Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers in Salon:

The earliest single-celled organisms on Earth simply cloned themselves. Some of their descendants still do. But as complex multicelled organisms evolved and eventually “discovered” the ability to mix their gametes, they gained a giant genetic advantage. Since these ancient creatures lived in the sea, the earliest sex was a straightforward process of spraying sperm and eggs into the water. The lucky few connected.

In that massive free-for-all, the fittest sperm reached the eggs and were rewarded with the prize of bringing their DNA into natural selection’s next round. Sometimes the fittest sperm were the strongest swimmers. Sometimes they were the ones deposited nearest the eggs. Others developed ways to follow molecular scent pathways to find the eggs. Or they bundled together in teams to improve their timing and accuracy. As sperm perfected ingenious rudders, tails, chemical markers and swimming strategies, the genital hardware that ejected them was evolving, too.

More here.

Andrew Russeth in the New York Observer:

Many of today’s superstar artists, like Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami (who also did a West record cover) and Damien Hirst not only do not shy away from publicity-rich spectacles, but embrace and engineer them with a vigor that would have impressed even Andy Warhol. Mr. Koons dreams of hanging a 70-foot-long smoke-puffing locomotive over the High Line, a public-art bauble par excellence; Mr. Murakami donned a plush flower costume and waved to fans from a float in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. As for Mr. Hirst, he trumped his epic 2008 single-artist Sotheby’s auction (which garnered $200.7 million) with this year’s Spot Challenge, the globe-trotter’s version of the contest on the back of a cereal box, for which all 11 Gagosian galleries fell into line behind him. These artists demand the love—or at least the attention—of the masses.

Nevertheless, it is rarely the nature of cutting-edge contemporary art to offer itself up so easily to the general public, which accounts for a counterbalancing force, a way in which the avant-garde maintains the initiates-only atmosphere that has always defined it. So it was that just as the last of the 128 people to successfully complete the Spot Challenge card were having their cards stamped at the beginning of March, a painting of a musician by the British artist Merlin Carpenter was going on view at the Independent art fair in Chelsea, after having been locked away during a show at the Berlin gallery MD72 the year before. During that show, collectors willing to part with €5,000 (about $6,900 at the time) were afforded the privilege of viewing the work. Those among the general public interested in viewing Mr. Carpenter’s latest work were strictly excluded from the real painting, able to view it only in reproductions printed on playing cards.

Welcome to the world of secret art.

More here.

Christopher Mims in Mother Board:

If you think of the Earth as a space ship with an energy budget that equals the input of the sun, which is exactly what it is, then you can imagine that there is a total quantity of biological productivity of which our planet is capable. Estimates say that humans are already appropriating between one quarter and one half of this productivity. The total amount of land given to crops is tied with forests as the single largest terrestrial ecosystem. Our food production requires almost a quarter of the total land area of the planet.

We have basically killed most of the wildlife that was available to us only a single generation ago. Chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy Peter Kareiva has declared that while 13 percent of Earth’s landmass is now protected as some sort of park — an area larger than all of South America — we have completely failed to stop the eradication of the plant and animal inhabitants of these “wild” places. Much of this is due to the fact that wild things are apparently quite tasty. And if you think this is limited to the land, the evidence is that our oceans are in even worse shape, with global fishing stocks set to collapse by mid-century. Meanwhile, as we all know, climate change is only accelerating what scientists now call the “sixth extinction.” Or in other words, the sixth time in the 4 billion year history of life on earth that the entire planet was so challenged that a vast majority of life came perilously close to being snuffed out.

More here.

29. Naturally Sacred

The world’s naturally sacred
—a holy cup. Its way is blessed.
To sip its yield is best.

The world resists the shove at last;
its push-back is hard on meddlers
foolish enough to thrust their fists
into its cogs. It can’t be grasped.

Change comes without force in any case.
It can’t be stopped
……………..— —it goes from
down to up, from cold to hot,
from weak to strong, to sick or not,
from first to last, ahead, behind,
whichever way it’s so inclined.

The wise find their path between extremes.
Failures from excess; judgment for the judged.

