From The New York Times:

It is hard to believe today that there was a time when securing Pelican Island, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon were controversial decisions denounced as a federal land grab inimical to states’ rights and economic growth. Of course every generation has its own idea of progress, beauty and necessity. What made Theodore Roosevelt a conservationist hero was his conviction that pelicans, 2,000-year-old redwood trees and ancient rock formations belonged to future generations of Americans as well as to the past. Weighed against eternity, what were the arguments of mining magnates, plume hunters, local businesses and assorted congressmen? From the time he became president, in 1901, until he left office 100 years ago, Roosevelt saved over 234 million acres of wild America.

How a city-born child of privilege became one of the greatest forces in American conservation is the subject of Douglas Brinkley’s vast, inspiring and enormously entertaining book, “The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America.” The subtitle is telling — the crusade for America, not “wild America” — because for Roosevelt, living forests and petrified forests, bird preserves and buffalo ranges were essential for the country’s survival as a moral and military power.

More here.

Carl Zimmer at Yale: Environment 360:

In 1997, Arthur Weis found himself with an extra bucket of seeds. Weis, who was teaching at the University of California at Irvine at the time, had dispatched a student, Sheina Sim, to gather some field mustard seeds for a study. When Sim was done with her research, Weis was left with a lot of leftover seeds. For no particular reason, he decided not to throw the bucket out. “We just tossed it in a cold, dry incubator,” said Weis.

Weis is glad they did. When a severe drought struck southern California, Weis realized that he could use the extra bucket of seeds for an experiment. In 2004 he and his colleagues collected more field mustard seeds from the same sites that Sim had visited seven years earlier. They thawed out some of the 1997 seeds and then reared both sets of plants under identical conditions. The newer plants grew to smaller sizes, produced fewer flowers, and, most dramatically, produced those flowers eight days earlier in the spring. The changing climate had, in other words, driven the field mustard plants to evolve over just a few years. “It was serendipity that we had the seeds lying around,” says Weis.

Weis is convinced that his experiment is just a harbinger of things to come. Global warming is projected to drastically raise the average global temperature, as well as producing many other changes to the world’s climate, such as more droughts in California. And in response, Weis and other researchers contend, life will undergo an evolutionary explosion.

“Darwin thought evolution was gradual, and that it would take longer than the lifetime of a scientist to observe even the slightest change,” says Weis, who is now at the University of Toronto. “That might be the average case, but evolution can also be very rapid under the right conditions. Climate change is going to be one of those things where the conditions are met.”

Over at Snag Films:

Second Skin takes an intimate look at three sets of computer gamers whose lives have been transformed by online virtual worlds. An emerging genre of computer software called Massively Multiplayer Online games, or MMOs, allows millions of users to interact simultaneously in virtual spaces. Of the 50 million players worldwide, 50 percent consider themselves addicted. From individuals struggling with addiction to couples who have fallen in love without meeting; from disabled players whose lives have been given new purpose to gold farmers, entrepreneurs and widows, Second Skin opens viewers’ eyes to a phenomenon that may permanently change the way human beings interact.

Jeremy Scahill in The Nation:

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince's companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.”

In their testimony, both men also allege that Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq. One of the men alleges that Prince turned a profit by transporting “illegal” or “unlawful” weapons into the country on Prince's private planes. They also charge that Prince and other Blackwater executives destroyed incriminating videos, emails and other documents and have intentionally deceived the US State Department and other federal agencies. The identities of the two individuals were sealed out of concerns for their safety.

These allegations, and a series of other charges, are contained in sworn affidavits, given under penalty of perjury, filed late at night on August 3 in the Eastern District of Virginia as part of a seventy-page motion by lawyers for Iraqi civilians suing Blackwater for alleged war crimes and other misconduct.

More here. [Thanks to Maniza Naqvi. Photo shows Erik Prince.]

Ethan Remmel in American Scientist:

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a baby, or how a young child’s perceptions and introspections might differ from those of an adult? Reading Alison Gopnik’s new book, The Philosophical Baby, is probably the closest you will ever come to knowing.

