Empirical Implications

2021 ◽  
pp. 151-179
Author(s):  
J. Arvid Ågren
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
The Body ◽  
Individual Organism ◽  
Genetic Elements ◽  
Selfish Genetic Elements ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Research Areas ◽  
Genome Wide ◽  
The Individual

The initial success of the gene’s-eye view came from making sense of old problems in evolutionary biology, in particular those related to social behaviour. It also stimulated new empirical research areas. This chapter is about three such new areas. The first is extended phenotypes, which are examples of phenotypic effects that occur outside of the body in which a gene is located. The second area is greenbeard genes, which gets its name from the thought-experiment devised to show that for altruism to evolve it is the relatedness between the actor and the recipient at the locus underlying the altruistic behaviour that matters, not the genome-wide relatedness. Finally, selfish genetic elements are genetic elements that have the ability to promote their own transmission even if it come at the expense of the fitness of the individual organism. The chapter outlines the current understanding of these topics and the role of the gene’s-eye view in uncovering them.

Reading Signs and Symbols with Abdelkébir Khatibi

2020 ◽  
pp. 237-260
Author(s):  
Rim Feriani ◽  
Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani ◽  
Debra Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
The Body ◽  
Radical Theory ◽  
Abdelkebir Khatibi ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Sign Systems ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Theories Of Meaning

This chapter considers the ways in which Khatibi’s practices of reading contribute to theories of meaning through his thinking on the deciphering of signs and symbols and of making sense of the world, and of the worlds of the text, in their multifaceted forms. It takes as its starting point what Khatibi terms, in his introductory essay ‘Le Cristal du Texte’ in La Bessure du Nom propre, ‘l’intersémiotique’, migrant signs which move between one sign system and another. Khatibi takes as his own project examples from semiotic systems found within Arabic and Islamic cultures, from both popular culture, such as the tattoo, to calligraphy and the language of the Koran, from the body to the text and beyond – including storytelling, mosaics, urban space, textiles. His readings reveal the intersemiotic and polysemic meanings created in the movements of these migrant signs between their sign systems. For Khatibi, this ‘infinity’ of the ‘text’ is linked also to a mobile and migrant identity refracted in the multifaceted surfaces of the crystal (hence the title of the essay – ‘Le Cristal du Texte’) rather than in one reflection as in a mirror. Moving from these concerns of Khatibi with which he develops his radical theory of the sign, of the word and of writing, the chapter goes on to propose new readings of a selection of other writers with a shared, but varied, relationship to their Islamic heritage. These are writers working with and through that heritage – and importantly, as for Khatibi, including the Sufi heritage – and whose writing is also resonant with Khatibi’s intersemiotic theoretical and cultural project concerned with the individual and the collective, the historical and the contemporary, the political, the social and the linguistic.

Units and levels of selection

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samir Okasha
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Kin Selection ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Evolutionary Process ◽  
Levels Of Selection ◽  
Evolutionary Transitions ◽  
Individual Organism ◽  
Selection Processes ◽  
Hierarchical Levels ◽  
The Individual

In a standard Darwinian explanation, natural selection takes place at the level of the individual organism, i.e. some organisms enjoy a survival or reproduction advantage over others, which results in evolutionary change. In principle however, natural selection could operate at other hierarchical levels too, above and below that of the organism, for example the level of genes, cells, groups, colonies or even whole species. This possibility gives rise to the ‘levels of selection’ question in evolutionary biology. Group and colony-level selection have been proposed, originally by Darwin, as a means by which altruism can evolve. (In biology, ‘altruism’ refers to behaviour which entails a fitness cost to the individual so behaving, but benefits others.) Though this idea is still alive today, many theorists regard kin selection as a superior explanation for the existence of altruism. Kin selection arises from the fact that relatives share genes, so if an organism behaves altruistically towards its relatives, there is a greater than random chance that the beneficiary of the altruistic action will itself be an altruist. Kin selection is closely bound up with the ‘gene’s eye view’ of evolution, which holds that genes, not organisms, are the true beneficiaries of the evolutionary process. The gene’s eye approach to evolution, though heuristically valuable, does not in itself resolve the levels of selection question, because selection processes that occur at many hierarchical levels can all be seen from a gene’s eye viewpoint. In recent years, the levels of selection discussion has been re-invigorated, and subtly transformed, by the important new work on the ‘major evolutionary transitions’. These transitions occur when a number of free-living biological units, originally capable of surviving and reproducing alone, become integrated into a larger whole, giving rise to a new biological unit at a higher level of organization. Evolutionary transitions are intimately bound up with the levels of selection issue, because during a transition the potential exists for selection to operate simultaneously at two different hierarchical levels.

