Jerry Coyne, Jason Rosenhouse and Chris Mooney debate evolution, religion and naturalism. Mooney:

In a recent New Republic book review, Coyne took on Kenneth Miller and Karl Giberson, two scientists who reconcile science and religion in their own lives. Basically, Forrest’s point was that while Coyne may be right that there’s no good reason to believe in the supernatural, he’s very misguided about strategy. Especially when we have the religious right to worry about, why is he criticizing people like Miller and Giberson for their attempts to reconcile modern science and religion?

Coyne responds:

Let’s first dispose of one argument: Mooney and Forrest’s implicit requirement that atheists should “make nice” with their religious, evolution-accepting opponents and never, ever criticize them. Where in tarnation did this idea come from? Why are newspaper columnists, politicians, and even grant reviewers allowed to criticize the ideas of their peers, but we scientist/atheists are not? Why are we supposed to shut up and other analysts aren’t? Let’s be clear here:

1. I have never criticized an evolutionist, writer, or scholar in an ad hominem manner. My New Republic review, which Forrest and Mooney find so odious, was temperate and respectful. In fact, of all the comments I’ve gotten on this piece, none of them until now have thought it intemperate.

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A few days after our return from what was thought of, until recently, as the future state of Palestine, and which is now the world’s largest prison (Gaza) and the world’s largest waiting room (Cis-Jordan), I had a dream. I was alone, standing, stripped to the waist, in a sandstone desert. Eventually somebody else’s hand scooped up some dusty soil from the ground and threw it at my chest. It was a considerate rather than an aggressive act. The soil or gravel changed, before it touched me, into torn pieces of cloth, probably cotton, which wrapped themselves around my torso. Then these tattered rags changed again and became words, phrases. Written not by me but by the place. Remembering this dream, the invented word landswept came to my mind. Repeatedly. Landswept describes a place or places where everything, both material and immaterial, has been brushed aside, purloined, swept away, blown down, irrigated off, everything except the touchable earth.

more from John Berger at Threepenny Review here.

For much of the past decade, the most imitated new American poets were slippery, digressive, polyvocalic, creators of overlapping, colorful fragments. Their poems were avowedly personal, although they never retold the poets’ life stories (they did not tell stories at all); the poets used, or at least mentioned, difficult ideas, especially from continental philosophy, although they never laid out philosophical arguments (they did not lay out arguments at all). Nor did they describe concrete objects at length. Full of illogic, of associative leaps, their poems resembled dreams, performances, speeches, or pieces of music, and they were, in M.H. Abrams’s famous formulation, less mirror than lamp: the poets sought to project their own experiences, in sparkling bursts of voluble utterance. Their models, among older authors, were Emily Dickinson, John Berryman, John Ashbery, perhaps Frank O’Hara; some had studied (or studied with) Jorie Graham, and many had picked up devices from the Language writers of the West Coast. These poets were what I, eleven years ago, called “elliptical,” what other (sometimes hostile) observers called “New Lyric,” or “post-avant,” or “Third Way.” Their emblematic first book was Mark Levine’s Debt (1993), their emblematic magazine probably Fence (founded 1998); their bad poems were bad surrealism, random-seeming improvisations, or comic turns hoping only to hold an audience, whether or not they had something to say.

more from Stephen Burt at the Boston Review here.

The date of the first operation under anesthetic, Oct. 16, 1846, ranks among the most iconic in the history of medicine. It was the moment when Boston, and indeed the United States, first emerged as a world-class center of medical innovation. The room at the heart of Massachusetts General Hospital where the operation took place has been known ever since as the Ether Dome, and the word “anesthesia” itself was coined by the Boston physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes to denote the strange new state of suspended consciousness that the city’s physicians had witnessed. The news from Boston swept around the world, and it was recognized within weeks as a moment that had changed medicine forever. But what precisely was invented that day? Not a chemical – the mysterious substance used by William Morton, the local dentist who performed the procedure, turned out to be simply ether, a volatile solvent that had been in common use for decades. And not the idea of anesthesia – ether, and the anesthetic gas nitrous oxide, had both been thoroughly inhaled and explored. As far back as 1525, the Renaissance physician Paracelsus had recorded that it made chickens “fall asleep, but wake up again after some time without any bad effect,” and that it “extinguishes pain” for the duration. What the great moment in the Ether Dome really marked was something less tangible but far more significant: a huge cultural shift in the idea of pain.

more from Mike Jay at the Boston Globe here. here

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…which I sadly will miss since I'll be en route to South Africa. This panel promises to be tour de force.

