Interview in Ready Steady Book:

Marek Kohn is a writer who lives in Brighton. His most recent book, A Reason For Everything: Natural Selection and the English Imagination, looks at the key thinkers behind the development of evolutionary theory in Britain, and why these ideas have thrived better in Britain than in other countries. His previous books have looked at drug culture, race, and the evolution of the human mind. Marek Kohn was talking to Stuart Watkins and Dave Flynn.

RSB: In your most recent book, A Reason For Everything, you talk about the different impact Darwinian thinking has had in Britain compared with the rest of Europe and the US. How do you account for this difference?

Marek Kohn: The distinguishing feature of English evolutionary thought has been its attitude to adaptation. An adaptationist tends to see the work of natural selection in every aspect of an organism – a reason for everything. You see bands on a snail’s shell: you wonder what good the bands do for the snail. And you go out into the field, and you look for possible reasons for them. In the case of the snails there’s a camouflage effect – different coloured or banded shells are better suited to different habitats, such as leaf litter or grass. Not the whole story but a robust example of English adaptationism in practice.

The palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould called this the British “hang-up”, and his colleague the geneticist Richard Lewontin said that it arose in large part from the fascination for butterflies, snails, birds and gardens typical of the pre-war upper middle class from whose ranks these scientists mostly came. True enough, though it doesn’t acknowledge the fascination with natural history that used to run right across the social spectrum. Also one can see its roots in Victorian natural history, which of course is where all this began. As Alfred Russel Wallace observed, it was a fascination with species and the subtle distinctions between them – beetle-collecting – that allowed him and Darwin to realise, independently, how natural selection works.

If by contrast your vision is shaped, as that of their counterparts on the continent was, by idealist philosophy, you are unlikely to see what is going on in nature. Idealism is concerned with ideal types and therefore discounts variation as ‘noise’. You need to be fascinated by variation to see natural selection, because variations are what nature selects.

More here.  [Thanks to Mark Thwaite.]

Over at Lawyers, Guns and Money, djw has an interesting post on letting children vote.

When I teach American Political Thought, I close with what always turns out to be a vigorous class discussion on Michael S. Cummings essay “On Children’s Right to Vote”* which is a brief, uncompromising case for extending the franchise to those under 18. My pedagogical reason is clear–they’ve all had the luxury of being casually correct and shaking their heads in dismay at the various arguments and justifications for *not* extending the franchise and full citizenship to various oppressed groups. Reading this essay, rightly or wrongly, tends to put most of them on the side of tradition and exclusion. Even those who are 100% convinced the proposal is insane tend to find this new position they find themselves in rather uncomfortable.

But I want to talk briefly about Cummings argument (sorry, it’s not available online) because it’s surprisingly seductive. I’ll summarize it in a series of premises:

1) The exclusion of any group from the franchise requires positive justification, as exclusion based on tradition has a poor track record.

2) The argument that children would take the responsibility of voting less seriously than other groups is an argument we’d reject out of hand if applied to other groups, even if it were empirically demonstrable.

3) The argument that children generally aren’t full economic citizens with jobs and taxes is a) often untrue and more often partially true, and b) is also true of many adults, but we’d never tolerate arguments to disenfranchise the chronically unemployed or dependent adults, and c) is perhaps the point.

Josiah Ober in the Boston Review:

The great legacy of the 20th century may be the emergence of democracy as a universal value: the conviction that whenever people are subjected to power, their views about the exercise of that power must be taken into consideration. This democratic principle, it is now widely agreed, is a fundamental moral requirement on the governance of states, global institutions, and even nongovernmental organizations.

But if democracy is now generally regarded as morally superior to other forms of political organization, its effectiveness in delivering the goods remains a matter of sharp contest. How does democracy fare when it comes to assuring physical security, protecting health, and fostering economic growth? We know, for example, from the economist Amartya Sen that famines are all too common under authoritarian regimes but do not occur in democratic states with a free press. Yet Sen also acknowledges that we do not know the effects of democracy on economic growth: “If all the comparative studie s are viewed together, the hypothesis that there is no clear relation between economic growth and democracy in either direction remains extremely plausible.”

