From PhysOrg.com:

“Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.” Mother Teresa's words echo throughout the world. They ring particularly true in the biological kingdom among brown anole lizards.

Dartmouth researchers Ryan Calsbeek and Bob Cox study male and female brown anole lizards in the Bahamas. As the researchers point out, one of the most striking features of this species is that the males and females actually look like two entirely different species: the males are two to three times larger than the tiny females, weighing just one to two grams apiece. By measuring the lizards' natural and sexual selection, they learned what traits and, by extension, what genes make a high-quality female–i.e. one with high survival and reproductive success. They also learned the traits and genes of a high-quality male are very different from a high-quality female. This is particularly true for body size.

Calsbeek and Cox report their findings in a paper called “Cryptic sex-ratio bias provides indirect genetic benefits despite sexual conflict.”The research is supported by the National Science Foundation's division of Environmental Biology in its Directorate for Biological Sciences. Natural selection favors large males and small females. As lead author Cox puts it, “In an evolutionary sense, what's good for the goose is not always good for the gander.” In other words, a double standard is alive and well.

More here.

The Name

You should try to hear the name the Holy One has for things.
There is something in the phrase: “The Holy One has taught
…him names.”
We name everything according to the number of legs it has;
the other one names it according to what it has inside.
Moses waved his stick; he thought it was a “rod,”
but inside it's name was “dangerous snake.”
We thought the name of Blake was “agitator against priests,”
but in eternity his name is “the one who believes.”
No one knows our name until our last breath goes out.

by Rumi

version by Robert Bly

John Noble Wilford in The New York Times:

Archaeologists have embarked on excavations in northern Syria expected to widen and deepen understanding of a prehistoric culture in Mesopotamia that set the stage for the rise of the world’s first cities and states and the invention of writing. In two seasons of preliminary surveying and digging at the site known as Tell Zeidan, American and Syrian investigators have already uncovered a tantalizing sampling of artifacts from what had been a robust pre-urban settlement on the upper Euphrates River. People occupied the site for two millenniums, until 4000 B.C. — a little-known but fateful period of human cultural evolution.

Scholars of antiquity say that Zeidan should reveal insights into life in a time called the Ubaid period, 5500 to 4000 B.C. In those poorly studied centuries, irrigation agriculture became widespread, long-distance trade grew in influence socially and economically, powerful political leaders came to the fore and communities gradually divided into social classes of wealthy elites and poorer commoners.

More here.

Sughra Raza. Chiaroscuro On Korangi Road. February, 2010.

Digital photograph.

Peter Singer on Google vs. China, in Project Syndicate:

Perhaps because Google has been all about making information more widely available, its collaboration with China’s official Internet censors has been seen as a deep betrayal. The hope of Internet anarchists was that repressive governments would have only two options: accept the Internet with its limitless possibilities of spreading information, or restrict Internet access to the ruling elite and turn your back on the twenty-first century, as North Korea has done.

Reality is more complex. The Chinese government was never going to cave in to Google’s demand that it abandon Internet censorship. The authorities will no doubt find ways of replacing the services that Google provided – at some cost, and maybe with some loss of efficiency, but the Internet will remain fettered in China.

Nevertheless, the more important point is that Google is no longer lending its imprimatur to political censorship. Predictably, some accuse Google of seeking to impose its own values on a foreign culture. Nonsense. Google is entitled to choose how and with whom it does business. One could just as easily assert that during the period in which Google filtered its results in China, China was imposing its values on Google.

Google’s withdrawal is a decision in accordance with its own values. In my view, those values are more defensible than the values that lead to political censorship – and who knows how many Chinese would endorse the value of open access to information, too, if they had the chance?

[H/t: Stefany Golberg]

Time-lapse films reveal the functions of human genes. Janelle Weaver in Nature:

Working out the functions of individual genes in human cells is now much simpler thanks to a new database of time-lapse movies showing cells in action.

Jan Ellenberg of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, and his colleagues across Europe introduced the freely accessible database of 190,000 videos to the scientific community along with a paper published today in Nature1.