Gopnik is a leading developmental psychologist, an expert on philosophy of mind and an excellent writer. What distinguishes this book from others on children’s cognition is the author’s emphasis on philosophical issues such as consciousness, identity and morality. She argues that the psychological study of children provides a rich source of insight into these issues, one that philosophers have traditionally overlooked.

Within developmental psychology, Gopnik is perhaps best known for promoting (with Henry Wellman, Andrew Meltzoff and others) the “theory theory”—the idea that children construct implicit causal models of the world (theories) using the same psychological mechanisms that scientists use to construct explicit scientific theories. In other words, children are like little scientists—or, as Gopnik prefers to put it, scientists are like big children. The focus in this book is broader. Gopnik argues that although young children’s thinking may seem illogical and their play functionless, their imagination and exploration actually reflect the operation of the same powerful causal learning mechanisms that enable our uniquely human achievements in areas such as science or art.

More here.

Steven Johnson in Time:

Earlier this year I attended a daylong conference in Manhattan devoted to education reform. Called Hacking Education, it was a small, private affair: 40-odd educators, entrepreneurs, scholars, philanthropists and venture capitalists, all engaged in a sprawling six-hour conversation about the future of schools. Twenty years ago, the ideas exchanged in that conversation would have been confined to the minds of the participants. Ten years ago, a transcript might have been published weeks or months later on the Web. Five years ago, a handful of participants might have blogged about their experiences after the fact. (See the top 10 celebrity Twitter feeds.)

But this event was happening in 2009, so trailing behind the real-time, real-world conversation was an equally real-time conversation on Twitter. At the outset of the conference, our hosts announced that anyone who wanted to post live commentary about the event via Twitter should include the word #hackedu in his 140 characters. In the room, a large display screen showed a running feed of tweets. Then we all started talking, and as we did, a shadow conversation unfolded on the screen: summaries of someone's argument, the occasional joke, suggested links for further reading. At one point, a brief argument flared up between two participants in the room — a tense back-and-forth that transpired silently on the screen as the rest of us conversed in friendly tones.

More here.

Jenny Diski in the London Review of Books:

In 2001, Armin Meiwes, a computer technician from Rotenburg in Germany, advertised on the Cannibal Café website for someone to have dinner with. He received numerous replies, but some withdrew when he responded and he considered others not serious enough. Eventually he invited Bernd Brandes for dinner. The plan was that Armin and Bernd would dine on Bernd’s severed penis, to be bitten off at the table for the occasion (this failed and it had to be cut off). Bernd found it too chewy, he said, so Armin put it in a sauté pan, but charred it and fed it to the dog. Later, Armin put Bernd in the bath (to marinate?), gave him alcohol and pills, read a science fiction book for three hours and then stabbed his dinner guest in the throat, hung him upside down on a meat hook in the ceiling, as any good butcher would, and sliced him into manageable portions. The world was agog at the news of the German cannibal and his two trials, at the first of which he was found guilty of manslaughter (no law against cannibalism in Germany, and his ‘victim’ had consented, volunteered actually, to being killed and eaten) and sentenced to eight years. He was retried on appeal for first-degree murder on the grounds that Bernd might not have been in a position to consent once his penis had been severed and the blood loss taken its intellectual toll. Armin Meiwes was given life. So far so goggable, but then Meiwes gave a TV interview and explained, ‘I sautéed the steak of Bernd, with salt, pepper, garlic and nutmeg. I had it with Princess croquettes, Brussels sprouts and a green pepper sauce,’ and you begin to see, as the suburban lace curtain drifts into place, that the reality of cannibalism could be far less interesting than the idea of it. I think it’s the Princess croquettes in particular that cause the disappointment.

More here.

Human Beings

look at your hands
your beautiful useful hands
you’re not an ape
you’re not a parrot
you’re not a slow loris
or a smart missile
you’re human

not british
not american
not israeli
not palestinian
you’re human

not catholic
not protestant
not muslim
not hindu
you’re human

we all start human
we end up human
human first
human last
we’re human
or we’re nothing

nothing but bombs
and poison gas
nothing but guns
and torturers
nothing but slaves
of Greed and War
if we’re not human

look at your body
with its amazing systems
of nerve-wires and blood canals
think about your mind
which can think about itself
and the whole universe
look at your face
which can freeze into horror
or melt into love
look at all that life
all that beauty
you’re human
they are human
we are human
let’s try to be human

dance!

by Adrian Mitchell

from The Shadow Knows; Bloodaxe Books,
Tarset, 2004

Emanuel Derman in Edge:

Money is human happiness in the abstract, wrote Schopenhauer grimly in the early 19th Century. He then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money.

