130,939 research outputs found
Halting the 'sad degenerationist parade': medical concerns about heredity and racial degeneracy in New Zealand psychiatry, 1853-99.
Historians have focused on early twentieth-century positive eugenics in New Zealand. In this article, I argue that the response came from a tradition of concern about heredity and white racial degeneracy, which extended beyond the British Empire. This article focuses on concerns about heredity at the Auckland Mental Hospital between 1850 and 1899, and contextualises these concerns in New Zealand mental hospital statistics from the late–nineteenth century. This article also considers Australasian, British, North and South American medical and immigration legislation history, and contrasts this with the legislation and medical discourses which formed part of a fear of heredity, racial degeneracy, immigration and mental illness in New Zealand
Structured variable selection in support vector machines
When applying the support vector machine (SVM) to high-dimensional
classification problems, we often impose a sparse structure in the SVM to
eliminate the influences of the irrelevant predictors. The lasso and other
variable selection techniques have been successfully used in the SVM to perform
automatic variable selection. In some problems, there is a natural hierarchical
structure among the variables. Thus, in order to have an interpretable SVM
classifier, it is important to respect the heredity principle when enforcing
the sparsity in the SVM. Many variable selection methods, however, do not
respect the heredity principle. In this paper we enforce both sparsity and the
heredity principle in the SVM by using the so-called structured variable
selection (SVS) framework originally proposed in Yuan, Joseph and Zou (2007).
We minimize the empirical hinge loss under a set of linear inequality
constraints and a lasso-type penalty. The solution always obeys the desired
heredity principle and enjoys sparsity. The new SVM classifier can be
efficiently fitted, because the optimization problem is a linear program.
Another contribution of this work is to present a nonparametric extension of
the SVS framework, and we propose nonparametric heredity SVMs. Simulated and
real data are used to illustrate the merits of the proposed method.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-EJS125 the Electronic
Journal of Statistics (http://www.i-journals.org/ejs/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Genetic, epigenetic and exogenetic information
We describe an approach to measuring biological information where ‘information’ is
understood in the sense found in Francis Crick’s foundational contributions to
molecular biology. Genes contain information in this sense, but so do epigenetic factors, as many biologists have recognized. The term ‘epigenetic’ is ambiguous, and we
introduce a distinction between epigenetic and exogenetic inheritance to clarify one
aspect of this ambiguity. These three heredity systems play complementary roles in
supplying information for development.
We then consider the evolutionary significance of the three inheritance systems. Whilst
the genetic inheritance system was the key innovation in the evolution of heredity, in
modern organisms the three systems each play important and complementary roles in
heredity and evolution.
Our focus in the earlier part of the paper is on ‘proximate biology’, where information
is a substantial causal factor that causes organisms to develop and causes offspring to
resemble their parents. But much philosophical work has focused on information in
‘ultimate biology’. Ultimate information is a way of talking about the evolutionary
design of the mechanisms of development and inheritance. We conclude by clarifying
the relationship between the two. Ultimate information is not a causal factor that acts
in development or heredity, but it can help to explain the evolution of proximate
information, which is
Organic Selection and Social Heredity: The Original Baldwin Effect Revisited
The so-called “Baldwin Effect” has been studied for years
in the fields of Artificial Life, Cognitive Science, and Evolutionary
Theory across disciplines. This idea is often conflated
with genetic assimilation, and has raised controversy
in trans-disciplinary scientific discourse due to the many interpretations
it has. This paper revisits the “Baldwin Effect”
in Baldwin’s original spirit from a joint historical, theoretical
and experimental approach. Social Heredity – the inheritance
of cultural knowledge via non-genetic means in Baldwin’s
term – is also taken into consideration. I shall argue that the
Baldwin Effect can occur via social heredity without necessity
for genetic assimilation. Computational experiments are
carried out to show that when social heredity is permitted with
high fidelity, there is no need for the assimilation of acquired
characteristics; instead the Baldwin Effect occurs as promoting
more plasticity to facilitate future intelligence. The role
of mind and intelligence in evolution and its implications in
an extended synthesis of evolution are briefly discussed
A comparative study on accounting heredity: the case of ex soviet countries versus other eastern european countries
This paper aims at investigating the existence of accounting heredity in some of Eastern European countries. Accounting heredity assumes that at the time the economic paradigm changes, a new accounting system emerges, enclosing both genes from the existing accounting system, as well as genes from a new accounting system used as an inspiration. Data was gathered by sending questionnaires to academics in the respective countries. Studied countries fell into two categories: Ex Soviet countries (Republic of Moldova & Ukrane), and other Est European countries (Romania, Republic of Macedonia and the Czech Republic). It analyses the survival of communist accounting practices in the post-1990 accounting systems and identifies other eternal influences that shaped these accounting systems.Accounting Heredity, Accounting Change, Accounting Genes, Eastern European Countries, Accounting History
Heredity for generalized power domination
In this paper, we study the behaviour of the generalized power domination
number of a graph by small changes on the graph, namely edge and vertex
deletion and edge contraction. We prove optimal bounds for
, and for in
terms of , and give examples for which these bounds are
tight. We characterize all graphs for which for any edge . We also consider the behaviour of the
propagation radius of graphs by similar modifications.Comment: Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, 201
Heredity and heritability
Journal ArticlePhilosophical discussions of heredity have focused on the sustainability of heritability analyses and more recently on the units of heredity. Here I introduce the concept of heritability and the problems associated with it. Next the units of heredity discussion is introduced. Here I consider alternatives to the view that DNA is the most important hereditary material. The information view of heredity is introduced and discussed and finally, several alternative or supplementary views of heredity are introduced
Chemistry of Living Systems Semiannual Report, May 1 - Sep. 30, 1966
Biochemical mechanisms of heredity and gene expression, their adaptation to environmental extremes, and possible relationships to origin and development of lif
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