If you stare at a purple image that suddenly turns grey, you will experience a repulsive aftereffect: You will not experience grey, but green. If you stare at a waterfall with downward motion and then you stare at something stationary, you will experience another repulsive aftereffect: You will now experience upward movement. According to an orthodox view in vision science, these adaptive aftereffects are not limited to lower-level visual features like color and motion but also proliferate to higher-level features like (...) variance, causality, and number. These instances of high-level adaptation are thereby said to answer deep, otherwise intractable questions about the nature and content of visual processing — but is this true? In the present treatment, we question this orthodoxy. We begin by considering number adaptation as a paradigmatic case of high-level visual adaptation, reiterating recent arguments against the existence of number adaptation and offering additional reasons for skepticism. We then argue that even if number adaptation were to exist, it could not serve the roles expected of it in mainstream philosophy and vision science since adaptation of the proposed sort fails to usefully demarcate perceptual content. Despite these conclusions, we close by suggesting that there may be better reasons to believe that number is represented by the visual system. (shrink)

‘Deep adaptation’ refers to the personal and collective changes that might help us to prepare for – and live with – a climate-influenced breakdown or collapse of our societies. It is a framework for responding to the terrifying realization of increasing disruption by committing ourselves to reducing suffering while saving more of society and the natural world. This is the first book to show how professionals across different sectors are beginning to incorporate the acceptance of likely or unfolding societal (...) breakdown into their work and lives. They do not assume that our current economic, social and political systems can be made resilient in the face of climate change but, instead, they demonstrate the caring and creative ways that people are responding to the most difficult realization with which humanity may ever have to come to terms. Edited by the originator of the concept of deep adaptation, Jem Bendell, and a leading climate activist and strategist, Rupert Read, this book is the essential introduction to the concept, practice and emerging global movement of Deep Adaptation to climate chaos. (shrink)

The definitions and conceptualizations of health, and the management of healthcare have been challenged by the current global scenarios (e.g., new diseases, new geographical distribution of diseases, effects of climate change on health, etc.) and by the ongoing scholarship in humanities and science. In this paper we question the mainstream definition of health adopted by the WHO-'a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity' (WHO in Preamble to the constitution of (...) the World Health Organization as adopted by the international health conference, The World Health Organization, 1948)-and its role in providing tools to understand what health is in the contemporary context. More specifically, we argue that this context requires to take into account the role of the environment both in medical theory and in the healthcare practice. To do so, we analyse WHO documents dated 1984 and 1986 which define health as 'coping with the environment'. We develop the idea of 'coping with the environment', by focusing on two cardinal concepts: adaptation in public health and adaptivity in philosophy of biology. We argue that the notions of adaptation and adaptivity can be of major benefit for the characterization of health, and have practical implications. We explore some of these implications by discussing two recent case studies of adaptivity in public health, which can be valuable to further develop * Laura Menatti. (shrink)

We can perceive not only low-level features of events such as color and motion, but also seemingly higher-level properties such as causality. A prototypical example of causal perception is the ”launching effect’: one object moves toward a stationary second object until they are adjacent, at which point A stops and B starts moving in the same direction. Beyond these motions themselves --- and regardless of any higher-level beliefs --- this display induces a vivid visual impression of causality, wherein A is (...) seen to cause B’s motion. Do such percepts reflect a unitary category of visual processing, or might there be multiple distinct forms of causal perception? While launching is often simply equated with causal perception, researchers have sometimes described other phenomena such as ”triggering’ and ”entraining’. We used psychophysical methods to determine whether these labels really carve visual processing at its joints, and how putatively different forms of causal perception relate to each other. Previous research demonstrated retinotopically specific adaptation to causality: exposure to causal launching makes subsequent ambiguous events in that same location more likely to be seen as non-causal ”passing’. Here, after replicating this effect, we show that exposure to triggering also yields retinotopically specific adaptation for subsequent ambiguous launching displays, but that exposure to entraining does not. Collectively, these results reveal that visual processing distinguishes some types of causal interactions. (shrink)

