Organochloride Pesticides Present in Animal Fur, Soil, and Streambed in an Agricultural Region of Southeastern Arkansas

Animals in agricultural settings may be subject to bioaccumulation of toxins. For the last several years, we collected hair samples from bats and rodents in an agricultural area near Bayou Bartholomew in Drew County, Arkansas. Samples were submitted to the Center of Environmental Sciences and Engineering at the University of Connecticut for wide-screen toxin analysis. Several of these samples contained measurable amounts of organochloride pesticides or their metabolites, including some that have been banned for decades, such as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and chlordane. In addition, we collected several samples of soil from within an agricultural field, from adjacent edge habitat, from alongside the bank of the Bayou, and from the bed of the Bayou itself. Although none of these samples tested positive for DDT or chlordane, all of the samples except one contained measurable amounts of metabolites from these pesticides. This study raises questions about environmental persistence of DDT/DDE and other organochlorides. There may be risk to wildlife populations, warranting further investigation into effects of long-term exposure to these toxins

Leveraging Generational Diversity in Today’s Workplace

Generational diversity has been noted as an obstacle for many U.S. organizations, yet there is a lack of understanding of how to leverage generational diversity in the workplace. This unawareness could be disastrous for companies wanting to increase economic wealth through human capital. The purpose of this paper is to identify the dilemma that exists when multiple generations coexist in the workplace and identify strategies that promote efficiency and improve employee communication and morale. The authors recommend developing new and innovative diversity training and incorporating an intergenerational mentoring program

The multiplex model of the genetics of Alzheimer’s disease

Genes play a strong role in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) with late-onset AD showing heritability of 58-79% and early-onset AD over 90%. Genetic association provides a robust platform to build our understanding of the etiology of this complex disease. Over 40 loci are now implicated for AD, suggesting that AD is a disease of multiple components as supported by pathway analyses (immunity, endocytosis, cholesterol transport, ubiquitination, amyloid-β and tau processing). Over 50% of late-onset AD (LOAD) heritability has been captured and allows the calculation of the accumulation of AD genetic risk through polygenic risk scores (PRS). PRS predicts disease with up to 90% accuracy and is an exciting tool in our research armoury that could allow selection of those with high PRS for clinical trials and precision medicine, as well as the cellular modelling of the combined risk. Here we propose the multiplex model as a new perspective from which to understand AD. The multiplex model reflex’s the combination of some, or all, of these model components (genetic and environmental), in a tissue specific manner, to trigger or sustain a disease cascade, which ultimately results in the cell/synaptic loss observed in AD

Strong continuity of life and mind: the free energy framework, predictive processing and ecological psychology

Located at the intersection of philosophy of cognitive science and philosophy of biology, this thesis aims to provide a novel approach to understanding the strong continuity between life and mind. This thesis applies the Free Energy Framework, predictive processing and the conceptual apparatus from ecological psychology to reveal different manners in which the organizational processes and principles underlying life have been enriched so as to result in cognitive processes. By using these anticipatory cognitive frameworks this thesis unveils different forms of cognition at work in surprising places and considers how such expressions of cognition are ultimately driven by various forms of environmental complexity. Importing the concepts of affordances, environmental information and perceptual medium from ecological psychology into predictive processing and the Free Energy Framework, an empirically grounded account of cognition as an anticipatory process that allows living systems to adapt to various degrees of uncertainty in their environments at distinct and yet overlapping timescales is argued for. In doing so, this thesis attempts to identify both the explanatory limits of ecological coupling accounts of perception and action, and the possible environmental conditions under which the predictive brain evolved from its decentralized non-neural predecessors as a solution to uncertainty. In contributing to a novel approach to constraining the mind, the various concepts deployed in both philosophy and cognitive science are sharpened, furthering the current debate on what cognition is and how it is related to life

A Continuum of Intentionality: linking biogenic and anthropogenic approaches to cognition

Biogenic approaches investigate cognition from the standpoint of evolutionary function, asking what cognition does for a living system and then looking for common principles and exhibitions of cognitive strategies in a vast array of living systems – non-neural to neural. One worry which arises for the biogenic approach is that it is overly permissive in terms of what it construes as cognition. In this paper I critically engage with a recent instance of this way of criticising biogenic approaches in order to clarify their theoretical commitments and prospects. In his critique of the biogenic approach, Fred Adams (2018) uses the presence of intentional states with conceptual content as a criterion to demarcate cognition-driven behaviour from mere sensory response. In this paper I agree with Adams that intentionality is the mark of the cognitive, but simultaneously reject his overly restrictive conception of intentionality. I argue that understanding intentionality simpliciter as the mark of the mental is compatible with endorsing the biogenic approach. I argue that because cognitive science is not exclusively interested in behaviour driven by intentional states with the kind of content Adams demands, the biogenic approach’s status as an approach to cognition is not called into question. I then go on to propose a novel view of intentionality whereby it is seen to exist along a continuum which increases in the degree of representational complexity: how far into the future representational content can be directed and drive anticipatory behaviour. Understanding intentionality as existing along a continuum allows biogenic approaches and anthropogenic approaches to investigate the same overarching capacity of cognition as expressed in its different forms positioned along the continuum of intentionality. Even if all organisms engage in some behaviour that is driven by weak intentional dynamics, this does not suggest that every behaviour of all organisms is so driven. As such, the worry that the biogenic approach is overly permissive can be avoided

How to count biological minds: symbiosis, the free energy principle, and reciprocal multiscale integration

The notion of a physiological individuals has been developed and applied in the phi- losophy of biology to understand symbiosis, an understanding of which is key to theorising about the major transition in evolution from multi-organismality to multi- cellularity. The paper begins by asking what such symbiotic individuals can help to reveal about a possible transition in the evolution of cognition. Such a transition marks the movement from cooperating individual biological cognizers to a function- ally integrated cognizing unit. Somewhere along the way, did such cognizing units simultaneously have cognizers as parts? Expanding upon the multiscale integration view of the Free Energy Principle, this paper develops an account of reciprocal inte- gration, demonstrating how some coupled biological cognizing systems, when certain constraints are met, can result in a cognizing unit that is in ways greater than the sum of its cognizing parts. Symbiosis between V. Fischeri bacteria and the bobtail squid is used to provide an illustration this account. A novel manner of conceptual- izing biological cognizers as gradient is then suggested. Lastly it is argued that the reason why the notion of ontologically nested cognizers may be unintuitive stems from the fact that our folk-psychology notion of what a cognizer is has been deeply influenced by our folk-biological manner of understanding biological individuals as units of reproduction

The Principle of Dynamic Holism: Guiding Methodology for Investigating Cognition in Nonneuronal Organisms

Basal cognition investigates cognition working upward from nonneuronal organisms. Because basal cognition is committed to empirically testable hypotheses, a methodological challenge arises: how can experiments avoid using zoocentric assumptions that ignore the ecological contexts that might elicit cognitively driven behavior in nonneuronal organisms? To meet this challenge, I articulate the principle of dynamic holism (PDH), a methodological principle for guiding research on nonneuronal cognition. I describe PDH’s relation to holistic research programs in human-focused cognitive science and psychology then present an argument from analogy based on holistic developmental biology. Last, I examine two experiments exemplifying the need for PDH