Malawi cichlids – how aggressive males create diversity

Ed Yong in Not Exactly Rocket Science:

ScreenHunter_02 Oct. 22 10.52 Certain groups of animals show a remarkable capacity for quickly evolving into new species to seize control of unexploited niches in the environment. And among these ecological opportunists, there are few better examples than the cichlids, a group of freshwater fishes that are one of the most varied group of back-boned animals on the planet.

In the words of Edward O. Wilson, the entire lineage seems “poised to expand.” The Great Lakes of Africa – Tanganyika, Malawi and Victoria – swarm with a multitude of different species; Lake Malawi alone houses over 500 that live nowhere else in the world. All of these forms arose from a common ancestor in a remarkably short span of time. Now, a new study suggests that this explosive burst of diversity has been partly fuelled by rivalry between hostile males.

Michael Pauers of the Medical College of Wisconsin found that male cichlids have no time for other males that look like them. They will bite, butt and threaten those who bear the same colour scheme. In doing so, they encourage diversity in the lake since mutant males with different tints are less likely to be set upon by territorial defenders.

This process is just part of the cichlids’ tale. Their rise to dominance in the African lakes probably happened in several stages and were driven by different evolutionary forces.

More here.

The Readers Behind Bars Put Books to Many Uses

Dwight Garner in the New York Times:

JUMPBOOK-popup Avi Steinberg’s memoir, “Running the Books,” about his job as a prison librarian at “the Bay” — the Suffolk County House of Correction in South Bay near Boston — gets off to an obnoxious start.

Mr. Steinberg is a self-described “asthmatic Jewish kid,” a young Harvard graduate and a stalled novelist. He applied for the prison library job when he saw it posted on Craigslist. He needed the health insurance. Probably he needed a book idea too.

The early bits of “Running the Books” are as hopped-up as a spaniel with a new rubber ball. The tone is, more or less, “Augusten Burroughs Goes to the Clink.” Here’s a not atypical passage: “It was official. I was now on the side of angels. The Po-Po. The Fuzz. The Heat. The Big Blue Machine.”

But a funny thing happens to “Running the Books” as it inches forward. Mr. Steinberg’s sentences start to pop out at you, at first because they’re funny and then because they’re acidly funny. The book slows down. It blossoms. Mr. Steinberg proves to be a keen observer, and a morally serious one. His memoir is wriggling and alive — as involving, and as layered, as a good coming-of-age novel.

More here.

Big Ideas from Small Countries

Ve798c_thumb3 Jeffrey Frankel in Project Syndicate:

[W]here should countries look now, in 2010, for models of economic success to emulate?

Perhaps they should look to the periphery of the world economy. Many small countries there have experimented with policies and institutions that could usefully be adopted by others.

Costa Rica in Central America and Mauritius in Africa each pulled ahead of its regional peers some time ago. Among many other decisions that have worked out well for them, both countries have foregone a standing army. The results in both cases have been a political history devoid of coups, and financial savings that can be used for education, investment, and other good things.

A panoply of innovations has helped Chile to outperform its South American neighbors. Chile’s fiscal institutions insure a countercyclical budget. Many governments increase spending excessively in booms, and then are forced to cut back in downturns, thereby exacerbating the cyclical swings.

There are two key elements to Chile’s fiscal institutions:

● A structural budget balance rule allows deficits only to the extent that the current price of copper is below its 10-year equilibrium or output is below its long-term trend.

● Two panels of technical experts are the ones to judge trends in copper prices and output, respectively, insulated from the political processes that can otherwise succumb to wishful thinking.

These institutions are particularly worthy of imitation by other commodity-exporting countries, in order to defeat the so-called “natural-resource curse.” Even advanced countries such as the US and UK could learn something from Chile, given that in the last expansion they evidently forgot how to run countercyclical fiscal policy.

Singapore achieved rich-country status with a unique development strategy. Among its many innovations were a paternalistic approach to saving and use of the price mechanism to defeat urban traffic congestion (an approach later adopted by London).

