John Gray at Literary Review:

In a popular American blog propagating Darwinism, Felipe Fernández-Armesto reports, a well-known biologist with mildly unorthodox views has been described as needing a ‘good punch in the balls’. Fernández-Armesto writes, ‘This is almost as nasty as anyodium theologicum rival religious dogmatists have ever exchanged.’ It is a characteristically civilised comment on what has become a thoroughly uncivilised debate. For some of its most ardent proponents, Darwinism is not a scientific theory about the origins and development of living things but instead a comprehensive world-view. For these evangelists, evolution enables us to understand everything that exists – not least human culture.

A mix of wide and deep learning and rigorous argument, beautifully written, A Foot in the River demolishes this way of thinking. Fernández-Armesto is no enemy of science. Already in the early 1970s he was holding a seminar with a colleague on what they called ‘historical ecology’, which aimed ‘to understand humans in relation to the whole of the rest of nature: the climate that surrounds us, the landscape that enfolds us, the species with which we interact, the ecosystems in which we are bound’. This kind of understanding infused his illuminating surveys of human history, Millennium (1995) and Civilizations (2001). Far from resisting any role for scientific enquiry in the humanities, Fernández-Armesto has been a pioneer in showing how the material circumstances in which humans act have helped shape their histories.

more here.

D H Kelly in The F Word:

There have been many clever and undoubtedly useful attempts to describe sexual consent in a non-sexual way, such as Alli Kirkham’s cartoons and Rockstar Dinosaur Pirate Princesss’s tea analogy which has inspired a video now promoted by the CPS. The trouble is, people do override one another’s non-sexual wishes. Disabled people and others who are considered vulnerable routinely have their wishes ignored, often for what is perceived to be for our own good. Friends, family and even strangers take hold of occupied wheelchairs and move us about without asking. I once listened in horror to a friend describe driving his autistic sister to a cafe for lunch, but refusing to tell her where they were going. “She insists on knowing the exact plan all the time,” my friend complained, “She needs to lighten up, so I said, ‘Tough. It’s a surprise.’ And she completely lost it!”

Most people don’t do these things most of the time. Most of us really don’t need to be taught not to rape, as one student recently put it. Not that because – as the young man claimed – we love consent, but because we are horrified at the idea of doing something sexual which isn’t wholly welcome. However, cultural ideas about consent are muddy enough for us to feel confused and conflicted about other people’s actions. Sex in movies almost always erupts spontaneously, without much interaction, let alone verbal discussion. Journalists ask whether you need permission to kiss someone, and there are apps which claim to record sexual consent, as if that’s about one moment in time. When Julian Assange was accused of penetrating an unconscious person – unable to make a decision, let alone indicate her wishes – there was a national debate about whether this was rape or bad manners. This doesn’t mean you or I, exposed to such a culture, will then look at a lovely sexy person who happens to be drunk as a skunk and think, “Here’s my chance!” but when we hear that someone else committed rape in these circumstances, culture tells us they were succumbing to temptation.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

A key concept in Darwin's theory of evolution which suggests nature favours larger females that can produce greater numbers of off-spring must be redefined according to scientists behind ground-breaking research published today (3rd November 2015). The study, published in the scientific journal Biological Reviews, concludes that the theory of 'fecundity selection' – one of Charles Darwin's three main evolutionary principles, also known as 'fertility selection' – should be redefined so that it no longer rests on the idea that more fertile females are more successful in evolutionary terms. The research highlights that too many offspring can have severe implications for mothers and the success of their descendants, and that that males can also affect the evolutionary success of a brood. Darwin's theory of fecundity selection was postulated in 1874 and, together with the principles of natural selection and sexual selection, remains a fundamental component of modern evolutionary theory. It describes the process of reproductive success among organisms, defined by the number of successful offspring which reach breeding age.

After years of research, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Lincoln, UK, has proposed a revised version of the theory of fecundity selection which recommends an updated definition, adjusts its traditional predictions and incorporates important new biological terms. The research indicates that rather than aiding survival, too many offspring can be extremely costly, and can in fact reduce the lifetime reproductive success of females. It highlights that in many species, mothers who produce fewer offspring tend to raise them more efficiently, and that in some cases fathers can take the lead in nurturing young by evolving 'male pregnancy'.

More here.

