Casey Schwartz in Daily Beast:

Maybe there’s a gene for the belief that genes can explain everything.

If so, I’m missing it.

In the last seven days, we’ve been hearing a lot about the DRD4 gene, dubbed by the media as the “slut gene,” that supposedly explains why certain people are likely to have lots of sex, especially of the adulterous variety.

In a study published last week in the journal PLoS One, a group of researchers, led by Justin Garcia at Binghamton University in New York, took 181 undergraduate-aged subjects, asked them about their sex lives, and ran a DNA test to see which version of the DRD4 gene they had: the 7R+ or the 7R- kind. The DRD4 gene has made headlines before. In fact, it’s a goldmine of scandalous behaviors, linked to everything from alcoholism to impulsive financial decisions. It influences how our brains respond to dopamine, a feel-good neurotransmitter unleashed by new and rewarding experiences. So the Binghamton group had good reason to think that they’d find something if they looked at its role in sexual behavior. And they did find something. But first, here’s what they didn’t find:

They didn’t find that those with one version of the gene had more sex than those with the other. And they didn’t find that the people with the so-called slut gene had more sexual partners, or that they're more likely to cheat.

What they found is that the group who had the 7R+ version was more likely to have had, at one point or another, “a one-night stand,” and that if someone with a 7R+ did cheat in a relationship, they were likely to have done so with more people than their 7R- counterparts.

The study leaves several questions unanswered. Was this 7R+ group really more likely to have had a one-night stand, or just more likely to report it? Did they actually cheat with more partners, or were they simply more willing to reveal the full extent of their adultery? You could just as easily interpret the study’s results this way and declare DRD4 the “candor gene.”

The DRD4 study isn’t an isolated case of shaky genetic science. In fact, it joins a cadre of questionable scientific assertions that link single genes to much broader patterns of behavior.

Why is there a universe, not a blank? The Grand Design and Cycles of Time suggest very different answers. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow make The Grand Design reader-friendly. Its physics and cosmology are enlivened by myth (“In the Mayan legend the Maker, unhappy because there was no one to praise him, decided to create humans”). You’ll find colourful artwork, jokes, a quick history of science, no mathematics. And the book can seem astonishingly open-minded. Even Archbishop Ussher’s view that things began in 4004 BC appears to get considerable respect. Suppose that Ussher’s modern disciples taught that in 4004 BC God created the universe exactly as if it had existed for billions of years, inclusive of fossils in the rocks: Hawking–Mlodinow’s “model-dependent realism” wouldn’t call their teaching mistaken, or its imagined facts “less real” than those you presumably believe in. “Philosophy”, the book declares, “is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science.” The authors then make bold philosophical claims. For example they aren’t attracted by the idea, perhaps it has never occurred to them, that even chess-playing computers “make choices” in a sense. So they theorize that “though we feel that we can choose what we do”, we are in fact “governed by the laws of physics and chemistry”, which at once proves we can’t. Presumably, they hope that after weighing the alternatives we will select their theory without actually choosing it.

more from John Leslie at the TLS here.

One might well consider the Chinese kung fu perspective a form of pragmatism. The proximity between the two is probably why the latter was well received in China early last century when John Dewey toured the country. What the kung fu perspective adds to the pragmatic approach, however, is its clear emphasis on the cultivation and transformation of the person, a dimension that is already in Dewey and William James but that often gets neglected. A kung fu master does not simply make good choices and use effective instruments to satisfy whatever preferences a person happens to have. In fact the subject is never simply accepted as a given. While an efficacious action may be the result of a sound rational decision, a good action that demonstrates kung fu has to be rooted in the entire person, including one’s bodily dispositions and sentiments, and its goodness is displayed not only through its consequences but also in the artistic style one does it. It also brings forward what Charles Taylor calls the “background” — elements such as tradition and community — in our understanding of the formation of a person’s beliefs and attitudes. Through the kung fu approach, classic Chinese philosophy displays a holistic vision that brings together these marginalized dimensions and thereby forces one to pay close attention to the ways they affect each other.

more from Peimin Ni at The Opinionater here.

Water/Zero

After the garden, the man and woman
squatted in a field of thorns.

See, they had become like us,
although they didn’t know it yet,
knowing good and evil, which meant also

a whole bestiary of pain,
which was new to them, and so
in the infancy of their wanting

thirst and hunger, famine and drought
lacked at first their proper names,
settling slowly on their tongues
like sand blown through the teeth.

