Tim Flannery in the New York Review of Books:

The invention of the microscope revealed wonders to the world, and permitted Jonathan Swift to quip:

So, naturalists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey
And these have smaller still to bite ’em
And so proceed ad infinitum.

By the late twentieth century fascination with the minuscule had begun to pall, and now it takes an exceptional book indeed to reawaken our interest. Thankfully, in David Attenborough’s Life in the Undergrowth, Piotr Naskrecki’s The Smaller Majority, and Jeffrey Lockwood’s Locust we find three works that do so.

Life in the Undergrowth is Attenborough’s tribute to the terrestrial invertebrates. They are, he says, a group of creatures that make life possible for us—whether as scavengers, aerators of soil, or agents of pollination, to name only three of their functions— but because they are small we largely ignore them. As he succinctly puts it, “We are greatly prejudiced by our size.” This is the latest in a series of projects combining television and print in a unique manner that has become Sir David’s métier. His investigations encompass disciplines as diverse as paleontology, botany, zoology, and ethnography; and each is similar in scope to a doctoral dissertation. While most of us think of Attenborough principally as a television presenter, he is also one of the greatest ecologists, synthesizers of evolutionary science, and teachers of our age.

More here.

Nancy De Wolf Smith in the Wall Street Journal:

Yenny Wahid has a smile that could melt a Hershey bar at 100 yards. Her sunny disposition is all the more remarkable because Ms. Wahid is on what may be the world’s most difficult mission right now: She’s a prominent Muslim (and a woman at that) who speaks out against terror and the hijacking of her religion by ideologues who twist it to their own political ends.

After 9/11, many Americans assume that the radical Islamic agenda is to destroy the U.S. The reality is that attacks on Western targets are designed to function as brutal propaganda coups that will attract recruits to the cause of violent revolution. The main goal of ideologues like Osama bin Laden is to topple the governments of Muslim countries, including, most famously, the Wahabi royal regime of Saudi Arabia. But the real strategic plum, Ms. Wahid says, would be her native Indonesia and its 220 million citizens–with the largest Muslim population on earth.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

I wanted to write up a quick post to draw your attention to three very interesting pieces of human evolution in the news.

1. Modern evolution. A new paper presents the results of a systematic scan for human genes that have experienced natural selection in the past few thousand years. An impressive 700 regions turned up. The fact that humans have been evolving during recorded history is not new. The ability to digest lactose in milk as an adult, resistance to malaria, and other traits have long been recognized as having experienced strong natural selection after the dawn of agriculture. But this new study certainly sets the standard for all future work in this area, because it is so thorough. (Gene Expression takes you through the steps. The original paper is here.) The next logical step would be to add new populations to the database. The new study compares only three populations–Yorubans from Nigeria, Chinese and Japanese, and people of European descent in Utah. I wonder how different the evolutionary pressures are in other groups. Inuits get no benefit from malaria resistance, for example. Lactase digestion turns up in people descended from cattle herders. Are there adaptations for eating rice, cassava, or blubber?

More here.  And this also by Zimmer in The Loom:

This image came out a couple months ago in Nature, but I just came across it today. I quite like the way it sums up the history of life–something that’s maddening hard to do, since the time scales are so vast. It shows how life’s diversity has been accumulating for billions of years. This chart shows the timing of the earliest paeolontological evidence for different kinds of life, ranging from fossils to chemical markers. A few definitions may help. Phototrophic bacteria can harness sunlight to grow. Cyanobacteria are also known as blue-green algae (aka pond scum). Eukaryotes are species such as amoebae, plants, fungi, and animals. Algal kindoms include red algae and green algae (closely related to land plants). Some of these bars may need to be pushed back in time when earlier evidence is discovered. Some studies on DNA suggests that a number of such “ghost lineages” remain to be discovered.

 

“A monstrous discovery suggests that viruses, long regarded as lowly evolutionary latecomers, may have been the precursors of all life on Earth.”

Charles Siebert in Discover Magazine:

Few things on Earth are spookier than viruses. The very name virus, from the Latin word for “poisonous slime,” speaks to our lowly regard for them. Their anatomy is equally dubious: loose, tiny envelopes of molecules—protein-coated DNA or RNA—that inhabit some netherworld between life and nonlife. Viruses do not have cell membranes, as bacteria do; they are not even cells. They seem most lifelike only when they invade and co-opt the machinery of living cells in order to make more of themselves, often killing their hosts in the process. Their efficiency at doing so ranks them among the most fearsome killers: Ebola virus, HIV, smallpox, flu. Yet they go untouched by antibiotics, having nothing really biotic about them.

The existence of viruses was first surmised just over a century ago by Dutch botanist Martinus Beijerinck…

More here.  [Thanks to Atiya Khan.]

