THE SELFISH GENE: THIRTY YEARS ON

From Edge:

Selfish The toughest ticket in London’s West End last week wasn’t for a new mega-hit musical from Cameron Mackintosh, or a new play by Tom Stoppard. The people who flocked to The Old Theatre were greeted by famed British radio and television presenter Melvyn Bragg (“Start the Week”) with the following opening words:

“They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.”

The words are from The Selfish Gene, by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. And the evening was a celebration of the thirty year anniversary of the publication of his classic book. As I was unable to attend, I asked Helena Cronin, the founder and director of Darwin@LSE, (and the author of The Ant and the Peacock), to guest edit this special edition of Edge, and she has kindly provided us with the complete audio of the event as well supervising the editing of the transcribed text. Edge is extremely grateful to her for her efforts.

More here.

. . . And an Older Erica Jong Learns To Love Zippers

From The Washington Post:

Jong_1 Back when Erica Jong was a lush literary Lolita penning the It novel, she had a certain somethin’ somethin’ going on. She had a way with words: “Fear of Flying,” her feminist manifesto, sold 18 million copies worldwide. And she had a way with men: four husbands and dalliances with other women’s husbands. (Martha Stewart is allegedly still ticked.) Back then, Jong has boasted, she smelled of sex. Pheromones-a-go-go. But with time comes both change and regrets, and, well, the Italians, they don’t stalk her through the streets of Venice anymore, fingers grasping at ripe rump flesh. As Jong, who turns 64 today, sees it, this is a blessing:

“The zipless [romp] could not interest me less,” says Jong, who coined the catchphrase back in 1973. But mature sex, committed sex, with all its zippered encumbrances, interests her plenty. She’s been married to husband No. 4, divorce lawyer Ken Burrows, for 17 years, and the days spent shagging married men, unmarried men, way older men, way younger men — not to mention the occasional tryst with a girlfriend — have given way to years of contented monogamy.

More here.

Dear Readers, last chance to vote for 3QD!!!

Rose

UPDATE 03/26/06: Polls for the Koufax Awards close today. Please vote now!

Of the more than 300 semi-finalists each in the Best Group Blog and the Blog Most Deserving of Wider Recognition categories, 3 Quarks Daily has made it into the top 10 finalists in each, thanks to your earlier votes! If all our readers vote for us one more time, we can actually win this, we think, and that would get us some needed attention. The competition is very tough this time, and we need every vote!

So, I must ask you to vote for us AGAIN, one last time, by sending an email to [email protected] with the word “Koufax” in the subject line, and in the body of the email, put the following line:

I vote for 3 Quarks Daily for Best Group Blog AND Blog Most Deserving of Wider Attention.

Please just do it NOW, as the voting is not open for long. Thanks a million!

Baghdad: The Besieged Press

Orville Schell in the New York Review of Books:

20060406journalists“Ladies and Gents,” the South African pilot matter-of-factly announces over the intercom, “we’ll be starting our spiral descent into Baghdad, where the temperature is 19 degrees Celsius.” The vast and mesmerizing expanse of sandpapery desert that has been stretching out beneath the plane has ended at the Tigris River. To avoid a dangerous glide path over hostile territory and missiles and automatic weapons fire, the plane banks steeply and then, as if caught in a powerful whirlpool, it plunges, circling downward in a corkscrew pattern.

Upon arriving in Amman, the main civilian gateway to Baghdad, one already has had the feeling of drawing ever nearer to an atomic reactor in meltdown. Even in Jordan, there is a palpable sense of being in the last concentric circle away from a radioactive ground zero emitting uncontrollable waves of contamination.

Almost nowhere in our homogenized world does crossing an international frontier deliver a traveler to a truly unique land. There is, however, no place in the world like Iraq.

More here.

Revolutionary jet engine tested

From the BBC:

_41476306_hyshot_test_inf416A new jet engine designed to fly at seven times the speed of sound appears to have been successfully tested.

The scramjet engine, the Hyshot III, was launched at Woomera, 500km north of Adelaide in Australia, on the back of a two stage Terrier-Orion rocket.

