Because of recent public excitement about cloning and embryonic stem cell research, more people than just developmental biologists are busily talking about embryos. Human embryos are central players in proposed legislation at state, federal, and international levels. But what is meant by an embryo? Rarely is the term defined or defined clearly. Yet the term is used in quite different ways and has evolved over time.

How have meanings changed, and for what reasons? What is the relationship between public and scientific understandings of embryos? Here, the focus is most directly on evolving understandings of the biological embryo, including recent shifting public meanings. In each case, both metaphysical and epistemological considerations are important. Yet only after the emergence of in vitro fertilization did the embryo become an object of significant ethical concern, and only with cloning and human embryonic stem stem cell research was it widely seen as an object of social concern. This essay considers the changing understandings of embryos.

Since at least 1771, with the appearance of the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the embryo has been seen as the earliest - and undifferentiated - stage of an individual organism's development. The embryonic stage was clearly separated from the fetal stage, with the first giving way to the second as form gradually emerged from unformed matter.

Philosophical arguments have played an influential role in the development of phylogenetic systematics - the field of biology that seeks to reconstruct the genealogical relationships among species, discover the pattern of events that has led to the distribution and diversity of life, and use this knowledge to construct natural classifications of species. Three sets of discussions clearly demonstrate this connection between philosophy and phylogenetics: inference modes and their relevance to competing phylogenetic methods, the nature and treatment of species and higher taxa, and the nature and treatment of phylogenetic evidence (character data). Within each of these areas, systematists have used philosophical arguments to defend particular concepts and methodological approaches, or to propose new ones. And, within each of these areas, philosophers have scrutinized the arguments of systematists and contributed their own.

Vigorous debate amongst systematists regarding these topics is pervasive. A common underlying tension that helps drive such debates revolves around the proper roles of process theories, assumptions, and trained judgment in phylogenetics research. For example, concerns about objectivity and testability have sometimes led systematists to reject methods that depend on evolutionary process theories, but such rejections typically do not 'stick' for very long. Thus, a cyclical pattern is evident - attempts to infuse theoretical dependence into phylogenetics research have repeatedly been countered by charges of non-objectivity and decreased testability, yet attempts to avoid them have repeatedly been countered by charges of operationalism.

“Do genes make people gay?” This is a question scientists who study human sexuality hear all the time from politicians, students, and people just curious about their own sexual orientation. Many people believe that the causation of sexual orientation has important implications for the moral status of homosexuality. Both common sense and moral theory tend to evaluate the acceptability of a person's behavior on the basis of the controllability of that behavior. One cannot be held morally blameworthy for things over which one has no control. Because individuals have no control over the genes they inherit, according to this theory they should not be held responsible for being gay if it is genetically determined. This view is apparent in surveys of Americans that have found an association between the belief that homosexuality is genetically determined and less negative attitudes towards gay people (Schmalz 1993, Tygart 2000).

The purposes of this essay are to review what the best science currently available says about the genetic causes of sexual orientation and to discuss some of the normative implications and, more importantly, nonimplications of that science. As with any issue in which there is substantial political and scientific controversy, there is ongoing debate about the very distinctions that lie at its foundation. Nevertheless, terms like “heterosexual” and “gay” are commonplace in both the popular and the scientific literature.

Eyes have long fascinated those who study the natural world. Cleanthes - the natural theologian protagonist of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion - invites his interlocutor to 'consider, anatomize the eye: Survey its structure and contrivance; and tell me, from your own feeling, if the idea of a contriver does not immediately flow in upon you with a force like that of sensation' (1990, 65). Darwin, too, counted the eye among what he called 'organs of extreme perfection'. Placing himself squarely within the tradition that runs from natural theology, through Darwin, to a certain style of modern biology, Maynard Smith writes that 'the main task of any theory of evolution is to explain adaptive complexity, that is, to explain the same set of facts that Paley used as evidence of a creator' (1969, 82). More recently still, Dawkins (1986) is impressed, also, with a force like that of sensation, by how well suited - how well adapted, that is - the eye is to its purpose. Like Paley, he thinks eyes are better pieces of work than watches, although unlike Paley he regards their artificer as blind.

An essay on adaptation could fill volumes. One might begin by asking how adaptation is to be explained. Immediately we would need to answer the prior question of what the proper definition of adaptation is, and we would also have to get clear on the nature of the diverse candidate processes - natural selection, self-organisation, macromutation, development, divine design - sometimes tabled as potential explanations.

INTRODUCTION

What is evolutionary psychology? The answer to this question is complicated by the fact that the term “evolutionary psychology” is commonly used in two distinct senses. In one sense, evolutionary psychology is simply the study of human behavior and psychology from an evolutionary perspective. In this sense, evolutionary psychology is a field of inquiry, a loose confederation of research programs that differ significantly in theoretical and methodological commitments. These diverse research programs attempt to explain a wide variety of phenomena, ranging from foraging and birth spacing in traditional hunter-gatherer societies to encephalization (the progressive increase in brain size relative to body size in the human lineage) and the evolution of altruism and language. What unites these research programs is not a shared commitment to specific theories regarding the evolution of human behavior and psychology, but only a commitment to articulating questions about human behavior and psychology, and articulating answers to those questions, with conceptual and theoretical tools drawn from evolutionary theory.

