Armstrong was a Cheat: A Reply to Eric Moore

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we reply to Eric Moore’s argument that Lance Armstrong did not cheat, at least according to one, standard account of cheating. If that is the case, we argue, so much the worse for the standard account of cheating, since Armstrong was a cheat. We argue that the standard account of cheating fails on several counts: it specifies conditions that are not necessary for cheating: that cheating involves trying to secure an unfair advantage and that cheating depends on fair application of the rules. We dispute Moore’s claim that doping in the peloton was a convention that had normative force, and reject his anti-formalist analogy between doping in the peloton and bodily contact in basketball.     

Acceptance of Conditional Suicide and Euthanasia among Adult Americans

ABSTRACT: Analysis of the attitudes of a 1977 cross-sectional sample of 1,530 American adults concerning euthanasia and suicide indicates that sex, age, and education are significant variables. Males, those who are younger and those who are better educated, are more likely to approve of euthanasia and suicide when a person has an incurable disease. Religious affiliation was not an important variable, although those who were frequent church-service attenders or who were high on religiosity were highly likely to reject euthanasia and suicide.     

Learning to pause: Fidelity of and biases in the developmental acquisition of gaps in the communicative signals of a songbird

The temporal organization of sounds used in social contexts can provide information about signal function and evoke varying responses in listeners (receivers). For example, music is a universal and learned human behavior that is characterized by different rhythms and tempos that can evoke disparate responses in listeners. Similarly, birdsong is a social behavior in songbirds that is learned during critical periods in development and used to evoke physiological and behavioral responses in receivers. Recent investigations have begun to reveal the breadth of universal patterns in birdsong and their similarities to common patterns in speech and music, but relatively little is known about the degree to which biological predispositions and developmental experiences interact to shape the temporal patterning of birdsong. Here, we investigated how biological predispositions modulate the acquisition and production of an important temporal feature of birdsong, namely the duration of silent pauses (“gaps”) between vocal elements (“syllables”). Through analyses of semi-naturally raised and experimentally tutored zebra finches, we observed that juvenile zebra finches imitate the durations of the silent gaps in their tutor's song. Further, when juveniles were experimentally tutored with stimuli containing a wide range of gap durations, we observed biases in the prevalence and stereotypy of gap durations. Together, these studies demonstrate how biological predispositions and developmental experiences differently affect distinct temporal features of birdsong and highlight similarities in developmental plasticity across birdsong, speech, and music.

Research Highlights

• The temporal organization of learned acoustic patterns can be similar across human cultures and across species, suggesting biological predispositions in acquisition.
• We studied how biological predispositions and developmental experiences affect an important temporal feature of birdsong, namely the duration of silent intervals between vocal elements (“gaps”).
• Semi-naturally and experimentally tutored zebra finches imitated the durations of gaps in their tutor's song and displayed some biases in the learning and production of gap durations and in gap variability.
• These findings in the zebra finch provide parallels with the acquisition of temporal features of speech and music in humans.