Nathaniel Comfort in Nature:

A curious stasis underlies Dawkins's thought. His biomorphs are grounded in 1970s assumptions. Back then, with rare exceptions, each gene specified a protein and each protein was specified by a gene. The genome was a linear text — a parts list or computer program for making an organism —insulated from the environment, with the coding regions interspersed with “junk”. Today's genome is much more than a script: it is a dynamic, three-dimensional structure, highly responsive to its environment and almost fractally modular. Genes may be fragmentary, with far-flung chunks of DNA sequence mixed and matched in bewildering combinatorial arrays. A universe of regulatory and modulatory elements hides in the erstwhile junk. Genes cooperate, evolving together as units to produce traits. Many researchers continue to find selfish DNA a productive idea, but taking the longer view, the selfish gene per se is looking increasingly like a twentieth-century construct. Dawkins's synopsis shows that he has not adapted to this view. He nods at cooperation among genes, but assimilates it as a kind of selfishness. The microbiome and the 3D genome go unnoticed. Epigenetics is an “interesting, if rather rare, phenomenon” enjoying its “fifteen minutes of pop science voguery”, which it has been doing since at least 2009, when Dawkins made the same claim in The Greatest Show on Earth (Transworld). Dawkins adheres to a deterministic language of “genes for” traits. As I and other historians have shown, such hereditarianism plays into the hands of the self-styled race realists (N. Comfort Nature 513, 306–307; 2014).

His writing can still sparkle. He excels at capturing the scenes behind a scene, deftly explaining a scientific principle, capping a story with an amusing anecdote. His tale of palaeoanthropologist Richard Leakey hauling his legs (amputated after a plane crash) to Kenya in his hand luggage for burial is funny and touching. Dawkins also makes an important case for the “poetic” side of science, arguing that the imperative to justify research in terms of potential medical or financial benefits bleeds the beauty out of it. Amen. At such moments, one feels transported to a tweedy evening at Oxford, pouring the sherry as a charming senior faculty member holds court. But too often, the professor rambles. He quotes friends' and colleagues' tributes from dust-jackets and afterwords. He mentions the fish genus Dawkinsia. He repeatedly slams his late rival, Gould (“whose genius for getting things wrong matched the eloquence with which he did so”). His digressions often come off as twee and self-indulgent. Mentioning the limping family dog, Bunch, in an apt example of an acquired characteristic that cannot be inherited, he is reminded of an unfinished poem his mother wrote after Bunch died, which he prints. “If you can't be sentimental in an autobiography, when can you?” he asks.

For a time, Dawkins was a rebellious scientific rock star. Now, his critique of religion seems cranky, and his immovably genocentric universe is parochial. Brief Candle is about as edgy as Sir Mick and the Rolling Stones cranking out the 3,578th rendition of 'Brown Sugar' — a treat for fans, but reinscribing boundaries rather than crossing them.

More here.

Possibilities

I prefer movies.
I prefer cats.
I prefer the oaks along the Warta.
I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.
I prefer myself liking people
to myself loving mankind.
I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.
I prefer the color green.
I prefer not to maintain
that reason is to blame for everything.
I prefer exceptions.
I prefer to leave early.
I prefer talking to doctors about something else.
I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations.
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
I prefer, where love's concerned, nonspecific anniversaries
that can be celebrated every day.
I prefer moralists
who promise me nothing.
I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer the earth in civvies.
I prefer conquered to conquering countries.
I prefer having some reservations.
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
I prefer Grimms' fairy tales to the newspapers' front pages.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.
I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.
I prefer desk drawers.
I prefer many things that I haven't mentioned here
to many things I've also left unsaid.
I prefer zeroes on the loose
to those lined up behind a cipher.
I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.

by Wislawa Szymborska
from Map –collected and last poems
translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh

Liesl Bradner in The New Republic:

Before Liberace, there was Korla Pandit. He was a pianist from New Delhi, India, and dazzled national audiences in the 1950s with his unique keyboard skills and exotic compositions on the Hammond B3 organ. He appeared on Los Angeles local television in 900 episodes of his show, “Korla Pandit’s Adventures in Music”, smartly dressed in a suit and tie or silk brocade Nehru jacket and cloaked in a turban adorned with a single shimmering jewel. The mysterious, spiritual Indian man with a hypnotic gaze and sly grin was transfixing.

