Parallel Debates Research Articles

The cultural evolution of fertility decline.

Cultural evolutionists have long been interested in the problem of why fertility declines as populations develop. By outlining plausible mechanistic links between individual decision-making, information flow in populations and competition between groups, models of cultural evolution offer a novel and powerful approach for integrating multiple levels of explanation of fertility transitions. However, only a modest number of models have been published. Their assumptions often differ from those in other evolutionary approaches to social behaviour, but their empirical predictions are often similar. Here I offer the first overview of cultural evolutionary research on demographic transition, critically compare it with approaches taken by other evolutionary researchers, identify gaps and overlaps, and highlight parallel debates in demography. I suggest that researchers divide their labour between three distinct phases of fertility decline—the origin, spread and maintenance of low fertility—each of which may be driven by different causal processes, at different scales, requiring different theoretical and empirical tools. A comparative, multi-level and mechanistic framework is essential for elucidating both the evolved aspects of our psychology that govern reproductive decision-making, and the social, ecological and cultural contingencies that precipitate and sustain fertility decline.

Earth Systems, Human Agency, and the Anthropocene: Planet Earth in the Human Age

A proposal to designate a new geological epoch of our own making—the Anthropocene—is being considered by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), part of the International Union of Geological Sciences. Based on a set of formal criteria, there is growing consensus for a Holocene–Anthropocene boundary set at some point in the last 200 years. A number of scientists have questioned the utility of such a designation because it overlooks the millennia-long history of human impacts on the planet and fails to focus on the causes of human domination of the Earth in favor of the effects. I review these debates and synthesize a variety of proposals for an Anthropocene beginning 10,000 years ago to as little as 50. I then review a number of parallel debates focused less on the geosciences and more on the political, social, and institutional implications of the Anthropocene. I demonstrate how and why formal ICS criteria for the designation of geological time units may be inadequate for effectively meeting the underlying rationale for designating a human-induced geological epoch and the role it is currently and, potentially, will continue to play in the court of public opinion.

Truck Journeys and Land Parcels: Understanding the Socioeconomic Organization of Family Farming Through Farm Life Histories

Conceptual advances for understanding the organization of family farms have not yet initiated parallel debates about how they might be aligned with the methods used to understand them. Customization of a novel research approach—farm life history—for an investigation of the socioeconomic organization of forty Australian farms responds to this literature gap. Individual farm life histories were initiated using farm tours (truck journeys) in which changes to the composition of land parcels prompted research conversations. The researcher and participants benefited from using motorized transport and traveling while talking, but the benefits were experienced unevenly across research encounters.

Linking Patent Reform and Civil Litigation Reform

Patent reform increasingly focuses on discovery. Discovery is perceived as disproportionately expensive and burdensome in patent cases. Excessive discovery is said to fuel so-called “patent trolls” and impose an unhealthy tax on innovation and competition. These supposedly exceptional problems have led to exceptional patent-only reform proposals, such as delaying most discovery for over a year and reversing the 75-year old allocation of discovery costs. Treating patent litigation as exceptional has a siloing effect. Patent reform debates ignore parallel debates over general civil litigation reform that raise the same arguments about disproportionately expensive and burdensome discovery and propose their own set of reforms. This Article links patent reform to civil litigation reform, arguing that patent discovery is not exceptional in its costs, supposed effects, or causes. Instead, patent discovery is representative of a subset of discovery-intensive civil cases. The main problem with discovery in patent cases is not abusive tactics of “patent trolls” or inherent technical complexity but rather complex and open-ended remedial doctrines. Doctrinal complexity is not unique to patent litigation. Pinpointing the source of patent discovery problems also suggests a solution – delaying costly and burdensome remedial discovery until after liability is established. This solution need not be limited to patent cases. Greater use of staged litigation – litigating and resolving some potentially case-dispositive issues before any discovery or other litigation occurs on more discovery-intensive issues – is a potentially valuable tool for reforming general civil litigation. Notably, staged litigation preserves the plaintiff’s access to information and right to a jury trial, overcoming objections to other efforts to reduce civil litigation costs, like Twombly/Iqbal plausibility pleading.

