Darwin's Account Research Articles

The Critical Force of Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Revolution

The Critical Force of Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Revolution Len Von Morzé (bio) Voices of Cosmopolitanism in Early American Writing and Culture chiara cillerai Palgrave Macmillan, 2017 205 pp. Black Cosmopolitans: Race, Religion, and Republicanism in an Age of Revolution christine levecq University of Virginia Press, 2019 289 pp. Enlightenment Orientalism in the American Mind, 1770-1807 matthew pangborn Routledge, 2018 272 pp. After Martinette de Beauvais has begun to describe her international education, the heroine of Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond (1799) asks her how a young woman could have learned so many languages and seen so many exotic places. Before launching into a long account of her adventures, Martinette draws a striking contrast between her early education and Constantia's: "You grew and flourished, like a pale Mimosa, in the spot where destiny had planted you. Thank my stars, I am somewhat better than a vegetable. Necessity, it is true, and not choice, set me in motion, but I am not sorry for the consequences" (Brown 146). While Martinette's insulting comparison of Constantia to a plant may suggest a simple contrast between global circulation and a vegetative state, her choice of the mimosa complicates the picture. From his reading of an oft-reprinted passage in Erasmus Darwin's Loves of the Plants, Brown would have known that mimosas are not in fact immobile; they move when touched—one might [End Page 259] say by necessity rather than choice (Darwin 30–31). Darwin's account of the mimosa as both prudishly averse to foreign hands and alluringly foreign itself (an Ottoman "bride" no less) further complicates the plant's rich figuration of both xenophobia and exoticism. To the extent that Constantia feels both planted and mobile, she will be torn between her friendship with the Anglo-American Sophia and her new friend, the polyglot Martinette. Thanks to Kwame Anthony Appiah we have a positive designation for the position Martinette invites Constantia to inhabit—"rooted cosmopolitanism"—though for Brown the relationship between a fondness for one's homeland on the one hand, and openness to the wider world on the other, is an either/or (transatlantic Anglo-American filiopiety or cosmopolitanism?) rather than a both/and, a binary that can be resolved only at the end of Constantia's knife. For literary historians, cosmopolitanism might seem to be purely a descriptor of cultural mobility, but as Appiah usefully reminds us, this concept (unlike hybridity) cannot be entirely separated from an ethical dimension. What is a cosmopolitan ethics in early America? It is not, at least in the three books under review, as simple as an attitude of simple broad-mindedness, a capacity to entertain the both/and. To enjoy such liberality in the Atlantic world seems here the privilege of a white male elite who, making their selfhood on their own terms, can stand aloof from ascriptive identities—an Enlightenment optimism that Appiah's ethics in many ways replicates.1 Perhaps counterintuitively, cosmopolitanism emerges in these studies as a way of describing a worldview whose starting point is privation rather than plenitude. While eighteenth-century cosmopolitans are generally imagined as white men whose wealth allowed them to step above narrow national prejudices, the first two books instead admirably draw attention to figures who represented themselves as cosmopolitans yet were denied full belonging within their respective nations. The third book, meanwhile, finds the critical force of cosmopolitanism in the early United States, in particular, in its negative relation to the privileges of wealth, the unfettered freedom of movement of people or goods enabled by participation in the British Empire. Seen in this way, critical American cosmopolitanism is directed against modernity: against the footloose traveler, the Lemuel Gulliver indulging his "man of the world" fantasies, or the global consumers of that unbounded market described by the Spectator [End Page 260] in number 69 of Addison and Steele's series. Instead most of the Atlantic cosmopolitans studied in these books circulate, like Martinette, of necessity rather than of their own free will, or are forced to move in search of bread like Constantia. This itinerancy seems to produce new epistemological standpoints from which to participate in global conversations and to engage...

A Natural Science of Behavior

We are evolved organisms, and our selection in that evolution depended on what our ancestors were able to do. Behavior should not be viewed as a symptom of something else, such as mind or brain; it is worthy of study in its own right. Psychology these days is like a biology without natural selection. The argument here is that psychology as a science cannot survive other than as a science of behavior. The selection of behavior by its consequences is not universal but it is pervasive. This selection, one aspect of which is called reinforcement, is a central component of a science of behavior. Reinforcement is a phenomenon, not a theory. Yet even this most fundamental of behavioral processes is too often misconstrued, misrepresented and even disowned by some psychologists. Misuse of extinction and the myth of hidden costs of reward provide two examples. The selection of behavior by its consequences was as significant a development in the science of the 20th century as Darwin's account of evolution in terms of natural selection in the 19th. In addition to phylogenic and cultural selection, language necessarily involves a third variety, cultural selection. The selection of verbal behavior, as it is passed on among individuals, is an essential dimension of human behavior. Critiques of behavioral accounts of language have typically conflated questions about language structure with those about its functions. Treating language as verbal behavior brings it within the purview of a unified account of human action.