Corey Powell in Nautilus:

Basically you can think of the division between the relativity and quantum systems as “smooth” versus “chunky.” In general relativity, events are continuous and deterministic, meaning that every cause matches up to a specific, local effect. In quantum mechanics, events produced by the interaction of subatomic particles happen in jumps (yes, quantum leaps), with probabilistic rather than definite outcomes. Quantum rules allow connections forbidden by classical physics. This was demonstrated in a much-discussed recent experiment, in which Dutch researchers defied the local effect. They showed two particles—in this case, electrons—could influence each other instantly, even though they were a mile apart. When you try to interpret smooth relativistic laws in a chunky quantum style, or vice versa, things go dreadfully wrong.

Relativity gives nonsensical answers when you try to scale it down to quantum size, eventually descending to infinite values in its description of gravity. Likewise, quantum mechanics runs into serious trouble when you blow it up to cosmic dimensions. Quantum fields carry a certain amount of energy, even in seemingly empty space, and the amount of energy gets bigger as the fields get bigger. According to Einstein, energy and mass are equivalent (that’s the message of e=mc2), so piling up energy is exactly like piling up mass. Go big enough, and the amount of energy in the quantum fields becomes so great that it creates a black hole that causes the universe to fold in on itself. Oops.

Craig Hogan, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Chicago and the director of the Center for Particle Astrophysics at Fermilab, is reinterpreting the quantum side with a novel theory in which the quantum units of space itself might be large enough to be studied directly. Meanwhile, Lee Smolin, a founding member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, is seeking to push physics forward by returning back to Einstein’s philosophical roots and extending them in an exciting direction.

To understand what is at stake, look back at the precedents. When Einstein unveiled general relativity, he not only superseded Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity; he also unleashed a new way of looking at physics that led to the modern conception of the Big Bang and black holes, not to mention atomic bombs and the time adjustments essential to your phone’s GPS.

More here.

Matthew Pratt Guterl in TNR:

More here.

Chris Hedges in truthdig:

Sheldon Wolin, our most important contemporary political theorist, died Oct. 21 at the age of 93. In his books “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism” and “Politics and Vision,” a massive survey of Western political thought that his former student Cornel West calls “magisterial,” Wolin lays bare the realities of our bankrupt democracy, the causes behind the decline of American empire and the rise of a new and terrifying configuration of corporate power he calls “inverted totalitarianism.”

Wendy Brown, a political science professor at UC Berkeley and another former student of Wolin’s, said in an email to me: “Resisting the monopolies on left theory by Marxism and on democratic theory by liberalism, Wolin developed a distinctive—even distinctively American—analysis of the political present and of radical democratic possibilities. He was especially prescient in theorizing the heavy statism forging what we now call neoliberalism, and in revealing the novel fusions of economic with political power that he took to be poisoning democracy at its root.”

Wolin throughout his scholarship charted the devolution of American democracy and in his last book, “Democracy Incorporated,” details our peculiar form of corporate totalitarianism. “One cannot point to any national institution[s] that can accurately be described as democratic,” he writes in that book, “surely not in the highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-biased judicial and penal system, or, least of all, the media.”

Inverted totalitarianism is different from classical forms of totalitarianism. It does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader but in the faceless anonymity of the corporate state. Our inverted totalitarianism pays outward fealty to the facade of electoral politics, the Constitution, civil liberties, freedom of the press, the independence of the judiciary, and the iconography, traditions and language of American patriotism, but it has effectively seized all of the mechanisms of power to render the citizen impotent.

More here.

Abraham Adams at Harper's Magazine:

There is a Moorish mansion on a steep hill in the New York countryside. Built by the landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church, it has mosaic rooftops, mortared stone walls, and a fez-red trim. Its balconies look out through horseshoe archways at the Hudson River Valley from a boxy, upright structure of a kind that is more locally familiar than its trappings; in fact, it’s a Victorian in Orientalist drag.

To get inside you have to take the tour. They sell the tickets at the gift shop in the carriage barn, a building just below the hilltop, painted solid green in deference to the house. I went in spring on no occasion. The silent man behind the register declined my press credentials, looking at them like they were reminding him of something he’d forgotten, so I paid. We were early. He invited us to watch their documentary. We followed him to a sunny back room full of benches that felt like a frontier chapel. A television on a rolling stand was displaying credits. The video ended and started over.

Church had muttonchops, a bare chin, and a wide-eyed visionary look that seemed to me, 150 years or so his junior watching photos of him passing on the screen, a little funny in its gravitas.

more here.