Offstage, Korla—known as the “Godfather of Exotica“— was living the American dream: he had a house in the Hollywood hills, a beautiful blonde wife, two kids, and a social circle that included Errol Flynn and Bob Hope. He even had his own floral-decorated organ float in the Rose Bowl parade in 1953.

Like most everything in Hollywood, it was all smoke and mirrors. His charade wasn’t his stage name—it was his race. Korla Pandit, born John Roland Redd, was a light skinned black man from St. Louis, Missouri. It was a secret he kept until the day he died.

A new documentary, Korla, explores Pandit’s extraordinary life and career. Filmmakers John Turner and Eric Christiansen grew up in the Bay Area watching Korla on TV and listening to his music. The two worked together for 35 years at KGO-TV in San Francisco, where Korla had a live show in 1964. Both fell under his spell learning the truth in a Los Angeles Magazine exposé in 2001, three years after Pandit’s death. “He was a slight man with a beatific smile who was spouting pearls of wisdom about how we could get along better and the universal language of music,” Turner told me. “Why question a person like that?”

More here.

Dani Rodrik in Project Syndicate:

Ever since the late nineteenth century, when economics, increasingly embracing mathematics and statistics, developed scientific pretensions, its practitioners have been accused of a variety of sins. The charges – including hubris, neglect of social goals beyond incomes, excessive attention to formal techniques, and failure to predict major economic developments such as financial crises – have usually come from outsiders, or from a heterodox fringe. But lately it seems that even the field’s leaders are unhappy.

Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate who also writes a newspaper column, has made a habit of slamming the latest generation of models in macroeconomics for neglecting old-fashioned Keynesian truths. Paul Romer, one of the originators of new growth theory, has accused some leading names, including the Nobel laureate Robert Lucas, of what he calls “mathiness” – using math to obfuscate rather than clarify.

Richard Thaler, a distinguished behavioral economist at the University of Chicago, has taken the profession to task for ignoring real-world behavior in favor of models that assume people are rational optimizers. And finance professor Luigi Zingales, also at the University of Chicago, has charged that his fellow finance specialists have led society astray by overstating the benefits produced by the financial industry.

This kind of critical examination by the discipline’s big names is healthy and welcome – especially in a field that has often lacked much self-reflection. I, too, have taken aim at the discipline’s sacred cows – free markets and free trade – often enough.

But there is a disconcerting undertone to this new round of criticism that needs to be made explicit – and rejected. Economics is not the kind of science in which there could ever be one true model that works best in all contexts. The point is not “to reach a consensus about which model is right,” as Romer puts it, but to figure out which model applies best in a given setting.

More here.

Simon Critchley in the NYT's The Stone:

Over the years, I have had the good fortune to teach a lot of graduate students, mostly in philosophy, and have noticed a recurring fact. Behind every new graduate student stands an undergraduate teacher. This is someone who opened the student’s eyes and ears to the possibility of the life of the mind that they had perhaps imagined but scarcely believed was within their reach. Someone who, through the force of their example, animated a desire to read more, study more and know more. Someone in whom the student heard something fascinating or funny or just downright strange. Someone who heard something significant in what the student said in a way that gave them confidence and self-belief. Such teachers are the often unknown and usually unacknowledged (and underpaid) heroes of the world of higher education.

Some lucky people have several such teachers. This was the case with me. But there is usually one teacher who sticks out and stays in one’s mind, and whose words resound down through the years. These are teachers who become repositories for all sorts of anecdotes, who are fondly recalled through multiple bon mots and jokes told by their former students. It is also very often the case that the really good teachers don’t write or don’t write that much. They are not engaged in “research,” whatever that benighted term means with respect to the humanities. They teach. They talk. Sometimes they even listen and ask questions.

