In the LRB, Simon Blackburn, Jerry Coyne, Philip Kitcher, Tim Lewens, Steven Rose pen a joint response to Jerry Fodor’s response to letters on the issue:

Jerry Fodor persists with two provocative claims: first, that natural selection explanations are incoherent; second, that there is some alternative explanation for adaptive phenomena such as camouflage or beak shape (Letters, 29 November).

To show the incoherence of anything, you have to address it in the form in which its professional expositors deploy it. In large numbers of articles and books, published from 1859 to the present, evolutionary biologists use the following style of explanation. A characteristic of an organism (the colour of an animal’s coat, say) is as it is because of a historical process. In some ancestral population there was a variant type that differed from the rest in ways that enhanced reproductive success. (White polar bears, for example, more camouflaged than their brown confrères, were better at sneaking up on seals, were better fed and left more offspring.) If the variant has a genetic basis, its frequency increases in the next generation.

Is this incoherent? Nothing Fodor says bears on that question.

Fodor:

[T]hey offer some potted polar bear history: ‘White polar bears . . . more camouflaged than their brown confrères, were better at sneaking up on seals, were better fed and left more offspring.’ I don’t know whether this story is true (neither, I imagine, do they), but let’s suppose it is. They ask, rhetorically, whether I think it’s incoherent. Well, of course I don’t, but that’s because they’ve somehow left out the Darwin bit. To get it back in, you have to add that the white bears were selected ‘because of’ their improved camouflage, and that the white bears were ‘selected for’ their improved camouflage: i.e. that the improved camouflage ‘explains’ why the white bears survived and flourished. But now we get the incoherence back too. What Darwin failed to notice (and what paradigm adaptationists continue to fail to notice) is that the theory of natural selection entails none of these. In fact, the theory of natural selection leaves it wide open what (if anything) the white bears were selected for.

What a difference a decade makes. When I worked in Moscow in 1994 and 1995 for the National Democratic Institute, an American nongovernmental organization, I could not have imagined the present situation. The idea that the collapse of the Soviet Union would be considered the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” as Putin claims, would have occurred to only a few hard-core, extremist (loony) Communist Party members. Suddenly, this view is not only mainstream but is shared by the youngest generation of Russians— even as they drink Starbucks coffee while surfing the Internet. Alongside Big Macs and iPods, a cottage industry of Soviet nostalgia has sprung up, complete with T-shirts, books, movies, bars, and restaurants. Stores even sell postcards of Stalin.

If Russians feel nostalgia for Soviet days, the run-up to the December elections stirred my own memories of a year of living not at all dangerously in what we thought of then as the new Russia. My thoughts, and those of so many others, go back to the era not only in Russia but also in the United States— the 12 years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. The United States’s efforts to promote democracy abroad had not yet become singed by the war in Iraq, and the democratic balance in its three branches of government seemed reasonably stable.

more from The American Scholar here.

Mr. Kirsch’s method as a critic differs sharply from the one prevalent among writers on poetry, many of whom feel the need to take a side in the argument between believers in the expressive, communicative, imitative power of poetry, and those who believe it is a medium whose meaning is internal, closed in its own horizon, constructed and conditioned solely by the inner tensions of any particular poem. (It’s odd that these views are seen as opposed.)

But Mr. Kirsch takes poets on in their own terms, reading them by their own lights even as he locates them in the poetic tradition — in particular their relation to the Romantics, a relationship he sees as key to understanding contemporary poetry. This is not merely to say Mr. Kirsch is gentle or ecumenical, but rather that he understands the difficulty of writing about poems, even the longest and most perfectly composed of which are fleet, fragmented, and elusive in a way particularly inhospitable to the kind of scrutiny that novels and essays bear up so well under. When Mr. Kirsch praises, he does not praise first and foremost in the service of any critical ideology.

more from The NY Sun here.

