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Stephen Budiansky
Stephen Budiansky (born March 3, 1957) is an American chemist, writer, historian and biographer, best known for his books on animal behaviour and his criticism of animal rights. He is also the author of a number of scholarly publications about the history of cryptography, military and intelligence history, and music. Early life and career Stephen Budiansky was born on March 3, 1957, in Boston, the son of Bernard Budiansky, who was a professor of structural mechanics at Harvard University. He grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, and graduated from Lexington High School. He graduated with a B.S. in chemistry at Yale University in 1978 and an M.S. in applied mathematics at Harvard University in 1979. From 1979 to 1982 he was a magazine editor and radio producer at the American Chemical Society in Washington, D.C. He was editor for the American Chemical Society’s journal ''Environmental Science & Technology'' and was the producer for the Society’s radio show ''Man and Molecules' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- most populous city in the country. The city boundaries encompass an area of about and a population of 675,647 as of 2020. It is the seat of Suffolk County (although the county government was disbanded on July 1, 1999). The city is the economic and cultural anchor of a substantially larger metropolitan area known as Greater Boston, a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) home to a census-estimated 4.8 million people in 2016 and ranking as the tenth-largest MSA in the country. A broader combined statistical area (CSA), generally corresponding to the commuting area and including Providence, Rhode Island, is home to approximately 8.2 million people, making it the sixth most populous in the United States. Boston is one of the oldest ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Economist
''The Economist'' is a British weekly newspaper printed in demitab format and published digitally. It focuses on current affairs, international business, politics, technology, and culture. Based in London, the newspaper is owned by The Economist Group, with its core editorial offices in the United States, as well as across major cities in continental Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. In 2019, its average global print circulation was over 909,476; this, combined with its digital presence, runs to over 1.6 million. Across its social media platforms, it reaches an audience of 35 million, as of 2016. The newspaper has a prominent focus on data journalism and interpretive analysis over original reporting, to both criticism and acclaim. Founded in 1843, ''The Economist'' was first circulated by Scottish economist James Wilson to muster support for abolishing the British Corn Laws (1815–1846), a system of import tariffs. Over time, the newspaper's coverage expanded further into ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jerry Fodor
Jerry Alan Fodor (; April 22, 1935 – November 29, 2017) was an American philosopher and the author of many crucial works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. His writings in these fields laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, and he is recognized as having had "an enormous influence on virtually every portion of the philosophy of mind literature since 1960." Until his death in 2017 he held the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Rutgers University. Fodor was known for his provocative and sometimes polemical style of argumentation. He argued that mental states, such as beliefs and desires, are relations between individuals and mental representations. He maintained that these representations can only be correctly explained in terms of a language of thought (LOT) in the mind. Furthermore, this language of thought itself is an actually existing thing that is codified in the b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jerry Coyne
Jerry may refer to: Animals * Jerry (Grand National winner), racehorse, winner of the 1840 Grand National * Jerry (St Leger winner), racehorse, winner of 1824 St Leger Stakes Arts, entertainment, and media * ''Jerry'' (film), a 2006 Indian film * "Jerry", a song from the album ''Young and Free'' by Rock Goddess * Tom and Jerry (other) People * Jerry (given name), including a list of people and fictional characters with the name * Harold A. Jerry, Jr. (1920–2001), New York politician * Thomas Jeremiah (d. 1775), commonly known simply as "Jerry", a free Negro in colonial South Carolina Places * Branche à Jerry, a tributary of the Baker River in Quebec and New Brunswick, Canada * Jerry, Washington, a community in the United States Other uses * Jerry (company) * Jerry (WWII), Allied nickname for Germans, originally from WWI but widely used in World War II * Jerry Rescue (1851), involving American slave William Henry, who called himself "Jerry" See also * Geri (disa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Moral Agency
Moral agency is an individual's ability to make moral choices based on some notion of right and wrong and to be held accountable for these actions. A moral agent is "a being who is capable of acting with reference to right and wrong." Development and analysis Most philosophers suggest only rational beings, who can reason and form self-interested judgments, are capable of being moral agents. Some suggest those with limited rationality (for example, people who are mildly mentally disabled or infants) also have some basic moral capabilities. Determinists argue all of our actions are the product of antecedent causes, and some believe this is incompatible with free will and thus claim that we have no real control over our actions. Immanuel Kant argued that whether or not our real self, the noumenal self, can choose, we have no choice but to believe that we choose freely when we make a choice. This does not mean that we can ''control'' the effects of our actions. Some Indeterminists ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Equal Consideration Of Interests