Universal Basic Income (UBI) has been proposed as a potential way in which welfare states could be made more responsive to the ever-shifting evolutionary challenges of institutional adaptation in a dynamic environment. It has been proposed as a tool of “real freedom” (Van Parijs) and as a tool of making the welfare state more efficient. (Friedman) From the point of view of complexity theory and evolutionary economics, I argue that only a welfare state model that is “polycentrically” (Polanyi, Hayek) (...) organized as an evolving network of distributed decision-making can respond to the challenges of complexity in an adaptively efficient manner. UBI has the theoretical possibility to facilitate flexible, bottom-up innovation, since a) it embodies the “rule of law” principles of generality, nondiscrimination, simplicity, and transparency, and b) it grants people widespread freedom to experiment, innovate, and deviate from established practices and norms; but whether it can be made to work as intended depends on a number of variables in its design. I situate my research in the contemporary UBI debate around automation and technological development, which I interpret creatively through the lens of contemporary evolutionary political economy. I advance a syncretic model of institutional design based upon the shared insights of the Santa Fe, Neo-Hayekian, and Neo-Schumpeterian schools of evolutionary economics that, following Adam Thierer and Michael Munger, I call the framework of Permissionless Innovation (PI). Under the PI framework, which is a development of the tradition of evolutionary liberalism (Hume, Smith, Mandeville, Mill, Hayek, Polanyi, Schumpeter, Hodgson), individuals are granted the default right to innovate without having to ask for permission, and the right to basic income, which they can use to support their right to innovate, mutate, and experiment. This framework is a liberal framework to the extent it relies on widespread human freedom as a means of fostering innovation and social learning. And it is an evolutionary framework to the extent that it seeks to facilitate evolutionary socioeconomic processes for the sake of social progress and welfare advancement. I proceed to show, through an analysis of how innovation operates in both the economy and the cultural domain, that UBI can be used as an important cornerstone of an evolutionary liberal model of “ecostructural” governance that treats the socioeconomic order as an ecological garden of spontaneous growths, adaptations, and innovations. I call this the Permissionless Innovation Universal Basic Income (PIUBI) framework. In it, the right to innovate, deviate, and mutate is upheld as the “gold standard” of institutional design whereby individuals are granted widespread freedoms combined with the provision of UBI and other innovation-fostering (carefully bound) services and regulations. In the coming decades, UBI may even enable poor people to take better advantage of Human Enhancement Technologies (HETs) and other experimental innovations. Such a framework is compatible with a fast pace of evolutionary development, but the regulatory model accompanying such a framework must be capable of responding to evolutionary lock-ins, maladaptive innovations, self-destructive behaviour on the part of UBI recipients, and the management of catastrophic and existential risks. In the end, I will have shown that the PIUBI framework can be justified as a plausible default institutional mechanism for responding to radical uncertainty, but it needs to be experimentally adapted to changing circumstances with the help of various situation-specific, polycentric, multi-level, approaches. (shrink)

The definitions and conceptualizations of health, and the management of healthcare have been challenged by the current global scenarios (e.g., new diseases, new geographical distribution of diseases, effects of climate change on health, etc.) and by the ongoing scholarship in humanities and science. In this paper we question the mainstream definition of health adopted by the WHO—‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’ (WHO in Preamble to the constitution of (...) the World Health Organization as adopted by the international health conference, The World Health Organization, 1948)—and its role in providing tools to understand what health is in the contemporary context. More specifically, we argue that this context requires to take into account the role of the environment both in medical theory and in the healthcare practice. To do so, we analyse WHO documents dated 1984 and 1986 which define health as ‘coping with the environment’. We develop the idea of ‘coping with the environment’, by focusing on two cardinal concepts: adaptation in public health and adaptivity in philosophy of biology. We argue that the notions of adaptation and adaptivity can be of major benefit for the characterization of health, and have practical implications. We explore some of these implications by discussing two recent case studies of adaptivity in public health, which can be valuable to further develop adaptive strategies in the current pandemic scenario: community-centred care and microbiologically healthier buildings. (shrink)

Contemporary definitions of intelligence in AI and psychology suffer from the operational fallacy: the collapse of ontological definition into operationalization and measurement. I address this problem by introducing a three-stage concep- tual hierarchy and developing a new foundation for intelligence grounded in Popper’s conception of the growth of knowledge, Pearl’s structural causality, and Deutsch’s physical account of knowledge. On this basis, I argue that intelli- gence is not behavioral competence or successful goal pursuit, but the capacity to generate and improve (...) the kinds of internal informational structures that sup- port counterfactual prediction and error correction at the level of explanations. This capacity—which I call explanatory adaptation—distinguishes intelligence from mere adaptation or Bayesian belief-updating. The framework clarifies why contemporary machine learning systems, including large language models, may exhibit competence without intelligence, and it characterizes general intelligence as the open-ended expansion of a system’s capacity to discover error in explana- tory knowledge. By grounding intelligence in physical information-structure and counterfactual causal reasoning, the framework links its ontological basis to its epistemic characterization and demarcates intelligence from ordinary forms of complex adaptation. (shrink)

Contemporary biological research has suggested that some host–microbiome multispecies systems (referred to as “holobionts”) can in certain circumstances evolve as unique biological individual, thus being a unit of selection in evolution. If this is so, then it is arguably the case that some biological adaptations have evolved at the level of the multispecies system, what we call hologenomic adaptations. However, no research has yet been devoted to investigating their nature, or how these adaptations can be distinguished from adaptations at the (...) species-level (genomic adaptations). In this paper, we cover this gap by investigating the nature of hologenomic adaptations. By drawing on the case of the evolution of sanguivory diet in vampire bats, we argue that a trait constitutes a hologenomic adaptation when its evolution can only be explained if the holobiont is considered the biological individual that manifests this adaptation, while the bacterial taxa that bear the trait are only opportunistic beneficiaries of it. We then use the philosophical notions of emergence and inter-identity to explain the nature of this form of individuality and argue why it is special of holobionts. Overall, our paper illustrates how the use of philosophical concepts can illuminate scientific discussions, in the trend of what has recently been called metaphysics of biology. (shrink)

Much of the work on the evolutionary origins of human emotions sees emotions standing or falling together: either all of our emotions are adaptations or none of them are. In this paper, I challenge this orthodoxy. Taking shame and guilt as case studies, I argue that while we have good reason to see shame as a biological adaptation, the case for guilt is much less impressive. But this conclusion raises an important question: if guilt isn’t any adaptation, then (...) what is it? In response, I argue that guilt might be best understood as a kind of emotional technology: a culturally-driven innovation that helped our ancestors address particular, recurrent challenges of social life. The resulting picture not only offers a revisionary account of the nature and origins of shame and guilt, but also sheds new light on the place of these emotions in moral and social life. (shrink)

