S13RS SGR No. 13 (Sustainability Orientation)

A RESOLUTION To urge and request the Office of Orientation to implement a sustainability program in all new student orientation session

Reciprocity as a foundation of financial economics

This paper argues that the subsistence of the fundamental theorem of contemporary financial mathematics is the ethical concept ‘reciprocity’. The argument is based on identifying an equivalence between the contemporary, and ostensibly ‘value neutral’, Fundamental Theory of Asset Pricing with theories of mathematical probability that emerged in the seventeenth century in the context of the ethical assessment of commercial contracts in a framework of Aristotelian ethics. This observation, the main claim of the paper, is justified on the basis of results from the Ultimatum Game and is analysed within a framework of Pragmatic philosophy. The analysis leads to the explanatory hypothesis that markets are centres of communicative action with reciprocity as a rule of discourse. The purpose of the paper is to reorientate financial economics to emphasise the objectives of cooperation and social cohesion and to this end, we offer specific policy advice

Quantitative and Molecular Genetic Analyses of Mutations Increasing Drosophila Life Span

Understanding the genetic and environmental factors that affect variation in life span and senescence is of major interest for human health and evolutionary biology. Multiple mechanisms affect longevity, many of which are conserved across species, but the genetic networks underlying each mechanism and cross-talk between networks are unknown. We report the results of a screen for mutations affecting Drosophila life span. One third of the 1,332 homozygous P–element insertion lines assessed had quantitative effects on life span; mutations reducing life span were twice as common as mutations increasing life span. We confirmed 58 mutations with increased longevity, only one of which is in a gene previously associated with life span. The effects of the mutations increasing life span were highly sex-specific, with a trend towards opposite effects in males and females. Mutations in the same gene were associated with both increased and decreased life span, depending on the location and orientation of the P–element insertion, and genetic background. We observed substantial—and sex-specific—epistasis among a sample of ten mutations with increased life span. All mutations increasing life span had at least one deleterious pleiotropic effect on stress resistance or general health, with different patterns of pleiotropy for males and females. Whole-genome transcript profiles of seven of the mutant lines and the wild type revealed 4,488 differentially expressed transcripts, 553 of which were common to four or more of the mutant lines, which include genes previously associated with life span and novel genes implicated by this study. Therefore longevity has a large mutational target size; genes affecting life span have variable allelic effects; alleles affecting life span exhibit antagonistic pleiotropy and form epistatic networks; and sex-specific mutational effects are ubiquitous. Comparison of transcript profiles of long-lived mutations and the control line reveals a transcriptional signature of increased life span

Population expansion of an Antarctic king crab?

Benthic assemblages of the Antarctic continental shelf are dominated by sessile and slow-moving, epifaunal invertebrates. This community structure persists because shell-crushing (durophagous) predators are absent or ecologically insignificant in shelf habitats. Durophagous teleosts, elasmobranchs, and crustaceans have been excluded by cold waters over the Antarctic shelf for millions of years. Now, as shallow waters warm rapidly, predatory king crabs (Lithodidae) living in the upper bathyal zone could emerge onto the shelf and into nearshore habitats. To assess the potential for a bathymetric expansion, we genetically inferred the historical demography of a population of the most abundant durophagous predator found in deep water off the western Antarctic Peninsula: the lithodid Paralomis birsteini Macpherson. Analysis of mitochondrial DNA sequences from crabs sampled at 1200–1400 m depth on the slope off Marguerite Bay suggests this population has expanded twice over the past 132,000 years. Those expansions were possibly coincident with episodes of climatic warming in Antarctica and elsewhere, raising the possibility of a third expansion in response to anthropogenic climate change