Making two parallel land-use sector debates meet: Carbon leakage and indirect land-use change

Several land-based policy options are discussed within the current quest for feasible climate change mitigation options, among them the creation and conservation of forest carbon sinks through mechanisms such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation also called REDD+ and the substitution of fossil fuels through biofuels, as legislated in the EU Renewable Energy Directive. While those two policy processes face several methodological challenges, there is one issue that both processes encounter: the displacement of land use and the related emissions, which is referred to as carbon leakage in the context of emissions accounting, and indirect land-use change also called ILUC within the bioenergy realm. The debates surrounding carbon leakage and indirect land-use change issues run in parallel but are rather isolated from each other, without much interaction. This paper analyzes the similarities and differences as well as common challenges within these parallel debates by the use of peer-reviewed articles and reports, with a focus on approaches to address and methods to quantify emissions at national and international scale. The aim is to assess the potential to use synergies and learn from the two debates to optimize climate benefits. The results show that the similarities are many, while the differences between carbon leakage and ILUC are found in the actual commodity at stake and to some degree in the policy forum in which the debate is taken. The geographical scale, actors and parties involved also play a role. Both processes operate under the same theoretical assumption and face the same problem of lacking methods to quantify the emissions caused by international displacement. The approach to international displacement is one of the main differences; while US and EU biofuel policymakers acknowledge uncertainties in ILUC accounting but strive to reduce them, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change excludes accounting for international carbon leakage. Potential explanations behind these differences lie in the liability issue and the underlying accounting principles of producer responsibility for carbon leakage and consumer responsibility for ILUC. This is also reflected on the level of lobby activities, where ILUC has reached greater public and policy interest than carbon leakage. Finally, a possible way forward for international leakage accounting in future climate treaties could be the adoption of accounting methods taking a consumer perspective, to be used alongside the existing set-up, which could improve climate integrity of land-based policies.

Sister-in-Law Marriage in the Empire: Religious Politics and Legislative Reform in the Australian Colonies 1850–1900

In 1835, a statute was passed in the parliament of the United Kingdom making it illegal for a widowed man to marry his sister-in-law.1 Marriage to a sister-in-law after a wife's death was common practice in nineteenth-century England and colonial Australia and aunts often took on the responsibility of raising children after a sibling's death. In the 1840s, a protracted parliamentary and social debate began over whether a widowed man's marriage to his sister-in-law should be made legal and this debate lasted over seven decades. In the Australian colonies, where English law had been inherited,2 a similar debate occurred in the 1870s. The marriage was legalised in most of Australia in the 1870s while it remained illegal in England until the turn of the century. The parallel debates in each country provide a window into the comparative effect of religious culture on the development of marriage law. One of the primary reasons for the protracted nature of the struggle for marriage reform in England was its significance for the relationship between church and state. This article explores the implications of the relationship between church and state in Britain and the colonies for marriage legislation.

Informal Economies in International Communications: Connecting Parallel Debates

��� Public policy is typically focused on reducing and containing informal trade, yet it is also instructive to examine why such activities exist and how they connect with the formal economy. This is of particular relevance to the current discussion about intellectual property rights. By outlining connections between the informal economies debate and the global piracy debate, this paper demonstrates how today’s communications environment is characterized by different but intersecting modes of economic organization. The formalized consumption patterns underpinning international IP trade are not the natural state of affairs from which informal economies depart, but rather a historically specific market environment that has been politically produced and must be constantly maintained.

Bridging parallel discourses of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM): institutional and political challenges in developing and developed countries

This paper provides a comparative review of the literature on the institutional challenges and politics of IWRM, in relation to the EU's Water Framework Directive (WFD). It reveals two parallel debates with little interaction. The extent to which IWRM is actually addressed in the WFD literature is questioned, as is the assumption that developing countries can learn from WFD experiences. Finally, the mutual benefits of connecting these parallel discussions are demonstrated, especially in terms of encouraging greater sensitivity to the contingencies and complexities of water management.