Two strong arguments have been given in favor of the claim that no selection process can play a role in explaining adaptations. According to the first argument, selection is a negative force; it may explain why the eliminated individuals are eliminated, but it does not explain why the ones that survived (or their offspring) have the traits they have. The second argument points out that the explanandum and the explanans are phenomena at different levels: selection is a population-level phenomenon, whereas (...) adaptation occurs on the individual level. Thus, selection can explain why individuals in a certain population have a certain trait, but it cannot explain why a certain indi- vidual has this trait. After pointing out that both arguments ignore the significance of the limitation of environmental resources, I will construe a positive argument for the claim that cumulative selection processes can, indeed, play a role in explaining adaptations. (shrink)

Background Considering the extensive debate that is currently taking place in Spain regarding euthanasia, it is important to examine the attitude of professionals who perform most of their duties at the bedside of these patients and their families. Objectives The aim of the present study was to present an adaptation and validation of the Euthanasia Attitude Scale and to evaluate its psychometric properties among a sample of nursing students in Spain. Research design A cross-sectional study design was conducted. Participants (...) and research context Non-probabilistic sampling was used to recruit 396 Spanish nursing students. Methods A self-report questionnaire, including socio-demographic data and the Euthanasia Attitude Scale, were used for data collection. The psychometric properties of the Euthanasia Attitude Scale were assessed, including reliability and validity. Fit indices of the overall model were computed. Ethical considerations This study was approved by the Hospital Ethical Committee. Students were informed of the aims and procedures and provided written informed consent prior to data collection. Results The factorial solution comprised four domains and the scale demonstrated adequate internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha =.878). For the exploratory factor analysis, the Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin index of sampling adequacy was.905 and the Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity was 2972.79 (p <.001). The initial factorial solution revealed four factors with eigenvalues of 6.78 for the first factor, 1.90 for the second one, 1.29 for the third, and 1.10 for the fourth factor. Moreover, there was a significant relationship between religiosity and the domains of the Euthanasia Attitude Scale. Discussion This study obtained a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of.88 which is in consonance with the findings reported by other studies whereby none of the items were removed and the initial structure based on four domains was conserved, with a factorial solution that explains 52.79% of the total variance. The displacement of some items of the domain may be explained by certain religious and/or cultural components as, in accordance with other studies, people with firm religious beliefs are more inclined to refuse euthanasia. Conclusion According to the findings of this study, the Euthanasia Attitude Scale is a reliable and valid instrument to measure the attitudes toward euthanasia in a sample of Spanish nursing students. This Spanish adaptation will be valuable in future studies examining the attitude and implication of nurses, understanding that nurses are key figures in the euthanasia debate. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article documents the adaptation, piloting and validation of a measure of teachers’ ethical sensitivity. To create the test, we modified a measure from dentistry drawing on literature in teacher professional ethics and drew on the expertise of professional ethics scholars and practitioners. Based on the results of Rasch analysis combined with traditional approaches to psychometric validation, the instrument was found to be a valid and reliable means of discerning levels of ethical sensitivity within the group of participants. (...) However, participants’ lack of ethical sensitivity as revealed by overall low scores, we contend, lends credence to concerns that teacher education programs may not be adequately preparing future teachers to meet expectations in connection with the ethical dimensions of the profession. In conclusion, we call for further research on pre- and in-service teachers’ capacity to perceive, reason about and react appropriately to ethical situations encountered at work. (shrink)

Recent studies indicate that the processing of an unexpected word is costly when the initial, disconfirmed prediction was strong. This penalty was suggested to stem from commitment to the strongly predicted word, requiring its inhibition when disconfirmed. Additional studies show that comprehenders rationally adapt their predictions in different situations. In the current study, we hypothesized that since the disconfirmation of strong predictions incurs costs, it would also trigger adaptation mechanisms influencing the processing of subsequent strong predictions. In two experiments, (...) participants made speeded congruency judgments on two-word phrases in which the first word was either highly constraining or not. We manipulated the proportion of disconfirmed predictions in highly constraining contexts between participants. The results provide additional evidence of the costs associated with the disconfirmation of strong predictions. Moreover, they show a reduction in these costs when participants experience a high proportion of disconfirmed strong predictions throughout the experiment, indicating that participants adjust the strength of their predictions when strong prediction is discouraged. We formulate a Bayesian adaptation model whereby prediction failure cost is weighted by the participant’s belief about the likelihood of encountering the expected word, and show that it accounts for the trial-by-trial data. (shrink)

The main misunderstanding of the etiological conception of the concept of function is to confuse this notion with the concept of adaptation. The explanations by natural selection do not justify function attributions: They explain the configuration of an organic structure by considerations that, among other elements, also include references to the functional performance of this structure. That is why, the best manner of characterizing them is to say that they are design explanations. However, for a correct formulation of the (...) idea of design, it will be necessary to adopt a conception of the function attributions that could avoid the difficulties of the etiological conception. For this, it will be necessary to think of functions as causal roles. (shrink)

