Operationalizing Goal Directedness: An Empirical Route to Advancing a Philosophical Discussion

Goal directedness is one of the most commonly observed behavior patterns in biology, exemplified by systems ranging in complexity from cellular migration to human motivations. Philosophers have long tried to understand goal directedness in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, but no consensus has been reached. Here we take an entirely novel approach to goal directedness, postponing the search for necessary and sufficient conditions, and instead trying to advance understanding by an empirical route. In particular, we introduce quantitative measures of goal directedness, applicable to systems that are generally agreed to be goal directed. The measures allow one to assess two signature properties of goal-directed systems, persistence and plasticity. Persistence is the tendency for an entity that is on a trajectory toward a goal to return to that trajectory following perturbations. Plasticity we understand as the tendency for an entity to find a trajectory toward a goal from a variety of different starting distances. We demonstrate the metrics by applying them to goal-directed behavior in two biological systems, bacteria moving up a chemoattractant gradient and a human following a heat gradient. Our approach reveals goal directedness to be an empirically tractable notion, one that makes possible a variety of comparative studies in biology, including comparing degree of goal directedness in different species, or in one species under different conditions, as well as studying evolutionary trends. More generally, the metrics make it possible to investigate the correlates and causes of goal-directed behavior. Finally, our approach challenges the conventional view of goal directedness as a discrete and unitary property, by showing that it can be treated as continuous, as a matter of degree, and that it can be broken down into at least two, and possibly more, partly independent components

Origin and Evolution of Large Brains in Toothed Whales

Toothed whales (order Cetacea: suborder Odontoceti) are highly encephalized, possessing brains that are significantly larger than expected for their body sizes. In particular, the odontocete superfamily Delphinoidea (dolphins, porpoises, belugas, and narwhals) comprises numerous species with encephalization levels second only to modern humans and greater than all other mammals. Odontocetes have also demonstrated behavioral faculties previously only ascribed to humans and, to some extent, other great apes. How did the large brains of odontocetes evolve? To begin to investigate this question, we quantified and averaged estimates of brain and body size for 36 fossil cetacean species using computed tomography and analyzed these data along with those for modern odontocetes. We provide the first description and statistical tests of the pattern of change in brain size relative to body size in cetaceans over 47 million years. We show that brain size increased significantly in two critical phases in the evolution of odontocetes. The first increase occurred with the origin of odontocetes from the ancestral group Archaeoceti near the Eocene-Oligocene boundary and was accompanied by a decrease in body size. The second occurred in the origin of Delphinoidea only by 15 million years ago

Goal directedness and the field concept

A long-standing problem in understanding goal-directed systems has been the insufficiency of mechanistic explanations to make sense of them. This paper offers a solution to this problem. It begins by observing the limitations of mechanistic decompositions when it comes to understanding physical fields. We argue that introducing the field concept, as it has been developed in field theory, alongside mechanisms is able to provide an account of goal directedness in the sciences

The Geozoic Supereon

Geological time units are the lingua franca of earth sciences: they are a terminological convenience, a vernacular of any geological conversation, and a prerequisite of geo-scientific writing found throughout in earth science dictionaries and textbooks. Time units include terms formalized by stratigraphic committees as well as informal constructs erected ad hoc to communicate more efficiently. With these time terms we partition Earth’s history into utilitarian and intuitively understandable time segments that vary in length over seven orders of magnitude: from the 225-year-long Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000) to the ,4-billion-year-long Precambrian (e.g., Hicks, 1885; Ball, 1906; formalized by De Villiers, 1969)