Ellenberg and his team set out to observe what happens to cells when each of the 21,000 human protein-coding genes is disrupted. They perturbed gene expression using short interfering RNA molecules (siRNA) and then observed the effects over two days on fluorescently labelled chromosomes using time-lapse imaging. Because this generated huge amounts of data — more than 19 million cell divisions — the researchers developed computational tools to analyse all of the videos. Their technique automatically tracked the position of the nucleus in each cell and classified its appearance into 16 different categories. The method recognized with 87% accuracy changes in the nuclear shape that were related to basic functions such as cell division, proliferation, survival and migration.

“Technically this paper is really a tour de force,” says Jason Swedlow, a cell biologist at the University of Dundee, UK. “The systematic way the group has gone through and knocked down genes and filmed the results is really impressive.”

Stuart Hall in The New Left Review:

The ‘first’ New Left was born in 1956, a conjuncture—not just a year—bounded on one side by the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution by Soviet tanks and on the other by the British and French invasion of the Suez Canal zone. [1] These two events, whose dramatic impact was heightened by the fact that they occurred within days of each other, unmasked the underlying violence and aggression latent in the two systems that dominated political life at the time—Western imperialism and Stalinism—and sent a shock wave through the political world. In a deeper sense, they defined for people of my generation the boundaries and limits of the tolerable in politics. Socialists after ‘Hungary’, it seemed to us, must carry in their hearts the sense of tragedy which the degeneration of the Russian Revolution into Stalinism represented for the left in the twentieth century. ‘Hungary’ brought to an end a certain kind of socialist innocence. On the other hand, ‘Suez’ underlined the enormity of the error in believing that lowering the Union Jack in a few ex-colonies necessarily signalled the ‘end of imperialism’, or that the real gains of the welfare state and the widening of material affluence meant the end of inequality and exploitation. ‘Hungary’ and ‘Suez’ were thus liminal, boundary-marking experiences. They symbolized the break-up of the political Ice Age.

The New Left came into existence in the aftermath of these two events. It attempted to define a third political space somewhere between these two metaphors. Its rise signified for people on the left in my generation the end of the imposed silences and political impasses of the Cold War, and the possibility of a breakthrough into a new socialist project. It may be useful to begin with genealogy. The term ‘New Left’ is commonly associated with ‘1968’, but to the ‘1956’ New Left generation, ‘1968’ was already a second, even perhaps a third, mutation. We had borrowed the phrase in the 1950s from the movement known as the nouvelle gauche, an independent tendency in French politics associated with the weekly newspaper France Observateur and its editor, Claude Bourdet. A leading figure in the French Resistance, Bourdet personified the attempt, after the war, to open a ‘third way’ in European politics, independent of the two dominant left positions of Stalinism and social democracy, beyond the military power blocs of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and opposed to both the American and the Soviet presences in Europe.

This ‘third position’ paralleled the political aspirations of many of the people who came together to form the early British New Left. Some of us had met Bourdet in Paris, at a conference called to consider setting up an International Socialist Society, across the divisions of Western and Eastern Europe. The main protagonist of the idea in Britain was G. D. H. Cole, an austere and courageous veteran of the independent left, who was at that time still teaching politics at Oxford. Although he was a distinguished historian of European socialism and a student of Marxism, Cole’s socialism was rooted in the cooperative and ‘workers’ control’ traditions of Guild Socialism. His critique of bureaucratic ‘Morrisonian’-style nationalization was enormously influential in shaping the attitude of many socialists of my generation towards statist forms of socialism.

In the New Statesman:

A police officer involved in the case of the murdered toddler declared that the moment he clapped eyes on one of the [teenage] culprits, he knew that he was evil. This is the kind of thing that gives evil a bad name. The point of demonising the boy in this way was to wrong-foot the soft-hearted liberals. It was a pre-emptive strike against those who might appeal to social conditions in seeking to understand why they did what they did. And such under standing can always bring forgiveness in its wake. Calling the action evil meant that it was beyond comprehension. Evil is unintelligible. It is just a thing in itself, like boarding a crowded commuter train wearing only a giant boa constrictor. There is no context which would make it explicable.

