Background: The Convention on Biological Diversity has reported invasive species as 2nd greatest cause of species extinction (COP10). However few efforts have been made to collate the evidence to support or contest the impact of invasive species on the decline and/or extinction of threatened species across large taxonomic or geographical scales. This Systematic Review was commissioned by the United States Department for Agriculture (USDA) Invasives Causing Extinction (ICE) programme to determine if the COP10 statement was based on scientific evidence. The evidence needs to be systematically reviewed and mapped to determine the importance and relevance of any such effects in order to develop national and international policies addressing the loss of threatened species, and to prioritise research and mitigation efforts.
There are two outstanding facts about the meaning that attaches to human activities and to the variety of objects and situations with which such activities are connected. One is that meaning along with the relationships it involves, depending as it does upon the past experience, present interests and prospective goals of the individual human being, varies indefinitely from one individual to another. The other is that meaning is actually operative in determining the behavior of the human organism. These two facts, taken together, set a problem for the psychologist. In all behavior that has the marks of intelligence it is the meaning of the stimulus-situation which determines the character of the response. But since such meaning always reflects the personal experience and point of view peculiar to the individual responding, it becomes a difficult if not impossible undertaking to discover and formulate general laws, which will predict how all individuals will behave in a specific type of situation. The two facts mentioned severally suggested two historic and opposing lines of attack upon the problem of meaning. One, starting from the premise that meaning is a property of conscious experience, of the mental states of individuals admittedly open only to introspection, attempted to discover, first, the elementary components of all mental processes in all individuals, and, secondly, the universal laws which govern the combination of these mental elements into the variety of meaningful complexes found in individual experience. Even 351
We are ready to agree that freedom with all that it implies, is the primary and central value of democracy, and that all its other advantages depend upon the realization of the values of freedom in the political sphere. But when we stop to ask ourselves what is implied in political (and personal) freedom, the whole matter becomes much less clear and self-evident. Thus we are reminded of how easy it is, particularly when dealing with values, to be convinced and contented by abstract and negative conceptions. Freedom, it is asserted, or at once agreed, is the outstanding value realized by the democratic system, but in discussing what such freedom means, few have any notion which goes beyond an individual's right not to be interfered with in the expression of opinion by speech or published statement, in religious belief and worship, and in the choice of occupation and the pursuit of prosperity therein. Now such liberties are, of course, fundamental. But democracy, we must admit, does propose a considerable amount of co-operation among its members. And it is hard to see how the establishment of freedom in this negative sense would enlist men in co-operative effort or would foster the spirit of co-operation among them.
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