Why this unholy trinity?

Supervenience, Emergence, and Epiphenomenalism: Physicalism’s Unholy Trinity

The unholy trinity: taxonomy, species delimitation and DNA barcoding.

Recent excitement over the development of an initiative to generate DNA sequences for all named species on the planet has in our opinion generated two major areas of contention as to how this 'DNA barcoding' initiative should proceed. It is critical that these two issues are clarified and resolved, before the use of DNA as a tool for taxonomy and species delimitation can be universalized. The f...

Unholy Trinity: Labor, Capital, and Land in the New Economy

My theme in these lectures is the capacity of the methods of the Classical political economists, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and their critic, Karl Marx, to reveal the self-organizing character of the capitalist economy regarded as a complex, adaptive, non-equilibrium system. From one point of view this is an exercise in anachronism, since the language of complex systems theory a...

Food Security’s Unholy Trinity — Environmental Degradation, Climate Change, and Migration

It has been estimated that almost one billion people – or one in seven out of the global population are either hungry or acutely malnourished. Among the most recent additions to this statistic are an estimated 43 million people affected by severe food shortages in Yemen and sub-Saharan Africa. However, food insecurity is also experienced by communities in the developed world. In 2011, for examp...

The Unholy Trinity: Fat Tails, Tail Dependence, and Micro-Correlations

Recent events in the financial and insurance markets, as well as the looming challenges of a globally changing climate point to the need to re-think the ways in which we measure and manage catastrophic and dependent risks. Management can only be as good as our measurement tools. To that end, this paper outlines detection, measurement, and analysis strategies for fat-tailed risks, tail dependent...