“Literally or figuratively?”: Embodied Perception and Figurative Prospect in Mansfield Park

When the mischievous Henry Crawford teases Maria Bertram about her “prospects” as they stand looking over the grounds of Sotherton, the estate of her betrothed, James Rushworth, she responds with a question: “Do you mean literally or figuratively?” (78). Beyond participating in the novel's contrast between the principled literalism of Fanny Price and the anarchic figurativeness of the Crawfords, Maria's question suggests that the prospect itself is a privileged site of intersection between material givenness and the figural power of the eye. Erasmus Darwin's account of the figurative nature of vision in Zoonomia (1794–1796), where the eye serves as his first and prime example of the mobile nature of both perceptual organs and their percepts, underwrites Austen's own optical experiments in representing this estate prospect, as do current cognitive accounts (Mark Johnson's, for instance) of the embodied qualities of perceptual situations. In addition, then, to the sexual and moral transgressions depicted in the scene, as Henry and Maria wriggle through the gate and head to the horizon, even the boundaries between literal and figurative are finally rendered porous in Austen's focus on an act of seeing.

Charles Darwin, Bartholomew Sulivan, and the geology of the Falkland Islands: unfinished business from an asymmetric partnership

When in 1846 Charles Darwin published the first account of the geology of the Falkland Islands he drew on his experiences in 1833 and 1834 during the voyage of Beagle, and on collections made at that time by the ship's Assistant Surgeon, William Kent. Aboard HMS Beagle Darwin struck up a particular friendship with Lieutenant Bartholomew Sulivan who subsequently revisited the Falklands between 1838 and 1845 in command of HMS Arrow and HMS Philomel. The surviving letters that Sulivan wrote to Darwin during those voyages contain a wealth of additional geological observations. Sulivan also dispatched additional geological specimens to Darwin, one of which can be identified in the extant Beagle collection. Darwin utilised some of Sulivan's structural geology sketches in his 1846 paper, but otherwise the detailed and accurate observations were only partly and ambiguously recorded there in a footnote. Sulivan described fold and cleavage relationships, made the first record of intrusive dolerite dykes in the Falkland Islands, and recorded landforms and lithologies that could have led to the early recognition of both Quaternary and Late Palaeozoic glaciation in the Falklands. Glacial phenomena were not generally understood at the time and Darwin at first misinterpreted some of Sulivan's prescient observations. The acknowledgements in Darwin's 1846 paper do scant justice to Sulivan's contributions which, as a result, have remained generally unappreciated. This paper seeks to rectify this situation whilst reconciling Darwin's account with the modern geological interpretation and reviewing his specimen collections in current terms.

Monkeys into Men and Men into Monkeys: Chance and Contingency in the Evolution of Man, Mind and Morals in Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies

The nineteenth century theologian, author and poet Charles Kingsley was a notable populariser of Darwinian evolution. He championed Darwin's cause and that of honesty in science for more than a decade from 1859 to 1871. Kingsley's interpretation of evolution shaped his theology, his politics and his views on race. The relationship between men and apes set the context for Kingsley's consideration of these issues. Having defended Darwin for a decade in 1871 Kingsley was dismayed to read Darwin's account of the evolution of morals in Descent of Man. He subsequently distanced himself from Darwin's conclusions even though he remained an ardent evolutionist until his death in 1875.

Capabilities: Their Origins and Ancestry

Capabilities: Their Origins and Ancestry

The naturalist and the nuances: Sentimentalism, moral values, and emotional expression in Darwin and the anatomists

Comparing Charles Darwin's account of emotional expression to previous nineteenth-century scientific studies on the same subject, this article intends to locate the exact nature of Darwin's break in his 1872 book (as well as in his earlier notebooks). In contrast to a standard view that approaches this question in the framework of the creationism/evolutionism dichotomy, I argue that Darwin's account distinguishes itself primarily by its distance toward the sentimentalist values and moral hierarchies that were traditionally linked with the study of expression--an attitude that is not an inevitable ingredient of the theory of evolution. However, Darwin's approach also reintroduces another kind of hierarchy in human expression, but one based on attenuation and self-restraint in the exhibition of expressive signs.