… at the New York Review of Books:

Robinson: I think that in our earlier history—the Gettysburg Address or something—there was the conscious sense that democracy was an achievement. It was not simply the most efficient modern system or something. It was something that people collectively made and they understood that they held it together by valuing it. I think that in earlier periods—which is not to say one we will never return to—the president himself was this sort of symbolic achievement of democracy. And there was the human respect that I was talking about before, [that] compounds itself in the respect for the personified achievement of a democratic culture. Which is a hard thing—not many people can pull that together, you know…. So I do think that one of the things that we have to realize and talk about is that we cannot take it for granted. It’s a made thing that we make continuously.

The President: A source of optimism—I took my girls to see Hamilton, this new musical on Broadway, which you should see. Because this wonderful young Latino playwright produced this play, musical, about Alexander Hamilton and the Founding Fathers. And it’s all in rap and hip-hop. And it’s all played by young African-American and Latino actors.

And it sounds initially like it would not work at all. And it is brilliant, and so much so that I’m pretty sure this is the only thing that Dick Cheney and I have agreed on—during my entire political career—it speaks to this vibrancy of American democracy, but also the fact that it was made by these living, breathing, flawed individuals who were brilliant. We haven’t seen a collection of that much smarts and chutzpah and character in any other nation in history, I think.

more here.

Thomas W. Laqueur at The Paris Review:

When an important nineteenth-century painter takes on the subject of mortality and immortality, the scene is set in a churchyard, not a cemetery. There were no bodies evident in the latter. Henry Alexander Bowler’s The Doubt: ‘Can These Dry Bones Live?’ was painted in 1855 as a meditation on Tennyson’s In Memoriam. A young woman is standing amidst the genteel disrepair of what appears to be a substantial country churchyard (but actually is the churchyard of the London suburb of Stoke Newington). The box tomb on her right has lost its siding, exposing the brick vault beneath; this is the sort of shelter that sparked late eighteenth-century litigation, an effort that went against the nature of the place, that somehow tried to bring order to an individual grave by claiming for it a permanence that some opposed. The stone behind her has sunk almost out of sight; further back, an old-fashioned and short-lived grave board with elaborately carved posts running laterally along the body beneath is visible among a picturesque array of variously angled slabs. She rests her arms on the gravestone of John Faithful and looks onto the disturbed earth of the grave—there is no hint why it is in this condition, but it is almost a trope of churchyard representation. More specifically, she contemplates the skull that is lying there and the femur and bits of ribs that are poking out of the ground. This would have been unthinkable in the new regime of the cemetery. The red brick buttresses and a few windows of the church building itself stand out as if to make the point of a historical continuity of the Christian community of the living and the dead, represented by the field of markers in various stages of decay—its past, by the church that serves the living, and by the visit itself. John Faithful died in 1791, and the woman’s costume makes clear that the scene we are witnessing occurred sixty years later, in the 1850s.

more here.

Eboo Patel and Mary Ellen Giess in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

This time it’s the Muslims at Wichita State University who are in the news. Consigned to praying in stairwells and hallways, they were delighted last month when a Christian minister on the campus proposed making changes in the chapel in a way that would accommodate diverse worship practices. The plan called for replacing the pews with stackable chairs, a step that enraged some alumni and community members. Part of the anger was directed toward the Christian leaders who led the plan. “You call yourself a Christian?” one critic thundered. But the Muslim students experienced the brunt of the backlash, accused of advocating for the Islamic transformation of America. The Wichita State events call to mind a similar incident at Duke University in January. After campus officials provided permission for Muslims to sound the adhan, or call to prayer, from the bell tower of the chapel, Franklin Graham, a prominent Christian evangelist, wrote: “As Christianity is being excluded from the public square and followers of Islam are raping, butchering, and beheading Christians, Jews, and anyone who doesn’t submit to their Sharia Islamic law, Duke is promoting this in the name of religious pluralism.” That inspired a groundswell of protest against Duke, with specific fury directed at its Muslim students. For us, these incidents highlight some disturbing facts.

It is no secret that non-Muslim Americans have generally negative attitudes toward Muslims. A 2014 report by the Pew Research Center, for example, shows that 41 percent of Americans rank Muslims in the lowest third on a scale of “warmth” toward diverse religious traditions. But it may surprise officials in higher education that perceptions in campus environments, generally thought to be more welcoming of diverse identities, bear striking similarities to the national data. The Campus Religious and Spiritual Climate Survey, designed by two professors of higher education, Alyssa Bryant Rockenbach and Matt Mayhew, found that only 46 percent of students surveyed believe that Muslims are accepted in their campus communities.

It has not escaped notice that many of the more aggressive individuals in targeting Muslims are evangelical Christians.

