Commentaries on the target article offer diverse perspectives on integrative experiment design. Our responses engage three themes: (1) Disputes of our characterization of the problem, (2) skepticism toward our proposed solution, and (3) endorsement of the solution, with accompanying discussions of its implementation in existing work and its potential for other domains. Collectively, the commentaries enhance our confidence in the promise and viability of integrative experiment design, while highlighting important considerations about how it is used.

The dominant paradigm of experiments in the social and behavioral sciences views an experiment as a test of a theory, where the theory is assumed to generalize beyond the experiment's specific conditions. According to this view, which Alan Newell once characterized as “playing twenty questions with nature,” theory is advanced one experiment at a time, and the integration of disparate findings is assumed to happen via the scientific publishing process. In this article, we argue that the process of integration is (...) at best inefficient, and at worst it does not, in fact, occur. We further show that the challenge of integration cannot be adequately addressed by recently proposed reforms that focus on the reliability and replicability of individual findings, nor simply by conducting more or larger experiments. Rather, the problem arises from the imprecise nature of social and behavioral theories and, consequently, a lack of commensurability across experiments conducted under different conditions. Therefore, researchers must fundamentally rethink how they design experiments and how the experiments relate to theory. We specifically describe an alternative framework, integrative experiment design, which intrinsically promotes commensurability and continuous integration of knowledge. In this paradigm, researchers explicitly map the design space of possible experiments associated with a given research question, embracing many potentially relevant theories rather than focusing on just one. Researchers then iteratively generate theories and test them with experiments explicitly sampled from the design space, allowing results to be integrated across experiments. Given recent methodological and technological developments, we conclude that this approach is feasible and would generate more-reliable, more-cumulative empirical and theoretical knowledge than the current paradigm – and with far greater efficiency. (shrink)

Patricia White (Stud Philos Educ 18:43–52, 1999) argues that the virtue gratitude is essential to a flourishing democracy because it helps foster universal and reciprocal amity between citizens. Citizens who participate in this reciprocal relationship ought to be encouraged to recognize that “much that people do does in fact help to make communal civic life less brutish, pleasanter and more flourishing.” This is the case even when the majority of citizens do not intentionally seek to make civic life better for (...) others. Were citizens to recognize the appropriateness of gratitude in these situations, the bonds of our democratic communities would be strengthened. In this paper, I examine White’s argument more carefully, arguing that it fails to address adequately the difficulties that arise when we attempt to encourage the virtue of gratitude in our students. To address these difficulties, I turn to an unlikely source for democratic inspiration: Friedrich Nietzsche. In spite of his well-known anti-democratic sentiments, Nietzsche offers democratic citizens insights into the social value of gratitude. I argue that Nietzsche’s ideas resolve the educational difficulties in White’s argument and viably establish gratitude as an important democratic virtue that ought to be cultivated. (shrink)

Patient report of functioning is one component of the neurocognitive exam following traumatic brain injury, and standardized patient-reported outcomes measures are useful to track outcomes during rehabilitation. The Traumatic Brain Injury Quality of Life measurement system is a TBI-specific extension of the PROMIS and Neuro-QoL measurement systems that includes 20 item banks across physical, emotional, social, and cognitive domains. Previous research has evaluated the responsiveness of the TBI-QOL measures in community-dwelling individuals and found clinically important change over a 6-month assessment (...) interval in a sample of individuals who were on average 5 years post-injury. In the present study, we report on the responsiveness of the TBI-QOL Cognition–General Concerns and Executive Function item bank scores and the Cognitive Health Composite scores in a recently injured sample over a 1-year study period. Data from 128 participants with complicated mild, moderate, or severe TBI within the previous 6 months were evaluated. The majority of the sample was male, white, and non-Hispanic. The participants were 18–92 years of age and were first evaluated from 0 to 5 months post-injury. Eighty participants completed the 1-year follow-up assessment. Results show acceptable standard response mean values for all measures and minimal detectable change values ranging from 8.2 to 8.8 T-score points for Cognition–General Concerns and Executive Functioning measures. Anchor rating analysis revealed that changes in scores on the Executive Function item bank and the Cognitive Health Composite were meaningfully associated with participant-reported changes in the areas of attention, multitasking, and memory. Evaluation of change score differences by a variety of clinical indicators demonstrated a small but significant difference in the three TBI-QOL change scores by TBI injury severity grouping. These results support the responsiveness of the TBI-QOL cognition measures in newly injured individuals and provides information on the minimal important differences for the TBI-QOL cognition measures, which can be used for score interpretation by clinicians and researchers seeking patient-reported outcome measures of self-reported cognitive QOL after TBI. (shrink)

If stem cell-based therapies are developed, we will likely confront a difficult problem of justice: for biological reasons alone, the new therapies might benefit only a limited range of patients. In fact, they might benefit primarily white Americans, thereby exacerbating long-standing differences in health and health care.

