by Paul Braterman

How Darwin's name is taken in vain, with mini-reviews of some of the worst offenders

From Darwin's Notebook B, 1837

Don't say Darwin unless you mean it. Don't say theory when you mean historical fact. And don't say you believe in evolution, when you mean you accept it on the basis of the evidence.

Don't say Darwin unless you mean it. Above all, don't say "Darwin" when you mean "evolution". It's like saying "Dalton" when you mean atoms. Our understanding of atoms has moved on enormously since Dalton's time, and our understanding of evolution has moved on similarly since Darwin's. Neither of them knew, or could have known, anything about what caused the phenomena they were talking about, and both would be delighted at how thoroughly their own work has been superseded.

From John Dalton's A New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808)

Imagine if a lot of people decided that atomic theory was against their religion. We would see a parallel world of sacred science, in which molecules were "intelligently constructed", and real chemistry would be referred to as Daltonism, or possibly, these days, neo-Daltonism. The scientific dissidents from Daltonism would invoke Dalton's name on every possible occasion, and draw attention to the many inadequacies of atomic theory as he presented it in 1808. Dalton didn’t know anything about the forces that hold atoms together, which depend on electrons and quantum mechanics. In fact, he didn’t even know about electrons. Worse still, he was hopelessly muddled about the difference between a molecule of hydrogen and an atom of hydrogen. He thought that the simplest compound between two different elements A and B would have the formula AB, so that water must be HO, not H2O. And of course he knew nothing about the origin of atoms, a problem not solved until the 1950s, over a century after his death. Shot through with errors and inconsistencies; nonsense, the lot of it!

Darwin was ignorant of transitional fossils, and in words still quoted by creationists deplored their absence as the greatest objection to his theory. He was equally ignorant about the origin of biological novelty, which comes from mutating genes. In fact, he didn't even know about genes. And because he did not realise that inheritance occurred through genes, he could not explain why favourable variations were not simply diluted out.

Read more »

by Michael Liss

I was in a 7-Eleven last Sunday morning for a restorative post-jog donut, when a big, late-middle-aged man with a MAGA hat and a matching red face came in. He grabbed a few tall-boys and a bag of ice, and made his way to the check-out line. To my reasonably educated eye (and nose) those particular tall-boys weren't going to be the first of the day.

In all the kaleidoscope of images from the first two weeks of Trump's reign, there is something about this man that I cannot get out of my head. To say he seemed out of place in my 83%-for-Hillary Congressional District would be an understatement—but there he was. Wow—a perfect specimen of a stereotypical Trump voter as if drawn in an editorial cartoon! Obviously, I wasn't actually going to interact with him, but this rara avis had somehow wandered into my cloistered neck of the woods and even allowed himself to helped by the Pakistani staff in the store.

I know this sounds idiotic, like the crowing of a rock-hound who found a really exciting piece of quartz. But I'm a politics junkie, and I had just finished reading Barron's Magazine's annual Roundtable. Several of the ultra-wealthy panelists were absolutely giddy about the possibilities of a Trump Presidency. All they could see was the banquet of tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks and unlimited drilling, without those nasty environmental rules. In my naiveté, I expected some concern about international trade agreements, immigration, engagement with Europe, relations with China and Russia, and just "Presidentialness," but these shrewd businesspeople seemed quite blasé. Trump was going to be good for the balance sheet, and everything else was irrelevant.

Read more »

by Paul North

At key moments in policy speeches, Margaret Thatcher used to say "there is no alternative." After a few years and too many repetitions, the phrase became a joke. Journalists abbreviated it: TINA. There Is No Alternative. When TINA became a reflex, after it became her signature phrase, it lost its bite. Before becoming an empty slogan however, when Thatcher really meant it and the UK was listening, it was formidable. And it was already questionable too. One of the ironies about TINA was that Thatcher could only really say it in a situation where there was in fact at least one viable alternative. Why would you say There Is No Alternative if things couldn't possibly be otherwise? That would indeed make it a joke.

