David Sloan Wilson (and Massimo Pigliucci) in Letter:

Dear Massimo,

We go way back and share a love of philosophy in addition to biology. I was proud to be included in the “Altenberg 16” workshop that you organized to explore the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, a term that you coined.  I have always regarded you as one of the most forward looking evolutionary thinkers.

I was therefore surprised by some of your recent comments on Twitter, which struck me as decidedly backward looking. The topic was ancient Greek history. I commented that it could benefit from a cultural multilevel selection perspective.  Your response—at least as I took it—was that you didn’t see how such an analysis would add to traditional scholarship on the topic. You also noted that the study of genetic evolution is hard and the study of human cultural evolution is harder still. You regarded much of the work on human cultural evolution as speculative adaptationist “just-so” story telling.

Really, Massimo! The study of humanity from an evolutionary perspective—including but not restricted to cultural evolution—lags behind the study of genetic evolution by nearly a century. This is not because the study of our species is more difficult—in many ways it is easier—but for more complicated and nuanced reasons.

More here.

Stephen Wolfram in his blog:

For me personally, the vision that became Wolfram|Alpha has a very long history. I first imagined creating something like it more than 47 years ago, when I was about 12 years old. Over the years, I built some powerful tools—most importantly the core of what’s now Wolfram Language. But it was only after some discoveries I made in basic science in the 1990s that I felt emboldened to actually try building what’s now Wolfram|Alpha.

It was—and still is—a daunting project. To take all areas of systematic knowledge and make them computable. To make it so that any question that can in principle be answered from knowledge accumulated by our civilization can actually be answered, immediately and automatically.

Leibniz had talked about something like this 350 years ago; Turing 70 years ago. But while science fiction (think the Star Trek computer) had imagined it, and AI research had set it as a key goal, 50 years of actual work on question-answering had failed to deliver. And I didn’t know for sure if we were in the right decade—or even the right century—to be able to build what I wanted.

More here.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

Sometimes, it is the very ordinariness of a scene that makes it terrifying. So it was with a clip from last week’s BBC documentary on facial recognition technology. It shows the Metropolitan police trialling a facial recognition system on an east London street

A man tries to avoid the cameras, covering his face by pulling up his fleece. He is stopped by the police and forced to have his photo taken. He is then fined £90 for ‘disorderly behaviour’. ‘What’s your suspicion?’ someone asks the police. ‘The fact that he’s walked past clearly masking his face from recognition,’ replies one of the plainclothes police operating the system.

If you want to protect your privacy, you must have something to hide. And if you actually do something to protect your privacy, well, that’s ‘disorderly behaviour’.

More here.

Maggie Fergusson in MIL:

LATE IN THE afternoon of June 22nd 1940, Hitler marched into a glade in the forest of Compiègne, 60km north of Paris. A giant swastika was unfurled as he saluted columns of Nazi troops, before hoisting himself into what had once been the private railway carriage of Marshal Foch. Inside this, on November 11th 1918, the Germans had signed the armistice that ended the first world war. So it was an apt spot for Hitler, sitting in Foch’s chair, and flanked by Goering, Ribbentrop and Hess, to witness the French surrender. Today, in a replica of the railway carriage, you can watch old newsreel of the Führer emerging into the evening sunshine and pulling on his leather gloves with an expression of grim satisfaction. This was a significant step towards the creation of his 1,000-year Reich. Four years later, of course, the Reich had collapsed, and Hitler was dead.

Less than an hour’s stroll through the beech trees, a rather different piece of history is unfolding. Fifty years ago this August, a 35-year-old ex-naval officer, Jean Vanier, bought a tumbledown cottage in Trosly-Breuil, a village on the edge of the forest. The cottage had no lavatory, one tap and a wood-burning stove, and he called it L’Arche—The Ark. He then invited two men with mental disabilities, Raphaël Simi and Philippe Seux, to leave the bleak, overcrowded asylum where they had spent most of their adult lives, and to make a home with him. “There was”, he says, looking back, “no huge idea of doing something special that might change the world.”

He thought that he, Raphaël and Philippe might remain one small family, able to fit comfortably into his battered car for outings. But, like the biblical mustard seed, L’Arche grew beyond all expectations. Friends came to visit, and were inspired by Jean Vanier’s insistence that those with mental disabilities have gifts that many “normal” people lack. More houses were bought, more men and women rescued from institutions. Today, there are L’Arche communities in every continent of the world—146 of them, in 35 countries, from Bangladesh to Burkina Faso, Ireland to the Ivory Coast, Palestine to the Philippines.

More here.