Spatial asymmetries are an intriguing feature of directed attention. Recent observations indicate an influence of temperament upon the direction of these asymmetries. It is unknown whether this influence generalises to visual orienting behaviour. The aim of the current study was therefore to explore the relationship between temperament and measures of spatial orienting as a function of target hemifield. An exogenous cueing task was administered to 92 healthy participants. Temperament was assessed using Carver and White's (1994) Behavioural Inhibition System and Behavioural (...) Activation System (BIS/BAS) scales. Individuals with high sensitivity to punishment and low sensitivity to reward showed a leftward asymmetry of directed attention when there was no informative spatial cue provided. This asymmetry was not present when targets were preceded by spatial cues that were either valid or invalid. The findings support the notion that individual variations in temperament influence spatial asymmetries in visual orienting, but only when lateral targets are preceded by a non-directional (neutral) cue. The results are discussed in terms of hemispheric asymmetries and dopamine activity. (shrink)

When Mrs. Frederick C. Little's second son was born, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse. (E. B. White, 1945, 1.) In every somatic and morphological detail Stuart Little was...

A national survey on researchers’ experiences with their institutional review boards (IRBs) is presented, focused exclusively on social and behavioral researchers. A wide range of experiences is apparent in the data, especially in terms of turnaround time for submitted protocols, incidence of data collection without prior IRB approval, and stated reasons for "going solo." Sixty-two percent felt that the turnaround time they typically experience is "reasonable," and 44% said they had not experienced long delays in obtaining approval. However, 48% of (...) respondents reported either conducting a project without IRB approval or modifying an existing project without IRB approval, with anticipated time for approval being the dominant reason offered for doing so. This adds a new dimension to the widely discussed "national IRB crisis" (e.g., Illinois White Paper, 2005). The article concludes with 2 preliminary recommendations for IRB reform. (shrink)

The rationality of concern for oneself has been taken for granted by the authors of western moral and political thought in a way in which the rationality of concern for others has not. While various authors have differed about the morality of self-concern, and about the extent to which such concern is rationally required, few have doubted that we have at least some special reasons to care for our selves, reasons that differ either in degree or in kind from those (...) we have to care for others. The rationality of prudence as traditionally conceived was thus taken to be threatened by Lockean accounts of personal identity. For taking a person’s identity through time to consist in psychological continuity is often thought to result in the numerical distinctness of his present and future selves, thus leaving his present self in the unsavoury position of having to ask, “Why care specially about my future self, if he won’t really be me?”. (shrink)

In his recent article ‘Notes Towards a Critique of Buddhist Karmic Theory’ Paul J. Griffiths makes four criticisms of Buddhist karmic theory: it is empirically false, it is incoherent, it is morally repugnant, and it is vacuous. After listing these four criticisms, Griffiths concludes that ‘all these mean that Buddhist karmic theory as expounded in the major theoretical works devoted to it must be false’.

As recent policy debates demonstrate, schools in democratic societies are often under political and cultural pressure to equalize achievement among all students, even if it necessitates diverting resources from the most educationally advantaged to the least educationally advantaged. The assumption is that maximizing student potential is a zero-sum game, and the best way to increase achievement in the least advantaged group is to focus the majority of attention on their needs, even if it diminishes the potential of the most advantaged (...) group. The question is whether this is a good assumption. Friedrich Nietzsche argues that it is not. In Schopenhauer as Educator, Nietzsche argues that inequalities of talent and achievement are actually productive of excellence in all students. He believes that attempts to minimize inequality by slowing the progress of the highest-achieving backfires. While it is supposed to help the lowest-achieving, it actually serves to diminish their flourishing. This is not to say that he wants to do away with all equality. Rather, he believes that flourishing cultures can embody a fundamental equality that is more meaningful than the false equality that demands similar levels of achievement among students. I examine Nietzsche’s reasons for believing that inequalities of talent and achievement may improve the well-being of the highest-achieving and lowest-achieving, and all students in between. While Nietzsche’s ideas are too radical to adopt wholesale, they raise important questions concerning how best to educate all students, no matter what their level of ability. (shrink)