A novel fuzzy control scheme with adaptation algorithms is developed for robot manipulators’ system. At the beginning, one adjustable parameter is introduced in the fuzzy logic system, the robot manipulators system with uncertain nonlinear terms as the master device and a reference model dynamic system as the slave robot system. To overcome the limitations such as online learning computation burden and logic structure in conventional fuzzy logic systems, a parameter should be used in fuzzy logic system, which composes fuzzy (...) logic system with updated parameter laws, and can be formed for a new fashioned adaptation algorithms controller. The error closed-loop dynamical system can be stabilized based on Lyapunov analysis, the number of online learning computation burdens can be reduced greatly, and the different kinds of fuzzy logic systems with fuzzy rules or without any fuzzy rules are also suited. Finally, effectiveness of the proposed approach has been shown in simulation example. (shrink)

Agriculture is widely recognised as one of the most vulnerable sectors to climate change. Despite this vulnerability, adaptation efforts have progressed slowly over the past several decades. Ireland is no exception, with higher temperatures and more variable rainfall impacting farmers and making adaptation necessary. However, despite commitments since 2018, agriculture has made only moderate or limited adaptation progress to date. Through narrative analysis using a justice and just transition lens, this paper explores how the framing of (...) class='Hi'>adaptation in rural community narratives portrays adaptation as an unfair burden on farmers. Document analysis, interviews with agricultural professionals, and a workshop revealed four narrative elements that were perceived to contribute to farming and rural communities feeling unjustly treated and resistant to implementing climate adaptation measures. The first is a general narrative of injustice in rural areas compared to urban areas. Second is a narrative that the purpose of climate adaptation is not to help farmers deal with climate impacts, but rather to provide climate mitigation and environmental improvements. Third is a feeling that when the environment wins, farmers lose. Finally, a narrative exists that farmers have been repeatedly asked to change their farming practices at their own expense and at their own risk to achieve larger societal goals. The findings underscore the need for adaptation narratives to take perceptions of justice into account, and to promote narratives that highlight specific benefits to farmers and their families. Such reframing could strengthen farmer engagement and foster greater support for climate adaptation initiatives. (shrink)

Avoiding severe impacts from anthropogenic climate change requires not only substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions but also further implementation of adaptation measures. In many regions with smallholder farming systems adaptation can help ensure food security despite significantly changing climatic conditions. However, the space for adaptation measures has limits. In this paper, we investigate hard and soft adaptation limits and discuss their relevance to food security in smallholder farming food systems. We argue that soft adaptation (...) limits can be defined by sufficiency levels of justice like basic needs, capabilities, human rights or levels of well-being. Depending on social, cultural, political and economic conditions different communities realize different sufficiency levels of justice. Furthermore, as normative claims of justice, these sufficiency levels not only allow the social, cultural and political and economic conditions of social systems to be described but also define entitlements. We show that for smallholder farming systems with low social and economic standards these entitlements might mean that soft adaptation limits can define entitlements to social and economic improvements despite transformational adaptation to changing climatic conditions. (shrink)

The 1940s and 1950s were marked by intense debates over the origin of drug resistance in microbes. Bacteriologists had traditionally invoked the notions of ‘training’ and ‘adaptation’ to account for the ability of microbes to acquire new traits. As the field of bacterial genetics emerged, however, its participants rejected ‘Lamarckian’ views of microbial heredity, and offered statistical evidence that drug resistance resulted from the selection of random resistant mutants. Antibiotic resistance became a key issue among those disputing physiological vs. (...) genetic explanations of variation in bacteria. Postwar developments connected with the Lysenko affair gave this debate a new political valence.Proponents of the neo-Darwinian synthesis weighed in with support for the genetic theory. However, certain features of drug resistance seemed inexplicable by mutation and selection, particularly the phenomenon of ‘multiple resistance’—the emergence of resistance in a single strain against several unrelated antibiotics. In the late 1950s, Tsutomu Watanabe and his collaborators solved this puzzle by determining that resistance could be conferred by cytoplasmic resistance factors rather than chromosomal mutation. These R factors could carry resistance to many antibiotics and seemed able to promote their own dissemination in bacterial populations. In the end, the vindication of the genetic view of drug resistance was accompanied by a recasting of the ‘gene’ to include extrachromosomal hereditary units carried on viruses and plasmids. (shrink)

I investigate the relationship between adaptation, as defined in evolutionary theory through natural selection, and the concept of emergence. I argue that there is an essential correlation between the former, and “emergence” defined in the field of algorithmic simulations. I first show that the computational concept of emergence (in terms of incompressible simulation) can be correlated with a causal criterion of emergence (in terms of the specificity of the explanation of global patterns). On this ground, I argue that emergence (...) in general involves some sort of selective processes. Finally, I show that a second criterion, concerning novel explanatory regularities following the emergence of a pattern, captures the robustness of emergence displayed by some cases of emergence (according to the first criterion). Emergent processes fulfilling both criteria are therefore exemplified in evolutionary biology by some so-called “innovations”, and mostly by the new units of fitness or new kinds of adaptations (like sexual reproduction, multicellular organisms, cells, societies) sometimes called “major transitions in evolution”, that recent research programs (Maynard-Smith and Szathmary 1995 ; Michod 1999 ) aims at explaining. (shrink)