In relation to philosophy, this phenomenon is hardly new. The activity of philosophy begins with Socrates, who didn’t write and about whom many stories were told. Plato and others, like Xenophon, wrote them down and we still read them. It is very often the case that the center of a vivid philosophical culture is held by figures who don’t write but who exist only through the stories that are told about them. One thinks of Sidney Morgenbesser, long-time philosophy professor at Columbia, whom I once heard described as a “mind on the loose.” The philosopher Robert Nozick said of his undergraduate education that he “majored in Sidney Morgenbesser.” On his deathbed, Morgenbesser is said to have asked: “Why is God making me suffer so much? Just because I don’t believe in him?”

These anecdotes seem incidental, but they are very important. They become a way of both revering the teacher and humanizing them, both building them up and belittling them, giving us a feeling of intimacy with them, keeping them within human reach. Often the litmus test of an interesting philosopher is how many stories circulate about them.

More here.

Over at MIT Technology Review:

It’s been almost 20 years since IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer beat the reigning world chess champion, Gary Kasparov, for the first time under standard tournament rules. Since then, chess-playing computers have become significantly stronger, leaving the best humans little chance even against a modern chess engine running on a smartphone.

Of course, no human can match that or come anywhere close. While Deep Blue was searching some 200 million positions per second, Kasparov was probably searching no more than five a second. And yet he played at essentially the same level. Clearly, humans have a trick up their sleeve that computers have yet to master.

This trick is in evaluating chess positions and narrowing down the most profitable avenues of search. That dramatically simplifies the computational task because it prunes the tree of all possible moves to just a few branches.

Computers have never been good at this, but today that changes thanks to the work of Matthew Lai at Imperial College London. Lai has created an artificial intelligence machine called Giraffe that has taught itself to play chess by evaluating positions much more like humans and in an entirely different way to conventional chess engines.

Straight out of the box, the new machine plays at the same level as the best conventional chess engines, many of which have been fine-tuned over many years. On a human level, it is equivalent to FIDE International Master status, placing it within the top 2.2 percent of tournament chess players.

More here.

David Orr in the Paris Review:

On a word-for-word basis, it may be the most popular piece of literature ever written by an American.

And almost everyone gets it wrong. This is the most remarkable thing about “The Road Not Taken”—not its immense popularity (which is remarkable enough), but the fact that it is popular for what seem to be the wrong reasons. It’s worth pausing here to underscore a truth so obvious that it is often taken for granted: Most widely celebrated artistic projects are known for being essentially what they purport to be. When we play “White Christmas” in December, we correctly assume that it’s a song about memory and longing centered around the image of snow falling at Christmas. When we read Joyce’sUlysses, we correctly assume that it’s a complex story about a journey around Dublin as filtered through many voices and styles. A cultural offering may be simple or complex, cooked or raw, but its audience nearly always knows what kind of dish is being served.

Frost’s poem turns this expectation on its head. Most readers consider “The Road Not Taken” to be a paean to triumphant self-assertion (“I took the one less traveled by”), but the literal meaning of the poem’s own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation.

More here. [For my sister Azra.]

Michael Binyon in Politico:

No country is more committed to European integration than Germany. All the grand schemes to bring Europeans together — the single currency, the push for common policies, the abolition of frontier controls within the European Union — have Germany at their heart.

But Berlin’s announcement Sunday that it is to reimpose frontier controls with Austria strikes a deadly blow at of one of the few agreements that has turned these visions into reality — the Schengen treaty, which removed passport controls along thousands of miles of Europe’s frontiers.

Is Schengen now dead? And is this the beginning of the end for an “ever closer union” in Europe?

More here.

