From The Wislon Quarterly:

In Second Nature, Nobel ­Prize–­winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman proposes what he calls ­“brain-­based epistemology,” which aims at solving the mystery of how we acquire knowledge by grounding it in an understanding of how the brain ­works.

Edelman’s title is, in part, meant “to call attention to the fact that our thoughts often float free of our realistic descriptions of nature,” even as he sets out to explore how the mind and the body interact. He favors the idea that the brain and mind are unified, but has little patience with the claim that the brain is a computer. Fortunately for the general reader, his explanations of brain function are accessible, buttressed by concrete examples and ­metaphors.

Edelman suggests that thanks to the recent development of instruments capable of measuring brain structure within millimeters and brain activity within milliseconds, perceptions, thoughts, memories, willed acts, and other mind matters traditionally considered private and impenetrable to scientific scrutiny now can be correlated with brain activity. Our consciousness (a ­“first-­person affair” displaying intentionality, reflecting beliefs and desires, etc.), our creativity, even our value systems, have a basis in brain ­function.

More here.

Simon Jenkins in The London Times:

The American and British armies do not have to withdraw from Iraq. They are powerful and can stay as long as they wish, even if entombed like French legionnaires in desert forts and sustained at great cost in lives and money. Their governments are a different matter. They need reasons for occupying foreign countries and now face humiliation in the greatest war of ideological intervention since Vietnam. They are praying for their armies to save them from this humiliation.

This week David Petraeus, the talented American general in Baghdad, reports on the progress of his “surge” strategy to an impatient Congress. Two thirds of Americans have joined two thirds of world opinion in wanting a swift American withdrawal, defined as inside a year. Petraeus’s predicament is therefore agonising. He cannot possibly offer victory. He can offer only defeat or a desperate clinging on, as now. For George Bush, his commander-in-chief, only the last is imaginable. Petraeus must therefore forget about a better yesterday or a better tomorrow, and concentrate on today.

Here he is trapped.

More here.

Part of the full transcript of the recent Bin Laden video from FOX News:

More here.

Gloria Goodale in the Christian Science Monitor:

TV shows have never shied away from trading on the sex appeal of their stars, but a quick look at the new fall season reveals that the overall TV landscape is about to get a whole lot sexier and more explicit. From the graphic grappling in HBO’s new relationship drama, “Tell Me You Love Me,” to the partner-swapping in CBS’s “Swingtown,” and the teen sex – including rape – of CW’s “Gossip Girl,” the sex is getting rawer and the camera ever closer.

This escalating emphasis on explicit scenes as well as themes is the result of seismic changes already rocking Hollywood and the larger society, say culture watchers: the competition for market share in a spiraling world of entertainment choices, the mainstreaming of pornography, and the explosive growth of an unregulated Internet.

Sexual mores are a good measure of social change, says Kevin Scott, coauthor of the upcoming Beacon Press book, “The Porning of America: Choosing Our Sexual Future.” The combination of adult erotica moving onto Main Street America by the mid 1990s, along with the emergence of the Internet as a massive distribution network, has created what Mr. Scott calls a “perfect storm” of cultural change. “Our general view of sexuality today is so much broader than what it was just 15 years ago,” he adds.

More here.

For Azra:

Via a post about the infection analogy for cultural evolution over at Language Log, Cosma Shalizi posts an excerpt from André Siegfried’s Germs and Ideas:

The spreading of germs and ideas

There is a striking parallel between the spreading of germs and the spreading of ideas or propaganda. On the one hand we are dealing with a virus which can be transported and transmitted under certain conditions which favor or limit its transportation or transmission: on the other hand with ideas, religions, and doctrines, which can be described as germs, benevolent or malevolent, according to the point of view one takes up. These germs can either remain at their source and be sterile, or emerge in the spreading of infection. The vocabulary which normally comes to mind is that of medicine. Conditions of infection, besides, will also be the same as in the domain of health. For diffusion to take place we must necessarily have a germ, a carrier, and receptive surroundings. It is then, as in the case of epidemics, a matter of contacts, made easier by the techniques of communication or delayed by obstacles arising from custom or from administration. Sociology and biology are curiously akin in this.

