Michele Pridmore-Brown in the Times Literary Supplement:

Darwinian sexual selection has not, in general, selected for particularly cosy relations between the sexes. The praying mantis female often cannibalizes her mate; she bites his head just as he is delivering his sperm and then completes her meal when he’s done. Aside from a hard-to-interpret wiggle, he seems not to protest the terms of the sexual bargain because he is solitary and unlikely to score again. By contrast, the male bedbug is a brutal bully; he has evolved a dagger-like projection with which to slash the female’s abdomen. The more graceful water strider has two precision antennae that serve no other purpose than to hold females down. As for the toxin-loaded scorpion, he has evolved a special toxin-lite to subdue the female of his species.

And so it goes. Sex on six legs, or eight, can be a decidedly sordid affair. As Darwin himself observed, one should not look for moral uplift in nature. For the economist and Darwinist Paul Seabright, insect sex nonetheless neatly illustrates the dialectical nature of sexual evolution. Male strategies for “scoring” escalate over time. In dialectic tandem, so do female counterstrategies for evading undesirables and exerting some choice – overt or covert – in their affairs. This is the “war” of his title.

Game theory enables evolutionary biologists and economists such as Seabright to think of the so-called war of the sexes as a strategic game. In general, the male evolves to “want” to score at all costs – whether that means being a bully, a martyr or something else entirely. The female, however, “knows” the real stakes are viable offspring. Of course, neither sex “knows” or “wants”, which would imply sentience or introspection; rather, they are unconscious vehicles for such behaviours. Insects and humans alike, we are the descendants of those who happened to play the game exceptionally well.

More here.

Noam Chomsky in TruthOut:

With the quadrennial presidential election extravaganza reaching its peak, it’s useful to ask how the political campaigns are dealing with the most crucial issues we face. The simple answer is: badly, or not at all. If so, some important questions arise: why, and what can we do about it?

There are two issues of overwhelming significance, because the fate of the species is at stake: environmental disaster, and nuclear war.

The former is regularly on the front pages. On Sept. 19, for example, Justin Gillis reported in The New York Times that the melting of Arctic sea ice had ended for the year, “but not before demolishing the previous record – and setting off new warnings about the rapid pace of change in the region.”

The melting is much faster than predicted by sophisticated computer models and the most recent U.N. report on global warming. New data indicate that summer ice might be gone by 2020, with severe consequences. Previous estimates had summer ice disappearing by 2050.

“But governments have not responded to the change with any greater urgency about limiting greenhouse emissions,” Gillis writes. “To the contrary, their main response has been to plan for exploitation of newly accessible minerals in the Arctic, including drilling for more oil” – that is, to accelerate the catastrophe.

This reaction demonstrates an extraordinary willingness to sacrifice the lives of our children and grandchildren for short-term gain. Or, perhaps, an equally remarkable willingness to shut our eyes so as not to see the impending peril.

More here.

Nauman Naqvi in Outlook India:

The pogrom-like atmosphere gathering apace vis-a-vis its minorities in Pakistan is a far graver threat to society than is commonly realised. Sunnis, the majority community, do not appear to perceive that what is at stake is not an ‘altruistic’ concern for some weak, insignificant others. The larger framework of our lives—capitalism, and its partner in the abomination of our collective existence, nationalism—works to make us think and act as if ethical action towards others is reserved for exceptional moments of ‘altruism’, rather than being the everyday condition of a decent life. This destitute conception of ethics has come to pervade more and more of our lives, including our ‘religion’, which increasingly appears as a domain distinct from its own heart: ethics. Like everything around us, our ethics and religion too are fast becoming content-free.

What is at stake is the character, meaning and quality of life as such, inclusive, above all, of Sunniism and the integrity of its own nature and traditions. It is one of the key teachings of the Abrahamic faiths (and beyond, for example, in the Indic concept of karma) that what is of equal concern in acts of injustice and violence is the impact they have on one’s own soul. This cosmological insight is also at the origin of the philosophical tradition where, in Socrates and Plato, virtue is cultivated in the care of one’s own soul. Both rest on one fundamental: the most basic, enduring pleasure of life—the ground and potential of all other pleasures—is the pleasure of one’s own soul. Simply put, one cannot be a scoundrel to others without becoming a scoundrel to oneself. It cannot be denied that there are pleasures to be experienced in the ego of the scoundrel, but their destitute and transient quality is a common experience.

