From MSNBC:

Taking turns isn't just a nice idea. It may be as much a part of the theory of evolution as survival of the fittest – at least that's the conclusion that British researchers reached after running a genetic simulation through thousands of generations of evolutionary change. Turn-taking behavior seem to come naturally to humans, whether it's standing in line or deciding who's going to do the dishes tonight. But such behavior has been observed in a wide variety of other species as well: Chimps take turns grooming each other, for example, and penguins take turns minding their eggs.

“It is far from obvious how turn-taking evolved without language or insight in animals shaped by natural selection to pursue their individual self-interests,” University of Leicester psychologist Andrew Colman said last week in a news release about the research. Colman and a university colleague of his, Lindsay Browning, looked into the evolution of politeness for a paper published in the September issue of the journal Evolutionary Ecology Research – not by studying actual monkeys, penguins or line-standers, but by setting up a series of genetic simulations where they could dictate the rules of the evolutionary game. The experiment was as much an exercise in game theory as in evolutionary biology. Colman and Browning programmed a computer to play a variety of games in which the payoff varied depending on whether the simulated players made the same or different choices.

More here.

Having read close to 30 Scandinavian crime novels over the last several months, I can come to only one conclusion: Scandinavia is a bleak, ungodly, extraordinarily violent place to live. The capitals are seething hot pots of murder. In Oslo, a serial killer slips red diamond pentagrams under the eyelids of his victims (Jo Nesbø’s The Devil’s Star), while in Stockholm a stalker terrorizes young girls in public parks (Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s The Man on the Balcony). The situation is even worse at the local level. Take, for instance, Ystad, population 17,000, a quaint fishing village on Sweden’s southern shore best known for its high-speed ferry terminal. It has suffered, in the novels of Henning Mankell, the following horrors: the torture and execution of an elderly farmer and his wife (Faceless Killers); the torture and execution of two men who are found floating off the coast in a life boat (The Dogs of Riga); the impalement of a retired bird-watcher on sharpened bamboo poles (The Fifth Woman); and the self-immolation of a teenage girl (Sidetracked). Each of these crimes—and many, many more—is committed by a different killer and all within just three years. In terms of per capita incidence of violent crime, Mankell’s Ystad would rank behind Mosul but well ahead of Johannesburg and Mogadishu. Fortunately, more people are murdered every year in the pages of Scandinavian crime novels than are murdered in Scandinavia itself. The homicide rates in Scandinavian countries are among the lowest on the planet. This year, the Global Peace Index ranked Denmark and Norway the second and third most peaceful countries. Sweden came in 13th. The Nordic countries also consistently rank as the happiest countries in the world.

more from Nathaniel Rich at Slate here.

It was slightly disconcerting when, towards the end of Berlin’s life, as his friend and former colleague Henry Hardy began to gather up his Remains, he published a series of essays under the title of The Crooked Timber of Humanity (1990). Here was the Maistre essay again, rechauffé under a new title but saying more or less what was contained in the volume of forty years before. It gave one the sense that perhaps Berlin – charming, witty, urbane, brilliantly talkative as he was – had not exactly done much with the intervening years. This sense is quickened by the publication of his voluminous letters. Before turning to these remarkable documents, I should like to stay for a moment with Berlin’s intellectual interests and with his heroes. Chief of these was undoubtedly Alexander Herzen. In his delightful essay on Herzen – in the volume entitled Russian Thinkers (1978) – Berlin painted another little self-portrait when he wrote, “Herzen is detached from party, detached from doctrine”. Young Revolutionaries (of 1860) attacked Herzen for “being a gentleman, for being rich, for living in comfort, for sitting in London and observing the Russian revolutionary struggle from afar, for being a member of a generation which had merely talked in the salons, and speculated and philosophised, when all round them was squalor and misery, bitterness and injustice”. Yet Herzen, sybaritic and lazy as he appears, had been clever enough not to be bewitched by doctrine when many others had been; and therefore he was able to see clearly. “Why is liberty valuable? Because it is an end in itself, because it is what it is. To bring it as a sacrifice to something else is simply to perform an act of human sacrifice.”

more from A.N. Wilson at the TLS here.