That parties might successfully organize transnationally is an idea often met with scepticism. This article argues that while certain favourable conditions are indeed absent in the transnational domain, this implies not that partisanship is impossible but that it is likely to be marked by certain traits. Specifically, it will tend to be episodic, structured as a low-density network and delocalized in its ideational content. These tendencies affect the normative expectations one can attach to it. Transnational partisanship should be valued as (...) a transitional phenomenon, e.g. as a pathway to transnational democracy, more than as a desirable thing in itself. (shrink)

In Chapter 5 of his book, Res Cogitans, Zeno Vendler argued for the thesis that what we know when we know that p, e.g. that Los Angeles is south of San Francisco, and what we believe when we believe that p cannot be the same despite being expressed in the same words, on the ground that ‘believe’ is what he called a subjective verb and ‘know’ what he called an objective verb. For this he gave two main criteria that subjective (...) verbs can take only ‘subjective that- clauses,’ by which he means clauses which express propositions, whereas objective verbs can take only ‘objective that-clauses,’ by which he means clauses which express facts; that subjective verbs cannot take, whereas objective verbs can take, wh- nominalisations - in practice these are the interrogatives what, who where, when, how - which Vendler also takes as a mark of the objective. (shrink)

Critics of reliability theories of epistemic justificationoften claim that the `generality problem' is an insurmountabledifficulty for such theories. The generality problem is theproblem of specifying the level of generality at which abelief-forming process is to be described for the purposeof assessing its reliability. This problem is not asintractable as it seems. There are illuminating solutionsto analogous problems in the ethics literature. Reliabilistsought to attend to utilitarian approaches to choices betweeninfinite utility streams; they also ought to attend towelfarist approaches to social (...) choice situations that donot demand full aggregation of individual welfares.These analogies suggest that the traditional `single number'approach to reliability is misguided. I argue that a newapproach – the `vector reliability' approach – is preferable.Vector reliability theories associate target beliefs withreliability vectors – that is, structured collections ofreliability numbers – and construct criteria of epistemicjustification that appeal to these vectors. The bulk of thetheoretical labor involved in a reliability account of epistemicjustification is thus transferred from picking a uniquereliability number to constructing a plausible criterionof epistemic justification. (shrink)

Critics of reliability theories of epistemic justificationoften claim that the `generality problem' is an insurmountabledifficulty for such theories. The generality problem is theproblem of specifying the level of generality at which abelief-forming process is to be described for the purposeof assessing its reliability. This problem is not asintractable as it seems. There are illuminating solutionsto analogous problems in the ethics literature. Reliabilistsought to attend to utilitarian approaches to choices betweeninfinite utility streams; they also ought to attend towelfarist approaches to social (...) choice situations that donot demand full aggregation of individual welfares.These analogies suggest that the traditional `single number'approach to reliability is misguided. I argue that a newapproach – the `vector reliability' approach – is preferable.Vector reliability theories associate target beliefs withreliability vectors – that is, structured collections ofreliability numbers – and construct criteria of epistemicjustification that appeal to these vectors. The bulk of thetheoretical labor involved in a reliability account of epistemicjustification is thus transferred from picking a uniquereliability number to constructing a plausible criterionof epistemic justification. (shrink)

Generative artificial intelligence systems based on transformers, including both text-generators like GPT-4 and image generators like DALL-E 3, have recently entered the popular consciousness. These tools, while impressive, are liable to reproduce, exacerbate, and reinforce extant human social biases, such as gender and racial biases. In this paper, we systematically review the extent to which DALL-E Mini suffers from this problem. In line with the Model Card published alongside DALL-E Mini by its creators, we find that the images it produces (...) tend to represent dozens of different occupations as populated either solely by men (e.g., pilot, builder, plumber) or solely by women (e.g., hairdresser, receptionist, dietitian). In addition, the images DALL-E Mini produces tend to represent most occupations as populated primarily or solely by White people (e.g., farmer, painter, prison officer, software engineer) and very few by non-White people (e.g., pastor, rapper). These findings suggest that exciting new AI technologies should be critically scrutinized and perhaps regulated before they are unleashed on society. (shrink)