It took some time before they saw
that certain things were missing:
the beasts of the field fled from them,
the evening thrush was still.

And something else as well, a thing
that had no name was missing too,
which had been everywhere before.

They began to speak of a before,
arranging stones to track the days,
circling them in the dry grass,
counting backward in their grief
to the first stone, day after day,
until there were too many stones to count,
and they built a house out of their grief.

What had gone? It was not in the sky,
or in the root, or in the wilted throat.
Before, it had been everywhere.

Above, the sky was blue and hard.
The leaves cracked in the wind.
They searched and searched the field in vain.

Only by digging an O in the earth,
carving and carving the shape of their grief,

did they find at last what they had lost,
and draw it up, and call it by its name.

Before, it had been everywhere.
Like nothing, it could not be
conceived. Now, in the sterile earth,
the man and woman made it into a thing.

And they saw that it was useful
for calling back the world,
the wild ass, the ox.
Later they found it could call forth
the green plants of the field as well.

But as with all the things that are
both intimate and necessary, they saw
how it could swallow and withhold:
the gourd dropped in the well.
The sea which never speaks.

We can imagine how the first echo
must have terrified them,
their own voices in the well
calling back to them, their words
the only things that would return.

And so they kept the words,
and made themselves a song about the whole,
their small, round world, held out to hold
a place for everything that’s lost.

by Leon Weinman
from Blackbird; Spring 2010

Simone Schnall in Edge:

I am a social psychologist, and study judgments and decisions from the perspective that emotions, and all kinds of feelings, including physical sensations, play a really important role. For example, such simple things as a sense of cleanliness can make a difference to how people decide whether something is right or wrong. We've been looking at, in general, how people make decisions, and how they arrive at judgments. In particular we've been studying moral judgments, that is, how do people tell right from wrong? It used to be thought for the longest time, going back for thousands of years of philosophical investigation, that people think of why a certain behavior might be wrong. They think of all the rational reasons, all the things they can come up with, they go through all the pros and cons, and then arrive at the judgment, and say, “Behavior X is either wrong, or very wrong, or not so wrong, it's fine”, and so on. So it used to be thought that people think long and hard, and then figure out the answer.

Now it turns out that actually this does not seem to be the case because first of all, people don't always think that much, and many thought processes are not really conscious, but rather, they happen outside of consciousness. Many thoughts just happen incidentally, and people aren't even aware of them. Therefore, instead of all these sophisticated thoughts and reasons, accidental factors enter the picture such as feelings and intuitions, for example, a sense of, “Well, I just have an intuition that this is the case”, and such factors can be much more powerful than rational thought. For morality this idea first became popular in 2001 when Jonathan Haidt published his paper on the social intuitionist model, which has been a really influential idea.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

In a new study, UNL researchers measured both liberals' and conservatives' reaction to “gaze cues” – a person's tendency to shift attention in a direction consistent with another person's eye movements, even if it's irrelevant to their current task – and found big differences between the two groups. Liberals responded strongly to the prompts, consistently moving their attention in the direction suggested to them by a face on a computer screen. Conservatives, on the other hand, did not. Why? Researchers suggested that conservatives' value on personal autonomy might make them less likely to be influenced by others, and therefore less responsive to the visual prompts.

“We thought that political temperament may moderate the magnitude of gaze-cuing effects, but we did not expect conservatives to be completely immune to these cues,” said Michael Dodd, a UNL assistant professor of psychology and the lead author of the study. Liberals may have followed the “gaze cues,” meanwhile, because they tend to be more responsive to others, the study suggests. “This study basically provides one more piece of evidence that liberals and conservatives perceive the world, and process information taken in from that world, in different ways,” said Kevin Smith, UNL professor of political science and one of the study's authors.

More here.

Yoko Ono in The New York Times:

JOHN and I are in our Dakota kitchen in the middle of the night. Three cats — Sasha, Micha and Charo — are looking up at John, who is making tea for us two. Sasha is all white, Micha is all black. They are both gorgeous, classy Persian cats. Charo, on the other hand, is a mutt. John used to have a special love for Charo. “You’ve got a funny face, Charo!” he would say, and pat her. “Yoko, Yoko, you’re supposed to first put the tea bags in, and then the hot water.” John took the role of the tea maker, for being English. So I gave up doing it.

