Confusion reigns in many popular discussions of evolution, and 3QD is not immune. I was inspired to write this Monday Musing today at least in part by a comment left by Ghostman on a post about autism a few days ago. In it, among other things, he theorizes that:

…autism, far from a brain disorder or malfunction, is an evolutionary reaction to the electrified, computerized world, and that once our brains iron out the wrinkles, we will come to look at modern autism as the first difficult steps toward a biological advancement of the human brain—an evolutionary improvement in the way we think, compute, and, yes, imagine…

…I believe the electrified, computerized world is actually changing the makeup of our brains. And that autism is one of the effects of this change…

…Consider the two most well-known symptoms of autism: lack of social skills (encompassing language, empathy, etc.) and enhanced recognition of and appreciation for patterns (often including improved memory and mathematical ability). These, I thought, do not seem to be the characteristics of a human; they are the characteristics of a computer. Computers are bad at emotions, language, social situations. Computers are good at math, memory, patterns. Furthermore, as one reads the literature, one is struck by how many teachers, parents, therapists, etc., comment on how compatible their autistic students, children, patients are with computers. Half of them seem outright amazed. But if one thinks that autism comes largely from computers, one would not be amazed by this, one would expect it…

—Ghostman, June 5, 2007

It’s late at night. It is too hard for me to attempt a sympathetic interpretation of this, and in the space that I have, I really cannot even seriously address the various confusions about evolution that are displayed here. (Even if brains were changed by “electricity” or “computers,” whatever that means, you should know, Ghostman, that ONLY changes to the DNA of the nuclei of sperm or egg cells can possibly be passed on to one’s offspring—and that is just one of the many misunderstandings of evolution that you betray.) Ghostman, I have no doubt that you are well-intentioned, but, my friend, you’ve got to learn something real about evolution before popping off, okay? Instead, all I can do is make my column today all about how Ghostman and others can most quickly educate themselves about evolution and its surrounding theory.

Unlike, say, quantum theory, the theory of evolution is something a lot of people think they understand pretty well. After all, no advanced math is required to understand the silly and tautological phrase which for some represents all there is to know about evolution: “survival of the fittest.” (Who are the fittest? Why, those that survive, of course!) Evolution is an elaborate and broad and subtle theory, with which one needs to spend some years to even begin to get a sense of its richness. (And parts of it do happen to be best expressed mathematically.) Luckily for non-biologists like me (and Ghostman) there exists a beacon of hope in the form of a book: thirty-one years ago, Richard Dawkins wrote what in my mind must be the best presentation of the complexly intertwined ideas and concepts that constitute the theory of evolution, since Darwin wrote The Origin of Species itself. I am referring, of course, to Dawkins’s magisterial work, The Selfish Gene. My column today can be seen as essentially an exhortation, a request, even an abject plea: if you haven’t read this book, please click here now, buy it, and read it from cover to cover as soon as possible. (Get the 30th-anniversary edition, which restores Robert Trivers’s introduction to the original, which had been deleted from subsequent editions, and which also contains a brand new preface by Dawkins detailing the book’s history, in addition to the then-new preface by Dawkins for the 1989 second-edition, and, of course, the original preface. The bibliography has also been updated.) If you haven’t read it but think that you already know what it is about, you just aren’t getting my message. Even Dawkins’s foes (such as H. Allen Orr, who recently trashed Dawkins’s recent book, The God Delusion, in the New York Review of Books) usually admit that The Selfish Gene is one of the most beautiful and clear expositions of science ever written. And it is not about some one thing or idea that can be easily summarized Cliff Notes-style. You just gotta’ read it. Even in an earlier Monday Musing in which I mostly criticized Dawkins for unnecessarily implicitly defending a certain philosophical theory of truth in some of his writings, I also had this to say:

Richard Dawkins has been an intellectual hero of mine since college, where I first read The Selfish Gene. Though I thought I understood the theory of evolution before I read that book, reading it was such a revelation (not to mention sheer enjoyment) that afterward I marveled at the poverty of my own previous understanding. In that (his first) book, Dawkins’s main and brilliant innovation is to look at various biological phenomena from the perspective of a gene, rather than that of the individual who possesses that gene, or the species to which that individual belongs, or some other entity. This seemingly simple perspectival shift turns out to have extraordinary explanatory power, and actually solves many biological puzzles. The delightful pleasure of the book lies in Dawkins’s bringing together his confident command of evolutionary theory with concrete examples drawn from his astoundingly wide knowledge of zoology. Who doesn’t enjoy being told stories about animals?

