The Market and Falling Fertility: Why Darwin Needs Help From Polanyi

Darwin said all living things tend to multiply. However, nowadays, maintaining fertility rate below the replacement level of 2.1, human beings appear to have opted to let their population shrink. Perplexingly, it occurs while the environment seems to become more suitable for their survival. In solving this puzzle, we get a great help from Polanyi. We proved that people choose to have fewer babies and consequently, usher in depopulation, because by giving them the chance to assess all the expenses necessary for raising children, the market makes the cost clarified increasingly, while the economic benefit from rearing their off-spring remains obscure.     

Evolutionary Psychology： How Psychological Mechanisms Shaped by Natural Selection for Ancestral Environments Produce Current Behaviours

The central purpose of this paper is to explain how Darwin′s theory of evolution by natural selection can be used in understanding current human behaviour. First, Darwin′s logic is briefly described. Development is an important issue when applying evolutionary theory to human behaviour. The notion of innate developmental organization of psychological mechanisms is introduced. The possible social and political outcomes produced when different levels of innate developmental organization are paired with differ...     

Self‐actualizing persons and the ideal society

In a number of scientific disciplines, the search for unified concepts is about to reach a new phase. Science is on the threshold of another “revolution,” one that promises to bring to us knowledge that is significantly unified in regard to the understanding of the essential features of reality. Its unfolding merits sustained attention.     

What Does It Mean to Be Human? A Personal and Catholic Perspective

A philosopher-poet-theologian ponders the implications of the multimillion-year biogenetic process that produced Homo sapiens and is beginning to reveal itself ever more clearly as evolution of the mind and consciousness. As meaning trappers and makers, called to actualize the divine image imprinted upon us, we are now facing biological and cultural evolution with deliberate human input as well as the evolution of evolution. As communicating animals that are becoming ever more aware of our adaptive behavior, we have the potential of affecting our own destiny by listening to the spirit within and nurturing the genes and memes that give rise to physical, intellectual, creative, and moral excellence. In the matrix of cyberspace we have the opportunity to heal the two-culture split, to reinvent ourselves, to incubate/weave the emergent religions of the future, and to create our multiple \"Ways\" appropriate to the dawning Age of Global Dialogue.     

The temporal organization of functional brain connectivity is abnormal in schizophrenia but does not correlate with symptomatology

Previous work employing graph theory and nonlinear analysis has found increased spatial and temporal disorder, respectively, of functional brain connectivity in schizophrenia. We present a new method combining graph theory and nonlinear techniques that measures the temporal disorder of functional brain connections. Multichannel electroencephalographic data were windowed and functional networks were reconstructed using the minimum spanning trees of correlation matrices. Using a method based on Shannon entropy, we found elevated connection entropy in gamma activity of patients with schizophrenia; however, gamma connection entropy remained elevated in patients with schizophrenia even after a reduction in symptoms due to treatment with antipsychotics. Our results are consistent with several possibilities: (1) aberrant functional connectivity is epiphenomenal to schizophrenia, (2) aberrant functional connectivity is a central feature but antipsychotics reduce symptoms by an independent mechanism, or (3) connection entropy is not an appropriately sensitive measure of brain abnormalities in schizophrenia.     

The impact of past behaviour normality on regret: replication and extension of three experiments of the exceptionality effect

Norm theory (Kahneman, D., & Miller, D. T. (1986). Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives. Psychological Review, 93, 136–153) described a tendency for people to associate stronger regret with a negative outcome when it is a result of an exception (abnormal behaviour) compared to when it is a result of routine (normal behaviour). In two pre-registered studies, we conducted a replication and extension of three classic experiments on past behaviour exception/routine contrasts (N?=?684). We successfully replicated Kahneman and Miller’s (1986) experiments with the classic hitchhiker-scenario (Part 1) and car accident-scenario (Part 2). In both cases, participants examined negative outcomes and tended to indicate a protagonist who deviated from own past behaviour as more regretful than another who followed routine. Pre-registered extensions also showed effects for ratings of social norms, negative affect, and perceived luck. We did not find support for the Miller, D. T., and McFarland, C. [(1986). Counterfactual thinking and victim compensation: A test of norm theory. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 12, 513–519] experiment robbery scenario (Part 3) using a compensation measure, in that compensation to a victim of a robbery was not significantly different comparing exceptional and routine circumstances. However, a pre-registered extension showed that robbery under exceptional circumstances was perceived as more regretful than robbery under routine circumstances. We discuss implications for current and future research.     

