Kevin Padhian in Nature:

Nevertheless, Improbable Destinies is deep, broad, brilliant and thought-provoking. Losos explores the meaning of terms such as fate, chance, convergence and contingency in evolution. Why do similar solutions — morphological, genetic and molecular — crop up again and again? He became intrigued by these questions when, as a student, he began to study the Caribbean Anolislizards, following groundbreaking work by ecologist Thomas Schoener. These lizards inhabit a great range of island sizes and habitats, and tend to evolve similar adaptations and roles in similar circumstances. However, species on different islands that resemble each other aren't each other's closest relatives. Why not?

The answer, we think, is that closely related lineages have similar genetic components, so under comparable ecological conditions they are likely to produce similar mutations that are then selected for. Many call this convergence; I prefer the term parallelism for closely related lineages. 'Convergence' is appropriate for reinvention in very different groups — the superficially similar wings of birds and pterosaurs, or the elongated grub-seeking fingers of the aye-aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis) and striped possum (Dactylopsila trivirgata). We can catalogue examples all day, but is there any real theory of convergence? We cannot assert that some lineages are 'fated' to converge on these features. Biological ideas of determinism went out with Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in the late eighteenth century. Evidence against determinism is the prevalence of creatures whose adaptations have never been duplicated: the kangaroo, the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus), the century plant (Agave americana, which blooms only once in its multidecade life) — and humans. Primates have the equipment apparently needed to evolve flight: arboreal habits, large brains, good coordination and active metabolisms. Yet no primate seems to have evolved gliding, let alone powered flight. No evolutionary duplication is inevitable.

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Hirsh Sawhney at the TLS:

In recent decades, scholars such as Gyanendra Pandey and Yasmin Khan have helped to unravel the complex role the British played in encouraging the religious discord that still beleaguers South Asia today, and yet the tendency to downplay the role of the colonizer in Partition persists in many English-language texts. Even seemingly nuanced accounts can’t seem to shake off this habit. Take Nisid Hajari’s book Midnight’s Furies (2015), which received thunderous acclaim in the US, UK and India. It presents provocative evidence of British imperialists actively fanning the flames of communal discord by paying off Muslim clerics to preach against the Congress Party, and yet the author seems reluctant to rigorously scrutinize British actions and attitudes leading up to Partition. He often makes light of the role of imperial actors, such as Viceroy Mountbatten; he rehashes old tropes about the “deep roots” of divisions between Hindus and Muslims, mentioning age-old “frictions” stemming from the destruction of “flower-strewn temples” by “Muslim conquerors”. Various scholars, including Audrey Truschke and Romila Thapar, have demonstrated the tenuousness of such claims. Thapar, for example, has pointed out that alleged Hindu grievances about the eleventh-century destruction of the Somnath temple were first aired in Britain’s Parliament; only after this point do records begin to reference “the Hindu trauma”.

It is true, as many critics have pointed out, that South Asian thinkers and politicians would do well to reckon with the culpability of their own leaders and citizens in carrying out Partition and perpetuating religious violence. As the legacy of twentieth-century imperialism continues to inform our current moment of global instability, it is similarly imperative for Anglo-American audiences to see through the simplicities epitomized by Google’s Partition commercial.

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Will Stephenson at The Paris Review:

In 1919, a year after he’d startled America by vanishing a four-thousand-pound elephant named Jenny onstage at the New York Hippodrome, Harry Houdini arrived in Hollywood to make his first feature film. Already, the magician was roughly as famous as any American performer could be in his era. He’d spent years diving handcuffed into ice-cold rivers, locking himself in jail cells, maneuvering his body in and out of sealed crates and prison vans and (once) the belly of a beached whale. He was a living legend, and a world-class egotist: he named his pets after himself; printed his initials on his pajamas, his bathroom tiles, and his cuff links; and signed most of his trick blueprints “H. H., Champion of the World.”

Still, Houdini was always looking for new frontiers, and he believed that Hollywood was the next step. “I think the film profession is the greatest, and that the moving picture is the most wonderful thing in the world,” he told an interviewer. Like the movies themselves, Houdini had emerged from vaudeville, and he understood film’s appeal intuitively. Earlier in the year, to test the waters, he’d starred in a fifteen-part serial, The Master Mystery, featuring a robot with a human brain who could shoot lasers out of his fingertips. (Houdini claimed to have designed the villain himself.) The series was well-received. Billboard deemed it a “cracker-jack production” that “will thunder down the ages to perpetuate the fame of this remarkable genius.” Financially, though, it was a nonstarter; it took Houdini four years in court to recover his earnings.