But what is happiness? In The Ethics, written in 1677, Spinoza ambitiously tried to do for the emotions what Euclid did for geometry. Euclid began with “primitives”, his raw material, the elements that everyone understands. In geometry, these were points and lines. He then added axioms, self-evident logical principles that no one would argue with, stating for example that “If equals are added to equals, then the wholes are equal”. Finally, he proceeded to theorems, interesting deductions he could prove from the primitives and the axioms. One of them is Pythagoras’ theorem that relates triangles to squares: the sum of the squares of the sides of right-angled triangle are equal to the square of the hypotenuse.

Spinoza approached human emotions the way Euclid approached triangles and squares, aiming to understand their inter-relations by means of principles, logic and deduction. Spinoza’s primitives were pain, pleasure and desire. Everyone who inhabits a human body recognizes these feelings. Just as financial stock options are derivatives that depend on the underlying stock price, so more complex emotions depend on these three primitives pain, pleasure and desire. Love or hate, then, is pleasure or pain associated with an external object. Hope is the expectation of future pleasure tinged with doubt. Joy is simply the pleasure we experience when that doubtful expectation materializes. Envy is pain at another’s pleasure. Cruelty is a hybrid of all three primitives: it is the desire to inflict pain on someone we love. And so on to all the other emotions …

Figure 1 is a simple diagram I constructed to illustrate Spinoza’s scheme. For Spinoza, good is everything that brings pleasure, and Evil is everything that brings pain. And happiness is good.

More here.

From Science:

Aesop's ancient fable The Crow and the Pitcher tells the story of a thirsty bird who cleverly drops stones into a pitcher of water, raising the liquid's level to quench his thirst. Now, scientists have shown that rooks (Corvus frugilegus), birds from the crow family, can perform a very similar task. The finding suggests that facts may underlie the legend and indicates that corvids, like great apes, have a general understanding of physical rules.

“I had always wanted to see if there was a way to test what the crow did in Aesop's fable,” explains Nathan Emery, a comparative psychologist at Queen Mary, University of London. But he and his graduate student, Christopher Bird of the University of Cambridge, realized they couldn't “ethically deprive a bird of water.” So they devised an experiment that would approximate the challenge facing Aesop's crow. In previous experiments, the two had shown that the rooks, which are not known for using tools in the wild, would nevertheless pick up stones and drop them into a tube in order to make a treat roll out. In the new experiments, Emery and Bird gave each of four rooks (two mated pairs) a clear plastic tube; the tube contained the larvae of a wax moth–the birds' favorite food–floating near the bottom, just beyond the reach of the rooks' beaks.

More here.

Speaking of 3QD people, Morgan Meis over at the Smart Set on Kolakowski:

Leszek Kolakowski died a couple of weeks ago. He was a philosopher, a man of letters, historian of ideas. He lived the 20th-century life. It sucked. But like many a Pole, he made the best of a bad situation. The opening lines of the Polish National Anthem are, after all, “Poland has not perished yet.” Poles know that everything will turn out for the worst. It always does.

Kolakowski grew up during the Nazi occupation of Poland and came of age when the Nazis were exchanged for the Soviets. Liberation, in Poland, is the name for a short period of chaos between oppressors. Kolakowski did his best to think with the times. He started out a Marxist — not a ridiculous position for a young anti-fascist to take in those days. It was not, however, a position that any self-respecting Eastern European could hold past the mid-’50s. Kolakowski had some self-respect.

That's where it gets interesting. Never an either/or sort of fellow, Kolakowski opted for nuance. There were things about the socialist mindset that he liked. He also considered himself fundamentally conservative. It's a tricky position, a perfect place from which to be misunderstood by everyone, on every side. For better or worse, Kolakowski was too smart to care.