Evil is often supposed to be without rhyme or reason. An English Evangelical bishop wrote in 1991 that clear signs of Satanic possession included inappropriate laughter, inexplicable knowledge, a false smile, Scottish ancestry, relatives who have been coal miners, and the habitual choice of black for dress or car colour. None of this makes sense, but then that is how it is with evil. The less sense it makes, the more evil it is. Evil has no relations to anything beyond itself, such as a cause.

In fact, the word has come to mean, among other things, “without a cause”. If the child killers did what they did because of boredom or bad housing or parental neglect, then – so the police officer may have feared – what they did was forced upon them by their circumstances; and it followed that they could not be punished for it as severely as he might have wished. This mistakenly implies that an action that has a cause cannot be freely undertaken. Causes in this view are forms of coercion. If our actions have causes, we are not responsible for them. Evil, on the other hand, is thought to be uncaused, or to be its own cause. This is one of its several points of resemblance with good. Apart from evil, only God is said to be the cause of himself.

There is a kind of tautology or circular argument implicit in the policeman's view. People do evil things because they are evil. Some people are evil in the way that some things are coloured indigo. They commit their evil deeds not to achieve some goal, but just because of the sort of people they are. But might this not mean that they can't help doing what they do? For the policeman, the idea of evil is an alternative to such determinism. But it seems that we have thrown out a determinism of environment only to replace it with one of character. It is now your character, not your social conditions, which drives you to unspeakable deeds.

An interview with Marian Schwartz, who most recently translated Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov and Olga Slavnikova’s 2017, in The Boston Globe:

Q. Can one language be faithful to the meaning of another?

A. That question, I think, points to the English speaker’s discomfort with the idea of a translation as two simultaneously existing texts. For readers accustomed to foreign languages, the issue is not as fraught. Of course, a translation is never going to be the same as the original. The idea is to use the tools and strengths of English to re-create the intention and effects of the original. As a simple example, Russian does not have auxiliary verbs like “seem’’ and “would,’’ although it conveys those notions by other means. “Seemingly, he is unhappy’’ is a neutral sentence in Russian but stilted in English. “He seems unhappy’’ is the good English translation. Different languages also have different levels of emotion. English favors understatement. We love subtlety and precision. But what comes across in Russian as neutral can seem histrionic in English. Even today, Russian fiction uses “alas’’ regularly, but I’ve yet to be able to keep the word in a translation because it almost always sounds ridiculous.

From Seed:

You’re at breakfast enjoying a mouthful of milk when it happens: the zygomatic muscles, anchored at each cheekbone, tug the corners of your mouth backwards and up. Orbicular muscles encircling your eyeballs slowly squeeze tight beneath wrinkling skin. A 310-millisecond-long noise explodes from your throat, extending to a frequency of 10,000 Hertz. Five shorter pulses of the “h” sound follow, five times per second, hovering around 6 Hertz, each lasting a fifteenth of a second. Your heart reaches 115 beats per minute. Blood vessels relax. Muscle tone softens. Abdominal muscles clench. The soft tissue lining your upper larynx vibrates 120 times per second as air blasts past. The milk spews forth. You are laughing.

Laughter, real laugh-till-you-cry laughter, is one of many human emotional expressions. Arguably, laughing and its tearful counterpart, crying, are the loudest, most intrusive non-linguistic expressions of our species. But for all of that familiarity, they are little-understood behavioral mysteries parading in the light of everyday experience. Though evolutionary biologists have long explored the mammalian origins of emotional expression, human laughs and cries only rarely become subjects of cognitive neuroscience. But that may not stay the case. Laughing and crying, being live demonstrations of emotion and its social expression, provide new entryways into the tangled pathways of the brain.

More here.

Steve Mirsky in Scientific American:

Here’s another idea that’s really been vexing me. Human embryonic stem cells are bad, I’ve been told, because they come from aborted embryos or from surplus embryos created for in vitro fertilization. And using these cells in potentially lifesaving research is morally wrong because even if that embryo was only a few cells or just one cell, it has the potential to be a human being. To some people’s thinking, it already is a human being. On the other completely gestated hand, what are called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are allegedly good because no embryos are involved. An iPSC is a tissue-specific adult cell that, with special treatment, has reverted to a fully pluripotent form capable of producing any other kind of cell in the body. In fact, it’s theoretically capable of being implanted into a welcoming womb and developing into a human being. Oh, the result would be a clone and therefore pure evil, but it would definitely be a human. So what I don’t get is why aren’t people who are against using embryonic stem cells in research just as against using iPSCs? Is it because of the evil clone thing?

