Arika Okrent in Aeon:

Science is a messy business, but just like everything with loose ends and ragged edges, we tend to understand it by resorting to ideal types. On the one hand, there’s the archetype of the scientific method: a means of accounting for observations, generating precise, testable predictions, and yielding new discoveries about the natural consequences of natural laws. On the other, there’s our ever-replenishing font of story archetypes: the accidental event that results in a sudden clarifying insight; the hero who pursues the truth in the face of resistance or even danger; the surprising fact that challenges the dominant theory and brings it toppling to the ground.

The interplay of these archetypes has produced a spirited, long-running controversy about the nature and origins of language. Recently, it’s been flung back into public awareness following the publication of Tom Wolfe’s book The Kingdom of Speech (2016).

In Wolfe’s breathless re-telling, the dominant scientific theory is Noam Chomsky’s concept of a ‘universal grammar’ – the idea that all languages share a deep underlying structure that’s almost certainly baked into our biology by evolution. The crucial hypothesis is that its core, essential feature is recursion, the capacity to embed phrases within phrases ad infinitum, and so express complex relations between ideas (such as ‘Tom says that Dan claims that Noam believes that…’). And the challenging fact is the discovery of an Amazonian language, Pirahã, that does not have recursion. The scientific debate plays out as a classic David-and-Goliath story, with Chomsky as a famous, ivory-tower intellectual whose grand armchair proclamations are challenged by a rugged, lowly field linguist and former Christian missionary named Daniel Everett.

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Gary Silverman in the FT:

I went down to Alabama a few weeks ago and had a religious experience. A man of God welcomed me into his home, poured us both cups of English tea and talked about what has been happening to Jesus Christ in the land of Donald Trump.

My host was Wayne Flynt, an Alabaman who has made the people of the southern US his life’s work. A 76-year-old emeritus professor of history at Auburn University, he has written empathetically about his region in books such as Poor But Proud. A Baptist minister, he still teaches Sunday school at his church and delivered the eulogy at last year’s funeral of his friend Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird.

I took my place in the book-lined study of Flynt’s redwood house in Auburn, Alabama, to hear his thoughts on the local economy, but the conversation turned to a central mystery of US politics. Trump would not be president without the strong support of the folks Flynt has chronicled — white residents of the Bible Belt, raised in the do-it-yourself religious traditions that distinguish the US from Europe. I wondered how a thrice-married former casino owner — who had been recorded bragging about grabbing women by the genitals — had won over the faithful.

Flynt’s answer is that his people are changing. The words of Jesus, as recorded in the Gospels, are less central to their thinking and behaviour, he says. Church is less compelling. Marriage is less important. Reading from a severely abridged Bible, their political concerns have narrowed down to abortion and issues involving homosexuality. Their faith, he says, has been put in a president who embodies an unholy trinity of materialism, hedonism and narcissism. Trump’s victory, in this sense, is less an expression of the old-time religion than evidence of a move away from it.

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Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian:

By the end of last year, anyone who had been paying even passing attention to the news headlines was highly likely to conclude that everything was terrible, and that the only attitude that made sense was one of profound pessimism – tempered, perhaps, by cynical humour, on the principle that if the world is going to hell in a handbasket, one may as well try to enjoy the ride. Naturally, Brexit and the election of Donald Trump loomed largest for many. But you didn’t need to be a remainer or a critic of Trump’s to feel depressed by the carnage in Syria; by the deaths of thousands of migrants in the Mediterranean; by North Korean missile tests, the spread of the zika virus, or terror attacks in Nice, Belgium, Florida, Pakistan and elsewhere – nor by the spectre of catastrophic climate change, lurking behind everything else. (And all that’s before even considering the string of deaths of beloved celebrities that seemed like a calculated attempt, on 2016’s part, to rub salt in the wound: in the space of a few months, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Prince, Muhammad Ali, Carrie Fisher and George Michael, to name only a handful, were all gone.) And few of the headlines so far in 2017 – Grenfell tower, the Manchester and London attacks, Brexit chaos, and 24/7 Trump – provide any reason to take a sunnier view.