PHILOSOPHY
…………………..
I love intellectual discourse, so don’t hold back.
Unleash your Wittgenstein. I Adorno.
Taste the Hegel on the lips, let Decartes
be an acrobat on the tongue. Let us be,
light-headedly, Spinoza, Saussure.
May Foucault suggest the unspeakably dirty.
Let us Schopenhauer until we are flushed.
Lacan will lead the way
to where we can lay together.
I’ll caress your Voltaire, run my fingers
along your Derrida, play with the curls
of your Kristeva. Drink in the perfume
of Deleuze and let James surprise us
with his firmness until we Kafka in fits.
Let the strap of your Nietzsche fall
from your shoulder.
We’ll Freud like Wilde animals,
drench ourselves in Brecht, and collapse
into Kierkegaard, our Jaspers wilted,
gasping for Camus.

by Brian R. Young
from Barn Owl Review, #1, 2009

Hannah Devlin in The Times:

Hundreds of wallets were planted on the streets of Edinburgh by psychologists last year. Perhaps surprisingly, nearly half of the 240 wallets were posted back. But there was a twist.

Richard Wiseman, a psychologist, and his team inserted one of four photographs behind a clear plastic window inside, showing either a smiling baby, a cute puppy, a happy family or a contented elderly couple. Some wallets had no image and some had charity papers inside.

When faced with the photograph of the baby people were far more likely to send the wallet back, the study found. In fact, only one in ten were hard-hearted enough not to do so. With no picture to tug at the emotions, just one in seven were sent back.

According to Dr Wiseman the result reflects a compassionate instinct towards vulnerable infants that people have evolved to ensure the survival of future generations. “The baby kicked off a caring feeling in people, which is not surprising from an evolutionary perspective,” he said.

More here.

John Markoff in the New York Times:

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates believes that if he had been able to watch physicist Richard Feynman lecture on physics in 1964 his life might have played out differently.

Mr. Gates, of course, is legendary as a Harvard University dropout who went on to create the world’s most successful software firm. He has told associates that if had watched the lectures earlier in his life he might have become a physicist instead of a software entrepreneur.

However, Mr. Gates, who is also well known for his sharp and varied intellectual interests and his philanthropic commitment to education, said this week that he had purchased the rights to videos of seven lectures that Dr. Feynman gave at Cornell University called “The Character of Physical Law,” in an effort to make them broadly available via the Internet.

Microsoft Research announced on Wednesday that Mr. Gates, who purchased the rights to the videos privately from the Feynman estate, BBC and from Cornell University, in cooperation with Curtis Wong, a Microsoft researcher, has created a Web site that is intended to enhance the videos by annotating them with related digital content.

More here. [Go to the website and watch the brilliant lectures!]

Mark McDonald and 3QD friend Wolf Böwig on the Rohingya (photo by Wolf Böwig with more amazing images in the piece):

The Rohingya number about 750.000 in Burma. But the military junta does not recognize them as one of the 135 “national races” in the mostly Buddhist nation. And so, in the face of forced labor, arbitrary arrest, stolen land and even starvation, they flee to the makeshift camp (an adjoining settlement of 20.000 residents has water, electricity and other basic services. Run by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, it is known as the official Kutupalong camp. Some Rohingya have lived there for more than a decade.)

Every day more Rohingya arrive at the Bangladeshi camps, stateless, sun-blasted refugees carrying their meager bundles. The newcomers, largely from Rakhine State in Burma, are often so traumatized that they’re unable to tell aid workers what they have fled.

Another one million Rohingya are scattered about the world – there has been a major diaspora from South Asia in recent decades – and they have flung themselves from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan to Thailand to Indonesia. The men lay asphalt and pour cement in Riyadh. They haul fishing nets in the Andaman Sea. They pull rickshaws in Jakarta. The children, with their small hands, peel shrimp and weave carpets in Karachi.

PZ Myers reviews Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum’s Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future:

They sent me a copy of their new book, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), with a strange request: “We hope that like Dr. Coyne, you will suspend judgment until reading the book, at which point we’ll be interested to hear what you think.” I was a bit offended; of course I was going to read it with an open mind. Why would they think it necessary to ask me to do so?

That was before I got to chapters 8 and 9, however, which open with very direct and personal attacks on me and on Pharyngula, atheists in general, and anyone who fails to offer religion its proper modicum of respect. “Oh, that’s why they warned me,” I realized, “it’s like asking the victim of a hatchet job to hold still for a moment so they can get in a good whack.” They definitely did need to request my forbearance, so I wouldn’t just toss their hypocritical and ignorant paean to mealy-mouthedness in the trash right away, which was one perceptive moment on their part. And yes, I freely admit that my opinion of the book is colored by the palpable contempt they hold for me.