Helen Santoro in Science:

Plastic makes up nearly 70% of all ocean litter, putting countless aquatic species at risk. But there is a tiny bit of hope—a teeny, tiny one to be precise: Scientists have discovered that microscopic marine microbes are eating away at the plastic, causing trash to slowly break down.

To conduct the study, researchers collected weathered plastic from two different beaches in Chania, Greece. The litter had already been exposed to the sun and undergone chemical changes that caused it to become more brittle, all of which needs to happen before the microbes start to munch on the plastic. The pieces were either polyethylene, the most popular plastic and the one found in products such as grocery bags and shampoo bottles, or polystyrene, a hard plastic found in food packaging and electronics. The team immersed both in saltwater with either naturally occurring ocean microbes or engineered microbes that were enhanced with carbon-eating microbe strains and could survive solely off of the carbon in plastic. Scientists then analyzed changes in the materials over a period of 5 months.

Both types of plastic lost a significant amount of weight after being exposed to the natural and engineered microbes, scientists reported in April in the Journal of Hazardous Materials. The microbes further changed the chemical makeup of the material, causing the polyethylene’s weight to go down by 7% and the polystyrene’s weight to go down by 11%. These findings may offer a new strategy to help combat ocean pollution: Deploy marine microbes to eat up the trash. However, researchers still need to measure how effective these microbes would be on a global scale.

More here.

Tectonics

In only a few months
there begin to be fissures
in what we remember,
and within a year or two,
the facts break apart
one from another
and slowly begin to shift
and turn, grinding,
pushing up over each other
until their shapes
have been changed
and the past has become
a new world.
And after many years,
even a love affair,
one lush green island
all to itself,
perfectly detailed
with even a candle
softly lighting a smile,
may slide under the waves
like Atlantis,
scarcely rippling the heart.

by Ted Kooser,
from Delights and Shadows
Copper Canyon Press, 2014

Sudip Bose at The American Scholar:

It’s amazing that this landmark symphony could have been so easily forgotten. As with the other seminal New Englanders—George Whitefield Chadwick, Horatio Parker, and Edward MacDowell, among them—modernism killed off Paine’s music. And with the ascendancy of American vernacular forms, reflected in the music of Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, and others, any music arising from the German Romantic tradition could be ridiculed and ignored. Paine may have been the acknowledged dean of a New England school, but he could not be comfortably located with any American school. Even Paine’s student Richard Aldrich, writing in the early 20th century, argued that Paine’s music, despite its “fertility,” “genuine warmth,” “spontaneity of invention,” and “fine harmonic feeling,” did not “disclose ‘American’ characteristics.” But what in Paine’s time and cultural milieu would have constituted an American characteristic?

more here.

John Waters at the Paris Review:

Somehow I became respectable. I don’t know how—the last film I directed got some terrible reviews and was rated NC-17. Six people in my personal phone book have been sentenced to life in prison. I did an art piece called Twelve Assholes and a Dirty Foot, which is composed of close-ups from porn films, yet a museum now has it in their permanent collection and nobody got mad. What the hell has happened?

I used to be despised but now I’m asked to give commencement addresses at prestigious colleges, attend career retrospectives at both the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the British Film Institute, and I even got a medal from the French government for “furthering the arts in France.” This cockeyed maturity is driving me crazy!

Suddenly the worst thing that can happen to a creative person has happened to me. I am accepted.

more here.

Alex von Tunzelmann at Literary Review:

There is a lot of horror in this book. People are thrown from helicopters into the sea, their arms tied behind their backs. A colonel grinds up his victims’ bodies and feeds them to his dogs. Forché finds mutilated corpses by the side of the road. She visits a prison where men are kept in cages the size of washing machines. She and a friend are pursued by an escuadrón de la muerte (death squad). Later, she meets a man who was a member of one such squad, who recalls the sound of bubbles as he cut his victims’ throats.

‘Look at this. Remember this. Try to see.’ This is Vides’s constant refrain. Yet he permits her to see little of himself. In a tantalising scene, he shows her ‘one place’ he lives. He offers her a bed with a poster of Che Guevara over it, pulling back the covers to reveal an AK-47. ‘Someone else also lives here,’ he says vaguely. She dares not ask about the gun, but mentions the poster of Che. ‘Yes, well, I have posters of Mussolini too, if the need arises,’ he replies.

more here.

John Ortved in Document:

Why do we like what we like? The books, movies, photos, and artworks that form our perspective—who puts them in front of us? One answer is the critic, that cipher of taste who places art in its various corridors, then augments, defines, degrades, and ultimately shapes the works that shape us. In times when the public’s eye travels with ever more scope but not necessarily more depth, criticism, the act of choosing—and so much more—becomes more important than ever. It’s for this reason that so many eyes are turning to Parul Sehgal and Teju Cole, two critics—as well as editors, essayists, and artists—challenging not only us but art forms themselves.