Steven Pinker in the London Times (via One Good Move):

I am a cognitive scientist, someone who studies the nature of intelligence and the workings of the mind. Yet one of my most profound scientific influences has been Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist. The influence runs deeper than the fact that the mind is a product of the brain and the brain a product of evolution; such an influence could apply to someone who studies any organ of any organism. The significance of Dawkins’s ideas, for me and many others, runs to his characterisation of the very nature of life and to a theme that runs throughout his writings: the possibility of deep commonalities between life and mind.

Dawkins’s ideas repay close reflection and re-examination, not because he is a guru issuing enigmatic pronouncements for others to ponder, but because he continually engages the deepest problems in biology, problems that continue to challenge our understanding.

When I first read Dawkins I was immediately gripped by concerns in his writings on life that were richer versions of ones that guided my thinking on the mind. The parallels concerned both the content and the practice of the relevant sciences.

A major theme in Dawkins’s writings on life that has important parallels in the understanding of the mind is a focus on information. In The Blind Watchmaker Dawkins wrote: “If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.”

More here.

In his 1962 essay ‘After Abstract Expressionism’ Clement Greenberg argued that ‘[u]nder the testing of Modernism more and more of the conventions of the art of painting have shown themselves to be dispensable, unessential […] thus a stretched or tacked-up canvas already exists as a picture – though not necessarily as a successful one’. The Modernist critic could hardly have guessed that this ‘tacked-up canvas’, for him merely a rhetorical possibility, would become an important touchstone for subsequent art practice, much as the monochrome had been for a previous generation of artists. The missing object and empty room have become Conceptual art’s degree zero, gesturing towards the conventions that ‘frame’ raw material as art and making room for the forms of openness, contradiction, paradox and irresolution that are contemporary art’s essential condition.

more from Frieze here.

Gordon Parks, the photographer, filmmaker, writer and composer who used his prodigious, largely self-taught talents to chronicle the African-American experience and to retell his own personal history, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was 93. . . .

“I’m in a sense sort of a rare bird,” Mr. Parks said in an interview in The New York Times in 1997. “I suppose a lot of it depended on my determination not to let discrimination stop me.” He never forgot that one of his teachers told her students not to waste their parents’ money on college because they would end up as porters or maids anyway. He dedicated one honorary degree to her because he had been so eager to prove her wrong.

“I had a great sense of curiosity and a great sense of just wanting to achieve,” he said. “I just forgot I was black and walked in and asked for a job and tried to be prepared for what I was asking for.”

more from the New York Times here.

Does masturbation lead to suicide bombing? One would think not. There is no more direct link to suicide bombing than there is to blindness or schizophrenia. But there may be a connection between sexual inadequacy or frustration and the pull towards violent extremism. This is the theme of an engaging novella, Seventeen, by the Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1994. The story is set in the 1960s, when it was written.

more from Ian Buruma at The Guardian here.

From MSNBC:

A team of American-led divers has discovered a new crustacean in the South Pacific that resembles a lobster and is covered with what looks like silky, blond fur, French researchers said Tuesday. Scientists said the animal, which they named Kiwa hirsuta, was so distinct from other species that they created a new family and genus for it.

The divers found the animal in waters 7,540 feet (2,300 meters) deep at a site 900 miles (1,440 kilometers) south of Easter Island last year, according to Michel Segonzac of the French Institute for Sea Exploration.

More here.

From New York Times:

JUDITH RICH HARRIS calls “No Two Alike” a “scientific detective story.” The mystery is why people — even identical twins who grow up in the same home with the same genes — end up with different personalities. The detective is Harris herself, a crotchety amateur, housebound because of an illness, who takes on the academic establishment armed only with a sharp mind and an Internet connection. Does home environment — parenting style, marital harmony, the use or rejection of day care — shape a child’s personality, making her more agreeable, less aggressive or more extroverted? Nope. Research shows that twins don’t turn out more alike if they’re raised together than if they’re raised apart.

More here.

Sam Lister in Fox News:

Five brothers and sisters who can only walk naturally on all fours are being hailed as a unique insight into human evolution after being found in a remote corner of rural Turkey.

Scientists believe that the family may provide invaluable information on how man evolved from a four-legged hominid to develop the ability to walk on two feet more than three million years ago.

A genetic abnormality, which may prevent the siblings, aged 18 to 34, from walking upright, has been identified…

Nicholas Humphrey, evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, who has visited the family, said that the siblings appeared to have reverted to an instinctive form of behavior encoded deep in the brain, but abandoned in the course of evolution.

More here.  [Thanks to Afshan Hussain.]

Over at TPM Cafe, John Ikenberry reviews Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism and Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence.

So Appiah and Sen are worrying about the same danger – the solitarist belittling of human identity. They have a similar vision of a proper functioning and enlightened human society. It is a world were people are complexly integrated into various realms of political and social life. Overlapping and multiple identities reinforce restraint and toleration.