Umer Abrar in Physics-Astronomy:

Scientists have picked up an atypical photon emission in X-rays coming from space, and say it could be evidence for the existence of a particle of dark matter. The signal comes from a very rare event in the Universe: a photon emitted due to the destruction of a hypothetical particle, possibly a “sterile neutrino”. If the discovery is confirmed, it will open up new avenues of research in particle physics. “It could usher in a new era in astronomy,” says Oleg Ruchayskiy at Leiden University . “Confirmation of this discovery may lead to construction of new telescopes specially designed for studying the signals from dark matter particles. We will know where to look in order to trace dark structures in space and will be able to reconstruct how the Universe has formed.”

The image is of the center of the galaxy taken by the Fermi space telescope, all known gamma-ray sources have been removed, revealing excess emissions that may arise from dark matter annihilations.

Could there finally be tangible evidence for the existence of dark matter in the Universe? After sifting through reams of X-ray data, scientists in EPFL's Laboratory of Particle Physics and Cosmology (LPPC) and Leiden University believe they could have identified the signal of a particle of dark matter.

More here.

Jacques Rupnik at Eurozine:

So, the first paradox is that those countries, which, after half-a-century of confinement, consider the greatest achievement of the 1989 revolutions to be freedom of movement, now refuse to apply that principle to non-Europeans. Whilst, for twenty years, they have been enthusiastic about globalization (the slogan for the Czech presidency of the EU in 2009 was “Europe without barriers”), today they are calling for a “Europe that protects” (the slogan of the French presidency in 2008). The second paradox is that, once upon a time, the pro-democracy uprisings in central and eastern Europe that were put down by Moscow gave rise to waves of refugees. More than 200,000 Hungarians fled from the Soviet tanks in 1956 and found a welcome in Austria and subsequently in the rest of Europe to which no one objected. The same occurred with the Czechs and Slovaks after the 1968 invasion and the Poles after 1981, when the repressive regime was bearing down on the Solidarnosc movement. But what now? Is this amnesia or is solidarity supposed to remain solely intra-European?

There are two factors that help us to better understand the situation as seen from the “Other Europe”. Historically, the countries of central and eastern Europe have, since the end of the nineteenth century, been lands of emigration and not immigration. Since 1989, almost one million Poles, Slovaks and citizens of the Baltic States have arrived in the United Kingdom and northern Europe. Romania and Bulgaria have seen about fifteen per cent of their population leave for southern EU countries. But, most importantly, these nations were built on the ruins of multi-national empires (Hapsburg, Ottoman, Russian); they began as nation-states that were nothing of the kind.

more here.

John Gray at Literary Review:

Isaiah Berlin had no very high opinion of his contribution to human thought. Writing in 1978 to the psychoanalyst Anthony Storr, he confessed, ‘Every line I have ever written and every lecture I have ever delivered seems to me of very little or no value.’ Nor did Berlin attach any great importance to the publication of his ideas. Partly this indifference reflected an academic culture – now barely remembered – in which the ‘publish or perish’ imperative did not exist. In the Oxford Berlin knew as a student and as a young fellow at New College and All Souls, building up a large corpus of published work tended to be seen as testimony to careerism or vanity rather than commitment to scholarship. Something of this attitude lasted into the Seventies, and it was only in the Eighties and Nineties that a cult of productivity fully took hold. Today, with universities labouring under a regime in which research and publication are monitored continuously, it is doubtful whether someone like Berlin would be able to find and keep an academic position in Britain.

Henry Hardy became Berlin’s editor in 1974. There can be no doubt that, without Hardy’s stimulus and more than forty years of tireless dedication, few of the twenty-odd volumes of Berlin’s writings that are in print would ever have seen the light of day. Certainly Berlin’s letters would not have been published. That would have been a pity since, as Hardy and his coeditor, Mark Pottle, write in the preface to this fourth and final volume, Berlin’s correspondence is an ‘integral part of hisoeuvre’. Extending up to the days before his death, this collection shows Berlin responding to a succession of world events: the rise of Thatcher and Reagan, IRA terrorism, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Falklands War, the formation of Solidarity in Poland, the emergence of Gorbachev and the fall of the Berlin Wall, among others.

more here.