At only 37, Sehgal is re-centering literature from her position as literary critic and columnist at The New York Times. (She was hired after the Times’s chief literary critic, Michiko Kakutani, stepped down in 2017). Her choice of subjects and focused, artful prose is giving space to works by marginalized authors, including women and people of color, as well as international identities and cultures historically left out of the canon. As we continue to look to the written word for clarity, hope, and maybe even answers, work by Sehgal—who teaches at Columbia University and won the 2010 Nona Balakian Award from the National Book Critics Circle—has become nothing short of essential reading.

Meanwhile, Cole is directing our gaze from various esteemed perches, be it his role as the first Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard, his job as the photography critic for The New York Times Magazine, as the PEN/Hemingway Award-winning author of Open City, or as an internationally exhibited photographer. Our eyes follow his, even if we’re not aware of it.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Most people in the modern world — and the vast majority of Mindscape listeners, I would imagine — agree that humans are part of the animal kingdom, and that all living animals evolved from a common ancestor. Nevertheless, there are ways in which we are unique; humans are the only animals that stress out over Game of Thrones (as far as I know). I talk with geneticist and science writer Adam Rutherford about what makes us human, and how we got that way, both biologically and culturally. One big takeaway lesson is that it’s harder to find firm distinctions than you might think; animals use language and tools and fire, and have way more inventive sex lives than we do.

More here.

David Robson at the BBC:

Earlier this year, the presidents of Sudan and Algeria both announced they would step aside after decades in office, thanks to peaceful campaigns of resistance.

In each case, civil resistance by ordinary members of the public trumped the political elite to achieve radical change.

There are, of course, many ethical reasons to use nonviolent strategies. But compelling research by Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, confirms that civil disobedience is not only the moral choice; it is also the most powerful way of shaping world politics – by a long way.

Looking at hundreds of campaigns over the last century, Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. And although the exact dynamics will depend on many factors, she has shown it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change.

More here.

John Tierney in The City Journal:

A team of Internet entrepreneurs in downtown Manhattan wants to revolutionize how Americans get prescription drugs. Their company, Blink Health, has a crazy idea: let customers shop for the best deal. In any other industry, of course, this would not be revolutionary, but it’s a foreign concept at the pharmacy counter and a distasteful prospect to the businesses now shielded from marketplace competition. Politicians and activists routinely decry the resulting high prices, but their preferred solution is to impose price controls that would stifle the development of new drugs. Democrats—joined, at times, by President Trump—argue that government control is necessary because the free-market system has failed patients. But the real problem with prescription drugs, as with the rest of the health-care system, is that the free market hasn’t been tried.

A functioning market requires price signals to provide consumer guidance; but at the pharmacy, neither the buyer nor the seller knows what the price is. In choosing among drugs to prescribe, your doctor doesn’t know how much each will cost you or your insurance company. You can’t find out what you’ll pay until after you’ve chosen a pharmacy to handle the prescription. The pharmacist must contact the insurance company to find out how much to charge you—and even then, he doesn’t know whether the transaction will be profitable.

All that information is available only to the middlemen, who have exploited the system’s secrecy and complexity to profit at the expense of patients, local pharmacists, drug manufacturers, and taxpayers. While politicians denounce the supposed power of Big Pharma, the pharmaceutical manufacturers are a puny, disorganized force compared with the companies that control the pricing and availability of drugs—Big Pharmacy, as the executives at Blink Health call these middlemen. They’re the ones who decide whether your insurance will cover a drug, how much you’ll pay for it at the counter, and how much of that payment the drugstore will keep.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:’

Scientists have created a living organism whose DNA is entirely human-made — perhaps a new form of life, experts said, and a milestone in the field of synthetic biology. Researchers at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Britain reported on Wednesday that they had rewritten the DNA of the bacteria Escherichia coli, fashioning a synthetic genome four times larger and far more complex than any previously created. The bacteria are alive, though unusually shaped and reproducing slowly. But their cells operate according to a new set of biological rules, producing familiar proteins with a reconstructed genetic code. The achievement one day may lead to organisms that produce novel medicines or other valuable molecules, as living factories. These synthetic bacteria also may offer clues as to how the genetic code arose in the early history of life.

Each gene in a living genome is detailed in an alphabet of four bases, molecules called adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine (often described only by their first letters: A, T, G, C). A gene may be made of thousands of bases. Genes direct cells to choose among 20 amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, the workhorses of every cell. Proteins carry out a vast number of jobs in the body, from ferrying oxygen in the blood to generating force in our muscles. Nine years ago, researchers built a synthetic genome that was one million base pairs long. The new E. coli genome, reported in the journal Nature, is four million base pairs long and had to be constructed with entirely new methods.