By the way, freezers in fertility clinics all over the country are filled with those surplus embryos, which some consider to be human beings with all the rights and privileges thereof. And there’s a thought experiment in which a fully developed human baby-type person (that detailed description is meant to ward off semantic issues about who’s a human or what’s a baby) is in the clinic sitting on one of those freezers when a fire breaks out—whom do you save, the crying baby or as many of the frozen embryos as you can? (Hint: if you leave the baby, you don’t get invited to the spaghetti dinner at the thought-experiment firehouse.)

More here.

Jonathan Raban in the NYRB blog:

Trying to follow the impending British general election from afar, I’ve been reading The End of the Party: The Rise and Fall of New Labour by Andrew Rawnsley, chief political commentator for the Observer. Eight hundred pages long, and crammed with “inside” political gossip (or credible intelligence, if you prefer), it’s a book as hard to admire as it is to put down. Though the text is bespattered with authenticating footnotes (many say no more than “Conversation, Cabinet minister”), it reads like airport fiction. Its flawed (and credible) hero is Tony Blair, its cardboard villain Gordon Brown.

The End of the Party seems to have gone to the printers in November 2009. The plot of the book then appeared unassailable. David Cameron’s Conservatives’ lead over Labour in the polls stood at twelve, fifteen, sometimes twenty points, pointing to Brown’s humiliation in the 2010 election (which will almost certainly take place on May 6). The commentariat had appointed Cameron as Britain’s next prime minister, and Gordon Brown and his party were yesterday’s men.

But for the last few months and weeks, the polls have been tightening. The Conservatives are still ahead (averaging out polls over the last twenty days, the useful site UK Polling Report puts the Conservatives at 38 percent, Labour at 31 percent, and the Liberal Democrats at 19 percent). Because the Lib Dems have 63 seats in the present parliament, it’s going to be a far tougher battle than was predicted a few months ago for either the Conservatives or Labour to gain an overall majority. There’s now much talk of a hung parliament and a minority government working in coalition with Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats.

There’s also talk—unthinkable when Rawnsley finished his gravedigging job for Brown’s corpse—of the no longer inconceivable possibility of a Labour victory. On March 25, Andy Beckett wrote a long and characteristically thoughtful piece in the Guardian titled “What Happens If Cameron Loses?”; on March 28, Matthew D’Ancona, the former editor of the Spectator, imagined Gordon Brown relishing his first morning after an election that returns him to Downing Street, while the Conservatives tear themselves apart in their search for David Cameron’s replacement.

In the New York Times Sunday Magazine:

Speaking on Oahu a few years ago as first lady, Laura Bush praised Laysan albatross couples for making lifelong commitments to one another. Lindsay C. Young, a biologist who studies the Kaena Point colony, told me: “They were supposed to be icons of monogamy: one male and one female. But I wouldn’t assume that what you’re looking at is a male and a female.”

Young has been researching the albatrosses on Oahu since 2003; the colony was the focus of her doctoral dissertation at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, which she completed last spring. (She now works on conservation projects as a biologist for hire.) In the course of her doctoral work, Young and a colleague discovered, almost incidentally, that a third of the pairs at Kaena Point actually consisted of two female birds, not one male and one female. Laysan albatrosses are one of countless species in which the two sexes look basically identical. It turned out that many of the female-female pairs, at Kaena Point and at a colony that Young’s colleague studied on Kauai, had been together for 4, 8 or even 19 years — as far back as the biologists’ data went, in some cases. The female-female pairs had been incubating eggs together, rearing chicks and just generally passing under everybody’s nose for what you might call “straight” couples.

