From The New York Times:

Since its humble beginnings as a single cell, life has evolved into a spectacular array of shapes and sizes, from tiny fleas to towering Tyrannosaurus rex, from slow-soaring vultures to fast-swimming swordfish, and from modest ferns to alluring orchids. But just how such diversity of form could arise out of evolution’s mess of random genetic mutations — how a functional wing could sprout where none had grown before, or how flowers could blossom in what had been a flowerless world — has remained one of the most fascinating and intractable questions in evolutionary biology. Now finally, after more than a century of puzzling, scientists are finding answers coming fast and furious and from a surprising quarter, the field known as evo-devo. Just coming into its own as a science, evo-devo is the combined study of evolution and development, the process by which a nubbin of a fertilized egg transforms into a full-fledged adult. And what these scientists are finding is that development, a process that has for more than half a century been largely ignored in the study of evolution, appears to have been one of the major forces shaping the history of life on earth.

For starters, evo-devo researchers are finding that the evolution of complex new forms, rather than requiring many new mutations or many new genes as had long been thought, can instead be accomplished by a much simpler process requiring no more than tweaks to already existing genes and developmental plans. Stranger still, researchers are finding that the genes that can be tweaked to create new shapes and body parts are surprisingly few.

More here.

Barbara Morgan. Martha Graham, Letter to The World, “The Kick”. 1940.

Gelatin silver print.

(The movement depicted is part of Graham’s dramatic ballet “Letter to the World,” based on the love life of American poet Emily Dickinson).

More on Barbara Morgan here, and here.

Oren Ben-Dor in Counterpunch:

It is true that some Israeli left wingers refer to the post-1967 occupation as an apartheid regime. There are good reasons for such comparison with the old South African system. In the Occupied Territories, Palestinians are subject to arbitrary military regulations, while Israeli settlers are governed by Israeli law. It is no accident that the barrier being built by Israel in the West Bank is called by Israelis the “gader hafrada”. Like the Afrikaans word “apartheid”, the Hebrew word “hafrada” means “separation”. The Israeli barrier separates Jewish settlements from Palestinian villages, usually also separating those villages from their farmland.

But the apartheid label should not be restricted to the post-1967 occupation. There is a more fundamental form of apartheid, of which the occupation is but a manifestation.

Apartheid in historic Palestine originated, and has persisted, in the ideology of creating a state in which Jews would be separated from non-Jews in terms of their stake in the political community.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

Last November, scientists announced they had revived a virus that had been dead for millions of years. The virus belongs to a special class that multiply by inserting their genetic code into the genome of their host cell. When the cell divides, it makes a new copy of the virus’s genes along with its own DNA. Once it has installed itself in a genome, the virus can liberate itself from time to time, creating new copies. These copies can infect the same cell again, or wander out of the cell to infect another one. Some of these viruses, known as human endogenous retroviruses, may be harmless, while others have been associated with diseases such as cancer. If one of these viruses happens to infect an egg or sperm, it has the chance to get in on the ground floor during the development of an embryo. The virus will be replicated in every one of the trillions of cells in the new growing body. It can then be passed down from one generation to the next along with the rest of the genome. Mutations may strike the DNA of these viruses, making them unable to jump out of the genome. But these dead copies will still be replicated for millions of years. Scientists are scanning the human genome to count up all of the endogenous retroviruses (or their dead remains and fragments). Roughly 100,000 pieces of DNA in our genomes started out as viruses, making up eight percent of the genome all told. A small fraction of them can still produce proteins; the rest are generally just coming along for the ride. Related versions of some viruses are residing in the genomes of our primate relatives, and a number of scientists are busy delving into the sixty-million year history of this viral evolution.

More here.

Hans Blix in the Boston Review:

A year ago the international Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, which I chaired, presented its unanimous report, “Weapons of Terror,” to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. The report urged governments to wake up from what Annan has called their “sleepwalking” and revive arms control and disarmament. We often hear warnings that the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—the global instrument through which states committed themselves against the acquisition of nuclear weapons and for nuclear disarmament—now risks collapse. The good news is that the world is not replete with would-be violators. The overwhelming commitment to the treaty remains tremendously valuable: Libya and Iraq were both found to be in violation and brought back into observance. In two other cases—North Korea and Iran—the world is actively seeking solutions. For now, at least, there appear to be no other problematic cases.

Still, the dangers are real, and the treaty is under strain.

More here.