More here.

Stephen Cave in Aeon:

It is often thought that science has shown that there is no such thing as free will. If all things are bound by the same impersonal cosmic laws, then (the story goes) our paths are no freer than those of rocks tumbling down a hill. But this is wrong. Science is giving us a very powerful and clear way to understand freedom of the will. We have just been looking for it in the wrong place. Instead of using an electron microscope or a brain-scanner, we should go to the zoo. There we will find animals using a wide range of skills that give them options for what to do – skills that we share. These abilities have evolved through natural selection because they are essential for survival: animals need to weigh different factors, explore available options, pursue new alternatives when old strategies don’t work. Together these abilities give all animals, including humans, an entirely natural free will, one that we need precisely because we are not rocks. We are complex organisms actively pursuing our interests in a changing environment. And we are starting to understand the cognitive abilities that underpin this behavioural freedom. Like most evolved capacities, they are a matter of degree. Take, for example, the ability to delay gratification. For a hungry cat, this means being able to hold back from pouncing until it is sure the sparrow is within range and looking the other way. Experimenters measure this ability by testing how long an animal can resist a small treat in return for a larger reward after a delay. Chickens, for example, can do this for six seconds. They can choose whether to wait for the juicier titbit or not – but only if that titbit comes very soon. A chimpanzee, on the other hand, can wait for a cool two minutes – or even up to eight minutes in some experiments. I am guessing that you could manage a lot longer.

The chimpanzee therefore has more options: if a juicier treat became available after six seconds, a chimp would be free to choose whether to wait for it, but a chicken would not. If you can delay gratification even longer, you have still more options: whether to turn down dessert because you are on a diet, or to forego all pleasure in this world in the hope of a heavenly reward. As we start to understand, and learn to measure, the capacities that underlie behavioural freedom, we can begin to put this natural free will on a scale. Paralleling the measurement of intelligence, we could call it the freedom quotient: FQ. Such a scale should give us new insights into the factors that hinder or enhance our efforts to shape our lives. In other words, FQ should tell us how free we are – and how we can become even more so.

More here.

Gretchen Reynolds in The New York Times:

For those of us who don’t know every portion of our cells’ interiors, telomeres are tiny caps found on the end of DNA strands, like plastic aglets on shoelaces. They are believed to protect the DNA from damage during cell division and replication. As a cell ages, its telomeres naturally shorten and fray. But the process can be accelerated by obesity, smoking, insomnia, diabetes and other aspects of health and lifestyle. In those cases, the affected cells age prematurely. However, recent science suggests that exercise may slow the fraying of telomeres. Past studies have found, for instance, that master athletes typically have longer telomeres than sedentary people of the same age, as do older women who frequently walk or engage in other fairly moderate exercise.

But those studies were relatively narrow, focusing mostly on elderly people who ran or walked. It remained unclear whether people of different ages who engaged in a variety of exercises would likewise show effects on their telomeres. So for the new study, which was published this month in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, researchers from the University of Mississippi and University of California, San Francisco, decided to look more broadly at the interactions of exercise and telomeres among a wide swath of Americans. To do so, they turned to the immense trove of data generated by the ongoing National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, for which tens of thousands of adults answer questions annually about their health, including their exercise habits, and complete an in-person health exam, providing a blood sample. In recent years, those blood samples have been tested for, among other markers of health, telomere length in the participants’ white blood cells. The researchers gathered the data for about 6,500 of the participants, ranging in age from 20 to 84, and then categorized them into four groups, based on how they had responded to questions about exercise. Those questions in this survey tended to be broad, asking people only if, at any time during the past month, they had engaged in weight training, moderate exercise like walking, more vigorous exercise like running, or have walked or ridden a bike to work or school. If a participant answered yes to any of those four questions, he or she earned a point from the researchers. So, someone who reported walking received a point. If he also ran, he earned another, and so on, for a maximum of four points. The researchers then compared those tallies to each person’s telomere length.

And there were clear associations. For every point someone gained from any type of exercise, his or her risks of having unusually short telomeres declined significantly.

More here.

How rain arrives

This morning you called
long before the sky slipped
on her sunrise shirt:
early stars blinked quietly
the way a heart beats
beneath the covers of sleep.
When the phone rang
the whole house seized awake.

She died in the night,
was the first thing you said.
I listened to you described
her fall, nodded my grief
into a phone gone suddenly
hard and cold.

You didn’t hear her go.

