Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Institution
-
- WellBeing International (15)
- Selected Works (7)
- City University of New York (CUNY) (4)
- Liberty University (3)
- University of Windsor (3)
-
- College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University (2)
- Louisiana State University (2)
- University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2)
- Western University (2)
- Abilene Christian University (1)
- Ateneo de Manila University (1)
- Brigham Young University (1)
- Butler University (1)
- California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (1)
- Duquesne University (1)
- Gettysburg College (1)
- Hamline University (1)
- Lesley University (1)
- Linfield University (1)
- Macalester College (1)
- Purdue University (1)
- Rhode Island School of Design (1)
- San Jose State University (1)
- Southern Methodist University (1)
- The University of Southern Mississippi (1)
- University of Massachusetts Amherst (1)
- University of Montana (1)
- University of New Mexico (1)
- University of Richmond (1)
- University of South Carolina (1)
- Publication Year
- Publication
-
- Animal Sentience (15)
- Faculty Publications (3)
- OSSA Conference Archive (3)
- Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects (2)
- Marco Solinas (2)
-
- Masters Theses (2)
- Philosophy Faculty Publications (2)
- Robert J. O’Hara (2)
- Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations (1)
- Between the Species (1)
- Brent A. R. Hege (1)
- CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture (1)
- Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects (1)
- Comparative Philosophy (1)
- Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive) (1)
- Culum Brown, PhD (1)
- Dacus Library Faculty Publications (1)
- Departmental Honors Projects (1)
- Devin Henry (1)
- Dialogue & Nexus (1)
- Doctoral Dissertations (1)
- Electronic Theses and Dissertations (1)
- Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository (1)
- Eleutheria: John W. Rawlings School of Divinity Academic Journal (1)
- Graduate Student Publications and Research (1)
- Headwaters (1)
- Intuition: The BYU Undergraduate Journal of Psychology (1)
- Journal of Health Ethics (1)
- Journal of the South Carolina Academy of Science (1)
- Marcus R. Ross (1)
- Publication Type
- File Type
Articles 1 - 30 of 63
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Analyzing Nietzsche And Darwin In Search Of Origin Of Morality: The Evolving Perspective, Anirban Ghosh, Malabika Chakrabarti
Analyzing Nietzsche And Darwin In Search Of Origin Of Morality: The Evolving Perspective, Anirban Ghosh, Malabika Chakrabarti
Comparative Philosophy
It is generally believed that the greatest asset of human being is the moral values and according to theist such values have been infused in human by the creator. By accepting such view we simply get rid of any effort of searching the origin of morality or ethics and also transfer the responsibility of being ethical on the almighty. But when atheist denied God, the liability of being moral comes to human and also the significant question arose why we should be moral. Probably more important is the hunt for the origin of our morality. In this article we have …
The Fall And Natural Suffering, Andrew Banacos
The Fall And Natural Suffering, Andrew Banacos
Obsculta
Evolutionary theory poses several questions for Christian notions of origins: 1) common ancestry of all creatures rather than monogenesis; 2) the violent history of evolution as a challenge to the notion of a fall from paradise into sin, death, and suffering; and 3) the relationship between suffering and evil in light of evolutionary process. This paper seeks to address the concept of the fall in the context of dialogue between evolution and the Christian faith.
Taming The Wandering Mind: Where Buddhism & Polyvagal Theory Meet, Tamara Embrey
Taming The Wandering Mind: Where Buddhism & Polyvagal Theory Meet, Tamara Embrey
Mindfulness Studies Theses
The ability to tame the wandering mind is at the heart of the insights emerging from the places where Buddhism and the Polyvagal Theory (Porges, 2001, 2011) meet. A polyvagal understanding of how our nervous system functions opens the door to developing skills that can strengthen our ability to regulate ourselves and others during times of challenge. The Buddha’s meditation instructions, laid out in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, the Establishment of Mindfulness Discourse offers a type of attentional training that allows us to become aware of our current neural state so that we can make intentional choices to tame our wandering …
Empathy And Fairness In Nonhuman Primates: Evolutionary Bases Of Human Morality, Colt Halter
Empathy And Fairness In Nonhuman Primates: Evolutionary Bases Of Human Morality, Colt Halter
Intuition: The BYU Undergraduate Journal of Psychology
Darwin offered an evolutionary perspective on the origins of human morality, suggesting that humans share a biological foundation with nonhuman primates. This paper reviews the current literature on moral and prosocial behaviors of nonhuman primates, specifically examining whether nonhuman primates exhibit behaviors that are typical of empathy and fairness. The literature documents that nonhuman primates exhibit empathetic behaviors regarding emotional contagion and sympathetic concern. There is also evidence that nonhuman primates have a sense of fairness, seen in their reciprocal behaviors and aversion to inequity. Taken together, this suggests that there are evolutionary roots of morality, lending empirical support to …
Martin Luther King Jr. And Ernest Everett Just - On Evolution Of Ethical Behavior, Theodore Walker
Martin Luther King Jr. And Ernest Everett Just - On Evolution Of Ethical Behavior, Theodore Walker
Perkins Faculty Research and Special Events
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. prescribed an evolutionary advance in ethical behavior: the total “abolition of poverty” and the abolition of war throughout “the world house.” Cell biologist Ernest Everett Just advanced the idea that human ethical behavior evolved from cellular origins.