What I’d like to do in the rest of this column today (in my admittedly ever-desperate hope that it may actually convince someone who hasn’t, to read the book) is give a small example of just how brilliantly Dawkins explains questions in evolutionary biology and then answers them in a profoundly satisfying manner in The Selfish Gene. I have chosen this particular topic out of the extravagance of interesting biological issues that Dawkins presents in his book precisely because I had never even thought to formulate the problem, much less guess its elegant and (I think, I hope!) easily-grasped solution before reading him, and because I think I can present it reasonably briefly (we’ll see!) . So without further delay, here’s the problem: Why are there so many men?

I’ll explain. Women, because they must carry a child for 40 weeks, can only have a rather limited number of children in their lifetimes. Of course, there are limits to the number of children that men can have too, but they are much higher in terms of the actual numbers. (I used to be a big reader of the Guiness Book of World Records, and vaguely recall reading at some point that some king or other of Morocco holds the confirmed record for men with more than 700 children! Look it up if you like, but you get the idea of the difference.) Now, those who believe that evolution works for the benefit of groups of individuals, such as species (they are called group-selectionists, and the late, great essayist Steven Jay Gould was one, but he turns out to have been wrong in this, as in quite a few other things—punctuated equilibrium, anyone?), must answer the following question: in a population of humans, fewer than 10% males in a population would suffice to succesfully mate with all the females, so why are 50% (roughly speaking) of humans males? Well, maybe women need men around in some marriage-like situation to take care of their children, otherwise not enough of their children would survive. This is plausible, after all. But then, why is the proportion of men to women almost exactly 50/50? How come it’s not 45/55, or 55/45 for that matter, depending on exactly how much the males are needed? Look at some other animal species: we find that cats have the same almost exact 50/50 ratio of males to females. So do dogs, cows, mice, fish, chimpanzees, birds, and walruses. Some species of animals share parenting duties equally between the male and the female, while in others, the female puts in almost all the effort in raising children, but all the ones I have mentioned have the same 50/50 ratio of sexes. Why?

(I am not even mentioning the fact that even before the conception of a child, the female has already put in much more effort in producing it than the male has: consider a species of bird in which the male and female spend equal amounts of time hatching the egg after it is laid, and then also spend equal amounts of time and effort feeding and caring for the hatchlings into adulthood: the female has already made a much greater investment by laying a relatively huge egg—imagine the effort a female chicken expends finding and eating enough food to lay one of the super-nutritious eggs in your refrigerator. Sperm, meanwhile, are a dime a dozen-million! This greater investment of energy on the part of females is the reason, by the way, that human females produce one fertilizable egg a month, and I produce several hundred million sperm a day.)

Let me tell you something about walruses: most walrus males will die virgins. (But almost all females will mate.) Only a few dominant walrus males monopolize most of the females (in mating terms). So what’s the point of having all those extra males around, then? They take up food and resources, but in the only thing that matters to evolution, they are useless, because they do not reproduce. From a species point-of-view, it would be better if only a small proportion of walruses were males, and the rest were females. In the sense that such a species of walrus would make much more efficient use of its resources and would, according to the logic of group-selectionists, soon wipe out the actual existing species of walrus with the inefficient 50/50 ratio of males to females. So why don’t they?

