Extinction Reversed

These days, even the humans are built by robots. Charlie7 is the progenitor of a mechanical race he built from the ashes of a dead world—Earth. He is a robot of leisure and idle political meddling—a retirement well-earned. Or he was, until a human girl named Eve was dropped in his lap. Geneticists have restored Earth’s biome and begun repopulation. But primate cloning is in its infancy; human cloning is banned. Far from a failed genetics experiment, Eve is brilliant, curious, and heartbreakingly naïve about her species’ history. But Eve’s creator wants her back and has a gruesome fate planned for her. There is only one robot qualified to protect her. For the first time in a thousand years, Charlie7 has a human race to protect. A.I. didn’t destroy humanity. It didn’t save us, either. The robots we built in our final days preserved human minds. They survived the end of life on Earth and embarked on the greatest single project in all recorded history. They rebuilt. The result of 1,000 years of genetic engineering, terraforming, and painstaking toxic cleanup has resulted in the ultimate achievement of the Post-Invasion Age: a healthy human. Her name is Eve14. Don’t ask about the 13 Eves before her. Or do, because that’s the reason why she’s in danger, and why one brave robot puts his millennium-long life on the line to save her. Welcome back to the Golden Age of science fiction, when scientists had planet-sized dreams and robots were robots. Grab your copy while there’s still an Earth left to read it on.

Throughout their lifetime, animals learn to associate stimuli with their consequences. Following memory acquisition and consolidation, circumstances may arise that necessitate that initially learned behaviour is no longer relevant. The ensuing process is called extinction learning and involves a novel and complex learning procedure that involves a large number of neural entities. While the neural fundaments of the initial acquisition are well studied, our understanding of the behavioural and neural basis of extinction is still limited and derives mostly from rodent data acquired through fear conditioning paradigms. Fear conditioning and extinction in rodents is a spectacularly successful paradigm within behavioral neuroscience. However, in recent years, new approaches have been emerging that examine the mechanisms of extinction learning in different setting that also involve appetitive models, a broader comparative perspective, a focus on other brain systems, an examination of hormonal factors, and conditioning of immune responses. Only a broader analysis of the neural fundaments of extinction learning will finally uncover shared and distinct mechanisms that underlie extinction learning in different functional systems. The papers compiled in this Research Topic offer new and valuable insights into the mechanisms and functional implementation of extinction learning at its different levels of complexity, and form the basis for new concepts and research ideas in this field.

Highly emotional events tend to be well remembered. The adaptive value in this is clear – those events that have a bearing on survival should be stored for future use as long-term memories whereas memories of inconsequential events would not as likely contribute to future survival. Enduring changes in the structure and function of synapses, neural circuitry, and ultimately behavior, can be modulated by highly aversive or rewarding experiences. In the last decade, the convergence of cellular, molecular, and systems neuroscience has produced new insights into the biological mechanisms that determine whether a memory will be stored for the long-term or lost forever. This Research Topic brings together leading experts, who work at multiple levels of analysis, to reveal recent discoveries and concepts regarding the synaptic mechanisms of consolidation and extinction of emotionally arousing memories.

Reinforcement: Behavioral Analyses covers the proceedings of the 1970 Symposium on Schedule-induced and Schedule-Dependent Phenomena, held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This symposium highlights theoretically inclined papers on reinforcement processes. This text contains 10 chapters and begins with a description of how behavior is induced by various environmental events, especially reinforcing events, as well as the relationship between control by inducing stimuli and reinforceability. The subsequent chapters deal with reinforcement phenomena in terms of preference relations and the conditioned emotional responses in terms of opposing motivational processes. These topics are followed by reviews of schedule-dependent effects of preaversive stimuli and the maintenance of behavior by apparent reinforcers that might be expected to punish, as well as the identification of critical variable that underlie the phenomenon. Other chapters examine the interactions between operant and responded conditioning processes. The final chapters outline the experiments on behavior stream whose hallmark is reinforcement if the absence of specified behavior. These chapters emphasize the analogy between the evolution of species and the modification of behavior. This book will be of value to behaviorists and psychologists.

In this book Christopher Belshaw draws on earlier work concerning death, identity, animals, immortality, and extinction, and builds a large-scale argument dealing with questions of both value and meaning. Rejecting suggestions that life is sacred or intrinsically valuable, he argues instead that its value varies, and varies considerably, both within and between different kinds of things. So in some cases we might have reason to improve or save a life, while in others that reason will be lacking. What about starting lives? The book’s central section takes this as its focus, and asks whether we ever have reason to start lives, just for the sake of the one whose life it is. Not only is it denied that there is any such reason, but some sympathy is afforded to the anti-natalist contention that there is always reason against. The final chapters deal with meaning. There is support here for the sober and familiar view that meaning derives from an enthusiasm for, and some success with, the pursuit of worthwhile projects. Now suppose we are immortal. Or suppose, in contrast, that we face imminent extinction. Would either of these threaten meaning? The claim is made that the force of such threats is often exaggerated. The Value and Meaning of Life is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, ethics, and religion, and will be of interest to all those concerned with how to live, and how to think about the lives of others.