Over at Philosophy Bites:

What makes an action a good one? According to consequentialists this question is decided by the action’s actual or likely consequences. In this episode of Philosophy Bites the moral philosopher Brad Hooker explains what consequentialism is and defends it against possible criticism.

A PUBLICIST long ago gave Luciano Pavarotti the sobriquet King of the High C’s, for his remarkable ability to hit and sing the heck out of one of the highest notes of the tenor voice. The tag followed Mr. Pavarotti, who died last week, into most of his obituaries.

His voice, especially earlier in his career, was remarkable across its range. But that little note, an octave above middle C on the piano, played a role in projecting Mr. Pavarotti’s fame around the world. That is no surprise. The tenor high C has a long and noble tradition, and a healthy dose of mystique.

“It’s the absolute summit of technique,” said Craig Rutenberg, the Metropolitan Opera’s director of musical administration — in effect, its chief vocal coach. “More than anywhere else in your voice, you have to know what you’re doing. To me it signals a self-confidence in the singer that lets him communicate to us that he knows what he’s doing and he has something very important to express with that note.”

more from the NY Times here.

Millais’s marvellous powers of observation and his greater assurance of technique made him the immediate front-runner of the pre-Raphaelite group. When his painting Isabella, based on Keats’s Isabella; or the Pot of Basil, was shown at the Academy in 1849, its garish colour and simplified design caused widespread controversy. Part of the shock was Millais’s inclusion in the painting of actual known people rather than professional models, an unsettling combination of an archaic story and contemporary life.

It was followed the next year by Millais’s first important religious composition, Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop, a work of disconcerting weirdness painted in a real carpenter’s workshop. It includes the realistic detail of a journeyman with dirty toenails, a St Anne with red, swollen, washerwoman’s hands and, most offensive of all, a boy Jesus depicted as an Ashkenazi Jew with bright red hair. Charles Dickens warned the readers of Household Words to prepare themselves “for the lowest depths of what is mean, odious, repulsive and revolting”. Queen Victoria entered the controversy, asking for the painting to be brought to Windsor Castle for a private viewing. Millais wrote to Holman Hunt: “I hope it will not have any bad effects on her mind.” (How she responded to it is not known.)

more from The Guardian here.

…it is equally clear, if it wasn’t already, that Bolaño’s piety is not to be distinguished from his irony. Is it a noble, properly quixotic folly to address one’s life to such a God? And does the Holy Father of left-wing Latin American poets – their socialism never built, their great poems never written – appear an incomprehensible, jesting sadist only because of the shortcomings of his adherents? Or is invoking this God just the height of their bullshit? The ambiguity lies over Bolaño’s own created world: to the extent that his fiction refuses to behave anything like fiction, is this a mark of its triumphant reality? Or (the depressive obverse to the mania of belief) is the world of Bolaño’s generation, and perhaps the world generally, too refractory to order and understanding to permit its transformation into literature, leaving inconclusive testimony the only honest form?

To these questions the answer would seem to be a ringing . . . simonel. In the first section of The Savage Detectives, García Madero wonders about the Mexican slang term: ‘If simón is slang for yes and nel means no, then what does simonel mean?’ Four hundred pages later, at the end of the middle section, a former poet named Amadeo Salvatierra (‘Like so many hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, I too, when the moment came, stopped writing and reading poetry’) recounts the drunken discussion he had one night with Lima and Belano when they had come to seek out any information he might possess about their vanished Cesárea Tinajero:

And I saw two boys, one awake and the other asleep, and the one who was asleep said don’t worry, Amadeo, we’ll find Cesárea for you even if we have to look under every stone in the north . . . And I insisted: don’t do it for me. And the one who was asleep . . . said: we’re not doing it for you, Amadeo, we’re doing it for Mexico, for Latin America, for the Third World, for our girlfriends, because we feel like doing it. Were they joking? Weren’t they joking?. . . and then I said: boys, is it worth it? is it worth it? is it really worth it? and the one who was asleep said Simonel.

more from the LRB here.

From The New York Times:

Songs without Words by Ann Packer.