Background In the translation of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), it is crucial to preserve the authenticity of its philosophical, historical, and linguistic characteristics. This study aims to conduct a comprehensive analysis of translation strategies for adapting TCM terminology to foreign cultural contexts, based on the classical text The Emperor”s Canon of Eighty-One Difficult Issues. Methods A comparative analysis was performed to evaluate the effectiveness of foreignization and domestication strategies in translating TCM terminology into Russian, using an experimental study involving 84 (...) respondents (42 in each group). The Student’s t-test was employed to assess medical accuracy, equivalence, pragmatic value, terminological precision, and cultural specificity. Results The results revealed a statistically significant advantage of the domestication strategy across most metrics, particularly in equivalence (_p_ = 0.001) and pragmatic value (_p_ = 0.008), where domestication achieved higher mean scores (4.12 and 4.03) compared to foreignization (3.48 and 3.55). Thus, it was established that domestication facilitates better adaptation of complex Chinese medical concepts for target audiences while maintaining sufficient medical accuracy. This is supported by higher scores in overcoming cultural barriers (48.8% versus 22.0%) and ensuring terminological precision (3.88 versus 3.41), making it a more effective strategy for translating medical terminology from Chinese into Russian. Conclusions The practical significance of this study lies in determining the effectiveness of translation approaches for TCM terminology into Russian through experimental research. These findings can be applied in the work of medical translators, the development of educational materials on Chinese medicine, and the creation of methodological guidelines for medical text translation. Consequently, the results hold the potential to improve the quality of educational materials on TCM and enhance intercultural medical communication. (shrink)

In 1965, Konrad Lorenz grounded the innate–acquired distinction in what he believed were the only two possible sources of information that can underlie adaptedness: phylogenetic and individual experience. Phylogenetic experience accumulates in the genome by the process of natural selection. Individual experience is acquired ontogenetically through interacting with the environment during the organism’s lifetime. According to Lorenz, the adaptive information underlying innate traits is stored in the genome. Lorenz erred in arguing that genetic adaptation is the only means of (...) accumulating information in phylogenetic experience. Cultural adaptation also occurs over a phylogenetic time scale, and cultural tradition is a third source from which adaptive information can be extracted. This paper argues that genetic adaptation can be distinguished from individual and cultural adaptation in a species like Homo sapiens, in which even adaptations with a genetic component require cultural inputs and scaffolding to develop and be expressed. Examination of the way in which innateness is used in science suggests that scientists use the term, as Lorenz suggested, to designate genetic adaptations. The search for innate traits plays an essential role in generating hypotheses in ethology and psychology. In addition, designating a trait as innate establishes important facts that apply at the information-processing level of description. (shrink)

Attention and adaptation are both mechanisms that optimize visual performance. Attention optimizes performance by increasing contrast sensitivity for and neural response to attended stimuli while decreasing them for unattended stimuli; adaptation optimizes performance by increasing contrast sensitivity for and neural response to changing stimuli while decreasing them for unchanging stimuli. We investigated whether and how the adaptation state and the attentional effect on contrast sensitivity interact. We measured contrast sensitivity with an orientation-discrimination task, in two adaptation (...) conditions—adapt to 0% or 100% contrast—in focused, distributed, and withdrawn attentional conditions. We used threshold and asymptotic performance to index the magnitude of the attentional effect—enhancement or impairment in contrast sensitivity—before and after adapting to high-contrast stimuli. The results show that attention and adaptation affect the contrast psychometric function in a similar but opposite way: Attention increases stimulus salience, whereas adaptation reduces stimulus salience. An interesting finding is that the adaptation state does not modulate the magnitude of the attentional effect. This suggests that attention affects the normalized signal once the effect of contrast adaptation has taken place and that these two mechanisms act separately to change contrast sensitivity. Attention can overcome adaptation to restore contrast sensitivity. (shrink)

It is often assumed that adaptation — a temporary change in sensitivity to a perceptual dimension following exposure to that dimension — is a litmus test for what is and is not a “primary visual attribute”. Thus, papers purporting to find evidence of number adaptation motivate a claim of great philosophical significance: That number is something that can be seen in much the way that canonical visual features, like color, contrast, size, and speed, can. Fifteen years after its (...) reported discovery, number adaptation’s existence seems to be nearly undisputed, with dozens of papers documenting support for the phenomenon. The aim of this paper is to offer a counterweight — to critically assess the evidence for and against number adaptation. After surveying the many reasons for thinking that number adaptation exists, we introduce several lesser-known reasons to be skeptical. We then advance an alternative account — the old news hypothesis — which can accommodate previously published findings while explaining various (otherwise unexplained) anomalies in the existing literature. Next, we describe the results of eight pre-registered experiments which pit our novel old news hypothesis against the received number adaptation hypothesis. Collectively, the results of these experiments undermine the number adaptation hypothesis on several fronts, whilst consistently supporting the old news hypothesis. More broadly our work raises questions about the status of adaptation itself as a means of discerning what is and is not a visual attribute. (shrink)

An adaptation is a special case of intertextuality or intermediality that usually involves the transfer of a work of art from one medium to another. Adaptation has become a dominant cultural phenomenon – for example, many films are based on novels. This paper explores the nature of the appreciation of adaptations. On the one hand, I argue that, when engaging with an adaptation, people take the same approach as when appreciating a work of art not based on (...) any pre-existing work. It follows that the process of appreciating adaptations is not as special and unique as we think. On the other hand, I argue this special way of appreciating adaptations negatively impacts our engagement with adaptations. Therefore, it should not be adopted by appreciators. I conclude that people do not have a special way to appreciate adaptations and may not require one. (shrink)

