Search Results

Traditional liberal paradigms in bioethics have rested on a misleading picture of the self as a separate individual. This chapter develops a biologicized picture of the self as a “way station”: so to speak, a launching pad and breeding ground of biological organisms, some pathological and many benign, that are transmitted from one human individual to another. Understanding people as way-station selves embedded in a web of infectious disease requires rethinking some of the most basic concepts of bioethics: autonomy, the harm principle, and responsibility, among others. The autonomous agent cannot be seen as an isolated individual, but must be viewed as acting in biological relationships with others. The harm principle's basic idea that intervention is permissible only to prevent people from harming each other must be reshaped by the recognition that there is no easy way to separate actions that harm only the individual him/herself from actions that affect others. Responsibility must be rethought in light of the biological reality that people may infect others unknowingly, and may never know the sources of the infections they contract. Although people may be more or less aware of their susceptibility to infectious disease, there is always a sense in which each person stands in unknown relationships of potential contagion to others.

This chapter compares the biological accounts of the evolution of modules with what is known about the evolution of modular systems in engineering. It describes the problem of mapping functions on a modular structure. It demonstrates that the benefits and the costs must be considered to explain the evolution of modular organization of biological organisms. It specifically explains the costs of a longer period of development, tara costs, autonomy costs, and costs for module-wise replacement. This chapter shows that there might have been an adaptive evolutionary path leading to the modular organization, without eliminating the possibility that exactly the proposed evolutionary pathway was highly unlikely to occur because of fitness-decreasing “side effects”.

Biological organisms have developed millions of responses to a variety of threats including diseases, resource scarcity, and natural disasters, as evidenced by methods of survival and reproduction. This book discusses how biological organisms maintain security in a hostile environment. It also draws an analogy between societal security problems and solutions developed in nature to shed light on strengths or weaknesses of societal security systems. In this chapter, examples of applications of biological study to societal security concerns are presented. It also provides an overview of the potential biological inspirations for solving security problems in modern society.

This book tries to elaborate the functionality of biological organisms and of technical artifacts. It also presents proper philosophical analyses of the concept of function from a perspective that embraces both fields of function ascription. It aims at a better understanding of the concept of “function” itself and also much more generally of the similarities and differences between organisms and artifacts insofar as they are related to functionality. It then contributes to the emancipation of the philosophy of technical artifacts. It provides a number of significant results that must be taken into account in future discussions about the possibility of a unified function theory for biology and technology.

This chapter discusses Gumilev's ideas on the nature of ethnicity. The ethnic unit or ethnos (plural: ethnies) is conceived as one of the most fundamental and durable categories of human organization. Ethnic belonging is an existential mode of being that forms an intrinsic and immutable part of the very persona of all individuals. It is a feature of human nature, which can be neither transcended nor transformed. Gumilev frequently used the metaphor of a biological organism, likening the ethnos either to an individual human being—which in a similar fashion “is born, matures, grows old, and dies”—or to aggregate organisms found in the natural world. But how, exactly, was an ethnos biological? It is important to appreciate that Gumilev's understanding of ethnic naturalism was two-sided in a manner that corresponded to two different dimensions of nature itself—what might be called “internal” and “external” nature. Gumilev himself was aware of this dualism in his approach, and he believed that in his ethnos theory he was successful in combining the two dimensions into a single grand perspective. The chapter, however, argues that this was not the case. Despite his obvious enthusiasm for genetic models and hypotheses and his imaginative attempts to deploy them, in the final analysis he did not accept their implications for the nature of ethnicity. For Gumilev, therefore, the biological naturalness of the ethnos was primarily environmental, elaborated in terms of what we will call his ecology of ethnicity.

This chapter introduces the useful model-analytic tools of both sensitivity analysis and structured singular value analysis and their application to cellular networks. It reviews the Nyquist stability criterion and extends it to conditions guaranteeing robust stability (RS). It then examines the structured singular value analysis for robust performance. This chapter shows that control-theoretic tools, such as sensitivity analysis and phase sensitivity, offer powerful means for network elucidation and manipulation in biological systems. It suggests that using tools from control theory to guide both mathematical modeling and experimental design can facilitate the iterative paradigm of systems biology and shed light on the complex network behavior underlying biological organisms.