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In this chapter, we explore whether various true, endogenous social cycle theories share common patterns and characteristics.

We examine a number of prominent social theories describing cyclical patterns, and attempt to abstract an ideal type common to all of them, based on the idea of two populations disrupting each other and adjusting to the other’s disruptions.

At the core of such theories we typically find a variation of a two-population model. In these theories, cycles emerge when one of the populations seems to disrupt the other population’s plans, leading to recurring adjustments and disruptions that constitute the cycle.

Finding such commonalities in the world of theories can be useful for several reasons. For one thing, noticing that two theories share certain traits may help us understand each of them better. Furthermore, we show that agent-based modelers using modern object-oriented programming techniques can benefit from finding common patterns in theories.

The Austrian theory of the business cycle (henceforth ABC) frequently has been a target for critics of Austrian economics. In particular, a number of economists who are generally appreciative of other Austrian themes have singled out ABC as being, in one such critic's words, an “embarrassing excrescence” marring the otherwise generally sound body of modern Austrian thought.¹ Despite such criticisms, many Austrian economists persist in forwarding ABC as the best available, or perhaps even the only valid, explanation for the cycles of boom and bust regularly occurring in most modern, national economies.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that the school of thought known as Critical Realism and the thinkers involved in the current revival of interest in British Idealism would benefit from interacting with each other.

The paper proceeds by critically examining central tenets in the thought of each school, and exhibit their affinities and differences.

It is found that there are central themes and concerns shared by each school of thought, and that the recognition of such commonalities might prove mutually beneficial to the relevant parties in their goal of positively transforming social reality. Furthermore, the Critical Realist worry about Idealisms “irreality” is shown to be unfounded.

The close relationship of the ideas of these two “lines of thought” has not, to our knowledge, previously been highlighted. Having done so in the paper, a useful dialogue may ensue.

Published in its first edition in 1978, the Encyclopedia of Bioethics already deserves landmark status for several reasons including uniqueness of concept, overall quality and broad appeal. Previous articles in this column have traced the historical development of longstanding reference classics. Because the Encyclopedia is a relatively young tool, the substance of this review will depart somewhat from other essays in the series by focusing more on the content, organization and scope of the work rather than its evolution.

The notion of partner‐violence as a male‐perpetrated phenomenon is not a scientific position but an amelioration of cognitive‐dissonance within a political mindset. Against all the data, this ‘gender paradigm’ persists as a series of staged retreats as new research debunks each in turn. Supposed highly sex‐differential injury rates, male unilaterality of perpetration, female self‐defence, male ‘control’, and female especial fear are all discredited as reasons to focus solely on men's aggression. By contrast, scientific theorising regarding the root of the great bulk of partner‐violence is in terms of the biological phenomenon of mate‐guarding. However, the usual model of male proprietariness over female fertility itself is in part a ‘gender paradigm’ position. Recently revealed sex‐symmetries necessitate a major overhaul of this model. Drawing on new understanding of the basis of pair‐bonding, outlined here is a parsimonious account of mate‐guarding as being by both sexes; notably women, owing to sex‐dichotomous mate‐value trajectory. This framework heralds the complete abandonment of the ‘gender paradigm’ and thus the end of a highly inappropriate intrusion of extreme ideology into science.

As environmental health scientists increasingly take up genetic/genomic modes of knowledge production and translate their work for applications in biomedicine, risk assessment, and regulation, they “bring the human in” to environmental health issues in novel ways. This paper describes the efforts of environmental health scientists to use molecular technologies to focus their research inside the human body, ascertain human genetic variations in susceptibility to adverse outcomes following environmental exposures, and identify individuals who have sustained DNA damage as a consequence of exposure to chemicals in the environment. In addition to transforming laboratory research, they see in these such practices the opportunity to advance public health, through innovations in biomedical practice and refinement of environmental health risk assessment and regulation. As environmental health scientists produce and translate these new forms of knowledge, they simultaneously assume and instantiate specific notions of the human subject and its agency, possibilities, and responsibilities vis-à-vis health and illness. Because dimensions of human subjectivity remain under-theorized in bioethics, sociological approaches to understanding and situating the human subject offer an important means of elucidating the consequences of genetics/genomics in the environmental health sciences and highlighting the social structures and processes through which they are produced.We are responsible for the world in which we live not because it is an arbitrary construction of our choosing, but because it is sedimented out of particular practices that we have a role in shaping. –Barad, 1998