“Teleosemantic” or “biosemantic” theories form a strong naturalistic programme in the philosophy of mind and language. They seek to explain the nature of mind and language by recourse to a natural history of “proper functions” as selected-for effects of language- and thought-producing mechanisms. However, they remain vague with respect to the nature of the proposed analogy between selected-for effects on the biological level and phenomena that are not strictly biological, such as reproducible linguistic and cultural forms. This essay critically explores (...) various interpretations of this analogy. It suggests that these interpretations can be explicated by contrasting adaptationist with pluralist readings of the evolutionary concept of adaptation. Among the possible interpretations of the relations between biological adaptations and their analogues in language and culture, the two most relevant are a linear, hierarchical, signalling-based model that takes its cues from the evolution of co-operation and joint intentionality and a mutualistic, pluralist model that takes its cues from mimesis and symbolism in the evolution of human communication. Arguing for the merits of the mutualistic model, the present analysis indicates a path towards an evolutionary pluralist version of biosemantics that will align with theories of cognition as being environmentally “scaffolded”. Language and other cultural forms are partly independent reproducible structures that acquire proper functions of their own while being integrated with organism-based cognitive traits in co-evolutionary fashion. (shrink)

Irreversible and inevitable climate change will, and already has, negatively affected the lives, livelihoods, and health of many communities around the world as well as of future generations. Yet, climate-affected communities often have little responsibility for bringing about these consequences. This has led some scholars to argue that climate-affected communities, now and in the future, have a ‘right to climate adaptation:’ the right to demand adaptive assistance and freedom. In this paper, I ask what normative commitments that should be (...) respected when implementing the right to climate adaptation within national and international climate policy and legislation. In particular, I identify three core normative commitments of the right to climate adaptation, namely (i) a commitment to conceptualizing socioeconomic justice in multi-dimensional terms, taking into account the context-sensitivity of climate-vulnerabilities and adaptive needs; (ii) a commitment to intergenerational justice, both forward-looking in order to anticipate adaptation needs of future generations, but also backwards-looking by recognizing the historical injustices that have brought about current climate-vulnerabilities and thus to provide reparations for past harms; and (iii) the commitments to provide basic adaptation and to respect autonomous adaptation. (shrink)

This essay defends a strong right against displacement as part of a basic individual right to secure access to one’s home. The analysis is purposefully situated within the difficult context of climate change adaptation policies. Under increasing environmental pressures, especially regarding water security, there are weighty reasons motivating the forced displacement of persons—to safeguard water resources or prevent water-related disasters. Even in these pressing circumstances, I argue, individuals have weighty rights to secure access to their homes. I explain how (...) the home provides a functional context for conditions of autonomous agency. Being coerced from the home disrupts and subverts the conditions necessary for autonomous processes. I conclude by suggesting that the right to the home could be a foundational element of territorial rights. (shrink)

This chapter begins by contrasting Spencer’s view of natural selection with Darwin’s understanding of its “paramount power.” Darwin’s interpretation contains seeds of a defining mark of the modern evolutionary synthesis: Adaptation is necessarily a consequence of natural selection working as a “creative” factor over multiple generations. The chapter distinguishes between several versions of the modern synthesis in order to argue that some are less at odds than others with the current turn toward development and in order to suggest that (...) allowing ontogeny to be the generative locus of (much) selectable variation makes for more continuity between the developmentalist turn and the modern synthesis than is sometimes thought. Shifting “adaptation” from trans-generational populations to ontogenetically construed organisms is in tension with the modern evolutionary synthesis, but not as much as some believe. (shrink)

Despite shrinking civic space, civil society organisations (CSOs) in Uganda continue to shape pathways toward sustainable and inclusive agricultural transformation. This paper explores why and how CSOs use non-confrontational strategies, particularly advocacy to influence policy and institutional processes regarding agricultural development. It draws on in-depth interviews with CSO actors, including NGOs, coalitions, networks, and farmer organisations. The findings indicate that advocacy functions as a tactical strategy that shields actors from repression, sustains political legitimacy, and enables promotion of alternative visions for (...) agricultural transformation within restrictive political environments. The implication here is that non-confrontational choices are not merely ideological but represent calculated responses to political threats and opportunities that shape political mobilisation landscape in Uganda. Hence, they can be interpreted through the lens of strategic adaptation, where actors deliberately avoid confrontation as a means of manouvring through obstacles in order to minimise the risk of demobilisation and cooptation while pursuing transformative goals. This way, the study shows how Ugandan CSOs balance collaboration and resistance to preserve the political essence of their efforts and ensure survival. More broadly, this study contributes to debates on agrarian transformation debates by highlighting how strategic adaptation shapes the ethical and practical possibilities for sustainable and inclusive agricultural change in restrictive environments. (shrink)

In Adaptation and Natural Selection, George C. Williams linked the distinction between group and individual adaptation with the distinction between group and individual selection. Williams' Principle, as we will call it, says that adaptation at a level requires selection at that level. This is a necessary but not a sufficient condition; for example, group adaptation requires group selection, but the fact that group selection influences a trait's evolution does not suffice for the resulting trait frequency to (...) be a group adaptation. What more is required? In this paper, we describe an answer to this question that has been developed in multilevel selection theory. We also discuss an alternative framework for defining units of adaptation that violates Williams' Principle. (shrink)