Ryan Gilbey at The New Statesman:

In his varied career, Willem Dafoe has played Jesus Christ (inThe Last Temptation of Christ) and the Nosferatu actor Max Schreck (in Shadow of the Vampire). He brings elements of both to the title role of Pasolini. Dafoe is as close a physical fit to the Italian poet, writer and film-maker as is possible without recourse to CGI. The craggy face, noble yet reptilian, is lined with deep bedsheet creases; the cheekbones could double as bookshelves. He also wears Pier Paolo Pasolini’s actual glasses (thick frames, tinted lenses), which transform him into something part-mechanical. We can only nod in agreement when he delivers one of his gospels to a journalist: “There are no more human beings, only strange machines colliding towards each other.”

He is referring to consumerism, which has turned people into personifications of appetite. We have, he claims, become “sinister gladiators trained to have, possess and destroy”. Pasolini is rightly remembered for his films, which located spiritual salvation in lives that would otherwise be considered unremarkable, even coarse – the pimps and petty hoods of Accattone, the former prostitute trying to save her wayward son in Mamma Roma. Those who have never seen a frame of his work may still be familiar with the circumstances of his death: beaten savagely on a beach in Ostia by a 17-year-old rent boy and unidentified others, who proceeded to run him over with his own car.

more here.

Holly Black in theFword:

Hidden away from the Royal Geographical Society’s main gallery site, a modest exhibition depicting the fascinating history of India’s tawa’if is prefaced by gorgeous sound recordings made by Fred Gaisberg, one of the first North Americans to travel to India in the early 20th century and document its diverse musical cultures. As talented vocalists, dancers and usually multi-instrumentalists, tawa’ifs enjoyed unsurpassable fame, socio-economic standing and political leverage as members of a cultural elite reserved for the entertainment of the royal courts. Such a position allowed these women to elude normal patriarchal dominance, but fell victim to new moral constraints imposed by colonial rule which considered such practices to have dangerous, sexually charged motivations. Nowadays, the term tawa’if is more likely to be considered synonymous with prostitution.

The Royal Geographical Society seeks to present the rise and fall of these women over the course of 300 years, from the Mughal period to present day, which is an incredible ask for even the most comprehensive exhibition programme. This display is small, featuring a number of informative texts that attempt to present anecdote alongside complex explanations of various artistic styles and their provenance and evolution over several centuries. Although the content itself is fascinating, there appears to be no clear narrative overview, resulting in a frustrating and slightly incomprehensible patchwork that often leaves you darting from one wall text to another in the hope of unravelling this complex web of information.

More here.

Frans de Waal in The New York Times:

ATLANTA — WHEN I learned last week about the discovery of an early human relative deep in a cave in South Africa, I had many questions. Obviously, they had dug up a fellow primate, but of what kind? The fabulous find, named Homo naledi, has rightly been celebrated for both the number of fossils and their completeness. It has australopithecine-like hips and an ape-size brain, yet its feet and teeth are typical of the genus Homo.

The mixed features of these prehistoric remains upset the received human origin story, according to which bipedalism ushered in technology, dietary change and high intelligence. Part of the new species’ physique lags behind this scenario, while another part is ahead. It is aptly called a mosaic species. We like the new better than the old, though, and treat every fossil as if it must fit somewhere on a timeline leading to the crown of creation. Chris Stringer, a prominent British paleoanthropologist who was not involved in the study, told BBC News: “What we are seeing is more and more species of creatures that suggests that nature was experimenting with how to evolve humans, thus giving rise to several different types of humanlike creatures originating in parallel in different parts of Africa.” This represents a shockingly teleological view, as if natural selection is seeking certain outcomes, which it is not. It doesn’t do so any more than a river seeks to reach the ocean. News reports spoke of a “new ancestor,” even a “new human species,” assuming a ladder heading our way, whereas what we are actually facing when we investigate our ancestry is a tangle of branches. There is no good reason to put Homo naledi on the branch that produced us. Nor does this make the discovery any less interesting.