Roderick MacFarquhar reviews Nixon and Mao: The Week that Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan, in the New York Review of Books:

“This was the week that changed the world” was Richard Nixon’s summing up at the end of his trip to China in February 1972. The hyperbole was justified, for this visit to China by an American president was a turning point in the cold war. Hitherto, the Soviet Union and China had been antagonists of the US. Thereafter, both Beijing and Moscow found it in their interest to come to agreements with Washington. For the Chinese it meant coming in from the cold. After the announcement of the visit in July 1971, the US effort to keep China out of the UN lost credibility: the People’s Republic of China replaced the Republic of China (Taiwan) in the Security Council that October; the US was unable even to keep Taiwan in the General Assembly. Member states that had loyally voted with the US began transferring diplomatic recognition from the Nationalist government in Taiwan to the Communist regime in Beijing.

More here.

Negar Azimi in the New York Times Magazine:

As a senior adviser to the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, David Denehy is charged with overseeing the distribution of millions of dollars to advance the cause of a more democratic Iran. Affable, charming and approachable, he is bearlike in stature and manner. His voice is pleasantly rumbly; his smile is so wide that it seems to have been drawn onto his face with a crayon. Over the last two years, Denehy has canvassed dozens of pundits, students, journalists, bloggers and activists across the world about how he might best go about his work — what he calls, echoing President Bush, “the freedom agenda.” He has shaken hands with millionaire exiles, dissidents, monarchists, Communists, self-styled Mandelas and would-be Chalabis. He is the public face of “the democracy fund,” as it has come to be known, or simply “the $75 million.”

More here.

William Booth in the Washington Post:

A full house has turned out at the Directors Guild of America for the L.A. premiere of the new documentary “Reel Bad Arabs,” which makes the case that Hollywood is obsessed with “the three Bs” — belly dancers, billionaire sheiks and bombers — in a largely unchallenged vilification of Middle Easterners here and abroad.

“In every movie they make, every time an Arab utters the word Allah? Something blows up,” says Eyad Zahra, a young filmmaker who organized the screening this week with the support of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

The documentary highlights the admittedly obsessive lifework of Jack Shaheen, a retired professor from Southern Illinois University, the son of Lebanese Christian immigrants and the author of “TV Arabs,” “Reel Bad Arabs” and the upcoming “Guilty? Hollywood‘s Verdict on Arabs after 9/11.”

More here.

[Thanks to S. J. Raza.]

From The Hindu:

Mohsin Hamid on the reasons why he chose to write The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a dramatic monologue and leave it deliberately polemical.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is not a pretty book. No, there is no violence but there is a certain stealth in its telling. That requires guts and a tremendous insight into a difficult situation. Hamid seems to have both and has employed his technique to perfection. 9/11 change d many things for many people. To quote Hamid, “I wanted to explore in fiction my own growing desire to leave (America). It was confusing territory for me, because I loved and still love so much about America and yet was still uncertain about staying on.” The book mirrors this. Excerpts:

The transformation of Changez is almost insidious. On one level it seems related to the larger issue and on another with his not-happening relationship with Erica.

I think that the personal and political are always intertwined. And in Changez’s case, there is the political narrative about what he’s feeling about the world alongside the personal narrative of what’s happening with Erica and he has inside him these fissures, he has this mix of being a very insecure person but a very proud person. He has this affair with this woman Erica and if it had worked out perhaps things would have been different for him. I think all of that mix is what makes his story.

More here.

Cosma,over at his blog,Three-toed Sloth:

Attention Conservation Notice: 1500-odd words on the plasticity and importance, or lack thereof, of certain human faculties, a topic of endless controversy; a controversy which, like the air from a blow-drier, is both arid and heated, and which this certainly won’t settle. Written in dialog form, which is always pretentious, especially when not used to good effect, which it isn’t here.

Q: Would you put on your right-thinking left-liberal educated-in-Berkeley-and-Madison hat for a moment?

A: I’d find nothing easier.  (You left out the dirty hippyprogressive Montessori school where they taught me Pirandello and Diderot.)

Q: Very good.  (It didn’t fit the rhythm, and anyway they get the picture.)  How would you react to the idea that a psychological trait, one intimately linked to the higher mental functions, is highly heritable?

A: With suspicion and unease, naturally.

Q: It’s strongly correlated with educational achievement, class and race.

A: Worse and worse.

Q: Basically nothing that happens after early adolescence makes an impact on it; before that it’s also correlated with diet.

A: Do you work at the Heritage Foundation?  Such things cannot be.

Q: What if I told you the trait was accent?