Dickens, Natural History, and Our Mutual Friend

The paper argues that, well aware of the developments in contemporary science, including biology and political economy, Dickens believed in the significance of the scientific paradigm shifts for ordinary human life. Dickens's early fiction constituted, among other things, a passionate critique of para-Malthusian political economy. This critique is resumed in Our Mutual Friend , yet with the new awareness of the shift of dominant paradigms from political economy to Darwinist biological thinking. Whereas the legislature that grew out of political economy could be challenged and modified, Darwin's account of natural selection, a biological theory that had permanent ontological ramifications, had a claim to the stability of a natural law which disabled beliefs in Providential design. Darwin's work, however, did not deny the potential of benevolent sympathetic human agency. Dickens's novel pits such agency against the blind forces of the struggle for survival, even while subverting the confidence in overall ethical design trailed in by the residual elements of the traditional melodrama.

Darwin and the Declaration

Does the prima facie contradiction between the Declaration of Independence's description of the separate and unique “creation” of human beings and Darwin's evolutionary account indicate a broader contradiction between theories of human rights and Darwinian evolution? While similar troubling questions have been raised and answered in the affirmative since Darwin's time, this article renews, updates and significantly fortifies such answers with original arguments. If a “distilled” formulation of the Declaration's central claims, shorn of complicating entanglements with both theology and comprehensive philosophical doctrines, may still be in contradiction with Darwinian evolutionary theory, this should be cause for substantial concern on the part of all normative political theorists, from Straussians to Rawlsians. Despite the notable recent efforts of a few political theorists, evolutionary ethicists and sociobiologists to establish the compatibility of Darwinian evolutionary theory with moral norms such as the idea of natural or human rights, I argue that significant obstacles remain.

Darwin and the Declaration

Does the prima facie contradiction between the Declaration of Independence's description of the separate and unique "creation" of human beings and Darwin's evolutionary account indicate a broader contradiction between theories of human rights and Darwinian evolution? While similar troubling questions have been raised and answered in the affirmative since Darwin's time, this article renews, updates and significantly fortifies such answers with original arguments. If a "distilled" formulation of the Declaration's central claims, shorn of complicating entanglements with both theology and comprehensive philosophical doctrines, may still be in contradiction with Darwinian evolutionary theory, this should be cause for substantial concern on the part of all normative political theorists, from Straussians to Rawlsians. Despite the notable recent efforts of a few political theorists, evolutionary ethicists and sociobiologists to establish the compatibility of Darwinian evolutionary theory with moral norms such as the idea of natural or human rights, I argue that significant obstacles remain.

“A Great Complication of Circumstances” – Darwin and the Economy of Nature

In 1749, Linnaeus presided over the dissertation "Oeconomia Naturae," which argued that each creature plays an important and particular role in nature's economy. This phrase should be familiar to readers of Darwin, for he claims in the Origin that "all organic beings are striving, it may be said, to seize on each place in the economy of nature." Many scholars have discussed the influence of political economy on Darwin's ideas. In this paper, I take a different tack, showing that Darwin's idea of an economy of nature stemmed from the views of earlier naturalists like Linnaeus and Lyell. I argue, in the first section of the paper, that Linnaeus' idea of oeconomia naturae is derived from the idea of the animal economy, and that his idea of politia naturae is an extension of the idea of a politia civitatis. In the second part, I explore the use of the concept of stations in the work of De Candolle and Lyell - the precursor to Darwin's concept of places. I show in the third part of the paper that the idea of places in an economy of nature is employed by Darwin at many key points in his thinking: his discussion of the Galapagos birds, his reading of Malthus, etc. Finally, in the last section, I demonstrate that the idea of a place in nature's economy is essential to Darwin's account of divergence. To tell his famous story of divergence and adaptation, Darwin needed the economy of nature.