More here.

From Himal SouthAsian:

Our Pictures, Our Words is a lucid, engaging primer to a topic that can at first seem intimidatingly broad – the women’s rights movement in India. The book is a ‘visual map’ through the various campaigns that have shaped the contemporary movement since its inception in the 1970s, compiling a broad and careful selection of campaign posters (and occasional photographs) from across India, selected from the larger archive of the Poster Women project from the feminist publishing house Zubaan. The book’s structure and accompanying texts add greatly to its educational value. The posters are thematically organised, dealing with a host of relevant issues ranging from sexual harassment and health to religion, women’s political participation, and the overlap of the women’s movement with environmental, labour, and other social struggles.

…Still, the book’s greatest strength are the posters themselves. Striking, innovative, spanning a range of styles from modern to traditional, this is a superb collection even on artistic merit alone, and an important record of Indian poster art. As Murthy and Dasgupta point out, the posters also circumvent the ‘institutionalisation’ of the voices of the Indian women’s movement in recent times. The posters are presented as primary sources for the reader’s own consideration, in the form that they were produced by artists and women’s collectives responding directly to the issues and events most important to them in the places they live.

More here.

David Ropeik in The New York Times:

WE make all sorts of ostensibly conscious and seemingly rational choices when we are aware of a potential risk. We eat organic food, max out on multivitamins and quickly forswear some products (even whole technologies) at the slightest hint of danger. We carry guns and vote for the candidate we think will keep us safe. Yet these choices are far from carefully considered — and, surprisingly often, they contravene reason. What’s more, while our choices about risk invariably feel right when we make them, many of these decisions end up putting us in greater peril. Researchers in neuroscience, psychology, economics and other disciplines have made a range of discoveries about why human beings sometimes fear more than the evidence warrants, and sometimes less than the evidence warns. That science is worth reviewing at length. But one current issue offers a crash course in the most significant of these findings: the fear of vaccines, particularly vaccines for children. In a 2011 Thomson Reuters/NPR poll, nearly one parent in three with a child under 18 was worried about vaccines, and roughly one American in four was concerned about the value and safety of vaccines in general. In the same poll, roughly one out of every five college-educated respondents worried that childhood vaccination was connected with autism; 7 percent said they feared a link with Type 1 diabetes. Based on the evidence, these and most other concerns about vaccines are unfounded. A comprehensive report last year from the Institute of Medicine is just one of many studies to report that vaccines do not cause autism, diabetes, asthma or other major afflictions listed by the anti-vaccination movement. Yet these fears, fierce and visceral, persist. To frustrated doctors and health officials, vaccine-phobia seems an irrational denial of the facts that puts both the unvaccinated child and the community at greater risk (as herd immunity goes down, disease spread rises). But the more we learn about how risk perception works, the more understandable — if still quite dangerous — the fear of vaccines becomes.

Along with many others, the cognitive psychologists Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon and Baruch Fischhoff of Carnegie Mellon University have identified several reasons something might feel more or less scary than mere reason might suppose. Humans subconsciously weigh the risks and benefits of any choice or course of action — and if taking a particular action seems to afford little or no benefit, the risk automatically feels bigger. Vaccinations are a striking example. As the subconscious mind might view it, vaccines protect children from diseases like measles and pertussis, or whooping cough, that are no longer common, so the benefit to vaccination feels small — and smaller still, perhaps, compared to even the minuscule risk of a serious side effect. (In actuality, outbreaks of both of these infections have been more common in recent years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) Contrast this with how people felt in the 1950s, in the frightening days of polio, when parents lined their kids up for vaccines that carried much greater risk than do the modern ones. The risk felt smaller, because the benefit was abundantly clear.

More here.

Toba 1

I have nothing to write about
My flesh is bared to the sun
My wife is beautiful
My children are healthy

Let me tell you the truth
I am not a poet
I just pretend to be one

I was created, and left here
Look, the sun cascades among the boulders
making the sea look darker

Other than this quiet at the height of the day
I have nothing I want to tell you about
even if you are bleeding in your country
Ah, this everlasting radiance!
.

by Shuntaro Tanikawa
from Tabi (Journey)
publisher: Kyuryudo, Tokyo, 1968

translation: Takako Lento
from The Art of Being Alone: Poems 1952–2009
Publisher: Cornell Univ.