Has any pop group’s comeback been analysed as much as that of the Spice Girls? Plumb the newspapers since their reunion tour began in Vancouver on 2 December, and Mel B, Mel C, Geri Halliwell, Emma Bunton and the ubiquitous Victoria Beckham have been labelled the lot: they are washed-up old crones, backbiting bitches, merciless money-grubbers, Top 40 turkeys – their comeback ballad “Headlines (Friendship Never Ends)” only reached number 11 – and a short-frocked, sloganeering riot squad who destroyed feminism for ever. Unpacking girl power in the Observer, the critic Kitty Empire protested, “Has there ever been a redder herring?” Before seeing the show, I’d have agreed. Afterwards, despite a less-than-consummate performance from the Girls, I wasn’t so sure.

more from The New Statesman here.

For Ga:

For Aps:

I cry with you. We will never forget.

Bachey to aglay baras hum hein aur yeh gham phir hai
Jo chal basay to yeh apna salam-e-akhir hai

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

In the spring of 1863, Lord & Taylor in New York, down on Ladies’ Mile, opened a “mourning store,” where the new widows of the Civil War could dress their grief in suitable fashion. Some idea of what they shopped for is apparent from the inventory advertised by Besson & Son, in Philadelphia, a mourning store of the same period: “Black Crape Grenadines / Black Balzerines / Black Baryadere Bareges / Black Bareges.” The Civil War dead are still among us—long after their beautifully dressed widows have passed away—and the problem is how to get them buried. The acceptable thing to say now, as it was then, is that the soldiers, and their sacrifice, are what remain to inspire us. But it’s the corpses that haunt us, not the soldiers, as they haunted us then, and no amount of black crêpe can cover them over. The scale of the dying disillusioned a country, and also, as Lincoln saw, gave us a country—turned a provisional arrangement of states into a modern nation. A few new books attempt to place the dying in the right context: What did people of the time make of all that dying? More provocatively, did those who died in some sense want to die, and, most provocative, did so many die, after all?

Drew Gilpin Faust, the Civil War historian who is also the new president of Harvard, has published what will probably be the central book in this accounting: “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War” (Knopf; $27.95). Her argument is that the scale of the killing between 1861 and 1865 demanded a new cult of memory—a new set of social rituals, some rooted in the Bible, but many intensely secular, the rituals of Republican mourning. These rituals—the response to the mass killing, from military cemeteries, neatly rowed, to a taste for tight-lipped prose—made us what we are. The embalming fluid developed at the time by Yankee ingenuity to preserve dead bodies on their way home from the battlefield still runs through our veins.

More here.

From Science:

Donated hearts for lifesaving transplants are scarce, but now researchers may have hit upon a way to generate the blood-pumping organs in the lab–at least in rats. The approach, which involves transplanting cells from a newborn rat onto the framework of an adult heart, produced an organ that could beat and pump fluid. Further refinement will be necessary before the technique is ready for people, but it could also generate other organs.

Taylor’s team started with a heart removed from an adult rat. The researchers soaked it in chemicals to remove the living cells, leaving behind a “skeleton” composed of the heart’s nonliving structural tissues, which are made of proteins and other molecules. Onto this scaffolding the researchers placed heart cells from a newborn rat, which are not stem cells but can give rise to multiple types of tissue. The cells took to their new home and after 8 days had assembled into a functioning heart that beat and pumped fluid, the researchers reported online 13 January in Nature Medicine. The new organ had only 2% of the pumping force of an adult heart, but Taylor says that she and her colleagues have since repeated the procedure with about 40 hearts and found that they can produce a stronger organ by adding more cells and giving them more time to grow.

More here.

Daido Moriyama. Midnight. 1986.

Gelatin silver print.

More on this photographer of the streets of Tokyo here and here.

Lensculture essay on a newly published collection “Eyes of an Island: Japanese Photography 1945-2007” here.

Over at the Freakanomics blog, Sudhir Venkatesh, author of Gang Leader for A Day, looks at some gang member responses to HBO’s The Wire.

For the first episode, we gathered in the Harlem apartment of Shine, a 43-year-old half Dominican, half African-American man who managed a gang for fifteen years before heading to prison for a ten-year drug trafficking sentence. I invited older guys like Shine, most of whom had retired from the drug trade, because they would have greater experience with rogue cops, political toughs, and everyone else that makes The Wire so appealing. They affectionately named our gathering “Thugs and ‘Cuz.” (I was told that the “‘cuz” — short for “cousin” — was for me.)… Here’s a quick-and-dirty summary of the evening’s highlights:

1. The Bunk is on the take. Much to my chagrin (since he is my favorite character), the consensus in the room was that the Bunk was guilty. In the words of Shine, “He’s too good not to be profiting. I got nothing against him! But he’s definitely in bed with these street [thugs].” Many had known of Bunk’s prowess as a detective from past episodes. The opening scene, in which he craftily obtains a confession, reinforced their view that the Bunk is too good not to be hiding something.

