Great Minds Think Different: Preserving Cognitive Diversity in an Age of Gene Editing

It is likely that gene editing technologies will become viable in the current century. As scientists uncover the genetic contribution to personality traits and cognitive styles, parents will face hard choices. Some of these choices will involve trade‐offs from the standpoint of the individual's welfare, while others will involve trade‐offs between what is best for each and what is good for all. Although we think we should generally defer to the informed choices of parents about what kinds of children to create, we argue that decisions to manipulate polygenic psychological traits will be much more ethically complicated than choosing Mendelian traits like blood type. We end by defending the principle of regulatory parsimony, which holds that when legislation is necessary to prevent serious harms, we should aim for simple rules that apply to all, rather than micro‐managing parental choices that shape the traits of their children. While we focus on embryo selection and gene editing, our arguments apply to all powerful technologies which influence the development of children

Boundary Images

How are images made, and how should we understand the capacities of digital images? This book investigates images as well as the technologies that host them. Its three chapters discuss the boundaries that images cross and blur between humans, machines, and nature and the ways in which images are political, material, and visual. Exploring these boundaries of images, this book places itself at the limits of the visual and beyond what can be seen, understanding these as starting points for the production of new and radically different ways of knowing about the world and its becomings

Reducing the Size of Combinatorial Optimization Problems Using the Operator Vaccine by Fuzzy Selector with Adaptive Heuristics

Nowadays, solving optimally combinatorial problems is an open problem. Determining the best arrangement of elements proves being a very complex task that becomes critical when the problem size increases. Researchers have proposed various algorithms for solving Combinatorial Optimization Problems (COPs) that take into account the scalability; however, issues are still presented with larger COPs concerning hardware limitations such as memory and CPU speed. It has been shown that the Reduce-Optimize-Expand (ROE) method can solve COPs faster with the same resources; in this methodology, the reduction step is the most important procedure since inappropriate reductions, applied to the problem, will produce suboptimal results on the subsequent stages. In this work, an algorithm to improve the reduction step is proposed. It is based on a fuzzy inference system to classify portions of the problem and remove them, allowing COPs solving algorithms to utilize better the hardware resources by dealing with smaller problem sizes, and the use of metadata and adaptive heuristics. The Travelling Salesman Problem has been used as a case of study; instances that range from 343 to 3056 cities were used to prove that the fuzzy logic approach produces a higher percentage of successful reductions

From Brave New World to Ready Player One; yesterday's dystopias as tomorrow's utopias

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the evolution of literary utopias and dystopias in light of what I consider to be the new master narrative of post-humanism. The inspiration for this project has been Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus (2017), which details some of the challenges and opportunities we might face in the future. This thesis will therefore explore the themes of his work and try to assess how this technological and ideological development changes our perception of an ideal society. I start this project by clarifying utopia and dystopia, before delving into a history of post-humanist ideology up to the present moment. This thesis then attempts a reading of Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley and Ready Player One (2011) by Ernest Cline. This reading of these two works will be a twofold attempt, where a comparison of traditional liberal humanist readings will be compared to post-humanist understandings. What this hopefully highlights is how post-humanism changes the definitions of what constitutes utopias and dystopias. Finally, I want to compare the two works and hopefully glean new insights about how post-humanism redefines ideal visions and ideal societies and avoiding the dangers of both utopias and dystopias in the post-human age

Fitness landscapes for predicting evolution between environments

Prediction of evolution is an ambitious undertaking that would consolidate knowledge from all fields of biology for the benefit of global health and biodiversity. Although prediction has been a foundational goal of population genetics theory, this goal is obstructed by the common simplifying assumptions of absent or weak genetic interactions (G⇥G), gene-by-environment interac tions (G⇥E), and higher-order epistasis-by-environment inter actions (G⇥G⇥E). This thesis examines the challenges posed by genetic and environmental interactions to the goal of predict ing evolution. Fitness landscapes models are brought to bear on data from both wild populations and laboratory conditions in order to investigate the predictability of two pressing issues: species-level biodiversity and antibiotic resistance evolution

Socio-economics of Personalized Medicine in Asia

The second decade of the twenty-first century has witnessed a surging interest in personalized medicine with the concomitant promise to enable more precise diagnosis and treatment of disease and illness, based upon an individual’s unique genetic makeup. In this book, my goal is to contribute to a growing body of literature on personalized medicine by tracing and analyzing how this field has blossomed in Asia. In so doing, I aim to illustrate how various social and economic forces shape the co-production of science and social order in global contexts. This book shows that there are inextricable transnational linkages between developing and developed countries and also provides a theoretically guided and empirically grounded understanding of the formation and usage of particular racial and ethnic human taxonomies in local, national and transnational settings

Prediction and Control: Global Population, Population Science, and Population Politics in the Twentieth Century.