The principle of equal consideration of interests is a moral principle that states that one should both include all affected interests when calculating the rightness of an action and weigh those interests equally. The term "equal consideration of interests" first appeared in Peter Singer's 1979 book ''Practical Ethics''. Singer asserts that if all beings, not just humans, are included as having interests that must be considered, then the principle of equal consideration of interests opposes not only racism and sexism, but also speciesism. Jeremy Bentham argued that a being's capacity to suffer is what is morally relevant when considering their interests, not their capacity for reason.Bentham, Jeremy. 1780.Of the Limits of the Penal Branch of Jurisprudence" pp. 307–35 in ''An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation''. London: T. Payne and Sons. "The question is not, Can they ''reason''? nor, Can they ''talk''? but, Can they ''suffer''?" The principle is related ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adaptation
In biology, adaptation has three related meanings. Firstly, it is the dynamic evolutionary process of natural selection that fits organisms to their environment, enhancing their evolutionary fitness. Secondly, it is a state reached by the population during that process. Thirdly, it is a phenotypic trait or adaptive trait, with a functional role in each individual organism, that is maintained and has evolved through natural selection. Historically, adaptation has been described from the time of the ancient Greek philosophers such as Empedocles and Aristotle. In 18th and 19th century natural theology, adaptation was taken as evidence for the existence of a deity. Charles Darwin proposed instead that it was explained by natural selection. Adaptation is related to biological fitness, which governs the rate of evolution as measured by change in allele frequencies. Often, two or more species co-adapt and co-evolve as they develop adaptations that interlock with those of the oth ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Neo-Darwinism
Neo-Darwinism is generally used to describe any integration of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection with Gregor Mendel's theory of genetics. It mostly refers to evolutionary theory from either 1895 (for the combinations of Darwin's and August Weismann's theories of evolution) or 1942 ( "modern synthesis"), but it can mean any new Darwinian- and Mendelian-based theory, such as the current evolutionary theory. Original use Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, as published in 1859, provided a selection mechanism for evolution, but not a trait transfer mechanism. Lamarckism was still a very popular candidate for this. August Weismann and Alfred Russel Wallace rejected the Lamarckian idea of inheritance of acquired characteristics that Darwin had accepted and later expanded upon in his writings on heredity. The basis for the complete rejection of Lamarckism was Weismann's germ plasm theory. Weismann realised that the cells that produce the germ plasm ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of methods, including spoken, sign, and written language. Many languages, including the most widely-spoken ones, have writing systems that enable sounds or signs to be recorded for later reactivation. Human language is highly variable between cultures and across time. Human languages have the properties of productivity and displacement, and rely on social convention and learning. Estimates of the number of human languages in the world vary between and . Precise estimates depend on an arbitrary distinction (dichotomy) established between languages and dialects. Natural languages are spoken, signed, or both; however, any language can be encoded into secondary media using auditory, visual, or tactile stimuli – for example, writing, whi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pain In Animals
Pain negatively affects the health and welfare of animals. "Pain" is defined by the International Association for the Study of Pain as "an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage." Only the animal experiencing the pain can know the pain's quality and intensity, and the degree of suffering. It is harder, if even possible, for an observer to know whether an emotional experience has occurred, especially if the sufferer cannot communicate. Therefore, this concept is often excluded in definitions of pain in animals, such as that provided by Zimmerman: "an aversive sensory experience caused by actual or potential injury that elicits protective motor and vegetative reactions, results in learned avoidance and may modify species-specific behaviour, including social behaviour." Nonhuman animals cannot report their feelings to language-using humans in the same manner as human communication, but obs ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Animal Consciousness
Animal consciousness, or animal awareness, is the quality or state of self-awareness within a non-human animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself. In humans, consciousness has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, qualia, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is. The topic of animal consciousness is beset with a number of difficulties. It poses the problem of other minds in an especially severe form because animals, lacking the ability to use human language, cannot tell us about their experiences. Also, it is difficult to reason objectively about the question, because a denial that an animal is conscious is often taken to imply that it does not feel, its life has no value, and that harming it is not morally wro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Animal Cognition
Animal cognition encompasses the mental capacities of non-human animals including insect cognition. The study of animal conditioning and learning used in this field was developed from comparative psychology. It has also been strongly influenced by research in ethology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary psychology; the alternative name cognitive ethology is sometimes used. Many behaviors associated with the term ''animal intelligence'' are also subsumed within animal cognition. Researchers have examined animal cognition in mammals (especially primates, cetaceans, elephants, dogs, cats, pigs, horses, cattle, raccoons and rodents), birds (including parrots, fowl, corvids and pigeons), reptiles ( lizards, snakes, and turtles), fish and invertebrates (including cephalopods, spiders and insects). Historical background Earliest inferences The mind and behavior of non-human animals has captivated the human imagination for centuries. Many writers, such as Descart ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