A. D. James reviews former 3QD writer Affinity Konar's novel The Illustrated Version of Things in T. Sky Reviews and Interviews:

Affinity Konar’s debut novel opens with a mentally-unbalanced young woman being released from an institution because she has just turned eighteen. She moves back in with her aged grandparents and, desperate for a normal life, quickly sets about reassembling her scattered family, starting with her half-brother and her father. She then undertakes a lengthy search for her runaway mother, although her attention soon enough wavers, causing the tenuous quest narrative to drift in and out. (The middlemost chapters more or less drop the plot and read instead like a string of short stories, although this is hardly a complaint: they’re good short stories.)

The overall missing-family arc, however, is of secondary importance. What really drives Konar’s novel is unrelenting wordplay: her restless narrator just can’t leave language alone. Her descriptions and expositions collage diverse types of illogic and jokey rhetoric: surrealistic word salad, parataxis, nonsense poetry, absurdist reductions, malapropisms, metonymy, twee riddles, cartoonish depictions of appalling behavior—and, occasionally, pitch-perfect imitations of Groucho Marx: “The magazine leads me to a neighborhood where people glare over their rosebushes for recreation.”

Compounding the narrator’s own verbal evasiveness is the fact the characters around her speak only in obstructions, constantly arguing and stonewalling by means of one-ups and puns.

G. A. Cohen, perhaps best known for Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defense and If You're An Egalitarian, How Come Your'e So Rich?, died yesterday. I remember being annoyed by KMTH when I first read, but the book kept on entering into my thinking, eventually shaping many of the mental habits. He was certainly on of the clearer political thinkers of the era, whether you agreed with him or not. The blog Political Theory — Habermas and Rawls has links to podcasts from the January 2009 conference “Rescuing Justice and Equality: Celebrating the Career of G.A. Cohen.” Also over at Philosophy Bites, an interview with Cohen on The Inequality of Wealth:

In a letter written to a friend in 1917 Ludwig Wittgenstein reported: ‘I work quite diligently and wish that I were better and smarter. And these both are one and the same.’ The notion that being a smarter human being and a better person are in the end the same thing is one that Amartya Sen, a Nobel prize-winning economist who has made fundamental advances in welfare economics and the theory of social choice, finds appealing. Citing Wittgenstein’s assertion at the start of the first chapter of The Idea of Justice and referring to it at several points in the book, Sen suggests that reason can do more than help people to achieve their goals. It can also enable them to criticise their goals, and in this way make them better people. In Sen’s view, a smarter world is sure to be a better world. Unlike some rationalists in the past, however, he does not think we need a conception of an ideal world in order to improve the one we live in. One of the recurring themes of The Idea of Justice is to contest the assumption that a theory of ideal justice is either necessary or desirable. Much of the book is a critique of the work of the late twentieth-century American liberal philosopher John Rawls. While Rawls’s work has shaped academic discussion for over thirty years, it has had a negligible impact on political practice, and one of the reasons may be that his theory leaves so little room for politics. For Rawls, justice is a unique set of principles that reasonable people would choose from an imaginary initial position that ensures impartiality. Once these principles have been chosen all that remains is to set the right institutions in place. Conflicts about the scope of basic liberties and the distribution of resources will then be settled by applying the theory, which is a legal rather than political process.

more from John Gray at Literary Review here.

Australian Aboriginal painting — complex and dazzling patterns of dots, lines and abstract geometrical shapes — are multilayered cultural artifacts whose symbolic visual vocabulary derives from ceremonial sand painting and body decoration, and can be found in petroglyphs that predate Western written language. They act simultaneously on multiple levels: as aerial landscape maps of traditional tribal domains, detailing the precise locations of food, water and other scarce resources necessary for nomadic desert survival; as recountings of mythological Creation stories of the Altjeringa or Dreamtime, when totemic ancestor spirits crisscrossed the world, laying out the structure that makes life possible and gives it meaning; as depictions of ceremonial rituals by which the Dreamtime — which exists as a sort of parallel realm of timeless continual creation underlying phenomenal reality — may be accessed; as operative manifestations of these rituals — i.e., portals to another dimension; and as objects of exquisite beauty. According to their creators, the paintings have further layers still, esoteric spiritual import that is discernible only to the initiated. In fact, for this reason, much of the work in the front gallery of Icons of the Desert — the exhibit focusing on the first couple of years’ worth of work from the Papunya collective — can’t be exhibited in Australia, and is represented in the catalog by blank gray rectangles (though a U.S.-only supplement includes the missing images).

more from Doug Harvey at the LA Weekly here.