Kendra Nordin in The Christian Science Monitor:

Most Americans have some memory of the 444 days the world waited to see if Iranian revolutionaries would release 52 American hostages seized at the American Embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979. The bitter feelings from that event are just now beginning to lessen: It was only last month that the United States and Iran sat down for their first diplomatic talks in 27 years.

From a distance, the Iranian revolution remains in the realm of political power plays. But to the Iranians who lived — and loved — through it, it was as if the world had gone mad. Books were frowned upon. Public displays of affection became a crime. Schoolchildren were arrested and held prisoner. Many were executed. In Prisoner of Tehran, Marina Nemat chronicles some of what it meant to come of age during this social upheaval. For young Marina, childhood in Tehran has its simple pleasures: a special friendship with a used bookstore owner, a doting Russian grandmother, and summer-long trips to the Caspian Sea.

But as Marina reaches the edge of her teen years, the normal order of daily life begins to unravel.

More here.

In the New York Sun, Mike Peed reviews in Marianne Wiggins’s The Shadow Catcher and Emily Mitchell’s The Last Summer of the World.

“Art comes first; one can’t focus on art if one has a family,” said the painter Édouard Vuillard. Those gifted with overwhelming artistic talent — be it painting, composing, or writing — are dutybound to their work because, as artists, they’re duty-bound to society. The advancement of human culture subjugates familial obligations, and so the family must be sacrificed. What may appear selfish to spouses and children is, viewed through the hyperopic lens of high culture, as selfless as martyrdom.

As detailed in Marianne Wiggins’s “The Shadow Catcher” ( Simon & Schuster, 336 pages, $25), and Emily Mitchell’s debut novel, “The Last Summer of the World” (Norton, 352 pages, $24.95), both Edward Curtis, the famed Native American iconographer, and Edward Steichen, an early director of the Museum of Modern Art’s photography department, left trails of spousal and filial detritus as they and their photographs climbed to international renown. These novels attempt to humanize their subjects, removing their pictures from gallery walls, scrutinizing the dust on their frames, and unveiling the spots of mold beneath.

Editorial in The Nation:

The sharp escalation of the power struggle between Hamas and Fatah, ending with Fatah’s sudden collapse and the seizure of power in Gaza by Hamas, is a tragic turn of events for the Palestinian national movement–but it’s also bad news for Israel, even though some Israeli strategists mistakenly thought it was a good idea to foment civil strife. Although the conflict was abetted by Israel and the United States, neither should be happy with the results, which will vastly complicate the already dismal chances for a peaceful resolution of the wider conflict. The recent events are a shocking demonstration of the failure of Bush Administration policy in the region.

This disaster has many fathers. The steady growth of the Islamist movement cannot be understood apart from the long-term US and Israeli strategy of undermining the secular Palestinian leadership…

More here.

Nick Coligan in the Liverpool Echo:

Commuters will soon be treated to the sensational sight of a city centre eyesore literally turning itself inside out.

The former Yates’s Wine Lodge building, opposite Moorfields station, is now the subject of one of the more eye-catching pieces of art planned for Capital of Culture.

Sculptor Richard Wilson has cut out an egg-shaped section of the derelict building’s front and fixed it to a giant pivot.

Once it is officially up and running later this month, the facade will rotate like a huge opening and closing window, giving passers-by a glimpse of the interior.

The artwork, called Turning The Place Over, will be launched on June 20 and will run until the end of 2008. It is costing £450,000 – with Culture Company paying £150,000.

More here.

UPDATE: also see this video pointed out by 3QD reader Carl:

Feeling conjugally challenged? Look at Frans Hals’s double portrait of Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen in the National Gallery’s forthcoming Dutch Portraits show and, instantly, all will be right with your corner of the world. The graceful painting, silvery with intimate affection, documents one of the great changes in the history of European marriage: the possibility of the shared smile – the glimlach revolution. Not that lipwork had hitherto been out of the question for portraiture. But let’s face it, La Joconde isn’t, is she? That thinly knowing smirk implies private knowledge, to be decoded only through the proprietorial collusion of patron and painter. But Hals’s newly married couple, Beatrix sporting both betrothal and wedding rings on her right hand, advertise their mutual pleasure openly for our shared celebration. They incline to each other and, through their self-identification as a harmonious pair, radiate that sympathy outward through the picture plane towards us. Behold, the painting says, as Isaac holds his hand to his heart, the very picture of proper Christian marriage in which duty also happens to be pleasure.

more from The Guardian here.

