Iti this article, we examine subjective vitality, a positive feeling of aliveness and energy, in six studies. Subjective vitality is hypothesized to reflect organismic well-being and thus should covary with both psychological and somatic factors that impact the energy available to the self. Associations are shown between subjective vitality and several indexes of psychological well-being; somatic factors such as physical symptoms and perceived body functioning; and basic personality traits and affective dispositions. Subse- quently, vitality is shown to be lower in people with chronic pain compared to matched controls, especially those who perceive their pain to be disabling or frightening. Subjective vitality is further associated with self-motivation and maintained weight loss among patients treated for obesity. Finally, sub- jective vitality is assessed in a diary study for its covariation with physical symptoms. Discussion focuses on the phenomenological salience of personal energy and its relations to physical and psychological well-being.

On Energy, Personality, and Health: Subjective Vitality as a Dynamic Reflection of Well‐Being

In both biology and the human sciences, social groups are sometimes treated as adaptive units whose organization cannot be reduced to individual interactions. This group-level view is opposed by a more individualistic one that treats social organization as a byproduct of self-interest. According to biologists, group-level adaptations can evolve only by a process of natural selection at the group level. Most biologists rejected group selection as an important evolutionary force during the 1960s and 1970s but a positive literature began to grow during the 1970s and is rapidly expanding today. We review this recent literature and its implications for human evolutionary biology. We show that the rejection of group selection was based on a misplaced emphasis on genes as “replicators” which is in fact irrelevant to the question of whether groups can be like individuals in their functional organization. The fundamental question is whether social groups and other higher-level entities can be “vehicles” of selection. When this elementary fact is recognized, group selection emerges as an important force in nature and what seem to be competing theories, such as kin selection and reciprocity, reappear as special cases of group selection. The result is a unified theory of natural selection that operates on a nested hierarchy of units.
 The vehicle-based theory makes it clear that group selection is an important force to consider in human evolution. Humans can facultatively span the full range from self-interested individuals to “organs” of group-level “organisms.” Human behavior not only reflects the balance between levels of selection but it can also alter the balance through the construction of social structures that have the effect of reducing fitness differences within groups, concentrating natural selection (and functional organization) at the group level. These social structures and the cognitive abilities that produce them allow group selection to be important even among large groups of unrelated individuals.

Reintroducing group selection to the human behavioral sciences

In the six decades since the publication of Julian Huxley's Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, the spectacular empirical advances in the biological sciences have been accompanied by equally significant developments within the core theoretical framework of the discipline. As a result, evolutionary theory today includes concepts and even entire new fields that were not part of the foundational structure of the Modern Synthesis. In this volume, sixteen leading evolutionary biologists and philosophers of science survey the conceptual changes that have emerged since Huxley's landmark publication, not only in such traditional domains of evolutionary biology as quantitative genetics and paleontology but also in such new fields of research as genomics and EvoDevo. Most of the contributors to Evolution, the Extended Synthesis accept many of the tenets of the classical framework but want to relax some of its assumptions and introduce significant conceptual augmentations of the basic Modern Synthesis structure -- just as the architects of the Modern Synthesis themselves expanded and modulated previous versions of Darwinism. This continuing revision of a theoretical edifice the foundations of which were laid in the middle of the nineteenth century--the reexamination of old ideas, proposals of new ones, and the synthesis of the most suitable -- shows us how science works, and how scientists have painstakingly built a solid set of explanations for what Darwin called the "grandeur" of life. Contributors: John Beatty, Werner Callebaut, Jeremy Draghi, Chrisantha Fernando, Sergey Gavrilets, John C. Gerhart, Eva Jablonka, David Jablonski, Marc W. Kirschner, Marion J. Lamb, Alan C. Love, Gerd B. Muller, Stuart A. Newman, John Odling-Smee, Massimo Pigliucci, Michael Purugganan, Eors Szathmary, Gunter P. Wagner, David Sloan Wilson, Gregory A. Wray.

Evolution, the Extended Synthesis

Twenty years ago, in four papers,1 I offered a unified descriptive analysis of health, disease, and function. In recent philosophy of medicine, these papers are often treated as a standard defense of one pole on the spectrum of views about health: the extreme view that, at least at the theoretical foundation ofmodern Western medicine, health and disease are value-free scientific concepts. Theoretical health, I argued, is the absence of disease; disease is only statistically species-subnormal biological part-function; therefore, the classification of human states as healthy or diseased is an objective matter, to be read off the biological facts of nature without need of value judgments. Let us refer to this general position as “naturalism”—the opposite of normativism, the view that health judgments are or include value judgments. Following Nordenfelt (1987), let me call my specific naturalist theory the “biostatistical theory (BST),” a name emphasizing that the analysis rests on the concepts of biological function and statistical normality.2

A Rebuttal on Health

These essays by leading scientists and philosophers address conceptual issues that arise in the theory and practice of evolutionary biology. The third edition of this widely used anthology has been substantially revised and updated. Four new sections have been added: on women in the evolutionary process, evolutionary psychology, laws in evolutionary theory, and race as social construction or biological reality. Other sections treat fitness, units of selection, adaptationism, reductionism, essentialism, species, phylogenetic inference, cultural evolution, and evolutionary ethics.Each of the twelve sections contains two or three essays that develop different views of the subject at hand. For example, the section on evolutionary psychology offers one essay by two founders of the field and another that questions its main tenets. One sign that a discipline is growing is that there are open questions, with multiple answers still in competition; the essays in this volume demonstrate that evolutionary biology and the philosophy of evolutionary biology are living, growing disciplines. ContributorsRobin O. Andreasen, Kwame Anthony Appiah, David A. Baum, John H. Beatty, David J. Buller, Leda Cosmides, James Donoghue, Steven J. Farris, Joseph Felsenstein, Susan K. Finsen, Joseph Fracchia, Stephen Jay Gould, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, David L. Hull, Philip Kitcher, R. C. Lewontin, Elisabeth Lloyd, Ernst Mayr, Michael Ruse, John Maynard Smith, Elliott Sober, John Tooby, C. Kenneth Waters, George C. Williams, David Sloan Wilson, E. O. Wilson

Conceptual issues in evolutionary biology

Preface 1. Biology and its philosophy 2. Autonomy and provincialism 3. Teleology and the roots of autonomy 4. Reductionism and the temptation of provincialism 5. The structure of evolutionary theory 6. Fitness 7. Species 8. New problems of functionalism Bibliography Index.

The Structure of Biological Science.

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The Structure of Biological Science.