Mooney and Kirshenbaum respond in 3 parts (here, here and here). From Part 3:

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Fredric Jameson in The New Left Review:

It is always good to have a new [Alexander] Kluge, provided you know what lies in store for you. His latest film, News from Ideological Antiquity—some nine hours long—is divided into three parts: I. Marx and Eisenstein in the Same House; II. All Things are Bewitched People; III. Paradoxes of Exchange Society. Rumour has it that Kluge has here filmed Eisenstein’s 1927–28 project for a film version of Marx’s Capital, whereas in fact only Kluge’s first part deals with this tantalizing matter. The rumour has been spread by the same people who believe Eisenstein actually wrote a sketch for a film on Capital, whereas he only jotted down some twenty pages of notes over a half-year period. And at least some of these people know that he was enthusiastic about Joyce’s Ulysses during much the same time and ‘planned’ a film on it, a fact that distorts their fantasies about the Capital project as well. Yet if Eisenstein’s notes for film projects all looked like this until some of them were turned into ‘real’—that is to say, fiction or narrative—films, it is only fair to warn viewers that Kluge’s ‘real’ films look more like Eisenstein’s notes.

Many important intellectuals have—as it were, posthumously—endorsed Marxism: one thinks of Derrida’s Spectres of Marx and of Deleuze’s unrealized Grandeur de Marx, along with any number of more contemporary witnesses to the world crisis (‘we are all socialists now’, etc.). Is Kluge’s new film a recommitment of that kind? Is he still a Marxist? Was he ever one? And what would ‘being a Marxist’ mean today? The Anglo-American reader may even wonder how the Germans in general now relate to their great national classic, with rumours of hundreds of Capital reading groups springing up under the auspices of the student wing of the Linkspartei. Kluge says this in the accompanying printed matter: ‘The possibility of a European revolution seems to have vanished; and along with it the belief in a historical process that can be directly shaped by human consciousness’. That Kluge believes in collective pedagogy, however, and in the reappropriation of negative learning processes by positive ones, in what one might call a reorientation of experience by way of a reconstruction of ‘feelings’ (a key or technical term for him): this is evident not only in his interpretive comments on his various films and stories, but also in such massive theoretical volumes as his Geschichte und Eigensinn—History and Obstinacy—written in collaboration with Oskar Negt.

All of these works bear on history; and of few countries can one say that they have lived so much varied history as Germany.

Via normblog, Robert Wright makes the case in The Huffington Post (in what appears to be an article that's wrong it is premise):

Atheism has little intrinsic ideological bent. (Karl Marx. Ayn Rand. I rest my case.) But things change when you add the key ingredient of the new atheism: the idea that religion is not just mistaken, but evil — that it “poisons everything,” as Hitchens has put it with characteristic nuance.

Consider Dawkins's assertion, in his book The God Delusion, that if there were no religion then there would be “no Israeli-Palestinian wars.”

For starters, this is just wrong. The initial resistance to the settlements, and to the establishment of Israel, wasn't essentially religious, and neither was the original establishment of the settlements, or even of Israel.

The problem here is that two ethnic groups disagree about who deserves what land. That there was so much killing before the dispute acquired a deeply religious cast suggests that taking religion out of the equation wouldn't be the magic recipe for peace that Dawkins imagines. (As I show in my new book The Evolution of God, zero-sum disputes over land and other things have long been the root cause of the ugliest manifestations of religion, ranging from Christian anti-semitism in ancient Rome to bloodthirsty xenophobia in the Hebrew Bible to the Koran's gleeful anticipation of infidel suffering in the afterlife.)

In 1830 Auguste Comte laid out his scheme of the three phases of human development, culminating in the ‘positive’ stage in which belief in demons and gods would be supplanted by an understanding of natural laws. Just eight years later, Charles Darwin began his descent from a robust young man to a neurotic invalid as he wrestled with the atheistic implications of his theory of natural selection. Friedrich Nietzsche announced the death of God in 1882. In 1919, Max Weber unveiled his argument about the progressive ‘disenchantment’ of the world caused by the decline of religious belief. Accompanying this ebbing tide of faith were repeated attempts to do something to slow down or reverse the flow – to ‘re-enchant’ the godless universe. The most exuberant manifestations of this impulse stemmed from poets and artists, but scientists also proffered their own solutions to the ‘anomie’ of materialism. Physicists proposed vital links between electricity, animal magnetism and nervous fluid. Chemistry inspired Goethe’s vision of love as elective affinity, linking human romantic desire with the attractive forces that structure natural substances. Biologists exhorted their followers to look to nature for moral guidance. By the end of the 19th century Romantic pantheism (the belief that God is identifiable with nature) had largely been supplanted by an eclectic neo-paganism inspired by anthropologists’ and archaeologists’ extensive catalogues of prehistoric rituals, myths and votive symbols.

more from Cathy Gere at History Today here.

