To contribute significantly to environmental policy of the next century, conservationists will need to reach a consensus on their fundamental values and goals and to persuade society to adopt them. Resolution of the debate over the continued role of naturalness as a guiding concept has important implications for how conservation is practiced and the future of the discipline. I examine five aspects of naturalness in the context of biological conservation: its utility, its assessment, its relation to values and ethics, alternative (...) imperatives, and implications of adopting it as a guiding concept. Naturalness can be viewed as a continuous gradient with completely natural and completely artificial extremes. Human actions are unnatural to the extent that they rely on technology to transform natural ecosystems. The ecological consequences of technological transformation often overwhelm the capacity of other biota to adapt and are a root cause of biodiversity loss. The naturalness of most ecosystems or ecosystem alterations can be assessed objectively despite imperfect knowledge if evolutionary limits and natural ranges of variability are carefully considered. Most conservationists value naturally evolved biotic elements such as genomes and communities over artificial elements. This judgment, which is not shared by society at large, is based on intrinsic and instrumental values, including respect for nature and recognition that many ecosystem amenities stem from natural processes. Given the wide accessibility of ecologically destructive technology, fundamental shifts in societal values and approaches to ecosystem alteration are needed to achieve conservation. Respect for nature must supplant the prevailing world view of human superiority. Although sometimes difficult to assess, naturalness is a more reasonable guide for conservation than are other ecosystem features such as diversity, productivity, or evolution, and naturalness is the foundation for several current conservation concepts such as ecological integrity and ecological restoration. Conservation biologists can help develop conservation practices and ethics that emphasize the importance of natural ecosystems. Key roles include refining distinctions between natural and anthropogenic conditions, devising ways to use ecosystems without losing biotic diversity, and facilitating shifts in societal values toward more respect for nature. (shrink)

This paper argues that pleasure and pains are not qualia and they are not to be analyzed in terms of supposedly antecedently intelligible mental states like bodily sensation or desire. Rather, pleasure and pain are char- acteristic of a distinctive kind of evaluation that is common to emotions, desires, and (some) bodily sensations. These are felt evaluations: pas- sive responses to attend to and be motivated by the import of something impressing itself on us, responses that are nonetheless simultaneously con- (...) stitutive of that import by virtue of the broader rational patterns of which they are a part and that they serve to de?ne. This account of felt eval- uations makes sense of the way in which pleasures and pains grab our attention and motivate us to act and of the peculiar dual objectivity and subjectivity of their implicit evaluations, while o?ering a phenomenology adequate to both emotional and bodily pleasures and pains. (shrink)

This paper surveys current theories on the nature of conscious experience, from traditional central state identity theories and functionalism, to more recent higher-order and representationalist theories. It is concluded that no current theory really solves the fundamental problem of how to incorporate conscious experience into the physical world, though much progress has been made.

Four common, current species concepts are described and their strengths and weaknesses discussed. It is proposed that a review of population biology at the species level will lead to inferences regarding speciational mechanisms, which in turn may lead to a new synthesis of the species concept. Major advances in the study of variation in populations have come through multivariate methodology and biochemical techniques. The relation between genetic, phenetic, and allozymic variation is still unclear. Attention is drawn to the spatial structure (...) of local populations which must play an important role in breeding patterns. Comparisons of patterns in phenetic hyperspace should yield clues to similarities of speciational patterns in sexually reproducing and apomictic populations. There is probably less reproductive connectedness between local population samples of putative species than is commonly assumed. Large-scale population structure will affect geographic variation patterns and reproductive connectedness among populations and needs to be analyzed by various techniques, among them graph theoretical methods. Any theory of species must take into account well-established facts at several levels of biological organization. The great diversity of kinds of species and patterns of speciation is stressed. In In addition to the classical theories of speciation, it is suggested that much local variation is due to the molding forces of local selection, little influenced by gene flow. Attention is directed to evidence from patterns of geographic variation of a single species examined over a series of localities, and from phenetic patterns of sympatric species. (shrink)