They both have grand principles they would like to defend. Alas, they are a bit less articulate when it comes to proposals and programs that might help create and extend a world of cosmopolitanism and freely chosen and shifting identities.

Appiah focuses on the promulgation of conceptions of basic human rights, secured in the first and last instance by nation-states. Cosmopolitans are rare who want world government. Obligations to others must be consistent with our own sense of self and sensitivities. Sen argues for a world where people have a full-blown freedom of choice for affiliations and associations. “The freedom to determine our loyalties and priorities between the different groups to all of which we may belong is a peculiarly important liberty which we have reason to recognize, value, and defend.”

So what does all of this mean? It seems to me that what these two intellectuals are searching for is really some sort of perfected global version of Western liberal society. After all, Europe and the West has been here before, starting perhaps with the religious wars of the early modern era. Western societies entered the modern democratic age when they succeeded in pushing ethnic and religious identities down into civil society. They semi-privatized these identities and created different layers and venues for the expression of social, political, and religious identities and affiliations.

Over at n+1, Henry Farrell has a piece on China Miéville’s New Crobuzon novels.

New Crobuzon is a metropolis of clashing cultures, equal parts Great Wen, Old Corruption, and mass struggle. It is redolent of London, just as Tolkien’s Middle-Earth is reminiscent of rural England. To the outside world, it’s an imperial power, seeking to extend itself through the tools of nineteenth-century colonial mercantilism – railways, conquest, and exclusive trading relationships.

Politics in New Crobuzon is a mug’s game. A grimly effective police state tolerates subversives up to the point where they become a political threat, and then crushes them. So too it subordinates the imagination to its will. The city’s judicial system combines the cruel and sanctimonious whimsicality of the Victorian magistrate with the machineries of Kafka’s penal colony. In a world where human flesh is almost infinitely malleable, criminals can be ‘Remade’ so that their punishment fits their crime, according to obscure aesthetic principles of justice. Magistrates decree that a woman who kills her baby should have its revivified arms grafted to her face as a reminder of her crime, while the vicious crime-lord Motley uses cod-Nietzschian aesthetic theory to justify Remaking his own body into a jumbled teratosis of eyes, mouths, and other parts.

The power to Remake is, in principle, the power to reimagine and reshape. Its abuse by the rulers of New Crobuzon suggests a corruption of the imagination, in which the fantasies of the powerful are written out in the flesh of those whom they oppress, while the fantasies of the oppressed themselves lead nowhere. As Miéville’s fictional art critic Derkhan says, “Remaking is creativity gone bad. Gone rotten, gone rancid …”

Over the last decade and half, political economy has become increasingly concerned with rising inequality within democratic societies. In PS: Political Science & Politics, Lawrence Jacobs and Theda Skocpol lay out an agenda for a critical study of American democracy, which would focus on inequality and growing concentrations of power.

One of the enduring projects of students of politics has been to describe and analyze, as Easton (1953) put it, the “tendency in mass societies for power to concentrate in the hands of a minority.” Questions about the asymmetries of power and its sources have animated scholars as diverse as Max Weber and Karl Marx, Robert Michels and Robert Dahl, and V. O. Key, Charles Lindblom, and E. E. Schattschneider. This commitment to studying power stems, in part, from the development of disciplinary responsibility for analysis of government authority and its use and from the normative concern ~as Easton described it! to “transfer a large share of political control to the people” (Easton 1953, 41, 121; Bang 1998). The sustained focus on power has provided a common focus for social science research, offering a valuable counterbalance to the hyper-fragmentation into ever more disconnected research communities that are of diminishing importance to understanding the state of democratic life. This is an important contribution to political science research.

Sharp increases in economic inequality make it imperative that we renew and reinvigorate the study of political power. We want to be clear, though, that research by colleagues as well as our own analysis does not support a simple economistic explanation: profound changes in the distribution of income and wealth have important implications for American democracy, but the sources and nature of those impacts are quite likely to involve interactions as well as indirect and reciprocal effects related to developments in political organizations, governmental institutions, and elite mobilizing strategies. Indeed, the Task Force’s work repeatedly emphasized that rising economic inequality corresponds with persistent levels of unequal political voice and influence…

Via Sean at Cosmic Variance comes this post from Wonkette.

We were originally going to say that we don’t actually believe that we here at Wonkette are being “censored” by anyone just because military computers in Iraq are blocked from viewing our site…But our embedded operative who sent us the initial heads-up sent an update.

Unfortunately anonomizers don’t work out here (never have). Anyway, I had a few minutes today and thought I’d look and see what else was banned on the Marine web here. I think the results speak for themselves:

Wonkette – “Forbidden, this page (http://www.wonkette.com/) is categorized as: Forum/Bulletin Boards, Politics/Opinion.”