Radical politics and the Apocalypse: activist readings of Revelation

The growth of the study of the geopolitics of religion is welcome after decades of neglect. However, the narrow focus upon right‐wing American interpretations of end‐times theology writes evangelical Christians as geography's ‘repugnant cultural other’ who constitute us as the modern, progressive, rational subject. Drawing on parallel debates in the anthropology of religion, this article stresses the importance of attending to other readings of the Apocalypse in other places. Using the examples of Dan Berrigan, William Stringfellow and Allan Boesak, it shows how justice and peace activists have read the Book of Revelation as a radical anti‐imperial text and found in it a source of resilience for non‐violent resistance in the face of apparently overwhelming odds.

Bullfighting and the War on Terror: Debates on culture and torture in Spain, 2004–11

This article analyses the commentaries on torture published in El País and La Vanguardia during the years 2004–11 in two parallel debates: first, the debate on bullfighting and human/animal relations, as Barcelona was preparing to manifest itself as an 'anti-bullfighting' city (2004) and later whilst debating the final ban on bullfighting (2010–11); second, the debate on torture in the War on Terror when photographs from Abu Ghraib were first revealed (2003–04). It shows that as a result of the synergy between these two debates new meanings were coined which connected war and other forms of violence in the human domain to the violence exercised by humans on animals.

Recent Work on Moore’s Proof

Recently, much work has been done on G.E. Moore’s proof of an external world with the aim of diagnosing just where the Proof ‘goes wrong’. In the mainstream literature, the most widely discussed debate on this score stands between those who defend competing accounts of perceptual warrant known as dogmatism (i.e. Pryor and Davies) and conservativism (i.e. Wright). Each account implies a different verdict on Moore’s Proof, though both share a commitment to supposing that an examination of premise-conclusion dependence relations will sufficiently reveal what’s wrong with the Proof. Parallel to this debate on Moore stands perhaps an equally interesting (though less discussed) debate within which the Proof is critiqued as it stands in the context of the skeptical debate. On this score, Michael Fara and Ernest Sosa have weighed in with a markedly different take on Moore’s anti-skeptical ambitions and on the nature of skeptical challenges more generally. The aim of this paper will be to critically evaluate these two very distinct strands of recent work on Moore’s Proof. Part I of the paper will focus on the mainstream debate, and in Part II of the paper, I’ll focus on the parallel debate about skepticism. My critical discussion will be aimed throughout at showing how the various proposals I’ve taken as representative of these two parallel debates surrounding Moore’s Proof ultimately fall short—each for different reasons—of what a satisfactory diagnosis of the Proof would require.

Race, Religion, and the Social Integration of New Immigrant Minorities in Canada

The social integration of Canada's new religious minorities is determined more by their racial minority status than by their religious affiliation or degree of religiosity, according to results from Statistics Canada's 2002 Ethnic Diversity Survey. Interview questions tap life satisfaction, affective ties to Canada, and participation in the wider community. Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Hindus are slower to integrate socially, mainly because they are mostly racial minorities. Degree of religiosity affects social integration in the same ways as ethnic community attachments in general, positively for some dimensions, negatively for others, and similarly for different religious groups. Patterns are similar in Quebec and the rest of Canada; results carry implications for the debate over “reasonable accommodation” of religious minorities in Quebec, and parallel debates in other provinces and countries.

Spartacus Before Marx

The story of the pre-Marxian ideology of Spartacus is not without its own peculiar interests. It is a strange narrative prompted both by the birth of a modern analytical, and political, interest in slavery, and in parallel debates over the meaning of liberty and servitude.