In “Songs Without Words,” calamity visits a placid, prosperous California family — a homemaker, Liz Mackay; her handsome Wi-Fi executive husband, Brody; and their adolescent kids, Lauren and Joe — all of them so vanilla and photo-friendly they could be cast in a T-Mobile “Fave Five” commercial. Liz has lived an unusually lucky life. Growing up secure and well loved in a happy family, she gave in early to an inclination to look after others — particularly her childhood friend Sarabeth, whose mother committed suicide when Sarabeth was in high school. Now in her 40s and still single, Sarabeth wallows in regret for her life’s missteps, but Liz nurses only one sprig of misgiving: embarrassment that she never yearned for a career. “All Liz had ever really wanted was to be a mother,” Packer explains. “Lauren and Joe were her career — her work, her life.” When disaster touches her family, Liz is completely unprepared.

The incident smashes the Mackay family’s smooth surface like a meteorite landing in a pond. Liz blames herself. “I know, it sounds crazy,” she tells her husband, “but the point is: if it was your fault, then you weren’t powerless — you weren’t at the mercy of stuff just happening.” He replies, “You’re always going to be at the mercy of stuff just happening, no matter what.” Can the Mackays regain the illusion of serenity that had been their terra firma? Will Liz and Brody’s marriage survive this blow? And what will become of Sarabeth, who has leaned on Liz for three decades?

More here.

From Scientific American:

Two-thirds of the world’s current polar bear population could be gone by midcentury if predictions of melting sea ice hold true, the U.S. Geological Survey reported on Friday. The fate of polar bears might be even more imperiled than that estimate, because sea ice in the Arctic might be vanishing faster than the available computer models predict, the geological survey said in a report aimed at determining whether the arctic bear should be classified as a threatened species.

More here.

David Oshinsky in the New York Times Book Review:

For almost a century, Knopf has been the gold standard in the book trade, publishing the works of 17 Nobel Prize-winning authors as well as 47 Pulitzer Prize-winning volumes of fiction, nonfiction, biography and history. Recently, however, scholars trolling through the Knopf archive have been struck by the number of reader’s reports that badly missed the mark, especially where new talent was concerned. The rejection files, which run from the 1940s through the 1970s, include dismissive verdicts on the likes of Jorge Luis Borges (“utterly untranslatable”), Isaac Bashevis Singer (“It’s Poland and the rich Jews again”), Anaïs Nin (“There is no commercial advantage in acquiring her, and, in my opinion, no artistic”), Sylvia Plath (“There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice”) and Jack Kerouac (“His frenetic and scrambling prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don’t think so”). In a two-year stretch beginning in 1955, Knopf turned down manuscripts by Jean-Paul Sartre, Mordecai Richler, and the historians A. J. P. Taylor and Barbara Tuchman, not to mention Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” (too racy) and James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” (“hopelessly bad”).

More here.

Richard Dawkins reviews Christopher Hitchens’ book, in the Times of London:

There is much fluttering in the dovecots of the deluded, and Christopher Hitchens is one of those responsible. Another is the philosopher A. C. Grayling. I recently shared a platform with both. We were to debate against a trio of, as it turned out, rather half-hearted religious apologists (“Of course I don’t believe in a God with a long white beard, but . . .”). I hadn’t met Hitchens before, but I got an idea of what to expect when Grayling emailed me to discuss tactics. After proposing a couple of lines for himself and me, he concluded, “. . . and Hitch will spray AK47 ammo at the enemy in characteristic style”.

Grayling’s engaging caricature misses Hitchens’s ability to temper his pugnacity with old-fashioned courtesy. And “spray” suggests a scattershot fusillade, which underestimates the deadly accuracy of his marksmanship. If you are a religious apologist invited to debate with Christopher Hitchens, decline. His witty repartee, his ready-access store of historical quotations, his bookish eloquence, his effortless flow of well-formed words, beautifully spoken in that formidable Richard Burton voice (the whole performance not dulled by other equally formidable Richard Burton habits), would threaten your arguments even if you had good ones to deploy. A string of reverends and “theologians” ruefully discovered this during Hitchens’s barnstorming book tour around the United States.

With characteristic effrontery, he took his tour through the Bible Belt states – the reptilian brain of southern and middle America, rather than the easier pickings of the country’s cerebral cortex to the north and down the coasts. The plaudits he received were all the more gratifying. Something is stirring in that great country.

More here.