In his inaugural lecture at Cambridge as Regius Professor of Modern History in 1895, Lord John Acton urged that the historian deliver moral judgments on the figures of his research. Acton declaimed: “I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.” (Acton 1906, 234) / In 1902, the year after Acton died, the president of the American Historical Association, Henry Lea, in dubious celebration of his British colleague, responded to the exordium with a contrary claim about the historian's obligation, namely, objectively to render the facts of history without subjective moralizing. Referring to Acton's lecture, Lea declared: “I must confess that to me all this seems to be based on false premises and to lead to unfortunate conclusions as to the objects and purposes of history, however much it may serve to give point and piquancy to a narrative, to stimulate the interests of the causal reader by heightening lights and deepening shadows, and to subserve the purpose of propagating the opinions of the writer.” (Lea 1904, 234)

As Toni Morrison established her place within the American literary canon, her writing has been for the most part well received both by critics writing for popular culture and those writing for academe. The numerous accolades and awards honoring Morrison for her literature testify to her importance as one of the most prolific and talented writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Critical responses to Morrison's work focus on her audience, stylistic technique, and major themes, and explore the role she plays as a precursor to new voices in American literature, especially African American women's literature, given her instrumental influence in the Black Women Writers' Renaissance in the last decades of the twentieth century and as a book editor. The critical response is also informed by the critics' need to categorize Morrison as a black woman writer, African American writer, American writer, woman writer, and critic.

Whether in fiction or non-fiction, Morrison focuses her writing on a variety of topics including the intersections of race, class, and gender, questions of home and place, the connection between the individual and the community, self-definition, and the importance of cultural, familial, and individual history or rememory, and connections between, and nurturing roles of, African American folk culture and black cultural beliefs across the diaspora. Throughout her work, the author examines a number of themes including justice, love, power, death, and betrayal.

The Bluest Eye

The publication of The Bluest Eye (1970) heralded the arrival of a brilliant young novelist - but it took almost five years for many to sit up and take notice. Though Sarah Blackburn remarks that Toni Morrison's first novel was published “at an auspicious time when a growing, middle-class women's movement was just beginning to acknowledge the reality of its black and poor sisters,” an overview of the critical discourse of the time shows that from the readership the book received little, if any, understanding. It is noteworthy that after its first publication the novel was out of print for quite a long time. A tragic story of child abuse, with race, gender and class mixed in, The Bluest Eye is concerned with racial self-loathing, the loss of identity, and shame. Even though the setting for the story is 1940-41 - the beginning of World War II for the United States - it is also “presentist” in concept, ideologically grounded in the 1960s when “Black is Beautiful” entered into the popular, if more militant, discourse. Setting out to write a story that she herself wanted to read, Morrison worried that this slogan of racial pride would be unable to dispel the long-term psychic effects of prejudices rooted in racialism and sexism.

The locale of this imaginative narrative is Lorrain, Ohio, the protagonist Pecola Breedlove, a little black girl at the most vulnerable phase of her life. The title The Bluest Eye calls attention to itself immediately: the superlative degree of color as well as the singular form of the noun in the title is rather unusual, resulting in a pun. The singular noun may refer to the damaging white gaze; the omitted plural to the object of desire, an epitome of beauty according to mainstream society; or alternatively, to the saddest story of the demise of a child's identity (the “eye” as “I”), integral to the blues sung by Claudia's mother.

It would be difficult, and perhaps counterproductive, to discuss Toni Morrison's language and narrative technique without examining the social vision, reimagined relationships, and redirected gaze they are designed to support. For, as feminist narratologist Susan Lanser notes in Fictions of Authority, “Narration entails social relationships and thus involves far more than the technical imperatives for getting a story told.” The notion that extra-textual relationships can motivate, inform, illuminate, or even confound the narrative project has particular significance for an understanding of Toni Morrison's choice of literary techniques.

In “Rootedness: the Ancestor as Foundation,” an essay published in the early 1980s, Morrison clarified the social and political vision informing her writing, stating that:

At a time when the dictum of art for art's sake had not yet been stripped of its disguise, Morrison was adamant in asserting that a socio-political function neither detracted from, nor conflicted with, aesthetic worth. Equally important, she revealed that this socio-political function was inextricably connected to her relationship to the society-as-readers she called “the village.” In “Home,” an essay published in 1997 that explores contemporary cultural and social contestations around “race,” she offered a more pointed description of the “manageable, doable, modern human activity” her fiction performs, that is, creating “a-world-in-which-race-does-not-matter.”