2. Prediction No. 1: McNulty and the Bunk will split. The observation regarding Bunk’s detective work led to a second agreement, namely that McNulty or Bunk will be taken down — shot, arrested, or killed. This was closely tied to the view that McNulty and Bunk will come into conflict. The rationale? Everyone felt that Marlo, Proposition Joe, or another high-ranking gang leader must have close (hitherto unexplained) ties with one of these two detectives.

First at the Independent (UK) (via richarddawkins.net):

An internationally renowned biologist has shocked colleagues by abandoning the established explanation for why insects appear to display altruistic behaviour.

For the last 40 years researchers have more or less agreed that most ants, bees and wasps forego reproduction to help raise another’s offspring in order to help spread the genes they share.

The theory, known as “kin selection”, was first proposed in 1955 by biologist J. B. S. Haldane, and more famously expressed in Richard Dawkin’s 1976 book The Selfish Gene.

Now however Prof Edward O. Wilson, of Harvard University, the renowned father of the field of socio-biology and a world expert on social insects, has amazed colleagues by renouncing it.

Wilson suggests something else at play, (Brandon Keim in Wired):

Only by conceiving of evolution as acting upon entire populations rather than individual organisms can we understand eusociality — the mysterious, seemingly “altruistic” behaviors exhibited by insects who forego reproduction in order to care for a colony’s young.

So says Edward O. Wilson, the legendary sociobiologist, environmentalist and entomologist, in an article published in the January issue of Bioscience. Wilson doesn’t extrapolate from bugs to people, but his conclusions raise fascinating questions about the evolutionary aspects of non-reproducing humans.

Dawkins responds:

EDWARD WILSON has given us a characteristically fascinating account of the evolution of social insects (see page 6 and BioScience, vol 58, p 17). But his “group selection” terminology is misleading, and his distinction between “kin selection” and “individual direct selection” is empty. What matters is gene selection.

All we need ask of a purportedly adaptive trait is, “What makes a gene for that trait increase in frequency?” Wilson wrongly implies that explanations should resort to kin selection only when “direct” selection fails. Here he falls for the first of my “12 misunderstandings of kin selection (pdf)“, that is, he thinks it is a special, complex kind of natural selection, which it is not (Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, vol 51, p 184).

Ann Pellegrini and Janet Jakobsen over at The Immanent Frame:

Why is it that sex is such a central part of American political life anyway? Why, when The New York Times reported on the influence of “values” voters on the 2004 Presidential election, did the Times name only two “values,” both of them reflecting a conservative sexual ethic: opposition to abortion and opposition to “recognition of lesbian and gay couples”?

This conflation of values and sexuality is particularly important because the polls on which the claim was based did not name any values, but just asked people to rate values in relation to other issues like the economy. In addition, the number of voters choosing values in this poll had actually fallen from a high point in 1996, when Bill Clinton was re-elected. But, the Times was willing not only to accept and promote the idea that values voters had swung the election, but also to promote the idea that the values these voters cared about were sexual in nature and conservative in force. Although there was subsequent criticism of the Times’s conclusion that voters in 2004 were more concerned with “values” than were voters in previous elections, there was little to no criticism of the presumption that “values” equals “sexuality,” and conservative sexuality at that.

Here, then, is another echo of the concern Taylor raises. The Reformation makes sexuality a matter of intense ethical concern, standing in for—and sometimes even blocking out—other concerns about the ideal moral life, such as whether it should be lived through a commitment to poverty.

Via TPM Cafe, Marjorie Valbrun in the Washington Post?

Last month, William Shaheen, a political surrogate for Clinton, was quoted publicly peddling concerns about Obama’s admitted past drug use and intimating that Republicans — not, heaven forbid, candidate Clinton herself — would raise questions about it if Obama was nominated.