Young would never use the phrase “straight couples.” And she is adamantly against calling the other birds “lesbians” too. For one thing, the same-sex pairs appear to do everything male-female pairs do except have sex, and Young isn’t really sure, or comfortable judging, whether that technically qualifies them as lesbians or not. But moreover, the whole question is meaningless to her; it has nothing to do with her research. “ ‘Lesbian,’ ” she told me, “is a human term,” and Young — a diligent and cautious scientist, just beginning to make a name in her field — is devoted to using the most aseptic language possible and resisting any tinge of anthropomorphism. “The study is about albatross,” she told me firmly. “The study is not about humans.” Often, she seemed to be mentally peer-reviewing her words before speaking.

A discovery like Young’s can disorient a wildlife biologist in the most thrilling way — if he or she takes it seriously, which has traditionally not been the case.

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone:

If you want to know what life in the Third World is like, just ask Lisa Pack, an administrative assistant who works in the roads and transportation department in Jefferson County, Alabama. Pack got rudely introduced to life in post-crisis America last August, when word came down that she and 1,000 of her fellow public employees would have to take a little unpaid vacation for a while. The county, it turned out, was more than $5 billion in debt — meaning that courthouses, jails and sheriff's precincts had to be closed so that Wall Street banks could be paid.

As public services in and around Birmingham were stripped to the bone, Pack struggled to support her family on a weekly unemployment check of $260. Nearly a fourth of that went to pay for her health insurance, which the county no longer covered. She also fielded calls from laid-off co-workers who had it even tougher. “I'd be on the phone sometimes until two in the morning,” she says. “I had to talk more than one person out of suicide. For some of the men supporting families, it was so hard — foreclosure, bankruptcy. I'd go to bed at night, and I'd be in tears.”

Homes stood empty, businesses were boarded up, and parts of already-blighted Birmingham began to take on the feel of a ghost town. There were also a few bills that were unique to the area — like the $64 sewer bill that Pack and her family paid each month. “Yeah, it went up about 400 percent just over the past few years,” she says.

The sewer bill, in fact, is what cost Pack and her co-workers their jobs. In 1996, the average monthly sewer bill for a family of four in Birmingham was only $14.71 — but that was before the county decided to build an elaborate new sewer system with the help of out-of-state financial wizards with names like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. The result was a monstrous pile of borrowed money that the county used to build, in essence, the world's grandest toilet — “the Taj Mahal of sewer-treatment plants” is how one county worker put it. What happened here in Jefferson County would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for the peculiar alchemy of modern oligarchical capitalism: A mob of corrupt local officials and morally absent financiers got together to build a giant device that converted human shit into billions of dollars of profit for Wall Street — and misery for people like Lisa Pack.

From The New Criterion:

Hemingway, remarks are not literature,” said Miss Stein imperiously. In Dorothy Parker’s case, however, the remarks, the snappy comebacks, live on, no matter how inexpert the witnesses (Mrs. Parker included). Even if she never really followed Clare Boothe Luce’s “Age before beauty” with “Pearls before swine” or wrote of the young Katharine Hepburn “She ran the gamut of emotions from A to B,” most of us, suffering from the delayed reaction times that wake us up a day or so later with the perfect rejoinder, envy the expert parry, the swift thrust of a Parker epigram, even a faux one. That she had no Boswell is, well, just as well, for the panache with which time has crowned her off-the-cuffs makes her loom larger in our cultural memory.

In life, however, she did not loom very large, around five feet by most accounts, and, though she battled weight problems periodically, she appears shrunken and mummified in photographs of her last years—too many Chesterfields, too much scotch. Born Dorothy Rothschild (“We’d never even heard of those Rothschilds!”), she first appeared while her Upper-West-Side parents were vacationing in New Jersey, getting back to her almost-native city just after Labor Day, 1893. Her Jewish father sent her to Catholic and Protestant schools, and, oddly, given her apparent lack of religious beliefs, the figure of the Virgin Mary appears in several of her most serious poems. She left school for good at fourteen and spent the next six years with her father, whose fortune had declined to the point that there was little estate to settle on his four children. After his death, she worked at a dance studio, either as an instructor or as a pianist, depending on whose account one reads.

More here.