Placing journalism inside memory — and memory studies

This article contends that it is important for scholars to ask what it matters that certain memory stories are told in journalistic prose and format and are received by audiences as `news'. Yet it also suggests that we must understand that journalism works within (not apart from) other cultural memory forms, and that it constructs memory not just with regard to discrete events, but across time and place. Finally, considering parallel debates across disciplines, this article is a call to reassess our definitions of legitimate subjects of study. It argues that scholars should pay attention to forms of journalism beyond elite news organizations and to recognize that journalism is a site of memory construction not only about shocking events, but also about everyday life. Indeed, if we expand our definitions of journalism and of memory, we broaden the relevance and the uses of journalism in memory studies.

The Scarecrow and the Tin Man: The Vicissitudes of Human Sympathy and Caring

Why do some victims elicit outpourings of sympathy from those who are unaffected, while others do not? The authors propose a theoretical framework for making sense of the vicissitudes of sympathy based on the interaction between two qualitatively different mental processes. One, which the authors term “sympathy,” is caring but immature and irrational. The other process, which the authors term “deliberation,” is rational but uncaring. After proposing a framework for how these two factors interact, the authors first discuss a variety of factors that affect the strength of sympathy, including whether one is in the same state as the victim, one's past and vicarious experiences, proximity, similarity, vividness, and newness. Next, the authors discuss factors that affect the relative influence of deliberation. The framework helps to integrate a wide range of disparate experimental findings and provides a possible resolution to parallel debates taking place in psychology and economics over the nature of altruism.

Parish pump politics

An understanding of the politics of the water sector during the first decade of South Africa's democracy requires an engagement with a series of parallel debates. There is a technical debate about the nature of the water supply challenge. There is an institutional politics around budget allocation, between and within spheres or levels of government. There is a tension between a rights-based approach to service provision and the politics of sustainability and conservation. The interplay between these parallel dynamics is about the politics of the South African transition to democracy. But South Africa is not an island. So, finally, there is the global water debate, with its human rights, economic, anti-privatisation/imperialism and environmental dimensions. The focus of this paper is on how these different politics are playing out and how they impact on South Africans, particularly the poor who have perhaps the most to gain or lose.

Catastrophic Evolution, Culture and Diversity Management Policy

Two parallel debates, on cultural diversity and on diversity in animals and plants, are underway with insufficient meaningful contact, but a shared focus on declining diversity. Underlying the sharp decline in diversity in many human and non-human domains is cultural change, bringing about sudden contact between life forms with no previous experience of contact with one another. A common consequence of sudden contact is catastrophic evolution, involving a rapid and often fatal decline in the numbers of a particular life form; this is more likely for life forms low in both preadaptiveness and postcontact adaptation speed. Greater efforts are needed, particularly on the part of cultural researchers, to develop an integrative ‘bio-cultural’ policy to manage diversity, recognizing that cultural changes impact on diversity in all life forms, and that cultural diversity and diversity in animals and plants are inter-connected.

Who needs ‘pukka1anthropologists'? A study of the perceptions of the use of anthropology in tropical public health research

Over the past 50 years, there have been considerable changes both in how medical anthropologists view their relationship to tropical public health and in how tropical public health professionals view the role of anthropologists. In particular, in recent decades critical currents have emerged from an anthropology of medicine, calling for an examination of biomedicine and its conceptualisation of public health. There are parallel debates in public health about a narrow disease-focused or broader socio-cultural approach to improving population health. Based on a review of the literature and a qualitative study of the views of public health professionals and anthropologists working in tropical public health, the data presented in this paper suggest that public health professionals remain unaware of many of the contributions anthropology could make to tropical public health theory and practice. However, the objectives of a critical social science are not dissimilar to those of the broader concept of public health. We suggest that there are grounds for optimism. For those of us concerned not just with disease but also with inequities in health, the challenge is to work towards a critical tropical public health which draws as much from social science as from biomedicine, in theory and practice.