Shaheen, who was co-chairman of the New Hampshire campaign but has since resigned, told The Post: “It’ll be: ‘When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?’ There are so many openings for Republican dirty tricks. It’s hard to overcome.”

What’s harder to overcome is the idea that these patently insincere sentiments about Obama — coming from an experienced political adviser working for a tightly controlled and heavily scripted campaign — weren’t part of a deliberate attempt to paint the Illinois senator as a stereotypical black drug dealer.

Clinton herself has made racially tinged comments that could be taken as either insensitive or patronizing. The most widely noticed was in her efforts to dismiss Obama’s talk of “hope” and “change” as empty idealism. In doing so, she offhandedly diminished the important role played by Martin Luther King Jr. in pushing America to meet its promise of equality for millions of black Americans. “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act,” Clinton said. “It took a president to get it done.”

In other words, “I have a dream” is a nice sentiment, but King couldn’t make it reality. It took a more practical and, of course, white president, Lyndon Johnson, to get blacks to the mountaintop. Of course no black man could have hoped to be president 44 years ago. And, for that matter, neither could any woman.

Via Sean Carroll, does MIMS’s “This is Why I’m Hot” affirm the consequent? 

Matthew Yglesias:

In particular, he [Nyhan] thinks “I’m hot ’cause I’m fly / You ain’t [hot] ’cause you’re not [fly]” is an example of the fallacy. I disagree. Nyhan’s reading depends on construing MIMS as trying to make a logical inference with “’cause” as a material conditional but there’s no need to do that. Interpretive charity suggest that we should understand MIMS to be making two logically independent causal claims: (1) he’s hot because he’s fly and (2) you’re not hot because you’re not fly. Perhaps MIMS believes that x is hot if and only if x is fly, or perhaps he doesn’t. I don’t, however, see a fallacy here.

Rob Harvilla provides a breakdown in The Village Voice:

If you find completely overlapping Venn diagrams visually unhelpful, consider this tautology:

If that’s a bit pretentious, then maybe a blunt flowchart works best:

It does not contradict the earlier remark about Kertész’s not wishing to be categorised as a “Holocaust” writer that not one of his works, including those that are much more concerned with communist totalitarian regimes, lacks at least one specific reference to Hitler’s reign of terror. The framing novel of The Failure, for instance, refers to a book Köves has published about his camp experiences (the title is not given but obviously Fatelessness is meant), and he directly quotes from several other books, including a passage about Ilsa Koch, the “Bitch of Buchenwald”, taken from Jorge Semprun’s The Long Voyage. By way of contrast, the allusion in The Union Jack is almost unnoticeable: Ernö Szép is immortalised as “a tiny old chap […] swept along the icy streets like a speck of dust by the wind of disaster, drifting from one coffee-house to the next […] his hat […] a so-called ‘Eden’ hat, of a shade that had evidently once been what was called ‘dove grey'”, who introduces himself with the devastating phrase, “I was Ernö Szép.” Most non-Hungarian readers will not be aware that Szép (1884-1953) was a genuinely popular Hungarian poet, writer and journalist of Jewish origin, among whose novels was Adam’s Apple (1935), mentioned by the nameless narrator of The Union Jack. More significantly, however, he wrote a remarkably sardonic memoir of his travails in a forced-labour battalion, published in 1945 and translated by John Bátki under the title The Smell of Humans.[4]

more from Eurozine here.

Today, in virtually any Waterstone’s, Smiths or Borders, the piles of Nigellas, McEwans, Clarksons and Russell Brands seem to demonstrate one simple equation: books equal celebrity. Actually, as John Mullan shows in this provocative little volume, writers used to go to extraordinary lengths to remain anonymous.

With good reason. Books were a matter of life and death. For the first three centuries after the introduction of the printing press, writers who challenged religious or political orthodoxy (and what is the use of a book that does not risk a contrary opinion?) were in mortal danger. Translations of the Bible, especially, offered a short route to immortality. Tyndale was burned at the stake. Lower down the slopes of Parnassus, even so fine a poet as Shakespeare published anonymously, after first circulating his work in private. Anon remains the star contributor to most dictionaries of quotations.

more from The Guardian here.