It was nice to be up in the middle of the night, when there was no sound in the house, and sip the tea John would make. One night, however, John said: “I was talking to Aunt Mimi this afternoon and she says you are supposed to put the hot water in first. Then the tea bag. I could swear she taught me to put the tea bag in first, but …”

“So all this time, we were doing it wrong?”

“Yeah …”

We both cracked up. That was in 1980. Neither of us knew that it was to be the last year of our life together.

This would have been the 70th birthday year for John if only he was here.

More here.

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

I’ve become a Julian Assange man. Leak away, Julian. Leak it all, leak everything. Leak whatever you can until they find a way to shut you down for good.

At first, I was not sure how to feel about the recent dump of classified documents at WikiLeaks. I could see the arguments on both sides. I understand that we are the owners of a flawed and imperfect world within which no one owns a pair of those proverbial clean hands. No, we have a dirty world of infinite compromise. We muddle through, more or less, and the women and men who do the muddling, at the international level, are, more often than not, engaged in a tricky business. Human beings have a hard enough time being moral agents. For nation states, the task is well nigh impossible. And yet, wars are, sometimes, averted. Catastrophes are met with coordinated action. Relatively more dangerous countries are kept in check by relatively less dangerous countries. A global civilization manages, if nothing else, to persist. Bravo to the individuals who make this so, some of whom are the very members of the international diplomatic core whose private and sometimes catty emails were just published for the world to read.

Luc Sante in the NYRB:

Couldn’t an exciting film be made from the map of Paris? From the unfolding of its various aspects in temporal succession? From the compression of a centuries-long movement of streets, boulevards, arcades, and squares into the space of half an hour? And does the flâneur do anything different?1

You might momentarily think that Walter Benjamin’s suggestion could apply to any city, but in just about every other case the narrative would be too diffuse, in both the spatial and temporal sense. Paris is exceptional for having grown in a particularly concentrated and directed way, and for having maintained the vigor of districts even after fashion went elsewhere.

Most cities spread like inkblots; a few, such as Manhattan, grew in linear increments. Paris expanded in concentric rings, approximately shown by the spiral numeration of its arrondissements. Its Neolithic center was fittingly located in what is now the First (leaking into the Fourth): the islands, the Louvre, Les Halles, the Hôtel de Ville. It then spread east to the Marais, north to the foot of Montmartre, west along the Seine, and tentatively south, across the river, to what would become St.-Germain-des-Prés. Its roughly circular form was maintained by a succession of walls, built under Philippe Auguste around the turn of the thirteenth century, Charles V in the fourteenth, the Farmers-General just before the Revolution, and Adolphe Thiers in the 1840s, that last one taken down beginning in 1919. But there is a wall even now, as Eric Hazan makes plain. The ring highway—the Périphérique—which was completed in 1973, is if anything even better at separating the city from the hinterlands than its predecessors were, and today that means keeping the immigrant masses at bay in their featureless housing project clusters, the vertical slums with rustic-sounding names that make up the banlieues.

“If human morality is an evolutionary adaptation and if neuroscientists can identify specific brain circuitry governing moral judgment, can scientists determine what is, in fact, right and wrong?” A panel discusses the question, over at The Science Network:

Charli Carpenter over at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

I hope most of you following the Wikileaks story read Aaron Bady’s essay at zunguzungu last week, in which he examines two early essays attributed to Julian Assange and provides his explanation of Assange’s broader theory. It’s a sophisticated read with at last glance 567 comments – the sort of blog post political theorists will (or should) assign to their graduate classes.

I also think Bady makes some mistakes in his interpretation of Assange’s essays – or at least glosses over some of the more disturbing implications in his zeal to paint Assange as smarter and less objectionable than might be assumed by those not familiar with his writings.

Let’s begin with what Robert Baird at 3QD argues is the central insight of Bady’s essay: “the recognition that Assange’s strategy stands at significant remove from a philosophy it might easily be confused for: the blend of technological triumphalism and anarcho-libertarian utopianism that takes ‘information wants to be free’ as its gospel and Silicon Valley as its spiritual homeland.”

In Bady’s words:

According to his essay, Julian Assange is trying to do something else. Because we all basically know that the US state — like all states — is basically doing a lot of basically shady things basically all the time, simply revealing the specific ways they are doing these shady things will not be, in and of itself, a necessarily good thing. In some cases, it may be a bad thing, and in many cases, the provisional good it may do will be limited in scope. The question for an ethical human being — and Assange always emphasizes his ethics — has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about. And whether you buy his argument or not, Assange has a clearly articulated vision for how Wikileaks’ activities will “carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity,” a strategy for how exposing secrets will ultimately impede the production of future secrets.