Yet one group of increasingly prominent commentators has seemed uniquely immune to the gloom. In December, in an article headlined “Never forget that we live in the best of times”, the Times columnist Philip Collins provided an end-of-year summary of reasons to be cheerful: during 2016, he noted, the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty had fallen below 10% for the first time; global carbon emissions from fossil fuels had failed to rise for the third year running; the death penalty had been ruled illegal in more than half of all countries – and giant pandas had been removed from the endangered species list.

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Martin Wolf in the FT:

Rapid change in relative economic power and huge shifts in the relative size of populations shape our world. At the same time, the sources of dynamism — technological change, productivity growth and globalisation — are slowing, to a worrying degree. One result, powerfully reinforced by the crisis, has been real income stagnation in many high-income countries.

Rising populist pressure across the high-income economies makes managing these shifts far more difficult. Among the most significant developments is flat or falling real incomes since the financial crisis. Up to two-thirds of the population of many high-income countries seem to have suffered flat or falling real incomes between 2005 and 2014. It is little wonder so many voters are grumpy. They are neither used to this nor wish to become used to this.

Output Between 1990 and 2022, the high-income countries’ share of world output, measured at purchasing power parity, is forecast by the International Monetary Fund to fall from 64 per cent to just 39 per cent. Remarkably, Asian emerging and developing countries account for the entirety of the rise in the share of emerging and developing countries: thus, the share of Asian emerging and developing countries is forecast to rise from 12 per cent to 39 per cent of the world total over this period.

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Sheldon Lee Glashow in Inference:

Quantitative science depends on measurement; measurements are expressed in numbers. Our number system is based on ten but some earlier systems were based on twenty—perhaps because our barefoot ancestors counted on their toes as well as on their fingers.⁴ Linguistic remnants, like eighty as four-score in English, firs in Danish and quatre-vingt in French, reveal their vigesimal ancestry, as did the once widely used Réaumur temperature scale, where the boiling point of water was set at 80 degrees. Many living languages, such as Mayan, Nahuatl, Georgian and Yoruba, retain heavily vigesimal counting schemes.

Computers, using simple yes-no binary numbers, are both digital and digitless.

Four millennia ago, our Sumerian and Babylonian antecedents favored 12 for the number of hours of daylight, signs of the zodiac, and months of the year. They also introduced the 360 degrees of the circle, and, for a while, used a year of that many days. Their number system was decimal from 1 to 59, but otherwise sexagesimal, using positive or negative powers of 60.⁵ It was a sophisticated choice.

In the measurement of time, early civilizations recognized three natural but incommensurate periods, each of which now has a precise meaning: 1) the solar year, the interval between successive vernal equinoxes, 2) the lunar month, that between successive new moons, and 3) the solar day, that between successive sunsets. The mean solar year is a few days more than 12 lunar months and a few hours more than 365 days. To deal with this issue the Sumerians came up with a remarkably accurate lunisolar calendar based on the near equality between 19 solar years and 235 lunar months. Their year consisted of 12 lunar months, one for each sign of the zodiac.

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Kyle Chayka at The Millions:

The short book demonstrates ways in which to live, but rather than self-help’s prescriptive explanations, it is content to evoke possibilities. The Swiss writer Fleur Jaeggy’s aptly titled These Possible Lives gives prismatic recitations of the biographies of Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob, reducing what could be thousands of pages into a scant 60 of hallucinatory description. Shawn Wen’s A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause sketches an impressionistic biography of Marcel Marceau, a famed French mime. I like the book’s voyeurism into the peculiar life, but also observing the challenge—and Wen’s success—of describing in words Marceau’s absence thereof. (The short book is also great for writer’s block.)

The paragon of the short-book form, for my taste, is In Praise of Shadows by the Japanese novelist Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. In the 42-page essay first published in 1933, Tanizaki contrasts the Japanese appreciation of darkness—the dim of rice-paper windows, candle lanterns, and black lacquered dishes—with the Westerner’s “quest for a brighter light:” electric lamps, glass windows, and white porcelain. The book’s brevity is synecdochic: It contains the world, from Noh drama to Albert Einstein, “murmuring soup,” the difficulties of building a house, an obscure local recipe for sushi, and what the author perceived as the roots of Japanese identity.