Bill O’Reilly (www.billoreilly.com) – OK

Air America (www.airamericaradio.com) – “Forbidden, this page (http://www.airamericaradio.com/) is categorized as: Internet Radio/TV, Politics/Opinion.”

Rush Limbaugh (www.rushlimbaugh.com) – OK
ABC News “The Note” – OK

Website of the Al Franken Show (www.alfrankenshow.com) – “Forbidden, this page (http://www.airamericaradio.com/) is categorized as: Internet Radio/TV, Politics/Opinion.”

G. Gordon Liddy Show (www.liddyshow.us) – OK

Don & Mike Show (www.donandmikewebsite.com) – “Forbidden, this page (http://www.donandmikewebsite.com/) is categorized as: Profanity, Entertainment/Recreation/Hobbies.”

Beginning with the publication in 1979 of her startling debut, Lithium for Medea, Kate Braverman has produced a daring body of work that strips bare the myth of glitzy Los Angeles to expose its decidedly unglamorous underbelly. Like the dystopian fiction of Nathanael West and John Fante, Braverman’s short stories and novels dramatize the plight of outcasts straddling fault lines, one step from ruin. What distinguishes Braverman is her emphatically feminist sensibility: She gives voice to a predominantly female cast of characters—divorcées and their drug-addled daughters, Mexican émigrés and whores—who brazenly defy convention.

Now, in her memoir Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles, Braverman returns to the landscape of her native city after having abandoned it more than a decade ago.

more from Bookforum here.

Siva Vaidhyanathan was invited by the Walker Center to write an essay for the Whitney Biennial (via NEWSgrist).

ABTSRACT: For the past twenty years, the United States has been experiencing a significant cultural, social, and political shift of which we are only now taking account. The very presence of powerful personal computers, loaded with easy-to-use editing and production software, connected to millions of others at high speed at all times of the day has changed the cultural and political environment radically and irreversibly. Distributive information and communication technologies have enabled this shift by amplifying the effects and possibilities of long-established practices. Clearly, Americans have experienced a radical change in expectations when it comes to culture and information. I call this change the rise of technocultural imagination. We are on the cusp of a truly democratic cultural moment. But all is not open and free. Nor should we celebrate this technologically enabled, radical cultural democracy for its own sake. It’s messy and troublesome. It�s risky and disruptive. But it’s also exciting and fascinating.

download full article here.

In honor of the Oscar’s this past Sunday, here’s David Denby’s review of Crash from earlier this year.

If there’s an ill-tempered remark that has ever been uttered in the city of Los Angeles that hasn’t found its way into Paul Haggis’s “Crash,” I can’t imagine what it is. “Crash” (opening May 6th) is about the rage and foolishness produced by intolerance, the mutual abrasions of white, black, Latino, Middle Eastern, and Asian citizens in an urban pot in which nothing melts. The characters run afoul of each other, say things better left unsaid, and get into terrible trouble. And yet the movie isn’t exasperating in the way that movies about steam-heated people often are. “Crash” is hyper-articulate and often breathtakingly intelligent and always brazenly alive. I think it’s easily the strongest American film since Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River,” though it is not for the fainthearted. In the first twenty minutes or so, the racial comments are so blunt and the dialogue so incisive that you may want to shield yourself from the daggers flying across the screen by getting up and leaving. That would be a mistake. “Crash” stretches the boundaries: after the cantankerous early scenes, it pulls us into the multiple stories it has to tell and becomes intensely moving.

more from the New Yorker here.

From Science:

When it comes to good recollection, elephants get the lion’s share of the glory. But now an animal only slightly larger than an elephant’s toenail is giving the largest land mammal a run for its memory. Hummingbirds can keep a running tab of multiple aspects of their visits to at least eight different flowers over the course of several days, displaying a type of memory once attributed solely to humans.

There’s long been speculation that only people have a memory for unique personal experiences, which is indicative of a sense of self. If future experiments show that hummingbirds can also keep track of the quality or type of nectar, they could challenge the view that only humans have this sense, he says.

More here.

From Nature:

Pregnant mice who take daily runs boost the production of new brain cells in their babies; but investigators say it is premature to say whether the same could be true in humans. Researchers already knew that exercise in adult animals can bump up the production of new neurons in a region of the brain called the hippocampus, which is involved in learning and memory. But now it seems that the effect can be passed from mother to offspring. The team gave one group of pregnant mice a running wheel and kept another group without. Given the chance, the animals ran about two to three kilometres per night, although they cut back as their pregnancy progressed.

During pregnancy, exercise seemed to dampen the growth of neurons in the developing embryos; babies in the wombs of exercising mothers had roughly 20% fewer neurons three-quarters of the way through pregnancy. But by the time mice were five weeks old, the situation looked quite different. The offspring of exercising mums were forming more neurons, and their hippocampus contained around 40% more of these cells in total.

More here.