Baird usefully describes Bady’s argument analytically as follows:

For Assange in 2006, then, the public benefit of leaked information is not the first-order good of the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world (free information is its own reward), nor is it the second-order good of the muckrakers* (free information will lead the people to demand change). What Assange asks of leaked information is that it supply a third-order public good: he wants it to demonstrate that secrets cannot be securely held, and he wants it to do this so that the currency of all secrets will be debased. He wants governments-cum-conspiracies to be rendered paranoid by the leaks and therefore be left with little energy to pursue its externally focused aims.

Here are my reactions. First of all both Bady and Baird, who seem in agreement about Assange’s “clearly articulated vision” and offer a very helpful analytical typology to situate his ethics in relation to others like Mark Z, both discount the inconsistencies with which he has articulated that vision.

Scott Esposito in The Quarterly Conversation:

Writers are a notably sensitive lot, ever-susceptible to flattery, dying for recognition; it is a significant moment in any writer’s career when they are singled out for high praise.

Any writer except for Thomas Bernhard, that is, at least according to the accounting he gives in My Prizes. In this slim collection of nine essays, each essay detailing one prize he received, Bernhard raises his disdain for all literary prizes to an art. (I do note, with some pleasure, that the author’s note at the end of this book states, “the winner of the three most distinguished and coveted literary prizes awarded in Germany . . .”) Bernhard rarely forgets to remind us that anything to do with prize-giving is beneath him. Again and again, he declares that all those unfortunates who would honor him with a literary prize are blockheads worthy of only the most tightfisted gratitude. In fact, in most cases Bernhard claims that the only reason he bothers to pick up the award is so that he can grab the prize money, which is immediately plugged into some debt or other.

Despite the titanic displays of thanklessness in My Prizes, Bernhard makes no secret of the important roles many of these prizes play in his life; perhaps this is his way of acknowledging that, whether or not he takes them as an honor, they are meaningful to him. One prize, for instance, allows Bernhard to buy his first home. Another gives him the means to own his first car.

More here.

A nice film by young Pakistani film maker Mahera Omar:

A Garden in Shigar from Mahera Omar on Vimeo.

A note from the film maker:

I have a special request. Please vote for my film “A Garden in Shigar” which is competing at the Women's Voices Now film festival in Los Angeles, USA. . It will only take a nanosecond, I promise! Many thanks if you've already voted, but do share with others and encourage (or threaten) them to vote too.

Click on the following link, choose a rating and press the “submit vote” button. You DO NOT have to enter name, address, email, what you ate for breakfast or anything like that at all.

http://womensvoicesnow.org/watchfilm/a_garden_in_shigar/

Enjoy the film, and please do leave a comment, even if it's just a “gr8 (or terribly bogus) effort”. Longer sentences will be better as all of this will be used by the judges to do their judging.

Some facts about the importance of your vote:

• Although the teaching garden has been designed, it hasn't been built yet due to a lack of funds. Your vote could help the film win prize money which would be put towards completion of the garden.
• The publicity from the film winning an award will help generate additional funds for the next two planting seasons.
• An added bonus: the winning filmmaker and the subjects of the film (the only five working women in Shigar) will be flown to Los Angeles, USA for the screening in March 2011. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity for these women to visit a foreign country.

From LA Times:

A daily dose of baby aspirin may reduce mortality from a range of common cancers by an average of 21%, with the reduction persisting for at least 20 years, British researchers reported Monday.
Deadly cases of stomach, colorectal and esophageal cancers all declined among people who took low-dose aspirin for 10 to 20 years, according to a study published online in the journal Lancet. The chewable tablets also were linked to a reduced risk of death from adenocarcinoma and from lung cancer in nonsmokers. The results were based on an analysis of more than 10,000 people who participated in seven clinical trials designed to test whether baby aspirin could reduce the risk of heart disease.

“We already had strong evidence that low-dose aspirin could reduce deaths from colorectal cancer by as much as a third, but this provides important new evidence that long-term aspirin use can provide protection against a variety of other cancers,” said epidemiologist Eric Jacobs of the American Cancer Society. However, he added, “it would be premature at this point to recommend that people start using aspirin specifically to prevent cancer.” For the millions of people who are currently taking low doses of aspirin to protect against cardiovascular disease, “the findings suggest that they should have some additional benefit for cancer,” said Dr. Lori Minasian, who is in charge of large cancer prevention trials at the National Cancer Institute.

