Colonialism, in its many forms and stages is often imposed as being central to the narratives of colonizedpeople and their cultures, as well as the genesis of their knowledge. In colonial discourse, lands and the occupants of these lands were ‘discovered’, further implying that colonized people did not have their own ways of knowing (nor even existence) before colonization. This narrative has been embedded within Euro‐American fields of study, including nursing, in which caring and healing practices that exist outside of (...) a colonial lens are dismissed and complicity with colonialism is downplayed or sanitized. This paper is a reflection on the current discourse on decolonizing nursing shaped by postcolonial, critical and Black feminist philosophies. After examining the decolonization discourse in nursing, I argue that current calls to decolonize nursing lack a clear description of the goals and process of doing so, making it unfeasible to hold those in the process of decolonizing accountable. In addition, the lack of intentionality in reckoning with past and current forms of colonialism embedded in nursing hinders the ability to engage with lessons that could shape the future. I conclude this discourse by discussing practical steps toward centrering diverse ways of knowing, and ensuring this process prioritizes communities and nurse scholars who have historically been silenced. (shrink)

Scholars of color have been instrumental in advancing nursing knowledge development but find limited spaces where one can authentically share their philosophical perspective. Although there is a call for antiracism in nursing and making way for more diverse and inclusive theories and philosophies, our voices remain at the margins of nursing theory and philosophy. In nursing philosophy, there continues to be a lack of racial diversity in those who are given the platform to share their scholarship. Five nurse scholars of (...) color attended the International Nursing Philosophy Conference in August 2022. We established a collective system of support by sharing our experiences as researchers, scholars, and educators with each other. The theory of emancipatory nursing praxis informed this process. In this dialogue, we reflected on what it is like to present at and attend predominantly white nursing conferences. We shared our experiences of how we exist as nurse scholars, our philosophical views, and our thoughts on how we create spaces where scholars of color can feel welcomed and acknowledged for their contributions to advancing nursing knowledge. (shrink)

This paper analyzes a model of sequential parimutuel betting described as a two-horse race with a finite number of noise bettors and a finite number of strategic and symmetrically informed bettors. For generic objective probabilities that the favorite wins the race, a unique subgame perfect equilibrium is characterized. Additionally, two explanations for the favorite–longshot bias—according to which favorites win more often than the market's estimate of their winning chances imply—are offered. It is shown that this robust anomalous empirical regularity (...) might be due to the presence of transaction costs and/or to strategic bettors' subjective attitude to probabilities. (shrink)

Trichoplax adhaerens is more simply organized than any other living metazoan. This tiny marine animal looks like a irregular “hairy plate” (“tricho plax”) with a simple upper and lower epithelium and some loose cells in between. After its original description by F.E. Schulze 1883, it attracted particular attention as a potential candidate representing the basic and ancestral state of metazoan organization. The lack of any kind of symmetry, organs, nerve cells, muscle cells, basal lamina and extracellular matrix originally left little (...) doubt about the basal position of T. adhaerens. Nevertheless, the interest of zoologists and evolutionary biologists suddenly vanished for more than half a century when Trichoplax was claimed to be an aberrant hydrozoan planula larva. Recently, Trichoplax has been rediscovered as a key species for unraveling early metazoan evolution. For example, research on regulatory genes and whole genome sequencing promise insights into the genetics underlying the origin and development of basal metazoan phyla. Trichoplax offers unique potential for understanding the minimal requirements of metazoan animal organization. BioEssays 27:1294–1302, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Kant’s claim that we must postulate the immortality of the soul is polarizing. While much attention has been paid to two standard arguments in its defense (one moral-psychological, the other rational), I contend that a favorite argument of Kant’s from the apogee of his critical period, namely, the teleological argument, deserves renewed attention. This paper reconstructs it and exhibits what makes it unique (though not necessarily superior) in relation to the other arguments. In particular, its form (as third-personal or (...) descriptive, beginning from observations) and related force of assent (as a subjectively universal reflective judgment) set it apart from the other arguments. My goal is to establish that any engagement with Kant’s immortality postulate must include equal consideration of the teleological argument in order to be complete. (shrink)