Here’s why: because a population of walruses (substitute any of the other animals I have mentioned, including humans, for the walruses in this example) with, say, 10% males and 90% females (or any other non-50/50 ratio), would not be stable. Why not? Remember that each male is producing almost ten times as many children as any female (by successfully mating with, on average, close to ten females). Imagine such a population. If you were a male in this kind of population, it would be to your evolutionary advantage to produce more sons than daughters because each son could be expected to produce roughly ten times as many offspring as any of your daughters. Got it? Reread the last few sentences and convince yourself that what I am saying is true. Look, suppose that the average male walrus fathers 100 children, and the average female walrus mothers 10 baby walruses. Okay? Here’s the crux of the matter: suppose a mutation arose in one of the male walruses (as it well might over a large number of generations) that made it such that this particular male walrus had more Y (male-producing) sperm than X (female-producing) sperm. In other words, the walrus produced sperm that would result in more male offspring than female ones, this gene would spread like wildfire through the described population. Within a few generations, more and more male walruses would have the gene that makes them have more male offspring than female ones, and soon you would get to the 50/50 ratio that we see in the real world. The same argument applies for females: any mutation in a female that caused her to produce more male offspring (though sex is determined by the sperm, not the egg, there are other mechanisms the female might employ to affect the sex ratio) than female ones, would spread quickly in this population, changing the ratio from 10/90 closer to 50/50. Do you see?

No? Well, that’s why I keep urging you to read Dawkins’s book. He is a much better writer, and a much better brain, honestly, than I am, and even if I can’t, I really think that he stands a good chance of winning you over. Get the book. Now!

Here’s a bonus video for your having read this post to the end:

All my previous Monday Musings can be seen here.

I’ve just returned from a few short days in my hometown, a very different part of New York than the more urban(e) one I now experience each day. Ten years have passed since I left, and in unconscious recognition of the anniversary I went back to visit the spots that, in their—or my—absence, have come to hold some of my most formative memories.

I returned, laptop in hand and loads of work to do, to the small town settled in 1787 where I grew up walking ten minutes to school with my brother each day, playing AYSO soccer, climbing trees, walking in the woods, building tree and snow forts, and generally having tons of time to pursue whatever it is my vivid imagination might have desired. By my teens, like so many others in villages of under 2,000 inhabitants, in graduating classes of about 125 kids, all I wanted was out—out to the big City, out to the world, out to work, out to life. Being the incredibly lucky girl I am, I was granted my wish, and went off to study one of those subjects that simply wasn’t considered viable, or respectable, or much of anything but marginalized by the nevertheless superb public school system that was all I’d known until then.

But before I took flight, and without really thinking about it (though my parents likely had), I’d spent years filling those delightfully unstructured hours after school with activities that, while important, I had a suspicion would someday have to be demoted to mere hobbies: workshops in painting, drawing, ceramics, and other craftsy stuff. It was with this attitude—the mindset that tells you something is enjoyable yet trivial (at least to the rest of the world)—that I went to my first painting class at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute in Utica. A ten-minute drive from my own quaint little college town, Utica was a real pit: the traffic lights on the city’s main drag, spaced at what seemed to be one-block intervals, were synchronized for the speed cars moved in the 1940s. The most memorable ads in the paper, even for a little kid, were either for used car dealerships or strip clubs. Graphically, the newest sign for any business looked like it came from the 1950s. Curiously Anglicized Polish and Italian names abounded, with even more curious pronunciations on local radio and television commercials. None of this has really changed much, except for the schools’ installation of metal detectors. The Polish and Italian names are giving way to Bosnian and South American names, accompanied by a growth in barely literate “my-grandpa-learned-English, why-can’t-these-scrappy-people-get-it?” old-timers’ letters to the editor in favor of declaring English an official language, whatever that might mean.

Not that I intend to get sidetracked: Utica seemed like such a pit to me, moderately privileged kid from a small liberal arts college town, that I just assumed—assigning guilt by association—that anything found there couldn’t possibly lead to much. So when this painting class I took with Ms. De Visser brought us into the museum portion of the Munstitute, as we called it, I didn’t expect to see much on the walls. They told us Philip Johnson designed the building, constructed in 1960, and we just saw it for the brutal, foreboding, windowless box it appeared to be. We were to choose a painting from the permanent collection and copy it in drawing, then choose another to copy in drawing and a more developed painting. Docents made a big deal of Thomas Cole’s Voyage of Life (though a second set is in the National Gallery in DC, the original set is here) and Jackson Pollock’s Number 2, 1949, but I was taken with the obscure, more figurative stuff: an 1888 neoclassical canvas by Francis Davis Millet titled After the Festival, of a wistful young woman in flowing robes with rose-bedeck’d hair, her graceful wrist perched on a tambourine; and a 1948 panel called Double Date Delayed, No. 1, by Isabel Bishop—whoever Millet and Bishop were, whoever Johnson was…. Apparently I indulged my predilection for depictions of missing, absent subjects from an early age.