Albert Einstein shattered previous ideas about time, but left many pivotal questions unanswered: Does time have a beginning? An end? Why does it move in only one direction? Is it real, or something our minds impose on reality? Journalist John Hockenberry leads a distinguished panel, including renowned physicist Sir Roger Penrose and prominent philosopher David Albert, as they explore the nature of time.

David Albert, Sean Carroll, George Ellis, Michael Heller, John Hockenberry, Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara, and Sir Roger Penrose. I don't if there are tickets left, but I'd love a report on the panel from one of our readers, or maybe Sean will post something.

Jesse Smith in The Smart Set:

To most of the American public, chicanery is pretty gauche right now: Bernie Madoff, risky bank investments, torture memos, Blago. Yet some deception is just too ingrained in our heritage to easily dismiss. Which is why competitors from around the world recently gathered in Ocean City, Maryland to celebrate and compete in the only American art form grounded in trickery. The Ward World Championship is the annual meet-up of wildfowl carvers, those artists with centuries-old ties to the decoy makers who carved birds not to decorate shelves or long tables of a small town's convention center, but to attract and kill birds that migrated along the nation's shores.

To be fair, this is trickery targeting not the human world, but the animal. Still, Ocean City is an oddly appropriate setting for such a celebration. It's one of the few cities on the lower Delmarva peninsula — one of the historic centers of decoy making and bird carving — with enough motel rooms and a large enough exhibition space to host such an event. But like most resort towns of the northern East Coast, it also trades in appropriation. I stayed in the Flamingo Motel while I was there, despite being about 1,100 miles from the nearest wild flamingo. My dining options included the Olive Tree and the Crabcake Factory.

More here.

From PRWeb:

The debut of a major new international literary talent is a rare and heartening event. THE WISH MAKER, the first novel by twenty-four-year-old Ali Sethi, combines classic storytelling instincts, an eye-opening portrait of a suddenly important nation that Americans are intensely curious about, and a remarkable back story. THE WISH MAKER has already been highlighted in USA Today's “Book Buzz” column and foreign rights have been sold in six countries to date. At once a fresh and affecting coming-of-age story, a riveting family saga, and a hip, witty social commentary, Sethi's novel vividly evokes the pungent texture of daily life in his native Pakistan, particularly for women, as well as his country's roiling social and political currents.

The son of prominent Pakistani journalists, Sethi went to Harvard University, where he studied with the novelists Zadie Smith and Amitav Ghosh as well as the critic James Wood. He has written in the Op Ed pages of The New York Times about Pakistan's “slow-motion emergency,” which has led it to the brink of widespread violence and chaos, and more recently about the attack in Lahore on the Sri Lankan cricket team.

In THE WISH MAKER, Sethi tells an intimate yet sweeping tale set mainly in the 1990s – a story of two cousins, a boy and girl, who grow up in the same household, unexpectedly follow very different paths, and reunite after a series of events that have irrevocably changed them and their country. It encompasses Benazir Bhutto, the heady promise of democracy, and the recurring nightmare of military intervention; Bollywood movie stars and American TV shows and the different kinds of forbidden love they inspire.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

How suggestively their names intertwined from the start: Masters, with its echoes of bondage and onanism, and Johnson, that venerable euphemism for penis. If they hadn't been the most famous sexologists of their day, they might have opened an S&M club in Tribeca. Gini, with her purring smile, would have greeted the customers; Bill would have stayed in the back room, testing the hoists and chains. Which was only a couple of degrees removed from what they did in real life. Their partnership began in St. Louis in the mid-1950s, when William Masters, an ob-gyn and fertility specialist at Washington University, decided to launch a scientific inquiry into human sexuality. Unlike his predecessor, Alfred Kinsey, Masters proposed something far more immersive than questionnaires: direct observation of the body's procreative functions, with each pulse and quiver painstakingly recorded.