Once 314km up, the Hyshot III fell back to Earth, reaching speeds analysts hope will have topped Mach 7.6 (9,000km/h).

It is hoped the British-designed Hyshot III will pave the way for ultra fast, intercontinental air travel.

An international team of researchers is presently analysing data from the experiment, to see if it met its objectives.

The scientists had just six seconds to monitor its performance before the £1m engine crashed into the ground.

More here.

Translation: Is the Whole World Watching?

Lorne Manly in the New York Times:

Manly4How you see something,” said Nigel Parsons, the managing director of Al Jazeera International, “depends very much on where you’re sitting.”

Those words could well serve as the manifesto for the channel, the English-language offspring of the polarizing pan-Arab network, which will make its debut in more than 40 million households in late May.

Addressing hundreds of journalists and academics who had come to Doha, Qatar, for the second Al Jazeera Forum, Mr. Parsons promised that the new channel — with its headquarters there and broadcast centers in Washington, London and Kuala Lumpur — will cover the stories and people that the Western-owned news media overlook. “We’re not going to be another CNN, BBC or Sky,” he told the attendees on the last day of January. “If we were, there’d be no point.” But, he added, “It’s not our position to tell viewers what to think.”

During a freewheeling question-and-answer session, the audience pressed him for details. With costs already surpassing a billion dollars, Al Jazeera is the most ambitious television network start-up in recent years. Will it be the first network to crack the Western monopoly on delivering news and opinion to a global audience? Will it provide an Arab and Muslim point of view to the rest of the world?

More here.

William Safire And Art That’s Good for You

Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post:

SafireIt used to be fairly easy to draw the political battle lines over art in America.

On one side, let’s call it the left, was a view of human creativity that emphasized confrontation and paradigm busting, that reveled in political provocation and performance art, experimental theater and German opera directors, and could be found, reliably every two years, in the Whitney Biennial. On the other, let’s call it the right, was a view of art as affirmative and pretty, that favored arts that were popular enough to be commercial, and most of the traditional performing arts, and could be found on a nightly basis at places like the Kennedy Center. This basic cultural fissure was only deepened by the right-wing assault on the National Endowment for the Arts in the early 1990s and the failed left-wing efforts to push back with yet more provocation and confrontation.

If this is an accurate picture of art in America, then conservative pundit William Safire’s delivery on Monday of the 19th annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy is something of an anomaly.

More here.

Bosses in love with claptrap and blinded by ideologies

Simon Caulkin in The Observer:

Heroic leaders are a disaster. Seventy per cent of mergers fail. In most organisations, financial incentives cause more problems than they solve. There is no connection between high executive pay and company performance (well, there is – the wider the pay differentials, the lower the commitment of the less well paid). The main result of many consultancy assignments is another consultancy assignment. All ‘silver bullet’ or ‘big ideas’ on their own are wrong.

These are not theories, but facts. Yet companies trip over themselves to buy others, launch change initiatives, introduce pay for performance, flit from one big idea to the next – and pay their CEOs stratospherically. It’s hardly surprising so many go belly up. If doctors were as cavalier with the evidence, a lot of their patients would be dead and many medics would be behind bars.

The last is a line from what bids fair to be one of the management books of the year. Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense (Harvard Business School Press), by Stanford professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton, is a compelling tour of management conventional wisdom and why it so often turns out to be unwise, untrue and a stranger to fact – bollocks, in fact. Every potential manager should be made to read it before they are allowed to be in charge of anything, even a whelk stall.

More here.

French Youth Revolt for the Status Quo

Henri Astier examines the large and ongoing demonstrations by French youth over the proposed change in the labor code, in openDemocracy.

France is undergoing another social convulsion, as hundreds of thousands of students and young people – now joined by the children of immigrants from the deprived banlieues – protest against a new law designed to increase the flexibility of the labour market. Some, like Naima Bouteldja, see the demonstrators as resisting the “flexploitation” characteristic of “the authoritarian market society France has become”; others, like the veteran of the 1968 protests (and current Green member of the European parliament) Danny Cohn-Bendit, portray their actions as “defensive, based on fear of insecurity and change”.