I came across these two works on Friday after forgetting all about them and the hard work I put into copying them. In the meantime Cole’s other major cycle, Course of Empire, has gained renewed attention thanks to a band named after it and newer works by Ed Ruscha. I took a closer look at the old Voyage of Life again, noting the fairly didactic little changes from one canvas to the next to facilitate viewers’ reading of the fixed narrative—the hourglass on the ship’s prow marks time, vanishing by the last scene, and the sculpted faces on the ship’s side reflect the mood of each season of life—and picking up an amusing little activity booklet for kids to help them decipher devices such as allegory, symbolism, etc. Across from this cycle was a remarkably kitsch, not-so-famous 1826 Audubon, Two Cats Fighting, painted in two days in his Edinburgh studio, quickly enough to toss the rotting carcasses out before the stench of the two cats and their coveted squirrel overcame the space.

Leaving the gallery of Audubon, Cole, and Tiffany silvers, I strolled past Dan Christiansen’s 1968 Draco, predecessor of his more recent works with similar title and gift of Philip Johnson (who’d ever have known…), whose colors echoed those of Pollock’s Number 2 across the way. Warhol’s 1967 purple and silver Big Electric Chair was there, along with David Smith’s 1950 The Letter and two surprising Gustons—a classic 1975 Table at Night and a surprisingly Shahn-esque, Lam-esque Porch No. 2, dated twenty-eight years earlier, hanging right next to Shahn’s 1958 painting of what seems to be a drowning man, The Parable.

Jenny Holzer’s 1984 truism THE BEGINNING OF THE WAR WILL BE SECRET, acquired in 1993, oh-so-timely then as now, was just about the last thing I’d expect to see here—but, then again, so was a large Louise Bourgeois spider sculpture, along with most of the other works. This surprisingly strong collection was begun in the 1860s and carried on by the two daughters of James Watson Williams and Helen Elizabeth Munson Williams, who both married entrepreneurs interested in collecting, had no children, and hence had loads of money to dedicate to that end. The institute was established in 1919, and the core works were joined by post-war acquisitions. 1940s director Harris Prior worked with collector Edward Root as acquisitions consultant, and Root’s bequests were later joined by those of architect Philip Johnson, Musa Guston (Philip Guston’s wife), and other people who saw art as the keystone of their lives, as it has since become for me.

One of the newest pieces on exhibit was Elaine Reichek’s Sampler I, a cross-stitch done in 2000. Taking Emily Dickinson’s 1862 poem, #640, “I Cannot Live with You,” Reichek crowns that wrenching verse with an image from Henry Peacham’s 1612 book Minerva Britannia. The emblem pictures a weeping eye floating in the sky and the motto Hei mihi quod vidi (“Oh woe is me because I see”). If I’d had my red pen with me, I might’ve made a correction to their catalogue, so it would read Heia, gaudio mihi quod vidi. That sentiment will just have to remain part of the personal catalogue I’ve been amassing for the last few years, begun and unexpectedly enriched in the humble Mohawk Valley of Central New York.

Other Lunar Refractions can be read here.

by Alex Cooley

In a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, Alex Motyl posed the question, “Do past empires hold lessons for U.S. foreign policy today?” In a review of two new books (an edited volume by Craig Calhoun and a study by Charles Maier), he concluded that “efforts [to show that they do] yield little payoff.”

To be sure, the use of the term “empire” has become commonplace in descriptions of contemporary U.S. foreign policy. Yet, save for a small group of exceptions, American political scientists until now have mostly neglected the theoretical investigation of empires and the dynamics of imperial relations. Filling a massive gap in the literature, political scientists Dan Nexon and Thomas Wright’s new article “What’s at Stake in the American Empire Debate” published in the May 2007 American Political Science Review is one of the most thought-provoking and policy relevant scholarly articles to appear in recent years in the field. The article builds on much of Nexon’s previous work on the network properties of early-modern empires, but applies these insights to some of the central problems confronting today’s U.S. foreign policy community.

