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The book concludes with a brief summary of the approach to modelling speech production and perception. The relationship between linguistic and biological modelling is emphasized. Focus is given to the wrapper model and the way in which speech production and perception are probably tightly integrated in the human being, and certainly usefully modelled as such.

This chapter looks at examples of biological approaches to understanding two mental disorders: schizophrenia and addiction. It shows that biological models in psychiatry depend on an implicit concept referred to as “soma”. Soma is what holds together biological psychiatry's conception of the body—an overarching conception of the kind of thing a body is. As such, it sets the agenda for psychiatric research on bodies: given that the body is such and such kind of thing, psychiatrists expect to find these other kinds of things as part of the body or related to it. It is argued that soma functions in a manner analogous to a Sellarsian Given. As a result, it also suffers the problems of the Given. Biological psychiatry would do better to approach soma in a different way, thereby opening a genuine place for the mind in neural explanations.

The variety of mental health treatments must be understood, at least partially, as a reflection of evolving sets of values and assumptions, sharing certain common theoretical roots along with some distinctive perspectives. Each new treatment development introduces new assumptions about what causes change, and these assumptions, in turn, contribute to the evolution of a society's philosophy about the nature of the people who live within the society itself. Biological models, psychodynamic models, and behavioral models of change all reflect different assumptions about depression, and all come from slightly different branches on the evolutionary tree of knowledge. Each has been built on models that went before, but the evolution of each was accepted only because it occurred within a nurturing culture or subculture and at a time when those views were ecologically compatible with the particular social groups who gave them recognition. In developing and presenting our basic and optimal treatment guidelines, we elected to abandon reliance on techniques and procedures that derive from specific theories of psychopathology.

Synthesis systems need to address several difficulties to produce acceptable expressive synthetic speech. It is argued that the role of adequate phonological description, robust biological models of the speaking system, and the need for a supervisory agent — the cognitive phonetic agent — are essential to building expressive synthesis systems. Such agents are sometimes referred to as ‘cerebral tools’.

Natural philosophers and biologists of the past sought to make sense of the many types of plants and creatures that, if not made for humans, were at least created by imaginative gods. As the Renaissance yielded enlightenment, the classification of organisms and a study of their structures embodied a new attempt to subdue the mystery of life. The effort was satisfying in confirming the systematic intentions of the designer. But as the last millennium progressed, the urge simply to recognize and sort plants and animals gave way to an ambition to understand their origins, functions, and diversity. Detached from constraints of authority by the examples of Galileo and Newton, the early explorers of the living domain began to ask empirical questions buried for centuries, latent in the human imagination. This chapter explores the choice and use of organisms in answering these questions. The organisms now living on earth are so diverse that one must ask how biologists made such choices. It looks at the organisms that brought biology to the beginning of the 20th century, when particular models began to guide experimental research and for a time limited our appreciation of organismic diversity. In doing so, it shows how very recent our understanding of living things really is, and why we saw such an acceleration of biological research in the 20th century.

This chapter examines theoretical models of suicide and nonfatal suicidal behaviors. The models of suicidal behavior include sociological, psychological, biological, family, and biopsychosocial models. Sociological models are categorized into egoistic, altruistic, anomic, and fatalistic suicides. Psychological models include psychodynamic, cognitive, social learning, and psychological and interpersonal models. The chapter also discusses the developmental theories that are applicable for constructing models of suicidal processes.

This chapter discusses the practice of “leveraging” genetic mutations. When a rare mutation is strongly associated with a common trait or medical condition, biomedical researchers often use the population with that mutation as a biological model for much broader, otherwise intractable questions about human difference. A trio of case studies shows how researchers can leverage mutations, turning genomically designated conditions into privileged sites of biomedical knowledge production: MAOA mutations and Brunner Syndrome as a model for aggression and crime; the 7q11.23 microdeletion that causes Williams Syndrome as a model for sociability and language; and the Fragile X mutation/syndrome as a model for psychiatric disorders like autism. The leveraging alliance between the Fragile X and autism movements was so successful it became a beacon for advocates dedicated to other genetic disorders. Although biologists have long used the abnormal as a lens onto broad questions about life, the most powerful forms of leveraging today take aim at common forms of human illness. Mutations can now serve as "boundary objects" that unite different disciplines, funding agencies, commercial actors, and advocacy organizations. In this way, the very meaning of a genetic mutation can be transformed by the changing “biosocial” networks built up around it.

