IN MEMORY OF VERA BORISOVNA VOZZHINSKAYA

On July 29, 2021, just 90 years have passed since the day of birth of Vera Borisovna Vozzhinskaya, doctor of biological sciences, head of the Laboratory of biological foundation of mariculture IO RAS. She was connected with our Institute during all her life, 43 years – from young post-graduate up to well-known algologist, specialist in benthic marine algae. She was a bright personality, outstanding organizer, skilled expedition worker. Under her leadership 37 coastal expeditions of IO were carried out – to the White, Barents, Black and Far East Seas. She tragically perished in happy and long-awaited moment: just after the authorization of her degree (doctor of biology) by All-Russian Attestation Commission. Publications by V.B. Vozzhinskaya are in demand up to now, especially her unique monograph on the White Sea macrophytobenthos and investigations on productivity of bottom seaweeds.

The Spirited Part of the Soul in the Timaeus

Chapter 8 examines Plato’s account of intrapsychic “communication” in the Timaeus and defends an imagistic account according to which the various activities of the spirited part of the soul—the motivations it generates, its training through musical and gymnastic education, its responsiveness to rational judgment, and its resistance to offensive appetites—can all be explained at the cognitive level by appealing only to the resources of sense-perception, memory, and imagination. On this view, it is not necessary to attribute to spirit the capacity either to understand the “logistic” (i.e. linguistic or propositional) content of rational judgments themselves, or to issue judgments with such content of its own. This chapter also examines how Plato adapts the Homeric and poetic association of thumos with the heart and circulatory system (as well as with the lungs and respiratory system) to provide a biological foundation for the dialogue’s theory of spirited cognition.

Philosophical and Biological Foundation of Brain Based Learning: A Phenomenological Approach

This investigation was undertaken to look at the philosophical and biological foundation of brain based learning through phenomenological approach. Subjective method of investigation was used. Interviews were taken through semi-structures procedure in which 12 instructors were involved as a sample. Two topics of the examination were assessed and it was discovered that authenticity, optimism, realism, dualism, naturalism, cognizant and oblivious part of cerebrum and constructivism were straightforwardly related with brain oriented learning approach. Correspondingly, Brain is not organically comprehended by the educator completely in light of the fact because cerebrum discovery is tranquil as a young ground of teaching learning process. Instructor have been rehearsing cerebrum based adapting normally yet they are not ready to express a reasonable balanced for their activity yet the educators still practice the mind based adapting adequately. Keywords: Brain-Based Learning, Philosophical and Biological Foundation, Phenomenological Study

Biocultural theory and the problem of human editing

The transition from an irregular understanding of nature as a given to the regulatory concepts of human development is one of the central philosophical and socio-humanitarian issues in the development of not only biotechnologies, but also society as a whole. In the theory of philosophy of biomedicine, the discussion is structured as the positioning of various problematic approaches, modeled using the principles of bioethics and philosophical ethics, taking into account the actual experience of the application and social perception of biomedical technologies. The status of problematic approaches is determined not only by philosophical ethics, but also by the willingness of society to accept something new as its own future. At the same time, accepting the future is impossible without rooting the future in the past - the beliefs and expectations that legitimize the future. The correlation of such concepts as the authentic autonomy of J. Habermas and the expansion of utilitarianism into the problems of editing the human genome, the conflict associated with challenges requiring collective moral action, and the rigidity of traditional moral mechanisms lead to the search for such a sociobiological language that would be formed from competitively coexisting old, traditional, and new, bioengineering, concepts of human development. The idea of biocultural theory as a form of connection between culture and biological foundation is associated with the work of A. Buchanan and R. Powell, who propose a systemic definition of biocultural theory as a mutual biological and cultural transformation of a person. Biocultural theory is aimed at shaping such a philosophical horizon, where the body, not only carnal, such as organs, but also personal - the awareness of its own bioidentity, becomes open and understandable due to the expansion of the connection between biology and culture, but at the same time acquires problems that becomes the subject of philosophy and ethics, since now a person, comprehended as a body, receives a variability that is no longer associated exclusively with culture. The goal of the article is to show that editing a person is not so much a traditionally understood risk as a transformation of the understanding of the cultural and biological conditions for the formation of his bioidentity.

