Gene Expression and Its Discontents

Gene Expression and Its Discontents
Author: Rodrick Wallace
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2016-11-23
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 3319480782

This book describes how epigenetic context, in a large sense, affects gene expression and the development of an organism, using the asymptotic limit theorems of information theory to construct statistical models useful in data analysis. The approach allows deep understanding of how embedding context affects development. We find that epigenetic information sources act as tunable catalysts, directing ontogeny into characteristic pathways, a perspective having important implications for epigenetic epidemiology. In sum, environmental stressors can induce a broad spectrum of developmental dysfunctions, and the book explores a number of pandemic chronic diseases, using U.S. data at different scales and levels of organization. In particular, we find the legacy of slavery has been grossly compounded by accelerating industrial decline and urban decay. Individual chapters are dedicated to obesity and its sequelae, coronary heart disease, cancer, mental disorders, autoimmune dysfunction, Alzheimer’s disease, and other conditions. Developmental disorders are driven by environmental factors channeled by historical trajectory and are unlikely to respond to medical interventions at the population level in the face of persistent individual and community stress. Drugs powerful enough to affect deleterious epigenetic programming will likely have side effects leading to shortened lifespan. Addressing chronic conditions and developmental disorders requires significant large-scale changes in public policy and resource allocation.

Cognitive Dynamics on Clausewitz Landscapes

Cognitive Dynamics on Clausewitz Landscapes
Author: Rodrick Wallace
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2019-08-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3030264246

This book applies cutting-edge methods from cognitive and evolutionary theories to develop models of conflict between hierarchically-structured cognitive entities under circumstances of imprecision, uncertainty and stress. Characterized as friction and the fog-of-war by the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, such conditions impair institutional cognition in real-time conflict and pose a real and continuing threat to organizations, such as the US military. In a linked collection of formal essays and a mathematical appendix, the book explores different aspects of cognitive and evolutionary process as conducted under the direction of doctrine that acts as a kind of genome for retention of what is learned through Lamarckian evolutionary selection pressures: armies and corporate entities learn from conflict, and incorporate that learning into their ongoing procedures. The book proposes models and policy solutions for strategic competence. A central feature of the book is a formal description of the famous OODA loop of the US military theorist John Boyd in terms of the Data Rate Theorem that links control and information theories. That description is expanded to cover more fully the impact of stochastic fog-of-war effects on tactical and operational scales of conflict. Subsequent chapters examine in more detail the role of doctrine, and the particular effect of embedding culture on cognitive and Lamarckian evolutionary processes associated with conflict on tactical, operational, and strategic scales and levels of organization. A scientifically sophisticated exercise in applied mathematics, history, evolutionary theory, and ecosystem theory, this book will be appropriate for researchers and students interested in defense, security, and international relations, as well as non-academic career professionals in government and industry.

Right-to-Work Laws and the Crumbling of American Public Health

Right-to-Work Laws and the Crumbling of American Public Health
Author: Deborah Wallace
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2018-02-16
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 3319727842

This book discusses the socioeconomic effects of Right-to-Work (RTW) laws on state populations. RTW laws forbid requiring union membership even at union-represented worksites. The core of the 22 long-term RTW states was the Confederacy, cultural descendants of rigidly hierarchical agrarian feudal England. RTW laws buttress hierarchy and power imbalance which unions minimize at the worksite and by encouraging higher educational attainment, social mobility, and individual empowerment through group validation. Contrary to claims of RTW proponents, RTW and non-RTW states do not differ significantly in unemployment rates. RTW states have higher poverty rates, lower median household incomes, and lower educational attainment on average and median than non-RTW states. RTW states on average and median have lower life expectancy, higher obesity prevalence, and higher rates of all-cause mortality, early mortality from chronic conditions, child mortality, and risk behaviors than non-RTW states. The higher mortality rates result in startlingly higher annual numbers of years of life lost before age 75. Stroke mortality at age 55-64 in RTW states results in nearly 10,000 years annually lost in excess of what it would be if the mortality rate were that of non-RTW states. A review of respected publications describes the physiological mechanisms and epidemiology of accelerated aging due to socioeconomic stress. Unions challenge hierarchy directly at work-sites and indirectly through encouraging college education, social mobility, and community and political engagement. How startling that feudal hierarchy lives in 21st century America, shaping vast differences between states in macro- and micro-economics, educational attainment, innovation, life expectancy, obesity prevalence, chronic disease mortality, infant and child mortality, risk behaviors, and other public health markers! Readers will gain insight about the coming clash between feudal individualism and adaptive collectivism, and, in the last chapter, on ways to win the clash by “missionary” work for collectivism.