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Adina Roskies in Salon:

These days, most of us accept that minds are dependent on brain function and wouldn’t object to the claim that “You are your brain.” After all, we’ve known for a long time that brains control how we behave, what we remember, even what we desire. But what does that mean? And is it really true? Despite giving lip service to the importance of brains, in our practical life this knowledge has done little to affect how we view our world. In part, that’s probably because we’ve been largely powerless to affect the way that brains work, at least in a systematic way. That’s all changing. Neuroscience has been advancing rapidly, and has begun to elucidate the circuits for control of behavior, representation of mental content and so on. More dramatically, neuroscientists have now started to develop novel methods of intervening in brain function. As treatments advance, interventions into brain function will dramatically illustrate the dependence of who we are on our brains — and they may put pressure on some basic beliefs and concepts that have been fundamental to how we view the world.

…Transgenic manipulations that make neural tissue sensitive to light will enable the precise control of individual neurons. Powerful gene editing techniques may enable us to correct some neurodevelopmental problems in utero. And although many of these methods seem futuristic, hundreds of thousands of cases of the future are already here: over 100,000 cyborgs are already walking among us, in some sense powered by or controlled by the steady zapping of their brain circuits with electrical pulses.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

Researchers in both academia and industry are turning to immune-suppressing cells to clamp down on autoimmune disorders, and the effort is building to a fever pitch. On 24 July, pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly of Indianapolis, Indiana, announced that it would pay up to US$400 million to support the development of a drug — which entered clinical trials in March — that stimulates these cells, called regulatory T cells. And in January, Celgene of Summit, New Jersey, announced plans to buy a company working on a similar therapy for $300 million. Other companies, from tiny biotechs to pharmaceutical heavyweights, are also investing in an approach that could yield treatments for a variety of disorders caused by an immune attack on the body’s own cells. Such conditions include type 1 diabetes, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.

…T cells are often thought of as key foot soldiers in the immune system’s battle against foreign invaders. But there are many kinds of T cell, each armed with a different set of skills. Regulatory T cells serve to dampen immune responses — rather than attack invaders — and are important for preventing autoimmunity. People with disorders caused by an autoimmune attack often also have reduced levels of regulatory T-cell activity, leading scientists to suspect that bolstering such cells could reduce the immune system’s attack on the body. To boost these cells, many researchers — now including those at Lilly and Celgene — are turning to a molecule called interleukin-2 (IL-2). High doses of IL-2 stimulate the ‘effector’ T cells that attack invaders, and in 1992, US regulators approved the treatment for some people with cancer, to prompt immune responses against the tumours. But low doses of IL-2 — roughly ten times lower than those used to treat cancer — instead stimulate regulatory T cells, and have relatively little effect on effector T cells.

More here.

David Mikics in Tablet:

A few weeks ago I visited David Gelernter in his home in Woodbridge, near New Haven, Connecticut. Gelernter, who teaches computer science at Yale, is probably best known for being the victim of a mail bomb sent in 1993 by the Unabomber (now the subject of a new Discovery TV series premiering tomorrow night); ever since then he has a reconstructed right hand covered by a black glove and a chest that, he once wrote, looks “like a construction site.” Gelernter is a brilliant iconoclast. He foresaw the World Wide Web and social media in his 1991 book Mirror Worlds, and he has written books about a wide range of subjects, including Judaism and the 1939 World’s Fair. He is also an outspoken conservative who has flirted with the idea of working for President Donald Trump. Some see Gelernter as nothing more than a right-wing grump—he loves to rail against liberal pieties out of nostalgia for the small-town America of his youth (he is 62 and grew up on Long Island). For others, he is a brilliant thinker about everything from art and music to cognitive science.

…I mentioned that children at my son’s elementary school in Brooklyn are taking coding classes in third grade. “It’s absolutely asinine,” Gelernter scowled. “You could also teach a third grader how to drive, using a miniature car, but why would you? Teach them discrete math, logic, graph theory, not baby coding. They have to work up to the coding. In America these days we don’t like working up to things.” Gelernter’s own classes sound very Italian Renaissance. He preaches the need for “elegance, boldness, surprise, and beauty” in graphical user interfaces. The ancient Greek vase painter known as the Berlin Painter figures in his computer interface class, as do Gothic cathedrals, Michelangelo’s Piazza del Campidoglio, and the trailblazing industrial designer Raymond Loewy. IBM, he said, introduced playfulness and beauty into computing in the 1960s. “Steve Jobs deserves respect,” he admitted. “He was an interesting guy. But there’s no way he was the father of bringing design to computers. IBM was the key force. They’re the ones who discovered that the computer was a way to communicate with people.”