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Louis Menand at The New Yorker:

It seems a little incongruous that T. S. Eliot, a man who adopted all the attributes—political, religious, cultural, and sartorial—of a proper Englishman was actually a Midwesterner. But, of course, he grew up in St. Louis, and some of the landscapes that seem distinctly English to many readers in his poetry, like the “yellow fog” in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” were recollected from his childhood there.

The Eliots were originally from New England, though. Eliot’s grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, moved to Missouri as a young man and eventually founded Washington University, in St. Louis. Eliot’s father, Henry, who ran a company that manufactured bricks, took the family to Massachusetts every summer, and in 1896, the year Eliot turned eight, Henry built a big house on Cape Ann, in Gloucester, overlooking the outer harbor. Until Eliot went off to Europe, in 1914, he spent his summers there.

Eliot often talked about his nostalgia for the sea off the Eastern Point, where he used to sail, and for the granite, the tide pools, and the birdlife of Cape Ann, memories that gave rise to many images in his poetry:

The salt is on the briar rose,
The fog is in the fir trees.

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The biologist and atheist, whose latest book was released this week, talks about the reliability of science, artificial intelligence, religion and the president.

John Horgan in Scientific American:

Richard Dawkins, the biologist and author, is complicated. I reached this conclusion in 2005 when I participated in a fellowship for journalists organized by the pro-religion Templeton Foundation. Ten of us spent several weeks at the University of Cambridge listening to 18 scientists and philosophers point out areas where science and religion converge. Alone among the speakers, Dawkins argued, in his usual uncompromising fashion, that science and religion are incompatible. But in his informal interactions with me and other fellows, Dawkins was open-minded and a good listener. Over drinks one evening, a Christian journalist described witnessing an episode of faith healing. Instead of dismissing the story outright, Dawkins pressed for details. He seemed to find the story fascinating. His curiosity, at least for a moment, trumped his skepticism.

I mention this episode because it is illustrative of the thinking on display in Dawkins’s newest book, Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist. It consists of essays written over the last several decades on, among other things, altruism, group selection, extraterrestrials, punctuated equilibrium, animal suffering, eugenics, essentialism, tortoises, dinosaurs, 9/11, the problem of evil, the internet, his father and Christopher Hitchens. The book showcases Dawkins’s dual talents. He is a ferocious polemicist, a defender of reason and enemy of superstition. He is also an extraordinarily talented explicator and celebrator of biology. He makes complex concepts, like kin selection, pop into focus in a way that imparts a jolt of pleasure. His best writings are suffused with the wide-ranging curiosity that he revealed at the fellowship in Cambridge.

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Video length: 39:00

Michael Muthukrishna in Evonomics:

There is nothing natural about democracy. There is nothing natural about living in communities with complete strangers. There is nothing natural about large-scale anonymous cooperation. Yet, this morning, I bought a coffee from Starbucks with no fear of being poisoned or cheated. I caught a train on London’s underground packed with people I’ve never met before and will probably never meet again. If we were commuting chimps in a space that small, it would have been a scene out of the latest Planet of the Apes by the time we reached Holborn station. We’ll return to this mystery in a moment.

There is something very natural about prioritizing your family over other people. There is something very natural about helping your friends and others in your social circle. And there is something very natural about returning favors given to you. These are all smaller scales of cooperation that we share with other animals and that are well described by the math of evolutionary biology. The trouble is that these smaller scales of cooperation can undermine the larger-scale cooperation of modern states. Although corruption is often thought of as a falling from grace, a challenge to the normal functioning state—it’s in the etymology of the word—it’s perhaps better understood as the flip side of cooperation. One scale of cooperation, typically the one that’s smaller and easier to sustain, undermines another.

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Over at the Breach, Lindsay Beyerstein interviews Ankit Panda:

Lindsay: What kind of nuclear strategy is North Korea entertaining at this point?

