From Salon:

David Shenk's new book, “The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong,” is 300 pages long, and more than half of those pages are endnotes. You need to offer up a lot of evidence when your goal is to overturn a concept as commonplace as the idea that genes are the “blueprints” for both our physical bodies and our personalities. Above all, what Shenk wants to communicate is that “the whole concept of genetic giftedness turns out to be wildly off the mark — tragically kept afloat for decades by a cascade of misunderstandings and misleading metaphors.” Instead of acquiescing to the belief that talent is a quality we're either born with or not, he wants us to understand that anyone can aspire to superlative achievement. Hard, persistent and focused work is responsible for greatness, rather than innate ability.

Shenk does have a lot of evidence for this assertion, most of it coming from geneticists and other biological researchers who are perplexed at the way their disciplines get depicted in the media. “Today's popular understanding of genes, heredity and evolution is not just crude, it's profoundly misleading,” Shenk writes. While most scientists long ago rejected the idea that nature and nurture are two separate factors competing in a zero-sum game to dominate human behavior, laypeople still cling to the idea that whatever aspect of ourselves isn't caused by our environment must be caused by our genes, and vice versa. In recent decades, heredity has gotten most of the credit; the host of the brainiest NPR talk show in my area inevitably prompts every expert to confirm that whatever they're discussing — mathematical ability, wanderlust, ambition, mental illness — is genetically determined.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Soon after the exciting discovery of a method to turn human adult cells into stem cells in 2007 came the frustration of actually trying to make that transformation efficient. In creating induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, scientists typically only get 0.01 percent of a sample of human fibroblast (skin) cells to change. A group led by Duanqing Pei of the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health in China has found that a simple chemical can boost the efficiency by 100-fold—namely, vitamin C.

The researchers can trigger the conversion to iPS cells by introducing genes or proteins to adult cells, typically with a virus. Once the cells become pluripotent, they have the ability to become any cell in the body, thereby offering the promise of repairing damaged organs and treating disease. But scientists have yet to come up with the ideal recipe. “It’s a worldwide effort to boost efficiency and make this more practical for much wider participation from the scientific community,” Pei says.

More here.

Once in a while we think about removing “Gossip” from the list of subjects we cover here at 3QD from our banner. But then we just post something like this and move on.

Geofferey Levy in The Daily Mail:

Alpha minds in and around Westminster that normally grapple with issues such as the forthcoming election, the sinking pound and the war in Afghanistan, were turned this week towards a ticklish and wholly unexpected political mystery.

Which two ministers of Margaret Thatcher's government had gay relations with the writer Christopher Hitchens while at Oxford?

Since Hitchens's extraordinary claim emerged this week, the louche figure, now 60, who has been married twice, has fended off all requests for further information.

After all – even for a clever polemicist who takes his work very seriously – such a tantalising, if frivolous kiss-and-tell is bound to sell extra copies of his memoir Hitch-22 when it is published in the summer.

But those who knew 'Hitch' in his Balliol College years, between 1967 and 1970, when he read Politics, Philosophy and Economics while simultaneously running amok as a rabid Trotskyist (he got a third-class degree, incidentally), have little doubt his claims are true.

For although he has always enjoyed a reputation as a womaniser, at Oxford Hitchens was known to be bisexual.

More here.

Adam Waytz in Scientific American:

Consider the classic hypothetical scenario: Your house is on fire and you can take only three things with you before the entire structure becomes engulfed in flames. What would you take? Laptops and external hard drives aside, people’s responses to this question differ wildly. This diversity results from people’s flexibility in ascribing unique value to objects ranging from a hand-scrawled note from a loved one to a threadbare t-shirt that others might consider worthless.

The critical quality that leads people to treat rookie cards like rosaries is that of the sacred, whereby an object becomes worthy of boundless reverence, commitment, and protection. As diverse as people are in ascribing sacred status to possessions, they are equally varied in which values they consider sacred, a diversity that can breed substantial conflict. The abortion debate, for example, often presents a divide between those who consider woman’s “right to choose” sacred versus those who consider a fetus’ “right to life” sacred.