Autoprobiotics for personalized nutrition of school children

2020 ◽  
pp. 65-68
Author(s):  
V.I. Ganina
Keyword(s):  
General Education ◽  
The Body ◽  
School Age Children ◽  
School Age ◽  
Individual Organism ◽  
Impaired Health ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Positive Effect

According to the Ministry of Health and Social Development of Russia, the health status of children and adolescents in the Russian Federation is characterized by the following indicators: more than half of school-age children have impaired health; two-thirds of children under 14 have chronic diseases; only 10-15 percent of graduates of general education institutions can be classified as healthy. In recent decades, with the development of nutrigenomics, the world community of scientists has come to understand the importance of the role of the microbiota in the human body and its relation with nutrition. Normal intestinal microbiota is involved in a variety of physiological functions of the body of school-age children: protective, digestive, detoxifying and anticarcinogenic, synthetic, genetic, immunogenic, metabolic, and others. Probiotic bacteria are one of the functional ingredients that have proven to have a positive effect on children's bodies. Methods of normoflora correction are proposed, aimed not only at restoring evolutionarily conditioned microbial populations, but also providing an effective impact on the individual organism.

scholarly journals The Shared Origins of Embodiment and Development

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter J. Marshall ◽  
Troy M. Houser ◽  
Staci M. Weiss
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Evolution Of Development ◽  
Specific Kind ◽  
Individual Organism ◽  
Living Things ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual

As a domain of study centering on the nature of the body in the functioning of the individual organism, embodiment encompasses a diverse array of topics and questions. One useful organizing framework places embodiment as a bridge construct connecting three standpoints on the body: the form of the body, the body as actively engaged in and with the world, and the body as lived experience. Through connecting these standpoints, the construct of embodiment shows that they are not mutually exclusive: inherent in form is the capacity for engagement, and inherent in engagement is a lived perspective that confers agency and meaning. Here, we employ this framework to underscore the deep connections between embodiment and development. We begin with a discussion of the origins of multicellularity, highlighting how the evolution of bodies was the evolution of development itself. The evolution of the metazoan (animal) body is of particular interest, because most animals possess complex bodies with sensorimotor capacities for perceiving and acting that bring forth a particular sort of embodiment. However, we also emphasize that the thread of embodiment runs through all living things, which share an organizational property of self-determination that endows them with a specific kind of autonomy. This realization moves us away from a Cartesian machine metaphor and instead puts an emphasis on the lived perspective that arises from being embodied. This broad view of embodiment presents opportunities to transcend the boundaries of individual disciplines to create a novel integrative vision for the scientific study of development.

scholarly journals Adaptation and the Parliament of Genes

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Abstract Model ◽  
Genetic Conflict ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
Considerable Evidence ◽  
Genetic Elements ◽  
Selfish Genetic Elements ◽  
Working Together ◽  
Bacterial Plasmid ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Impact

AbstractOur modern understanding of adaptation by natural selection rests on assumptions about genes working together to produce organisms. However, there is considerable evidence for selfish genetic elements that distort the behaviour of individuals to increase their own transmission. How can we reconcile these opposing notions? We use a combination of population genetics, agent-based simulation, and game theory to model the evolution of both selfish genetic elements and genes that could suppress their distortion. We found that: (1) suppressor genes are more likely to be favoured when selfish genetic elements cause greater distortion; (2) selection on selfish genetic elements favours the evolution of greater distortion, making them more likely to be suppressed. We found these same results when examining an abstract model designed to illuminate the general principles, and models for three specific scenarios: an X chromosome driver, an imprinted gene, and a bacterial plasmid. Our results suggest that selection on selfish genetic elements will often drive coevolution with suppressors in a way that removes the impact of genetic conflict at the level of the individual.

