高层次医学影像技师培养与临床水平的提高

随着我国经济飞速发展,医疗技术日新月异,综合医院从国外引进的影像设备越来越先进,而影像技术人员普遍存在学历、职称偏低、知识结构老化等问题,高层次医学影像技术人才出现断层,限制了新技术的高级临床应用和开发。急需培养知识面宽、基础扎实、素质高、能力强的复合型、实用型影像专业技术人才。建议加强高层次医学影像技术人才的培养,以适应新时期综合医院医学发展对影像技术人才的要求。     

Adjoints and emergence: applications of a new theory of adjoint functors

Since its formal definition over sixty years ago, category theory has been increasingly recognized as having a foundational role in mathematics. It provides the conceptual lens to isolate and characterize the structures with importance and universality in mathematics. The notion of an adjunction (a pair of adjoint functors) has moved to center-stage as the principal lens. The central feature of an adjunction is what might be called “determination through universals” based on universal mapping properties. A recently developed “heteromorphic” theory about adjoints suggests a conceptual structure, albeit abstract and atemporal, for how new relatively autonomous behavior can emerge within a system obeying certain laws. The focus here is on applications in the life sciences (e.g., selectionist mechanisms) and human sciences (e.g., the generative grammar view of language).

Qualitative differences between naïve and scientific theories of evolution

Philosophers of biology have long argued that Darwin's theory of evolution was qualitatively different from all earlier theories of evolution. Whereas Darwin's predecessors and contemporaries explained adaptation as the transformation of a species' "essence," Darwin explained adaptation as the selective propagation of randomly occurring mutations within a population. The present study explored the possibility of a parallel between early "transformational" theories of evolution and modern na?ve theories. Forty-two high school and college students and three evolutionary biologists were tested on their understanding of six evolutionary phenomena: variation, inheritance, adaptation, domestication, speciation, and extinction. As predicted, a plurality of participants demonstrated transformational reasoning inconsistent with natural selection. Correlational analyses revealed that participants who demonstrated transformational reasoning were as internally consistent as participants who demonstrated an understanding of natural selection, with the exception of one group of participants who appeared to have assimilated two heuristics--"survival of the fittest" and "acquired traits are not inherited"--into an otherwise transformational framework. These findings suggest that the widespread and early-developing tendency to essentialize biological kinds precludes students from conceptualizing species as populations of individuals differentially affected by the environment.     

Assessing the automaticity of intramodal and crossmodal spatial attentional orienting

Clark and Chalmers (1998) have argued that mental states can be extended outside an organism's skin. In response to some worries about the availability, reliability and portability of such extended resources, Clark (2005) offers a set of rough criteria that non-biological objects must fulfil to legitimately ground mental states. One such criterion is that the information retrieved from these non-biological sources be (more or less) automatically endorsed. But Sterelny (2003, 2005) has persuasively argued that the extended sphere is epistemologically opaque: a domain of contested truth and deliberate deception. As such, retrieving information from this domain requires the deployment of social guards for the information to remain reliable. But deploying such guards would seem to endanger endorsability by increasing cognitive load. Here I demonstrate that deploying social guards does not increase cognitive load if the guards are implemented in a highly distributed connectionist economy or off-loaded to the external environment.     

The faculty of language: what's special about it?

We examine the question of which aspects of language are uniquely human and uniquely linguistic in light of recent suggestions by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch that the only such aspect is syntactic recursion, the rest of language being either specific to humans but not to language (e.g. words and concepts) or not specific to humans (e.g. speech perception). We find the hypothesis problematic. It ignores the many aspects of grammar that are not recursive, such as phonology, morphology, case, agreement, and many properties of words. It is inconsistent with the anatomy and neural control of the human vocal tract. And it is weakened by experiments suggesting that speech perception cannot be reduced to primate audition, that word learning cannot be reduced to fact learning, and that at least one gene involved in speech and language was evolutionarily selected in the human lineage but is not specific to recursion. The recursion-only claim, we suggest, is motivated by Chomsky's recent approach to syntax, the Minimalist Program, which de-emphasizes the same aspects of language. The approach, however, is sufficiently problematic that it cannot be used to support claims about evolution. We contest related arguments that language is not an adaptation, namely that it is "perfect," non-redundant, unusable in any partial form, and badly designed for communication. The hypothesis that language is a complex adaptation for communication which evolved piecemeal avoids all these problems.     

The structure and evolution of symbol

The received opinion is that symbol is an evolutionary prerequisite for syntax. This paper shows two things: 1) symbol is not a monolithic phenomenon, and 2) symbol and syntax must have co-evolved. I argue that full-blown syntax requires only three building blocks: signs, concatenation, grammar (constraints on concatenation). Functional dependencies between the blocks suggest the four-stage model of syntactic evolution, compatible with several earlier scenarios: (1) signs, (2) increased number of signs, (3) commutative concatenation of signs, (4) grammatical (noncommutative) concatenation of signs. The main claim of the paper is that symbolic reference comprises up to five distinct interpretative correlates: mental imagery, denotation, paradigmatic connotation, syntagmatic connotation, and definition. I show that the correlates form an evolutionary sequence, some stages of which can be aligned with certain stages of syntactic evolution.     

Revelation between Cognitive Science of Religion and Dialectical Theology

Abstract

The article critically discusses the contemporary relevance and challenges of Rudolf Bultmann's theology of revelation in relation to the basic claims of cognitive science of religion. Underlying the analysis is the assumption that his theology still has some relevance when confronted with the claims from this scientific approach to religion. There are nevertheless also good reasons for arguing that his notion of revelation needs a wider and more experiential focus. The argument for such an experiential-based notion of revelation is provided by an analysis of what features qualified revelatory experience may consist in.     

Evolution and Providence: Discovering Creation as Carmen Dei

Abstract

Bonaventure describes the natural world as carmen Dei (song of God) that humanity should be able to detect through philosophical wisdom. Many contemporary evolutionary biologists, however, present the natural world as an argument against God's existence. Evolution is deemed incompatible with Providence and natural causes competitively exclusive of divine ones. These arguments against God are not proper to science, but to scientism. This purported conflict between evolution and faith is overcome by respecting the epistemological boundaries among science, philosophy, and theology, understanding creation as ontological dependence, and having a non-contrastive divine transcendence, in which God's transcendence does not oppose God's immanence.     

Jesus and Evolutionary Psychology,Two Agendas

Abstract

Transhumanism is a term used to describe the enhancement of human life through technology, seeking to overcome biological limits. Teilhard de Chardin has been described as a transhumanist, but a closer examination of his ideas reveals his distinction of ultrahumanism, a deepening of the whole evolutionary process in and through the human person. This paper examines ultrahumanism and Teilhard's vision of technology in the evolution of religion.     

The creative suffering of the triune God: An evolutionary panentheistic paradigm

Abstract

One way the alleged conflict between science and religion is often presented is the claim that Western religions represent human beings as the pinnacle of creation. Science, however, has progressively shown this perspective to be false, specifically through the discoveries that we are not at the universe's center, that the universe is much larger than we once thought, and that we evolved from “lower” life forms. While these discoveries are valid, the interpretation that they mortify vain human pretensions to significance is not. In this essay we assess this claim of mortification and argue that it is a myth.