Mr. Grumpy Goes Back to Africa

Vs naipaul - gettyEmily Witt in The New York Observer:

Pick up the collected essays of any member of what we might imagine as a dream team of postcolonial literature and it will include an annoyed complaint about V. S. Naipaul. Salman Rushdie, Edward Said, Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott—each has publicly registered his disgust with the Nobel Prize winner from Trinidad. Mr. Naipaul's novels are one source of dismay, but what enrages everyone is his travel writing. At issue is Mr. Naipaul's callous treatment of respective homelands or religions, his use of minor samples to draw broad and negative conclusions, his unfairness, prejudice and blind pessimism. But also, really, it's that even though his work is exasperating, ill-informed and usually kind of offensive, people still think he's great.

Consider the bulk of Mr. Naipaul's travel oeuvre. It's pretty repetitive. He goes to some non-European place—India, Congo and Iran are some previous destinations—and, in a style that Mr. Rushdie called “a novelist's truth masquerading as objective reality,” Mr. Naipaul complains. He complains about the natives' disrespect for hygiene, regular garbage collection and the tenets of the Enlightenment. He subjects his readers to the country's abhorrent lack of concern for his own personal comfort, dietary preferences and taste in architecture. If the destination had also been a former colony, Mr. Naipaul depicts the colonial era as the only respite such countries have had from the chaos and tyranny of their own people. Then he gives the book a vaguely imperial title: An Area of Darkness, or India: A Wounded Civilization, or, his latest effort, The Masque of Africa.

The Masque of Africa is ostensibly about how traditional African religions have co-existed with Islam and Christianity. Mr. Naipaul sees the latter two as external influences and, one gathers, somehow inauthentic. He calls the Christian-Muslim-traditional medley “African belief,” and he travels to Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Gabon and South Africa to document its manifestations and—cultural determinist to the end—figure out how it continues to affect the quality of African life.

His haphazard methods, though, are not up to the task.

Military-Publishing Complex

51tnpEO+EYL._SL500_AA300_ Nick Turse in The American Conservative:

Quick — name the five most important, influential, and best known books on the Afghan War. Okay, name three. Okay, I’ll settle for two. How about one?

While the American war in Vietnam raged, publishers churned out books whose titles still resonate. In 1967 alone, classics like Mary McCarthy’s Vietnam, Howard Zinn’s Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, Thich Nhat Hanh’s Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire, not to mention Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam: A Novel all hit the shelves.

In fact, between 1962 and 1970, as American involvement in the conflict accelerated and peaked, some 9,430 books were written about the Vietnam War. From 2002 to 2010, less than half as many — 4,221 texts of all types — have been written about the Afghan War.

Of course, it didn’t help that, from 2003-2008, the Iraq War sucked up all the attention and left Afghanistan largely “forgotten,” analytically and otherwise, nor did it help that the Afghan War never had a significant antiwar movement. The vibrant, large-scale movement of the Vietnam years, filled with people eager to learn more about just what they were protesting, proved an engine that drove publishers. Significant numbers of books produced by and for members of that movement investigated aspects of the civilian suffering the American war brought to Indochina. Not surprisingly, the Afghan War has produced many fewer works on the conflict’s human fallout, and books like Zinn’s, calling for withdrawal, have been few and far between.

Four decades ago, a stream of books was being produced for popular audiences that exposed the nature of war-making and focused readers’ attention on the misery caused by U.S. military actions abroad. Today, a startling percentage of the authors who bother to focus on the current conflict are producing works dedicated to waging the seemingly endless American war in Afghanistan better.

E-Mail Auto-Response

Martin Marks in The New Yorker:

Dear Friend, Family Member, Loved One, and/or Business Associate:

101025_r20147_p233 Thank you for your e-mail, which, if it is under three (3) sentences long, I have read. Owing to the large volume of e-mails I’m receiving at this time, please note that it will sometimes take up to fourteen (14) calendar days, though sometimes longer (and sometimes much longer), to respond to your e-mail; in the interim, please rest assured that I am attempting to address, resolve, or think about the matter you have described, unless, of course, I’m avoiding the matter entirely. Some possible reasons for this include:

Thinking about the matter gives me a headache.