These contrasting perspectives reflect the fractures at the heart of current French social experience. Every country has its “haves” and “have-nots”, but in France the have-nots are a particularly desperate lot…

[U]nemployment is only part of the story. Millions more are caught on a treadmill of short-term schemes – mostly subsidised by the government – that lead either nowhere or to another dead-end job. Add those living off various welfare benefits, and the number of people relegated to the margins of French society has been variously estimated at a staggering 7-12 million.

The real fracture sociale Jacques Chirac referred to when he was elected president in 1995 – and has gone on to do nothing about – is between “insiders” with well-paid, secure positions, and “outsiders” who find it extremely difficult to get on the career path many take for granted in other countries.

International Cosmetic Assistance, a Review of The Beauty Academy of Kabul

In Variety, Ronnie Scheib reviews Liz Mermin’s The Beauty Academy of Kabul.

In an act of “selfless service,” a group of American women, backed by industry giants like Clairol and Vogue, open a beauty school in war-ravaged Afghanistan in “Beauty Academy of Kabul.” The anomalies are manifold: Gun-toting soldiers patrolling the streets are visible through the windows as rookie beauticians busily snip, perm and tweeze. Although helmer Liz Mermin’s straight-faced adherence to her subject tends to diffuse the cultural dissonance the pic reveals, docu’s feminist optimism should still serve Wellspring well domestically, while pic retains enough absurdist contradictions to satisfy cynical European auds.

Mermin achieves an easy intimacy with students and instructors alike. Pic alternates between scenes in the elegant academy, where the mindsets of the teachers dominate, and visits to the home salons of their various Afghan students, most of whom have husbands and children, where quite another set of values holds sway.

Critical thinking

From The Guardian:

Fukuyamasmall After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads by Francis Fukuyama. This book is a brutal critique of neoconservatism as practised by the Bush administration: and it is all the more damaging for the fact that Francis Fukuyama has himself been strongly identified with the neo-conservative cause. His tone is measured but the comprehensive nature of his demolition of Bush’s foreign policy leaves it – and neo-conservatism – in tatters. What, of course, has really done for Bush is “events”, above all those in Iraq. Rarely has a policy been exposed so rapidly and comprehensively on such a grand scale, but then wars have a habit of doing precisely that: the rhetoric and platitudes are suddenly and mercilessly subject to the cold test of reality.

The invasion of Iraq has failed so comprehensively that it seems bound to stimulate much soul-searching in Washington over the coming years. The defeat in Vietnam had a long-lasting effect on American foreign policy: the Mesopotamian disaster may come to be seen in not dissimilar terms.

More here.

Testicle cells may aid research

From BBC News:Stem_cells

Stem cells hold great promise for new treatments for many conditions as they have the ability to become many different types of adult tissue. But at present the most flexible type is found in human embryos – and their use is mired in controversy. A German team describe in the journal Nature how they isolated cells from mice testes that seem equally useful. The researchers, from the Georg August University in Gottingen, isolated sperm-producing cells from the testes of adult mice. They were able to show that, under certain culture conditions, some of them grew into colonies much like embryonic stem cells.

More here.

Wanted: A Few Good Sperm

Jennifer Egan in the New York Times Magazine:

19coverSperm donors, like online daters, answer myriad questions about heroes, hobbies and favorite things. Karyn read her donor’s profile and liked what she saw. “You can tell he comes from a warm family, some very educated,” she said. He had worked as a chef. He had “proven fertility,” meaning that at least one woman conceived using his sperm. Like all sperm donors, he was free from any sexually transmitted diseases or testable genetic disorders. “People in New York change sex partners quicker than the crosstown bus,” Karyn said. “I’d be a lot more concerned about my date next week.” But she especially liked the fact that he was an identity-release donor (also called an “open donor” or a “yes donor”) — a growing and extremely popular category of sperm donors who are willing to be contacted by any offspring who reach the age of 18.

More here.