The dizzy ride the wheel’s rim.
The centered, at its hub,
calmly watch the dizzy spin.

Lao Tzu
from Adaptations of the Tao Te Ching
by R.Bob

From The New York Times:

The extremes of animal behavior can be a source of endless astonishment. Books have been written about insect sex. The antics of dogs and cats are sometimes hard to believe. And birds, those amazing birds: They build elaborate nests, learn lyrical songs, migrate impossibly long distances. But “Gifts of the Crow,” by John N. Marzluff and Tony Angell, includes a description of one behavior that even Aesop never imagined. “On Kinkazan Island in northern Japan,” the authors write, “jungle crows pick up deer feces — dry pellets of dung — and deftly wedge them in the deer’s ears.” What!?

I checked the notes at the back of the book, and this account comes from another book, written in Japanese. So I can’t give any more information on this astonishing claim, other than to say that Dr. Marzluff, of the University of Washington, and Mr. Angell, an artist and observer of birds, think that the crows do it in the spirit of fun. Deer droppings, it must be said, are only one of the crows’ gifts. The authors’ real focus is on the way that crows can give us “the ephemeral and profound connection to nature that many people crave.” To that end, however, they tell some wild anecdotes and make some surprising assertions. Many of the behaviors they describe — crows drinking beer and coffee, whistling and calling dogs and presenting gifts to people who feed them — are based on personal testimony and would seem to fall into the category of anecdote rather than science.

More here.

There was once a virtually unbroken consensus in the foundational works of social science about modernization and religion. One part of this consensus was empirical or factual. The other was normative or ethical. The empirical assumption was that with economic modernization or “development,” religion would decline. The ethical assumption was that with political modernization and its attendant “democratization,” religion should be confined to the private sphere. Description and prescription went happily together. Both parts of this consensus are now in question. The September 11 attacks clearly demonstrated that the consensus was wrong. Well before and apart from September 11, however, the consensus was increasingly difficult to sustain. A multitude of simultaneously developed and vibrantly religious societies—starting with the United States—explodes the empirical assumption. A multitude of simultaneously democratic and luxuriantly faith-saturated societies—including India, Turkey, and Indonesia—explodes the ethical assumption. And ten years after September 11, 2001, religious militancy remains a powerful force—in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and numerous other locales—that individual governments and the international community have proven unable to defeat or even contain. This old consensus is nevertheless stubborn.

more from Timothy Samuel Shah at The Immanent Frame here.

Imagine a scene from a dystopian movie that depicts our society in the near future. Uniformed guards patrol half-empty downtown streets at night, on the prowl for immigrants, criminals and vagrants. Those they find are brutalised. What seems like a fanciful Hollywood image is a reality in today’s Greece. At night, black-shirted vigilantes from the Holocaust-denying neo-fascist Golden Dawn movement – which won 7 per cent of the vote in the last round of elections, and had the support, it’s said, of 50 per cent of the Athenian police – have been patrolling the street and beating up all the immigrants they can find: Afghans, Pakistanis, Algerians. So this is how Europe is defended in the spring of 2012. The trouble with defending European civilisation against the immigrant threat is that the ferocity of the defence is more of a threat to ‘civilisation’ than any number of Muslims. With friendly defenders like this, Europe needs no enemies. A hundred years ago, G.K. Chesterton articulated the deadlock in which critics of religion find themselves: ‘Men who begin to fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church … The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them.’

more from Slavoj Žižek at the LRB here.

To continue with the theme of debating development, over at NYU's Development Research Institute, Abhijit Banerjee debates Angus Deaton:

Banerjee described the surprising result of a recent experiment in Hyderabad, India. Even with access to small loans, small business owners did not invest in growing their own businesses. This is surprising because other RCTs have shown that such investments would reap returns of 60-100 percent a year.

Banerjee suggested several explanations. Perhaps the scale is simply too small. Perhaps lack of education constrains the potential of these businesses. But the most convincing explanation according to Banerjee is that for the poor, the returns are huge incrementally, but small in absolute terms. The owners of these very small businesses think that whatever profits they might earn are unlikely to dramatically change their lives.

