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

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

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