Amphioxus represents the most basally divergent group in chordates and probably the best extant proxy to the ancestor of all chordates including vertebrates. The amphioxus, or lancelets, are benthic filter feeding marine animals and their interest as a model in research is due to their phylogenetic position and their anatomical and genetic stasis throughout their evolutionary history. From the first works in the 19th century to the present day, enormous progress is made mainly favored by technical development at different levels, (...) from spawning induction and husbandry techniques, through techniques for studies of gene function or of the role of different signalling pathways through embryonic development, to functional genomics techniques. Together, these advances foretell a plethora of interesting developments in the world of research with the amphioxus model. Here, the author review the discovery and development of amphioxus as a superb model organism in evolutionary and evolutionary‐developmental biology. (shrink)

The gut protozoan parasite, Giardia duodenalis, is the best characterized example of the most ancient eukaryotes, which are anaerobic and appear to be primitively amitochondrial. Apart from its obvious medical importance, Giardia is fascinating in its own right. Its prokaryotic-like anaerobic metabolism renders it selectively sensitive to some bacterial drugs, especially the nitroimidazoles, which are activated to form toxic radicals. Other features, including an enzyme that reduces oxygen directly to water, cysteine as the keeper of redox balance, a plasmid, and (...) toxin-like genes are also distinctly prokaryotic-like. But, unlike prokaryotes, Giardia has a sophisticated, highly developed cytoskeleton, bounded nuclei, linear chromosomes capped with telomeric repeats, and telomere positional regulation of gene expression. BioEssays 20:256–263, 1998.© 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

The gut protozoan parasite, Giardia duodenalis, is the best characterized example of the most ancient eukaryotes, which are anaerobic and appear to be primitively amitochondrial. Apart from its obvious medical importance, Giardia is fascinating in its own right. Its prokaryotic-like anaerobic metabolism renders it selectively sensitive to some bacterial drugs, especially the nitroimidazoles, which are activated to form toxic radicals. Other features, including an enzyme that reduces oxygen directly to water, cysteine as the keeper of redox balance, a plasmid, and (...) toxin-like genes are also distinctly prokaryotic-like. But, unlike prokaryotes, Giardia has a sophisticated, highly developed cytoskeleton, bounded nuclei, linear chromosomes capped with telomeric repeats, and telomere positional regulation of gene expression. BioEssays 20:256–263, 1998.© 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

“Let me begin with the standard stupid question: if I were allowed to take only one piece of music to a lone island, which one this would be? [...]”.

A Paramecium cell has a stereotypically patterned surface, with regularly arranged cilia, dense‐core secretory vesicles and subplasmalemmal calcium stores. Less strikingly, there is also a patterning of molecules; for instance, some ion channels are restricted to certain regions of the cell surface. This design may explain very effective and selective responses, such as that to Ca2+ upon stimulation. It enables the cell to respond to a Ca2+ signal precisely secretion (exocytosis) or by changing its ciliary activity. These responses depend on (...) the location and/or type of signal, even though these two target structures co‐exist side‐by‐side, and normally only limited overlap occurs between the different functions. Furthermore, the patterning of exocytotic sites and the possibility of synchronous exocytosis induction in the sub‐second time range have considerably facilitated analyses, and thus led to new concepts of exocytotic membrane fusion. It has been possible to dissect complicated events like overlapping Ca2+ fluxes produced from external sources and from internal stores. Since molecular genetic approaches have become available for Paramecium, many different gene products have been identified only some of which are known from “higher” eukaryotes. Although a variety of basic cellular functions are briefly addressed to demonstrate the uniqueness of this unicellular organism, this article focuses on exocytosis regulation. BioEssays 24:649–658, 2002. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Injection of a peptide of 36 amino acids into virgin Drosophila females changes their reproductive properties drastically: males are rejected and egg laying is increased. The neuronal and physiological properties of the virgin state are replaced by a new pattern of behavior and stimulation of egg production and deposition. Under natural conditions, the peptide is synthesized by the male and transferred into the female during copulation. The sex‐peptide, therefore, can be considered as a pheromone. In this review, I shall limit (...) my discussion to Drosophila melanogaster. (shrink)