He began in a small way by spying on prostitutes (conscripted with the local vice squad's help and the Catholic archbishop's blessing). When one of his subjects suggested he find a female partner, Masters settled on an unlikely candidate: an unemployed, twice-divorced mother with two small kids and no degree. Initially hired as Masters's secretary, Virginia Johnson quickly proved her worth in the lab, efficiently gathering personal histories and sounding the notes of empathy that were absent from Masters's cool register.

More here.

Hello,

The voting round of our prize (details here) is over. A total of 2,655 votes were cast for the 171 nominees (click here for full list of nominees). Thanks to the nominators and the voters for participating.

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

1. The Science Babe: The Physics of High Heels
2. My Genes and Me: Journey to My Genes
3. Southern Fried Science: The ecological disaster that is dolphin safe tuna
4. In The Pipeline: Your Paper Is A Sack Of Raving Nonsense. Thank You.
5. 3 Quarks Daily: Giambattista Della Porta of Naples: How to Turn a Woman Green
6. Daylight Atheism: The Age of Wonder
7. Dot Physics: Physics of Fantastic Contraption I
8. Mauka to Makai: The Ocean's Big pHat Problem
9. Cocktail Party Physics: The Universe Makes A Lotta Gas
10. Unitary Flow: Smooth Quantum Mechanics
11. The Primate Diaries: Male Chauvinist Chimps or the Meat Market of Public Opinion?
12. Mauka to Makai: Baby-Making
13. Tom Paine’s Ghost: Dr. Temple Grandin
14. In The Pipeline: Things I Won’t Work With: Triazadienyl Fluoride
15. The Intersection: Singled Out
16. Expression Patterns: A Squishy Topic
17. Observations of a Nerd: The End of the Age of Man?
18. Tetrapod Zoology: Passerine birds fight dirty, a la Velociraptor
19. Daylight Atheism: Bands of Iron
20. Observations of a Nerd: A Marine Biologist’s Story

We'll announce the seven finalists on June 11.

Good luck!

Abbas

Sughra Raza. Highway Fog. 2003.

Acrylic on canvas.

Digital photograph outside the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, 2008.

William Deresiewicz in The Nation:

To be fair, the problem lies less in the field's goals than in its claims. Much of its opposition is misguided and out-of-date. For a long time, evolutionary approaches to human behavior were discredited by the specter of Social Darwinism. More recently, the concept of a unitary human nature has been condemned as a form of bourgeois universalism–that is, of disguised ethnocentrism. But those who reject the notion of human psychology as a product of evolution (that is, of nature rather than culture) would undoubtedly recoil at the idea that human physiology is not a product of evolution. The only alternative is creationism. And if our bodies have evolved, then so have our minds, which a materialist philosophy (one that doesn't depend on supernatural entities like the Christian soul) must regard as products of our bodies–of our brains, nerves, sense organs and so forth. Surely no one would dispute that there is a universal bee nature or dog nature or chimpanzee nature. Why not then acknowledge, at least in principle, a universal human nature, however various its elaborations in culture?