Democracy may be right, then, but is it good?

More here.

Sharon LaFraniere in the New York Times:

As Solomon Linda first recorded it in 1939, it was a tender melody, almost childish in its simplicity — three chords, a couple of words and some baritones chanting in the background.

But the saga of the song now known worldwide as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” is anything but a lullaby. It is fraught with racism and exploitation and, in the end, 40-plus years after his death, brings a measure of justice. Were he still alive, Solomon Linda might turn it into one heck of a ballad…

Some 150 artists eventually recorded the song. It was translated into languages from Dutch to Japanese. It had a role in more than 13 movies. By all rights, Mr. Linda should have been a rich man.

Instead, he lived in Soweto with barely a stick of furniture, sleeping on a dirt floor carpeted with cow dung.

Mr. Linda received 10 shillings — about 87 cents today — when he signed over the copyright of “Mbube” in 1952 to Gallo Studios, the company that produced his record. He also got a job sweeping floors and serving tea in the company’s packing house.

More here.  [Mr. Linda leftmost in photo.]

Nancy Etcoff in Science & Spirit:

Some people are happier than others, some people seem never to be happy, and others seem glad to be unhappy. In his memoir, Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis contrasts his father’s sentimental, passionate family with his mother’s cheerful clan, which “had the talent for happiness in a high degree—went straight for it as experienced travelers go for the best seat in a train.” In American psychologist William James’ words, “There are men who seem to have started in life with a bottle or two of champagne inscribed to their credit, whilst others seem to have been born close to the pain-threshold, which the slightest irritants fatally send them over.” The question is: What accounts for such enduring individual differences?

One answer comes from behavioral geneticists trying to determine how much of the variance we see in happiness levels may be due to genetic differences.

More here.

Jim Endersby in the Times Literary Supplement:

In 1771, the Scottish naturalist William Smellie used an article in the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (of which he was the main compiler) to attack the “alluring seductions” of the Linnaean system of plant classification. Smellie accused Linnaeus of taking his analogies “beyond all decent limits”, claiming that the Swedish naturalist’s books were enough to make even the most “obscene romance writer” blush. His outrage was shared by the English naturalist William Goodenough, who was appalled by Linnaeus’s “disgusting names, his nomenclatural wantonness, vulgar lasciviousness, and the gross prurience of his mind”.

The subject of all this moral outrage was the methodus propria (“proper method”) of plant classification, devised by the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné, better known by the Latinized version of his name as Linnaeus. His system was published in a series of books that started appearing in the 1750s, the most important of which were the Philosophia Botanica (“Philosophy of Botany”, 1751) and the Species Plantarum (“Species of Plants”, 1753). These provided the foundations for all subsequent classification, not least because the two-part Latin scientific names, such as Homo sapiens, that we still use were regularized and – even more importantly – publicized by Linnaeus.

More here.

Ian Buruma in the New York Review of Books:

Great claims have been made for the art of Robert Crumb, creator of Mr. Natural, Angelfood McSpade, Devil Girl, Fritz the Cat, and the Snoid, among other comic masterpieces. Crumb’s Zap Comix is a cultural landmark of the 1960s, as much as the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. “Keep on Truckin’,” the title of a series of drawings of strutting men in oversized shoes, like stoned dancers in a great nationwide cakewalk, became a catchphrase of the hippy era, immortalized in a song by the Grateful Dead. It was so overused that Crumb himself grew heartily sick of it.

Perhaps the greatest, and by now best-known, cartoon character in Crumb’s rich oeuvre is R. Crumb himself, a little mustachioed figure in a tweed jacket and glasses with a rampant penis, playing the banjo, or jumping on large athletic women in tight jeans, or getting beaten up, or masturbating over his own cartoons. R. Crumb, the comic figure, is not quite Mr. Everyman. Rather, he is the artist as loser, the sensitive nerd, who feels humiliated by the handsome bullies who are dumb and cruel but get the girls, while he can only dream about them. That is, until R. Crumb becomes a famous cartoonist and can suddenly do whatever he likes with the “gurls,” which is usually something rather drastic, like slamming them face-down on the floor and riding them like a jockey.