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Mohan Rao reviews Namit Arora's book The Lottery of Birth:

Namit Arora is an unlikely writer of a book such as this, and thus is all the more convincing. A graduate of IIT, who gets into IIT on the basis of a high all-India rank in the notoriously difficult entrance exam, he goes on, as many from IIT do, to the USA, where, with financial aid, he obtains a Masters degree from an American university and then finds economic success in that land of milk and honey, Silicon Valley. Most people, he notes, would see this as a just reward for his knowledge and hard work.

But as Arora notes, ‘If I’m honest with myself, I can’t take much credit for it….I happened to be born in an upper-caste household, inheriting eons of unearned privilege over 80 per cent of all other Indians, I was a fair skinned boy raised in a society that lavished far more positive attention on fair skin and boys. I neither suffered any caste discrimination, nor faced any social and physical restrictions on account of my gender or sexual orientation’ (p. 6). What bothered him was that life’s outcomes depended ‘on the lottery of birth, where people were, marked in the womb for worldly success and failure, based on their accidental inheritance of caste, class, caste, gender, region, religion, sexuality, language, and more’ (p. 7).

This book of essays is on inequality along the various axes of caste, class and gender in the country, on the distortions these impose on Indian democracy, on the writings of some of the people who have suffered the indignities that are mounted on pre-existing inequalities and on those who have attempted, with varying degrees of success and disenchantment, to overturn this unjust order. The essays argue that these are indeed man made, not divinely created. They have been published for the most part in an on-line journal 3 Quarks Daily over the last seven years. These are essays written with honesty, intelligence, sensitivity and with ease. Arora has read all the relevant literature in history, anthropology and political theory and writes for the general reader. What is significant above all, is his respect for data, skillfully analysed.

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Gregory Laughlin in Nautilus:

The size of things in our universe runs all the way from the tiny 10^-19 meter scale that characterizes quark interactions, to the cosmic horizon 10²⁶ meters away. In these 45 possible orders of magnitude, life, as far as we know it, is confined to a relatively tiny bracket of just over nine orders of magnitude, roughly in the middle of the universal range: Bacteria and viruses can measure less than a micron, or 10^-6 meters, and the height of the largest trees reaches roughly 100 meters. The honey fungus that lives under the Blue Mountains in Oregon, and is arguably a single living organism, is about 4 kilometers across. When it comes to known sentient life, the range in scale is even smaller, at about three orders of magnitude.

Could things be any different?

Progress in the theory of computation suggests that sentience and intelligence likely require quadrillions of primitive “circuit” elements. Given that our brains are composed of neurons, which are themselves, in essence, specialized cooperative single-cell organisms, we can conclude that biological computers need to be about the physical size of our own brains in order to exhibit the capabilities that we have.

We can imagine building neurons that are smaller than our own, in artificially intelligent systems. Electronic circuit elements, for example, are now substantially smaller than neurons. But they are also simpler in their behavior, and require a superstructure of support (energy, cooling, intercommunication) that takes up a substantial volume. It’s likely that the first true artificial intelligences will occupy volumes that are not so different from the size of our own bodies, despite being based on fundamentally different materials and architectures, again suggesting that there is something special about the meter scale.

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Charles Derber in Salon:

Noam, recently you gave a very powerful talk on the theme of extinction, the nightmare looming over us from climate change and nuclear war. As I listened and read the transcript, one gets the feeling that we’re entering a new stage of history. It’s not an easy stage to contemplate. What I want to focus on in this conversation is just what can everybody do, especially in the wake of Trump’s election as President. Trump’s agenda appears to be taking out the climate initiatives that gave a little hope on climate change. And foreign policy measures that would make nuclear conflict more likely deserve attention in our discussion of extinction.

Do you believe we have moved into this new era? Do you see the threat of extinction as fundamentally changing the way the Left movements have to think about what they’re doing?