“Making money,” writes Kirn, “didn’t interest me. While my classmates signed up for on-campus ‘face-to-faces’ with Wall Street investment firms … I scanned the horizon for another test to take, another contest to compete in. … For me, wealth and power were trivial by-products in the great generational tournament of aptitude. The ranking itself was the essential prize.” Here, we see, the young Kirn was a romantic. But I doubt he was quite the deranged romantic the old Kirn makes him out to be. His telling of the tale of his cynicism is more cynical than the cynicism it describes. At Princeton, he was an approval-seeking, and approval-deprived poet and playwright who at times suffered a debilitating drug habit. He got laid, it seems to me, a fair amount. He read W. B. Yeats and John Berryman and wrote plays with titles like Soft White Kids in Leather (which, by the way, was later staged at the Edinburgh Festival). Though the son of a lawyer, he was too often a poor boy in a rich man’s house. A frank memoir about this experience, one undetermined by the publishing trends of the moment, might have been funny, even—when young Kirn hits bottom—moving. But this market-tuned book, fastened to a social problem about which its author has little of substance to say, and sweetened with just enough Hollywood-style titillation, seems destined to be made into one of those movies that nobody sees. No matter. Kirn has already cashed out. The con is complete.

more from Christian Lorentzen at n+1 here.

Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance:

If someone believes that abortion really is murder, talk of the reproductive freedom of the mother isn’t going to carry much weight — nobody has the right to murder another person. Supporters of abortion rights don’t say “No, this is one case where murder is completely justified.” Rather, they say “No, the fetus is not a person, so abortion is not murder.” The crucial question (I know, this is not exactly an astonishing new insight) is whether a fetus is really a person.

I have nothing original to add to the debate over when “personhood” begins. But there is something to say about how we decide questions like that. And it takes us directly back to the previous discussion about marriage and fundamental physics. The upshot of which is: how you think about the universe, how you conceptualize the natural world around us, obviously is going to have an enormous impact on how you decide questions like “When does personhood begin?”

In a pre-scientific world, life was — quite understandably — thought of as something intrinsically different from non-life. This view could be taken to different extremes; Plato gave voice to one popular tradition, by claiming that the human soul was a distinct, incorporeal entity that actually occupied a human body. These days we know a lot more than they did back then.

More here.

Marc Weingarten in Salon:

It was snowing hard when the bank called Nick Popovich. They needed to grab a Gulfstream in South Carolina now. Not tomorrow. Tonight.

All commercial and private planes were grounded, but Nick Popovich wasn't one to turn down a job. So he waited for the storm to clear long enough to charter a Hawker jet from Chicago into South Carolina. There was just one detail: No one had told Popovich about the heavily armed white supremacist militia that would be guarding the aircraft when he arrived.

But then again, no one had told the militia about Popovich, a brawny and intimidating man who has been jailed and shot at and has faced down more angry men than a prison warden. When Popovich and two of his colleagues arrived that evening at a South Carolina airfield, they were met by a bunch of nasty-looking thugs with cocked shotguns. “They had someone in the parking lot with binoculars,” Popovich says, recalling the incident. “When we went to grab the plane, one of them came out with his weapon drawn and tells us we better get out of there.” Undeterred, Popovich continued toward the plane until he felt a gun resting on his temple.

More here.

My Voice gets Black Quiet & I want to Fly
Jim Bell

I’m so tired
of these brown
patient
hills
sitting
over my
shoulder
like buddha
with bumps
laughing
&
no more corn
fields
no more pole
vault
no more
sad
irish eyes
wildly
whacking
at 1950’s
looking

for a mother’s
face to touch
& love
& bring back
home
healed
soft
sober

a father’s
rage
to bottle
& send
back
to his mother’s
buried ground

& the sound
of your lovely
naked voice
leaves
me screaming
at the edge
of an ocean
I want to grow
old & die in

from: Crossing the Bar; poems by Jim Bell
Slate Roof Publishing, Northfield, MA ,2005

From The Boston Globe:

The date of the first operation under anesthetic, Oct. 16, 1846, ranks among the most iconic in the history of medicine. It was the moment when Boston, and indeed the United States, first emerged as a world-class center of medical innovation. The room at the heart of Massachusetts General Hospital where the operation took place has been known ever since as the Ether Dome, and the word “anesthesia” itself was coined by the Boston physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes to denote the strange new state of suspended consciousness that the city's physicians had witnessed. The news from Boston swept around the world, and it was recognized within weeks as a moment that had changed medicine forever.

More here.