So, you only say TINA when there is another alternative so strong that you have to pretend it doesn't exist. A prime piece of rhetoric, TINA also alludes to a dearly held belief. The phrase was—and is—a statement about how we think things are, a belief about how the world is made. Say TINA and you imply this belief. As I say, you don't really call it an alternative, if there is only one. That is called reality. And this is just the point: TINA implies a single world with a single theory that fits all of the facts. So, if someone says TINA, listeners are reminded of their belief that, yes, there is one way that things are and one correct account of it. We can in good conscience ignore anything else. There is no decision left to make. The belief that goes along with TINA and which TINA reinforces we can call TOOT: There's Only One Theory. When she was saying TINA, Thatcher was implying TOOT at the same time. Mine workers striking? TOOT: there's only one theory and it tells us to break the back of their movement because the free flow of labor is best governed by the market. Jobless rate high? The same theory—the only one—says: inflation is the greatest evil in a post-industrial economy. That economy sluggish? The very same theory says: privatize national industries and increase worker productivity. Question is, can there really be only one theory covering human matters?

Read more »

..[Listen below]

Pattern Language

I take the sidewalk a step at a time,
shards of its exposed aggregate form archipelagos,
and there’s Jesus in a cloud, or is it Lao Tzu
explaining Is without a word

Deep clefts in the bark of a tree just passed
define the humps of Appalachians.
I saw Scranton strewn along a gully on the lichen side
of the fat trunk of a sugar maple when I glanced

A net of angst chokes a birch in the side yard
of a small house, but it’s just Bittersweet being a garrote.
Its hot orange berries are incendiary cherries.
Its network of vine is untamed thought

A wall of desiccated siding, its south face
so in need of paint some of it is dust
some parched raised grain, is the surface of Mars.
What’s left of its spent red pigment
is the feel of utter space

Hairline cracks in river ice in the dam pond
are rifts of splintered glass silvered on one side
full of mere reflections falling to the sea

A crow measures distance between
gutter pebbles with her beak
aligning as if she were a smart array of atoms
laying out the footings of a house or universe

The patterns in her brain must be
the forms she seeks

.
Jim Culleny
1/2/17.

by Dave Maier

Fatale (Ed Brubaker, writer; Sean Phillips, artist)

Once upon a time there were comic books about superheroes, which only juvenile delinquents read. Then there were graphic novels, which were respectable (and mostly not about superheroes). Comic books were still around, though, and it eventually became respectable to read them as well, if at first only under cover of irony. But just as TV viewers binge-watch whole seasons on DVD or stream, so now many comix readers spurn single monthly issues in favor of collected story arcs in books. However, although this does blur the line, they’re still comic books rather than graphic novels. Again, though, just as good TV is better than a lot of cinema, good comix are still well worth your time.

In any case, here are several such things I’ve enjoyed over the last couple of years. There's nothing really obscure here, but I’ve omitted some rather better-known and/or justly famous titles like Hellboy, Sandman, Lucifer, Preacher, and Fables. Some I discovered from an article I saw a while back recommending such series as potential TV shows, so if we’re lucky we may eventually see those as well.

1. Fatale (Ed Brubaker, writer; Sean Phillips, artist)

Brubaker and Phillips have been around for a while, it seems, producing several series of mostly hard-boiled and noir-type stories (e.g. Criminal and The Fade Out, both excellent). Fatale, as the name suggests, is in this line as well, but with an important difference. The main character is indeed a femme fatale, with an unnatural power over men; but here “unnatural” is quite the operative word, as Fatale is an ingenious merger of two distinct genres, as if Raymond Chandler were channeling H. P. Lovecraft. I won’t go into the details – lest the mind-melting horror beyond time and space itself cause you to become hopelessly insane – but just think “tentacle noir” and you’ve got the general idea. This might simply strike you as a novelty, but this experienced team brings the same tight plotting and darkly effective art to this one as they do to their other works, achieving some truly creepy effects, even for hardened horror fans, and Fatale would indeed make an excellent TV show.