Demography and Archaeology

In the field of archaeology, demography has sometimes seemed something of a phantom science. Many explanatory models in archaeology have taken population density as a central theme. But the quantitative precision and broad sweep of the resulting formulations, scientific enough in their intentions, have often been undermined by the difficulties in the practice of estimating population densities for the prehistoric or early historic past. Indeed, even for the Classical world, where historical and literary texts as well as inscriptions are available to supplement the settlement remains still visible on the ground, the estimation of population has been a field of controversy for more than a century (Beloch 1886). Problems of estimation have undermined those quantitative intentions of the would-be scientist. Yet despite these practical problems, the attractions of the explanations already proposed have been considerable. When Gordon Childe (1936) outlined his two great revolutions in prehistory the Neolithic revolution and the urban revolution they were formulated with explicit reference to the demographic effects of what Childe took as his prototype: the Industrial Revolution. They have been greatly influential in much further work. For instance, in Lewis Binford's Post-Pleistocene Adaptations (Binford 1968), one of the pioneering articles of the new archaeology of 40 years ago, population density was explicitly regarded as the key parameter. In the years that followed, influenced partly by Esther Boserup's Conditions of Agricultural Growth (Boserup 1965), many archaeologists tended to take population increase as a prime mover for changes in the cultural system. So it is no surprise that, in the present volume, Richerson, Boyd, and Bettinger take Darwin's account of his reading of Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population (Malthus 1798) for their epigraph in a paper in which increasing population density is again seen as a key variable. More recently, broad formulations have been proposed that are explicitly quantitative. Indeed, since Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza set out their wave of advance model for the spread of the Neolithic way of life to Europe (Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza 1973), the coming of farming (especially to Europe) has become a locus classicus for demographic discussions in the field of archaeology. Indeed it remains so here in the papers of Shennan and Bentley, Layton, and Tehrani.

Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain (review)

Reviewed by: Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain Mateusz Borowski and Małgorzata Sugiera Mark Pizzato. Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Pp. 335$75.00. The title of Mark Pizzato's book promises a study devoted to the topic which nowadays gains increasing significance—the way the technology of the new media, sometimes referred to as "the third nature," comes to play a key role in both individual and collective life. It can hardly skip anyone's attention that today the mediated experiences, gathered in virtual reality or by means of various kinds of avatars or fictional figures from more traditional forms of art and literature, take the place of the experiences that were formerly made at first hand or passed down from generation to generation via the oral tradition. Therefore one can firmly posit that our brains have become haunted and dominated by ghosts from theater stages, cinema screens, television, and computer games. These phantoms have started more and more often to serve as the basic foundation for our memories, fantasies, and dreams. However, the description and analysis of the condition of the postmodern, always-mediated "self" provides merely a starting point for a much more ambitious scholarly project undertaken by the author of Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain. Contrary to what the title of the book spells, Pizzato does not focus on the ghosts from the stage and the screen which haunt or inhabit our minds, determining the shape and the ultimate meaning of our fate. Rather, he treats the human mind as a primary internal stage, on which ghosts appear in accordance with the organic principles and the evolutionarily structured brain, before they migrate outside to enter real theater stages and cinema screens. One could most accurately (and by no means ironically) describe his undertaking as a major attempt at supplementing Charles Darwin's account of the evolution of the human species; supplementing primarily with those survival strategies which we work out not in direct contact with hostile nature but within the realm of cultural artifacts—on the level of symbolic meanings and imaginary worlds. The momentous stage of the evolution described by Pizzato began when the interior theater of our brain enabled us to break free from the confining horizon of the present moment, typical of animals, and let us recall in memory past events as well as anticipate and plan the future. In order to convincingly prove that the survival instinct, commonly regarded as the physiological basis of representing arts, became the major evolutionary force, the author of Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in Brainreaches for the latest empirical and therapeutic theories of neurobiology and evolutionary psychology. Pizzato, giving a lucid account of these scientific theories and making them accessible even to lay readers, looks for material basis of that which cognitive sciences describe only in terms of conceptualizing metaphors and mental constructs. However, there is much more to his book. [End Page 393] At every juncture of his argument Pizzato extends the perspective of his research. He goes in the footsteps of Lacan and ∂iñek in that he links Freud's long-standing conceptualizations of mental reality with detailed analyses of antique tragedy and Shakespeare's plays and their contemporary stage productions and screenings. This approach yields the most valuable results in the chapter devoted to the theme of ghosts in Hamlet, in which Pizzato relies heavily on Stephen Greenblatt's argument developed in his Hamlet in Purgatory. Scrutinizing the postwar screenings of Shakespeare's masterpiece (from Laurence Olivier's 1948 film, through Kenneth Branagh's Victorian version from 1996 to Michael Almereyda's postmodern Hamletfrom 2000) he persuasively demonstrates how over a few decades the cultural image of ghosts and their place in our lives were changing relative to the development of the media and new techniques of image production. A wise selection of examples allows him to prove that in spite of the diversity of styles and poetics, various meanings and differently inscribed messages from antiquity to the postmodern era, one can identify the same images and representations of the "self" and its interaction with Other...