This article provides insight into one form of audience involvement with celebrities: parasocial relationships. To address several shortcomings in PSR research – focus on TV, confusion between PSI and PSR, use of student samples, neglect of socio-demographic variables – a representative online survey was conducted with 1000 Flemish adults who indicated 382 celebrities as favorites. A new scale reveals that PSR contain two important elements: emotional connections and an analogy with social relationships. Confirming previous research, most favorite celebrities are (...) male, and cultural proximity is especially important for older respondents. In one combined model, respondents’ and celebrities’ characteristics are included as potential PSR predictors. This model nuances previous research and reveals that people who are male, older, more lowly-educated, and interested in celebrity news have stronger PSR. Further, stronger PSR are found for local and religious, political, sports, and music celebrities than for film celebrities. (shrink)

This article closely reads “Chelsea Girls,” an autobiographical short story by Eileen Myles that depicts her experience caring for the diabetic, bipolar poet James Schuyler when she was a young writer getting started in East Village in the late 1970s. Their dependency relationship is a form of queer kinship, an early version of the caring relations between lesbians and gay men that HIV/aids would demand over the next two decades as chosen families emerged to nurture gay men and lesbians rejected (...) by their families of origin. The representation of queer kinship offers an alternative to more traditional portrayals of care in literature that focus on the heteronormative family, a site of care that feminist dependency theory also paradoxically privileges. This article synthesizes insights from queer theory and critical disability studies in order to expand our understanding of the roles participants in care can play, the ways they can feel, and the outcomes they can achieve. Myles and Schuyler’s dependency relationship was sustaining for both of them and also critical for her development as a pioneering lesbian poet in an art world still dominated by men. (shrink)

The paper generalizes Van McGee's well-known result that there are many maximal consistent sets of instances of Tarski's schema to a number of non-classical theories of truth. It is shown that if a non-classical theory rejects some classically valid principle in order to avoid the truth-theoretic paradoxes, then there will be many maximal non-trivial sets of instances of that principle that the non-classical theorist could in principle endorse. On the basis of this it is argued that the idea of classical (...) recapture, which plays such an important role for non-classical logicians, can only be pushed so far. (shrink)

This book challenges the notion that humans aren't any more important than, say, ants, and ethics and politics must be adjusted accordingly as not to rank human concerns as primary.

It had to happen. After two full decades of intense energy, business ethicists and business practitioners may actually have succeeded in suppressing the feeblest joke of the profession: “Business Ethics. Isn’t that an oxymoron?” Har har har.In the early days of business ethics, the oxymoron had actual embodiments. “Business” was represented by hard-nosed, thicks-kinnedmanagers with no inclination to adopt academia’s language and critiques. “Ethics” was embodied by ivory-towered theoreticians with an undisguised contempt for profit makers. What a joke to think (...) of these two groups as conceptually productive partners. (shrink)

It had to happen. After two full decades of intense energy, business ethicists and business practitioners may actually have succeeded in suppressing the feeblest joke of the profession: “Business Ethics. Isn’t that an oxymoron?” Har har har.In the early days of business ethics, the oxymoron had actual embodiments. “Business” was represented by hard-nosed, thicks-kinnedmanagers with no inclination to adopt academia’s language and critiques. “Ethics” was embodied by ivory-towered theoreticians with an undisguised contempt for profit makers. What a joke to think (...) of these two groups as conceptually productive partners. (shrink)