Read more »

by Leanne Ogasawara

Are we deranged?

In recent days, watching friends and family reeling over the Trump win, I keep thinking that climate disaster will be a disaster-of-denial just like this. Shell-shocked and busy blaming, who will be in a position to lead the way forward when the unthinkable happens?

Why do we remain in denial about climate change?

And by denial, I mean, why aren't we making the changes we need to make in our own lives to reduce our carbon imprint and step away from the systems and corporations that are destroying our planet? Is it because it seems too impossible to imagine that our beautiful and perfect earth will suddenly become less hospitable? Or hard to really understand that species of animals we love are disappearing? Impossible to wrap our minds around what warmer oceans mean?

For me, the most compelling description I have read of imagined things to come was the last chapter of David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks. By the time things fall apart in the world, according to Mitchell, it is too late for most people to protect themselves, as governments collapse and the world is divided into a few oil states with the rest of the world descending into pure chaos. In the novel, we find ourselves in rural Ireland, in 2043

as the electricity’s running out, the Internet seems about to crash for good and people are reduced to foraging for rabbits and eating dried seaweed.

Within months of what becomes known as the "global endarkenment," gangs are roving the countryside stealing and killing and even the most common medications are no longer available. It all happened so quickly so that no one had the time to really prepare before resource scarcity caused total collapse. Toward the end of the novel, a young gangster is robbing an old woman of her solar panels; and when she protests, he says,

"They had a better life than I did, mind. So did you. Your power stations your cars, your creature comforts. You lived too long. The bill; due today."

The old woman protests, "But it wasn't us, personally, who trashed the world. It was the system. We couldn't change it."

Not missing a beat, the young gangster retorts: "Then its not us, personally, taking your panels. It's the system. We can't change it.

Like Trump, the end of the world kind of crept up on people.

Read more »

by Bill Benzon

One day several years ago I waited an hour in traffic to go a quarter of a mile so I could enter the Holland Tunnel and cross under the Hudson River to my home in Jersey City. While sitting in the queue I kept thinking why why why? Why?

After saying a bit more about traffic to and from Manhattan, I answer the question with a boiling-frog story, a parable about Happy Island. I conclude by suggesting that the world is happy island and we’re stuck in traffic.

Tunnel Traffic

At that time I was living in Jersey City, New Jersey, which is across the Hudson River from Lower Manhattan (I’m now living in Hoboken). Whenever I go to Manhattan I use public transportation, which is reasonably good, though just a bit inconvenient from my present location. But driving my car through a tunnel or over a bridge and parking it on Manhattan, that’s VERY inconvenient. And so I avoid doing it.

But I had to go to rural Connecticut to meet Charlie for a trip to Vermont. I could have taken public transportation to a point where Charlie could pick me up. But that’s a longish walk and four trains, or a longish walk and three trains and a long walk or a cab. Which was a hassle. So I decided to drive. Yes, I’d have to cross the Hudson River, but the Holland Tunnel is nearby and I could avoid rush-hour traffic on both trips, too and from. Driving in Manhattan would be a bit of a hassle, but not too bad on this trip because I’d be mostly on the West Side Highway.

So I drove. I left on Thursday morning at, say, 9:45 AM. By 11:30 I’d crossed off the northern end of Manhattan and was headed toward Connecticut. That’s an hour and forty-five minutes to go the first 15 miles, and probably an hour to go the first four miles, from my place in Jersey City through the Holland Tunnel and onto the West Side Highway headed North.

And that wasn’t rush-hour.