Of all the harrowing experiences that are a part of medical training, perhaps the most affecting is that of gross anatomy. No surprise, then, that the dissection of the human body attracts so many attempts at explication. Irresistible storytelling opportunities abound: The opening of the cranium is a metaphor for the opening of the medical student’s mind to new ways of understanding the body; the dismemberment of a cadaver is an ironic comment on the disassociation students experience in becoming healers; and the cadaver itself is the ultimate paradox, at once the sacred vessel of our humanness and a lifeless object wrapped in plastic trash bags to keep it moist.

more from the LA Times here.

Pagels and King do an excellent job explaining why, according to the author of this renegade gospel, mainstream Christianity has gotten it so wrong for so long. Along the way they introduce us to, among other things, a goddess named Barbelo (for some Gnostics, a divine mother figure who often symbolized heaven) and try to make sense of teachings that to most readers today will seem like nutty musings on numerology, cosmology, astrology and eschatology. On the perennial question of death and the afterlife, Pagels and King explain that whereas other early Christians affimed the doctrine of bodily resurrection, the Christians to whom this gospel is addressed believed in the immortal spirit. Here the body is suspect. Jesus is not reborn in the flesh but simply appears. The eternal life he offers is lived in the spirit alone, and it is won more through Jesus’ teachings than through his sacrifice on the cross.

Thomas Jefferson, in his own cut-and-paste version of the Gospels made in the White House in 1804, depicted Jesus not as a savior who died to pay for our sins but as a great moral teacher who lived to show us how to live ourselves. The Jefferson Bible, as this anti-supernatural Scripture is called, concludes abruptly, as Jesus is being laid in the tomb, without a hint of the Resurrection. The Gospel of Judas ends even more abruptly — before Jesus begins his trek to Calvary. Like Jefferson’s Bible, it scoffs at the notion that God would sacrifice his son to atone for the world’s sins. It too depicts Jesus as a teacher rather than a savior, though its esoteric theology, laced with numerological musings on the “72 luminaries” and the “five firmaments,” would have revolted Jefferson, who preferred to take his morality neat.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Jonathan Ree in Prospect:

In his luminous new collection, The Curtain (Faber & Faber), Milan Kundera argues that the special virtue of the novel lies in its ability to part the “magic curtain, woven of legends” that hangs between us and the ordinary world. The curtain has been put there to cover up the trivia of our lives, the forgotten old boxes and bags where “an enigma remains an enigma” while ugliness flirts with beauty, and reason courts the absurd. These neglected spaces were redeemed for literature, according to Kundera, at the moment when Cervantes got his readers to imagine Don Quixote as he lay dying while his niece went on eating, the housekeeper went on drinking and Sancho Panza went on being “of good cheer.” By inventing a narrator through whose consciousness such dumb events could be worked up into an affecting “scene,” Cervantes created a form of literature that could do justice to “modest sentiments”; and so a new kind of beauty—Kundera calls it “prosaic beauty”—was born. Henry Fielding took the technique further when he created a narrator who could charm his readers with benign loquacity, and Laurence Sterne completed the development by blithely allowing the story of Tristram Shandy to be ruined by the character trying to recount it.

If Cervantes rent the curtain that separates us from the prose of ordinary life, Kafka tore it down completely. After Kafka, according to Kundera, the novel entered a realm where reality could never “correspond to people’s idea of it”; from now on the novel would be a constant witness to the “unavoidable relativism of human truths.”

More here.

Helen DaSilva at Oxfam:

Eight months ago Oxfam began working to raise awareness of Ethiopians’ efforts to gain control over their fine coffee brands. Today, Starbucks has honored its commitments to Ethiopian coffee farmers by becoming one of the first in the industry to join the innovative Ethiopian trademarking initiative.

“Harnessing market forces and allowing poor countries to benefit from intellectual property rights are keys to creating fairer and more equitable trade,” continued Offenheiser. “In a modern economy, companies must bring their business models in line with the demands of good corporate citizenship, which goes beyond traditional philanthropic approaches to dealing with poverty.”

Nearly three years ago, Ethiopia’s coffee sector launched a plan to take better advantage of its intellectual property. The country applied for the trademark registrations of its specialty coffee brands in the United States, Canada, and other countries. At the same time, Ethiopia began negotiating with coffee roasters to sign agreements acknowledging the right of Ethiopians to control these brands.

“With this agreement, Ethiopians can build the value of their coffees and farmers can capture a greater share of the retail price,” Offenheiser concluded. “This should help improve the lives of millions of poor farmers, allowing them to send their children to school and access health care.”

More here.