One of the epigraphs that punctuate Invented Knowledge is from Pascal: “It is natural for the mind to believe and for the will to love; so that, for want of true objects, they must attach themselves to false”. Whether it is natural or not, it would seem that the false – the extravagant, the fantastical, the grandiose – can at times be so seductive that we suspend our critical faculties in its consideration. Ronald Fritze, a historian and dean at Athens State University in Alabama, is concerned about, and clearly fascinated by, the pseudo-histories and pseudo-sciences – the stories of Atlantis, pre-Ice Age civilizations, the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and cosmic catastrophes – which, as he argues, developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and are still with us. “The delivery system for pseudohistorians and pseudoscientists of all stripes”, Fritze writes, “now encompasses a charlatan’s playground of film, television, radio, magazines, and the net.” Fritze, a committed positivist, finds them at times dangerous and always a threat to the standards of “objective” history. Recognizing how “tricky” it is to define pseudo-history, Fritze suggests we begin by asking, What is history? – “a vexed question for people living in a postmodernist age”. But apparently not for Fritze. “A simple and elegant definition for history is a true story about the human past”, he tells us, ignoring the epistemological anguish that has troubled historians from well before the arrival of the postmodernists. So, pseudo-history can easily be defined as an untrue story about the past.

more from Vincent Crapanzano at the TLS here.

Remark

We had been a long time busy
a little sad maybe,
preoccupied,
then I said something dry
perhaps you’d call it

and you laughed
in a way
that made me
stop and stare.

Sudden, rich and startling
it turned my head
and such a flood of happiness was there

that here was something I could do.
Something I’d forgotten I could do.

Here, take it from me,
breathe on it
till it shines
and on a darker day
we might see the world more kindly
through it it might light the way.

by Maura Dooley

from Life Under Water; Bloodax, Tarset, 2008

James D. Watson in The New York Times:

The idea that cancer cells may be united in having a common set of molecules not found in most other cells of our bodies was first proposed by the great German biochemist Otto Warburg. In 1924, he observed that all cancer cells, irrespective of whether they were growing in the presence or absence of oxygen, produce large amounts of lactic acid. Yet it wasn’t until a year ago that the meaning of Warburg’s discovery was revealed: The metabolism of cancer cells, and indeed of all proliferating cells, is largely directed toward the synthesis of cellular building blocks from the breakdown products of glucose. To make this glucose breakdown run even faster in growing cells than in differentiated cells (that is, cells that have stopped growing and taken on their specialized functions in the body), the growth-promoting signal molecules turn up the levels of the “transporter” proteins that move glucose molecules into cells.

This discovery indicates that we need bold new efforts to see if drugs that specifically inhibit the key enzymes involved in this glucose breakdown have anti-cancer activity. In the late 1940s, when I was working toward my doctorate, the top dogs of biology were its biochemists, who were trying to discover how the intermediary molecules of metabolism were made and broken down.

More here. (Note: This posting is dedicated to our devoted reader Professor Winnfield J. Abbe who has been saying the same thing to the “Cancer Generals” for several years in multiple comments posted on this blog)

From The National Geographic:

The journey of young Charles Darwin aboard His Majesty's Ship Beagle, during the years 1831-36, is one of the best known and most neatly mythologized episodes in the history of science. As the legend goes, Darwin sailed as ship's naturalist on the Beagle, visited the Galápagos archipelago in the eastern Pacific Ocean, and there beheld giant tortoises and finches. The finches, many species of them, were distinguishable by differently shaped beaks, suggesting adaptations to particular diets. The tortoises, island by island, carried differently shaped shells.

These clues from the Galápagos led Darwin (immediately? long afterward? here the mythic story is vague) to conclude that Earth's living diversity has arisen by an organic process of descent with modification—evolution, as it's now known—and that natural selection is the mechanism. He wrote a book called The Origin of Species and persuaded everyone, except the Anglican Church establishment, that it was so.

Well, yes and no.

More here.