Read more »

by Jalees Rehman

Words are routinely abused by those in power to manipulate us but we should be most vigilant when we encounter a new class of "plastic words". What are these plastic words? In 1988, the German linguist Uwe Pörksen published his landmark book "Plastikwörter:Die Sprache einer internationalen Diktatur" (literal translation into English: "Plastic words: The language of an international dictatorship") in which he describes the emergence and steady expansion during the latter half of the 20^th century of selected words that are incredibly malleable yet empty when it comes to their actual meaning. Plastic words have surreptitiously seeped into our everyday language and dictate how we think. They have been imported from the languages of science, technology and mathematics, and thus appear to be imbued with their authority. When used in a scientific or technological context, these words are characterized by precise and narrow definitions, however this precision and definability is lost once they become widely used. Pörksen's use of "plastic" refers to the pliability of how these words can be used and abused but he also points out their similarity to plastic lego bricks which act as modular elements to construct larger composites. The German language makes it very easy to create new composite words by combining two words but analogous composites can be created in English by stringing together multiple words. This is especially important for one of Pörksen's key characteristics of plastic words: they have become part of an international vocabulary with cognate words in numerous languages.

Here are some examples of "plastic words"(German originals are listed in parentheses next to the English translations) – see if you recognize them and if you can give a precise definition of what they mean:

exchange (Austausch)

information (Information)

communication (Kommunikation)

process (Prozess)

resource (Ressource)

strategy (Strategie)

structure (Struktur)

Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Trying to name the peculiar sweetness of Spanish sunlight in winter (lemon soufflé? saffron ice cream? malai qulfi?) before touchdown in Granada, I feel the small plane shake, then gently glide into descent. I’m reminded of a poem of mine in which a character has a dream of flying over the Alhambra: She grew wings so long they dipped in the Vega… Flying over Alhambra, she looked for the mexura, the court of myrtles, granaries, the royal stables…

This is my first flight to Granada and first visit since I finished Baker of Tarifa— my book of poems based on the legendary “convivencia” (peaceful coexistence of the Abrahamic people) in al-Andalus or Muslim Spain (711-1492). In the many years since the book was published, it has traveled to numerous places but this place, Andalucia, is a return to the world it embodies, the spectacular bridge that al-Andalus was— a bridge between antiquity and modernity, between Africa, Europe and Asia, between Medieval Jews, Muslims and Christians.

I am here to present from Baker of Tarifa and I am exhilarated to meet the academics who have invited me, to meet students, to present my poems at venues that are only a few miles away from the great Alhambra. These are difficult times to be speaking about the Islamic Civilization as a Muslim; being in the line of fire from the weaponry of literalism on both sides of the war-terrorism binary, the only thing we can do is attempt to be a bridge, to revive a language that conceived pluralism, a time known to be the pre-cursor to European Renaissance. The history of Al-Andalus, spanning nearly a millennium and collapsing with the Spanish Inquisition, is not entirely free of conflict, but it offers a model for tolerance and intellectual efflorescence and inspires hope.

Read more »

by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

For those of us who work in the Sciences, the last decade or so has been a boon to research and new discoveries. This has been facilitated by the massive data collection and data analysis which would have been inconceivable just a few decades ago. The rapid change in the Sciences has been described as the forth paradigm of Science i.e., data intensive discovery. As a side consequence of these changes, many of us thought that the time has finally arrived where data will be the absolute arbiter of truth. If the global events of 2016 in general and the US elections in particular are any indication then we were dead wrong thinking this. One may even ask, in an era of post-Truth, fake news and alternate facts, is data really that relevant? One can do all the fact checking in the world but it won't matter if the person to whom the evidence is being presented gives the rejoinder, “What does evidence have to do with it?” Welcome to the brave new world of Data Nihilsm, a term coined by Terry Morse to denote outright denial of data. Closely related to the study of data nihilism is Agnothology or the study of culturally induced ignorance.