More here.

Tom Heneghan in Reuters UK:

Western political leaders and the media have reacted with mounting indignation to the news that a Kabul court threatened to impose the death sentence on an Afghan man who abandoned Islam and converted to Christianity.

Two months ago, political and religious leaders in the Muslim world were rounding on Western European media and governments for printing and defending caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad that they considered blasphemous.

The cases are clearly different. Western leaders from President George W. Bush down have spoken up to save the life of a man whose religious freedom is a universal human right which his judges say is secondary to Islamic law.

More here.

From Nature:

Think you’re too young to worry about cholesterol? Think again. Many people could drastically reduce their future risk of heart disease by lowering their cholesterol levels from as early as their 20s. That’s the bottom line of a study showing that people born with low cholesterol are protected from heart problems. High levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL), a molecule that transports cholesterol in the blood, are strongly associated with heart disease. Doctors already know that reducing LDL with exercise or drugs can reduce a person’s risk of heart attack. But it has been harder to find out whether heart health could be improved further by lowering LDL from a young age.

Helen Hobbs at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, and her colleagues saw an opportunity to find out. Last year, they discovered that a fraction of the population are genetically programmed to have low LDL levels, because they carry particular versions of a gene called PCSK9 that help the liver to eliminate LDL cholesterol.

More here.

From BBC News:

Snails with left-handed shells can have a big advantage in life – predators may find it impossible to eat them. That is the conclusion of research just published in the Royal Society’s journal Biology Letters. Scientists from the US examined whelks and cone shells preyed on by the crab Calappa flammea. They found the crab is unable to open left-handed shells because it only has a tool for peeling t hem on its right claw; so it discards them. “The crabs have a special tool on their claw, a tooth that’s used like a can-opener,” said Gregory Dietl from Yale University. “So, if you imagine trying to use a right-handed can-opener with your left hand – it’s very hard to do,” he told the BBC News website.

From the Toronto Star:

Canada’s Kelly Scott missed an opportunity to grab a share of second place Wednesday night after a disappointing effort against the U.S. at the Ford World Women’s Curling Championship.

The troubles for the skip from Kelowna, B.C. began in the second end when Scott was heavy on a draw to score one against Debbie McCormick of the United States and gave up a steal instead. The Americans scored a deuce in the 6th end and picked up another steal in the seventh on the way to a 6-2 victory.

As a result, Canada’s dropped to 6-3 and into a tie with Andrea Schoepp of Germany, who blasted Switzerland 10-3.

More here.

Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker:

During what you could call Bill O’Reilly’s classical period, the first few years of “The O’Reilly Factor”—which débuted in 1996, at the same time as Fox News—O’Reilly seemed to be a recognizable member of the conservative-talk-show-host species, like his Fox stablemate Sean Hannity, or like Joe Scarborough, on MSNBC. He attacked Bill Clinton and Al Gore relentlessly; the Monica Lewinsky scandal was his signature subject. Now, ten years later, O’Reilly has become baroque, and “The O’Reilly Factor” is a complex affair, dense with self-references, obsessions, and elaborations, even though it still delivers a satisfying punch.

O’Reilly is the most popular host on cable news; his average nightly audience is about two million people, while Larry King, on CNN, has an audience about half that size.

More here.

Jerome Kasparian in American Scientist:

Next time you give a presentation about your research, take a close look at the laser pointer you’re holding in your hand. How big is the beam coming out of it? And how large is the spot that it forms? The answers will, of course, hinge on the particular laser pointer you’re wielding and the distance between podium and screen. Typical values might be a few millimeters for the beam as it exits the aperture of the pointer and a centimeter or so for the circle of light it casts across the auditorium. It takes only a smattering of physical intuition to guess the reason: Diffraction causes the beam to diverge. The actual cause may be a little more complicated, because some laser pointers include a lens that makes the light converge at a fixed distance from the tip, which leads the beam to spread out beyond this focal point—more so than if only diffraction had operated.