Some General Properties of Morphogenetlc Systems

1988 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Stewart Thomson
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Downward Causation ◽  
Developmental Theory ◽  
Evolutionary Mechanisms ◽  
Developmental Processes ◽  
Individual Organism ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
General Properties ◽  
The Individual

J. Maynard Smith (1983) has written that “although we have a clear and highly articulated theory of evolution, we have no comparable theory of development.” I would turn this statement around somewhat and say that until we have a general theory of development we are unlikely to be able to derive a complete theory of evolution. This does not mean that a theory of evolution is wholly contained, in some reductionist sense (see Chapter 2), within a theory of development. However, if developmental processes play a major role in determining the modes and tempi of introduction of new variation at the level of the individual organism, and if they also have roles in upward and downward causation to other focal levels in the hierarchy of evolutionary mechanisms, then at least some of the rules of variation must be contained within the rules of development. If we are to progress in evolutionary biology beyond the study only of the contingent, and of unique empirical events, we will need a general theory, and part of that theory must derive from theories of the developmental processes that drive the introduction of variation. From developmental theory we will be able to make new general statements about how variation can be introduced at the phenotypic level. Although we still lack any such general theory, we can begin the process by using the preceding discussions at least to propose some general properties of developmental systems. The properties and processes of morphogenesis form an extremely complex system. Perhaps the hardest parts to grapple with are those “whole-organism” properties by which any given region of the developing embryo responds to field phenomena created by and expressed within the organism as a single whole rather than as a collection of isolated units, each with their own independent problems, mechanisms, and histories. Although these are vital questions (no pun intended), relatively little experimental work is being conducted in this area for obvious conceptual and technical reasons. Reductionist, functionalist approaches tend to make one concentrate on the parts rather than the whole.

Medicine Unbound

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Corinna Treitel
Keyword(s):  
History Of Medicine ◽  
Medical History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Search Engine ◽  
The Body ◽  
Research Areas ◽  
Medicine Physician ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Mind

Why should intellectual historians care about the history of medicine? As someone who admires and draws frequently on intellectual history but is mostly an outsider to the field, I asked myself this question after accepting the invitation to review two books related to medical history for Modern Intellectual History. To make the question manageable, I decided to investigate how much the history of medicine had cropped up in the pages of MIH since it began publishing in 2004. Three terms fundamental to the history of medicine went into the MIH search engine: “medicine,” “physician,” and “disease.” “Medicine” yielded seven hits, “physician” three, and “disease” one. Curious to see in what context “medicine” appeared, I clicked on the seven hits and discovered three book reviews, two articles that made mention of medicine only incidentally, and two articles that connected medicine to the history of subjectivity. Because seven hits seemed low and the subjectivity result intrigued me, I went back to the search engine with a more specific set of terms. “Psychology” yielded sixteen hits, “psychoanalysis” fourteen, and “psychiatry” one. These results, of course, only tell us about the publishing record of MIH and not necessarily about the research interests that intellectual historians might have in the history of medicine. Still, they do suggest that the piece of medical history most useful to intellectual historians concerns the mind/brain sciences—that is, those sciences most likely to engage minds, selves, identities, the individual, and related constructs of interiority. Apparently less interesting is work from other vibrant research areas in medical history: diseases (e.g. cholera, cancer, plague), hospitals, medical education, medical practice, medical technology, medical sciences (e.g. physiology, nutrition, biochemistry), and the body, to name just a few. Intellectual historians, it seems, hold a strong but quite selective interest in medicine right now.

scholarly journals THE HYDE WE LIVE IN: STEVENSON, EVOLUTION, AND THE ANTHROPOGENIC FOG

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 181-199
Author(s):  
Pascale McCullough Manning
Keyword(s):  
Fossil Fuels ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Physical World ◽  
The Body ◽  
Scientific Language ◽  
Individual Organism ◽  
Natural Processes ◽  
Evolutionary Forces ◽  
Environmental Force ◽  
The Individual

