Joanne Connor

Really, he was writing about health, or organisms in relation to their environment - which defines disability. Which unavoidably has psychological and sociological implications, when we move onto psychiatry and sexology. These being the two most famous concerns of Foucalt; insanity and paraohilia.

Presenting a symptom, does not itself define subjective illness.

The impairment must be related to the measure of the individual in reference to itself, as much as it can tolerate changed states, without endangering its holistic function as a living thing.

At face value it seems irrelevant to biology, to say that the deletriousness of a condition, may only be asessed by the patient. There are certainly problems with the statement. But its certainly relevant to, for example, conceptualising disability.

Canguilhem distinguished the merely non-normal from the truly abnormal, which involves the infraction of the average, in a way impairing its organic functioning. The latter is not merely statistical, but is often tinged by observer assumptions.

He also pondered much, as a physicisn by training, the definition and of pathology, and its usual (but incorrect) opposition to normalcy. Themes in the thought of Foucalt. We may ask in biology, "Are there genuine sciences of normal and pathological?"

Canguilhem viewed the function of organisms as a relation to their ambient milieu, this being his legacy to sociology and psychology.

Like Nietzsche he viewed living things, by their survival, as exceeding the sum of their parts, and therefore their very nature exceeds any chemistry or mechanics.

Is anything wrong with the Foucaltian approach? The history of human ideas? Things like psychiatry and sexology, despite the best efforts of sincere researchers in these fields, have scarcely been scientific. Foucalt's focus derives from the physician, Georges Canguilhem, who pondered disease.

It might be true. Not all fictional works, nor fictional genres, are equally descriotive or verbose

Id the ancestor the same as the descendant?

When is the chicken, no longer the egg? (Or however you want to phrase it.)

Drake Meme: Panel one, Drake cringing at "Transcendental Arguments." Panel two, Drake loving "What must the world be like in order to be well approximated by theory x?"

Analytic philosophers of science be like...
#philsci

Interesting informed proposal for a psychology of science. People who study causal learning, concept acquisition, updating of beliefs are already doing some of this. But this is more specific, including the idea of studying wellbeing in science, which i like a lot (especially if it covers illbeing!)

✅ 1. It defines "strains" above 99.99% ANI.
Molecular biologists have traditionally used "strain" interchangeably with "colony" or "clone", and usually imply identical bacterial "individuals", often with completely identical genomes and implied identical phenotypes... 2/n

Whatever one thinks of Musk, is he wrong to moderate what is, essentially, a website and app that he owns?

Should we be able to choose our own death? - BBC Ideas This is a video that features philosopher Nigel Warburton's thoughts and opinions on what a future world, where we choose how we die, might look like.

Imagine a world in which we get what we deserve: a good death (I wrote the script for this BBC animation) www.bbc.co.uk/ideas/videos...

Today I watched a crocodile, playing with his food

Sim Earth?

As a child I always insisted, on looking inside a book, and not judging the book by its cover

How Neotropical in nature does the Geisetal-Messel fauna look these days? A new description of a second Geisetal Eoconstrictor species, has this European Eocene genus, the sister to Neotropical boas

academic.oup.com/zoolinnean/a...

Really a lot of traditional taxa used by the paleo-mammalogists are purely typological. Groups like 'cimolestids', 'palaeoryctids', and 'hyopsodontids' may approach members of other arbitrary categories. And the memberships of these taxa, might well compose polyphyletic assemblages.

If you exclude the didelphodontines, which are really basal hyaenodonts (like Wyolestes) then the core palaeoryctids, are generalised eutherians. They might fall into the stem group, yet might be afrotherian, or laurasiatherian and something close to eulipotyphlans.

On zoogeographical grounds, it seems as though Apternodontidae would be ideal ancestors for Solenodon. Yet the land mammals of the Caribbean are South American, and the Nesophontes + Solenodon LCA was presumably West Indian. So were apternodontids another convergent morph?

Tooth morphology poorly distinguishes dilambdodont from zalambdodont forms. Both morphs are definitively present, in the well supported West Indian insectivore clade. And derive from a Potamogale-like 'protozalsmbdodont' morph.

The UCEs have, unexpectedly, found talpids basal to a clade of West Indian 'insectivores', plus a subclade of soricids plus erinaceids.

Whereas I found morphological data to recover Cope's Dilambdodonta, or soricids and talpids + bats. Curiously the Van Valen diagram does not include basal bats.

I do wonder wether eulipotyphlans really are monophyletic, to the exclusion of supposed non-eulipotyphlans, such as 'palaeoryctids'.

The sort of material usually fossilised and diagnosed to a taxon, can't readily distinguish Afro-Madagascan from Northern Hemisphere Holocene insectivores.

Not all these groupings are neccessarily natural, and not all of them are eutherian. Leptictids, zalambdalestids, and (at least) part of the endotherioids, are cases in point. So the bottom left represents the stem and basal placental stock. ('Cimolestans' are perhaps the laurasiathere mainline?

Van Valen doesn't connect anagalids to tupaids, though they are nowadays seen as scandentians. On a positive note, neither is connected by him to macroscelideans; a relationship formerly regarded as fact, until it was disproven by examination of the brain anatomy of the two living clades.

A lot of these taxa are poorly known, except to specialists; and, with the best will in the world, those specialists - and the fossil record - were and are biased, towards anatomical regions esp. cheek teeth, highly subject to homoplasy, and known to be evolutionarily plastic.

Its all a confusing mess and it still is. Interesting he predicted a Tubulidentata + Macroscelididae clade. Amongst other little details

Before the invention of transgender, treatments of what we call transgender, were always contextual and relational.

Although transvestitism was illegal, the transvestite had to become a public nuisance to be prosecuted. In practice prosecution/persecution depended (usually) on overlap or confusion, with homosexuality or sex work; otherwise it was punished most often, only with a mild chastisement.