Ed Yong in Nature:

Nobel prize-winner Daniel Kahneman has issued a strongly worded call to one group of psychologists to restore the credibility of their field by creating a replication ring to check each others’ results.

Kahneman, a psychologist at Princeton University in New Jersey, addressed his open e-mail to researchers who work on social priming, the study of how subtle cues can unconsciously influence our thoughts or behaviour. For example, volunteers might walk more slowly down a corridor after seeing words related to old age¹, or fare better in general-knowledge tests after writing down the attributes of a typical professor².

Such tests are widely used in psychology, and Kahneman counts himself as a “general believer” in priming effects. But in his e-mail, seen by Nature, he writes that there is a “train wreck looming” for the field, due to a “storm of doubt” about the robustness of priming results.

This scepticism has been fed by failed attempts to replicate classic priming studies, increasing concerns about replicability in psychology more broadly (see 'Bad Copy'), and the exposure of fraudulent social psychologists such as Diederik Stapel, Dirk Smeesters and Lawrence Sanna, who used priming techniques in their work.

“For all these reasons, right or wrong, your field is now the poster child for doubts about the integrity of psychological research,” Kahneman writes. “I believe that you should collectively do something about this mess.”

More here.

Lisa Grossman in New Scientist:

Schrödinger's cat, the enduring icon of quantum mechanics, has been defied. By making constant but weak measurements of a quantum system, physicists have managed to probe a delicate quantum state without destroying it – the equivalent of taking a peek at Schrodinger's metaphorical cat without killing it. The result should make it easier to handle systems such as quantum computers that exploit the exotic properties of the quantum world.

Quantum objects have the bizarre but useful property of being able to exist in multiple states at once, a phenomenon called superposition. Physicist Erwin Schrödinger illustrated the strange implications of superposition by imagining a cat in a box whose fate depends on a radioactive atom. Because the atom's decay is governed by quantum mechanics – and so only takes a definite value when it is measured – the cat is, somehow, both dead and alive until the box is opened.

Superposition could, in theory, let quantum computers run calculations in parallel by holding information in quantum bits. Unlike ordinary bits, these qubits don't take a value of 1 or 0, but instead exist as a mixture of the two, only settling on a definite value of 1 or 0 when measured.

But this ability to destroy superpositions simply by peeking at them makes systems that depend on this property fragile. That has been a stumbling block for would-be quantum computer scientists, who need quantum states to keep it together long enough to do calculations.

More here.

Salim Ali in National Geographic:

Six years ago, I received an invitation to participate in an event on peace-building in the Middle East at the University of California, Los Angeles. The seminar had been organized by a local lawyer, Josef Avesar, along with academics at UCLA to find a novel way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The idea was taken from other historic territorial conflicts and rivalries – to establish an Israeli-Palestinian Confederation – analogous to the cantons of Switzerland uniting or indeed the articles of confederation of the United States, as noted by Amherst College political scientist Ronald Tiersky in the Jerusalem Post earlier this year. However, unlike earlier efforts, this idea was to be implemented from the grassroots using the internet as a platform to recruit candidates for a “virtual parliament,” while the policy-makers remained deadlocked. In six years, Mr. Avesar has been determined despite all odds and has managed to get over 700 Israelis and Palestinians (including in Gaza) to run in a virtual election which will be held on December 12, 2012. Those who may dismiss this as a gimmick should note that even a willingness to run in an election of this kind poses peril to the candidates but they are willing to do so because they see this as the most tangible effort to “think outside the box” and move beyond the stagnation of one-state/ two-state fixes.

More here.

The problem with Odysseus’ intelligence, for many philosophical readers, is that it looks too self-serving. Odysseus is willing to put his mind to anything, and adopt any available means, in order to achieve his own selfish goals. This is the sophistical Odysseus damningly represented in Sophocles’ Philoctetes, the man who is perfectly willing to trick a sick, lonely old man into giving up his only weapon and only means of livelihood – and do it without compunction, if that’s what it takes to win the war. No moral philosopher wants to taint himself with that particular kind of cleverness. Philosophers who focus on Odysseus’ intelligence, then, had to make extremely clear that the hero does not use his intelligence at the service of his own gain. Rather, he subdues his selfish passions for the sake of wisdom. The Calypso episode is a key piece of evidence for Stoics such as Epictetus. Odysseus’ behaviour in leaving Calypso is taken as a sign that he subordinates mere pleasure to the higher calling of wisdom – despite the fact that, as Montiglio notes, Odysseus in Homer doesn’t seem to be having any fun with Calypso at all (he is crying; he wants to go home).

more from Emily Wilson at the TLS here.