Ankit: So this is the question of the hour. It's been something that I've been talking about with Vipin Narang who is a nuclear strategy expert up in Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I actually recently had him on my own podcast to kind of talk this stuff in like really wonky detail. I'll try not to get into too much detail right now

Lindsay: It's wonderful everybody should go download that episode of The Diplomat, it's really good.

Ankit: Oh thank you. Thank you, Lindsay. But like to just very quickly wrap up what I think is going on in North Korea's nuclear strategy is that, they're essentially looking to use a first strike nuclear strategy. But they're planning to use a first strike within the theater. So the theater you can broadly think of everything kind of 2,000 to 3,000 miles out from North Korea. So, basically, what the North Koreans have been saying … they're actually pretty explicit about it this. This isn't something that kind of tell us in poetry and we have to kind of spend hours decoding. They have very explicitly released statements through their foreign ministry – actually, their deputy foreign minister had a great statement in April where he kind of laid this out. Basically, this is what they say: if North Korea ever gets the sense that The United States and South Korea are mobilizing to preemptively attack North Korea, or preemptively take out Kim Jong-un, or preemptively kind of take out North Korea nuclear launch sites, they will launch everything they have except their intercontinental range systems, right? So they will launch their short range systems, their medium range systems, their intermediate range systems first, with nuclear war heads and conventional explosive range warheads. They will launch them at pretty much every US asset in the region, right? So this includes the Port Of Pusan, Iwakuni air force base in Japan, Guam. And to kind of tell you that I'm not crazy and kind of envisioning this, when they release images of their recent nuclear tests — it's really interesting they kind of dangle these maps, right? So if you look at Kim Jongun's desk, for example, in February — or sorry in March — when they tested these four extended range scud missiles, there was this map on Kim Jun-un's desk. And I think this was the map that showed these missiles going to Iwakuni, right…

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Stuart Klawans at The Nation:

What happened, exactly? Detroit gives you a highly credible reconstruction—not that the filmmakers will stop at mere plausibility. They’re content with nothing less than full immersion, playing out the incident at such length that the movie might more accurately have been titled Algiers. By means of excruciating exhaustiveness, they hit the first of their sweet spots: proving to their own satisfaction, and presumably yours, that their opening statement was correct. The white cops in the Algiers were unrelentingly racist and violent, and the black Detroiters devoid of options other than enduring their victimhood, collaborating with the cops, or rebelling.

Bigelow and Boal envision the purity of victimhood in the figures of Larry Reed (Algee Smith) and Fred Temple (Jacob Latimore), members of an aspiring vocal group who are holed up at the Algiers. They’re portrayed as achingly dewy and innocent—especially Larry, who might play at being a ladies’ man but mostly wants to lift his sweet tenor toward heaven. The self-torture of collaboration is represented by Melvin Dismukes (John Boyega), a security guard who believes the best way to help his people is to align himself with the inescapable white authorities and demonstrate his rectitude to them at all times. Bigelow and Boal make him out to be the type of guy who would iron his boxer shorts. You know from the start that he’ll end up betrayed and disillusioned, just as any experienced moviegoer will understand that Larry and Fred will never get back to the stage of the Fox Theatre.

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T.J. Clark at the LRB:

In the ten years preceding Guernica Picasso had been, to put it baldly, the artist of monstrosity. His paintings had set forth a view of the human as constantly haunted, and maybe defined, by a monstrous, captivating otherness – most markedly, perhaps, in the Punch and Judy show of sex. ‘Au fond, il n’y a que l’amour,’ he said. This was as close, I reckon, as Picasso ever came to a philosophy of life, and by ‘love’ he certainly meant primarily the sexual kind, the carnal, the whole pantomime of desire. In his art monstrosity was capable of attaining to beauty, or monumentality, or a kind of strange pathos. But do any of these inflections lead to Guernica? Are not the monstrous and the tragic two separate things? To paint Guernica, in other words, wasn’t Picasso obliged to change key as an artist and sing a tune he’d never before tried; and more than that, to suppress in himself the fascination with horror that had shaped so much of his previous work? (The belonging together of ecstasy and antipathy, or fixation and bewilderment – elation, absurdity, self-loss, panic, disbelief – is basic to Picasso’s understanding of sex, and therefore of human life au fond. And the very word ‘fascination’ speaks to the normality of the intertwining: its Latin root, fascinus, means simply ‘erect penis’.) But isn’t Guernica great precisely to the extent that it manages, for once, to show us women (and animals) in pain and fear without eliciting that stunned, half-repelled, half-attracted ‘fascination’?