BIOLOGY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Abstract. The sciences may be conceptualized as a hierarchy ranked by level of organization (e.g., many-body physics ranks above particle physics). Each science serves as an antidiscipline for the science above it; that is, between each pair, tense but creative interplay is inevitable. Biology has advanced through such tension between its subdisciplines and now can serve as an antidiscipline for the social sciences—for anthropology, for example, by examining the connection between cultural and biological evolution; for psychology, by addressing the nature of learning and the structure of the unconscious; for economics, by examining economically irrational behavior and by comparing economic activity in humans and other species. Sociology, concerned mainly with advanced literate societies, is relatively remote from the genetic basis of human social behavior. However, moving between biological and social levels of organization generates richness and points to new and unexpected principles.     

Sidman or statistics?

Murray Sidman's statements regarding variability, experimental control, and generality are interwoven with examples from the literature on conditional discrimination. Sidman's position was that statistical inferences from group studies produce no information about the behavior of individual subjects and that statistical treatment of individual subject data masks variability which may represent conditions that are not controlled. Sidman's work on conditional discrimination provides excellent examples of how complex discriminations should be examined in detail with accuracy levels obtained for each type of discrimination within an experiment. Sidman made important contributions to the foundation of behavior analysis with extensive basic research as well as applications of methods and principles to clinical and educational settings.     

用达尔文医学的观点看待近视眼的发生和治疗

从近视眼的进化史来看,伴随人类生活方式的改变,眼睛对近距离信息摄取的需求膨胀是近视眼形成的终因.在漫长的人类历史中,近视眼获得的每一种益处,都伴随着相应的代价.而达尔文医学关于生物进化的不完美性决定了近视眼的进化适应和代价将长期共存.因此,从治疗模式来看,应该摒弃达尔文医学固有的消极性而考虑生物的整体性和生态性.近视眼的中医和基因治疗正是避免了达尔文医学治疗模式的理论消极性,而且融入了其有关生物进化、遗传与环境统一的部分理念,可能成为近视眼治疗的候选策略.     

Genes and Citizens: Can Moral Philosophy Learn from Evolutionary Biology?

The claim that moral philosophers have something to learn from recent neo-Darwinian theory cannot be sustained – at least, not in the case of the three theses characteristic of the latter on which I concentrate. The first thesis, reductionism, is open to some serious, and familiar, objections. Neo-Darwinism can escape those objections only by weakening its position to a point at which it can no longer be described as distinctively reductionist. The second, atavism, mistakenly attempts to generalise from the apparent persistence of` ‘vestigial’ behaviour patterns. Third, neo-Darwinists are frequently guilty of a number of confusions over the relation between fact and value. In conclusion, I point out that neo-Darwinism derives a certain ideological dynamic from the misleading supposition that patterns of explanation which succeed in one area necessarily apply in others. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

语言——自然选择的一种适应

该文认为人类的语言能力是一种生物学意义上的适应,是自然选择的产物。人类的语言与自然界中其它复杂的生物学适应相类似,也具有特定的机能。语言的特定机能在于编码叙事性信息并与他人分享,这与人类认知活动中因果推理所具有的高度社会性特点相一致。两个新的研究领域,进化博弈理论和分子进化选择理论,都证实了语言是一种受到自然选择的进化适应     

为什么信息超载损害决策?基于有限认知资源的解释

信息超载是指需要处理的信息量大于信息加工的能力。信息超载会降低决策质量, 延长决策时间, 降低决策满意度, 引起慢性压力。信息超载损害决策的机制可以从有限的注意力资源和工作记忆资源来解释。在信息超载条件下, 一方面用于过滤和控制信息的注意力资源总量被快速消耗, 注意力资源的分配和利用受到无关信息的干扰, 信息得不到高效加工; 另一方面负责保持和加工信息的工作记忆在限定时间内不能充分加工海量信息, 进而损害决策绩效。未来可以运用眼动赋权法探索信息超载下的信息加工模式; 发展意识思维和无意识思维的动态耦合模型指导个体减轻信息超载; 探索运用智能代理和交互记忆系统缓解组织中的信息超载。     

THEISTIC EVOLUTION IN THE POSTGENOMIC ERA

How to reconcile the theory of evolution with existing religious beliefs has occupied minds since Darwin's time. The majority of the discourse on the subject is still focused on the Darwinian version of evolutionary theory, or at best, the mid‐twentieth century version of the Modern Synthesis. However, evolutionary thought has moved forward since then with the insights provided by the advent of comparative genomics in recent decades having a particularly significant impact. A theology that successfully incorporates evolutionary biology needs to take such developments into account, because range of truly viable options among the many versions of theistic evolution that have been proposed in the past may narrow down when this is done. Here I present these previously underappreciated strains of contemporary evolutionary thought and discuss their potential theological impact.