Sceptical Reflections on Human Nature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Sterelny
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
David Hull ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Over Time

David Hull famously argued that the very idea of human nature was pre-Darwinian; once we genuinely embrace Darwin’s insights into unbounded variation and plasticity over time, no robust account of human nature can survive. There have been a variety of responses to Hull’s critique, variously showing that some concept of human nature can be rebuilt in ways consistent with contemporary evolutionary biology. In this chapter, I argue that, in one sense, some of these reconstructive attempts succeed. One can develop a concept of human nature consistent with evolutionary insights into variation and potentially unbounded change. But in a deeper sense these reconstructive projects are in trouble: the cost of making a concept of human nature evolutionarily credible is, arguably, to rob that concept of explanatory salience.

Costume and Identity

1973 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 348-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilda Kuper
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Cultural Symbols ◽  
Cultural Variations ◽  
Length Width ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
Over Time

Clothing is a bundle of cultural symbols that has been dealt withsomewhat eclectically and indiscriminately in the anthropological wash.Some writers have speculated on the origins of clothing, stressing suchqualities in human nature as modesty and vanity; others, more materiallyoriented, have emphasized utility; others again have listed separategarments, the materials of which they were made, and the techniquesemployed; and some have paid attention to broader historical and sociological dimensions. In a pioneering study, Kroeber used documentary evidence to correlate fluctuations in women's fashions (using indices of skirt length, width of waist, and depth of decolletage) with major social and political upheavals (Kroeber, 1919, 1940), but perhaps because of the nature of his data, as well as his particular orientation, he made no reference to the persons involved, and overlooked internal cultural variations and conflicts of style. These issues received more attention from scholars trained in the Malinowski tradition of fieldwork, and they described clothing worn by different persons in different situations; those who worked in areas where people of different cultures were brought in contact in the colonial situation indicated the meaning of changes in style of clothing over time. General textbooks draw attention to the correlation between clothing and social status and to such facts as the cost of clothing, its technology and its aesthetics.

The cost of homelessness: Assessing change over time

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Spano ◽  
P. Toro ◽  
M. Goldstein
Keyword(s):  
Change Over Time ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Over Time

The Internet Trap

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Hindman
Keyword(s):  
The Internet ◽  
Net Neutrality ◽  
The Public ◽  
Attention Economy ◽  
Digital News ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Over Time

The Internet was supposed to fragment audiences and make media monopolies impossible. Instead, behemoths like Google and Facebook now dominate the time we spend online—and grab all the profits from the attention economy. This book explains how this happened. It sheds light on the stunning rise of the digital giants and the online struggles of nearly everyone else—and reveals what small players can do to survive in a game that is rigged against them. The book shows how seemingly tiny advantages in attracting users can snowball over time. The Internet has not reduced the cost of reaching audiences—it has merely shifted who pays and how. Challenging some of the most enduring myths of digital life, the book explains why the Internet is not the postindustrial technology that has been sold to the public, how it has become mathematically impossible for grad students in a garage to beat Google, and why net neutrality alone is no guarantee of an open Internet. It also explains why the challenges for local digital news outlets and other small players are worse than they appear and demonstrates what it really takes to grow a digital audience and stay alive in today's online economy. The book shows why, even on the Internet, there is still no such thing as a free audience.

The Evolutionary Biology of Species

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy G. Barraclough
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Biological Diversity ◽  
Distinct Species ◽  
Species Boundaries ◽  
Central Thesis ◽  
Species Accumulation ◽  
Multicellular Organisms ◽  
Broad Approach ◽  
Over Time

‘Species’ are central to understanding the origin and dynamics of biological diversity; explaining why lineages split into multiple distinct species is one of the main goals of evolutionary biology. However, the existence of species is often taken for granted, and precisely what is meant by species and whether they really exist as a pattern of nature has rarely been modelled or critically tested. This novel book presents a synthetic overview of the evolutionary biology of species, describing what species are, how they form, the consequences of species boundaries and diversity for evolution, and patterns of species accumulation over time. The central thesis is that species represent more than just a unit of taxonomy; they are a model of how diversity is structured as well as how groups of related organisms evolve. The author adopts an intentionally broad approach to consider what species constitute, both theoretically and empirically, and how we detect them, drawing on a wealth of examples from microbes to multicellular organisms.

Value-based dentistry: Putting the patient first

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 126-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sreenivas Koka ◽  
Galya Raz
Keyword(s):  
Risk Management ◽  
Quality Improvement ◽  
Quality Of Care ◽  
Dental Care ◽  
Time Cost ◽  
Safety Risk ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Over Time

What does ‘value’ mean? In the context of dental care, it can be defined as the quality of care received by a patient divided by the cost to the patient of receiving that care. In other words: V =Q/C, where Q equals the quality improvement over time, which most patients view in the context of the outcome, the service provided and safety/risk management, and C equals the financial, biological and time cost to the patient. Here, the need for, and implications of, value-based density for clinicians and patients alike are explored.

