The Dialectical Biologist

Gilbert, Nora; Levins, Richard; Lewontin, Richard C

doi:10.2307/4973

Cited by 4 publications

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“…These factors are the pursuit of profit by the agro-industrial corporate sector and their quest for social and mar-ket control. This has been the case for more than 70 years, as Levins and Lewontin (1987) previously elaborated in The Dialectical Biologist, and it continues to hold true today, with even higher profits and expanded control (Loyd et al, 2024 [in this Special Issue]; Murphy, 2008). Agroecology can provide the autonomy that farmers need to resist this new form of empire (Holt-Giménez et al, 2021;Van der Ploeg, 2021).…”

Section: The Quest For Profits and Controlmentioning

confidence: 86%

Reflections on research agendas in agroecology: In search of a practical guide

Perfecto,

Vandermeer

2024

J. Agric. Food Syst. Community Dev.

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First paragraph: Dismantling the Capitalist Industrial Food System Should Be a Priority Food systems are crucial to the stability of our planet’s ecosystems and the future of humanity. The industrial capitalist global food system has generated multiple crises that pose a significant threat to the future of our planet. The environmental, health, and social impacts of this system of agriculture are multifaceted and well-documented. Pesticides poison us and destroy the world’s biodiversity (Ali et al., 2020; Beaumelle et al., 2023; Beketov et al., 2013; Kumar et al., 2023). Pesticides and fertilizer runoff pollute our water and create dead zones (Craswell, 2021, Diaz & Rosenberg, 2008). Greenhouse gas emissions from the global food system contribute up to a third of total global emissions (Crippa et al., 2020). Land concentration and land grabbing condemn millions to poverty (DeShutter, 2011). Food insecurity persists even as food production continues to increase (Long et al., 2020l; Müller et al., 2021). Not only is our current agri-food system environmentally and socially damaging, but it is also extremely cost-inefficient. Diet-related health problems, for example, overburden global public health systems and affect workers’ productivity, costing an estimated 9 trillion dollars annually (Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO], 2023). . . .

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Section: The Quest For Profits and Controlmentioning

confidence: 86%

Reflections on research agendas in agroecology: In search of a practical guide

Perfecto,

Vandermeer

2024

J. Agric. Food Syst. Community Dev.

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“…The idea that we are born with certain dispositions that are shared by every human being, or that there is, in other words, such a thing as a human nature, has been debated in Western thought since at least the Hellenistic period. The idea that there are patterns of behavior that derive from an innate makeup has been resisted fiercely on account both of its methodological flaws, its political underpinnings and its ethical consequences (see, for instance, Dupré, 2001;Gould, 1996;Levins & Lewontin, 2009;Sahlins, 2008), but the very denial of human nature has, in turn, been Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca / CC BY-NC-SA ArtefaCToS, Vol. 13, No.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolved and Cultural Intuitions. Highly Speculative Remarks on the Origins of our Sense of Fairness

Braicovich

2024

Artefactos

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The question of whether the sense of fairness constitutes an exclusively human trait has been answered mostly from two polar positions: the first one unambiguously affirms such exclusivity, thus denying the relevance of cognitive ethology to understand our evaluations of justice; the second one, on the contrary, postulates the existence of a (proto) sense of fairness in non-human animals, strongly related to ours, which would make cognitive ethology highly relevant to understand the mechanisms on which our evaluative practices are based. From a position of extreme caution in relation to the possibility of (eventually) offering concrete evidence in favor of innatist theses such as the one I will defend here, I will suggest that i) in line with the rupturist positions, it is possible to preserve the human exclusivity of the sense of justice, ii) in line with the continuist positions, the relevance of studies coming from cognitive ethology is guaranteed, insofar as (ex hypotesi) our evaluative practices often take as input innate psychological dispositions shared with other species. Finally, I will suggest that the concept of rationalization is central to determine in each case the possible articulation between innate dispositions and explicit justifications.

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Reframing Developmental Biology and Building Evolutionary Theory's New Synthesis

Tauber¹

2010

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Gilbert and Epel present a new approach to developmental biology: embryogenesis must be understood within the full context of the organism's environment. Instead of an insular embryo following a genetic blueprint, this revised program maintains that embryogenesis is subject to inputs from the environment that generate novel genetic variation with dynamic consequences for development. Beyond allelic variation of structural genes and of regulatory loci, plasticity-derived epigenetic variation completes the triad of the major types of variation required for evolution. Developmental biology and ecology, disciplines that have previously been regarded as distinct, are presented here as fully integrated under the rubric of "eco-devo," and from this perspective, which highlights how the environment not only selects variation, it helps construct it, another synthesis with evolutionary biology must also be made, "eco-evo-devo." This second integration has enormous implications for expanding evolution theory, inasmuch as the Modern Synthesis (Provine 1971), which combined classical genetics and Darwinism in the mid-20th century, did not account for the role of development in evolution. The eco-evo-devo synthesis thus portends a major theoretical inflection in evolutionary biology. Following a description of these scientific developments, comment is offered as to how this new integrated approach might be understood within the larger shifts in contemporary biology.

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The Dialectical Biologist

Cited by 4 publications

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Reflections on research agendas in agroecology: In search of a practical guide

Reflections on research agendas in agroecology: In search of a practical guide

Evolved and Cultural Intuitions. Highly Speculative Remarks on the Origins of our Sense of Fairness

Reframing Developmental Biology and Building Evolutionary Theory's New Synthesis

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