Dürrenmatt was not alone in voicing criticism of the role of science in Western democracy in the early 1960s. In the same month that Dürrenmatt began writing The Physicists, January 1961, President Eisenhower delivered his famous farewell address. In it, he warned of two particular threats to the American political system that closely parallel Dürrenmatt’s nightmare. First, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” The now-permanent coalition of the military and mass industry, Eisenhower observed, was at that point unprecedented in American history. One might say that a military-industrial complex (the phrase has been in common parlance since Eisenhower used it) that exists for the purpose of being ready for war at all times leads to a situation in which even peace implies a state of war. Of course, it is the ever-increasing resources of science and technology that make possible the maintenance of such a military-industrial complex.

more from Samuel Matlack at The New Atlantis here.

The end was coming in different forms. On April 5, Hitler was shown more Zossen files; enraged anew, he ordered the liquidation of the Canaris group, and in the chaos of impending defeat the Nazis indulged in a final spasm of murder. Tietze, told to transfer Dohnanyi back to Sachsenhausen, arranged for Christine to see her husband one last time, and then sedated Hans heavily. The next day, when his “trial” took place, Hans was still drugged and only intermittently conscious, thus spared the offense of having to participate in this travesty of justice with its foreordained verdict and sentence. On April 9 he was carried on a stretcher to the place of his execution and hanged. Buchenwald was where Dietrich and other Gestapo prisoners had been taken. On April 3, as the guards heard the rumble of nearby American cannons, some of them took away a group of prisoners and drove them south to the concentration camp at Flossenbürg, where the Gestapo and SS had orders to obey and work to do no matter how close the enemy, how close their own defeat. Survivors of the macabre journey remembered Bonhoeffer’s calm, reassuring presence throughout.

more from Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern at the NYRB here.

To Know the Dark

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

by Wendell Berry
from Farming -A Handbook
Harvest Books 1967

From Smithsonian:

In 2004, hedge fund analyst Salman Khan began tutoring his 12-year-old cousin, Nadia, in some basic math concepts. Since he lived in Boston and she in New Orleans, they spoke by telephone, and he used Yahoo! Doodle to work through specific problems. As other family members requested his services, Khan began to post simple video lectures on YouTube. Khan realized he was on to something when strangers began leaving comments, thanking him for explaining things like systems of equations and geometry in a way that finally made sense. In 2009, Kahn quit his lucrative job to put all his efforts into Khan Academy. He founded the nonprofit with a lofty goal in mind: to provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

Students from 234 countries and territories have logged on to Khan’s site to watch any number of his 3,400 video lectures on topics in math, science, computer science, economics and history. Teachers in some 15,000 classrooms now incorporate his lessons and software into their instruction. In his new book The One World Schoolhouse, Khan totally reimagines education. He diagnoses the problems with our century-old model for education and envisions schools that better prepare students for today’s world.

More here.

From Nature:

Japanese researchers have coaxed mouse stem cells into becoming viable eggs that produce healthy offspring¹. The work provides a powerful tool to study basic elements of mammalian development and infertility that have long been shrouded in mystery. People have been trying to make sex cells from embryonic stem cells and from pluripotent cells for years, says Evelyn Telfer, a reproductive biologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK. “They’ve done it — and they’ve done it really well.” Stem-cell scientists have derived many types of cells from stem-cell precursors, but have struggled with sex cells. These cells have significantly more complex developmental programmes, in part because of the difference in the way they divide. Most cells in the body undergo mitosis, in which both sets of chromosomes are copied, but sex cells are produced by meiosis, which results in cells containing a single copy of each chromosome. Last year, the same team from Mitinori Saitou’s lab at Kyoto University in Japan successfully used mouse stem cells to make functional sperm². Whereas sperm cells are some of the simpler cells in the body, oocytes are much more complex. “It was always believed that making sperm was probably easier,” says Davor Solter, a developmental biologist at the Institute of Medical Biology in Singapore, who was not involved with the study. “The oocyte is the thing which makes the whole of development possible.”

