Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

It’s still not clear what in the brain accounts for intelligence. Neuroscientists have compared the brains of people with high and low test scores for clues, and they’ve found a few. Brain size explains a small part of the variation, for example, although there are plenty of people with small brains who score higher than others with bigger brains. Other studies hint that intelligence has something to do with how efficiently a brain can send signals from one region to another. Danielle Posthuma, a geneticist at Vrije University Amsterdam and senior author of the new paper, first became interested in the study of intelligence in the 1990s. “I’ve always been intrigued by how it works,” she said. “Is it a matter of connections in the brain, or neurotransmitters that aren’t sufficient?” Dr. Posthuma wanted to find the genes that influence intelligence. She started by studying identical twins who share the same DNA. Identical twins tended to have more similar intelligence test scores than fraternal twins, she and her colleagues found. Hundreds of other studies have come to the same conclusion, showing a clear genetic influence on intelligence. But that doesn’t mean that intelligence is determined by genes alone. Our environment exerts its own effects, only some of which scientists understand well. Lead in drinking water, for instance, can drag down test scores. In places where food doesn’t contain iodine, giving supplements to children can raise scores. Advances in DNA sequencing technology raised the possibility that researchers could find individual genes underlying differences in intelligence test scores. Some candidates were identified in small populations, but their effects did not reappear in studies on larger groups. So scientists turned to what’s now called the genome-wide association study: They sequence bits of genetic material scattered across the DNA of many unrelated people, then look to see whether people who share a particular condition — say, a high intelligence test score — also share the same genetic marker.

In 2014, Dr. Posthuma was part of a large-scale study of over 150,000 people that revealed 108 genes linked to schizophrenia. But she and her colleagues had less luck with intelligence, which has proved a hard nut to crack for a few reasons. Standard intelligence tests can take a long time to complete, making it hard to gather results on huge numbers of people. Scientists can try combining smaller studies, but they often have to merge different tests together, potentially masking the effects of genes. As a result, the first generation of genome-wide association studies on intelligence failed to find any genes. Later studies managed to turn up promising results, but when researchers turned to other groups of people, the effect of the genes again disappeared. But in the past couple of years, larger studies relying on new statistical methods finally have produced compelling evidence that particular genes really are involved in shaping human intelligence.

More here.

Parker Bauer in The Weekly Standard:

In January 1944 the up-and-coming novelist Vladimir Nabokov sent the oracular literary critic Edmund Wilson a letter, with two enclosures. The first was a sample of Nabokov's new translation of the Russian verse novel Eugene Onegin; the second was a pair of socks Wilson had lent him. The translation, he disclosed, had been done by "a new method I have found after some scientific thinking." In one sock Nabokov had poked a hole, which his wife, Vera, had sewed up with "her rather simple patching methods."

Sometimes Wilson would tuck in a note to Nabokov a paper butterfly with a wound-up rubber band, which, on opening, "buzzed out of the card like a real lepidopteron," delighting Nabokov, whose sideline was the classifying of butterfly genitalia for the Harvard Museum. Mostly by mail, the two writers carried on discourse and disputation (and sometimes just carried on, needling one another) for a quarter-century. Alas, it all ended quite badly.

Pen pals forever, or so it might have seemed: two literary minds who meshed and yet clashed, both deeply engaged but different enough to keep it interesting, masters of the amicable insult. "We have always been frank with one another," breezes Nabokov in 1956, as a kind of keynote for their entire correspondence, "and I know that you will find my criticism exhilarating." Their letters—crackling with debate on diction both Russian and English, with pleas to read this or that overlooked novel, with a crossfire of critiques of their own works—were private, even intimate. Their breakup was anything but. At the end, the combatants were flinging their charges not in personal notes but in the letters columns of literary journals where, almost cinematically, the world could enjoy the spectacle.

More here.

