Uniqueness and the Image of God: A Theological and Philosophical Justification of the Value of Diversity

In Christian education, cultural diversity is valued. But what is the theological basis for that value? While our commonality as human persons is rooted in the image of God, what about the diversity of human beings and the cultural diversity flowing from it? This essays argues that although the image of God is common to us all, there is an account of the image of God that provides for uniqueness as well and that individual uniqueness is at the core of human being as we participate in our cultural forms of life

Una manera posible de naturalizar el alma humana

One of the most basic linguistic principles (or parameters, according to some) is used to point to a likely necessary (though, probably, not sufficient) condition of human uniqueness (i.e. being able to speak, communicate complex messages, have religious feelings, indulge in art and humour, and so on) which has been conceptualised either as the fact that we have human souls, in religious contexts, or human minds, in other contexts

Human Uniqueness: Standing Alone?

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from SAGE via http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0014524615599101 Discussion of human uniqueness requires careful attention to what ‘uniqueness’ means. The word is commonly deployed as meaning both distinctiveness and superiority, which implies contrasting relations of continuity and distinction between what is ‘unique’ and what it is contrasted with. Human uniqueness has come into sharp focus in recent years because of discussions of ‘exobiology’: life beyond Earth. Intelligence has frequently been put forward as definitive of human uniqueness, but the ‘convergent evolution’ of intelligence suggests that intelligence would also evolve elsewhere, leaving human beings unique neither as to distinctiveness nor to excellence. However, while evolution might be convergent over basic characteristics such as intelligence, to how the body is structured seems to be more contingent, and we must take the role of the body’s role in thought (‘embodied cognition’) seriously. Basic bodily differences between putative life-forms might, therefore, lead to strong distinctions between the forms that intelligence takes. Human beings might not be ‘unique as superior’, but they would be unique as distinct, bodily speaking, and that distinction might be strongly determinative of the way in which intelligence is worked out. </jats:p

Are Some Animals Also Moral Agents?

Animal rights philosophers have traditionally accepted the claim that human beings are unique, but rejected the claim that our uniqueness justifies denying animals moral rights. Humans were thought to be unique specifically because we possess moral agency. In this commentary, I explore the claim that some nonhuman animals are also moral agents, and I take note of its counter-intuitive implications

Uniqueness of human running coordination: The integration of modern and ancient evolutionary innovations

Running is a pervasive activity across human cultures and a cornerstone of contemporary health, fitness and sporting activities. Yet for the overwhelming predominance of human existence running was an essential prerequisite for survival. A means to hunt, and a means to escape when hunted. In a very real sense humans have evolved to run. Yet curiously, perhaps due to running’s cultural ubiquity and the natural ease with which we learn to run, we rarely consider the uniqueness of human bipedal running within the animal kingdom. Our unique upright, single stance, bouncing running gait imposes a unique set of coordinative difficulties. Challenges demanding we precariously balance our fragile brains in the very position where they are most vulnerable to falling injury while simultaneously retaining stability, steering direction of travel, and powering the upcoming stride: all within the abbreviated time-frames afforded by short, violent ground contacts separated by long flight times. These running coordination challenges are solved through the tightly-integrated blending of primitive evolutionary legacies, conserved from reptilian and vertebrate lineages, and comparatively modern, more exclusively human, innovations. The integrated unification of these top-down and bottom-up control processes bestows humans with an agile control system, enabling us to readily modulate speeds, change direction, negotiate varied terrains and to instantaneously adapt to changing surface conditions. The seamless integration of these evolutionary processes is facilitated by pervasive, neural and biological, activity-dependent adaptive plasticity. Over time, and with progressive exposure, this adaptive plasticity shapes neural and biological structures to best cope with regularly imposed movement challenges. This pervasive plasticity enables the gradual construction of a robust system of distributed coordinated control, comprised of processes that are so deeply collectively entwined that describing their functionality in isolation obscures their true irrevocably entangled nature. Although other species rely on a similar set of coordinated processes to run, the bouncing bipedal nature of human running presents a specific set of coordination challenges, solved using a customized blend of evolved solutions. A deeper appreciation of the foundations of the running coordination phenomenon promotes conceptual clarity, potentially informing future advances in running training and running-injury rehabilitation interventions

Random matrix analysis for gene interaction networks in cancer cells

Investigations of topological uniqueness of gene interaction networks in cancer cells are essential for understanding this disease. Based on the random matrix theory, we study the distribution of the nearest neighbor level spacings $P(s)$ of interaction matrices for gene networks in human cancer cells. The interaction matrices are computed using the Cancer Network Galaxy (TCNG) database, which is a repository of gene interactions inferred by a Bayesian network model. 256 NCBI GEO entries regarding gene expressions in human cancer cells have been selected for the Bayesian network calculations in TCNG. We observe the Wigner distribution of $P(s)$ when the gene networks are dense networks that have more than $\sim 38,000$ edges. In the opposite case, when the networks have smaller numbers of edges, the distribution $P(s)$ becomes the Poisson distribution. We investigate relevance of $P(s)$ both to the size of the networks and to edge frequencies that manifest reliance of the inferred gene interactions.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figure