Dan Dennett in the New York Review of Books:

I thank Galen Strawson for his passionate attack on my views, since it provides a large, clear target for my rebuttal. I would never have dared put Strawson’s words in the mouth of Otto (the fictional critic I invented as a sort of ombudsman for the skeptical reader of Consciousness Explained) for fear of being scolded for creating a strawman. A full-throated, table-thumping Strawson serves me much better. He clearly believes what he says, thinks it is very important, and is spectacularly wrong in useful ways. His most obvious mistake is his misrepresentation of my main claim:

If [Dennett] is right, no one has ever really suffered, in spite of agonizing diseases, mental illness, murder, rape, famine, slavery, bereavement, torture, and genocide. And no one has ever caused anyone else pain.

I don’t deny the existence of consciousness; of course, consciousness exists; it just isn’t what most people think it is, as I have said many times. I do grant that Strawson expresses quite vividly a widespread conviction about what consciousness is. Might people—and Strawson, in particular—be wrong about this? That is the issue.

He invokes common sense against which to contrast “the silliest claim ever made” (I’m honored!), but here is some other common sense that pushes back: when you encounter people who claim to have seen a magician saw a lady in half, counsel them to postpone their extravagant hypotheses—backwards time travel, multi-world wormholes, quantum entanglement, “real magic”—until they have exhausted the more mundane possibilities. Unrevolutionary science has discovered good explanations for such heretofore baffling phenomena as reproduction, metabolism, growth, and self-repair, for instance. So while it is possible that we will have to overthrow that science in order to account for consciousness, we should explore the default possibilities first.

More here.

Randall Colburn in The A. V. Club:

“There is pride to be had where the prejudicial is practiced with precision in the trenchant triage of tactile terminations.”

No, this is not a tongue twister you’d hear muttered in the wings of a high school stage play. This is, no lie, just one of several deadening excerpts from Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff, the debut novel of actor Sean Penn, who, terrifyingly, seems to be giving up acting in favor of poorly aping Thomas Pynchon and successfully embodying Charles Bukowski.

The 160-page novel tells the story of its namesake character, a septic tank entrepreneur and contract killer who Forrest Gumps his way through Hurricane Katrina, Baghdad at the outset of the Iraq War, and the “penis-edency” of a Donald Trumpian commander in chief. Huffington Post’s Claire Fallon describes it as “an exercise in ass-showing, a 160-page self-own.” Other reviews are kinder, if similarly unimpressed. The New York Times calls it “agonizing” and “conspicuously un-fun,” while Entertainment Weekly criticizes its “woozy gender politics” while dubbing it “shrill,” “confounding,” and “a little hypocritical.”

But one needn’t dig far to discover the dissertation’s most dunk-worthy declarations, which allow for an astonishing abundance of alliterative announcements.

More here.

Paul Krugman in the New York Times:

These days almost everyone has the (justified) sense that America is coming apart at the seams. But this isn’t a new story, or just about politics. Things have been falling apart on multiple fronts since the 1970s: Political polarization has marched side by side with economic polarization, as income inequality has soared.

And both political and economic polarization have a strong geographic dimension. On the economic side, some parts of America, mainly big coastal cities, have been getting much richer, but other parts have been left behind. On the political side, the thriving regions by and large voted for Hillary Clinton, while the lagging regions voted for Donald Trump.

I’m not saying that everything is great in coastal cities: Many people remain economically stranded even within metropolitan areas that look successful in the aggregate. And soaring housing costs, thanks in large part to Nimbyism, are a real and growing problem. Still, regional economic divergence is real and correlates closely, though not perfectly, with political divergence.

But what’s behind this divergence? What’s the matter with Trumpland?

More here.

Tony Joseph in The Quint:

Before you begin to read this, take a chair and sit down comfortably. Because this is going to take some time, and it is going to address some of the most fundamental questions about how we, the Indians, or South Asians more generally, came to be.

The answers you are going to read are taken from an extensive new study that has just been released, titled ‘The Genomic Formation of Central and South Asia’. It is co-authored by 92 scientists from around the world and was co-directed by Prof David Reich of Harvard Medical School. Reich runs a lab at Harvard that has no equal in its ability to sequence and analyse ancient DNA at scale and speed, and he has co-authored multiple studies in recent years that have changed the way we understand the prehistory of much of the world. His just-released book, ‘Who We Are and How We Got Here’, is currently making waves.

Among those 92 co-authors are scientists who are stars of an equal measure in their own disciplines, like James Mallory, archaeologist and author of the classic ‘In search of Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth’; and David Anthony, anthropologist and author of the ground-breaking ‘The Horse, The Wheel and the Language: How Bronze Age Raiders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World’.

Archaeobotanist Dorian Fuller and archaeologist Nicole Boivin are familiar names in India for the work they have done in the country.

More here.

Tracks

Night, two o'clock: moonlight. The train has stopped
in the middle of the plain. Distance bright points of a town
twinkle cold on the horizon.

As when someone has gone into a dream so far
that he'll never remember he was there
when he come back to his room.

