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Human Species (human + species)
Selected AbstractsOf Dodos and Dutchmen: reflections on the nature of historyCRITICAL QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2005FRANCIS GOODING History-making is a defining property of the human species; the ability to retain information in symbolic form over time (an ability which is granted principally by the presence of true natural language) is a unique attribute of the human animal. It has allowed human beings to enter in a qualitatively different relationship with the physical environment, and to operate in and alter that environment in highly complex, highly effective ways. To a great extent, the types of events that structure this way of life are absent from the rest of the natural world; in order to describe them accurately, it is necessary to attend to the special quality which defines them, a quality which we can characterise as their 'historical-ness'. Descriptions of human events cannot overlook the histories that organise and determine them, and to that extent they are not fruitfully apprehended with the tools of the exact sciences and instead require attention from the social sciences; but nevertheless, the phenomena of history are a part of the natural world, since they are part of the life of the organism. History itself arises in the non-historical crucible of biology. The paper examines a particular suite of events which have distinct historical and non-historical aspects - the extinction of the Dodo - in order to explore the epistemological difficulties which necessarily complicate any attempt to view human conduct as an integrated part of the natural world. [source] Reorientation by geometric and landmark information in environments of different sizeDEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE, Issue 5 2005Giorgio Vallortigara It has been found that disoriented children could use geometric information in combination with landmark information to reorient themselves in large but not in small experimental spaces. We tested domestic chicks in the same task and found that they were able to conjoin geometric and nongeometric (landmark) information to reorient themselves in both the large and the small space used. Moreover, chicks reoriented immediately when displaced from a large to a small experimental space and vice versa, suggesting that they used the relative metrics of the environment. However, when tested with a transformation (affine transformation) that alters the geometric relations between the target and the shape of the environment, chicks tended to make more errors based on geometric information when tested in the small than in the large space. These findings suggest that the reliance of the use of geometric information on the spatial scale of the environment is not restricted to the human species. [source] Accidental Shooting: An AnalysisJOURNAL OF CONTINGENCIES AND CRISIS MANAGEMENT, Issue 3 2000Michael T. Charles Despite efforts at managing crises, they tenaciously occur at the most inopportune times. The crisis manager understands that the risk of a catastrophic failure never equals zero when the human species interacts with nature or man-made structures and processes. However, the role of responsible managers is to limit risk or at least to make a best effort in assuring that acceptable precautions are taken to reduce risk to an acceptable level. In this case study, the author discusses the elements of risk taking and the causes of error in a police firearms training environment. Also discussed are the goals of firearms training, and the impact of that training design on the firearms training environment which is put into perspective. The author looks at the mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery stages of crisis management as they relate to police firearms training. The author discusses precautions and how those precautions were violated in an established environment of safety, resulting in the accidental shooting in the gun-cleaning area. Also included are alternative safety measures designed to further negate the possibility of a recurrence of such an accident. [source] Evolved sex differences and occupational segregationJOURNAL OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR, Issue 2 2006Kingsley R. Browne Average sex differences in workplace outcomes are often assumed to be products of a malfunctioning labor market that discourages women from nontraditional occupations and a biased educational system that leaves women inadequately prepared for scientific and technical work. Rather than being a product purely of discriminatory demand, however, many sex differences in occupational distribution are at least partially a result of an imbalance in supply. Sex differences in both temperament and cognitive ability, which are products of our evolutionary history, predispose men and women toward different occupational behavior. The tendency of men to predominate in fields imposing high quantitative demands, high physical risk, and low social demands, and the tendency of women to be drawn to less quantitatively demanding fields, safer jobs, and jobs with a higher social content are, at least in part, artifacts of an evolutionary history that has left the human species with a sexually dimorphic mind. These differences are proximately mediated by sex hormones. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] A four-fold humanity: Margaret Mead and psychological typesJOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES, Issue 2 2004Gerald SullivanArticle first published online: 19 MAR 200 Beginning in 1933, while working in New Guinea, Margaret Mead developed her so-called squares hypothesis. Mead never published its terms, though she made a brief comment on it in her autobiography, Blackberry Winter (1972), and the arguments found in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935) and the research leading to Balinese Character (Bateson & Mead, 1942) bore its imprint. Beginning with William McDougall's distinction between temperament (innate predispositions) and character (learned organization of habit), Mead articulated a morphological approach to the interplay between biology and culture that yielded four primary and four intermediary personality types. Under specified but not inevitable circumstances, the conscious choices of a given people could render one or another of these types characteristic or predominantly stable within their population, giving each of the other types a definite relation to the dominant type and thereby the cultural ethos of its society. Persons of each type followed a developmental path specific to their type different both from that of other types and in its manifestations given the various relations of the individual's type to the dominant type. Mead's hypothesis was, therefore, a vision of the unity and diversity of a single human species as well as an approach to the differing psychological positioning of individuals in cultures. In examining Mead's hypothesis, this essay also takes up Mead's debts to several leading psychologists (McDougall, C. G. Jung, and Erik Erikson), and (provisionally) how her vision differed from that of Ruth Benedict. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source] Race and global patterns of phenotypic variationAMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 1 2009John H. Relethford Abstract Phenotypic traits have been used for centuries for the purpose of racial classification. Developments in quantitative population genetics have allowed global comparison of patterns of phenotypic variation with patterns of variation in classical genetic markers and DNA markers. Human skin color shows a high degree of variation among geographic regions, typical of traits that show extensive natural selection. Even given this high level of geographic differentiation, skin color variation is clinal and is not well described by discrete racial categories. Craniometric traits show a level of among-region differentiation comparable to genetic markers, with high levels of variation within populations as well as a correlation between phenotypic and geographic distance. Craniometric variation is geographically structured, allowing high levels of classification accuracy when comparing crania from different parts of the world. Nonetheless, the boundaries in global variation are not abrupt and do not fit a strict view of the race concept; the number of races and the cutoffs used to define them are arbitrary. The race concept is at best a crude first-order approximation to the geographically structured phenotypic variation in the human species. Am J Phys Anthropol 2009. © 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source] Neuroscientific approaches and applications within anthropologyAMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue S47 2008James K. Rilling Abstract Many of the most distinctive attributes of our species are a product of our brains. To understand the function, development, variability, and evolution of the human brain, we must engage with the field of neuroscience. Neuroscientific methods can be used to investigate research topics that are of special interest to anthropologists, such as the neural bases of primate behavioral diversity, human brain evolution, and human brain development. Traditional neuroscience methods had to rely on investigation of postmortem brains, as well as invasive studies in living nonhuman primates. However, recent neuroimaging methods have made it possible to compare living human and nonhuman primate brains using noninvasive techniques such as structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging, positron emission tomography, and diffusion tensor imaging. These methods are providing an integrated picture of brain structure and function that was not previously available. With a combination of these traditional and modern neuroscience methods, we are beginning to explore and understand the neural bases of some of the most distinctive cognitive and behavioral attributes of the human species, including language, tool use, altruism, and mental self-projection, and we can now begin to propose plausible scenarios by which the neural substrates supporting these human specializations evolved from pre-existing neural circuitry serving related functions in common ancestors we shared with the living nonhuman primates. Consideration of the process of neurodevelopment suggests plausible mechanisms by which the highly encephalized human brain might have evolved. Neurodevelopmental studies also demonstrate that experience can shape both brain structure and function, providing a mechanism by which people of different cultures learn to act and think differently. Finally, not only can anthropologists benefit from neuroscience, neuroscience can benefit from the more sophisticated concept of evolution that anthropology offers, including an appreciation of evolutionary diversity as well as consideration of the process by which the human brain was formed during evolution. Yrbk Phys Anthropol 51:2,32, 2008. © 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source] LIFE-CENTERED ETHICS, AND THE HUMAN FUTURE IN SPACEBIOETHICS, Issue 8 2009MICHAEL N. MAUTNER ABSTRACT In the future, human destiny may depend on our ethics. In particular, biotechnology and expansion in space can transform life, raising profound questions. Guidance may be found in Life-centered ethics, as biotic ethics that value the basic patterns of organic gene/protein life, and as panbiotic ethics that always seek to expand life. These life-centered principles can be based on scientific insights into the unique place of life in nature, and the biological unity of all life. Belonging to life then implies a human purpose: to safeguard and propagate life. Expansion in space will advance this purpose but will also raise basic questions. Should we expand all life or only intelligent life? Should we aim to create populations of trillions? Should we seed other solar systems? How far can we change but still preserve the human species, and life itself? The future of all life may be in our hands, and it can depend on our guiding ethics whether life will fulfil its full potentials. Given such profound powers, life-centered ethics can best secure future generations. Our descendants may then understand nature more deeply, and seek to extend life indefinitely. In that future, our human existence can find a cosmic purpose. [source] | ||||||||||||||||