Also, astrobiologists Chandra Wickramasinghe and Sir Fred Hoyle advanced the idea of cosmic biology, including stellar evolution and cosmic evolution. From cells to humans to stars and cosmology, evolutionary natural science converges with natural theology.
The Bioethical Significance Of “The Origin Of Man’S Ethical Behavior” (October 1941, Unpublished) By Ernest Everett Just And Hedwig Anna Schnetzler Just, Theodore Walker Jr.
The Bioethical Significance Of “The Origin Of Man’S Ethical Behavior” (October 1941, Unpublished) By Ernest Everett Just And Hedwig Anna Schnetzler Just, Theodore Walker Jr.
Journal of the South Carolina Academy of Science
Abstract –
E. E. Just (1883-1941) is an acknowledged “pioneer” in cell biology, and he is perhaps the pioneer in study of egg cell fertilization. Here we discover that Just also made pioneering contributions to general biology and evolutionary bioethics.
Within Just’s published contributions to observational cell biology, there are substantial fragments of his theory of ethical behavior, a theory with roots in cell biology. In addition to such previously available fragments, Just’s fully developed theory is now available. This recently discovered unpublished book-length manuscript argues for the biological origins of ethical behavior (evolving from cells to humans, within a …
Sentience Is The Foundation Of Animal Rights, Michael L. Woodruff
Sentience Is The Foundation Of Animal Rights, Michael L. Woodruff
Animal Sentience
Chapman & Huffman argue that the cognitive differences between humans and nonhuman animals do not make humans superior to animals. I suggest that humans have domain-general cognitive abilities that make them superior in causing uniquely complex changes in the world not caused by any other species. The ability to conceive of and articulate a claim of rights is an example. However, possession of superior cognitive ability does not entitle humans to superior moral status. It is sentience, not cognitive complexity, that is the basis for the assignment of rights and the protections under the law that accompany them.
Octopi-Ing A Unique Niche In Comparative Psychology, Jennifer Vonk
Octopi-Ing A Unique Niche In Comparative Psychology, Jennifer Vonk
Animal Sentience
Mather’s work has been fundamental in informing scientists of the relatively mysterious behavior and cognition of an understudied group of animals – the cephalopods. This work helps to fill a gap in the comparative literature that has historically sought evidence for complex behavior only in species that are closely related to humans or share important ecological features such as social complexity.
Our Brains Make Us Out To Be Unique In Ways We Are Not, Matthew J. Criscione, Julian Paul Keenan
Our Brains Make Us Out To Be Unique In Ways We Are Not, Matthew J. Criscione, Julian Paul Keenan
Animal Sentience
Humans have long viewed themselves in a favorable light. This bias is consistent with a general pattern of self-enhancement. Neural systems in the medial prefrontal cortex underlie this way of thinking, which, even when false, may be beneficial for survival. It is hence not surprising that we often disregard contrary evidence in believing ourselves superior.
Morality As Social Software, Jongjin Kim
Morality As Social Software, Jongjin Kim
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The dissertation research is a project to understand morality better through the concept of ‘Social Software.’ The dissertation is, consequently, to argue that the morality in a human society functions as a form of social software in the society. The three aspects of morality as social software are discussed in detail: the evolutionary, anti-entropic, and epistemic game-theoretic aspect.