Imagine now that your laser pen packed a more powerful punch—say that the intensity of the beam was a whopping 10¹² times that of a typical pointer. What then would the beam do as it crossed the room? (It’s clear enough what it’ll do when it hits the screen—quickly burn a hole). The answer, it turns out, is anything but intuitive. A laser of sufficient intensity traveling through air will—all by itself—engineer a narrow channel, one perhaps a tenth of a millimeter wide, over which light will propagate for tens or even hundreds of meters.

More here.

“There’s a new outsourcing boom in South Asia – and a billion people are jockeying for the jobs. How India became the global hot spot for drug trials.”

Jennifer Kahn in Wired:

The town of Sevagram in central India has long been known for three things: its heat, which is oppressive even by Indian standards; its snakes, which are abundant; and its ashram, a derelict and increasingly malarial retreat preserved as a tribute to Mohandas Gandhi, who lived here and was known for tenderly relocating the poisonous vipers that slithered into his shack.

Despite this intemperate setting, Sevagram’s hospital has a good reputation. Though the power fails often, forcing medics to use the backlit screens of their cell phones for illumination, the standard of care is higher than at many of the country’s public hospitals, and the facilities are comparatively plush. At the nearby government medical center in Nagpur, for instance, patients sometimes have to sleep on mattresses on the floor.

Last year, Sevagram began garnering even more cachet. A German pharmaceutical company called Boehringer Ingelheim, whose latest stroke-prevention drug was making its way through the clinical pipeline, approved the town’s hospital as a trial site – one of 28 in India recruiting stroke victims to round out the company’s 18,500-person study.

More here.

Hassan Abbas in al-Nakhlah (The Fletcher School Online Journal for issues related to Southwest Asia and Islamic Civilization):

Interaction between Islam and the West,at various levels and in different forms,is a centuries- old phenomenon.In the post-September 11 context, however,the discourse is increasingly framed in terms of “us versus them,” an “Islam versus the West ” issue.Terrorist attacks in Spain and United Kingdom in the last two years and the recent cartoon controversy have further exacerbated this confrontational discourse.Within the Muslim world today,the conservative elements largely understand interactions with the West as “Muslims versus Christians,” including an element of Jewish conspiracy as well.Most Muslims see America ’s military campaign in Afghanistan in October 2001; its so-called “preemptive attack ” on Iraq in early 2003 and its bloody aftermath;and media disclosures about U.S.police profiling of Muslims as reflective of an American war on Islam rather than as components of a war on terror.Many westerners also view ordinary Muslims as potential terrorists and as adherents of a religion that is orthodox in its approach and violent in its worldview,an excessively sweeping and profoundly incorrect assessment.Tragically,these perceptions have generated a gulf of estrangement between Islam and the West.

This paper represents an effort to understand these trends and shifts in perception and approach of both Muslims and the West (primarily the United States)in the light of how AbdolKarim Soroush,a leading and influential Muslim scholar from Iran,analyzes this matter.

More here.  [Thanks to Samad Khan.]

The syntax of the songs of humpback whales unlocked:

The songs of the humpback whale are among the most complex in the animal kingdom. Researchers have now mathematically confirmed that whales have their own syntax that uses sound units to build phrases that can be combined to form songs that last for hours.

Until now, only humans have demonstrated the ability to use such a hierarchical structure of communication. The research, published online in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, offers a new approach to studying animal communication, although the authors do not claim that humpback whale songs meet the linguistic rigor necessary for a true language.

“Humpback songs are not like human language, but elements of language are seen in their songs,” said Ryuji Suzuki, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) predoctoral fellow in neuroscience at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and first author of the paper.

The marketing strategy behind Brokeback Mountain has been subject to some criticism. James Schamus, producer of Brokeback Mountain, responds to Daniel Mendelsohn’s in The New York Review of Books.