Ecological and geographical scale: parallels and potential for integration

Scale has emerged as a major issue in both ecology and geography in recent decades. Little effort has been made to compare these parallel debates, however, or to seek an integrated conception of scale across the two disciplines. This paper argues that such an integration is possible, even between ecology and human geography—the subfield of geography seemingly most removed from ecological concerns and methods. In both disciplines, globalization has lent practical urgency to problems of scale, revealing deeper theoretical issues. Geographers have helped impel ecologists to take space and scale seriously, and the epistemological insight that scale is produced (rather than given a priori) should be applied to ecological as well as social phenomena. Ecologists' conceptual distinctions and methodological guidelines regarding scale, meanwhile, can help resolve `the scale question' in critical human geography. Scale is both a methodological issue inherent to observation (its epistemological moment) and an objective characteristic of complex interactions within and among social and natural processes (its ontological moment). These processes and interactions—rather than scale per se—should be the object of research, with particular attention to nonlinearities or thresholds of change.

Whose Trojan Horses?

AMIDST THE PARALLEL DEBATES over transatlantic relations and further enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), policy-makers and analysts have looked to the countries of central and eastern Europe as reliably pro-American counterweights to the increasingly sceptical, independent-minded states further west on the continent. Representative commentaries have recently described NATO's new and prospective members as 'Europe's most determined Atlanticists,'(1) 'desperate [for] a relationship with the United States,'(2) and thus key to long-term plans for forging an 'American commonwealth' in Europe.(3)Expressions of sympathy and support following the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 notwithstanding, however, the hopes of some and the fears of others along these lines appear increasingly unwarranted. Rather than serve as reflexively supportive 'Trojan horses' for the United States within Euro-Atlantic institutions, the nations in the region are being driven by six underlying factors to accord precedence to relations with their leading partners in Western Europe. Managing the impact of this trend will present a major diplomatic challenge for all sides of this evolving triangle and the next great foreign policy test for central and eastern Europe.FOLLOW THE MONEYFirst, despite greater dynamism in the United States, central and east Europeans have grown ever more tightly linked economically over the past decade with their more immediate neighbours to the West. The European Union now provides roughly US$3 billion dollars annually in pre-accession assistance for its candidate partners in the region and almost another US$1 billion in humanitarian and redevelopment aid for the Balkans.(4) Individual EU members and other West European states provide additional funds. Meanwhile, though America's direct military expenditures in Europe remain sizeable, annual United States spending on traditional aid programmes for eastern Europe each of the past three years has hovered around US$700,00 and is set to decline sharply in 2003.(5)Trade and investment present a similar picture. Central and east European countries individually conduct between half and three-quarters of their trade with the European Union, with Germany alone making up roughly half the total. In contrast, less than five per cent of trade is with the United States.(6) The foreign investment gap is smaller and is magnified by the practice of some American companies of routing regional acquisitions through overseas subsidiaries for tax purposes. Nonetheless, among the three countries that account for the vast majority of outside investment in the region, the recorded American share reaches a high of 25 per cent in Hungary and only 15 per cent and six per cent, respectively, in Poland and the Czech Republic.(7)MY GENERATIONSecond, the oft-repeated triple rationale for NATO - 'keeping the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down' - may retain some underlying logic, but it is losing much of its emotional resonance for younger generations on both sides of the Atlantic.(8) As baby boomers and their offspring take over positions of social and political leadership across the former Soviet bloc, they generally lack their parents' and grandparents' sense of existential threat from predatory neighbours. Even if other Russian leaders were to diverge from President Vladimir Putin's recent 'strategic commitment' to closer co-operative ties with America and Europe, Russia will remain a severely weakened shadow of its former imperial self for many years to come. Meanwhile, despite its increasing willingness to assume a higher profile internationally, Germany will, for the foreseeable future, remain a thoroughly 'tamed power,' committed to peaceful, multilateral foreign policy.(9)Given those realities, even as younger cohorts of central and east Europeans continue to be drawn to American popular culture, fewer of them will view the United States as the indispensable defender of their national freedom. …