When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, but before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture often takes place. All of a sudden, people know the game is up: they simply cease to be afraid. It isn’t just that the regime loses its legitimacy: its exercise of power is now perceived as a panic reaction, a gesture of impotence. Ryszard Kapuściński, in Shah of Shahs, his account of the Khomeini revolution, located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman withdrew. Within a couple of hours, all Tehran had heard about the incident, and although the streetfighting carried on for weeks, everyone somehow knew it was all over. Is something similar happening now? There are many versions of last month’s events in Tehran. Some see in the protests the culmination of the pro-Western ‘reform movement’, something along the lines of the colour-coded revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. They support the protests as a secular reaction to the Khomeini revolution, as the first step towards a new liberal-democratic Iran freed from Muslim fundamentalism. They are countered by sceptics who think that Ahmadinejad actually won, that he is the voice of the majority, while Mousavi’s support comes from the middle classes and their gilded youth. Let’s face facts, they say: in Ahmadinejad, Iran has the president it deserves.

more from the LRB here.

Tests

All submit to them where they sit, inner secure,
unapproachable to analysis in the soul,
Not traditions, not the outer authorities are the judges,
They are the judges of outer authorities and of all traditions,
They corroborate as they go only whatever corroborates
themselves, and touches themselves;
For all that, they have it forever in themselves to corroborate
far and near without one exception.

by Walt Whitman

from Whitman Poetry and Prose;
Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1882

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

When you take a photograph with a digital camera, the sensor behind the lens has just a few milliseconds to gather in a huge array of data. A 10-megapixel camera captures some 30 megabytes—one byte each for the red, green and blue channels in each of the 10 million pixels. Yet the image you download from the camera is often only about 3 megabytes. A compression algorithm based on the JPEG standard squeezes the file down to a tenth of its original size. This saving of storage space is welcome, but it provokes a question: Why go to the trouble of capturing 30 megabytes of data if you’re going to throw away 90 percent of it before anyone even sees the picture? Why not design the sensor to select and retain just the 3 megabytes that are worth keeping?

It’s the same story with audio recording. Music is usually digitized at a rate that works out to roughly 32 megabytes for a three-minute song. But the MP3 file on your iPod is probably only 3 megabytes. Again, 90 percent of the data has been discarded in a compression step. Wouldn’t it make more sense to record only the parts of the signal that will eventually reach the ear?

Until a few years ago, these questions had a simple answer, backed up both by common sense and by theoretical precept. Sifting out the best bits without first recording the whole signal was deemed impossible because you couldn’t know which bits to keep until you’d seen them all. That conclusion now seems unduly pessimistic. A suite of new signal-processing methods known as compressed or compressive sensing can extract the most essential elements “on the fly,” without even bothering to store the rest. It’s like a magical diet: You get to eat the whole meal, but you only digest the nutritious parts.

More here.

Katha Pollitt in Slate

Not many writers furnish enough material for a biography focused entirely on their love lives. In his short life (1788-1824), George Gordon, Lord Byron, managed to cram in just about every sort of connection imaginable—unrequited pinings galore; affairs with aristocrats, actresses, servants, landladies, worshipful fans, and more in almost as many countries as appear on Don Giovanni's list; plus countless one-offs with prostitutes and purchased girls; a brief, disastrous marriage; and an incestuous relationship with his half-sister. And that's just the women! It's a wonder he found the time, considering everything else on his plate. He composed thousands of pages of dazzling poetry, traveled restlessly on the continent and in the Middle East, maintained complex relationships with friends and hangers-on, wrote letters and kept diaries and read books constantly, boxed and took fencing lessons and swam, drank (prodigiously), suffered bouts of depression and paranoia and physical ill-health, and, in his later years, joined in Italian and Greek liberation struggles. Just tending the menagerie that he liked to have about him—monkeys, parrots and macaws, dogs, a goat, a heron, even, while he was a student at Cambridge, a bear—would have driven a lesser man to distraction.

More here.

From Salon:

There are many ways to cope with death, but founding an online book club is a pretty unique approach. “When I heard that David Foster Wallace had died, it was like remembering an assignment that had been due the day before,” said Matthew Baldwin. A blogger who regretted never having finished “Infinite Jest,” Baldwin founded InfiniteSummer.org, a Web site and collaborative reading experiment that creates a vast literary support group for completing the late author's 1,079-page tome over the course of this summer.