—Thinking about the matter takes longer than forty-five (45) seconds.

—Thinking about the matter is simple enough, and takes less than forty-five (45) seconds, but, when combined with all the other e-mails in my in-box, it creates a synergy of matterdom, exacerbating the headaches mentioned at the beginning of this list.

Please note that if your e-mail is more than three (3) sentences in length I have read the first three (3) sentences, skimmed the opening paragraph, and sort of eyeballed the rest of it. Please do not expect a response to your e-mail anytime soon, if at all, for I am not a mind reader, and therefore cannot guess the nature of anything beyond the first three (3) sentences. For those of you who continue to insist on sending e-mails longer than three (3) sentences, here is a Wikipedia entry on haiku. Reformat your e-mails accordingly, as in this example:

I am busy now;
The Internet has stolen
So much precious time.

More here.

bacteria have powers to engineer the environment, to communicate, and may even think

Valerie Brown in Miller-McCune:

Vibrio_fischeri A few scientists noticed in the late 1960s that the marine bacteria Vibrio fischeri appeared to coordinate among themselves the production of chemicals that produced bioluminescence, waiting until a certain number of them were in the neighborhood before firing up their light-making machinery. This behavior was eventually dubbed “quorum sensing.” It was one of the first in what has turned out to be a long list of ways in which bacteria talk to each other and to other organisms.

Some populations of V. fischeri put this skill to a remarkable use: They live in the light-sensing organs of the bobtail squid. This squid, a charming nocturnal denizen of shallow Hawaiian waters, relies on V. fischeri to calculate the light shining from above and emit exactly the same amount of light downward, masking the squid from being seen by predators swimming beneath them.

For their lighting services, V. fischeri get a protected environment rich in essential nutrients. Each dawn, the squid evict all their V. fischeri to prevent overpopulation. During the day, the bacteria recolonize the light-sensing organ and detect a fresh quorum, once again ready to camouflage the squid by night.

More here.

Postcard From Palestine

Christopher Hayes in The Nation:

ScreenHunter_01 Oct. 21 15.14 The first thing you notice when you drive into Hebron is the lack of cars. Since 1997 this second-largest Palestinian city in the West Bank, the only one with an Israeli settlement in its midst, has been formally divided. Within the Israeli section, which takes up much of the historic downtown, Palestinians are not allowed to drive, so they walk or use donkey carts. When people are ill or injured, they are carried to the hospital. It is not surprising, therefore, that many of the 30,000 Palestinians who once lived here have moved out. According to a 2007 report from Israeli human rights organizations, more than 1,000 Palestinian housing units in the area have been left vacant, and more than 75 percent of the businesses in the central district have closed. A handful of shops remain open; a cluster or two of children play in the street. But that's it. The streets are buried under the heaviness of an ominous quiet. Periodically, buses rumble past bringing settlers to and from the adjoining settlement, Kiryat Arba, and Israel proper. In the absence of routine urban noise, their engines sound like gunshots.

I went to Israel and the West Bank with a group of American journalists on a trip sponsored by the New America Foundation. We were led through the streets of Hebron by Mikhael Manekin, a former Israel Defense Forces soldier who patrolled the city during the second intifada. He now runs an organization called Breaking the Silence, which collects testimony about IDF human rights abuses from Israeli soldiers. I had heard of Hebron, of course, but it was lodged vaguely in my mind as one of those foreign places where awful things happen. To see it in person is to understand viscerally that the status quo in the West Bank cannot hold. To see it is to understand just what occupation requires.

More here.