In The Problem of Punishment, David Boonin offers an analysis of punishment and an account of what he sees as ethically problematic about it. In this essay I make three points. First, pace Boonin's analysis, everyday examples of punishment show that it sometimes isn't harmful, but merely "discomforting." Second, intentionally discomforting offenders isn't uniquely problematic, given that we have cases of non-punitive intentional discomforture---and perhaps even harmful discomforture---that seem unobjectionable. Third, a notable fact about both non-harmful punishment and non-punitive intentional (...) discomforture is that they aim at improving the subject. This suggests that, if the prima facie wrongness of intentionally harming another person is the fundamental challenge for punishment, the "educative defense" is the royal road to justifying the practice. I conclude by outlining one version of the educative defense that exploits this advantage while avoiding some traditional objections to the approach. (shrink)

Comparative genomics has proven a fruitful approach to acquire many functional and evolutionary insights into core cellular processes. Here it is argued that in order to perform accurate and interesting comparative genomics, one first and foremost has to be able to recognize, postulate, and revise different evolutionary scenarios. After all, these studies lack a simple protocol, due to different proteins having different evolutionary dynamics and demanding different approaches. The authors here discuss this challenge from a practical (what are the observations?) (...) and conceptual (how do these indicate a specific evolutionary scenario?) viewpoint, with the aim to guide investigators who want to analyze the evolution of their protein(s) of interest. By sharing how the authors draft, test, and update such a scenario and how it directs their investigations, the authors hope to illuminate how to execute molecular evolution studies and how to interpret them. Also see the video abstract here https://youtu.be/VCt3l2pbdbQ. (shrink)

In Putting Humans First: Why We Are Nature’s Favorite, Tibor Machan argues against moral perspectives that require taking animals’ interests seriously. He attempts to defend the status quo regarding routine, harmful uses of animals for food, fashion and experimentation. Graham and Nobis show that his arguments fail: they arguments provide no good reason to resist pro-animal moral conclusions that are supported by a wide range of contemporary ethical arguments.

A straightforward way to handle moral uncertainty is simply to follow the moral theory in which you have most credence. This approach is known as My Favourite Theory. In this paper, I argue that, in some cases, My Favourite Theory prescribes choices that are, sequentially, worse in expected moral value than the opposite choices according to each moral theory you have any credence in. In addition this, problem generalizes to other approaches that avoid intertheoretic comparisons of value, such as My (...) Favourite Option, the Borda Rule, Variance Normalization, and the Principle of Maximizing Expected Normalized Moral Value. (shrink)

One of the principles on how to act under moral uncertainty, My Favourite Theory, says roughly that a morally conscientious agent chooses an option that is permitted by the most credible moral theory. In defence of this principle, we argue that it prescribes consistent choices over time, without relying on intertheoretic comparisons of value, while its main rivals are either plagued by moral analogues of money pumps or in need of a method for making non-arbitrary intertheoretic comparisons. We rebut the (...) arguments that have been levelled against My Favourite Theory and offer some arguments against intertheoretic comparisons of value. (shrink)

Tetrahymena has been used as a model cell system in many studies of morphogenesis, conjugation, gene mapping, cell division and growth kinetics. In this article, we consider some advances which have resulted from the successful development of a chemically defined medium (CDM), and how subsequent work has extended the contribution that this organism has made to our understanding of different aspects of growth, nutrition, cell cycle control, cytokinesis and intercellular signalling. Finally, we discuss the considerable potential that has arisen for (...) the biotechnological exploitation of this big and rapidly growing eukaryotic cell. (shrink)