A recent study in the journal for Judgment and Decision Making assessed how the Iranian nuclear defense program has become a sacred value and how this affects negotiation over Iranian disarmament, an issue of growing global concern.

More here.

Hello,

The editors of 3QD have made their decision. The twenty semifinalists have been winnowed down and wildcards added. Thanks to all the participants. (Details about the prize here.)

Once again, Carla Goller has provided a “trophy” logo that our finalists may choose to display on their own blogs. And if you like our site, please do add us to your blogroll and tell your friends.

So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Robert Pinsky, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners: (given here in alphabetical order by blog name)

1. 3 Quarks Daily: James Ensor: Keepin' It Surreal
2. Amitava Kumar: Postmortem
3. Digital Emunction: A Lume Spento
4. Imaginary Boundaries: To Live Outside the Law, You Must Be Honest
5. Infrequent Thoughts, Haphazardly Published: Lucky
6. Novel Readings: Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost
7. November Sky Poetry: How to photograph the heart
8. PEN America: Tomasz Rozycki on “Scorched Maps”
9. The Millions: Proust’s Arabesk: The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk

We'll announce the three winners on March 20, 2010.

Good luck!

Abbas

P.S. The editors of 3QD will not be making any comments on our deliberations, or the process by which we made our decision, other than to simply say that we picked what we thought were the best six posts out of the semifinalists, and added up to three others that we also liked.

John Allen Paulos in his excellent Who's Counting column at ABC News:

As usual, simple arithmetic is crucial to understanding many of the biggest, most important news stories (as well as those, like the Tiger Woods saga, that are of no public significance). What follows is a collage of some of these stories.

One problem is that people often view numbers as providing decoration rather than information. Over the last couple of weeks, for example, I performed a little experiment with people I randomly met.

If our idle conversation turned to current events, I mentioned a headline I claimed to have just read proclaiming, “Experts Fear Annual Housing Costs in the U.S. (Rent, Mortgage Payments) May Top $2 Billion.” I followed up with, “Imagine that — more than 2 billion dollars per year.”

People usually responded by bemoaning the mortgage crisis, foreclosures, Wall Street, and a host of other issues. Only one noticed that $2 billion is an absurdly low number. A population of 300 million translates to about 100 million households. Dividing 100 million into $2 billion results in about $20 in rent or mortgage paid annually by the average household. Just $20!

More here.

I steal a post from today’s offerings to make a small request. Flux Factory is an arts organization that my wife Shuffy and I started lo those many years ago. It continues along nicely. They have an online campaign to get a new heating system. It’s easy to throw in a few bucks, they are using the Kickstart campaign, which seems a nice way to do a little fund raising online. And Flux is a pretty cool place, just trying to eke out a spot for a dollop of aesthetic freedom.

What prevents Bohlen-Pierce from becoming unpleasant, dissonant noise is the fact that is not merely an avant-garde musician taking a hacksaw to our current musical system for sheer destructive glee. In the same way that languages share certain principles, Bohlen-Pierce takes advantage of fundamental properties that make our own musical system work. It makes some different basic assumptions, most notably by not using the octave. But it also makes use of analogous ways of creating harmony and chords. The result is music that sounds different, but not bad. “A different tuning system is almost like a different language,” said Ross W. Duffin, a music professor at Case Western Reserve University and author of the book “How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (And Why You Should Care).” “There are other languages that sound completely different [from English] – that have different grammatical systems, that have different words for the same thing. And yet those things coexist, and it’s recognized there’s great beauty in a French poem, for example.”

more from Carolyn Y. Johnson at The Boston Globe here.