It’s very difficult to talk about the Left as an entity because it’s a collection of very disparate movements involved in all sorts of endeavors, many of them quite valuable.

The Left needs to become unified and integrated because whatever particular issue you’re working on, this crisis of potential extinction is overshadowing it. There must be international solidarity.

The situation for organizing here is not that bleak. If you take a look at the last election, Clinton won a majority of the votes. The outcome has to do with special features of the U.S. electoral system, which is pretty regressive by world standards. Among younger people, Clinton did win a substantial majority. More important, Sanders won an overwhelming majority. That’s the younger part of the population. You take a look at Trump supporters. Many of them voted for Obama.

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David Salle at The Brooklyn Rail:

Walter was a prodigious talker. There was a time when we spoke on the phone every few weeks, seldom for less than an hour. Walter would call up, sometimes in the morning, or later in the afternoon, and without much preamble or conventional small talk would launch into his latest musings on broad historical events, like the Westward Migration and its late flowering in the art of the 1950s, or the Civil War (a favorite topic) and how it shapes attitudes still, and then continue, in that looping, circuitous way of his, through various other formative periods in American history (FDR, WWII, Eisenhower), before arriving, either quickly or slowly, at his main themes, one thing linked to and calling up the others: jazz, especially his beloved Miles, Dada, Duchamp (or simply Marcel, as Walter referred to him); American painting after the War; the social and economic history of Southern California and how it intersected with the visual arts; Surrealism in America; the history of the Beats; Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg; Faulkner; the movies, and anything having to do with Dennis Hopper, Jean Stein, or Terry Southern; there was also postmodernism, the architecture of Louis Kahn, Native American shamanistic rituals, baseball—well, you get the idea. Like I said, at least an hour.

The conversations, near monologues really, would often end with him making a connection to his listener (that is, me) with something like, “Now, what you guys are up to today is in line with what Bob and Jasper were doing in the early 60s. I get that.” I never felt it was gratuitous or a sop.

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Mitch Leslie in Science:

If you sneeze your way through ragweed season or need a restraining order against your neighbor’s cat, researchers finally know what part of your immune system you should blame. A new study nails down the specific group of cells that orchestrates allergic reactions, a result that could help scientists determine not only why some people have allergies, but also how to block them. “It’s exciting for those of us who are looking at potential ways to treat allergic diseases,” says Thomas Casale, an allergist and immunologist at the University of South Florida in Tampa who wasn’t connected to the study. Allergies stem from mistaken identity, when some of our immune cells respond to benign substances—known as allergens—that include pollen, mold spores, and certain foods. Researchers know that the culprits that touch off allergic symptoms belong to a group of T cells known as TH2 cells. But not all TH2 cells are culpable. Some guard us against parasites and other invaders. Sorting the beneficial TH2 cells from the rogues has proved difficult, however. In the new study, researchers led by T cell biologist Erik Wambre and immunologist William Kwok of the Benaroya Research Institute at Virginia Mason in Seattle, Washington, obtained blood samples from patients who were sensitive to pollen from alder trees, a common cause of winter and spring allergies. An allergic patient’s TH2 cells recognize and respond to an allergen because they carry receptor, proteins that match allergen molecules. To tag immune cells carrying receptors for alder pollen, the team added customized fluorescent proteins known as MHCII tetramers to the patients’ blood samples.

Along with receptors, TH2 cells are dotted with marker proteins. Like sports fans wearing their favorite team’s jersey, immune cells proclaim their identity with these marker proteins. The researchers analyzed the tagged cells to determine their combination of markers. Compared with other TH2 cells, one group sported more copies of two marker proteins and fewer copies of four others. Although none of the proteins was exclusive to the cells, together they provided a signature for this clique of TH2 cells, which the researchers dubbed TH2A cells. T cells can sometimes shift identifies, but the researchers found that TH2A cells remained distinct, even after several cellular generations. “When these cells are born, they are born to be pathogenic,” Wambre says. As they report online today in Science Translational Medicine, Wambre, Kwok, and colleagues found that the cells were abundant in the blood of patients with allergies to a variety of triggers, including grass pollen and house dust mites. But they were absent from the blood of people who weren’t sensitive. The team also tested patients undergoing an experimental treatment called oral immunotherapy to alleviate their peanut allergies. Over about 20 weeks, the participants receive larger and larger doses of allergy inducing peanut proteins, and this repeated exposure eventually allows them to tolerate peanuts.