AdipoR1/AdipoR2 dual agonist recovers nonalcoholic steatohepatitis and related fibrosis via endoplasmic reticulum-mitochondria axis

Chronic nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) is a metabolic disorder that often leads to liver fibrosis, a condition with limited therapy options. Adiponectin is an adipocytokine that regulates glucose and lipid metabolism via binding to its receptors AdipoR1 and AdipoR2, and AdipoRs signaling is reported to enhance fatty acid oxidation and glucose uptake. Here, we synthesize and report an adiponectin-based agonist JT003, which potently improves insulin resistance in high fat diet induced NASH mice and suppresses hepatic stellate cells (HSCs) activation in CCl4 induced liver fibrosis. Mechanistic studies indicate that JT003 simultaneously stimulates AdipoR1- and AdipoR2- mediated signaling pathways as well as the PI3K-Akt pathway. Moreover, JT003 treatment significantly improves ER-mitochondrial axis function, which contributes to the reduced HSCs activation. Thus, the AdipoR1/AdipoR2 dual agonist improves both NASH and fibrosis in mice models, which provides the pharmacological and biological foundation for developing AdipoRs-based therapeutic agents on liver fibrosis.

The Scientific Foundation of Disordered Mood

This chapter maps how early nineteenth-century experimental physiology provided a biological foundation for mental disorders in which no visible changes to brain tissue could be found. It charts the emergence of ‘psychological reflex action’, a key concept that facilitated a view of emotion as automated and involuntary, and thus prone to malfunction. The chapter follows the trajectory of psychological reflexion from internal scientific medicine to what became known as ‘physiological psychology’, where it provided mid-century British writers with the tools to create a biomedical framework for the phenomenon of disordered mood. The chapter ends by looking at how physiological psychology was gradually taken up by mid-century asylum physicians writing on mental disease.

Sound-induced motion in chimpanzees does not imply shared ancestry for music or dance

This letter is in reply to Hattori & Tomonaga (2020), who report that seven captive chimpanzees moved in response to piano sounds, more so than in silence. On this basis, they argue, "some biological foundation for dancing existed in the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees ~6 million years ago". Music's universality suggests it has deep phylogenetic roots; understanding music-like behavior in non-human animals is therefore valuable for understanding the evolution of music. But the paper's claim of shared ancestry for music or dance is unjustified.

From Jungian Attitude-Types to a Comprehensive Model of Diseases

This review discusses the pair of opposites named introversion and extraversion by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung in its biological foundation and psychosomatic implications. Jung’s typology was the reference for Elida Evans’ book on cancer in 1926, which would be the basis of American psycho-oncology and of a holistic approach to cancer patients. It is shown that introversion and extraversion have been widely used in psychology and psychiatry, even without any reference to Jung. Moreover, these concepts have been used for somatic illnesses. In 1990, independently of each other, George A. Bonanno and Jerome L. Singer of Yale University (USA) and Marco Balenci of Sapienza University of Rome (Italy) conceived two similar comprehensive models of diseases - both in their physical and psychic aspects - based on the psychophysical balance of opposite attitudes. Persistent dualism in Western medicine may explain the lack of development of these models. Actually, this kind of model derives from a holistic view, which was advocated by George L. Engel in the United States, giving relevance to biopsychosocial factors. Despite the increasing discoveries of psychoneuroimmunology and developmental psychobiology can provide a new scientific impetus to the individual-as-a-whole, this perspective still has greater convergence with Eastern medicine

Language and human ecology: from cartesian linguistics to ecolinguistics

Segregating language, man, and world, Cartesian linguistics comes short of explaining the function of language as a biological adaptation. To challenge the entrenched perspectives on language as a code for information transfer, we must learn to speak differently, realizing that the ability to think is not an innate feature of the human brain. As interactional activity in the second-order consensual domain, language provides a biological foundation for abstract thought as an adaptive mechanism for ‘simulating’ possible interactions of the organism with the environment. The use of writing marks the next step in the development of this adaptive mechanism, when humans continue their ecological niche construction by creating ‘a world on paper’, saturating their niche with affordances provided by linguistic interactions in the experiential domains of speech and writing. Linguistic interactions in these domains become an ecological factor that both affects and sustains the development of individuals and society as living systems. This, it is argued, should be the subject matter of ecolinguistics as the new paradigm in linguistic explorations.