Is it possible to advance democracy by empowering ordinary citizens to make key decisions about the design of political institutions and policies? In 2004, the government of British Columbia embarked on a bold democratic experiment: it created an assembly of 160 near-randomly selected citizens to assess and redesign the province's electoral system. The British Columbia Citizens' Assembly represents the first time a citizen body has had the power to reform fundamental political institutions. It was an innovative gamble that has been (...) replicated elsewhere in Canada and in the Netherlands, and is gaining increasing attention in Europe as a democratic alternative for constitution-making and constitutional reform. In the USA, advocates view citizens' assemblies as a means for reforming referendum processes. This book investigates the citizens' assembly in British Columbia to test and refine key propositions of democratic theory and practice. (shrink)

Avi Mintz (2008) has recently argued that Anglo-American educators have a tendency to alleviate student suffering in the classroom. According to Mintz, this tendency can be detrimental because certain kinds of suffering actually enhance student learning. While Mintz compellingly describes the effects of educator’s desires to alleviate suffering in students, he does not examine one of the roots of the desire: the feeling of compassion or pity (used as synonyms here). Compassion leads many teachers to unreflectively alleviate student struggles. While (...) there are certainly times when compassion is necessary to help students learn, there are other times when it must be overcome. Compassion in the classroom is a two-edged sword that must be carefully employed; and yet it is often assumed that it is an unequivocal good that ought to trump all other impulses. In this article I hope to raise awareness concerning the promises and pitfalls of compassion in education by examining the theories of two historical figures who famously emphasised compassion in their philosophical writings: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche. Rousseau and Nietzsche argue that compassion is a powerful educational force but that it must be properly employed. For Rousseau and Nietzsche, compassion is necessary to develop self-mastery in human beings—the ultimate goal of education—but it is a compassion that must hurt in order to help. My hope is that Rousseau’s and Nietzsche’s ideas on compassion will encourage thoughtful reflection on the uses and abuses of compassion in education. (shrink)

While a great deal has been written on Plato's Lysis in philosophy and philology journals over the last thirty years, nothing has been published on Lysis in the major Anglo-American philosophy of education journals during that time. Nevertheless, this dialogue deserves attention from educators. In this essay, Mark Jonas argues that Lysis can serve as a model for educators who want to move their students beyond mere aporia, but also do not want to dictate answers to students. Although the (...) dialogue ends in Socrates's affirmation of aporia, his affirmation is actually meant to persuade his interlocutors to reflect on an epiphany they had previously experienced. In what follows, Jonas offers a close reading of relevant passages of Lysis, demonstrating the way that Socrates leads his interlocutors to an epiphany without forcing his answers upon them. (shrink)

Two of the distinctive ethical issues that arise for computer users (as opposed to computer programmers) have to do with the file formats that are used to encode information and the licensing terms for computer software. With respect to both issues, most professional philosophers do not recognize the burdens that they impose on others. Once one recognizes these burdens, a very simple argument demands changes in the behavior of the typical computer user: some of the ways we use computers gratuitously (...) impose significant burdens on others; it is wrong to impose significant burdens on others gratuitously; some of the ways we use computers are unethical. (shrink)

Abstract Differing interpretations of the political thought of David Hume have tended to emphasize either conservative, gradualist elements similar to Burke or rationalist aspects similar to Hobbes. The concept of indirect utility as used by Hume reconciles these two approaches. Indirect utility is best illustrated by Hume's conception of justice, in contrast to his conception of benevolence, which yields direct benefits. This understanding of Hume's consequentialism also helps underscore certain egalitarian aspects of Hume's thought.

Some adaptationist explanations are regarded as maximally solid and others fanciful just-so stories. Just-so stories are explanations based on very little evidence. Lack of evidence leads to circular-sounding reasoning: “this trait was shaped by selection in unseen ancestral populations and this selection must have occurred because the trait is present.” Well-supported adaptationist explanations include evidence that is not only abundant but selected from comparative, populational, and optimality perspectives, the three adaptationist subdisciplines. Each subdiscipline obtains its broad relevance in evolutionary biology (...) via assumptions that can only be tested with the methods of the other subdisciplines. However, even in the best-supported explanations, assumptions regarding variation, heritability, and fitness in unseen ancestral populations are always present. These assumptions are accepted given how well they would explain the data if they were true. This means that some degree of “circularity” is present in all evolutionary explanations. Evolutionary explanation corresponds not to a deductive structure, as biologists usually assert, but instead to ones such as abduction or induction. With these structures in mind, we show the way to a healthier view of “circularity” in evolutionary biology, and why integration across the comparative, populational, and optimality approaches is necessary. (shrink)