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Tim Crane in the Times Literary Supplement:

Readers familiar with contemporary philosophy of mind may have been a bit puzzled by David Papineau’s recent critical review of Daniel Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back in the TLS (June 30). They will know that one of the big debates here is between materialists – who think the mind is wholly material or physical – and dualists – who think that the mind is something else, something over and above its physical basis in the brain. But Papineau and Dennett are both well-known materialists. So why did Papineau object to so much in Dennett’s book? Is this disagreement a bit like the bitter disputes between tiny left-wing Marxist splinter groups – Monty Python’s People’s Front of Judea versus the Judean People’s Front – or is something more substantial going on?

There were two main lines of criticism in Papineau’s review: one concerns Dennett’s doubts about explicit understanding or “comprehension”; the other concerns his views about consciousness. On comprehension, Dennett maintains that much animal and indeed human behaviour displays “competence without comprehension”, achieving ends without the subject’s understanding why. In a similar vein, he holds that human cultures can develop blindly, due to the natural selection of the “informational viruses” that Richard Dawkins has labelled “memes”, including some of the greatest products of human culture (hence Bach and bacteria). Papineau argues that Dennett fails to justify his downgrading of animal intelligence or his exclusion of deliberate design from cultural innovation, and hence that Dennett does not take sufficiently seriously the widespread role of intelligent insight. On consciousness, Papineau takes issue with Dennett’s view that consciousness is a kind of illusion (“illusionism”) and argues that materialists should have no difficulty accepting the reality of consciousness – the difficulty is finding the material basis of this reality in the brain.

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Damian Carrington in The Guardian:

Extreme heatwaves that kill even healthy people within hours will strike parts of the Indian subcontinent unless global carbon emissions are cut sharply and soon, according to new research.

Even outside of these hotspots, three-quarters of the 1.7bn population – particularly those farming in the Ganges and Indus valleys – will be exposed to a level of humid heat classed as posing “extreme danger” towards the end of the century.

The new analysis assesses the impact of climate change on the deadly combination of heat and humidity, measured as the “wet bulb” temperature (WBT). Once this reaches 35C, the human body cannot cool itself by sweating and even fit people sitting in the shade will die within six hours.

The revelations show the most severe impacts of global warming may strike those nations, such as India, whose carbon emissions are still rising as they lift millions of people out of poverty.

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Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler:

On the second grim Friday following President Donald Trump’s victory in the November elections, I attended a Friday service at the Women’s Mosque of America. Held at a community center in Los Angeles, the service was organized entirely by a group of women seeking to further women’s leadership within the American Muslim community. Unlike other mixed mosque congregations, women deliver the call to prayer, they give the sermon, they set up and they pick up, they talk and they pray. We did all of those things that day; we also worried and cried and listened to announcements about self-defense classes—very important, the speaker emphasized, given recent developments. I left both drained and heartened, feeling at once unsure of an America mired in Islamophobia and yet hopeful for an American Muslim community led by women. Could the two co-exist, I wondered? How long before the demands of survival as American Muslims wipe out the efforts of resisting patriarchy as American Muslim women?

The same amalgam of terror and hope I felt that day is reflected in the results of a Pew survey[*] on American Muslims released last Wednesday. According to its results, the American Muslim community has changed markedly since the last time Pew polled them ten years ago. From the viewpoint of an ever-suspicious America, unsure of the assimilative abilities of troublesome American Muslims, the news is mostly good. Muslims are now “more liberal,” a fact meant to be celebrated. To get the party started, CNN helpfully highlights a statistic telling us that the numbers of those American Muslims who believe society should be tolerant of homosexuality has nearly doubled (up from 27 percent to 52 percent), with millennial Muslims leading the charge of change. Nearly two-thirds of Muslims believe in the validity of varying interpretations of faith, and 6 percent more than in 2007 self-identify as politically liberal. To top it off, the vast majority—nearly eight out of ten of the roughly 1,000 polled—voted accordingly, casting their ballots for Hillary Clinton.

At the same time, while American Muslims are more liberal, they are also rather replete with dread, or, like me, just plain terrified.

More here.