You couldn’t have known
how you’d sewn guilt
into your end of the conversation,
scratchy and strange the way
a mended sheet rubs
on a bare foot at dawn.

By the time my bed was made,
clouds shrouded the sky’s face.
When I started the car,
rain had already stained
the road dark and wet.
.

by Christine Klocek-Lim
from How to Photograph a Heart
The Lives You Touch Publications, 2009
.

Sughra Raza. Self Portrait at Whispering Bayou, Houston, 2015.

Digital photograph.

“The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston presents Whispering Bayou, an immersive multi-media installation that consists of a video triptych and a multi-channel soundscape composed of the sounds, voices, and images of Houstonians and their city. The project is a collaboration between Houston-based filmmaker, interactive multimedia producer, and community activist Carroll Parrott Blue; French composer and multimedia artist Jean-Baptiste Barrière; and New York-based composer and computer interactive artist George Lewis.”

More on this installation here and here.

Eric Fish in The Atlantic:

Since the collapse of several authoritarian regimes in the 1980s and 1990s—most notably the Soviet Union—conventional wisdom in political science has held that dictatorships inevitably democratize or stagnate. This wisdom has even been applied to China, where the Communist Party (CCP) has presided over 26 years of economic growth since violently suppressing protests at Tiananmen Square. In 2012, the political theorist and Tsinghua University philosophy professor Daniel A. Bell aroused controversy among many China-watchers for challenging this idea. In several op-eds published in prominent Western publications, Bell argued that China’s government, far from being an opaque tyranny, actually presented a “meritocratic” alternative to liberal, multiparty democracy. In a new book titledThe China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy, Bell expands on that idea.

“I disagree with the view that there’s only one morally legitimate way of selecting leaders: one person, one vote,” Bell said at a recent debate hosted by ChinaFile at Asia Society in New York.

Bell is under no illusion that China has already perfected its political recipe, admitting that the ideal “China model” is still very theoretical. This involves a “vertical democratic meritocracy,” as he puts it, with open democratic elections at the local level, meritocratic assessment (like China’s civil-service exam) to choose top national leaders, and experimentation in the middle. In this system, local leaders—who handle relatively basic issues—are still accountable to voters. But national leaders, who must handle more complex issues and make tough decisions that may not be popular (like enacting serious climate-change measures), can be chosen based on experience and knowledge without American-style political gridlock or susceptibility to populist approval.

More here.

Chrissie Giles in Mosaic:

Everyone in alcohol research knows the graph. It plots the change in annual consumption of alcohol in the UK, calculated in litres of pure alcohol per person. (None of us drinks pure alcohol, thankfully; one litre of pure alcohol is equivalent to 35 pints of strong beer.) In 1950, Brits drank an average of 3.9 litres per person. Look to the right and at first the line barely rises. Then, in 1960, it begins to creep upward. The climb becomes more steady during the 1970s. The upward trajectory ends in 1980, but that turns out to be temporary. By the late 1990s consumption is rising rapidly again. Come Peak Booze, in 2004, we were drinking 9.5 litres of alcohol per person – the equivalent of more than 100 bottles of wine.

It’s impossible to untangle the forces behind the graph’s every rise and fall, but I’ve talked to researchers who have studied our relationship with alcohol. They told me how everything from recessions to marketing to sexism has shaped the way Brits drink. This is the story of that research, and of what it tells us about the ascent to Peak Booze. In many ways it is not a story about how much we drink, but about who drinks what, and where. It begins well over half a century ago, in the pub.

More here.

Laura D'Olimpio at the Australian Broadcast Corporation:

Some people may wonder if young people can do philosophy. In his Nicomachean Ethics, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle writes that the young—and not necessarily the young in age—are not suitable students of ethics and politics because they lack experience and because they tend to follow feelings rather than reason.

Furthermore, in Socrates’ day, there was a concern that teaching the youth critical thinking skills would result in them being less obedient. If we teach students philosophy, will they simply argue for whatever they like, and be able to justify their arguments? Is the study of philosophy corrupting or empowering?

Philosophy for Children (P4C) is a program that takes philosophy out of the academy and into the classrooms of primary and high schools. P4C started at Montclair State University, New Jersey in the 1970s, when Matthew Lipman and Ann Sharp decided that a pragmatic approach to doing philosophy was needed. Their vision was to train children to think critically, creatively and collaboratively so that they would be better democratic citizens.

Influenced by the pragmatism of the philosopher John Dewey, Lipman applied the term ‘community of inquiry’ to the pedagogy that is central to conducting philosophical dialogue with children.

More here.