Central to Nexon and Wright’s analysis is the contention that the term “empire” has been stripped of much of its analytical content and, instead, is now used (and over-used) to describe the aggressive or domineering foreign policy actions of the United States. Accordingly, the terms “empire” and “imperial” have become fused with normative connotations about unchecked expansionism. Consequently, policymakers disdain the term’s implications, while they ignore coming to terms with the actual political logics and trade-offs produced by an imperial political order. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s now infamous quote that “we don’t do empire” comes to mind, although some now would add the word “well” to the end of that particular musing.

In a theoretical tour-de-force, the Nexon and Wright suspend the current normative use of the term in order to explore the actual structural or network characteristics of imperial systems. In doing so, they upend many of the assumptions of the international relations discipline.

The authors propose that two structural properties distinguish imperial systems from other types of hierarchical political orders such as unipolar systems or hegemonic orders. First, empires are systems where a central power exercises control over peripheral polities indirectly through intermediaries or “informal” rule. Second, these imperial arrangements or contracts differ across a central power’s different peripheries. So the terms of governance of imperial rule over “Periphery A” are not the same as those over peripheries B or C. In this way, the authors distinguish imperial rule from a federal arrangement under which all contracts with subordinate units are equal. In turn, the various peripheries of an imperial system remain segmented or walled off from one another as their relations are mediated and managed by the core power. In visual terms, imperial systems resemble a rimless hub and spokes of a wheel, rimless because the individual peripheries at the end of each spoke remain segmented.

This simple network analytic has three major consequences for how international relations theorists should think about systemic dynamics. First, traditional balance-of-power concerns, the supposedly timeless practice of states playing power politics against each other, are supplanted by divide-and-rule dynamics. That is, empires seek to control, manage and extract resources from their peripheries, but must also prevent the formation of collective ties among peripheries that might become the basis for future anti-imperial collective action.

Second, the axis of relevant political relations shifts from interstate relations to intersocietal within peripheries, as imperial centers empower intermediaries to govern local populations according to specific markers of social status and hierarchy. From the center’s perspective, there is a trade-off between controlling the actions of an intermediary (or the “principal-agent” problem), while allowing them to retain local legitimacy as a ruler.

Third, empires face perennial problems of legitimating their control, especially when they try to maintain authority across a wide audience of multiple peripheries that have very different demands and expectations from the center. Thus, a justification of rule to one periphery may completely contradict the rationale given to another. Accordingly, imperial centers must be mindful of their mixed messages or, more precisely, the structural capacity for peripheries to realize they are receiving mixed messages. As the authors observe, “Multivocal signaling is most effective when the two audiences either cannot or do not communicate with one another. (p. 264).” All of these theoretical claims are illustrated with loads of fascinating anecdotes drawn from such seemingly disparate empires as the British East India Company, the Mongols, the Hapsburgs and the Soviet Union.

The “real world” implications of all of this rigorous theorizing are too numerous to summarize, but let me flag four important issues that the Nexon and Wright model raises.

First, this account of international relations provides a more robust account of Cold War politics than traditional balance-of-power accounts that focus just on the inter-state bipolar competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Nexon and Wright model explains both great power competition and why the United States and Soviet Union took such pains to intervene in the internal affairs of peripheral countries and reinforce the client status of allies (the Shah in Iran, Marcos in the Philippines, Park in South Korea) by providing them with private goods. Cold War politics exhibited both balance-of-power and divide and rule dynamics, even though the legitimating strategy of the latter was one of systemic anti-Communism.

Second, in terms of the Nexon/Wright model, America’s actual resort to imperial governance since the end of the Cold War has been declining, not increasing. Of course, the post 9/11 military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have drawn more attention to the practice of “American Empire” and the authors acknowledge that “empire”-like qualities of continuing U.S. intervention in these countries. But the more counterintuitive point is that America’s use of overtly imperial systems is actually not as widespread as it was during the 1960s and 1970s.