More here.

From Nature:

Days after an announcement that a strain of bacteria can apparently use arsenic in place of phosphorous to build its DNA and other biomolecules — an ability unknown in any other organism — some scientists are questioning the finding and taking issue with how it was communicated to non-specialists.

Many readily agree that the bacterium, described last week in Science and dubbed GFAJ-1 (F. Wolfe-Simon et al. Science doi:10.1126/science.1197258; 2010), performs a remarkable feat by surviving high concentrations of arsenic in California's Mono Lake and in the laboratory. But data in the paper, they argue, suggest that it is just as likely that the microbe isn't using the arsenic, but instead is scavenging every possible phosphate molecule while fighting off arsenic toxicity. The claim at a NASA press briefing that the bacterium represents a new chemistry of life is at best premature, they say. “It's a great story about adaptation, but it's not ET,” says Gerald Joyce, a biochemist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.

More here.

The Gist of the Matter

Apple peelings
red and moistened
slide from the knife
onto my calico apron
in a large, curly heap.
I listen to the chatter of
my family around the table.
Over and over,
I slice pieces from my apple,
and eat them from the knife
like my father before me,
until nothing is left but the core.
That’s where I like to begin
my story.

by Glenda Barrett
from When the Sap Rises
(Finishing Line Press, 2008)

With all the recent controversy over the Hide/Seek show in DC, I thought I would post my own commentary on the show from before the excitement started….

I never would have thought that the problem of gayness in America could boil down to something so simple, that it could be, simply, Frank O’Hara. But Frank O’Hara stood before us as a gay man in a way that no one before him had. One painting in the show, by Alice Neel, is nothing more than Frank O’Hara’s profile as he sits alone at a table in a baggy sweater in front of some lilacs. His nose is extraordinary and rather beakish. Alice Neel called it “falconlike.” You sense, looking at the painting, that this is a man who knew who he was. Something in the straightforward nonchalance of Frank O’Hara says that he is willing to be gay in the same way that another man is willing to be a Democrat, or an Episcopalian. He isn’t putting on a show. He isn’t masking himself in layers of false identity. He isn’t engaged in the game of hide and seek any more than he has to be. He just wants to be Frank, a human being who happens to love men. Another painting in the show, “Frank O’Hara Nude with Boots” by Larry Rivers, says roughly the same thing, if with a little more attitude. In this painting, Frank is to be found staring out at us with his head cocked slightly to the side, naked, wearing boots. His penis hangs like a warning, neither explicitly erotic nor willing to be ignored. Frank’s penis is telling us, none to subtly, that he, Frank O’Hara, is a man, and that his maleness is an ineradicable function of who he is.

more from me at The Smart Set here.

Finally, the truth that still escapes Navasky is that these Soviet spies were recruited out of the U.S. communist movement, whose leaders knew of and covered up the Rosenbergs’ espionage, and, when they found out that those arrested would not talk, waged a worldwide propaganda campaign to portray the Rosenbergs as victims of America’s imperial thrust. The Rosenbergs’ belief in the Soviet Union and communism was the motive for their actions. Julius began working for Soviet foreign intelligence during the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, when Stalin and Hitler were cooperating in the brutal division of Eastern Europe. Hence, the notion that Julius was simply working to oppose fascism is baseless. As in so many other episodes of this era, it was the anti-communists, and not the apologists for communism, whom history has proved correct.

more from Ronald Radosh and Steven Usdin at TNR here.

Qari Sami did something strange the day he killed himself. The university student from Kabul had long since grown a bushy, Taliban-style beard and favored the baggy tunics and trousers of the terrorists he idolized. He had even talked of waging jihad. But on the day in 2005 that he strapped the bomb to his chest and walked into the crowded Kabul Internet cafe, Sami kept walking — between the rows of tables, beyond the crowd, along the back wall, until he was in the bathroom, with the door closed. And that is where, alone, he set off his bomb. The blast killed a customer and a United Nations worker, and injured five more. But the carnage could have been far worse. Brian Williams, an associate professor of Islamic studies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, was in Afghanistan at the time. One day after the attack, he stood before the cafe’s hollowed-out wreckage and wondered why any suicide bomber would do what Sami had done: deliberately walk away from the target before setting off the explosives. “[Sami] was the one that got me thinking about the state of mind of these guys,” Williams said.

more from Paul Kix at the Boston Globe here.