Shane O'Neill's Cairn

When you and I on the Palos Verdes cliff
Found life more desperate than dear,
And when we hawked at it on the lake by Seattle,
In the west of the world, where hardly
Anything has died yet: we'd not have been sorry, Una,
But surprised, to foresee this gray
Coast in our days, the gray waters of the Moyle
Below us, and under our feet
The heavy black stones of the cairn of the lord of Ulster.
A man of blood who died bloodily
Four centuries ago: but death's nothing, and life,
From a high death-mark on a headland
of this dim island of burials, is nothing either.
How beautiful are both these nothings.

by Robinson Jeffers

From Harvard Magazine:

Your parents recommend taking a Caribbean cruise and tell you about a discount deal. You’ve never taken a cruise and aren’t so sure you’d enjoy it, so you dig up some information on the Web and even watch a couple of videos. You recollect the times you’ve been on ships, and your past visits to Caribbean islands—rum drinks, aqua waters. But will you really enjoy an eight-day cruise? Turns out there is a better way to answer this question: ask anyone who has just gotten off a cruise boat—a total stranger is fine. That way, you’ll be 30 to 60 percent more likely to accurately predict your own experience than by basing your decision on painstaking research and inner speculations.

That’s the upshot of new work by professor of psychology Daniel Gilbert, author of the bestselling 2007 psychology book Stumbling on Happiness and host of the recent PBS television series This Emotional Life. In a recent issue of Science, Gilbert and his coauthors—psychology graduate student Matthew Killingsworth, Rebecca Eyre, Ph.D. ’05, and Timothy Wilson, Aston professor of psychology at the University of Virginia—reported findings on “surrogation”: consulting the experience of another person, a surrogate, in deciding whether something will make you happy. They discovered that the direct experience of another person trumps the conjecturing of our own minds.

More here.

Dennis Overbye in The New York Times:

It was “Mad Men” meets “Flash Gordon.”

The years from 1957 to 1962 were a golden age of science fiction, as well as paranoia and exhilaration on a cosmic scale. The future was still the future back then, some of us could dream of farms on the moon and heroically finned rockets blasting off from alien landscapes. Others worried about Russian moon bases. Scientists debated whether robots or humans should explore space. Satellites and transistors were jazzy emblems of postwar technology, and we were about to unravel the secrets of the universe and tame the atom (if it did not kill us first).

Some of the most extravagant of these visions of the future came not from cheap paperbacks, but from corporations buffing their high-tech credentials and recruiting engineering talent in the heady days when zooming budgets for defense and NASA had created a gold rush in outer space. In the pages of magazines like Aviation Week, Missiles and Rockets and even Fortune, companies, some famous and some now obscure, were engaged in a sort of leapfrog of dreams. And so, for example, Republic Aviation of Farmingdale, N.Y. — “Designers and Builders of the Incomparable Thundercraft” — could be found bragging in Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine in 1959 about the lunar gardening experiments it was doing for a future Air Force base on the moon.

More here.

Ben Zimmer in Word Routes:

The movie's official website says of the title, “In Iraq, it is soldier vernacular to speak of explosions as sending you to 'the hurt locker.'” In fact, like so much American military slang, hurt locker (along with related hurt expressions) dates back to the Vietnam War.

In The Historical Dictionary of American Slang, Jonathan Lighter includes an extended entry for hurt in its military use, which he defines as “trouble or suffering, esp. deliberately or callously inflicted.” One common use of hurt that sprang up in the Vietnam era is in the phrase a world of hurt, “great trouble or suffering.” In “My First Day in Viet Nam Combat,” an Oct. 15, 1967 battle report in the Chicago Tribune, new recruit Russell Enlow wrote, “But now, as I drained the last drop from the fourth canteen, I realized what a world of hurt I would be in if that resupply chopper didn't show.”

Vietnam was a breeding ground for other hurt phrases, such as in the hurt locker, in the hurt bag and in the hurt seat, all defined by Lighter as “in trouble or at a disadvantage; in bad shape.” On February 21, 1966, an Associated Press article by John T. Wheeler appeared in many newspapers around the country, quoting a U.S. military adviser as saying, “If an army marches on its stomach, old Charlie is in the hurt locker.” (“Charlie is an American nickname for the Viet Cong,” Wheeler explained to readers not yet familiar with such slang.)

More here.

Abbas Milani in The New Republic:

Traditional Iranian husbands, the sort found in the highest ranks of the Islamic Republic, sometimes refer to their wives as “the house.” For them, this is not just an expression of their understanding of gender relations. It is viewed as a necessary euphemism, vital protection for a woman’s honor. The mere uttering of her name, after all, might compromise her chastity.

