Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Arts and Humanities
Bengal Basin in the Midst of the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean Littoral: A Study of the Earliest Trading Centre and the Nautical Network of Inland and Oceanic Trade originating from Ancient Bengal
Published: 2025-04-29
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This study explores the pivotal role of the Bengal Basin in shaping ancient maritime and inland trade networks in South Asia. Centered on the region’s complex deltaic system and strategic coastal position, the research investigates how natural features such as the expansive Gangetic delta and extensive river networks fostered both local commerce and long-distance trade across the Indian Ocean. [...]
MUSEUMS SHOULD CURATE BEYOND THE NATURAL: DOMESTIC BREEDS OFFER UNIQUE INSIGHT INTO EVOLUTIONARY PROCESSES & HUMAN CULTURE
Published: 2025-04-23
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Life Sciences
This short communication proposes that natural history museums should consider expanding their mission by intensively collecting and curating domesticated, hemerophilic, and genetically engineered animals, plants, and fungi to improve the study of evolutionary biology and anthropology, as well as mitigate against future climatic and economic challenges.
How to Balance Conceptual Unity and Plurality: The Case of the Individualized Niche Concept
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Life Sciences
Many philosophical discussions about biological concepts have focused on arguments for conceptual pluralism or monism, an approach that threatens to obscure the nuances of conceptual structure. We characterize the structure of the individualized niche concept based on the results of a qualitative empirical study we conducted within an interdisciplinary, biological research center. Our findings [...]
Dragon Kill Points: applying a transparent working template to relieve authorship stress
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Business, Education, Engineering, Law, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The concept of authorship, while straightforward in theory, proves to be remarkably complex in practice. While existing frameworks provide a foundation for classifying and ranking authorship roles, conflicts still arise when contributions are ambiguous or poorly documented. To address these issues, we propose Dragon Kill Points, adapted from multiplayer gaming, which tracks individual [...]
The Individualized Niche: A Case Study in Scientific Conceptual Change
Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Other Arts and Humanities, Philosophy
We explore the causes and outcomes of scientific conceptual change using a case study of the development of the individualized niche concept. We outline a framework for characterizing conceptual change that distinguishes between epistemically adaptive and neutral processes and outcomes of conceptual change. We then apply this framework in tracing how the individualized niche concept arose [...]
Breaking Barriers: Dualistic Thinking in Religious and Social Contexts and its Environmental Impact
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Breaking Barriers: Dualistic Thinking in Religious and Social Contexts and its environmental impact explores the intricate relationship between dualistic thinking, influenced by religious and societal norms, and its role in perpetuating environmental degradation. Through an interdisciplinary analysis spanning history and philosophy, it investigates how entrenched dualistic frameworks, such as [...]
Biocultural Families and Leaders: New Metaphors, Methods and Members for Environmental Connectivity in Unama'ki
Published: 2025-01-09
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
In this community inquiry into the importance of connectivity to the newly established Kluskap Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area (IPCA) in Unama'ki (Cape Breton), our team partnered with local knowledge-holders to develop locally appropriate definitions and metaphors for connectivity along with methodologies for understanding and visualizing its concrete manifestations, including by [...]
Filosofía Fungi
Published: 2024-10-17
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Life Sciences
Muchos conceptos en ecología y evolución se han construido en base a observaciones zoológicas y, en menor medida, botánicas, mientras que una visión fúngica en estas áreas es prácticamente inexistente. Mucho menos se han indagado aspectos de la filosofía de la biología en base a los hongos. Sin embargo, en este artículo mostramos que dadas sus características particulares, el Reino Fungi [...]
Seasonal Migrants and Traditional Ecological Knowledge in a Region of Risk: The Pulse Seine Fisheries in Limfjorden, Denmark, c. 1740-1860
Published: 2024-07-31
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Biodiversity, Economic History, Environmental Studies, Marine Biology, Other Arts and Humanities, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
This article presents the commercial scale and organization of the Danish pulse seine eel fishery in the Limfjord before the advent of modern offshore fisheries. Partly, for environmental concerns, the pulse seine fishery was tightly regulated, with every seine having to be checked and certified by the local district bailiffs. Here, we present the first in-depth analysis of all preserved [...]
Ratio versus difference optimization in human behavior
Published: 2023-10-27
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Business, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Models of optimization have played an important role in the fields of evolution as well as economics. In the classical models of optimization, some tend to maximize the ratio of returns to investment and others tend to maximize the net benefit or the difference between the two. Clarity in the contextual appropriateness of the ratio model versus difference model came very recently. This clarity [...]
Global research priorities for historical ecology to inform conservation
Published: 2023-10-27
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Historical ecology draws on a broad range of information sources and methods to provide insight into ecological and social change, especially over the past ~12,000 years. While its results are often relevant to conservation and restoration, insights from its diverse disciplines, environments, and geographies have frequently remained siloed or underrepresented, restricting their full potential. [...]
Mobilising central bank digital currency to bend the curve of biodiversity loss
Published: 2023-10-21
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Business, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Humanity is at a critical juncture. Despite our efforts to set targets and goals, biodiversity and climate are both changing rapidly, pushing us towards a biosphere our species has not known. To solve this problem one view is that we need transformational change of the economic paradigm, but that might be more an ideal than pragmatic. A new idea could be to take inspiration from recent [...]
Biogeographical distributions of trickster animals
Published: 2023-07-04
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Human language encompasses almost endless potential for meaning and folklore can theoretically incorporate themes beyond time and space. However, actual distributions of the themes are not always universal and their constraints remain unclear. Here, we specifically focused on zoological folklore and aimed to reveal what restricts the distribution of trickster animals in folklore. We applied the [...]
Queering ecology: (Re)Constructing ecology as a home to better understand the social-ecological pressures of wildlife
Published: 2023-06-02
Subjects: Arts and Humanities
Homes are intimate spaces where many bodies come together in space and time to deeply learn and understand the many processes that have created one another. Ecology, the study of the relationship between organisms and their environment, is based on the study of a home. Yet, ecologists are trained in patriarchal, heteronormative, and otherwise Western articulations and understandings of nature [...]
Disentangling human nature: Anthropological reflections on evolution, zoonoses and ethnographic investigations
Published: 2023-02-12
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Human nature is a puzzling matter that must be analysed through a holistic lens. In this commentary, I foray into anthropology's biosocial dimensions to underscore that human relations span from microorganisms to global commodities. I argue that the future of social-cultural anthropology depends on the integration of evolutionary theory for its advancement. Ultimately, since the likelihood of [...]