Justice unbound? Globalisation, states and the transformation of the social bond

Conventional accounts of justice suppose the presence of a stable political society, stable identities, and a Westphalian cartography of clear lines of authority--usually a state--where justice can be realised. They also assume a stable social bond. But what if, in an age of globalisation, the territorial boundaries of politics unbundle and a stable social bond deteriorates? How then are we to think about justice? Can there be justice in a world where that bond is constantly being disrupted or transformed by globalisation? Thus the paper argues that we need to think about the relationship between globalisation, governance and justice. It does so in three stages: (i) It explains how, under conditions of globalisation, assumptions made about the social bond are changing. (ii) It demonsrates how strains on the social bond within states give rise to a search for newer forms of global political theory and organisation and the emergence of new global (non state) actors which contest with states over the policy agendas emanating from globalisation. (iii) Despite the new forms of activity identified at (ii) the paper concludes that the prospects for a satisfactory synthesis of a liberal economic theory of globalisation, a normative political theory of the global public domain and a new social bond are remote

Genetic draft, selective interference, and population genetics of rapid adaptation

To learn about the past from a sample of genomic sequences, one needs to understand how evolutionary processes shape genetic diversity. Most population genetic inference is based on frameworks assuming adaptive evolution is rare. But if positive selection operates on many loci simultaneously, as has recently been suggested for many species including animals such as flies, a different approach is necessary. In this review, I discuss recent progress in characterizing and understanding evolution in rapidly adapting populations where random associations of mutations with genetic backgrounds of different fitness, i.e., genetic draft, dominate over genetic drift. As a result, neutral genetic diversity depends weakly on population size, but strongly on the rate of adaptation or more generally the variance in fitness. Coalescent processes with multiple mergers, rather than Kingman's coalescent, are appropriate genealogical models for rapidly adapting populations with important implications for population genetic inference.Comment: supplementary illustrations and scripts are available at http://webdav.tuebingen.mpg.de/interference

Status of the spawning biomass of the Pacific sardine, 1978-79

State law requires that the population of Pacific sardines, Sardinops sagax caeruleus, must reach a minimum spawning biomass of 20,O0O short tons before initiation of a fishery. Data from ichthyoplankton surveys, the anchovy live bait fishery, sea survey cruises, and the jack mackerel purse seine fishery are analyzed for evidence of an increase in population size. Presently, the spawning biomass of the northern stock of sardines remains far below 20,000 tons. (9pp.