I am challenged at the Iowa caucuses to endorse gay marriage as a sacred institution. Of course I believe it, but how can they make me say so when they know the political cost it will exact? Hot tears of rage stream down my scarlet face.

In New Hampshire, I endure the grandiose posturing of Chris Matthews so I can get an interview on MSNBC. What a blowhard the man is! Who, man or woman, would not find his pompous questions exasperating? I curl my fists into tiny balls beneath the interview table.

There comes a time, dear reader, when a woman of high conscience must make her feelings plain. Today, in Ohio, I came out strongly for government support of stem-cell research.

more from McSweeney’s here.

WHY should not old men be mad?

WHY should not old men be mad?
Some have known a likely lad
That had a sound fly-fisher’s wrist
Turn to a drunken journalist;
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live to bear children to a dunce;
A Helen of social welfare dream,
Climb on a wagonette to scream.
Some think it a matter of course that chance
Should starve good men and bad advance,
That if their neighbours figured plain,
As though upon a lighted screen,
No single story would they find
Of an unbroken happy mind,
A finish worthy of the start.
Young men know nothing of this sort,
Observant old men know it well;
And when they know what old books tell
And that no better can be had,
Know why an old man should be mad.
 

–  from On The Boiler by William Butler Yeats

From The Washington Post:

  DEFYING DIXIE: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 By Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore.

The real and infinitely more complicated history of the modern civil rights struggle “begins at the radical edges of a human rights movement after World War I, with communists who promoted and practiced racial equality and considered the South crucial to their success in elevating labor and overthrowing the capitalist system. They were joined in the late 1930s by a radical left to form a southern Popular Front that sought to overturn Jim Crow, elevate the working class, and promote civil rights and civil liberties. During and after World War II a growing number of grassroots activists protested directly against white supremacy and imagined it poised to fall of its own weight. They gave it a shove.”

In telling this story, Gilmore broadens the scope of Southern and civil rights history to include individuals and organizations operating well beyond the Mason-Dixon line. Nationalizing and internationalizing the saga, she reminds us that “the South could remain the South only by chasing out some of its brightest minds and most bountiful spirits, generation after generation. Many of those who left did so, directly or indirectly, because they opposed white supremacy. Counting them back into southern history reveals an insurgent South and shows some Southerners to be a revolutionary lot that fought longer and harder than anyone else to defeat Dixie.”

No brief review can do justice to the full range of historical characters and events that dominate the pages of Defying Dixie. But one example may give some sense of the exotic radicalism that prevailed prior to the classic civil rights struggle of the 1950s and ’60s. Gilmore begins the book with the story of Lovett Fort-Whiteman, the first African American to join the Communist Party.

More here.

A Philoctetes Center roundtable discussion with Jorge L. Ahumada, Akeel Bilgrami, Arnold M. Cooper, Garrett Deckel, Peter D. Kramer, and Bernard Reginster:

Richard Skinner in Ekklesia:

Recently, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, a noted theologian and philosopher in his own right, gave a lecture at Swansea University entitled ‘How to Misunderstand Religion’. He was responding in particular to the writings of Richard Dawkins, arguing that in applying evolutionary thinking to religion Dawkins is making two mistakes: first, in doing so he is reducing religion to the status of a “survival strategy”, and second, in opposing a scientific theory to religion he is reducing religion to a pre-scientific explanatory system now superseded by real science.

I have no quarrel with Dr Williams’ second point, but I wish to take issue with his view that the application of evolutionary theory reduces religion to a form of “survival strategy”, since I find the understanding of evolutionary thinking implicit in this argument too simplistic. It is important to clarify the matter, because many people, myself included, have criticised Richard Dawkins for having a misguided, indeed crass, understanding of what religion is about. We have claimed that he sets up a ‘straw god’ in order to knock it down, that he misquotes and misunderstands religious texts and arguments, that philosophically he is stuck in the nineteenth century, that he fails to bring to his scrutiny of religion the same scrupulous scholarship that he brings to his scientific work, and so forth. Given that Professor Dawkins’ critics launch into him thus, it is only fair, as well as being crucial in the interests of reasoned debate, that in criticising the application (or the attempted application) of Darwinian theory to religion we do not fall into the same trap by misrepresenting the former. But I think that in his use of the term “survival strategy” Rowan Williams does just that.