Let’s say that an act requires Person-Affecting Justification if and only if some alternative would have been better for someone. So, Lucifer breaking Xavier’s back requires Person-Affecting Justification because the alternative would have been better for Xavier. But the story continues: While Lucifer evades justice, Xavier moves on and founds a school for gifted children. Xavier’s deepest values become identified with the school and its community. When authorities catch Lucifer, he claims no Person-Affecting Justification is needed: because the attack set (...) Xavier on his life’s path, it’s no longer true that the alternative would have been better by the standard of what Xavier now values most. An unappealingly paternalistic way to hold Lucifer to account is to discount Xavier’s preferences as merely adaptive. Instead, I propose understanding the persons of Person-Affecting Justification to be not persons but person stages. This allows us to hold Lucifer to account without having to discount Xavier’s actual preferences, and has interesting implications for compensatory justice, including making sense of reparations for historical wrongs. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of self-overcoming has been largely misinterpreted in the philosophy of education journals. The misinterpretation partially stems from a misconstruction of Nietzsche’s perspectivism, and leads to a conception of self-overcoming that is inconsistent with Nietzsche’s educational ideals. To show this, I examine some of the prominent features of the so-called “debate” of the 1980s surrounding Nietzsche’s conception of self-overcoming. I then offer an alternative conception that is more consistent with Nietzsche’s thought, and (...) provides a more nuanced understanding of Nietzsche’s “anti-democratic” pedagogy. Ultimately, I argue that while Nietzsche’s educational philosophy is not egalitarian, it can be effectively utilized in “democratic” classrooms, assuming his concept of self-overcoming is properly construed. (shrink)

In his 2001 article 'Teaching to Lie and Obey: Nietzsche on Education', Stefan Ramaekers defends Nietzsche's concept of perspectivism against the charge that it is relativistic. He argues that perspectivism is not relativistic because it denies the dichotomy between the 'true' world and the 'seeming' world, a dichotomy central to claims to relativism. While Ramaekers' article is correct in denying relativistic interpretations of perspectivism it does not go far enough in this direction. In fact, the way Ramaekers makes his case (...) may actually encourage the charge of relativism, especially when it comes to his appropriation of perspectivism for education. This article proposes to pick up where Ramaekers left off. It will argue that Nietzsche's denial of the opposition between the 'true' world and the 'seeming' world opens up the possibility for the reestablishment of truth, albeit in a modified form. After examining Nietzsche's modified 'realist' epistemology, the paper will explore the implications of it for his philosophy of education. It will be argued that Nietzsche's educational philosophy is founded on his concept of perspectivism in so far as he demands that students be rigorously inculcated into a pedagogical framework that teaches students to discriminate between 'true' and 'false' perspectives. This framework is essential for the development of an intellectually robust and life-affirming culture. (shrink)

In his 2001 article ‘Teaching to Lie and Obey: Nietzsche on Education’, Stefan Ramaekers defends Nietzsche’s concept of perspectivism against the charge that it is relativistic. He argues that perspectivism is not relativistic because it denies the dichotomy between the ‘true’ world and the ‘seeming’ world, a dichotomy central to claims to relativism. While Ramaekers’ article is correct in denying relativistic interpretations of perspectivism it does not go far enough in this direction. In fact, the way Ramaekers makes his case (...) may actually encourage the charge of relativism, especially when it comes to his appropriation of perspectivism for education. This article proposes to pick up where Ramaekers left off. It will argue that Nietzsche’s denial of the opposition between the ‘true’ world and the ‘seeming’ world opens up the possibility for the reestablishment of truth, albeit in a modified form. After examining Nietzsche’s modified ‘realist’ epistemology, the paper will explore the implications of it for his philosophy of education. It will be argued that Nietzsche’s educational philosophy is founded on his concept of perspectivism in so far as he demands that students be rigorously inculcated into a pedagogical framework that teaches students to discriminate between ‘true’ and ‘false’ perspectives. This framework is essential for the development of an intellectually robust and life-affirming culture. (shrink)

Many teachers in teacher education programs are cursorily introduced to Dewey's ‘epochmaking’ ideas on interest and effort through discussions based on the need for child-centered pedagogies that utilize students' interests. Unfortunately, this strategy often tacitly encourages teachers to over-rely on students' interests. In this paper, I recommend a way of introducing Dewey's conception of interest that avoids the common pitfall of over-reliance on students' interests. I argue that if we focus on the changes Dewey made to the expression of his (...) philosophy during a seventeen-year period, we can help illuminate the force of his theory while protecting against unfortunate misinterpretations. (shrink)

Despite the periodic table having been discovered by chemists half a century before the discovery of electronic structure, modern designs are invariably based on physicists’ definition of periods. This table is a chemists’ table, reverting to the phenomenal periods that led to the table’s discovery. In doing so, the position of hydrogen is clarified.