Ernest Hemingway, secret agent

Peter Moreira in the Toronto Star:

060319_e_hemingway_300Hemingway, however, caught the espionage bug in Asia and didn’t shake it until World War II ended. When he returned to Cuba, he headed an FBI-funded spy ring to monitor Spanish fifth columnists in Havana. Gellhorn nicknamed the operation “The Crook Factory.” After that, he loaded drinking buddies on to his fishing boat with guns and a bomb and plied the Caribbean looking for U-boats.

Later, in France, Hemingway headed a small band of irregulars that moved in tandem with other allied troops heading westward to Berlin.

More here.

Busting people for “public intoxication” in bars

William Saletan in Slate:

Texas is busting people for “public intoxication” in bars. Undercover agents have “infiltrated” 36 bars and arrested 30 drinkers. Explanations from the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission: 1) We’re doing it to stop drinkers before they get in a car. 2) Even if they’re not going to get in a car, maybe they’ll “walk out into traffic and get run over.” 3) Or maybe they’ll “jump off of balconies trying to reach a swimming pool and miss.” 4) Anyway, bars aren’t exempt from laws against public intoxication…

Smoking may increase a man’s risk of impotence by almost 40 percent. The correlation shows up in men who smoke more than a pack a day. Smoking up to 20 cigarettes a day correlated with a 24 increase in impotence. Theory: Nicotine and other related chemicals “diminish blood flow to the penis and blood pressure in it.” Bonus finding: Moderate alcohol consumption “significantly reduced” the risk of impotence. (For Human Nature’s previous updates on the benefits of alcohol, click here and here.)

More here.

Deliberative Polling and Policy

In the Boston Review, James Fishkin looks at the problems of transforming public opinion into policy and discusses a way of making better public opinion, “Deliberative Polling”, on which I posted earlier.

After seven decades of public-opinion research, we see both the power and the limitations of this vision. The power is that we can take the public’s pulse on almost every conceivable issue on a regular basis. The limitations come from what is being measured. Consider three basic limitations. First, while everyone may, in some sense, be “in one great room,” the room is so big that often no one is listening, and no one is motivated to think much about the issues. In the 1950s, the political economist Anthony Downs coined a term for this problem: “rational ignorance.” If I have but one vote or opinion out of millions, why should I spend a lot of time and effort becoming informed about complex policy questions? My individual vote or opinion will not make much difference. And most of us have more urgent demands on our time and attention. The public’s well-documented low levels of information might be regrettable to democratic theorists, but they are understandable given the incentives facing any individual citizen.

Second, sometimes the “opinions” reported in polls do not exist. Because respondents do not like to say “I don’t know,” they often pick an answer more or less at random. When George Bishop of the University of Cincinnati asked in surveys about the “Public Affairs Act of 1975,” the public offered opinions even though the act was fictional. (And when The Washington Post celebrated the fictional act’s 20th anniversary by proposing its repeal, the public offered opinions about that as well.) Of course, on some issues the public has well-formed opinions, but on many others their opinions may represent nothing more than spontaneous impressions.

A third limitation comes from the way people choose interlocutors and news sources. Even when people discuss politics or policy—and many Americans do—they tend to talk to people like themselves, from similar social spheres and often with similar views. When an intense issue divides the country and you know someone on the other side, you are more likely to discuss the weather than risk potentially unpleasant disagreements.

“Spirituality” and the Revival of Liberalism

In the Wilson Quarterly, Leigh Schmidt makes the case that hopes for the revival of liberalism rests in “spirituality”, itself an old and important American tradition.

America may be polarized, but in one activity its social critics have achieved a rare unanimity: lambasting American “spirituality” in all its New Age quirkiness and anarchic individualism. The range of detractors is really quite impressive. James A. Herrick, an evangelical Christian author, deplores the “new spirituality” as a mélange of Gnostics, goddess worshipers, and self-proclaimed UFO abductees out to usurp the place of Christianity: all told, a widespread but shallowly rooted challenge to the mighty religious inheritance of the West. The neoconservative pundit David Brooks of The New York Times thinks that a “soft-core spirituality,” with its attendant “psychobabble” and “easygoing narcissism,” is epidemic. Observers on the left are no less prone to alarm. One pair of such commentators warned recently that the rebranding of religion as “spirituality” is part of corporate capitalism’s “silent takeover” of the interior life, the sly mar keting of a private, consumerist faith in the service of global enterprise.