Socrates – a man for our times

From The Guardian:

Soc Two thousand four hundred years ago, one man tried to discover the meaning of life. His search was so radical, charismatic and counterintuitive that he become famous throughout the Mediterranean. Men – particularly young men – flocked to hear him speak. Some were inspired to imitate his ascetic habits. They wore their hair long, their feet bare, their cloaks torn. He charmed a city; soldiers, prostitutes, merchants, aristocrats – all would come to listen. As Cicero eloquently put it, “He brought philosophy down from the skies.” For close on half a century this man was allowed to philosophise unhindered on the streets of his hometown. But then things started to turn ugly. His glittering city-state suffered horribly in foreign and civil wars. The economy crashed; year in, year out, men came home dead; the population starved; the political landscape was turned upside down. And suddenly the philosopher's bright ideas, his eternal questions, his eccentric ways, started to jar. And so, on a spring morning in 399BC, the first democratic court in the story of mankind summoned the 70-year-old philosopher to the dock on two charges: disrespecting the city's traditional gods and corrupting the young. The accused was found guilty. His punishment: state-sponsored suicide, courtesy of a measure of hemlock poison in his prison cell.

The man was Socrates, the philosopher from ancient Athens and arguably the true father of western thought. Not bad, given his humble origins. The son of a stonemason, born around 469BC, Socrates was famously odd. In a city that made a cult of physical beauty (an exquisite face was thought to reveal an inner nobility of spirit) the philosopher was disturbingly ugly. Socrates had a pot-belly, a weird walk, swivelling eyes and hairy hands. As he grew up in a suburb of Athens, the city seethed with creativity – he witnessed the Greek miracle at first-hand. But when poverty-striken Socrates (he taught in the streets for free) strode through the city's central marketplace, he would harrumph provocatively, “How many things I don't need!”

More here.

Revving up expression of a single gene in the brain reverses depression symptoms

From Nature:

Depress Gene therapy delivered to a specific part of the brain reverses symptoms of depression in a mouse model of the disease — potentially laying the groundwork for a new approach to treating severe cases of human depression in which drugs are ineffective. But the invasive nature of the treatment, and the notorious difficulty in translating neuropsychiatric research from animal models to humans, could complicate its path to the clinic. Many researchers believe that poor signalling of the neurotransmitter serotonin is responsible for causing depression, and common antidepressants act by increasing serotonin's concentration. Research published today in Science Translational Medicine1 uses a virus to deliver an extra dose of the gene p11 to the adult mouse brain. The protein expressed by the gene is thought to bind to serotonin receptor molecules and ferry them to the cell surface, positioning them to receive serotonin's signals from neighbouring cells.

“I think it awakens the possibility of gene therapy for neuropsychiatric diseases,” says Husseini Manji, a senior investigator at Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development in Titusville, New Jersey, who was not involved in the study. But, he adds, “thinking about delivering a gene to the brain poses all sorts of challenges”.

More here.

Thursday Poem

Bastille Day

The first time I saw Paris
I went to see where the Bastille
had been, and though
I saw the column there
I was too aware that
the Bastille was not there:
I did not know how
to see the emptiness.
People go to see
the missing Twin Towers
and seem to like feeling
the lack of something.
I do not like knowing
that my mother no longer
exists, or the feeling
of knowing. Excuse me
for comparing my mother
to large buildings. Also
for talking about absence.
The red and gray sky
above the rooftops
is darkening and the inhabitants
are hastening home for dinner.
I hope to see you later.

by Ron Padgett
from Jacket Magazine, April 2005

dissatisfied onto death

0162_gauguin3

The Italian conceptual artist Alighiero Boetti, as his onetime protégé Francesco Clemente recalled, “considered that there was a big difference between people who moved north towards power, order, and control, and people who moved south, away from them.” Boetti himself had moved from Turin, in Italy’s industrial north, down to Rome, and then, for a while, to Kabul, Afghanistan. But historically, this southward vector has rarely been the one chosen by artists, whose profession magnetically draws them toward courts and capitals, patrons and potentates. Paul Gauguin was one of the first to take the opposite route, and he remains the most emblematic and radical of those who’ve tried to flee the world’s metropolitan centers, submitting without resistance to what Charles Baudelaire had once diagnosed in his poem “Le Voyage” as the “Singulière fortune où le but se déplace, Et n’étant nulle part, peut être n’importe où,” or, to turn French verse into English prose, the “singular fate of having a goal that keeps shifting, and being nowhere, might be anywhere.” The story is well enough known: Gauguin, grandson of a pioneer of socialist feminism, Flora Tristan, was born in Paris in the revolutionary year of 1848; he spent part of his childhood in Peru (where his grandmother had roots) and part in France, before spending much of his young manhood at sea as a merchant marine and then a naval sailor. He liked to think of his Peruvian forebears as Indians. “As you can see,” he would later explain, “my life has always been very restless and uneven. In me, a great many mixtures. Coarse sailor. So be it. But there is also blue blood, or, to put it better, two kinds of blood, two races.”

more from Barry Schwabsky at The Nation here.

the grinning watch of the Muse of Impossibility

Amos-golem

One day in December 1919, the twenty-year-old Jorge Luis Borges, during a short stay in Seville, wrote a letter, in French, to his friend Maurice Abramowicz in Geneva, in which, almost in passing, he confessed to Abramowicz contradictory feelings about his literary vocation: “Sometimes I think that it’s idiotic to have the ambition of being a more or less mediocre maker of phrases. But that is my destiny.” As Borges was well aware even then, the history of literature is the history of this paradox. On the one hand, the deeply rooted intuition writers have that the world exists, in Mallarmé’s much-abused phrase, to result in a beautiful book (or, as Borges would have it, even a mediocre book), and, on the other hand, to know that the muse governing the enterprise is, as Mallarmé called her, the Muse of Impotence (or, to use a freer translation, the Muse of Impossibility). Mallarmé added later that all who have ever written anything, even those we call geniuses, have attempted this ultimate Book, the Book with a capital B. And all have failed.

more from Alberto Manguel at Threepenny Review here.

ONWARD CHRISTIAN NURSES

Ridley_10_10

At 7am on 12 October 1915 a slight, upright Englishwoman, neatly dressed in a coat and skirt and wearing a hat, was tied to a stake in a field outside Brussels, blindfolded, and shot by a German firing squad. The woman was Edith Cavell, a 49-year-old hospital matron in Brussels. She had been found guilty by a German court martial on a charge of treason. Cavell’s crime was to aid the escape of Allied soldiers who had become separated from their regiments and stranded in German-occupied Belgium. She helped hundreds of soldiers to cross the border to neutral Holland. Her execution was one of the iconic atrocities of the First World War. It was hugely damaging to the Germans. Diana Souhami’s concern in this compelling biography is to show how it was that Cavell, a devoted, dutiful nurse, became involved in such dangerous and duplicitous work, and why she died.

more from Jane Ridley at Literary Review here.

The Leopard

Review of Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa's novel by Ruchira Paul in Accidental Blogger:

08dilampedusa The Leopard, written by Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa was published a year after the author’s death in 1957. Based on the life of his great-grandfather, the benevolent Sicilian tyrant Don Fabrizio, the Prince of Salina, Lampedusa’s account is meticulous in attention, generous in admiration and tinged with half hearted regret for the loss of a certain way of life. I say half-hearted because it is not entirely clear whether the author, the penurious descendant of a once prosperous and proud feudal family, gently mocks his ancestor’s grandiose ways while harboring considerable affection for the man himself.

The title character, Don Fabrizio aka The Leopard (a nickname derived from the family’s coat of arms) is a fascinating character. Large and proud, possessing big appetites and enormous physical strength, the Prince was elegant, generous, occasionally unthinkingly cruel and often unexpectedly melancholy. He supported the brood of offspring he had spawned with his long suffering wife as well as a large retinue of servants and dependants. But he was not above casting a jaundiced eye on their minor shortcomings. His wife's hysterical sorrow exasperated him; his sons disappointed him; his daughters' emotional upheavals irritated him. Outwardly reverential toward the ever present Jesuit clergy (the Jesuit intially opposed the Italian revolution for unification that is the backdrop of the novel) he rarely missed an opportunity to mock the resident priest Father Pirrone for his piety and poor personal hygiene. In fact the only character in the novel toward whom The Prince was unfailingly affectionate and forgiving was his charming and ambitious nephew Tancredi Falconeri, a penniless aristocratic young man who fought on the side of Garibaldi’s Red Shirts who brought the battle for the Risorgimento to the Sicilian shores in 1860.

The novel, after its posthumous publication, became an instant sensation. It was embraced and assailed by both the left and the right of the Italian political divide. Many conservatives felt that Lampedusa had betrayed his own noble heritage by mocking the upper class while some on the left interpreted his views as a repudiation of the Italian unification.

More here.

To Choose Austerity is to Bet it All on the Confidence Fairy

Joseph_stiglitz_140x140 Joseph Stiglitz in The Guardian:

The Keynesian policies in the aftermath of the Lehman brothers bankruptcy were a triumph of economic theory. In Europe, the US and Asia, the stimulus packages worked. Those countries that had the largest (relative to the size of their economy) and best-designed packages did best. China, for instance, maintained growth at a rate in excess of 8%, despite a massive decline in exports. In the US the stimulus was both too small and poorly designed – 40% of it went on household tax cuts, which were known not to provide much bang for the buck – and yet unemployment was reduced from what it otherwise would have been – over 12% – to 10%.

The stimulus was always thought of as a stopgap measure until the private sector could recover. In some countries, such as the US, politics rather than economics drove the size and design, with the result that they were too small and less effective than they might have been. Still, they worked. Now, financial markets – the same shortsighted markets that created the crisis – are focusing on soaring deficits and debts.

We should be clear. Most of the increase is not due to the stimulus but to the downturns and the bank bailouts. Those in the financial market are egging on politicians to ask whether we can afford another stimulus. I argue that Britain, and the world, cannot afford not to have another stimulus. We cannot afford austerity. In a better world, we might rightfully debate the size of the public sector. Even now there should be a debate about how government spends its money. But today cutbacks in spending will weaken Britain, and even worsen its long-term fiscal position relative to well-designed government spending.

There is a shortage of aggregate demand – the demand for goods and services that generates jobs. Cutbacks in government spending will mean lower output and higher unemployment, unless something else fills the gap. Monetary policy won't. Short-term interest rates can't go any lower, and quantitative easing is not likely to substantially reduce the long-term interest rates government pays – and is even less likely to lead to substantial increases either in consumption or investment.

Anish Kapoor, Turning the World Upside Down

2010-09-28-14-30-06-4ca1fbeec674c-Press Page image DSC4140 Sue Hubbard in The New Statesman:

The camera obscura (Latin for a darkened room) is an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings onto a screen and was one of the inventions that led to photography. Consisting of a box or room with a hole in one side, light from an external scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside where it is reproduced, upside-down, but with colour and perspective preserved.

To come across Anish Kapoor's startlingly beautiful C-Curve sculpture in the middle of Kensington Gardens is to experience the effects of the camera obscura but without the darkened room. Walk towards the highly polished concave surface of stainless steel and the surrounding lawns, autumn trees and people will appear upside down like a child's vision of Australia, where everything is topsy-turvy. Move around to the bulging convex facade and the world will be the right way up again.

Clouds, dog-walkers, babies and bikers all pass across the silver screen in a filmic version of real life. The players in this pageant stroll on and off stage passing, only for a moment, like the shadows in Plato's cave. “Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more,” Macbeth despaired. What is real? What is a chimera? asks Kapoor in these mirroring multiplications and inversions of our surroundings, which pose questions about our very existence.

From the first encounter with these four stainless steel structures placed within Kensington Gardens, we are reminded that the world is rarely what it seems. As Alice discovered in the looking glass, reality is a slippery concept. The symbolism of the mirror is ancient; from Narcissus to Snow White, it is an image that has caught the human imagination.

Also see here

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