As when someone goes into a sickness so deep
that all his former days become twinkling points, a swarm,
cold and feeble on the horizon.

The train stand perfectly still.
Two o'clock: full moonlight, few stars.

by Tomas Tranströmer
from A Book of Luminous Things
Harcourt, 1996

Brendan P. Foht at The New Atlantis:

There are few novels that have been more interpreted and re-­imagined than Frankenstein, and it has become something of a cliché in ­bioethics — especially in debates about embryo research and reproductive ­technologies — to invoke Victor Frankenstein’s hubris in “playing God” by creating a person out of inanimate matter. And yet, reading the story again two hundred years after its publication, we find that its moral teachings have been stubbornly ignored, or even inverted, by the scientists and ethicists who have the most to learn from it.

As a starting point for thinking about the counterintuitive place of the novel in contemporary discourse about technology and ethics, consider a 2012 essay by the French sociologist of science Bruno Latour, “Love Your Monsters,” in which he argues that the real lesson of the novel is that “we must care for our technologies as we do our children.” According to Latour, “Dr. Frankenstein’s crime was not that he invented a creature through some combination of hubris and high technology, but rather that he abandoned the creature to itself,” referring to the moment in the story when Frankenstein runs in horror, without good reason, from the creature he has made.

more here.

Lucas Mann at The Paris Review:

When we were first getting into The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, the husband of one of the show’s stars, who had seemed to be a real asshole (like potentially abusive) on-screen, hanged himself. The following season, his widow was back, shocked yet resilient, weepy but still game.

At the height of The Real Housewives of New Jersey (your favorite), Teresa went to jail for the mail, wire, and bank fraud that had funded the lifestyle she so proudly flaunted for the cameras. Her special return-home episode airs next month.

In the middle of our Here Comes Honey Boo Boo obsession, Honey Boo Boo’s mother’s boyfriend got arrested for rape, child molestation, aggravated child molestation, and aggravated sexual assault battery against Honey Boo Boo’s sister. The show got canceled, but Honey Boo Boo did appear in a special obesity episode of The Doctors, and now her mother is on Marriage Boot Camp.

more here.

Mitch Leslie in Science:

About 12 years ago, Gary Glick and his wife noticed something wrong with their son, Jeremy. He seemed to be lagging behind his twin sister, recalls the immunologist and chemical biologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "They were growing in unison, and he sort of stopped." Jeremy, who was 9 or 10 at the time, also looked sickly and pale and began complaining of nagging pains in his stomach and elsewhere. Rachel Lipson Glick, a physician, was stumped by their son's mysterious ailment. So were other doctors. It took about 3 years to rule out myriad cancers, endocrine malfunctions, and other potential causes and to determine that Jeremy had Crohn disease, an inflammation of the digestive tract stoked by misbehaving immune cells. The diagnosis made life harder for Jeremy, now 22 and a senior at college. To control the symptoms, he injects the antibody drug adalimumab (Humira). He will likely need it, or another immune-inhibiting treatment, for the rest of his life.

By coincidence, one of those alternatives might stem from his father's work. Gary Glick, like an increasing number of other researchers, is convinced that the immune cells driving conditions such as Crohn disease share a feature that could be their undoing: their metabolism. He has spent the past 2 decades searching for drugs that target metabolic adaptations of immune cells. Clinical trials by Lycera, a company Glick founded, are now assessing the first of those drugs for psoriasis and ulcerative colitis, an intestinal illness related to Crohn disease. Drug companies are working to develop other candidates. Researchers are also looking to deploy existing drugs that tamper with metabolism, such as the diabetes treatments metformin and 2-deoxyglucose (2DG). "It's a very exciting time," says immunologist Jonathan Powell of Johns Hopkins University's School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. "Potentially, all immunologic diseases are targets for metabolic therapy."

Cancer researchers have also tried to disrupt cell metabolism, even testing some of the same drugs immunologists are investigating. But many scientists are convinced the strategy will work better for immune diseases than for tumors because drugs to treat those illnesses need only to suppress a relatively small number of overexuberant cells, not eliminate them.

More here.

M. M. Owen in The Point:

The Hungarian philosopher György Lukács called the novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.” Other forces played more obviously into the form’s rise to literary preeminence—the consolidation of a middle class; advances in printing technology—but the link between the emergence of the novel and the decline of religiosity is strong. Three hundred years ago, reading novels (as opposed to the classics, or Shakespeare) was widely seen as vulgar, indicative of a deficient mind. So was not believing in a divine creator. Today, at least among the sort of people who tend to read literary magazines, both these thing are more likely to be regarded as signs of intellectual and moral refinement. For the critic James Wood, this is no coincidence: the novel is “the slayer of religions,” a form that swept away Biblical certitudes and replaced them with fictional narratives that move “in the shadow of doubt,” asking readers for a belief that is fundamentally and irreligiously metaphorical.