Even many scholars of religion have jumped on the bandwagon. Martin E. Marty, the widely esteemed historian of American Christianity and professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, published an opinion piece this past January in Christian Century in which he labeled the “spirituality” versus “religion” debate “a defining conflict of our time.” …

All this criticism of the “new spirituality” has obscured and diminished what is, in fact, an important American tradition, one in which spiritual journeying has long been joined to social and political progressivism. Emerson’s “endless seeker” was, as often as not, an abolitionist; Whitman’s “traveling soul,” a champion of women’s rights; Henry David Thoreau’s “hermit,” a challenger of unjust war. A good sense of the continuing moral and political import of this American vocabulary of the spirit comes from Barack Obama, the recently elected Democratic senator from Illinois. Obama has said that, despite the results of the 2004 election, it “shouldn’t be hard” to reconnect progressive politics with religious vision: “Martin Luther King did it. The abolitionists did it. Dorothy Day did it. . . . We don’t have to start from scratch.”

How Computer Science Is Changing the Scientific Method

In the Economist:

WHAT makes a scientific revolution? Thomas Kuhn famously described it as a “paradigm shift”—the change that takes place when one idea is overtaken by another, usually through the replacement over time of the generation of scientists who adhered to an old idea with another that cleaves to a new one. These revolutions can be triggered by technological breakthroughs, such as the construction of the first telescope (which overthrew the Aristotelian idea that heavenly bodies are perfect and unchanging) and by conceptual breakthroughs such as the invention of calculus (which allowed the laws of motion to be formulated). This week, a group of computer scientists claimed that developments in their subject will trigger a scientific revolution of similar proportions in the next 15 years.

That claim is not being made lightly. Some 34 of the world’s leading biologists, physicists, chemists, Earth scientists and computer scientists, led by Stephen Emmott, of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, Britain, have spent the past eight months trying to understand how future developments in computing science might influence science as a whole. They have concluded, in a report called “Towards 2020 Science”, that computing no longer merely helps scientists with their work. Instead, its concepts, tools and theorems have become integrated into the fabric of science itself. Indeed, computer science produces “an orderly, formal framework and exploratory apparatus for other sciences,” according to George Djorgovski, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology…Stephen Muggleton, the head of computational bio-informatics at Imperial College, London, has, meanwhile, taken the involvement of computers with data handling one step further. He argues they will soon play a role in formulating scientific hypotheses and designing and running experiments to test them.

Here is the report “Towards 2020 Science”.

Climate Model Predicts Greater Melting, Submerged Cities

From Scienctific American:Rainbow

Over the past 30 years, temperatures in the Arctic have been creeping up, rising half a degree Celsius with attendant increases in glacial melting and decreases in sea ice. Experts predict that at current levels of greenhouse gases–carbon dioxide alone is at 375 parts per million–the earth may warm by as much as five degrees Celsius, matching conditions roughly 130,000 years ago. Now a refined climate model is predicting, among other things, sea level rises of as much as 20 feet, according to research results published today in the journal Science.

More here:

An Ointment in the Fly

From Science:Fly_3

Viruses are deceptive little buggers, mutating often to dodge their hosts’ immune defenses. Plants fight back using a weapon called RNA interference (RNAi), which rips apart the viral machinery. Now, a new study shows that fruit flies employ the same defense–the first example of animals using this antiviral strategy. According to a related study, the genes behind this resistance are evolving rapidly to keep up with an ever-changing adversary.

For most creatures, RNA is just the middle man that helps a gene make a protein. But many viruses can get by on RNA alone. When they invade a cell, their RNA infiltrates the host’s genetic machinery, tricking it into making viral proteins. Scientists knew that all cells can shred unwanted RNA using RNAi, but they had never observed living animals using this strategy to defend against viruses.

More here: