H/t Jyotsna Uppal:
Month: January 2012
Test Tube Yeast Evolve Multicellularity
Sarah Fecht in Scientific American:
“This is a significant paper that addresses one of the most fundamental questions in evolutionary and developmental biology,” says Rick Grosberg, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Davis, who was not involved with the research.
Since evolution acts on individual cells, it pays off for a cell to be selfish. By hogging resources and hindering neighbors, a cell can increase the odds that more of its own genes get passed into the next generation. This logic is one of the reasons it has been challenging to imagine how multicellularity arose; it requires the subjugation of self-interest in favor of the group’s survival.
More here.
Barbarism In Cultured Soil: Rushdie’s Great Pakistani Novel
Shehryar Fazli at The India Site:
But first, a word about my own copy of this novel. It’s a 1984 Picador edition, with the Urdu word for shame, ‘sharam’, written as if by hand with Tippex in Arabic script above the English title. I say ‘my’ copy, but it in fact belonged to my father, who bought it in the 1980s at a secondhand bookstore in Islamabad. What’s peculiar about this is that General Zia-ul-Haq’s military government had banned Shame in Pakistan, a decision that attracted more attention to the book than the dictatorship intended, and induced several Western capitals to ship copies to Islamabad through the diplomatic bag for their envoys to read. Once done, these people would sell their copies to one of the many used bookstores in the capital.
More here.
Award-winning teen-age science in action
Iran’s Bomb and Pakistan
Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Express Tribune:
On the other hand, an Israeli attack — whether aided or not by the US — would be truly terrible. The Middle East would become a permanent war zone. The third Gulf War would surely devastate Iran. But today it is in a position to inflict much greater damage on the US than were Iraq or Libya. The US would plunge into an economic crisis the likes of which it has not seen before. The last bits of its post-withdrawal strategy from Afghanistan would be shredded to pieces.
More here.
How Obama’s Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics
A president in the last year of his first term will always get attacked mercilessly by his partisan opponents, and also, often, by the feistier members of his base. And when unemployment is at remarkably high levels, and with the national debt setting records, the criticism will—and should be—even fiercer. But this time, with this president, something different has happened. It’s not that I don’t understand the critiques of Barack Obama from the enraged right and the demoralized left. It’s that I don’t even recognize their description of Obama’s first term in any way. The attacks from both the right and the left on the man and his policies aren’t out of bounds. They’re simply—empirically—wrong.
A caveat: I write this as an unabashed supporter of Obama from early 2007 on. I did so not as a liberal, but as a conservative-minded independent appalled by the Bush administration’s record of war, debt, spending, and torture. I did not expect, or want, a messiah. I have one already, thank you very much. And there have been many times when I have disagreed with decisions Obama has made—to drop the Bowles-Simpson debt commission, to ignore the war crimes of the recent past, and to launch a war in Libya without Congress’s sanction, to cite three. But given the enormity of what he inherited, and given what he explicitly promised, it remains simply a fact that Obama has delivered in a way that the unhinged right and purist left have yet to understand or absorb. Their short-term outbursts have missed Obama’s long game—and why his reelection remains, in my view, as essential for this country’s future as his original election in 2008.
Tuesday Poem
Justice
That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we black are wise:
Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes.
Langston Hughes
What if humans could be made twice as intelligent?
From MSNBC:
Haier believes greater intelligence, which he defines as the ability to learn faster and remember more, would be highly advantageous on an individual scale. “Experiencing the world with a higher IQ might be more interesting for most people. They might enjoy reading more, might have a greater depth of appreciation for certain things and more insight into life,” he told Life's Little Mysteries. Furthermore, IQs of 200 would allow us to pursue activities and careers that most interest us, not just those we're mentally capable of, Haier said. We could master new languages in a few weeks, for example, or become brain surgeons. Smarter humans would also be healthier and longer-living, the scientists said, because they'd have a better grasp of what behavior leads to these attributes.
More here.
Cracking Open the Scientific Process
From The New York Times:
More here.
Martin Luther King – I Have A Dream
This is not the first time you have heard this, but I defy you to listen to (or read, below) the whole thing and remain unmoved by it. This post is dedicated to my sister Azra and my niece Sheherzad. Now watch, or read, or do both:
And here is the text of the speech:
I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.
In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check — a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.
My Little Pony: Reality is Magic!
by Julia Galef
But you might be surprised to learn that My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic’s biggest accolades have come not from its target audience of little girls and their families, but from a fervent adult fanbase. I first heard of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic from one of my favorite sources of intelligent pop culture criticism, The Onion's AV Club, which gave the show an enthusiastic review last year. (I had my suspicions at first that the AV Club’s enthusiasm was meant to be ironic, but they insisted the show wore down their defenses and that it was “legitimately entertaining and lots of fun.” So either their appreciation of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is genuine, or irony has gotten way more poker-faced than I realized.)
And you might be even more taken aback to learn that many, if not most, of those adult My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fans are men and that they've even coined a name for themselves: “Bronies.” At least, I was taken aback. In fact, my curiosity was sufficiently piqued that I contacted Purple Tinker, the person in charge of organizing the bronies’ seasonal convention in New York City. Purple Tinker was friendly and helpful, saying that he had read about my work in the skeptic/rationalist communities, and commended me as only a brony could: “Bravo – that’s very Twilight Sparkle of you!”
Sex and Violence in Role Playing
Role playing is something we do from a very early age. Pretending to be someone else, particularly an archetypal grown-up, is a staple of childhood play. Two common examples of childhood role playing show how it can be both innocent and highly loaded, even (or perhaps especially) among children too young to really understand what they are doing.
The first example is the classic kids’ game of Cops and Robbers. To me, this seems an obvious case of innocent role play. Has a parent ever worried that by playing the role of a criminal, their small child is prepping for a future as a career felon? There is an obvious social subtext to the game, ostensibly teaching children that crime is wrong, but only the squarest of nosey sticklers would become alarmed if the extemporaneous script developing in the backyard occasionally ends with the bandits getting away with it once in a while? After all, it’s just play.
But then there is the other classic role play game of American children: Cowboys and Indians. This one is much more problematic. Well, not for the kids, of course. To them this is no different than Cops and Robbers. It’s just two groups, one them highly favored, the other one an underdog and a bit of a scoundrel, and off they go to horse around in the summer sun. But the subtext of this game is far more insidious. It serves to reinforce the imperial mythologies that have dominated American culture since its inception. Regardless of which team wins one improvised fracas or another, this role play is reinforcing ideals just as much as Cops and Robbers. But instead of the innocuous lesson of “criminals are the bad guys,” Cowboys and Indians teaches children too young to really understand that America’s Indigenous peoples were supposed to “lose” to Europeans and their descendants.
Everything Americans Think Is Complete Crap — Why Occupy Wall Street May Be Our Last Best Hope
by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash
Why? Because even though South Africa stunk headier than an elephant's poo after a rainy day, its black majority knew what they wanted and knew the country would be theirs one day. In America, it's by no means certain that the country will ever belong to its majority (or that its majority even knows what it wants).
We're not a country anymore, we're a racket run by the likes of a corrupt and immoral Wall Street. We have miserably failed at the single most basic organizing principle of any civilized society: how do you prevent the elite from stealing everything?
We haven't. They've done it. They've stolen everything. Our elite have stolen our money, our government, our legal system and our power from we, the people.
They've got it all, and we've got crumbs.
The difference between the 1% and the 99% is not simply economic. Not simply, for example, that we pay 35% taxes and big corporations either pay nothing — GE — or less than 2% — Goldman Sachs. The difference is moral and legal: folks at the top can torture and cheat and steal and lie and endanger the livelihoods of everyone else around them, and get away with it.
Our American elite is now as shitty as the Gaddafis and the Mubaraks and the Mugabes, and just about as crazy in their entitled bubble of runaway greed. Worst of all, they operate beyond the reach of the law. Too big to fail and too big to jail.
Ode to the GOP primaries
So we're two GOP primaries down
But don't worry, don't pout, snarl or frown
The fun won't end soon
Still so much to lampoon
South Carolina, the circus' in town!
For today we bid Huntsman adieu
Who does God love more?
Well clearly no one who's poor
At least that's the creed of this crew
If God's summoned each one to this calling
Did he just want to laugh at their brawling?
I may doubt that he's real
But this atheist can feel
That if not, he'd find these guys appalling
Which one is the worst hypocrite?
Is it wetback-hiring Mitt?
Or thrice married Newt
Who really should have stayed mute
When Bill Clinton's infidelity hit
I confess that I do miss Herman Cain
That was sure just a wacky campaign
But I don't need to fret
Now it's Mitt's turn to sweat
As he tries to back pedal from Bain
So South Carolina as you go into vote
And decide on which of these fools to dote
Just remember this thought
Your vote's really for naught
“Big Money”, that's all she wrote!
by Sarah Firisen
In The Name Of The Holy Cow…Yet Again…
by Gautam Pemmaraju
On January 7th news publications ran reports of a young Muslim cattle trader being harassed by members of the Hindu right-wing Bajrang Dal in Madhya Pradesh. A group stopped 25-year-old Anish Aslam Kureishi, son of a cattle trader of Chhindwara district, on December 31st, who was ferrying cattle. The men demanded money from him and on his refusal, they damaged his pick-up truck, dragged him to a village close by, beat him up, shaved part of his head off, as well as one eyebrow and half his moustache, and left him there tied to a pole. While the group claimed that the cattle were headed to an illegal slaughterhouse, the father of the waylaid man stated that they were meant for sale at a nearby market, and his younger brother said that they often paid off the Bajrang Dal to escape harassment. There have been subsequent reports quoting the police and administration that the entire family has been involved in illegal cattle transport.
This incident followed a widely reported amendment to the state’s cow protection laws that received presidential sanction on December 22nd. The amendment, as several commentators have pointed out, extends the scope of the already stringent anti-cow slaughter laws, which expressly prohibits the killing of cows, by increasing the jail term for those caught killing cows, transporting or selling beef, to up to 7 years. In addition, the BJP led government, by way of this amendment, also invests public officials with extraordinary powers to enter, search premises on suspicion of cow slaughter and beef storage, as well as to make arrests. The burden of proof is also transferred to the accused, making this law not only dangerously harsh, but also of dubious constitutional character. The Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s ‘dream’ has come true, according to the state’s Culture & PR Minister, who further added that the administration was keen to enforce the provisions of the Act ‘in letter and spirit’.
Several commentators have been quick to attack the draconian provisions of this already pernicious Act, pointing out that they mimic those of anti-terror laws. The BJP led central government has in the past also attempted ‘more robust application’ (read here and here) by attempting to amend law to bring detention under the ambit of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), which was repealed by the Congress led UPA government in 2004.
On the Areopagitica: Why Milton’s Defence of Free Speech Remains Almost Unsurpassed but Not Secular
by Tauriq Moosa
As per various stories emerging concerning censorship, I thought it a good time to consider one of the greatest documents defending free speech.
Arrests, search and seizure of books, book burnings and all other classical depictions of authoritarian hatred were the outcome of this Order. The Stationer’s Company, a guild of booksellers, printers and so on, and established by Queen Mary in 1557, was put in charge of dealing out this Order. Hindsight makes those fires brighter and stupidity greater and fear lesser; curled pages to us invite anger at oppression, but in the eyes of the moralisers, it meant something called order.
The great poet, John Milton, delivered a speech in 1644, called Areopagitica (or, its full title Areopagitica: A speech of Mr. John Milton for the liberty of unlicensed printing to the Parliament of England). In it, he made an impassioned plea that rings out today, calling for free thought, speech and reason, for “when complaints are freely heard, deeply considered and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty attained, that wise men look for.”
His most powerful argument is encapsulated in what is surely one of the most beautiful sentences ever written:
A man may be a heretic in the truth, and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.
Here, Milton cut to the heart of the problem.
Rewriting
by Joy Icayan
“You have the advantage of youth, use it to win.”
An old remembered advice from an old job. That was years back, just post college and unsure of what we were doing, trying to sell products whose own reasons for existing eluded us. Someone was always trying to do something else—trying to rekindle a band or the armed revolution. I was trying to write stories and poetry. But one writes what one knows, so in one of my stories a man is trying to save his brand image. I tried to make sci-fi, George Saunders like, but I’m no George Saunders. In my stories the characters are always speaking in corporate jargon—your rebranding is not working, our consumers relate our fast food label to pictures of dead cows! Or resorting to suicide or murder, which was often the easiest thing to do in case of non-functional characters. In the mornings, my boss gently told me I didn’t understand how desire led to action and to revise the slides.
The truth is, we were massively bored, bored in the manner of the ill fit young, middle class in a developing country—educated, earning enough for rent and expensive coffee and independence—when our idea of revolt was attacking the human resources office for imposing stupid regulations like Skirt Mondays. We revolted against Skirt Mondays, and we revolted when they prohibited miniskirts. We were always finding something to fight for or against. It felt good to be fighting against something.
There’s a game children play when they’re bored in traffic—make words out of license plates. At some point you do enough of these and you develop a talent for finding words where there are none. So the man who comes on Wednesday nights in a motel near my apartment, the man who drives an SUV is RAFT (Plate Number RFT). I’ve become his personal documentor; no one has documented his comings and goings as I have and I feel we’ve formed some sort of connection, as one way as it is. When he doesn’t come, or I’ve missed him, I feel a bit unaccomplished.
In my head, he has a wife somewhere who has a conventional name like Sara or Lisa. This isn’t the same woman who rides in the passenger seat, window always open, arm perched on the door. I’ve caught sight of her more than the man; she looks bored all the time.
I don’t know what their deal is or what it is with Wednesdays. I imagine the mirrors, wall and ceiling of the rooms they’ve gone in. They touch the rooms where a hundred others have come in, and leave traces others would soon erase.
Religion for Atheists
Diderot, a doyen of the French Enlightenment, wrote that the Christian gospel might have been a less gloomy affair if Jesus had fondled the breasts of the bridesmaids at Cana and caressed the buttocks of St John. Yet he, too, believed that religion was essential for social unity. Matthew Arnold feared the spread of godlessness among the Victorian working class. It could be countered, he thought, with a poeticised form of a Christianity in which he himself had long ceased to believe. The 19th-century French philosopher Auguste Comte, an out-and-out materialist, designed an ideal society complete with secular versions of God, priests, sacraments, prayer and feast days.
There is something deeply disingenuous about this whole tradition. “I don't believe myself, but it is politically prudent that you should” is the slogan of thinkers supposedly devoted to the integrity of the intellect. If the Almighty goes out of the window, how are social order and moral self-discipline to be maintained? It took the barefaced audacity of Friedrich Nietzsche to point out that if God was dead, then so was Man – or at least the conception of humanity favoured by the guardians of social order. The problem was not so much that God had inconveniently expired; it was that men and women were cravenly pretending that he was still alive, and thus refusing to revolutionise their idea of themselves.
God may be dead, but Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists is a sign that the tradition from Voltaire to Arnold lives on. The book assumes that religious beliefs are a lot of nonsense, but that they remain indispensible to civilised existence. One wonders how this impeccably liberal author would react to being told that free speech and civil rights were all bunkum, but that they had their social uses and so shouldn't be knocked. Perhaps he might have the faintest sense of being patronised. De Botton claims that one can be an atheist while still finding religion “sporadically useful, interesting and consoling”, which makes it sound rather like knocking up a bookcase when you are feeling a bit low. Since Christianity requires one, if need be, to lay down one's life for a stranger, he must have a strange idea of consolation. Like many an atheist, his theology is rather conservative and old-fashioned.
De Botton does not want people literally to believe, but he remains a latter-day Matthew Arnold, as his high Victorian language makes plain.
Debating Casual Sex
Society dictates that only within marriage or another long-term relationship do sex and intimacy exist and popular culture upholds this as the ultimate formula for happiness. Despite the high divorce rate, tax laws, for example, continue to bestow benefits on married couples, while relegating single people to second-class status.
How many times have you heard: He's afraid of intimacy? In arguing against casual sex, marriage advocates regularly flaunt research purportedly showing that spouses are happier than single people. But these studies contain a damaging methodology, which cannot be readily identified by their findings. That is, they fail to consider the guilt and shame that some single people internalize as a result of how society stigmatizes them.
The truth is, long-term relationships or marriage do not guarantee a satisfying emotional life or sexual intimacy. Everyone knows someone stuck in a barren marriage, whose members have lost their autonomy and in which sex has disappeared. Brandon's assertion that people do not belong together forever is correct, but too many of us fear facing that truth or consider alternatives to that permanence.
There are times when casual sex actually deepens one's self-knowledge. With intelligence and clarity of purpose, casual sex is more than instant gratification. By openly exploring our fantasies and true desires with different partners in a way that may not possible in a committed relationship, we can transcend our inhibitions. With each new encounter we can discover buried parts of ourselves and in time experience the totality of who we are. We can even experience profound, revelatory moments that unravel our past and show us things we never knew about ourselves. We can satisfy unmet needs by embracing those aspects of our sexuality that are deeply meaningful and we can choose to let go of those that no longer have importance.
How to Build Your Pop Culture Persona
Branding is all anyone can talk about these days. It’s how celebrities stay famous. It’s what Twitter is really for. It’s even what the last season of America’s Next Top Model was all about (besides Tyra Banks’s book, we mean). This week saw famed Bright Lights, Big City author Jay McInerney’s birthday — the renowned playboy is 57 years old, if you can believe it. Inspired by the persistence of the McInerney legend even after all these years, we thought we’d give you a brief outline of how to build a successful pop culture persona using two demonstrative models: the aforementioned Jay McInerney, poster boy of ’80s excess, and Lady Gaga, Queen of overblown contemporary pop. Click through to pick up a few helpful tips on how to build your pop culture persona based on these two tabloid legends, and make sure to send us a postcard from the top when you get there.
1. Come onto the scene with a little salacious controversy.
You have several options on this front, depending on your existing skill set. But whether you write a novel, drop a hit single, or debut in a film, make sure there’s some scandal attached. For instance, if you decide to write a novel, you should make sure that the main character is almost identical to you, that he is consumed with cocaine and the party boy lifestyle, as Jay McInerney did with Bright Lights, Big City. It will help if you have a posse already, so you can look even more like one of the popular kids. If you’re a musician, make sure you’re wearing something so ridiculous no one can look away or shut up about it, like Lady Gaga — in this case, it will also help if that outfit makes it unclear whether or not you secretly have a penis. Now people are paying attention to you. You may proceed.