Published in 1996, “Infinite Jest” was David Foster Wallace's second, and ultimately final, completed novel, and has become known equally for its sprawling attention to detail, its near impenetrability and its effectiveness as a doorstop. Often compared to experimental fiction like “Ulysses” and “Naked Lunch,” its list of characters (and their fictional filmographies) alone may be longer than some entire novels. In the foreword to the paperback release, penned by Wallace's friend and contemporary Dave Eggers, he promises that the book isn't actually daunting, and that its author is indeed a “normal person.” But that's no consolation to the legions who have quit reading the book partway through. Baldwin admits that before he started the project, he had only read about 75 pages — but they'd stuck with him. “It sat in my library for so long that I no longer even saw it when I scanned the shelves,” he said. “But based on what little I had read, I knew for a fact that I would enjoy all 1,000 pages. I can't say that with such certainty for, say, 'Don Quixote.'”

More here.

From Edge:

When children turn four, they start to wonder what other people are thinking. For instance, if you show a four-year-old a packet of gum and ask what's inside, she'll say, “Gum.” You open the packet and show her that inside there's a pencil instead of gum. If you ask her what her mother, who's waiting outside, will think is in the packet once it's been reclosed, she'll say, “Gum,” because she knows her mother hasn't seen the pencil. But children under the age of four will generally say their mother will think there's a pencil inside — because children this young cannot yet escape the pull of the real world. They think everyone knows what they know,
because they cannot model someone else's mind and in this case realize that someone must see something in order to know it. This ability to think about what others are thinking about is called having a theory of mind.

Humans constantly want to know what others are thinking: Did he see me glance at him? Does that beautiful woman want to approach me? Does my boss know I was not at my desk? A theory of mind allows for complex social behaviors, such as military strategies, and the formation of institutions, such as governments.

More here.

In the past century, we have had dozens upon dozens of studies of the origins of the Constitution. Historians, jurists, and legal scholars have all tried to explain the sources and the character of the document. Slauter’s book is the first full-scale effort by a literary scholar to bring the special tools of his discipline to bear on the Constitution and its cultural origins. The result is a smart, strange, and frustrating book. It is a curious mixture of insight and artifice, of careful readings and runaway metaphors, of persuasive arguments and imaginative exaggerations. The historian’s conception of causality is often bent out of shape, and the connections between events become ambiguous and elusive. Still, Slauter’s prose is almost always clear and straightforward, avoiding all of the usual jargon that has plagued much literary writing over the past several decades. Slauter has divided his book into two parts: “The State as a Work of Art” and “The Culture of Natural Rights. ” Each of these parts has three chapters, only loosely related to one another. Consequently, the book is really a collection of six essays on various aspects of the cultural origins of American constitutionalism. Slauter begins by emphasizing a point of which the American Revolutionaries were well aware–that governments and constitutions were the products of a society’s manners, customs, and genius, and at the same time the producers of those cultural inclinations and distinctions. There was a mutual influence, a feedback and an interplay, between government and society, and it was the recognition of these relations that made an eighteenth-century theorist such as Montesquieu so subtle and significant. No doubt the nature of the government had to be adapted to the customs and the habits of the people, but the government itself could shape and reform the character of the people. “It is in the rich terrain of the period’s shifting desire to see politics as an effect of culture and culture as an effect of politics,” observes Slauter, “that it makes sense to consider, as I do in this book, the state as a work of art and the cultural origins of the Constitution of the United States.”

more from Gordon S. Wood at TNR here.

Over at Boston Review, a forum on Paul Collier's work on poverty, economic development and military intervention, with Collier, Stephen Krasner, Mike McGovern, Nancy Birdsall, Edward Miguel, and William Easterly. William Easterly:

I have been troubled by Paul Collier’s research and policy advocacy for some time. In this essay he goes even further in directions I argued were dangerous in his previous work. Collier wants to de facto recolonize the “bottom billion,” and he justifies his position with research that is based on one logical fallacy, one mistaken assumption, and a multitude of fatally flawed statistical exercises.

The logical fallacy leads to the conclusion that the poorest countries systematically fall behind everybody else in economic growth. Of course they do! Collier selected countries that were on the bottom at the end of a specific period, so naturally they would be more likely to have had among the worst growth rates in the world over the preceding period. This ex post selection bias makes the test of poor-country divergence invalid. The correct test would be to see who is poor at the beginning of the period and then see if they have worse growth than richer countries in the following years. When the test is run this way, there is no evidence that poor countries grow more slowly than richer countries.

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