One major reason for this decline is that globalization – contra the claims of many globalization critics – undermines the conditions necessary for effective imperial management by the center. Today, imperial powers can no longer monopolize globalizing processes such as transnational information flows, media broadcasts, NGO activity and economic exchange. Such transnational flows undercut the informational firewalls that imperial managers have traditionally erected between their peripheries to maintain segmentation and prevent collective action. For example, Al Jazeera and other Middle Eastern cable news networks can instantly and effectively undermine U.S. legitimation strategies regarding its Middle East policy by broadcasting daily images of how America and its political clients routinely disregard human rights concerns and democratic ideals. The contradictions of multivocal legitimation strategies are more quickly, and effectively, exposed in our global era.

The U.S. experience with Uzbekistan is a good case in point. To support its military campaign in Afghanistan, the United States established a military base in southern Uzbekistan in fall 2001 and signed a security cooperation agreement with the Uzbek government. Under its terms, the United States aided and armed Uzbek security services in exchange for basing rights. However, it turned out that the Uzbek government had little interest in adhering to its human rights obligations and used its international support as a partner in the war on terror to eradicate all forms of domestic opposition, not just Islamists with ties to al-Qaeda.

The most egregious of these actions was the so-called Andijan massacre in May 2005 when troops that were dispatched by the Uzbek Ministry of the Interior killed hundreds of demonstrators in the eastern city of Andijan. Following these events, the cross-periphery dissonance between the justifications for promoting democratic state-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, and supporting the heavy-handed actions of the Uzbek regime became an international embarrassment to U.S policymakers. Even William Kristol, editor of the hawkish neo-conservative Weekly Standard, pointed out that the administration’s Uzbek policy simply was no longer compatible with the public logic of America’s involvement in the Middle East or its support of the colored revolutions in the other former Soviet states. In the end, the United States military was shortly after evicted from its military base, as the Uzbek government grew increasingly concerned that U.S. officials were actually intent on fomenting democratic change. Multivocal signaling, in the Uzbek case, delegitimized U.S. relations with the Middle East, but it also lessened American credibility with the Uzbek government.

Again, the analytical point here is not that the United States is hypocritical in the conduct of its external relations; rather, it is that traditional “multivocal” appeals and legitimating strategies can no longer function effectively in a global setting where contradictory justifications cannot be restricted to specific peripheries and political clients.

Third, Nexon and Wright correctly focus our attention on the formal structures of hierarchy operating in the contemporary international system. But we should be aware that states and international actors often employ a mixture of different types of hierarchical organizational forms, some of which require intermediaries and others which are more direct. Thus, Iraqi reconstruction has been delegated to intermediary private corporations and contractors, most of them American, however the U.S. military continues to directly play the major security function within the country. Moreover, some states may also find themselves at the periphery of multiple “imperial centers” and their dictates. The former Communist countries of East Europe may be a case in point, as they implement both the conditions and expectations laid out by the EU while they integrate themselves into the security network of the United States (including its overseas basing network and/or global missile defense shield).

The fourth – and most unsavory – implication of the Nexon/Wright model concerns what an “effective” U.S. strategy would look like in Iraq. The authors convincingly point to some of the control problems that using unreliable intermediaries in Iraq has generated for the United States. But their own analytic scheme points to the broader problem inherent in current U.S. efforts to preserve Iraqi unity while maintaining a political balance among Iraq’s factions in a quasi-democratic setting.

In fact, the extreme implication of the Nexon/Wright model for U.S. policymakers would be to more vigorously pursue “divide-and-rule” policies in Iraq instead of its contradictory nation-building policies of “unite and rule.” This would mean, practically, to empower or even openly arm Shiite and Kurdish factions against the Sunni minority and to license such action in exchange for American patronage. Now, to be clear, the authors do not advocate such a policy (and nor do I), but some others have, drawing upon this structural imperial logic.

All of this points to the fact that U.S. officials have not learned basic lessons from past imperial experiences. Indeed, the very explosion in the recent use of the term “empire” by critics of U.S. foreign policy merely highlights the failure of the U.S. to adequately manage its imperial cross-pressures and multivocal contradictions. Moreover, from this perspective, the rapid erosion of American legitimacy throughout the world – as evidenced in surveys like the Pew Survey on Global Attitudes – should be a much more central concern for the current managers of the American Empire than it was for its discredited recent champions.

Alex Cooley is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, author of Logics of Hierarchy (Cornell University Press, 2005), and also served as 3 Quarks Daily’s World Cup 2006 correspondent.