The information theoretic principle of rational adaptation predicts that individuals with aphasia adapt to their language impairments by relying more heavily on comparatively unimpaired non-linguistic knowledge to communicate. This prediction was examined by assessing the extent to which adults with chronic aphasia due to left-hemisphere stroke rely more on conceptual rather than lexical information during verb retrieval, as compared to age-matched neurotypical controls. A primed verb naming task examined the degree of facilitation each participant group received from either conceptual (...) event-related or lexical collocate cues, compared to unrelated baseline cues. The results provide evidence that adults with aphasia received amplified facilitation from conceptual cues compared to controls, whereas healthy controls received greater facilitation from lexical cues. This indicates that adaptation to alternative and relatively unimpaired information may facilitate successful word retrieval in aphasia. Implications for models of rational adaptation and clinical neurorehabilitation are discussed. (shrink)

As cities strive to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), repurposing industrial heritage is emerging as a crucial yet frequently overlooked approach to fostering urban sustainability, resilience, and social inclusion. While SDG 11 acknowledges heritage’s role in sustainable urbanization, its implementation remains inconsistent, hindered by prevailing economic growth models, voluntary governance structures, and rigid sustainability metrics. This paper examines adaptive reuse as a sustainability tool beyond 2030, drawing from concepts such as placemaking, urban commons, and resilience-based design. Through case studies (...) from diverse urban settings, it highlights how community-led sustainability initiatives challenge top-down, performance-driven SDG frameworks. Emphasizing community-driven placemaking, decolonial heritage approaches, and circular economy principles, the study calls for a fundamental shift in global urban sustainability paradigms. Looking ahead, sustainability strategies must incorporate heritage-led development that prioritizes social and environmental well-being, foster participatory governance to empower local communities, and embrace broader well-being metrics beyond GDP. Additionally, adaptive reuse must facilitate just transitions, preventing displacement and gentrification while ensuring inclusive regeneration. By connecting critical urban theory with practical applications, this paper contributes to the ongoing discussion on how industrial heritage can drive a more transformative and community-centered sustainability agenda beyond 2030. (shrink)

This paper explores a framework for defining artificial intelligence (AI) that adapts to individuals within a group, and discusses the technical challenges for collaborative AI systems that must work with different human partners. Collaborative AI is not one-size-fits-all, and thus AI systems must tune their output based on each human partner's needs and abilities. For example, when communicating with a partner, an AI should consider how prepared their partner is to receive and correctly interpret the information they are receiving. Forgoing (...) such individual considerations may adversely impact the partner's mental state and proficiency. On the other hand, successfully adapting to each person's (or team member's) behavior and abilities can yield performance benefits for the human–AI team. Under this framework, an AI teammate adapts to human partners by first learning components of the human's decision-making process and then updating its own behaviors to positively influence the ongoing collaboration. This paper explains the role of this AI adaptation formalism in dyadic human–AI interactions and examines its application through a case study in a simulated navigation domain. (shrink)

Indonesia is a multicultural country with a variety of different cultures and ethnicities. The cultural diversity that exists in Indonesia makes language as an identity of an ethnic group different. When moving to a new environment, of course, adaptation is needed, especially language adaptation to rejuvenate migrants and residents in interaction as happened in Bayur Hamlet, Balik Bukit District, West Lampung Regency. The purpose of this study itself is to analyze how the adaptation process that occurs between (...) Javanese ethnic migrants and Lampung natives also analyzes communication patterns that occur in the process of language adaptation. In this study, researchers used a qualitative type of research with a descriptive approach. The informants of this research amounted to five people who were traditional stakeholders, two ethnic residents of Lampung and two ethnic transmigrants of Java. The theory used is speech code. The results of this study show that the adaptation that occurs between Javanese ethnic transmigrants and indigenous Lampung ethnic is cultural hybridity or cultural mixing, especially in terms of language and the communication pattern that occurs in the process of language adaptation is circular. (shrink)

Philosophy of action in the context of Classical China is radically different from its counterpart in the contemporary Western philosophical narrative. Classical Chinese philosophers began from the assumption that relations are primary to the constitution of the person, hence acting in the early Chinese context necessarily is interacting and co-acting along with others –human and nonhuman actors. This book is the first monograph dedicated to the exploration and rigorous reconstruction of an extraordinary strategy for efficacious relational action devised by Classical (...) Chinese philosophers in order to account for the interdependent and embedded character of human agency –what the author has denominated “adapting” or “adaptive agency” (yin 因). As opposed to more unilateral approaches to action also conceptualized in the Classical Chinese corpus, such as forceful and prescriptive agency, adapting requires great capacity of self and other-awareness, equanimity, flexibility, creativity, and response, which allows the agent to co-raise courses of action ad-hoc: unique and temporary solutions to specific, non-permanent, and non-generalizable life problems. Adapting is one of the world’s oldest philosophies of action, and yet it is shockingly new for contemporary audiences, who will find in it an unlikely source of inspiration to deal with our current global problems. This book explores the core conception of adapting both on autochthonous terms and by cross-cultural comparison, drawing on the European and Analytic philosophical traditions as well as on scholarship from other disciplines, opening a brand-new topic in Chinese and comparative philosophy. (shrink)