Decadence and the Organic Metaphor

ABSTRACT While Charles Darwin's evolutionary account of organic decay, decline, and extinction provided a model for accounts of supposedly similar processes in the domain of human culture and society, Darwin's own theory of natural selection depended on models of cultural and social transformation, degeneration, and destruction. In the full circuit of the organic metaphor of decadence, then, a theory of culture was applied to nature and then re-applied to the cultural world even though cultural forms do not always literally display processes of organic morbidity, and natural forms do not always literally display the results of intentional human artistry, cultivation, and collection. The organic metaphor of decadence was some-times used to imagine a continuous and regenerating life; sometimes, however, the organic metaphor was used to imagine the necessity of all-pervasive death. The essay compares and contrasts these two approaches—exemplified, on the one hand, by Darwin's own writings and, on the other hand, by Joris-Karl Huysmans's Against Nature.

A necessary hero

A necessary hero

Darwin, Social Theory, and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

This essay considers ways in which Darwin's account of natural processes was influenced by economic, ethical, and natural‐theological theories in his own day. It argues that the Anabaptist concept of “the gospel of all creatures” calls into question alliances between evolutionary theory and social policy that are based on the dominance of conflictual images such as “the survival of the fittest” and questions the negative images of both nature and God that Darwinism has been taken to sponsor. The essay also considers developments in biology that have called into question dualist accounts of human nature as body and soul, thus reminding us that we are fully a part of the natural world and thus contributing, in turn, to a better theological grasp of God's relation to nature.

The Making of the English Novel

The Making of the English NovelJA. Downie The search for the origins of the novel now bears comparison to the quest for the Holy Grail. Part of the problem is to do with the very terms in which such investigations are couched. Almost inevitably, the search for origins assumes the evolutionary connotations of Darwin's classic account, On the Origin ofSpecies by Means ofNatural Selection. Several unfortunate consequences ensue. First, the search for origins insinuates that the novel is in some obscure sense a natural phenomenon, when it quite clearly is not. Second, the evolutionary overtones that accompany the search make it difficult to avoid offering an account of the novel that is not uncompromisingly teleological, the part played by human agency in the novel's development downplayed, if not discounted altogether. Finally, the overall effect is to imply that, whatever it is, "the novel" is not a construct. Although most recent studies of the origins of the English novel illustrate several if not all of these points, they are equally appropriate to Ian Watt's classic, The Rise ofthe Novel (1957). The OED's first signification of "origin" is, after all, "The act or fact of arising or springing from something : derivation, rise; beginning of existence in reference to its source or cause" (emphasis added). If John J. Richetti was the first to take exception to Watt's "teleological bias,"1 critics have subsequently queued up to identify other weaknesses in Watt's approach. For all its initial persuasiveness , Watt's "triple-rise" thesis is built on a number of flawed or at least unverified—perhaps unverifiable—assumptions. 1 John J. Richetti, Popular Fiction before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700-1739 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), "The Rise of the Novel Reconsidered," pp. 1-22. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 9, Number 3, April 1997 250 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Briefly stated, the "triple-rise" thesis is as follows: the rise of the reading public, a more or less direct consequence of the rise of the middle class, leads in turn to the rise of the novel. Unfortunately, as scholarship since 1956 has increasingly demonstrated, there are major problems with each plank of the "triple-rise" thesis. Let me outline these difficulties in turn. 1)Where is the evidence for the rise of a "middle class" in England in the early eighteenth century? Despite the consequences of the Revolution of 1688, the structure of English society remained stubbornly hierarchical, not to say aristocratic during this period. Indeed, the Glorious Revolution itself has been convincingly interpreted as a conservative attempt to defend the rights and privileges of the propertied élite against the threat posed by the absolutist policies of James n. Not only liberal and conservative historians express such a point of view. E.P. Thompson insisted that the "class" that "gained the day in 1688" was not a "middle" class, but the gentry. Although "a purposive, cohesive, growing middle class of professional men and of the manufacturing middle class" may have existed in the early to mid-eighteenth century, it "fell far short of a class with its own institutions and objectives." "Such a class did not begin to discover itself (except, perhaps, in London) until the last three decades ofthe [eighteenth] century" (emphasis added).2 How does this affect Watt's thesis? Difficulties arise because he virtually restricts his account of the rise of the novel to three influential figures—Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding—writing almost exclusively in the first half of the eighteenth century. If the rise of the novel is linked to the rise of the middle class, then one might reasonably expect the relevant social developments at least to have coincided with, if not actually to have preceded, the literary. Instead, they seem to have taken place some years later. 2)Watt's account of the growth ofthe reading public presents problems similar to those in his account of the rise of the middle class, because the most significant growth does not appear to coincide with the publication ofthose key works by Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding either. In order to assess whether there was a growth in the reading public in the early eighteenth century, we need to take...

