Mounting empirical evidence underscores the health benefits of the arts, as recently reported in a scoping review by the World Health Organization. The creative arts in particular are acknowledged to be a public health resource that can be beneficial for well-being and health. Within this broad context, and as a subfield of participatory arts, the term social arts (SA) specifically refers to an art made by socially engaged professionals (e.g., artists, creative arts therapists, social workers, etc.) with non-professionals who determine (...) together the content and the final art product (in theater, visual arts, music, literature, etc.) with the aim to produce meaningful social changes. SA can enhance individual, community, and public health in times of sociopolitical instability and is an active field in Israel. However, SA is still an under-investigated field of study worldwide that is hard to characterize, typify, or evaluate. This paper presents a research protocol designed to examine a tripartite empirically-based model of SA that will cover a wide range of SA training programs, implementations, and impacts. The findings will help refine the definition of SA and inform practitioners, trainers, and researchers, as well as funding bodies and policymakers, on the content and impact of SA projects in Israel and beyond. (shrink)

Research on the human microbiome has gen- erated a staggering amount of sequence data, revealing variation in microbial diversity at the community, species (or phylotype), and genomic levels. In order to make this complexity more manageable and easier to interpret, new units—the metagenome, core microbiome, and entero- type—have been introduced in the scientific literature. Here, I argue that analytical tools and exploratory statisti- cal methods, coupled with a translational imperative, are the primary drivers of this new ontology. By reducing the (...) dimensionality of variation in the human microbiome, these new units render it more tractable and easier to interpret, and hence serve an important heuristic role. Nonetheless, there are several reasons to be cautious about these new categories prematurely ‘‘hardening’’ into natural units: a lack of constraints on what can be sequenced metagenomically, freedom of choice in taxonomic level in defining a ‘‘core microbiome,’’ typological framing of some of the concepts, and possible reification of statistical constructs. Finally, lessons from the Human Genome Project have led to a translational imperative: a drive to derive results from the exploration of microbiome variation that can help to articulate the emerging paradigm of per- sonalized genomic medicine (PGM). There is a tension between the typologizing inherent in much of this research and the personal in PGM. (shrink)

As the international genomic research community moves from the tool-making efforts of the Human Genome Project into biomedical applications of those tools, new metaphors are being suggested as useful to understanding how our genes work – and for understanding who we are as biological organisms. In this essay we focus on the Human Microbiome Project as one such translational initiative. The HMP is a new ‘metagenomic’ research effort to sequence the genomes of human microbiological flora, in order to pursue the (...) interesting hypothesis that our ‘microbiome’ plays a vital and interactive role with our human genome in normal human physiology. Rather than describing the human genome as the ‘blueprint’ for human nature, the promoters of the HMP stress the ways in which our primate lineage DNA is interdependent with the genomes of our microbiological flora. They argue that the human body should be understood as an ecosystem with multiple ecological niches and habitats in which a variety of cellular species collaborate and compete, and that human beings should be understood as ‘superorganisms’ that incorporate multiple symbiotic cell species into a single individual with very blurry boundaries. These metaphors carry interesting philosophical messages, but their inspiration is not entirely ideological. Instead, part of their cachet within genome science stems from the ways in which they are rooted in genomic research techniques, in what philosophers of science have called a ‘tools-to-theory’ heuristic. Their emergence within genome science illustrates the complexity of conceptual change in translational research, by showing how it reflects both aspirational and methodological influences. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss several temporal aspects of paleontology from a philosophical perspective. I begin by presenting the general problem of “taming” deep time to make it comprehensible at a human scale, starting with the traditional geologic time scale: an event-based, relative time scale consisting of a hierarchy of chronological units. Not only does the relative timescale provide a basis for reconstructing many of the general features of the history of life, but it is also consonant with the cognitive (...) processes humans use to think about time. Absolute dating of rocks, fossils, and evolutionary events (such as branching events on the tree of life) can be accomplished through the use of radiometric dating, chronological signals extractable from fossil growth patterns, and the “molecular clock.” Sometimes these different methods of absolute dating, which start from largely independent assumptions and evidentiary bases, converge in their temporal estimates, resulting in a consilience of inductions. At other times they fail to agree, either because fossils and molecules are giving temporal information about different aspects of nature and should not be expected to agree, or because of flawed assumptions that give rise to an inaccurate estimate. I argue that in general, despite the fact that it can be difficult to integrate disparate kinds of evidence, the principle of total evidence should be applied to the dating of evolutionary events. As a historical science, paleontology studies past events we cannot observe directly. This raises questions of epistemic access, meaning that due to the fragmentary nature of the fossil record we may find ourselves without access to the relevant traces to adjudicate between rival hypotheses about the past. The problems and prospects of epistemic access are explored through a case study of the reconstruction of the colors of dinosaurs. The paper closes with a reflection on the Darwin- Lyell metaphor of the fossil record as a highly fragmentary history book, and a call for a reconsideration of the book metaphor in favor of a systems view of the geologic and fossil records. (shrink)

Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has argued that rock and roll happens from the neck down. In this contribution to The Rolling Stones and Philosophy, edited by Luke Dick and George Reisch, I draw on neuroscience to argue that, in the parlance of John Stuart Mill, rock and roll is both a higher and a lower pleasure.