Consciousness, Cognition and Crosstalk: The Evolutionary Exaptation of Nonergodic Groupoid Symmetry-Breaking

Consciousness, Cognition and Crosstalk: The Evolutionary Exaptation of Nonergodic Groupoid Symmetry-Breaking
Author: Rodrick Wallace
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 80
Release: 2021-10-20
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 303087219X

This book makes application to the dynamics of arousal and distraction, and to other examples. A modified version of the Kadanoff picture of phase transitions in consciousness emerges from the Morse Function itself in a surprisingly standard manner, closely associated with the breaking of groupoid symmetries driven by fundamental equivalence class algebras. Although this is far indeed from the familiar world of physical theory, it should be possible, on the basis of the probability models developed in the book, to develop new statistical tools for the analysis of observational and empirical data regarding cognition and consciousness.

Politics, Hierarchy, and Public Health

Politics, Hierarchy, and Public Health
Author: Deborah Wallace
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2019-06-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1000005267

Steep socioeconomic hierarchy in post-industrial Western society threatens public health because of the physiological consequences of material and psychosocial insecurities and deprivations. Following on from their previous books, the authors continue their exploration of the geography of early mortality from age-related chronic conditions, of risk behaviors and their health outcomes, and of infant and child mortality, all due to rigid hierarchy. They divide the 50 states into those that gave their electoral college votes to Trump and those that gave theirs to Clinton in the 2016 presidential election and compare the two sets for socioeconomic and public health profiles. They deliberately apply only simple standard statistical methods in the public health analyses: t-test, Mann-Whitney test, bivariate regression, and backward stepwise multivariate regression. The book assumes familiarity with basic statistics. The authors argue that the unequal power relations that result in eroding public health in the nation and, in particular, in the Trump-voting states, largely cascade from the collapse of American industry, and they analyze the Cold War roots of that collapse. In two largely independent chapters on economics, they explore both the suppression of countervailing forces, such as organized labor, and the diversion of technical resources to the military as essential foundations to the population-level suffering that expressed itself in the 2016 presidential election. This interdisciplinary book has several primary audiences: creators of public policies, such as legislators and governmental staff, public health professionals and social epidemiologists, economists, labor union professionals, civil rights advocates, political scientists, historians, and students of these disciplines from public health through the social sciences. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Computational Psychiatry

Computational Psychiatry
Author: Rodrick Wallace
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2017-04-20
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3319539108

This book explores mental disorders from a uniquely evolutionary perspective. Although there have been many attempts to mathematically model neural processes and, to some extent, their dysfunction, there is very little literature that models mental function within a sociocultural, socioeconomic, and environmental context. Addressing this gap in the extant literature, this book explores essential aspects of mental disorders, recognizing the ubiquitous role played by the exaptation of crosstalk between cognitive modules at many different scales and levels of organization, the missing heritability of complex diseases, and cultural epigenetics. Further, it introduces readers to valuable control theory tools that permit the exploration of the environmental induction of neurodevelopmental disorders, as well as the study of the synergism between culture, psychopathology and sleep disorders, offering a distinctively unique resource.

A Primer on Christian Ethics

A Primer on Christian Ethics
Author: Luke Bretherton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2023-10-31
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1009328972

An introduction to Christian ethics that provides a new, constructive framework for Christian moral and political thought. It draws on and integrates classic sources and approaches with contemporary liberationist and critical voices while making the ethical relationship between human and nonhuman life a central concern.

Essays on Strategy and Public Health

Essays on Strategy and Public Health
Author: Rodrick Wallace
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2022-04-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3030835782

This book is a collection of essays that explore commonalities and contrasts between strategy in armed conflict and strategy in public health. The first part uses the asymptotic limit theorems of information and control theories to study strategy as an exchange of messages between adversaries, in the context of underlying power relations. The ‘messages’ to be exchanged are constructed from an ‘alphabet’ of tactics available to each contender, in a large sense. The second part of the book explores four case histories from this perspective, ranging across agribusiness-generated pandemics, through tuberculosis and COVID-19. The final chapter attempts a strategic synthesis applicable more specifically to public health than to the remarkably – and disturbingly -- close parallel of armed conflict. Taking a unique approach to public health tactics and strategy this volume will be of interest to social epidemiologists, public health economists, public policy scientists, as well as public health researchers and practitioners.

Urban Alchemy

Urban Alchemy
Author: Mindy Thompson Fullilove
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2013-06-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1613320124

What if divided neighborhoods were causing public health problems? What if a new approach to planning and design could tackle both the built environment and collective well-being at the same time? What if cities could help each other? Dr. Mindy Fullilove, the acclaimed author of Root Shock, uses her unique perspective as a public health psychiatrist to explore ways of healing social and spatial fractures simultaneously. Using the work of French urbanist Michel Cantal-Dupart as a guide, Fullilove takes readers on a tour of successful collaborative interventions that repair cities and make communities whole.