The larger point is that the whole intellectual journey of finding a surprising research result and formulating and testing hypotheses to explain the puzzle would not be possible without RCTs:

“We Need Experiments”

►

Angus Deaton responded that RCTs are of limited value since they focus on very small interventions that by definition only work in certain contexts. It’s like designing a better lawnmower—and who wouldn’t want that? —unless you’re in a country with no grass, or where the government dumps waste on your lawn. RCTs can help to design a perfect program for a specific context, but there’s no guarantee it will work in any other context.

RCTs are so highly regarded because people assume that the randomness of the selection eliminates bias. What people don’t talk about is that there are actually two stages of selection. The first stage, in which researchers start with the entire population, and choose a group which will in the second stage be randomly divided into the study and control groups, is NOT random. Selection in the first stage may be determined by convenience or politics, and therefore may not be representative of the entire population.

Via Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber (who was pointed to this by Doug Henwood)–first Paul Roemer:

Next, David Ellerman's critique:

One of the hot topics today is the debate about Paul Romer’s idea of charter cities. One easy introduction to the debate is Romer’s TED talk with the full story on Romer’s website. Sebastian Mallaby also did a recent piece in the Financial Times as well as an earlier piece in The Atlantic on the topic. A similar and more explicitly (right-wing) libertarian idea is pushed by Patri Friedman substituting floating cities for Romer’s charter cities (thus solving the land problem) and is called “seasteading” with the story given at his website and his TEDx talk. Patri’s father is David and David’s father is Milton, in case one wondered about the libertarian parentage of these ideas.

One of the interesting sidelights of the charter cities and seasteading debates is how they “out” the lack of any necessary connection between liberalism and democracy. As Mallaby puts it in the FT article about Romer: “In mild professorial language, [Romer] declares that poor countries should hand control of these new cities to foreign governments, which should appoint technocratic viceroys. The better to banish politics, there must be no city elections.”

For classical liberalism, the basic necessary condition for a system of governance is consent. Consent could be to a non-democratic constitution which alienates the right of self-governance to some sovereign–which in the case of a charter city would be the technocratic viceroys, or their principals such as some well-meaning foreign governments. Consent plus free entry and exit suffice to satisfy the governance requirements of classical liberalism. Classical liberalism per se sees no moral necessity in democratic self-governance at all (with or without safeguards). Most modern libertarians are not “against” democracy; it nice if you have it (and it works well with safeguards) but it is also OK if you don’t have it but have a consent-based non-democratic governance regime with good rules and the possibility of exit.

Hello,

The period for nominating entries is now over.

To browse the full list of nominees and then vote, go here.

Voting will end on Saturday, June 16 at 11:59 pm NYC time.

Good luck to all!

Yto Barrada. La Cage Aux Singes 2008/2011.

From the solo show titled Riffs.

“…The show´s title is inspired by music, where “Riff” stands for a rhythmic figure, a musical phrase that some players add to a written score. Riff relates also to the rugged Rif mountains of Morocco, home to insurgencies and a splinter Republic, and to the art deco Rif Cinema, which houses the Tangier Cinémathèque.”

More here, here, and here.

Thanks to David and Margaret Gullette!

Chris Vaughan in Metapsychology:

Why would a work on legalizing prostitution have thirty five pages of closely printed notes and a bibliography running to almost sixteen pages? The answer lies in the incendiary nature of the subject matter. Emotions frequently run high when it comes to discussing the sex trade and there doesn't seem to be any middle ground. Ronald Weitzer, Professor of Sociology at George Washington University is determined to bring some calm dispassionate reasoning based on solid research to the debate. Too often, he says, this debate is still stuck in what Popper termed the pre-scientific stage. Arguments are formulated on impressionistic, untested assumptions. Hence when it comes to prostitution, given that only a minority of the population ever experience prostitutes in the flesh as it were – between 15 – 18 per cent across the Western world – then the debate is coloured by impressions gathered from the media, from literature, from films and plays and from the more high profile street prostitutes on view in any large city.