Daniel Mendelsohn, in his finely observed review of Brokeback Mountain [“An Affair to Remember,” NYR, February 23], sets up a false dichotomy between the essentially “gay” nature of the film and the erasure of this gay identity through the marketing and reception of the film as a “universal” love story. As one of the film’s producers, I am grateful for his understanding of the unapologetic and unvarnished treatment of the specifically gay story we set out to tell; but as the co-president of Focus Features, the studio that is marketing and distributing the film, I take umbrage at some of the rhetorical shortcuts Mendelsohn takes in his depiction of our work.

Mendelsohn is rightly nervous about what happens when a gay text is so widely and enthusiastically embraced by mainstream hetero-dominated culture; and it is true that many reviewers contextualize their investment in the gay aspects of the romance by claiming that the characters’ homosexuality is incidental to the film’s achievements. Many reviewers indeed have gone out of their way to denounce the “gay cowboy movie” label (although, to be fair, they are mainly objecting to the fact that the label was used as a derogatory joke, a point I wish Mendelsohn had more fully considered).

Paul Griffiths in Bookforum:

In considering here how the work of writers and composers comes to change as their lives near an end, Edward Said has little to say about the abandoned fragment—the achievement cut off by death, as Mozart’s Requiem was. Yet that is precisely the condition of the present book, which, as the author’s widow, Mariam Said, explains in the foreword, was left far from complete when Said died, in 2003. While incorporating material written long before (as Said seems to have intended), this volume comes to us as a last work, drafted by one who knew his time was limited. It therefore exemplifies its own subject matter, manifesting some of the qualities Said discerns in “late style,” including penetration and breadth of reference, and yet, inevitably, leaving much in outline or unstated.

Said’s reflection starts out from the notion of timeliness in human doings, and so of how certain things become possible, or available, in later years. One of time’s gifts is widely held to be wisdom, but Said is attracted much more by lateness “as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction.” The wise elders—Shakespeare, Verdi, Rembrandt, Matisse, Bach, Wagner—are saluted, then dismissed. Kept for later and longer scrutiny are those who, like ancient trees, grew ever more gnarled.

More here.  [Thanks to Andrew N. Rubin.]

The great sociologist Barrington Moore Jr.’s death last October passed largely unnoticed, to the shame of the era. Charles Tilly remembers Moore in the Canadian Journal of Sociology Online, via Political Theory Daily Review.

Moore graduated from Williams, went on to a Yale Ph.D. and service in the wartime Office of Strategic Services, then taught at Chicago for two years before taking up a post as research associate at Harvard’s Russian Research Center. At Harvard, Moore was reluctant to take on the routine administration and petty politics of university departments; only late in his career did he move from lecturer to professor. Meanwhile he spent most of most summers on his yacht, sailing out of Bar Harbor, and significant parts of his winters skiing near his lodge in Alta, Utah.

Despite this life of relative ease, Moore maintained a fierce commitment to democracy, a contempt for intolerance and injustice, a hatred for tyrannies of all persuasions, and a conviction that changing material conditions shape human political action. His closest friends (and most frequent guests on his yacht) were typically intellectual radicals such as Herbert Marcuse and Robert Paul Wolff. When Moore worked, he went at it with ferocious energy, never publishing until he had gotten the argument more or less right. For his students, he became a model of intellectual commitment and rigor.

From Edge:

On Wednesday, April 12th Harvard Book Store and Seed Magazine will cosponsor a discussion on Science in the Age of Certainty with John Brockman, Daniel C. Dennett, Daniel Gilbert, Marc D. Hauser, Elizabeth Spelke and Seth Lloyd. This event coincides with the publication of the new book What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty, edited by Mr. Brockman.

Eminent cultural impresario, editor, and publisher of Edge (www.edge.org), John Brockman asked a group of leading scientists and thinkers to answer the question: What do you believe to be true even though you cannot prove it? This book brings together the very best answers from the most distinguished contributors. This collection of bite-size thought-experiments is a fascinating insight into the instinctive beliefs of some of the most brilliant minds today.

More here.