We humans ‘usually’ think that, for example, (a) killing other humans without any necessary reason is morally wrong, and (b) helping other humans in need is morally right. We want to know, in this dissertation research project, why we think in such …
De-Extinction And The Conception Of Species, Leonard Finkelman
De-Extinction And The Conception Of Species, Leonard Finkelman
Faculty Publications
Developments in genetic engineering may soon allow biologists to clone organisms from extinct species. The process, dubbed “de-extinction,” has been publicized as a means to bring extinct species back to life. For theorists and philosophers of biology, the process also suggests a thought experiment for the ongoing “species problem”: given a species concept, would a clone be classified in the extinct species? Previous analyses have answered this question in the context of specific de-extinction technologies or particular species concepts. The thought experiment is given more comprehensive treatment here. Given the products of three de-extinction technologies, twenty-two species concepts are “tested” …
Can They Suffer?, Todd K. Shackelford
Can They Suffer?, Todd K. Shackelford
Animal Sentience
We should treat sentient nonhuman animals as worthy of moral consideration, not because we share an evolutionary history with them, but because they can suffer. As Chapman & Huffman (2018) argue, humans are not uniquely disconnected from other species. We should minimize the suffering we inflict on sentient beings — whether human or nonhuman — not because they, too, are tool-makers or have sophisticated communication systems, but because they, too, can suffer, and suffering is bad.
Animal Suicide: An Account Worth Giving?, Irina Mikhalevich
Animal Suicide: An Account Worth Giving?, Irina Mikhalevich
Animal Sentience
Peña-Guzmán (2017) argues that empirical evidence and evolutionary theory compel us to treat the phenomenon of suicide as continuous in the animal kingdom. He defends a “continuist” account in which suicide is a multiply-realizable phenomenon characterized by self-injurious and self-annihilative behaviors. This view is problematic for several reasons. First, it appears to mischaracterize the Darwinian view that mind is continuous in nature. Second, by focusing only on surface-level features of behavior, it groups causally and etiologically disparate phenomena under a single conceptual umbrella, thereby reducing the account’s explanatory power. Third, it obscures existing analyses of suicide in biomedical ethics and …
Aspects Of Biological Explanation, Derek J. Skillings
Aspects Of Biological Explanation, Derek J. Skillings
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation is an evaluation of some strategies used for understanding the biological world. It argues that the complexity of living systems challenges the adequacy of traditional approaches to scientific explanation. An examination of the empirical details—especially those at the microscopic and nano scales—highlights the limitations of mechanistic explanation, common habits of causal reasoning, and theories of individuality. According to this analysis, starting with broad generalizations of how the world is, or a single universal theory of how it ought to be investigated or explained, has things entirely backwards. Instead, we ought to start by looking at the important processes, …
Human Evolution And Divine Agency, Alexandra Rakestraw
Human Evolution And Divine Agency, Alexandra Rakestraw
Dialogue & Nexus
Modern Christians often find themselves at a crossroads when confronted with the two predominant understandings of human and universal origins. Plain sense readings of Genesis lead many to believe in a historical six-day creation that occurred in the past ten thousand years while proponents on the other side of the spectrum use current scientific understanding to support a creation that occurs through evolutionary means. How one views human origins has a profound impact on one’s concept of how God works in the cosmos. In this paper, I will lay out a background to better understand the characters of Adam and …
The Emotional Brain Of Fish, Sonia Rey Planellas
The Emotional Brain Of Fish, Sonia Rey Planellas
Animal Sentience
Woodruff (2017) analyzes structural homologies and functional equivalences between the brains of mammals and fish to understand where sentience and social cognition might reside in teleosts. He compares neuroanatomical, neurophysiological and behavioural correlates. I discuss current advances in the study of fish cognitive abilities and emotions, and advocate an evolutionary approach to the underlying basis of sentience in teleosts.
Consciousness Is Not Inherent In But Emergent From Life, Jon Mallatt, Todd E. Feinberg
Consciousness Is Not Inherent In But Emergent From Life, Jon Mallatt, Todd E. Feinberg
Animal Sentience
Reber’s theory of the cellular basis of consciousness (CBC) is right to emphasize that we should study consciousness (sentience) in its simplest form, taking its evolution into account. However, not enough evidence is presented to support CBC’s unorthodox claim that even simple, one-celled organisms are conscious. As pointed out by other commentators, the CBC seems to be based on outdated ideas about evolution and does not acknowledge that consciousness could be an evolutionary novel feature. Such emergent features are abundant in living organisms. We review our own emergentist solution, in which consciousness evolved in the elaborating nervous systems of the …
Cognitive Continuity In Cognitive Dissonance, David R. Brodbeck, Madeleine I. R. Brodbeck
Cognitive Continuity In Cognitive Dissonance, David R. Brodbeck, Madeleine I. R. Brodbeck
Animal Sentience
Zentall’s (2016) model of cognitive dissonance is compatible with cognitive continuity between humans and nonhumans. It may help explain cognitive dissonance-like behavior in many species, including humans. It is also consistent with Tinbergen’s (1963) ‘four whys’ in ethological explanation.
Darwinian Evolutionary Theory And Constructions Of Race In Nazi Germany: A Literary And Cultural Analysis Of Darwin’S Works And Nazi Rhetoric, Emily M. Wollmuth
Darwinian Evolutionary Theory And Constructions Of Race In Nazi Germany: A Literary And Cultural Analysis Of Darwin’S Works And Nazi Rhetoric, Emily M. Wollmuth
Departmental Honors Projects
First published in 1856, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species is one of the most impactful scientific writings in history. While the influence of Darwinian evolutionary theory on historical events has been widely studied, no single work of scholarship has previously combined close reading of Origin’s representations of “race” with analysis of how those constructions of “racial” difference are (mis)translated across the cultural discourses of the eugenics movement and Nazi Germany. Through comparative cultural studies and close literary analysis of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Darwin’s works—including Origin, Descent of Man, and Voyage of the Beagle, this paper examines how evolutionary …
Bio-Aesthetics: The Evolution Of Sensibility Through Nature, Katya Mandoki
Bio-Aesthetics: The Evolution Of Sensibility Through Nature, Katya Mandoki
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
[1] This paper gathers a few points developed in my recent book, The Indispensable Excess of the Aesthetic: Evolution of Sensibility in Nature, where I explore the processes that involve aisthesis from their most primal manifestations to their more complex. I propose the concept of bio-aesthetics as the study of all forms of sensibility in living beings, and that, given the fact that it is a function of our corporeal condition, the required starting point is the evolutionary paradigm. Another crucial tool for understanding how different types of creatures value, understand, react, and relate to their environment is provided by …
Phylogeny, Psychology, And The Vicissitudes Of Human Development: The Anxiety Of Atavism, Frank Pittenger
Phylogeny, Psychology, And The Vicissitudes Of Human Development: The Anxiety Of Atavism, Frank Pittenger
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This cross-disciplinary dissertation provides a missing intellectual history of an ostensibly dead idea. Once widely held and no less elegant for its obsolescence, the principle of biogenetic recapitulation is best remembered by its defining mantra, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” Among psychologists and sociologists as well as embryologists, the notion that the development of any individual organism repeats in compressed, miniaturized form the entire history of its species enjoyed broad (if not uncontested) acceptance through the early twentieth century. The author reexamines the origins of this theory in the work of Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel, and traces its influence in psychology …
In Theory, There's Hope: Queer Co-(M)Motions Of Science And Subjectivity, Cordelia Sand
In Theory, There's Hope: Queer Co-(M)Motions Of Science And Subjectivity, Cordelia Sand
Masters Theses
Given the state of the planet at present —specifically, the linked global ecological and economic crises that conjure dark imaginings and nihilistic actualities of increasing resource depletion, poisonings, and wide-scale sufferings and extinctions—I ask What might we hope now? What points of intervention offer possibility for transformation? At best, the response can only be partial. The approach this thesis takes initiates from specific pre-discursive assumptions. The first understands current conditions as having been produced, and continuing to be so, through practices that enact and sustain neoliberal relations. Secondly, these practices are expressive of a subjectivity tied to a Cartesian worldview, …
How Could Consciousness Emerge From Adaptive Functioning?, Max Velmans
How Could Consciousness Emerge From Adaptive Functioning?, Max Velmans
Animal Sentience
The sudden appearance of consciousness that Reber posits in creatures with flexible cell walls and motility rather than non-flexible cells walls and no motility involves an evolutionary discontinuity. This kind of “miracle” is required by all “discontinuity” theories of consciousness. To avoid miraculous emergence, one may need to consider continuity theories, which accept that different forms of consciousness and material functioning co-evolve but assume the existence of consciousness to be primal in the way that matter and energy are assumed to be primal in physics.
“Cellular Basis Of Consciousness”: Not Just Radical But Wrong, Brian Key
“Cellular Basis Of Consciousness”: Not Just Radical But Wrong, Brian Key
Animal Sentience
Reber (2016) attempts to resuscitate an obscure and outdated hypothesis referred to as the “cellular basis of consciousness” that was originally formulated by the author nearly twenty years ago. This hypothesis proposes that any organism with flexible cell walls, a sensitivity to its surrounds, and the capacity for locomotion will possess the biological foundations of mind and consciousness. Reber seeks to reduce consciousness to a fundamental property inherent to individual cells rather than to centralised nervous systems. This commentary shows how this hypothesis is based on supposition, false premises and a misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. The cellular basis of consciousness …
Beginnings: Physics, Sentience And Luca, Carolyn A. Ristau
Beginnings: Physics, Sentience And Luca, Carolyn A. Ristau
Animal Sentience
According to Reber’s model, Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC), sentience had its origins in a unicellular organism and is an inherent property of living, mobile organic forms. He argues by analogy to basic physical forces which he considers to be inherent properties of matter; I suggest that they are instead the stuff of scientific investigation in physics. I find no convincing argument that sentience had to begin in endogenously mobile cells, a criterial attribute of the originator cell(s)for sentience according to CBC. Non-endogenously mobile cells, (i.e., plants or precursors) in a moving environment would suffice. Despite my concerns and the …
Fish Pain: An Inconvenient Truth, Culum Brown
Fish Pain: An Inconvenient Truth, Culum Brown
Culum Brown, PhD
Whether fish feel pain is a hot political topic. The consequences of our denial are huge given the billions of fish that are slaughtered annually for human consumption. The economic costs of changing our commercial fishery harvest practices are also likely to be great. Key outlines a structure-function analogy of pain in humans, tries to force that template on the rest of the vertebrate kingdom, and fails. His target article has so far elicited 34 commentaries from scientific experts from a broad range of disciplines; only three of these support his position. The broad consensus from the scientific community is …
Slavery, Welfare And The Sixth Extinction, Stephen R. Clark
Slavery, Welfare And The Sixth Extinction, Stephen R. Clark
Animal Sentience
Ng’s laudable concern for animal welfare would be welcome to any sensible slave-owner wishing to preserve his investment. What welfarism – for slave-owners and animal husbandmen – fails to call into question is whether we have the right to breed, hold captive and kill animals at all: If it matters, as the widely recognized slogan of ‘Five Freedoms’ suggests, that animals have the chance to live a ‘normal’ life, then more matters than keeping them ‘happy’ in subjection. Their lives – and also the lives of wild things – also deserve respect.
Fish Pain: An Inconvenient Truth, Culum Brown
Fish Pain: An Inconvenient Truth, Culum Brown
Animal Sentience
Whether fish feel pain is a hot political topic. The consequences of our denial are huge given the billions of fish that are slaughtered annually for human consumption. The economic costs of changing our commercial fishery harvest practices are also likely to be great. Key outlines a structure-function analogy of pain in humans, tries to force that template on the rest of the vertebrate kingdom, and fails. His target article has so far elicited 34 commentaries from scientific experts from a broad range of disciplines; only three of these support his position. The broad consensus from the scientific community is …
Pain And Fish Welfare, Eliane Gonçalves-De-Freitas
Pain And Fish Welfare, Eliane Gonçalves-De-Freitas
Animal Sentience
The evolutionary approach of Key’s (2016) target article, generically comparing humans with fish of all kinds, is simplistic. The author ignores published research on structural and molecular aspects of pain in fish. The target article reads more like a selective polemic against fish welfare than an even-handed analysis.
Pain-Capable Neural Substrates May Be Widely Available In The Animal Kingdom, Edgar T. Walters
Pain-Capable Neural Substrates May Be Widely Available In The Animal Kingdom, Edgar T. Walters
Animal Sentience
Neural and behavioral evidence from diverse species indicates that some forms of pain may be generated by coordinated activity in networks far smaller than the cortical pain matrix in mammals. Studies on responses to injury in squid suggest that simplification of the circuitry necessary for conscious pain might be achieved by restricting awareness to very limited information about a noxious event, possibly only to the fact that injury has occurred, ignoring information that is much less important for survival, such as the location of the injury. Some of the neural properties proposed to be critical for conscious pain in mammals …