My own impressions were formed when the neighbourhood where I live, at the time a decaying inner city suburb of large Victorian houses, many of them sublet, was invaded by a posse of street prostitutes who had been driven out from the city's traditional 'red light' area by angry residents taking direct action. His broadly researched description of this form of selling sex match my own observations as we, as residents, strove with the help of the police, the civil courts, city officers and social workers to get them to desist or move on and stop using our neighbourhood as their place of work and all the attendant ills it visited on us. He lists these: the initial transaction is in a public place: the sex act takes place in a public or semi-public place: many underage prostitutes are runaways in a new locale with no resources and little recourse but to engage in some kind of criminal activity – theft, drug dealing, selling sex. They sell sex out of dire necessity or to support a drug habit.

More here.

Rebecca Foresman in The New Yorker:

Natasha Trethewey, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the collection “Native Guard,” was named U.S. Poet Laureate last Wednesday. Her poetic voice has deftly positioned her to inherit the laureate tradition and usher it into the future. Trethewey’s writing mines the cavernous isolation, brutality, and resilience of African American history, tracing its subterranean echoes to today.

Her poem, “Native Guard,” for example, draws its title and narrative focus from the so-called Union Army regiment of black soldiers, primarily liberated slaves, who watched over Confederate prisoners of war. Trethewey, in an agile shift from poetry to prose, past to present, and national to personal history, continues her investigation of race relations in her non-fiction book, “Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.” Here, Trethewey applies an autobiographical lens to the vertiginous power dynamics and fractured identity politics of being black in America. She delves into her memories of childhood as the daughter of an interracial marriage, deemed illegal under Mississippi law at the time of her parents’ union.

More here.

David Luban in the Boston Review:

This week, U.S. officials announced that they had killed al Qaeda’s second-in-command with a drone strike. The news came soon after the New York Timespublished the fullest account to date of the process by which the United States selects lower-profile targets for drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen. The most startling revelation was that President Obama personally supervises the “nomination” of potential targets and gives final approval for killing them.

The lengthy Times story isn’t based on a leak—it is clearly news that the White House wants the world to know. The reporters interviewed three dozen current and former Obama advisors to assemble their picture of the target-selection process. In his new book, Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency,Newsweek reporter Daniel Klaidman notes that Obama’s presidential campaign “is painting a portrait of a steely commander who pursues the enemy without flinching.” Three days after the drones article, the Times ran an equally detailed article, again with obvious White House consent, about U.S. cyberattacks against Iran, reporting that “Mr. Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room meetings . . . was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory.” This image of the president firmly in command of the drone campaign is precisely what the White House wishes to convey in the run-up to the election.

So why did the president put his hand on the helm? The Times reports:

Aides say Mr. Obama has several reasons for becoming so immersed in lethal counterterrorism operations. A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions.

This image of a president schooled in just war theory is remarkable. At least one Catholic Web site has poured scorn on “the wise, judicious philosopher-king consulting Aquinas and Augustine before sending a drone missile on a ‘signature strike’ on a group of picnickers in Yemen or farmers in Pakistan.”

More here.

Angelique Richardson in the Times Literary Supplement:

Reading Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species straight after publication, Friedrich Engels wrote to tell Karl Marx that it was quite splendid. Excepting, that is, its “clumsy English method”. Turning to it on his sickbed a year later, Marx responded that “although it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the natural history basis for my view”. Closer to home, Darwin’s readers were not always more enamoured of his style. Within weeks of its appearance, George Eliot wrote that she thought the book “ill-written”, and that she didn’t think it would be very popular. But few could doubt its significance, and writers were among the first to see this. Hitting the bookshops in November 1859, it sold out on the first day, Darwin’s publisher John Murray told him. Eliot said “it will have a great effect in the scientific world . . . . So the world gets on step by step towards brave clearness and honesty!”, and Thomas Hardy, who read it as a teenager, declared himself to be one of its first champions. Rereading the Origin (“slowly again for the nth time, with the view of picking out the essentials of the argument for the obituary notice”), T. H. Huxley remarked that “nothing entertains me more than to hear people call it easy reading”. “Exposition”, he insisted, “was not Darwin’s forte – and his English is sometimes wonderful.” This wonderful English, the extraordinary prose that could puzzle Darwin’s Victorian readers, is the subject of George Levine’s new book, from which Darwin emerges as an artist as well as a scientist, a master of argument, analogical reasoning, hypothesis and anecdote.