As a data scientist, I imagined that an argument based on careful analysis of data coupled with sound statistical reasoning and proper used of machine learning should be enough to convince any person of one’s argument. However in many contexts this may actually have the opposite effect. For one, the previous statement may actually sound elitist and there is strong evidence that if people have strong convictions about a certain belief then offering contradictory evidence may actually strength their belief instead of weakening it. Thinking about why people act this way becomes easier if we rather drop the assumption that people are rational and start thinking that people’s rationality is mediated via emotions. Leibniz theorized that one day we would have machines that will be able to calculate answers to any question for us and so people instead of arguing will just say let us calculate. One might argue that the data driven society that we are currently building is taking us close to this ideal. However there is a hidden assumption in this assertion that that all people evaluate evidence in the same manner. The presence of conformation bias and other cognitive biases in humans tell a different story altogether. People are more likely to be skeptical and thorough in investigation if evidence presented to them goes against what they already believe. Even things like what people perceive as the scientific consensus varies from person to person. Thus Creationists pounce over any alleged evidence that “proves” that the theory of evolution is false while neglecting any data that goes in its favor. The point is not whether one can use data to make one’s point but rather evidence is powerless if one has already made up one’s mind, to quote Salman Hameed who studies the public perception of the theory of evolution.

Read more »

by Genese Sodikoff

One does not normally think about infection, illness, and recovery in terms of a three-staged "rite of passage" as European ethnographer Arnold van Gennep defined it, although catching a disease certainly involves a period of physical transition and disruption of our sense of self.

Of course, a "rite of passage" conventionally refers to a ceremony that marks a change in status, such as a wedding or commencement, where one social identity is shed and another assumed. Van Gennep's three stages include the separation from peers, a liminal or in-between period, and reassimilation into society with a new status. But if we loosely apply this concept to other life experiences, such as illness, we begin to see a structure to the stories that make up our lives.

Say an individual goes from healthy person, to ill patient, and finally to some resolution. At this point the individual has either returned to the prior state of healthiness, dies, remains somehow marked by the period of suffering, or persists in a state of impaired health, neither here nor there. Certain diseases seem to occupy the liminal space, casting their victims into medical limbo as neither diagnosable nor well. Chronic Lyme disease is one of those. Since the source of prolonged suffering is contested by doctors, many sufferers must seek help at the edges of the medical mainstream.

To turn back to the "rite of passage" schema for a moment, anthropologist Victor Turner was intrigued by Van Gennep's demarcation of a liminal period, the "betwixt and between" stage. In the late 1960s, Turner elaborated the concept, finding it rife with both social ambiguity and possibility. For Turner, liminality evoked an unstructured space, an opposition to the dominant structure at the edges of the cultural mainstream. It is here where people experience "communitas," a spirit of camaraderie and equality. Liminality is counter-cultural, a state of flux in which the dominant structure is recast in the image of the oppositional force until that new image becomes the structure from which to pull away.

Read more »

“All humans are genetically 99.9 per cent identical.”
—Roger Highfield, Science Editor

Great Wall, Tremendous Wall
.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall one poet said
imagining friendly neighbors working their way
along that which stood between, resetting
fallen gneiss and granite loaves and balls
that had fallen to each to keep their wall intact
while one questioned the irony of friendly walls
and the other made a prima facie case
for an inherent friendliness in their practicality.
And so we’ve had walls and walls remain
not of stone but of blood and bone,
walls built of double helixes spiraling through time,
hydrogen-mortared pairs of adenine,
guanine, cytosine, thymine,
smaller than any past poet’s wall-builder might imagine,
but centuries stronger than Hadrian’s real
or Alexander’s mythic one which imprisoned
the Gogs and Magogs of alien tribes
behind stone or iron barriers to keep the builders safe
from differences that barely exist in the protein hieroglyphics
of the nature-made chemical bonds of a double helix
making us all Gogs and Magogs of each other
as we spiral through worlds hurting and killing
to uphold our imagination’s chronic beliefs
in quixotic walls and spurious distinctions
which heap between us grudges and griefs
.

Jim Culleny
from Blink
12/13/16
.

Gog and Magog