Measurement-Based Automatic Parameterization of a Virtual Acoustic Room Model

Modernien auralisaatiotekniikoiden ansiosta kuulokkeilla voidaan tuottaa kuuntelukokemus, joka muistuttaa useimpien äänitteiden tuotannossa oletettua kaiutinkuuntelua. Huoneakustinen mallinnus on tärkeä osa toimivaa auralisaatiojärjestelmää. Huonemallinnuksen parametrien määrittäminen vaatii kuitenkin ammattitaitoa ja aikaa. Tässä työssä kehitetään järjestelmä parametrien automaattiseksi määrittämiseksi huoneakustisten mittausten perusteella. Parametrisaatio perustuu mikrofoniryhmällä mitattuihin huoneen impulssivasteisiin ja voidaan jakaa kahteen osaan: suoran äänen ja aikaisten heijastusten analyysiin sekä jälkikaiunnan analyysiin. Suorat äänet erotellaan impulssivasteista erilaisia signaalinkäsittelytekniikoita käyttäen ja niitä hyödynnetään heijastuksia etsivässä algoritmissa. Äänilähteet ja heijastuksia vastaavat kuvalähteet paikannetaan saapumisaikaeroon perustuvalla paikannusmenetelmällä ja taajuusriippuvat etenemistien vaikutukset arvioidaan kuvalähdemallissa käyttöä varten. Auralisaation jälkikaiunta on toteutettu takaisinkytkevällä viiveverkostomallilla. Sen parametrisointi vaatii taajuusriippuvan jälkikaiunta-ajan ja jälkikaiunnan taajuusvasteen määrittämistä. Normalisoitua kaikutiheyttä käytetään jälkikaiunnan alkamisajan löytämiseen mittauksista ja simuloidun jälkikaiunnan alkamisajan asettamiseen. Jälkikaiunta-aikojen määrittämisessä hyödynnetään energy decay relief -metodia. Kuuntelukokeiden perusteella automaattinen parametrisaatiojärjestelmä tuottaa parempia tuloksia kuin parametrien asettaminen manuaalisesti huoneen summittaisten geometriatietojen pohjalta. Järjestelmässä on ongelmia erityisesti jälkikaiunnan ekvalisoinnissa, mutta käytettyihin suhteellisen yksinkertaisiin tekniikoihin nähden järjestelmä toimii hyvin.Modern auralization techniques enable making the headphone listening experience similar to the experience of listening with loudspeakers, which is the reproduction method most content is made to be listened with. Room acoustic modeling is an essential part of a plausible auralization system. Specifying the parameters for room modeling requires expertise and time. In this thesis, a system is developed for automatic analysis of the parameters from room acoustic measurements. The parameterization is based on room impulse responses measured with a microphone array and can be divided into two parts: the analysis of the direct sound and early reflections, and the analysis of the late reverberation. The direct sounds are separated from the impulse responses using various signal processing techniques and used in the matching pursuit algorithm to find the reflections in the impulse responses. The sound sources and their reflection images are localized using time difference of arrival -based localization and frequency-dependent propagation path effects are estimated for use in an image source model. The late reverberation of the auralization is implemented using a feedback delay network. Its parameterization requires the analysis of the frequency-dependent reverberation time and frequency response of the late reverberation. Normalized echo density is used to determine the beginning of the late reverberation in the measurements and to set the starting point of the modeled late field. The reverberation times are analyzed using the energy decay relief. A formal listening test shows that the automatic parameterization system outperforms parameters set manually based on approximate geometrical data. Problems remain especially in the precision of the late reverberation equalization but the system works well considering the relative simplicity of the processing methods used

Political transition and emergent forest-conservation issues in Myanmar.

Political and economic transitions have had substantial impacts on forest conservation. Where transitions are underway or anticipated, historical precedent and methods for systematically assessing future trends should be used to anticipate likely threats to forest conservation and design appropriate and prescient policy measures to counteract them. Myanmar is transitioning from an authoritarian, centralized state with a highly regulated economy to a more decentralized and economically liberal democracy and is working to end a long-running civil war. With these transitions in mind, we used a horizon-scanning approach to assess the 40 emerging issues most affecting Myanmar's forests, including internal conflict, land-tenure insecurity, large-scale agricultural development, demise of state timber enterprises, shortfalls in government revenue and capacity, and opening of new deforestation frontiers with new roads, mines, and hydroelectric dams. Averting these threats will require, for example, overhauling governance models, building capacity, improving infrastructure- and energy-project planning, and reforming land-tenure and environmental-protection laws. Although challenges to conservation in Myanmar are daunting, the political transition offers an opportunity for conservationists and researchers to help shape a future that enhances Myanmar's social, economic, and environmental potential while learning and applying lessons from other countries. Our approach and results are relevant to other countries undergoing similar transitions

