Porfirio Silva

© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. The golden jackal of Africa has long been considered a conspecific of jackals distributed throughout Eurasia, with the nearest source populations in the Middle East. However, two recent reports found that mitochondrial haplotypes of some African golden jackals aligned more closely to gray wolves [1, 2], which is surprising giventhe absence of gray wolves in Africa and the phenotypic divergence between the two species. Moreover, these results imply the existence of a previously unrecognized phylogenetically distinct species despite a long history of taxonomic work on African canids. To test the distinct-species hypothesis and understand the evolutionary history that would account for this puzzling result, we analyzed extensive genomic data including mitochondrial genome sequences, sequences from 20 autosomal loci, microsatellite loci, X- and Y-linked zinc-finger protein gene sequences, and whole-genome nuclear sequences in African and Eurasian golden jackals and gray wolves. Our results provide consistent and robust evidence that populations of golden jackals from Africa and Eurasia represent distinct monophyletic lineages separated for more than onemillion years, sufficient to merit formal recognition as different species: C.anthus and C.aureus. Usingmorphologic data, we demonstrate a striking morphologic similarity between East African and Eurasian golden jackals, suggesting parallelism, which may have misled taxonomists and likely reflects uniquely intense interspecific competition in the East African carnivore guild. Our study shows how ecology can confound taxonomy if interspecific competition constrains size diversification. Koepfli etal. assess divergence between golden jackals from Africa and Eurasia using data from the mitochondrial and nuclear genomes. They show that African and Eurasian golden jackals are genetically distinct and independent lineages, and that African golden jackals likely represent a separate species.

Pioneer approaches to Artificial Intelligence have traditionally neglected, in a chronological sequence, the agent body, the world where the agent is situated, and the other agents. With the advent of Collective Robotics approaches, important progresses were made toward embodying and situating the agents, together with the introduction of collective intelligence. However, the currently used models of social environments are still rather poor, jeopardizing the attempts of developing truly intelligent robot teams. In this paper, we propose a roadmap for a new approach to the design of multi-robot systems, mainly inspired by concepts from Institutional Economics, an alternative to mainstream neoclassical economic theory. Our approach intends to sophisticate the design of robot collectives by adding, to the currently popular emergentist view, the concepts of physically and socially bounded autonomy of cognitive agents, uncoupled interaction among them and deliberately set up coordination devices.

There are plenty of intelligent machines in our world today: digital computers and autonomous robots. At the heart of each of these machines there are automatic formal systems (programs running on a digital computer). Now, if the interpretation of a formal system does not belong to the formal system itself, if the interpretation has to be added, it is worth asking: in the case of these intelligent machines that are massively interspersed in our social interactions, where does the interpretation come from? In this paper, we analyse what we call the invisibility of interpretation. Dealing with various types of formal systems (computers, robots, formalist approaches to Economics), the human source of the interpretation of these systems is sometimes concealed by a formalist restriction. To show how the formalist restriction produces the invisibility of interpretation allows us to underline our responsibility, as human agents, for all this interpretative work—and its importance for us as human beings.

In this essay we try an answer to the question has intentionality to be reduced to anything? We propose that it is possible to reduce any variety of intentionality to a specification of mechanisms (internal organization of the items involved in a given intentional phenomenon) and a historical pattern of interaction (structure of mutual significant relations historically acquired by different items involved in the same intentional phenomenon). We first clarify the meaning of this proposal having recourse to the Ruth Millikan’s teleosemantics. Then, we assess the relevance and feasibility of our proposal, considering, in a succession, the case of animals and humans, of machines, and of sophisticated human collectives. We conclude arguing the heuristic nature of the proposed reduction.