Many have thought so. But the story is more complicated. I doubt that an artist of Picasso’s sort ever raises his or her account of humanity to a higher power simply by purging, or repressing, what had been dangerous or horrible in an earlier vision. There must be a way from monstrosity to tragedy. The one must be capable of being folded into the other, lending it aspects of the previous vision’s power.

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Sophie Alka in The Feminist Wire:

Whether as a lover, mother, daughter, sister, or in religious life, there is a social narrative happening that is telling us that, as women, we can contribute, thrive most in the service of intellect, invention, transcendence, and genius – but as it is embodied in others, not in ourselves. This is our best hope of coming near to inhabiting these spheres, for they are inherently masculine, and therefore preclude us.

This may seem like a dated theme to be needling, yet there are parallels in contemporary popular culture which beg thought. This narrative, “the myth of the master” as Germaine Greer calls it, has its roots in the Enlightenment, and before: the renaissance man, the maverick genius in his ivory tower, the Master, who looks for inspiration and satiety to the feminine Muse. It has passed through many incarnations over the centuries from its origins in the classical Greek concept of the Muses. The Master/Muse narrative is, for example, immanent in the cults of devotion to the “Virgin Queen” Elizabeth I who was cast by figures such as Raleigh as Muse to the nascent colonial and industrial ambitions of the English. This nationalistic discourse of Queen/country as Muse later reappeared in the language of Victorian Britannia. In this way, the notion of Master/ Muse fueled imperialism’s justification for slavery and frontier violence against First Nations people and lands. The concept of Muse was also employed to describe these lands as “virgin territory” or “terra nullius” – a blank canvas for European colonialists to project the identities and vanities of their utopias upon; as well as embodied in the Other – those who violence was perpetrated against. In this context, the Muse was objectified as a source of raw materials convertible to wealth, the fulfillment of romanticized ideals, and sexual gratification. Another example of this objectification via the Muse was occurring in the salons and studios of 17th to early 20th century Western artists, with the Muse embodied as the Master’s mistress: a source of raw inspiration (rarely remunerated), sexual gratification, and the embodiment of romanticized virtues. So many of our Western cultural icons live out this trope, both historically as creators, and in the literary characters they created, creatures of persistent patriarchy. As the saying goes, look behind every great man, and you shall find a great woman. But why always behind?

Greer writes that “the artistic ego is to most women repulsive for themselves, and compelling in men” (35). Seeing and recognizing single-minded creative and spiritual impulse in another is captivating, especially when one has been unknowingly taught that such light in oneself is not valued by society to the same degree. In her opening to Middlemarch (one of Western literature’s great explorations of the Master/Muse trope) George Eliot quotes the early seventeenth century play The Maid’s Tragedy: “Since I can do no good because a woman, reach constantly at something that is near it” (1).

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Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

From The Guardian:

Moni Mohsin

In the early 90s, I went from Lahore to Delhi to attend a wedding in the family of some Hindu friends. At one of its many events, I bumped into a friend from Lahore who was also visiting the city. We were chatting in Punjabi when we noticed a well-dressed, middle-aged man lurking nearby, apparently eavesdropping on our conversation. Noticing our discomfiture, he apologised.

“When you mentioned Lahore, I couldn’t tear myself away,” he said. “You see, we are Hindus, but my family was Lahori. We had a house in Model Town and I attended Aitchison college. We left at partition. I have never gone back. When my wife passed away, 17 years ago, I thought that even though I had no children or siblings I would get by. But now I feel the creeping loneliness of old age and what I think of most is the happiness of my childhood. I have a yearning to return to Lahore. I want to see it once before I die.”

Everywhere I went in Delhi I heard similar stories, but that is not surprising. At partition, Delhi received a huge influx of Hindu and Sikh refugees from Punjab. Some moved on to other parts of India, but most stayed and put down roots. In the 90s, many of those elderly migrants were alive; whenever I bumped into them and they heard I was from Lahore, they crowded round, asking me to speak in “real Lahori Punjabi”. Others asked after childhood haunts they hadn’t seen for almost 50 years – Anarkali Bazaar, Shalimar Gardens, Mayo School of Arts, Model Town. “Our home was on Queen’s Road. It had a semicircular driveway and black, wrought-iron balconies. Is it still there?” “Do the fireflies still dance on the canal on summer nights?” “Do you ever go to Faletti’s hotel? And its famous cabarets?” When I told the late writer and historian Khushwant Singh– a Delhi wallah who was once a Lahori – of my encounters in Delhi, he smiled and said: “You should see them at the cinema. Whenever Lahore gets mentioned, they all burst into tears together.”