Thy‐1 is a small glycoprotein of 110 amino acids which, folded in the characteristic structure of an immunoglobulin variable domain1, are anchored to the plasma membrane via a glycophosphatidylinositol (GPI) tail(2,3) (Fig. 1). It is a major component of the surface of various cell types, including neurons, at certain stages of their development (4). These qualities doubtlessly appeal to certain cognoscenti, but it is not clear why they would raise Thy‐1 to the status of a favourite molecule. Indeed, few scientists (...) readily admit to having a favourite. We study individual molecules because science is rooted in specific observations; but we do so in order to discover mechanisms of general importance. A molecule's appeal is dependent on its ability to reveal novel aspects of how nature works.Thy‐1 has been unusual in this respect. It was the first lymphocyte surface antigen shown to be restricted to a functional subset of lymphocytes (T cells in the mouse), a finding crucial to the development of cellular immunology(5); it was one of the first cell surface molecules to be sequenced and indicated the importance of immunoglobulin domains and GPI anchors as structural motifs(1–3); it has been pivotal in studies demonstrating that GPI‐anchored molecules are able to signal across the membrane they do not span(6, 7). Thy‐1 has revealed this much, however, with the charm of an adroit stripper: it has always promised glimpses of things more exciting than that displayed. In particular, the function of this molecule has never emerged.Our current work on Thy‐1 in the nervous system is, we believe, finally prizing this last secret into the open. It suggests that Thy‐1 on the neuronal surface interacts with one of the main glial types of adult brain, the astrocyte, to restrict axonal growth(8). There is no current consensus that astrocytes do regulate such growth, and this is the wider question we are addressing from the perspective of Thy‐1. At issue also is how to progress from knowing the nature of a molecule to defining its function. This task has already been achieved with molecules which were harder to characterise than Thy‐1. The problem is a classic Catch 22 situation: Thy‐1 has been readily characterised because it is small and abundant it is ten times more abundant than any other surface glycoprotein on rat thymocytes(9); but since there is so much of it, whatever it does it must do rather badly (or there would be no need to have so much of it!). Defining a function based on low activity or affinity is not trivial.Here I describe two aspects of work on Thy‐1. One is long completed ‐ the research which led to Thy‐1 being isolated and characterised ‐ and included because it demonstrates features which are still applicable to much research using a antibodies today. The other is our ongoing work on the nervous system, which is at that exciting early stage where hypotheses are formed, but the answers are still coming in. (shrink)

Meiotin‐1 is a protein found in developing microsporocytes of Lilium longiflorum, and immunological assays indicate that cognates exist in both mono‐ and dicotyledonous plants. Its temporal and spatial expression pattern, coupled with its unusual distribution in chromatin and the properties it shares with histone H1, encourages speculation that it is involved in regulating meiotic chromatin structure. Molecular analyses provide support for the hypothesis that meiotin‐1 arose from histone H1 by an exon shuffling mechanism, as meiotin‐1 is an H1‐like protein that (...) lacks the amino‐terminal domain shared by H1 molecules. We have proposed that meiotin‐1 serves to limit chromatin condensation in order to foster the unique cytological and molecular events which occur during meiotic prophase. As such, meiotin‐1 fits the role of a ‘meiosis readiness factor’, and its accumulation to a threshold level may commit mitotically dividing progenitor cells to differentiate into meiocytes. (shrink)

Nucleosomes are the basic elements of chromatin structure. Polyamines, such as spermine and spermidine, are small ubiquitous molecules absolutely required for cell growth. Photoaffinity polyamines bind to specific locations in nucleosomes and can change the helical twist of DNA in nucleosomes. Acetylation of polyamines reduces their affinity for DNA and nucleosomes, thus the helical twist of DNA in nucleosomes could be regulated by cells through acetylation. I suggest that histone and polyamine acetylation act synergistically to modulate chromatin structure. On naked (...) DNA, the photoaffinity spermine bound preferentially to a specific ‘TATA’ sequence element, suggesting that polyamines may be involved in the unusual chromatin structure in this region. Further work is needed to test whether the specificities shown by photoaffinity polyamines are also shown by cellular polyamines; such experiments are now feasible. (shrink)

Microinjection of frog oocytes, a technique whose usefulness for studies on gene expression is already established, may be similarly helpful for the unraveling of several enigmas of cellular metabolism and its organization.

The discovery of the signal peptides that direct proteins to localize at the nucleolus is described here. The nucleolar targeting signal termed the NOS consists of clustered basic amino acids organized such that a portion also functions as the nuclear transporting signal. Although a NOS has been identified within the regulatory genes of human retroviruses, HTLV‐I and HIV‐I, signals of similar function in cellular proteins – such as heat shock proteins – may be induced through the configurational change of protein (...) structure by heat or stress. (shrink)