One author who would agree wholeheartedly with Wood is England’s Ian McEwan, who asserted in 2013 that the novel is a product of the Enlightenment that “has always been a secular and skeptical form.” McEwan is a committed nonbeliever, so committed that he qualifies as a junior member of the intellectual movement-cum-publishing-ploy known as New Atheism, which emerged in the wake of 9/11. Christopher Hitchens dedicated his God Is Not Great to McEwan, and McEwan blurbed Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, calling it “lucid and wise, truly magisterial.” The critics Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate, in their 2010 study The New Atheist Novel, write of McEwan “it is tempting to say that—if his fiction did not exist—Dawkins and company would have had to invent it, so completely does it vindicate their worldview.” McEwan’s protagonists are universally, as Edward says in On Chesil Beach, “grateful to live in a time when religion has generally faded into insignificance.” Ostensibly, this view is never seriously challenged, the gratitude never corroded.

More here.

Charles P. Pierce in Esquire:

The most tragic and infuriating piece of writing of the week came in Tuesday’s New York Times. It carried a very plain and simple headline.

"Fifteen Years Ago, America Destroyed My Country"

My short visit only confirmed my conviction and fear that the invasion would spell disaster for Iraqis. Removing Saddam was just a byproduct of another objective: dismantling the Iraqi state and its institutions. That state was replaced with a dysfunctional and corrupt semi-state. We were still filming in Baghdad when L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, announced the formation of the so-called Governing Council in July 2003. The names of its members were each followed by their sect and ethnicity. Many of the Iraqis we spoke to on that day were upset with institutionalization of an ethno-sectarian quota system. Ethnic and sectarian tensions already existed, but their translation into political currency was toxic. Those unsavory characters on the governing council, most of whom were allies of the United States from the preceding decade, went on to loot the country, making it one of the most corrupt in the world.

Except for Sinan Antoon’s richly deserved jeremiad, the 15th anniversary of the worst foreign policy disaster in modern American history went sailing by largely unremarked, at least in this country. After all, over here, everyone was too busy keeping track of the latest news involving the vulgar talking yam the country had installed as president, how he was still truckling to Russian oligarchs, how he was still being run to ground by Bob Mueller, and about how he was being outwitted and out-lawyered by a lady from the adult entertainment industry.

More here.

David Reich in the New York Times:

In a Sunday Review essay last weekend, David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard, argued that science is changing how we think about “race” and urged a candid discussion of the findings, whatever they may be. Hundreds of readers left comments, many expressing worry about the possibility that the results could be misinterpreted or nefariously applied. Here are Dr. Reich’s responses to some of the comments. — The Editors

Unfortunately, science has always been misused. From slavery, to eugenics, to economic Darwinism, to anti-abortion politics, the latest scientific knowledge has been employed in the service of evil. The idea of forestalling such efforts is valiant but fruitless. Science must continue its pursuit of truth, and scientists, as always, must speak out when their discoveries are exploited for harmful purposes. — Syfredrick, Providence, R.I.

We scientists always need to keep in mind our social responsibilities and to think about whether what we are doing has positive or negative effects on our world.

With respect to today’s study of human variation, I am optimistic — I believe that it has been socially positive. It is making every racist view of the world untenable. In my just-published book, I explain how the ancient DNA revolution — which has provided far greater power to reveal what happened in our deep past than what was available before — has done far more to undermine racist beliefs than to support them. As I wrote in the final paragraph of my book:

The study of human variation has not always been a force for good. In Nazi Germany, someone with my expertise at interpreting genetic data would have been tasked with categorizing people by ancestry had that been possible with the science of the 1930s. But in our time, the findings from ancient DNA leave little solace for racist or nationalistic misinterpretation. In this field, the pursuit of truth for its own sake has overwhelmingly had the effect of exploding stereotypes, undercutting prejudice, and highlighting the connections among peoples not previously known to be related. I am optimistic that the direction of my work and that of my colleagues is to promote understanding, and I welcome our opportunity to do our best by the people, ancient and modern, whom we have been given the privilege to study.

My book also gives concrete examples of how it is no longer so easy to twist science to support long-cherished stereotypes because ancient DNA is now debunking the stories that used to be made up about the nature of human variation.

More here.

Matt Ridley in his blog:

The modern world stands on a cairn built by energy conversions in the past. Just as it took many loaves of bread and nosebags of hay to build Salisbury Cathedral, so it took many cubic metres of gas or puffs of wind to power the computer and develop the software on which I write these words. The Industrial Revolution was founded on the discovery of how to convert heat into work, initially via steam. Before that, heat (wood, coal) and work (oxen, people, wind, water) were separate worlds.

To be valuable, any conversion technology must produce reliable, just-in-time power that greatly exceeds — by a factor of seven and upwards — the amount of energy that goes into its extraction, conversion and delivery to a consumer. It is this measure of productivity, EROEI (energy return on energy invested), that limits our choice.

You could make your own electricity on an exercise bicycle, eating organic ice cream as fuel, but such a system would have wildly negative EROEI once you include the energetics of farming cattle and making ice cream. It would also produce a pathetic trickle of power: about 50 watts (joules per second). The average Briton uses about 4,000 watts, as much energy as if she had 240 slaves on exercise bicycles in the back room, pedalling eight-hour shifts. That’s roughly what “civilisation” looked like in ancient Egypt or China.

More here.