From BBC News:

A study of 61 male university students found those who were hungry were attracted to heavier women than those who were satiated. The hungry men also paid much less attention to a woman’s body shape and regarded less curvy figures as more attractive. Although it is not clear exactly how hunger exerts an influence on attraction, past research suggests social, cultural and psychological factors are involved.

In some societies where food is a limited resource, such as the South Pacific, higher body weights are revered. In others where food is abundant, such as the West, lower female body weights are preferred. Evolutionary psychologists believe this is a survival preference. What you are looking for in a mate is the best chance of healthy offspring and in an environment where food is scarce, a heavier woman is deemed a safer bet for this.

More here.

This past week, the House approved the US-India nuclear deal. At the Pugwash site is an article from a few months ago on the consequences of the agreement by Pervez Hoodbhoy.

For all who have opposed Pakistan’s nuclear program over the years – including myself – the US-India nuclear agreement may probably be the worst thing that has happened in a long time.

Post agreement: Pakistan’s ruling elite is confused and bitter. They know that India has overtaken Pakistan in far too many areas for there to be any reasonable basis for symmetry. They see the US is now interested in reconstructing the geopolitics of South Asia and in repairing relations with India, not in mollifying Pakistani grievances. Nevertheless, there were lingering hopes of a sweetener during President George W. Bush’s furtive and unwelcomed visit in March to Islamabad. There was none.

This change in US policy thrilled many in India. Many enjoyed President Musharraf’s discomfiture. But they would do well to restrain their exuberance. The nuclear deal, even if ratified, will not dramatically increase nuclear power production currently this stands at only 3% of the total production, and can at most double to 6% if all currently planned plants are eventually constructed and commissioned. On the other hand, Pakistan is bound to react – and react badly – once US nuclear materials and equipment starting rolling into India.

One certain consequence will be more bombs on both sides of the border.

In three months the UN will choose a successor to Secretary-General Kofi Anan. This blog, which Ram pointed out, tracks the candidates, campaigns, outlines the selection process, and suggests ways to influence the process. It also posted this funny segment from the Colbert Report, in which “the Word” of the day was “Secretary-General Bolton”.

A little more than a week ago, the Center for American Progress had a debate on net neutrality. The audio is available here. Pete Backof summarizes:

In navigating the complex issue of “net neutrality,” the government should protect consumers’ rights amid a rapidly changing and dynamic Internet. Two experts agreed on that much Monday during a panel discussion hosted by the Center for American Progress, but they disagreed on how to do that without stifling innovation.

Bringing together two of the Internet’s founding figures, the Center welcomed Vint Cerf, Vice-President of Google; and Dave Farber, Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. Carl Malamud, the Center’s Chief Technology Officer, moderated.

Cerf began by quickly surveying the history of net neutrality. From its inception, the Internet has been open to any kind of application or content provider, and those providers could be accessed by any Internet user over a neutral network. “People didn’t have to get permission” to try new ideas, said Cerf, which “helped to stimulate and sustain innovation.”

As the struggle for equal civil rights and freedoms for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered people continues, a new, broader approach to securing them emerges.

The time has come to reframe the narrow terms of the marriage debate in the United States. Conservatives are seeking to enshrine discrimination in the U.S. Constitution through the Federal Marriage Amendment. But their opposition to same-sex marriage is only one part of a broader pro-marriage, “family values” agenda that includes abstinence-only sex education, stringent divorce laws, coercive marriage promotion policies directed toward women on welfare, and attacks on reproductive freedom. Moreover, a thirty-year political assault on the social safety net has left households with more burdens and constraints and fewer resources.

Meanwhile, the LGBT movement has recently focused on marriage equality as a stand-alone issue. While this strategy may secure rights and benefits for some LGBT families, it has left us isolated and vulnerable to a virulent backlash. We must respond to the full scope of the conservative marriage agenda by building alliances across issues and constituencies. Our strategies must be visionary, creative, and practical to counter the right’s powerful and effective use of marriage as a “wedge” issue that pits one group against another. The struggle for marriage rights should be part of a larger effort to strengthen the stability and security of diverse households and families.

(Hat tip: Linta Varghese.)

