systems theory (DST) offers a new conceptual framework with which to resolve such debates. DST views ontogeny as contingent cycles of interaction among a varied set of developmental resources, no one of which controls the process. These factors include DNA, cellular and organismic structure, and social and ecological interactions. DST has excited interest from a wide range of researchers, from molecular biologists to anthropologists, because of its ability to integrate evolutionary theory and other disciplines without falling into traditional oppositions.The book provides historical background to DST, recent theoretical findings on the mechanisms of heredity, applications of the DST framework to behavioral development, implications of DST for the philosophy of biology, and critical reactions to DST.

  • - The Struggle to Understand the Interaction of Nature and Nurture
    av James (University of Utah) Tabery
    449,-

    Why the "nature versus nurture" debate persists despite widespread recognition that human traits arise from the interaction of nature and nurture.

  • - The Ontogenesis, Metaphysics, and Expression of Human Emotionality
    av University of Queensland) Greenwood & Jennifer (Tutor
    128,-

  • - In Defense of Informational Teleosemantics
    av Karen Neander
    484,-

  • - The Evolution of Language
    av Ronald Planer
    434,-

    A novel account of the evolution of language and the cognitive capacities on which language depends.In From Signal to Symbol, Ronald Planer and Kim Sterelny propose a novel theory of language: that modern language is the product of a long series of increasingly rich protolanguages evolving over the last two million years. Arguing that language and cognition coevolved, they give a central role to archaeological evidence and attempt to infer cognitive capacities on the basis of that evidence, which they link in turn to communicative capacities.  Countering other accounts, which move directly from archaeological traces to language, Planer and Sterelny show that rudimentary forms of many of the elements on which language depends can be found in the great apes and were part of the equipment of the earliest species in our lineage. After outlining the constraints a theory of the evolution of language should satisfy and filling in the details of their model, they take up the evolution of words, composite utterances, and hierarchical structure. They consider the transition from a predominantly gestural to a predominantly vocal form of language and discuss the economic and social factors that led to language. Finally, they evaluate their theory in terms of the constraints previously laid out.

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