It is telling, therefore, that Mir Hossein Mousavi courted and eventually married Zahra Rahnavard. When they met, in 1969, Rahnavard was already an acclaimed pioneer in the field of Islamic feminism, as well as a sculptor and critic and all-around star of the intellectual scene that throbbed in Tehran at that time. But it was her political theories that vaulted her farthest: Rahnavard proffered the kind of critique of patriarchy percolating in the Western academy at the time. Yet she didn’t join her sisters in the West in launching an all-out assault on tradition. Yes, Islam has misogynistic elements, she argued in her speeches. But those misogynistic elements are not necessarily native to Islam. They only prevail because of the male domination of the faith.

More here.

Kelly Amis and Joseph E. Robert, Jr. in the Washington Post:

Some say the scholarship program isn't needed because charter schools can fill the void. But charters and private school scholarships are not mutually exclusive reforms, and while the District's charter program is vibrant, it is far from providing all local students with an excellent education.

Indeed, charter schools are just part of the District's “three-sector strategy” toward education reform. This strategy, which we helped to design, presumes that all children deserve excellent schools and that every school effectively and appropriately educating students — whether traditional, private or charter — should be applauded and supported.

The strategy is working. The competition of new options created a landscape in which Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee could take steps only dreamed of by prior administrations: refining the downtown bureaucracy, closing near-empty schools and shifting the savings to academic programs, and holding teachers more accountable.

More here.

Hello,

The voting round of our arts & literature prize (details here) is over. A total of 2010 (odd coincidence, huh?) votes were cast for the 79 nominees (click here for full list of nominees). Thanks to the nominators and the voters for participating.

Carla Goller has designed a “trophy” logo that our top twenty vote-getters may choose to display on their own sites. So here they are, in descending order from the most voted-for:

1. 3 Quarks Daily: James Ensor: Keepin' It Surreal
2. The Millions: Proust’s Arabesk: The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk
3. The Second Pass: Mary Flannery, Quite Contrary
4. The Rumpus: Interview with Sam Anderson
5. 3 Quarks Daily: Somebody Nailed My Dress To The Wall
6. Quantum Tantra: The New Sex Robot
7. PEN America: Tomasz Rozycki on “Scorched Maps”
8. The Millions: It’s All Right to Cry: Restoring Raymond Carver’s Voice
9. Digital Emunction: Fake Book Review 9
10. Imaginary Boundaries: To Live Outside the Law, You Must Be Honest
11. Geoffrey Philp's Blogspot: You're Not My Son Anymore
12. The Millions: It’s Not You, It’s Me: Thoughts on Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs
13. Digital Emunction: A Lume Spento
14. Letters From Exile: Letters From Exile IV
15. 3 Quarks Daily: The Bitter Taste of Life
16. In This Light: Lens and Pen as Mirrors
17. 3 Quarks Daily: Mapping the Cracks: Art-Objects in Motion
18. Cognition and Culture: The universality of music: Cross-cultural comparison, the recognition of emotions, and the influence of the the Backstreet Boys on a Cockatoo
19. Infrequent Thoughts, Haphazardly Published: Lucky
20. Michael Bérubé: Mighty Moloch, cure me of my severe allergy to the discourse of the “cure”

The editors of 3 Quarks Daily will now pick the top six entries from these, and after possibly adding up to three “wildcard” entries, will send that list of finalists to Robert Pinsky on March 10. We will also post the list of finalists here on that date.

Good luck!

Abbas

by Jeff Wilson

I. GONDWANALAND, MIGRATION, AND DINOSAURS

Greater India has long inspired geographers with its singularly wondrous shape: an inverted triangle bounded on two sides by waters of the Indian Ocean and on its third side by the Himalayan Mountain Range. Nourished by the Indus and Ganges Rivers, Greater India covers nearly 4.5 million km². Those more familiar with its geography will know that within Greater India is a smaller triangle known as the Deccan Plateau. Bounded by Western Ghats, Eastern Ghats, and the Satpura and Vindhya Ranges, the Deccan is a catchment area (14,21,000 km²) for several large rivers and sanctuary to many of India’s endemic species. This geography becomes more interesting when we take into account its deeper history and evolution.