In the latest study, published today in Science, Saitou and his colleagues started with two cell types: mouse embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells, which can be derived from adult cells. Just as in the earlier sperm study, they used a cocktail of signalling molecules to transform the stem cells first into epiblast cells and then into primordial germ cells (PGCs), both egg precursors. Whereas male PGCs could be injected directly into infertile male mice to mature into sperm, the female version required further coddling. The researchers isolated embryonic ovary tissue that did not contain sex cells and then added their lab-made PGCs to the dish. The mixture spontaneously formed ovary-like structures, which they transplanted into female mice. After four weeks, the stem-cell-derived PGCs had matured into oocytes. The team fertilized them and transplanted the embryos into foster mothers. The offspring that were produced grew up to be fertile themselves.

More here.

David Deutsch in Aeon:

It is uncontroversial that the human brain has capabilities that are, in some respects, far superior to those of all other known objects in the cosmos. It is the only kind of object capable of understanding that the cosmos is even there, or why there are infinitely many prime numbers, or that apples fall because of the curvature of space-time, or that obeying its own inborn instincts can be morally wrong, or that it itself exists. Nor are its unique abilities confined to such cerebral matters. The cold, physical fact is that it is the only kind of object that can propel itself into space and back without harm, or predict and prevent a meteor strike on itself, or cool objects to a billionth of a degree above absolute zero, or detect others of its kind across galactic distances.

But no brain on Earth is yet close to knowing what brains do in order to achieve any of that functionality. The enterprise of achieving it artificially — the field of ‘artificial general intelligence’ or AGI — has made no progress whatever during the entire six decades of its existence.

Why? Because, as an unknown sage once remarked, ‘it ain’t what we don’t know that causes trouble, it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so’ (and if you know that sage was Mark Twain, then what you know ain’t so either). I cannot think of any other significant field of knowledge in which the prevailing wisdom, not only in society at large but also among experts, is so beset with entrenched, overlapping, fundamental errors. Yet it has also been one of the most self-confident fields in prophesying that it will soon achieve the ultimate breakthrough.

Despite this long record of failure, AGI must be possible. And that is because of a deep property of the laws of physics, namely theuniversality of computation. This entails that everything that the laws of physics require a physical object to do can, in principle, be emulated in arbitrarily fine detail by some program on a general-purpose computer, provided it is given enough time and memory. The first people to guess this and to grapple with its ramifications were the 19th-century mathematician Charles Babbage and his assistant Ada, Countess of Lovelace. It remained a guess until the 1980s, when I proved it using the quantum theory of computation.

More here.

Emily Monosson in American Scientist:

PCBs are one of the best kept secrets,” a chemist once told me. This was the 1980s, and he made his livelihood extracting polychlorinated biphenyls, a class of synthetic chemicals whose production in the United States was banned in 1979, from fish tissues and sediments. What he meant was that although we hadn’t yet fully understood the toxicology of these chemicals, there was plenty of concern about widespread contamination: enough to keep cadres of federal and private-industry chemists employed for years studying the PCBs which had made their way from factories into air and water and eventually into fish, birds, whales and humans. At the time, PCB analyses were about $500 a pop, and tests for dioxins (PCBs’ more nefarious cousin) cost more than $1,000. Add to this all the dollars that have been spent funding toxicologists and other health-related scientists, engineers and clean-up experts—and the more difficult-to-measure costs associated with health effects. For the past 30 years or more, our collective experience with these synthetic pollutants has been costly, and we—the public—are too often the ones footing the bill. As Carl F. Cranor describes them in Legally Poisoned,these costs represent the externalities—costs not fully reflected in the market price of a product—so often associated with industrial chemicals and our ongoing reliance on postmarket environmental-health laws to protect us. Cranor explains that many important chemicals, including drugs, pesticides and food additives, are regulated by premarket testing, a flawed but relatively effective approach in which, as the phrase implies, toxicity testing is required before commercialization. But far too many chemicals, such as PCBs, bisphenol A (BPA) and polybrominated flame retardants are subject only to postmarket laws. These chemicals are commonly referred to as “innocent until proven guilty,” and they are the chemicals that all too often invade our most private spaces—our bodies.

The market is awash with books about toxic bodies, babies, rubber ducks, homes and workplaces (not to mention in-laws, men, faith and assets). Cranor, a legal and moral philosopher and a faculty member in the University of California, Riverside’s graduate environmental toxicology program, cannot resist reiterating how contaminated we all are. Nonetheless, Legally Poisonedoffers a refreshingly different take on toxic chemicals in our lives, explaining how this situation came to be and what we might do about it.

More here.