Seventy years ago, on 14 August 1947, as 200 years of British rule came to an end, India was divided into two independent states, Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India. It was one of the most painful births in modern history.

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Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic:

This week, headlines across a diverse array of media outlets proclaimed that at least one Google employee was so antagonistic to women that he circulated a 10-page “anti-diversity screed.”

That is how Gizmodo characterized the now infamous internal memo when publishing it Saturday. Similar language was used in headlines at Fox News, CNN, ABC News, the BBC, NBC News, Time, Slate, Engadget, The Huffington Post, PBS, Fast Company, and beyond (including a fleeting appearance in a headline here at The Atlantic).

But love or hate the memo, which makes a number of substantive claims, some of which I regard as wrongheaded (and which would’ve benefitted greatly from an editor with more emotional intelligence than the author to help him avoid alienating his audience, even if he was determined to raise all of the same arguments), the many characterizations of the memo as “anti-diversity” are inaccurate.

Using that shorthand is highly misleading.

As many who read past the headlines would later observe, its author, who was later fired, began, “I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes. When addressing the gap in representation in the population, we need to look at population level differences in distributions. If we can’t have an honest discussion about this, then we can never truly solve the problem.”

The balance of his memo argues that he is not against pursuing greater gender diversity at Google; he says it is against the current means Google is using to pursue that end and the way the company conceives of tradeoffs between the good of diversity and other goods.

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Jessica Berg in Phys.org:

The announcement by researchers in Portland, Oregon that they've successfully modified the genetic material of a human embryo took some people by surprise.

With headlines referring to "groundbreaking" research and "designer babies," you might wonder what the scientists actually accomplished. This was a big step forward, but hardly unexpected. As this kind of work proceeds, it continues to raise questions about ethical issues and how we should we react.

For a number of years now we have had the ability to alter genetic material in a cell, using a technique called CRISPR.

The DNA that makes up our genome comprises long sequences of base pairs, each base indicated by one of four letters. These letters form a genetic alphabet, and the "words" or "sentences" created from a particular order of letters are the genes that determine our characteristics.

Sometimes words can be "misspelled" or sentences slightly garbled, resulting in a disease or disorder. Genetic engineering is designed to correct those mistakes. CRISPR is a tool that enables scientists to target a specific area of a gene, working like the search-and-replace function in Microsoft Word, to remove a section and insert the "correct" sequence.

In the last decade, CRISPR has been the primary tool for those seeking to modify genes – human and otherwise. Among other things, it has been used in experiments to make mosquitoes resistant to malaria, genetically modify plants to be resistant to disease, explore the possibility of engineered pets and livestock, and potentially treat some human diseases (including HIV, hemophilia and leukemia).

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Kurt Anderson in The Atlantic:

When did America become untethered from reality?

I first noticed our national lurch toward fantasy in 2004, after President George W. Bush’s political mastermind, Karl Rove, came up with the remarkable phrase reality-based community. People in “the reality-based community,” he told a reporter, “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality … That’s not the way the world really works anymore.” A year later, The Colbert Report went on the air. In the first few minutes of the first episode, Stephen Colbert, playing his right-wing-populist commentator character, performed a feature called “The Word.” His first selection: truthiness. “Now, I’m sure some of the ‘word police,’ the ‘wordinistas’ over at Webster’s, are gonna say, ‘Hey, that’s not a word!’ Well, anybody who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true. Or what did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books—they’re all fact, no heart … Face it, folks, we are a divided nation … divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart … Because that’s where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen—the gut.”

Whoa, yes, I thought: exactly. America had changed since I was young, when truthiness and reality-based community wouldn’t have made any sense as jokes. For all the fun, and all the many salutary effects of the 1960s—the main decade of my childhood—I saw that those years had also been the big-bang moment for truthiness. And if the ’60s amounted to a national nervous breakdown, we are probably mistaken to consider ourselves over it.

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