There is a long history of using mathematical modeling to study and improve aspects of population health. This chapter provides a brief overview of the diversity of such applications to complex health-related outcomes, including biological modeling (highlighting applications in infectious disease and human physiology), statistical modeling, cost-effectiveness analysis, and operations research (highlighting applications in queueing systems, Bayesian decision-making, and constrained optimization). Motivating objectives, typical model structure, and analyses are briefly described for each. As computational power has increased, computer simulation is often used to model complex phenomena. This chapter reminds readers of the many examples in which mathematical equations are used to parsimoniously represent complex systems and to understand their behavior. When mathematical models are tractable, analysts can obtain closed-form equations characterizing steady-state system behavior and tipping conditions—which provide a powerful and often easy to use tool for decision makers.

This chapter briefly introduces error management theory, an evolutionary framework for understanding how natural selection should be expected to shape decision-making mechanisms. Selection minimizes not the overall rate of error in decision making, but rather the expected fitness burden of error. This means that where the fitness impact of errors is asymmetric (e.g., when failing to run from a predator that is present is more costly than running from a predator which is not in fact there), evolution will favor mechanisms that choose the cheap error much more often than the costly one. This principle can be applied to decision making in many different domains. This chapter discusses the relationships between error management theory and expected utility theory, and the extent to which error management theory can be invoked to explain the prevalence of biased beliefs.

The executive branch departments and agencies of the national government have the key role in the implementation stage of the policy process. In the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA), the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) was assigned the task of providing an annual report on the condition of the nation’s environment, assessing the effects of national, state, and local governments’ efforts to protect the environment, and developing recommendations to improve environmental quality. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was given the primary responsibility for implementing the pollution control laws Congress created between 1970 and 1980, amendments to those laws, and new laws enacted during the next three decades. Some scholars have maintained that the process of implementing a public law is “removed from the hurry and strife of politics,” since the important political and substantive matters have been decided in the law itself. Other scholars, however, describe the implementation stage of the policy process as a continuation of the political struggle that occurred over the creation of the law. The competition between these two views of policy implementation is one factor that makes the study of the “life cycles” of executive branch departments and agencies so important. If the first view is correct, the implementation of a public law should be a relatively smooth process in which the leadership, managers, and professionals in agencies like the CEQ and the EPA carry out their assigned statutory duties. Likewise, the life cycle of the executive branch agency should be relatively stable and long. Finally, absent serious flaws in the design of the policy itself, the prospects for successful implementation of the law might seem to be relatively high. If the alternative view of policy implementation is correct, however, the extent to which implementation of a public law actually occurs is likely to depend heavily on the health, vitality, and even survival of the implementing agency. In turn, the health and vitality of the executive branch agency is likely to depend on the leadership of the agency and the resources that Congress and the president appropriate for it.

This chapter suggests a possible grounding in the mimetic encounter between hunter and prey, and also suggests how people are able to understand animal personhood, which opposes both anthropological and biological models. It identifies the differences between humans and animals, the connection between hunting and sex, and mimetic empathy and perspectivism.

In “Penelope,” James Joyce uses a controversial debate on women's so-called diseases as a provocative intertext for the representation of Molly Bloom's sexuality. Her recollection of a gynecological visit, which took place in 1888, responds explicitly to the complex turn-of-the-century discourse that related womanhood, pathology, and social politics. Further, it recalls fin-de-siècle fears about medical abuse that were most sensationally captured in the image of Jack the Ripper. While doctors multiplied the number of surgical operations performed on women's anesthetized bodies, feminists and antivivisectionists ferociously condemned both the ideological foundation for and the consequences of the mutilations resulting from doctors' surgical interventions. Surprisingly, though, as “Penelope” reveals, the argument about women's social inferiority that the biological model had established received support by another, much more subtle medical interventionism. Patent medicine forms an equally central medical subtext in “Penelope”.

This chapter outlines the aims of the book and introduces its methodology. It explores the notion of childhood as a construct used by adults for emotional, social, and legal purposes. It provides an overview of influential theories concerning childhood, distinguishing between biological and social models of development, and highlighting that the majority of such studies have been carried out in the Global North. It introduces the concept of the aesthetic social imagination as the basis for understanding the social functions of visual and material objects, and in the process, it explores the nature of visuality and the agency of objects. Finally, it provides a brief overview of the use of visual images in literature for children in Islamic societies.