Throughout most of the 545 million years during which there has been visible life on Earth (the Phanerozoic Eon), Greater India was not part of Asia, and it was not a peninsula. The majestic Himalayas, the mighty Indus and Ganges Rivers, and the expansive Deccan Plateau did not yet exist. These geographical features, which are integral to modern characterizations of Greater India, did not emerge until well after the extinction of dinosaurs at the end of the Mesozoic Era, 65 million years ago. The Greater India that was known to early dinosaurs and their antecedents was interlocked with Antarctica, Africa, Madagascar, Australia, and South America. These conjoined southern landmasses were called “Gondwana” or “Gondwanaland”, owing to their shared flora and fauna (du Toit 1937; Sorkhabi 1996). The break-up of Gondwana later in the Mesozoic Era remains a fascinating event in Earth history because it led to the creation of islands, each initially seeded with a common flora and fauna, that became progressively isolated from one another. Greater India in particular is interesting because it rifted from Gondwana and drifted across the equator some 6,000 km to Asia. The evolutionary changes and extinction events manifest during that journey remain the subject of investigation by many paleontologists.

Dinosaurs are one of the best groups for studying the potential effects of paleogeographic changes on evolution because dinosaurs were large animals that were capable of traversing continent scale-distances. For example, early in the Mesozoic Era, when the Earth's continental landmasses were connected, dinosaur faunas worldwide are generally similar. Carnivorous dinosaurs from North America, for example, bear striking resemblance to those from southern Africa, and herbivorous dinosaurs from China resemble those from South America. Later in the Mesozoic Era, however, this is not the case. Dinosaur faunas worldwide became more distinctive from one another due to evolutionary changes and extinction associated with increased isolation.

The first reported dinosaur from Greater India was discovered in 1828 by Captain W. H. Sleeman, famous for eradicating the ‘thaggi’ from central India, who encountered bones in Cretaceous sediments on Bara Simla hill near Jabalpur (Sleeman 1844). At that time, the name “Dinosauria” had not yet been coined, and Sleeman's discovery was not formally described and interpreted for some years. After passing through several hands, those first bones finally reached the Geological Survey of India. In 1877, Richard Lydekker named India's first dinosaur Titanosaurus indicus, or “India's titan lizard”. Although the remains were fragmentary (tail bones and a thigh bone), they indicated a large, herbivorous dinosaur that resembled the sauropod Cetiosaurus (“whale lizard”), known from Jurassic rocks of England. Lydekker named other species of Titanosaurus in a second paper in 1879, but few dinosaur discoveries followed.

Read more »

Ship-breaking in Bangladesh

Researchers are reporting impressive results in testing a vaccine for mesothelioma, a cancer that attacks the lining which protects the body's internal organs. Mesothelioma is almost always caused by exposure to asbestos, which means that it's almost always industrial and occupational in origin. Asbestos miners and millworkers are at high risk for the disease, as are shipyard workers and the family members of people who work with asbestos.

Technology created the disease. Science may have found a new way to treat it. But the worldwide path of the disease and the likely arc of its treatment offer reason for reflection. 125 million people are exposed to asbestos every year, and lower-income people are far more likely to be at risk. The World Health Organization (WHO 2006) and others have noted that the best way to eliminate mesothelioma and other asbestos-related disease is to eliminate exposure, but we don't. And nanotechnology, the latest technological breakthrough, may bring the risk of another mesothelioma outbreak.

The success of the vaccine approach is worth celebrating. But, as with so many diseases, it seems we're more likely to celebrate the cure than we're willing to eliminate the cause. Should the cure be validated by future testing, the financial structure of modern medicine suggests it will be distributed as unequally and unfairly as the disease's causes have been. Economics. as much as biology, has shaped this disease's story. And economics will probably paint its future arc.

Read more »

Sughra Raza. Drive by shooting series, #x.

Digital photograph. Karachi, February, 2010.