Hedonic adaptation, the tendency for affective experience to return toward a baseline after improvements or setbacks, has been widely studied in psychology and economics, but its implications for theodicy have received little attention. This paper argues that adaptation introduces a distinctive constraint on the problem of evil by foregrounding a neglected dimension of suffering: its recurrence. Even when objective conditions improve, relief tends to lose experiential force as evaluative baselines reset and perceived suffering reasserts itself. I develop a (...) minimal framework distinguishing external circumstances from perceived suffering and identify two structural features of adaptation: the persistence of deviations from baseline and the degree of asymmetry between recovery from adversity and habituation to improvement. The framework shows why even benevolently calibrated trajectories can at best reduce cumulative burden rather than secure lasting experiential relief. These dynamics have differential implications for soul-making, free-will, providential-restraint, and interventionist theodicies, reframing what divine benevolence can be taken to accomplish within affective life. They also supplement skeptical theism by identifying an affective source of opacity and illuminate an experiential pathway to divine hiddenness. (shrink)

In this chapter, the central focus is on the mechanisms used by animals to control their interactions with all aspects of their world. In order to understand what is stressful and what situations lead to good or poor welfare, we need to know about the systems with which humans and other species regulate their lives. Research on motivation has long been a major aspect of animal welfare science. Since the brain is the source of control mechanisms its complexity of function (...) is a key issue. Which animals are sentient and when during development do humans and other animals become sentient? What are the roles of the complex mechanisms that we call feelings and emotions? Terms defined in this chapter include: adaptation, homeostasis, sentience, causal factor, motivational state, gain, need, frustration, pain, feelings, emotion and suffering. (shrink)

This chapter explores health as adaptation and balance, emphasizing self-management, resilience, and environmental interplay. While the concept broadens traditional biomedical models, it faces significant challenges. Defining health as capacity to adapt and self-manage places responsibility on individuals, and it risks victim-blaming, as social and economic disparities influencing health behaviors are overlooked. “One Health” expands the focus to human, animal, and ecosystem health, but its broad scope challenges medicine’s boundaries and raises operational difficulties. The analysis highlights a recurring tension between (...) inclusivity and clarity, explanatory depth with practical and ethical coherence. Distinguishing conceptual components of health from determinants of health is a possible way out. (shrink)

In this paper we introduce the ‘New Substitution Problem’ which, on its face, presents a problem for adaptation proposals that are justified by appeal to obligations of reparation. In contrast to the standard view, which is that obligations of reparation require that one restore lost value, we propose instead that obligations to aid and assist species and ecosystems in adaptation, in particular, follow from a failure to adequately justify – either by absence, neglect, omission or malice – actions (...) that caused, or coalesced to cause, climatic change. Because this position suggests a different reason for reparation – namely, it does not rely on the notion that an obligation to repair is contingent upon a lost good – it permits moving forward with assisted colonisation and migration, but does so without falling subject to the complications of the New Substitution Problem. (shrink)

Farmers perceive and appraise climate change, related risks and opportunities as well as adaptation measures differently. Such differences are not well understood and rarely considered in extension services, outreach activities and agricultural policies. We aim to develop empirically based farmer types, who differ in their socio-cognitive and emotional processes towards droughts, their expected drought impacts, their appraisal of drought adaptation measures, and their previous and intended implementation of such measures. The Model of Private Pro-Active Adaptation to Climate (...) Change provides the theoretical foundation for a three-phase procedure of semi-structured interviews, a standardized survey and a qualitative workshop. The principal component analysis reveals eight socio-cognitive and emotional processes of relevance for forming the famer types of drought adaptation: perceived opportunities resulting from droughts, perceived effectiveness of drought adaptation measures, negative affect towards droughts, perceived work effort and perceived social approval of drought adaptation measures, fatalism, trust in public measures, and perceived self-efficacy. Cluster analyses of these processes yield four types of Austrian farmers. The social implementers perceive themselves as capable, and drought adaptation measures as effective, socially approved, and effortless. The unaffected profiteers have hardly been affected by droughts and perceive beneficial impacts due to a decline in precipitation. The trusting fearfuls have already experienced severe drought impacts and express intense negative affect towards droughts. The passive fatalists focus on avoidance and do neither trust in important others nor in public measures. The identified farmer types of drought adaptation may support the design of climate and agricultural policy instruments and of tailor-made education and communication programs, for instance to increase self-efficacy and reduce fatalism. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that we must adapt to climate change. But we sit on the edge of radical, unprecedented, and rapid anthropogenic environmental changes that are driven by many factors in addition to greenhouse gas emissions. In this way, we occupy a unique and precarious position in the history of our species. Many basic conditions of life on Earth are changing at an alarming rate and thus we should begin to transform and broaden our thinking about adaptation. The (...) conceptual history of climate adaptation intersects with conceptions of human development and sustainability, which provides a framework for adaptation in how we think about human flourishing and, subsequently, what it is to be human in the Anthropocene. If sustainability is about maintaining human welfare across generations but we acknowledge that climate change may undercut our ability to deliver as much and as good total or natural capital to subsequent generations, we have a residual duty to otherwise positively affect the welfare of future generations. A subjective, preference-based conception of human welfare is compared to an objective, capabilities-based approach and, while some adaptive preferences are unavoidable, embracing an objective theory of human flourishing provides a superior approach for meeting the residual duty we have to future generations by beginning the process of adapting our conception of human natural goodness, or what it is to be a good human being. (shrink)