More here.

Geoff Dyer in The Observer:

I'd heard that the title essay of Jonathan Franzen's new collection was about his punishing experiences on a rough and tiny island. Some of what happened there is by now well known. The inhabitants of this island welcomed him by printing the wrong version of his novel Freedom, necessitating the pulping of its entire first print run. Then at the party – marked, as a consequence of this error, by the absence of the book it was intended to launch – a gatecrasher plucked Franzen's glasses from his face, ran off into the night and demanded a ransom of several thousand pounds. (He's blind as a mole without his specs, apparently; probably the result of having subjected his peepers to every page of William Gaddis's The Recognitions and about half of JR.)

When the plane lifted off from Heathrow, Franzen must have breathed a sigh of relief and said to himself that it would be a cold day in hell before he'd set foot on that loud-dump again. So I admired the courage it took to revisit the site of these serial traumas in print.

Except, it turns out, the essay is about another, less ferocious place: Más Afuera, the island way down in the South Pacific where Alexander Selkirk (the model for Robinson Crusoe) was a castaway. Franzen retreats there after months of promoting his book, armed with a tent, a copy of Defoe's novel and some of the ashes of his friend David Foster Wallace. Once installed on the island – installed in the sense of barely able to erect his tent – Franzen reflects on the ludicrousness of the endeavour (“I hadn't felt so homesick since, possibly, the last time I'd camped by myself”), the rise of the novel in the age of Defoe and on his “friendship of compare and contrast and (in a brotherly way) compete” with Wallace.

More here.

Marcella Sirhandi in Islamic Arts:

Lubna graduated from Mina Art School in Karachi, Pakistan in 1967, and at a very young age became one of the most recognized painters in the country. In the 1960s she painted colorful abstract compositions, exhibited at the Arts Council as well as newly established galleries in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. She sold her work at a time when collectors were few and very selective.

In the 1970s, she became famous for her White series, delicate minimalist paintings with cotton ball shapes delineated by calligraphic lines and sweeps of black and red paint. The press reacted as never before. Each journalist, trying to outdo one another, saw something symbolic in these paintings, from the erotic to the sublime. These paintings were purely formalist concerns but Lubna enjoyed the spin. In 1973, when she was in her 20s, Lubna was awarded second prize in the National Exhibition in Pakistan, an exhibition dominated by senior Pakistani artists.

At the height of her career in Pakistan, Lubna and her family moved to Sacramento, California. Lubna took up drawing, print making and painting small watercolors in her new home. Her drawings expressed feelings of alienation from her home in Pakistan. California was truly a foreign place for her. Her watercolors held similar meaning with falling figures and limbs detached from their bodies. Several exhibitions, including one-person shows, followed both in California, the United Kingdom and on her periodic return to Pakistan. By the year 2000, Lubna was gripped by political concerns. She produced the Ja-namaaz series to address her grievances. Pakistan, her homeland, had become increasingly dependent on foreign institutions. She painted prayer rugs mocking allegiance to these institutions, including the White House, the IMF and even McDonalds.

More here.

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Thanks very much for participating in our contest. For details of the prize you can look at the announcement here, and to read the nominated posts you can go here for a complete list with links.

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Kishwar Desai in The Independent:

Why is it that, most of the time, life-changing events appear to come out of nowhere? Or are we always unconsciously preparing for that moment, and the destiny-diverting collision (even with a book) is never as coincidental as it seems? There are few books that I have read which have not shaped my mind and fate in some way, especially when I was growing up. Whether it was the PG Wodehouse Jeeves series, or the collection of Oscar Wilde stories I constantly enjoyed…or Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Daphne du Maurier. I was a greedy monster, devouring them all.