On reliving theWanderjahr: The many voyages of theBeagle

This is a study of constancy and change in the development of one adult's system of beliefs and way of thought. It compares two documents, two versions of Charles Darwin's account of the voyage of theBeagle, one written at an early stage in the development of his evolutionary thought, the other much later but still long before he wrote theOrigin of the Species. The second version was produced 7 years after Darwin developed the theory of evolution through natural selection. Although no explicit reference is made to that theory, both versions exhibit a style of thought and a pattern of beliefs that remained very stable throughout. Examination of the documents reveals 13 major themes: relation between food supply and population; struggle; extinction; the superfecundity of nature; the “tangled bank”; selection; variation and divergence; the law of the succession of types; biogeography; strange contrivances, maladaptations, and rudimentary organs; human imperfections and perfectibility; the transformation of creation; and psychology. The study concludes with a discussion of the relation between private thought and public discourse, and the bearing of this relationship on exchanges between Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.

Intrinsic Value in Environmental Ethics

It is widely held that all hope for a satisfactory environmental ethic rests on the question whether intrinsic can be discovered in non human nature, for it is also widely held that intrinsic is what, anything, grounds human obligations to non-human nature. The work of J. Baird Callicott on intrinsic has been central to the contemporary discussion of environmental ethics and the present paper leads off with an overview of some aspects of his work in this area. An account of Callicott's views falls naturally into two parts. His earlier work in theory explicitly endorsed subjectivism and con sisted in an articulation of a sentimentalism, with roots in Hume and Dar win, which he perceived to be essential to a satisfactory exposition of Aldo Leopold's land ethic. With the publication of Intrinsic Value, Quantum Theory, and Environmental Ethics in 1985, however, Callicott confessed that subjectivism rests on the dualism of mind and body, subject and object, characteristic of the waning Cartesian/Newtonian world view, and formulated a relational theory of intrinsic inspired by the new physics.1 Callicott's tack in his earlier work was to provide as much objectivity for intrinsic as possible within a subjectivist framework by adopting a Humean moral philosophy and tailoring it to the needs of environmental ethics by the inclusion of Darwin's account of the origin of other-regarding sentiments and Leopold's account of the biotic community of which we are members. Stipulating that something has value (for our pur poses here, read 'intrinsic value') if (while its is not independent of all valuing consciousness) it is valued for itself and not only and merely because it serves as a means to satisfy the desires, further the interests, or occasion the preferred experiences of the valuers,2 Callicott argued that such inherent does exist in non-human nature. He also argued that his view does not entail a radical relativism of since there is a functional

Toward applied behavior analysis of life aloft

This article deals with systems at multiple levels, at least from cell to organization. It also deals with learning, decision making, and other behavior at multiple levels. Technological development of a human behavioral ecosystem appropriate to space environments requires an analytic and synthetic orientation, explicitly experimental in nature, dictated by scientific and pragmatic considerations, and closely approximating procedures of established effectiveness in other areas of natural science. The conceptual basis of such an approach has its roots in environmentalism which has two main features: (1) knowledge comes from experience rather than from innate ideas, divine revelation, or other obscure sources; and (2) action is governed by consequences rather than by instinct, reason, will, beliefs, attitudes or even the currently fashionable cognitions. Without an experimentally derived data base founded upon such a functional analysis of human behavior, the overgenerality of "ecological systems" approaches render them incapable of ensuring the successful establishment of enduring space habitats. Without an experimentally derived function account of individual behavioral variability, a natural science of behavior cannot exist. And without a natural science of behavior, the social sciences will necessarily remain in their current status as disciplines of less than optimal precision or utility. Such a functional analysis of human performance should provide an operational account of behavior change in a manner similar to the way in which Darwin's approach to natural selection accounted for the evolution of phylogenetic lines (i.e., in descriptive, nonteleological terms). Similarly, as Darwin's account has subsequently been shown to be consonant with information obtained at the cellular level, so too should behavior principles ultimately prove to be in accord with an account of ontogenetic adaptation at a biochemical level. It would thus seem obvious that the most productive conceptual and methodological approaches to long-term research investments focused upon human behavior in space environments will require multidisciplinary inputs from such wide-ranging fields as molecular biology, environmental physiology, behavioral biology, architecture, sociology, and political science, among others.