In this essay, Mark Jonas argues that there are three broadly held misconceptions of Plato's philosophy that work against his relevance for contemporary moral education. The first is that he is an intellectualist who is concerned only with the cognitive aspect of moral development and does not sufficiently emphasize the affective and conative aspects; the second is that he is an elitist who believes that only philosopher-kings can attain true knowledge of virtue and it is they who should govern (...) society; the third is that he affirms the realm of the Forms as a literal metaphysical reality and believes that for individuals to attain virtue they must access this realm through contemplation. The goal of this essay is to correct these misconceptions. The rehabilitation of Plato's reputation may enable future researchers in moral education to discover in his philosophy new avenues for exploring how best to cultivate virtues in students. (shrink)

Following Lawrence Kohlberg it has been commonplace to regard Plato's moral theory as ‘intellectualist’, where Plato supposedly believes that becoming virtuous requires nothing other than ‘philosophical knowledge or intuition of the ideal form of the good’. This is a radical misunderstanding of Plato's educational programme, however. While Plato claims that knowledge is extremely important in the initial stages of the moral development of young adults, he also claims that knowledge must be followed by a rigorous process of imitation and habituation. (...) Like Aristotle, Plato believes that it is not possible to become virtuous if one does not practice the virtues under the guidance of virtuous role models. This paper seeks to illuminate this little recognised aspect of Plato's educational programme. When properly understood, Plato's theory offers educators important insights into how best to encourage the moral development of young adults. (shrink)

Suppose that Depletion will reduce the well-being of future people. Many of us would like to say that Depletion is wrong because of the harm to future people. However, it can easily be made to seem that Depletion is actually harmless – this is the non-identity problem. I discuss a particularly ingenious attempt by Melinda Roberts to attribute a harm to Depletion. I will argue that the magnitude of Roberts's harm is off target by many orders of magnitude: it is (...) just too tiny to explain the intuitive wrong of Depletion. (shrink)

In Book II of the Republic, Socrates briefly depicts a city where each inhabitant contributes to the welfare of all by performing the role for which he or she is naturally suited. Socrates calls this city the `true city ' and the `healthy one'. Nearly all commentators have argued that Socrates' praise of the city cannot be taken at face value, claiming that it does not represent Socrates' preferred community. The point of this paper is to argue otherwise. The claim (...) is that Socrates genuinely believes the city is a healthy and desirable city, and that he believes that the First City is in fact superior to the Kallipolis. (shrink)

‘‘Adaptive radiation’’ is an evocative metaphor for explosive evolutionary divergence, which for over 100 years has given a powerful heuristic to countless scientists working on all types of organisms at all phylogenetic levels. However, success has come at the price of making ‘‘adaptive radiation’’ so vague that it can no longer reflect the detailed results yielded by powerful new phylogeny-based techniques that quantify continuous adaptive radiation variables such as speciation rate, phylogenetic tree shape, and morphological diversity. Attempts to shoehorn the (...) results of these techniques into categorical ‘‘adaptive radiation: yes/no’’ schemes lead to reification, in which arbitrary quantitative thresholds are regarded as real. Our account of the life cycle of metaphors in science suggests that it is time to exchange the spent metaphor for new concepts that better represent the full range of diversity, disparity, and speciation rate across all of life. (shrink)

Mary Poppins is a magical film and a story of redemption that might be placed alongside the Parable of the Prodigal Son or A Christmas Carol. Mary may be the star of the film, but George Banks is its subject. If the world ever seemed wonderful and filled with surprises for George Banks as a child, it has since been supplanted by a world that is mechanical, predictable, and subject to the demands of business and of propriety. From Jack the (...) Giant Killer people learn that when pride has grown to gigantic proportions it ought to be killed; Cinderella teaches that the humble are exalted; Beauty and the Beast demonstrates the principle that loving the unlovable may result in the transformation from the beastly to the beautiful; and Mary Poppins reminds them that “There is no greater joy than that seen through the eyes of a child,” as Walt Disney observes in Saving Mr. Banks. (shrink)