Richard Dawkins in the Times of London:

The hardback God Delusion was hailed as the surprise bestseller of 2006. While it was warmly received by most of the 1,000-plus individuals who volunteered personal reviews to Amazon, paid print reviewers gave less uniform approval. Cynics might invoke unimaginative literary editors: it has “God” in the title, so send it to a known faith-head. That would be too cynical, however. Several critics began with the ominous phrase, “I’m an atheist, BUT . . .” So here is my brief rebuttal to criticisms originating from this “belief in belief” school.

I’m an atheist, but I wish to dissociate myself from your shrill, strident, intemperate, intolerant, ranting language.

Objectively judged, the language of The God Delusion is less shrill than we regularly hear from political commentators or from theatre, art, book or restaurant critics. The illusion of intemperance flows from the unspoken convention that faith is uniquely privileged: off limits to attack. In a criticism of religion, even clarity ceases to be a virtue and begins to sound like aggressive hostility.

A politician may attack an opponent scathingly across the floor of the House and earn plaudits for his robust pugnacity. But let a soberly reasoning critic of religion employ what would, in other contexts, sound merely direct or forthright, and it will be described as a shrill rant. My nearest approach to stridency was my account of God as “the most unpleasant character in all fiction”. I don’t know how well I succeeded, but my intention was closer to humorous broadside than shrill polemic. Restaurant critics are notoriously scathing, but are seldom dismissed as shrill or intolerant. A restaurant might seem a trivial target compared to God. But restaurateurs and chefs have feelings to hurt and livelihoods to lose, whereas “blasphemy is a victimless crime”.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Michael Pollan’s bestseller, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has gotten people all riled up about farmers again. The last time this happened was when the first Farm Aid concerts reminded America that we have strong feelings about the family farm and its economic viability. The new round of farmer feelings is more directly related to issues of trade and the impact of globalization. As Pollan writes:

“I’m thinking of the sense of security that comes from knowing your community, or country, can feed itself; the beauty of an agricultural landscape; the outlook and kinds of local knowledge the presence of farmers brings to a community; the satisfactions of buying food from a farmer you know rather than the supermarket; the locally inflected flavor of a raw-milk cheese or honey. All those things—all those pastoral values—free trade proposes to sacrifice in the name of efficiency and economic growth.”

My general feeling about farmers is that they can go fuck themselves. Perhaps this is strong. But farmers also come on strong in their own sort of farmer way. They take a homespun approach but they often wrap themselves up in a hell of a lot of self-righteousness. It all has to do with the land, I suppose, the importance and simplicity of the land. Americans love the simple even if we’ve been destroying it for generations. A few pithy sayings and we’re eating out of their hands. The farmers.

More here.

John Allen Paulos in his Who’s Counting column at ABC News:

School begins again, and we read more about the intrusion of pseudoscience into school science curricula in this country, particularly into the study of biology and evolution.

The motive, despite the claims of proponents of intelligent design and other bogus “disciplines,” has been religious. Although some of the creation scientists’ arguments presented have a probabilistic flavor, the mathematics curriculum has seemed somewhat resistant to this trend. Recently a number of readers have sent me course descriptions from various schools that suggest otherwise, however.

The issue is complicated (perhaps too complicated for a column), but I’ll also briefly discuss the relevance of evolution to a more defensible, but still flawed argument relating religion and mathematics.

Consider first a Baptist school in Texas whose description of a geometry course begins:

Students will examine the nature of God as they progress in their understanding of mathematics. Students will understand the absolute consistency of mathematical principles and know that God was the inventor of that consistency. They will see God’s nature revealed in the order and precision they review foundational concepts while being able to demonstrate geometric thinking and spatial reasoning. The study of the basics of geometry through making and testing conjectures regarding mathematical and real-world patterns will allow the students to understand the absolute consistency of God as seen in the geometric principles he created.

I wonder if the school teaches that non-Euclidean geometry is the work of the devil or at least of non-Christians.

More here.

Via the NYT’s blog Paper Cuts, the short list:

The judges of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2007 have announced this year’s six shortlisted novels.

The six titles shortlisted are:

* Darkmans by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate)

* The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)

* The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)

* Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)

* On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)

* Animal’s People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)

The shortlist of six was announced today at a press conference at Man Group plc in London.