Response to Comment on “Plant diversity increases with the strength of negative density dependence at the global scale”

Hülsmann and Hartig suggest that ecological mechanisms other than specialized natural enemies or intraspecific competition contribute to our estimates of conspecific negative density dependence (CNDD). To address their concern, we show that our results are not the result of a methodological artifact and present a null-model analysis that demonstrates that our original findings—(i) stronger CNDD at tropical relative to temperate latitudes and (ii) a latitudinal shift in the relationship between CNDD and species abundance—persist even after controlling for other processes that might influence spatial relationships between adults and recruits

Political transition and emergent forest-conservation issues in Myanmar.

Political and economic transitions have had substantial impacts on forest conservation. Where transitions are underway or anticipated, historical precedent and methods for systematically assessing future trends should be used to anticipate likely threats to forest conservation and design appropriate and prescient policy measures to counteract them. Myanmar is transitioning from an authoritarian, centralized state with a highly regulated economy to a more decentralized and economically liberal democracy and is working to end a long-running civil war. With these transitions in mind, we used a horizon-scanning approach to assess the 40 emerging issues most affecting Myanmar's forests, including internal conflict, land-tenure insecurity, large-scale agricultural development, demise of state timber enterprises, shortfalls in government revenue and capacity, and opening of new deforestation frontiers with new roads, mines, and hydroelectric dams. Averting these threats will require, for example, overhauling governance models, building capacity, improving infrastructure- and energy-project planning, and reforming land-tenure and environmental-protection laws. Although challenges to conservation in Myanmar are daunting, the political transition offers an opportunity for conservationists and researchers to help shape a future that enhances Myanmar's social, economic, and environmental potential while learning and applying lessons from other countries. Our approach and results are relevant to other countries undergoing similar transitions

SNAPSHOT USA 2019 : a coordinated national camera trap survey of the United States

This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.With the accelerating pace of global change, it is imperative that we obtain rapid inventories of the status and distribution of wildlife for ecological inferences and conservation planning. To address this challenge, we launched the SNAPSHOT USA project, a collaborative survey of terrestrial wildlife populations using camera traps across the United States. For our first annual survey, we compiled data across all 50 states during a 14-week period (17 August - 24 November of 2019). We sampled wildlife at 1509 camera trap sites from 110 camera trap arrays covering 12 different ecoregions across four development zones. This effort resulted in 166,036 unique detections of 83 species of mammals and 17 species of birds. All images were processed through the Smithsonian's eMammal camera trap data repository and included an expert review phase to ensure taxonomic accuracy of data, resulting in each picture being reviewed at least twice. The results represent a timely and standardized camera trap survey of the USA. All of the 2019 survey data are made available herein. We are currently repeating surveys in fall 2020, opening up the opportunity to other institutions and cooperators to expand coverage of all the urban-wild gradients and ecophysiographic regions of the country. Future data will be available as the database is updated at eMammal.si.edu/snapshot-usa, as well as future data paper submissions. These data will be useful for local and macroecological research including the examination of community assembly, effects of environmental and anthropogenic landscape variables, effects of fragmentation and extinction debt dynamics, as well as species-specific population dynamics and conservation action plans. There are no copyright restrictions; please cite this paper when using the data for publication.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Mammal responses to global changes in human activity vary by trophic group and landscape

Wildlife must adapt to human presence to survive in the Anthropocene, so it is critical to understand species responses to humans in different contexts. We used camera trapping as a lens to view mammal responses to changes in human activity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Across 163 species sampled in 102 projects around the world, changes in the amount and timing of animal activity varied widely. Under higher human activity, mammals were less active in undeveloped areas but unexpectedly more active in developed areas while exhibiting greater nocturnality. Carnivores were most sensitive, showing the strongest decreases in activity and greatest increases in nocturnality. Wildlife managers must consider how habituation and uneven sensitivity across species may cause fundamental differences in human–wildlife interactions along gradients of human influence.Peer reviewe