Confirming Anomalies

2021 ◽  
pp. 2150024
Author(s):  
Peter Chinloy ◽  
Matthew Imes
Keyword(s):  
Capital Structure ◽  
Stock Returns ◽  
Cost Of Capital ◽  
Simultaneous Equations ◽  
Second Stage ◽  
Predicted Values ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Identification Strategy

A procedure confirms whether a return-factor correlation is anomalous or results from endogenous simultaneous-equations bias. The identification strategy sorts the cost of capital components for instruments. In the first stage, the initially found factors are regressed on cost instruments. In the second stage, a confirmed anomaly has predicted value significant in returns and exogenous. Taxes, depreciation and capital structure are strong instruments, affecting 1980–2017 quarterly U.S. stock returns. Size, value and profitability decisions are significant in instruments. Returns increase in fitted profits, but not small size. Actual and predicted values have weaker correlation with returns over time.

The Virtues of Justice: Toward a Moral and Jurisprudential Psychology

2021 ◽  
pp. 0306624X2110668
Author(s):  
Christopher Williams ◽  
Bruce Arrigo
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Offender Therapy ◽  
Psychological Structure ◽  
The Common ◽  
Over Time

Within the theoretical literature on crime control and offender therapy, little has been written about the importance of virtue ethics in the experience of human justice and in the evolution of the common good. As a theory of being, the aretaic tradition extols eudemonic existence (i.e., excellence, flourishing) as a relational habit of developing character that is both practiced and embodied over time. What this implies is that virtue justice depends on a set of assumptions and predispositions—both moral and jurisprudential—whose meanings are essential to comprehending its psychological structure. This article sets out to explore several themes that our integral to our thesis on the virtues (i.e., the being) of justice. We reclaim justice’s aretaic significance, critique the common conflation of justice and law, discuss how the dominant legalistic conception of justice is rooted in a particular view of human nature, suggest how justice might be more properly grounded in natural moral sensibilities, and provide a tentative explication of the psychological character of justice as a twofold moral disposition. Given this exploratory commentary, we conclude by reflecting on how individual well-being, system-wide progress, and transformative social change are both possible and practical, in the interest of promoting the virtues of justice within the practice of crime control and offender therapy.

Health, Longevity, and Welfare Inequality of Older Americans

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-45
Author(s):  
Ray Miller ◽  
Neha Bairoliya
Keyword(s):  
Expected Utility ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Poor Health ◽  
Cost Of Living ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Older Americans ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Welfare Inequality ◽  
Health And Mortality ◽  
Over Time

Abstract We estimate the distribution of well-being among the older U.S. population using an expected utility framework that incorporates differences in consumption, leisure, health, and mortality. We find large disparities in welfare that have increased over time. Incorporating the cost of living with poor health into elderly welfare substantially increases the overall inequality. Disparity measures based on cross-sectional income or consumption underestimate the growth in aggregate welfare inequality. Moreover, health is a better indicator of an individual's relative welfare position than income or consumption.

The Development of Xunzi’s Theory of Xing, Reconstructed on the Basis of a Textual Analysis of Xunzi 23, “Xing E” 性惡 (Xing is Bad)

Early China ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 99-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Robins
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
The Core ◽  
Over Time

The section of the Xunzi called “Xing e” 性惡 (xing is bad) prominently and repeatedly claims that people's xing is bad. However, no other text in the Xunzi makes this claim, and it is widely thought that the claim does not express Xunzi's fundamental ideas about human nature. This article addresses the issue in a somewhat indirect way, beginning with a detailed examination of the text of “Xing e”: identifying a core text, removing a series of interpolations, analyzing the structure of the core text, and distinguishing between three positions that are defended there. This analysis shows that the claim that people's xing is bad is not really central to “Xing e.” More ambitiously, it supports the conclusion that Xunzi's ideas about people's xing changed over time. Though Xunzi did claim that people's xing is bad, he later abandoned the claim, and replaced it with an account of wei 偽 “artifice.”

Legume production at Cyrene in the Hellenistic period: epigraphic evidence

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 159-169
Author(s):  
Muna H. Haroun Abdelhamed
Keyword(s):  
General Trend ◽  
Production Capacity ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Human Diet ◽  
Regional Production ◽  
Legume Production ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Epigraphic Evidence ◽  
Over Time

AbstractLegumes seem to have been cultivated and to have formed an essential part of the human diet during the Greek and Roman periods. This paper examines the cultivation of pulses in Cyrenaica during the Hellenistic era. It considers the regional production capacity for legumes to meet local needs and argues the involvement of different kinds of pulses in interregional commerce alongside cereals and other dry grains. This study has been implemented via investigating Hellenistic epigraphic evidence from Cyrene. It has traced the cost of pulses mentioned in inscriptions of the fourth and third/second centuries BC and compared them with that of wheat and barley. Pulses and cereal costs indicated by Diocletian's ‘Edict on Maximum Prices of AD 301’ have also been investigated to assess the general trend of their prices over time. The examination demonstrates that varieties of pulses were produced in Cyrenaica during the Hellenistic era and were likely as significant as wheat and barley. It also indicates that they were probably traded from the region alongside other dry commodities.

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