More here.

Under a Certain Little Star

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity in case I’m mistaken.
May happiness not be angry if I take it for my own.
May the dead forgive me that their memory’s but a flicker.
My apologies to time for the multiplicity of the world overlooked
each second.
My apologies to an old love for treating the new one as the first.
Forgive me far-off wars for taking my flowers home.
Forgive me open wounds for pricking my finger.
My apologies for the minuet record, to those calling out from the
abyss.
My apologies to those in railway stations for sleeping comfortably
at five in the morning.
Pardon me hounded hope for laughing sometimes.
Pardon me deserts for not rushing in with a spoonful of water.
And you O hawk, the same bird for years in the same cage,
forever still and staring at the same spot,
absolve me even if you happened to be stuffed.
My apologies to the tree felled for four table legs.
My apologies to large questions for small answers.
Truth, do not pay me too much attention.
Solemnity, be magnanimous to me.
Endure, O mystery of being that I might pull threads from your
veil.

Soul, don’t blame me that I’ve got you so seldom.
My apologies to everything that I can’t be everywhere.
My apologies to all for not knowing how to be every man and
woman.
I know that as long as I live nothing can excuse me,
because I myself am my own obstacle.
Do not hold it against me, O speech, that I borrow weighty words,
and then labor to make them light.

by Wislawa Szymborska,
translated by Joanna Trzeciak

Karan Mahajan in the New York Times:

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have gone on so long that the Middle East war novel has itself become a crusty genre — a familiar set of echoes coming back to us from ravaged lands. Many of these books are stirring on the level of detail but an equal number thoughtlessly valorize the American soldier or wallow in the morally vacuous conclusion that war is hell and that’s that. Where is the ferocious “Catch-22” of these benighted conflicts? Who will have the temerity to make these wars the subject of bracing comedy?

Mohammed Hanif, who at 54 is among the most revered Pakistani novelists of his generation, comes with an obvious pedigree to pull off such a stunt. A celebrated satirist and former air force fighter pilot, he has been profiled by Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker and is reliably one of the subcontinent’s most contrarian and provocative voices. One pores over his Op-Eds in The New York Times savoring his insouciant bons mots, which encompass everything from India-Pakistan warmongering (“Schoolyard brawls have a more nuanced buildup”) to yoga instructors (“Drill sergeants trapped in poets’ bodies”). His greatest strength, though, in writing about an American war might be that he is not American. He is less likely to soften his work with patriotic (or even anti-patriotic) pieties that put America — as opposed to its victims — dead center.

More here.

David Wallace-Wells in New York Magazine:

Jared Diamond’s new book, Upheaval, addresses itself to a world very obviously in crisis, and tries to lift some lessons for what do about it from the distant past. In that way, it’s not so different from all the other books that have made the UCLA geographer a sort of don of “big think” history and a perennial favorite of people like Steven Pinker and Bill Gates.

Diamond’s life as a public intellectual began with his 1991 book The Third Chimpanzee, a work of evolutionary psychology, but really took off with Guns, Germs, and Steel, published in 1997, which offered a three-word explanation for the rise of the West to the status of global empire in the modern era — and, even published right at the “end of history,” got no little flak from critics who saw in it both geographic determinism and what they might today call a whiff of Western supremacy. In 2005, he published Collapse, a series of case studies about what made ancient civilizations fall into disarray in the face of environmental challenges — a doorstopper that has become a kind of touchstone work for understanding the crisis of climate change today. In The World Until Yesterday, published in 2012, he asked what we can learn from traditional societies; and in his new book, he asks what we can learn from ones more like our own that have faced upheaval but nevertheless endured.

More here.

Eliza Mackintosh at CNN:

On a recent afternoon in Helsinki, a group of students gathered to hear a lecture on a subject that is far from a staple in most community college curriculums.

Standing in front of the classroom at Espoo Adult Education Centre, Jussi Toivanen worked his way through his PowerPoint presentation. A slide titled “Have you been hit by the Russian troll army?” included a checklist of methods used to deceive readers on social media: image and video manipulations, half-truths, intimidation and false profiles.

Another slide, featuring a diagram of a Twitter profile page, explained how to identify bots: look for stock photos, assess the volume of posts per day, check for inconsistent translations and a lack of personal information.

The lesson wrapped with a popular “deepfake” — highly realistic manipulated video or audio — of Barack Obama to highlight the challenges of the information war ahead.

The course is part of an anti-fake news initiative launched by Finland’s government in 2014 – two years before Russia meddled in the US elections – aimed at teaching residents, students, journalists and politicians how to counter false information designed to sow division.

More here.