The twentieth century was an exceptional period in the history of world population: it grew faster than it had before or has since, and became the subject of a new science --- demography --- and a critical arena of intervention for states, international agencies, and non-governmental organizations. This dissertation examines how population became a subject of expertise for scientists in North America and Western Europe between the world wars, and how that expertise both supported and challenged postwar programs that aimed to shape the world's population by limiting fertility, particularly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. At the beginning of the twentieth century, scientists and policy makers in North America and Western Europe increasingly understood social, political, and economic issues in biological terms, and viewed population engineering --- through the control of fertility and immigration --- as a key tool of governance. Between the world wars, scientists in a variety of fields began to analyze population dynamics, including both the quantity of individuals and the socioeconomic, racial, and national composition of populations (their "quality"). After World War II, governments and international and nongovernmental agencies increasingly sought demographic expertise to assist with planning both for population --- to accommodate expected changes in population size and/or composition --- and of population --- to engineer changes in population size and/or composition. Policy makers, philanthropists, and business leaders in the U.S. developed two new overpopulation discourses, each linking population growth to global disaster. The first was economic, attributing global poverty and inequality to rapid population growth in the global south. The second was environmental, attributing pollution and resource depletion directly to population growth. The proponents of these discourses called on demography for support, and raised substantial funds for demographic and biomedical research aimed at stemming fertility, particularly in the global south. Yet demographic research consistently failed to provide conclusive support for these overpopulation discourses. The dissertation concludes in 1984, when the postwar overpopulation discourses dissolved under political pressure from both the left --- which called for structural solutions to poverty and environmental degradation --- and the right --- which called for neoliberal market-based solutions.PHDHistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113440/1/eklanche_1.pd

Narrative in the Age of the Genome

Shortlisted for the 2021 BSLS Book Prize Genomic technologies have had a profound impact on understandings of what it means to be human and our links to the world we inhabit, and on practices of inhabiting the world. This open access book considers this impact across a range of literary forms, cultural practices, and political imaginaries, and argues that new descriptions of biological value introduced through practices of genomic sequencing from the late 1970s registered a broader crisis of narrative form. Examining a wide range of texts by Doris Lessing, Samuel Delany, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, Kir Bulychev, Kazuo Ishiguro, Saidiya Hartman, Yaa Gyasi, Svetlana Alexievich, and Jeff VanderMeer, Narrative in the Age of the Genome casts new light on the intersections of genomics with politics of racism, sexuality, labour and gender, neoliberal economics and environmental crisis. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The Wellcome Trus

STABLE ADAPTIVE STRATEGY of HOMO SAPIENS and EVOLUTIONARY RISK of HIGH TECH. Transdisciplinary essay

The co-evolutionary concept of Three-modal stable evolutionary strategy of Homo sapiens is developed. The concept based on the principle of evolutionary complementarity of anthropogenesis: value of evolutionary risk and evolutionary path of human evolution are defined by descriptive (evolutionary efficiency) and creative-teleological (evolutionary correctly) parameters simultaneously, that cannot be instrumental reduced to others ones. Resulting volume of both parameters define the trends of biological, social, cultural and techno-rationalistic human evolution by two gear mechanism ˗ gene-cultural co-evolution and techno- humanitarian balance. The resultant each of them can estimated by the ratio of socio-psychological predispositions of humanization/dehumanization in mentality. Explanatory model and methodology of evaluation of creatively teleological evolutionary risk component of NBIC technological complex is proposed. Integral part of the model is evolutionary semantics (time-varying semantic code, the compliance of the biological, socio-cultural and techno-rationalist adaptive modules of human stable evolutionary strategy)

The cultural revolution warfare at Beijing's Universities

Too little research has been conducted about the fascinating, confusing upheavals that shook China during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of 1966–68. Now, four decades after the mass fighting was suppressed, Andrew Walder helps to fill important gaps in our knowledge, in a 400-page book that examines the origins and chronicles the factional fighting at Beijing’s universitie