More here.

Browse the nominees in the list below and then go to the bottom of the post to vote.

Alphabetical list of nominated blog names followed by the blog post title:

(Please report any problems with links in the comments section below.)

For prize details, click here.

1. 3 Quarks Daily: Artificially Flavored Intelligence
2. 3 Quarks Daily: Fearing Artificial Intelligence
   
3. 3 Quarks Daily: On Optimal Paths & Minimal Action
4. 3 Quarks Daily: Randomness: the Ghost in the Machine?
5. 3 Quarks Daily: The Monarch Butterflies
6. Activist Teacher: Self-Image-Incongruence Theory of Individual Health
7. Andrew Silver: Mo'orea Scavenger Hunt
8. Bekka S. Brodie: How Blow Flies find Corpses
9. Collide-a-Scape: No Love in Boulder for Colorado’s GMO Labeling Proposition
10. Companion Animal Psychology: How Does a Dog's Brain Respond to the Smell of a Familiar Human?
11. Curious Wavefunction: The fundamental philosophical dilemma of chemistry
12. Earth Touch News: What Other Animals Have Taught Us About Human Uniqueness
13. Empirical Zeal: How a 19th Century Math Genius Taught Us the Best Way to Hold a Pizza Slice
14. European Geosciences Union: The Oldest Eurypterid
15. Excursion Set: Destiny's Child
16. ImaGeo: New NASA Visualization Shows Carbon Dioxide Emissions Swirling Around the World
17. Invariance: 3 myths of physics, especially in textbooks
18. IO9: Your Guide to Pluto: Everything We've Learned From New Horizons So Far
19. Los Angeles Review of Books: Three Physicists Try Philosophy
20. Nautilus: Intemperate Planet: How Natural Systems Magnify the Effects of Global Warming
21. Nautilus: The Sound So Loud That It Circled the Earth Four Times
22. Neurobabble: Masters of deception: how spiders trick ants
23. No Place Like Home: When Hubble Stared at Nothing for 100 Hours
24. Nova Next: From Discovery to Dust
25. One Universe at a Time: Another Brick in the Wall
26. Preposterous Universe: Why Is There Dark Matter?
27. Psych Central: Feeling Bipolar Disorder In Your Gut
28. PsySociety: Decoding Trump-Mania (scroll down after following link for parts 2 and 3)
29. Roots of Unity: The Saddest Thing I Know about the Integers
30. Rosin Cerate: Bezoars are gross bits of gunk that get stuck in your guts
31. Scicurious: Serotonin and the science of sex
32. Science: Ants have group-level personalities, study shows
33. Science Friday: Sunshine Recorder
34. Science Sushi: Four-Legged Snake Shakes Up Squamate Family Tree – Or Does It?
35. Scientist Sees Squirrel: Two creatures named “merianae”
36. Skulls in the Stars: Infinite hotels in swirling beams of light
37. Social Pulses: The public subsidy of scientific publishing monopolies
38. Space Age Archaeology: Shadows on the Moon: an ephemeral archaeology
39. Starts With A Bang: CONFIRMED: The Last Great Prediction Of The Big Bang!
40. Starts With A Bang: Is the Multiverse Science?
41. The Loom: Editing Human Embryos: So This Happened
42. Thinking of Things: All I Didn't Know About Cancer
43. Thinking of Things: The Pain in the Brain Game
44. Tycho's Nose: The Kilogram turns 125
45. Tycho's Nose: The largest dinosaur ever found – and subsequently lost again
46. Wait But Why: The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence
47. Why Evolution Is True: A gynandromorph moth comes to the light – and tells a story about science
48. Wired: Glowing Tampons Help Detect Sewage Leaks
49. Wired: Tambora 1815: Just How Big Was The Eruption?
50. Wired: When a Giant Asteroid Impact Created Its Own Magma

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