In multiple entries in his notebooks, Robert Louis Stevenson pauses to consider the failure of scientific language to communicate the abstractions that undergird its theoretical models of natural processes. In failing to make the operations of the physical world speak, materialist discourse suffers from a terminological disorder. His diagnosis is sweeping and acerbic: “Scientific language like most other language is extremely unsatisfactory” (“Note Book” 300). In what follows I will argue that over the course of several key essays of the 1880s and his most famous work of fiction, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Stevenson aims to redress the fundamental abstraction of the most prominent materialist doctrine of his day, Darwinian evolutionary theory, rendering it viscerally communicable in the figure of Hyde, who represents both the individual organism subject to the pervasive modifying forces of speciation and the embodiment, in a single yet fluctuating corporeal entity, of those very forces. Further to this, I will propose that in imagining Hyde's genesis at the laboratory table (the result of Jekyll's incursions into nature) and in placing Hyde in symbiosis with the London fog (the admixture of natural forces and human intervention in the form of the burning of fossil fuels), Strange Case can be added to the body of literature that hails the dawning of the Anthropocene, famously defined by Paul Crutzen as the “human-dominated geological epoch supplementing the Holocene” in which the human has become “a major environmental force” (23). The figure of Hyde thus manifests evolutionary forces in all their teeming presence while also harkening the new forms of subjectivity emerging from our catastrophic agency in the present era – one in which the human has become, in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, a “geophysical force” (13).

scholarly journals Adaptation is maintained by the parliament of genes

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas W. Scott ◽  
Stuart A. West
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Genome Size ◽  
Mutation Rate ◽  
Evolutionary Ecology ◽  
Genetic Conflict ◽  
Considerable Evidence ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Genetic Elements ◽  
Selfish Genetic Elements ◽  
The Individual

AbstractFields such as behavioural and evolutionary ecology are built on the assumption that natural selection leads to organisms that behave as if they are trying to maximise their fitness. However, there is considerable evidence for selfish genetic elements that change the behaviour of individuals to increase their own transmission. How can we reconcile this contradiction? Here we show that: (1) when selfish genetic elements have a greater impact at the individual level, they are more likely to be suppressed, and suppression spreads more quickly; (2) selection on selfish genetic elements leads them towards a greater impact at the individual level, making them more likely to be suppressed; (3) the majority interest within the genome generally prevails over ‘cabals’ of a few genes, irrespective of genome size, mutation rate and the sophistication of trait distorters. Overall, our results suggest that even when there is the potential for considerable genetic conflict, this will often have negligible impact at the individual level.

Influence of stable iodine on the uptake of the thyroid – model vs. experiment

2001 ◽  
Vol 40 (01) ◽  
pp. 31-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
U. Wellner ◽  
E. Voth ◽  
H. Schicha ◽  
K. Weber
Keyword(s):  
Time Course ◽  
Compartment Model ◽  
The Body ◽  
Iodine Uptake ◽  
Model Calculations ◽  
Physiological Conditions ◽  
Iodine Supply ◽  
Predicted Values ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Stable Iodine

Summary Aim: The influence of physiological and pharmacological amounts of iodine on the uptake of radioiodine in the thyroid was examined in a 4-compartment model. This model allows equations to be derived describing the distribution of tracer iodine as a function of time. The aim of the study was to compare the predictions of the model with experimental data. Methods: Five euthyroid persons received stable iodine (200 μg, 10 mg). 1-123-uptake into the thyroid was measured with the Nal (Tl)-detector of a body counter under physiological conditions and after application of each dose of additional iodine. Actual measurements and predicted values were compared, taking into account the individual iodine supply as estimated from the thyroid uptake under physiological conditions and data from the literature. Results: Thyroid iodine uptake decreased from 80% under physiological conditions to 50% in individuals with very low iodine supply (15 μg/d) (n = 2). The uptake calculated from the model was 36%. Iodine uptake into the thyroid did not decrease in individuals with typical iodine supply, i.e. for Cologne 65-85 μg/d (n = 3). After application of 10 mg of stable iodine, uptake into the thyroid decreased in all individuals to about 5%, in accordance with the model calculations. Conclusion: Comparison of theoretical predictions with the measured values demonstrated that the model tested is well suited for describing the time course of iodine distribution and uptake within the body. It can now be used to study aspects of iodine metabolism relevant to the pharmacological administration of iodine which cannot be investigated experimentally in humans for ethical and technical reasons.

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