Steve Taylor in Psychology Today:

Questionnaires by psychologists have shown that almost everyone – including college students – feels that time is passing faster now compared to when they were half or a quarter as old as now. And perhaps most strikingly, a number of experiments have shown that, when older people are asked to guess how long intervals of time are, or to ‘reproduce' the length of periods of time, they guess a shorter amount than younger people.

We usually become conscious of this speeding up around our late twenties, when most of us have ‘settled down.' We have steady jobs and marriages and homes and our lives become ordered into routines – the daily routine of working, coming home, having dinner and watching TV; the weekly routine of (for example) going to the gym on Monday night, going to the cinema on Wednesday night, going for a drink with friends on Friday night etc.; and the yearly routine of birthdays, bank holidays and two weeks' holiday in the summer. After a few years we start to realise that the time it takes us to run through these routines seems to be decreasing, as if we're on a turntable which is picking up speed with every rotation.

This speeding up is probably responsible for the phenomenon which psychologists call ‘forward telescoping': our tendency to think that past events have happened more recently than they actually have. Marriages, deaths, the birth of children – when we look back at these and other significant events, we're often surprised that they happened so long ago, shocked to find that it's already four years since a friend died when we thought it was only a couple of years, or that a niece or nephew is already ten years old when it only seems like three or four years since they were born.

More here. [Thanks to Ali Minai.]

Jennifer Ouellette in Physics World:

After being found guilty of heresy by the Catholic Church, Galileo Galilei was infamously placed under house arrest for the last nine years of his life. But he was far from idle during this time, writing one of the foundational works of modern science, Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences. The text includes a discussion of why it would be impossible to scale up an animal, a tree or a building to infinity. Galileo phrased it as a question of geometry – assuming a fixed shape for an object, its volume will increase at a much faster rate than its area. In practical terms, as an animal grows in size, its weight increases faster than the corresponding strength of its limbs, until the animal collapses under the force of its own weight. That’s why there could never be an animal the size of Godzilla, or Hollywood’s latest incarnation of King Kong.

In other words, there are very real constraints on how large a complex organism can grow. This is the essence of all modern-day scaling laws, and the subject of Geoffrey West’s provocative new book, Scale: the Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies. A physicist by training, West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, and former director of the prestigious Santa Fe Institute in the US. Scale is the culmination of years of interdisciplinary research geared toward answering one fundamental question: could there be just a few simple rules that all complex organisms obey, whether they are animals, corporations or cities?

More here.

From The Poke, and more here.

Eric Barker in Time:

Karen Arnold, a researcher at Boston College, followed 81 high school valedictorians and salutatorians from graduation onward to see what becomes of those who lead the academic pack. Of the 95 percent who went on to graduate college, their average GPA was 3.6, and by 1994, 60 percent had received a graduate degree. There was little debate that high school success predicted college success. Nearly 90 percent are now in professional careers with 40 percent in the highest tier jobs.They are reliable, consistent, and well-adjusted, and by all measures the majority have good lives.

But how many of these number-one high school performers go on to change the world, run the world, or impress the world? The answer seems to be clear: zero.

Commenting on the success trajectories of her subjects, Karen Arnold said, “Even though most are strong occupational achievers, the great majority of former high school valedictorians do not appear headed for the very top of adult achievement arenas.” In another interview Arnold said, “Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the future’s visionaries . . . they typically settle into the system instead of shaking it up.”

Was it just that these 81 didn’t happen to reach the stratosphere? No. Research shows that what makes students likely to be impressive in the classroom is the same thing that makes them less likely to be home-run hitters outside the classroom.

More here.

Colm Toibin in The Guardian:

I needed Orestes to be someone uneasy in the world, easily led or distracted, in two minds about many things. And stricken with a sense of loss. And ready, under pressure, to do anything.

…The problem then was to make this world credible for the reader of a contemporary novel – mother, mother’s lover, daughter, son, all paranoid, all living in a space that was like domestic space, rather than the stage of a Greek theatre, or a page of translated Greek text. The story had to stand on its own, even though it had echoes of actual events that were occurring as I was writing the book, even though many of the characters were based on figures from Greek theatre. I remembered something then, an article I had read in Vogue magazine in 2011 about the home life of Bashar al- Assad and his wife Asma in the time before the Syrian uprising. It was a truly remarkable piece of work because it gave us a sense not only of how the couple wanted the world to see them but how, in the waking dream of their days, they might actually have seen themselves. It was well written, informative, and accompanied by a marvellous photo of the devoted Assads playing with their lovely children. Some of the descriptions of the Assads at home, however, were laugh-out-loud. And it was hard to know what to do when the first lady was described as having “a killer IQ” except to feel that it must have come in useful for her, and might still.

The first lady’s mission, according to the article, was to encourage the 6 million Syrians under 18 to engage in “active citizenship”. She told Vogue: “It’s about everyone taking shared responsibility in moving this country forward, about empowerment in a civil society. We all have a stake in this country; it will be what we make it.” And then there was the appearance of her husband Bashar. He was casually dressed, friendly, wearing jeans. “He says he was attracted to studying eye surgery,” the article pointed out, quoting him directly: “because it’s very precise, it’s almost never an emergency, and there is very little blood.” This article intrigued me because it gave a picture of murderousness as something under control, in the background, something that maybe only needed to appear at proper moments as though it were a metaphor for meal times, or vice versa. It emphasised how people might manage to create an illusion as each day dawned that what they did yesterday or planned to do next hardly mattered compared with some soft image they could project of themselves.

Thus Clytemnestra, who has, in House of Names, developed a hunger for murder and become involved in the most brutal and cruel crimes, also genuinely loves her son Orestes and wants to spend quality time with him, as she wishes to walk in the garden with Electra, even though Electra loathes her. When Orestes returns, his mother wants his room to be comfortable, and she does what she can to make him happy. She is filled with darting desires, and lives for much of the day as though she is guilty, really, of nothing, but rather is much put upon. She complains of the heat, sits with her lover and her son and daughter at the table as food is served, making small talk. The murders she orders, or does with her own hands, are something that happened, that is all. Not the banality of evil, but its regulated presence and absence, its being there and then its becoming invisible, unpleasant, its way of living in the body, coming and going, like a heartbeat, like systolic pressure.

More here.

Seligman and Tierney in The New York Times:

We are misnamed. We call ourselves Homo sapiens, the “wise man,” but that’s more of a boast than a description. What makes us wise? What sets us apart from other animals? Various answers have been proposed — language, tools, cooperation, culture, tasting bad to predators — but none is unique to humans. What best distinguishes our species is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future. Our singular foresight created civilization and sustains society. It usually lifts our spirits, but it’s also the source of most depression and anxiety, whether we’re evaluating our own lives or worrying about the nation. Other animals have springtime rituals for educating the young, but only we subject them to “commencement” speeches grandly informing them that today is the first day of the rest of their lives. A more apt name for our species would be Homo prospectus, because we thrive by considering our prospects. The power o.f prospection is what makes us wise. Looking into the future, consciously and unconsciously, is a central function of our large brain, as psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered — rather belatedly, because for the past century most researchers have assumed that we’re prisoners of the past and the present.

Behaviorists thought of animal learning as the ingraining of habit by repetition. Psychoanalysts believed that treating patients was a matter of unearthing and confronting the past. Even when cognitive psychology emerged, it focused on the past and present — on memory and perception. But it is increasingly clear that the mind is mainly drawn to the future, not driven by the past. Behavior, memory and perception can’t be understood without appreciating the central role of prospection. We learn not by storing static records but by continually retouching memories and imagining future possibilities. Our brain sees the world not by processing every pixel in a scene but by focusing on the unexpected.

Our emotions are less reactions to the present than guides to future behavior. Therapists are exploring new ways to treat depression now that they see it as primarily not because of past traumas and present stresses but because of skewed visions of what lies ahead. Prospection enables us to become wise not just from our own experiences but also by learning from others. We are social animals like no others, living and working in very large groups of strangers, because we have jointly constructed the future. Human culture — our language, our division of labor, our knowledge, our laws and technology — is possible only because we can anticipate what fellow humans will do in the distant future. We make sacrifices today to earn rewards tomorrow, whether in this life or in the afterlife promised by so many religions.

More here.

Matt Staggs at Signature:

What do you, your town, and your employer all have in common? Scalability. According to physicist Geoffrey West, there are mathematical principles that govern the growth and longevity of complex organisms, crowded cities, and even corporations. West’s new book Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies, introduces readers to this hidden, fascinating world.

In the following interview, West explains the difference between complicated and complex, what the rise of Donald Trump suggests about the state of the world, and why the company you work for could be living on borrowed time.

SIGNATURE: You’re known as “the dean of complexity theory”. A lot of our readers may not understand what complexity means and why you study it.

GEOFFREY WEST: Science has progressed, at least beginning with the physical sciences, by always being what’s called reductionistic: that is, reducing things to their primary elements, whether they’re electrons, atoms, molecules, or genes and so forth. That has been enormously successful, but one of the things that we’ve begun to appreciate more and more — especially in the last 50 years, certainly the last 20 — is that kind of paradigm has extraordinary limitations.

When you try to build up from these fundamental elements to the collective whole, you discover that the whole is much greater than, behaves differently than, and is structured differently from the sum of its parts. What you recognize in parallel with that is almost all of the major issues that we face on the planet in a tsunami of challenges and crises — everything from climate change and the question of stability in markets to potential questions about risk and how we deal with things like cancer, and the encroaching threat of global urbanization — are what we call complex. They’re not easily, or even potentially, reduced to the sum of their parts.

More here.

Shehryar Fazli in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

The 2016 presidential election, with its tides of rage, party divisions, and Russian meddling, was always going to howl for the kind of radical treatment given to earlier historic campaigns, like Norman Mailer’s and Joe McGinniss’s books on the 1968 race, Hunter S. Thompson’s and Timothy Crouse’s dispatches from 1972, and David Foster Wallace’s profile of John McCain’s 2000 bid.

Now former Huffington Post reporter Scott Conroy has given us one of the first of an expected horde of books on the 2016 election, but with a soda-straw view that delivers intriguing results. Vote First or Die: The New Hampshire Primary: America’s Discerning, Magnificent, Absurd Road to the White House — a mouthful of a title, perhaps — offers a good helping of telling particulars about the most eccentric and often most important stop on the presidential nomination calendar.

Like those earlier works, Conroy’s account is highly personalized, and much of the fun comes from seeing this peculiar place through the eyes of an often-tentative intruder. Speaking directly to the reader, for example, he recommends the Errol Motel as a cozy option if one needs “to dispose of a corpse.” Of a man he meets during a protest, Conroy writes, “as nice as he was, Bill seemed like the kind of guy who might mistake me on a foggy morning for a tasty looking wild turkey and take a shot at me.” A revealing New Hampshire idiosyncrasy he uncovers is the local prestige associated with low-numbered license plates, and how former Governor John H. Sununu used to offer one of these coveted items to sway a state senator’s endorsement toward a particular candidate.

More here.

Daniel Engber in Slate:

It seemed obvious, at first, that Jade Wu was getting punked. In the fall of 2009, the Cornell University undergraduate had come across a posting for a job in the lab of one of the world’s best-known social psychologists. A short while later, she found herself in a conference room, seated alongside several other undergraduate women. “Have you guys heard of extrasensory perception?” Daryl Bem asked the students. They shook their heads.

While most labs in the psych department were harshly lit with fluorescent ceiling bulbs, Bem’s was set up for tranquility. A large tasseled tapestry stretched across one wall, and a cubicle partition was draped with soft, black fabric. It felt like the kind of place where one might stage a séance.

“Well, extrasensory perception, also called ESP, is when you can perceive things that are not immediately available in space or time,” Bem said. “So, for example, when you can perceive something on the other side of the world, or in a different room, or something that hasn’t happened yet.”

It occurred to Wu that the flyer might have been a trick. What if she and the other women were themselves the subjects of Bem’s experiment? What if he were testing whether they’d go along with total nonsense?

More here.

Francine Prose in The New York Times:

How challenging it can be, these days, to distinguish the dystopian from the naturalistic, to tell the difference between an artist’s darkest imaginings and current events. With its vision of a culture driven mad by technology, the British television series “Black Mirror” resembles 21st-century reality, fancifully tweaked. Mohsin Hamid’s recent novel, “Exit West,” depicts a near future in which the sheer number of people driven from their homes by war has destabilized global civilization. Wallace Shawn’s new play, “Evening at the Talk House,” posits a not-so-distant era in which ordinary citizens facilitate targeted long-distance killings as a way to pay the rent. Now Nadeem Aslam’s powerful and engrossing fifth novel, “The Golden Legend,” introduces us to a world that may at first seem to be a dire and distorted version of our own. In the city Aslam calls Zamana, the rule of law is a distant memory and the social order has thoroughly deteriorated. Aslam’s characters must struggle to survive in a society ruled by mob violence, sectarianism and intolerance, presided over by fanatical despots. Danger lurks everywhere: in the households and neighborhoods controlled by religious extremists and in the sky above, where drones take aim at civilians selected for execution by the American military. This apparent dystopia is, in fact, all too real. The nightmare Aslam so forcefully describes is, he suggests, a portrait of the most turbulent and painful aspects of everyday life in contemporary urban Pakistan.

As the novel opens, books are being transferred from an older library to a new structure that Massud and Nargis — a middle-aged married couple, both celebrated architects — have designed. Because the Islamic texts “contained the names of Allah and Muhammad somewhere, it had been decided that they should be taken from one building to the other by hand. In a truck or cart the risk was too great of something coming into contact with uncleanliness. Nargis and Massud would be walking to the nearby Grand Trunk Road to be part of a human chain, and the books would travel a mile-long succession of hands.” Among the treasures passed in this manner is a ninth-century Abbasid Quran, soon “followed by a book of Mughal paintings of which Rembrandt had made copies in 17th-century Holland.” As the “human chain” performs its reverential ritual, two young men on a motorcycle attack a car that has stopped nearby. Riding in the car is an American, who promptly whips out his gun and fires blindly into the crowd. In the ensuing chaos, Massud is shot and killed. Within days, the grieving widow is visited by a mysterious and clearly sinister “soldier-spy” who informs her that, as a way to help calm the volatile, anti-American mood of the local population, she must declare in court that she has forgiven her husband’s murderer. When Nargis hesitates, her visitor makes it clear that unless she complies she will be made to suffer.

More here.

Lucina Schell at The Quarterly Conversation:

The human-precipitated Anthropocene promises unprecedented loss: of beauty and wildness in the natural sphere, and the comforts of convenient consumption in the domestic sphere—yet outside of science fiction, this has yet to register in our literature. In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh argues that the blame should be put on the very structure of the novel, which employs depictions of mundane reality to conceal a scaffold of more remarkable plot points, and which developed at a time when nature was viewed as a bucolic canvas upon which human individuals acted rather than a system of which we are part. The best way to think about the Anthropocene may be through images, Ghosh suggests—film and television already seem to be having a more successful time. Danish writer Josefine Klougart’s cinematic experimental novel, Of Darkness, would seem to be the sort of novel Ghosh would appreciate: it moves in and out of images, dissolving the false border between human beings and nature in a series of interlocked vignettes that add up to a metonym for the large-scale loss implied by climate change.

Readers who prefer plot-driven novels will not be satisfied. A cohesive narrative never emerges from the various sections that retrace recurring scenes in forms as diverse as flash prose, lineated prose, Sapphic fragments, and even a screenplay. (Personally, I feared they might draw together by the end, and was relieved when they did not.) Tellingly, the screenplay section spends much more time describing the setting and directing the shots than on dialogue between its two characters, WOMAN and MAN.

more here.