IT IS WITH REGRET that I see, instead of an orderly and strict mathematical epic poem in honor of the One State-I see some kind of fantastic adventure novel emerging from me.” So laments D-503, mathematician and rocket designer, halfway through Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel “We.” Completed in 1921, but not published in Russia until 1988, half a century after Zamyatin’s death, it appears this month from the Modern Library in a new English translation by Natasha Randall.

Zamyatin’s vision of a totally controlled society, one in which unresisting citizens eat, sleep, work, and make love like clockwork-and in which thinkers and writers sing the glories of “the morning buzz of electric toothbrushes and . . . the intimate peal of the crystal-sparkling latrine”-was considered too dangerously satirical by the early Soviet state, and it was smuggled abroad in samizdat form. Written a decade before Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” its influence can be seen in George Orwell’s “1984,” and it has been hailed as a warning of the totalitarian dangers inherent in every utopian scheme.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

It is often claimed that it is impossible to have, in the foreseeable future, a democratic global state. This is indeed so, and yet if democracy is seen in terms of public reasoning, we need not put the possibility of global democracy in indefinite cold storage. It is not an “all or nothing” choice. Many institutions can be invoked in this exercise of global identity, including the United Nations, but there is also the possibility of committed work, which has already begun, by citizens’ organisations, many non-government institutions, and independent parts of the news media.

There is an important role for the global justice movement. Washington and London may be irritated by the widely dispersed criticism of their strategy in Iraq, just as Chicago or Paris or Tokyo may be appalled by so-called anti-globalisation protests. The protesters are not invariably correct, but many of them do ask relevant questions. There is a compelling need in the contemporary world to ask questions not only about the economics and politics of globalisation, but also about the values, ethics and sense of belonging that shape our conception of the global world. But global identity can begin to receive its due without eliminating our other loyalties.

more from Sen’s book at The New Statesman here.

Shapero’s present-day epic is a self-invented version of the classic fairy tale that bespeaks and relieves anxiety. It is also about fear of monstrosity and our own potential to engender it. Her narrative starts out with a cute little patch of fur that has always been around, sitting “like anthrax does in the middle of a place seldom traveled by humans or animals,” when suddenly it becomes activated. Driven by a yearning to be loved, it steals the eyes of everyone in a village, and, discovering that “these eyes could advance its progression and growth,” engulfs even more eyes. Learning to see with eyes that it has stolen enables it to steal even more eyes. Growing to the size of a large sack, it becomes like King Ubu, the fantastical character imagined by French teenager Alfred Jarry more than a century ago who would later become a fixation in Surrealist practice. Although Shapero’s sack threatens to engulf everything in the world, ceding to the economy of fairy tales its very growth is ultimately turned against it. Once it becomes visible and threatening, people protect themselves.

more from X-TRA here.

From The Guardian:

The earliest copies of the Qur’an were written in a script called Kufic Arabic, which had no vowel signs. It was not until the rule of the Umayyad Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik (685-705) that the first written version of the Qur’an with diacritics was produced. Seven different ways of reciting the Qur’an were also fixed, but that occurred still later, ca 934 CE. The same seven forms of Qur’an recitation have remained a canonical standard ever since.

Revelations are sorted out into chapters and verses, and the causes of each revelation provide context for its content. The number of revelations exceeds 200. They came to the Prophet Muhammad via a divine mediary (the Archangel Gabriel) between 610 and 632 CE. They are now arranged in 114 chapters. All but one begin by invoking God’s Name, then qualify the Name as at once Compassion and Compassionate: “In the Name of God, Full of Compassion, Ever Compassionate”. Different people close to the Prophet Muhammad heard these revelations as he uttered them. They remembered the words and repeated them orally. A few wrote them down. In all they total at least 6,219 verses. The contents of the surahs (chapters) and ayat (verses) are informed by the causes of revelation – that is, by events and circumstances that marked the Prophet’s life and the early Muslim community.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Francis Crick has never before been the subject of a significant biography. His personality, however, is the subject of one of the best-known lines in science literature. “I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood,” James Watson declared in the first sentence of “The Double Helix” (1968), his celebrated account of how he and Crick came to identify the structure of DNA in 1953. Thus the popular image of Watson’s scientific partner: a brash and boastful figure who shared responsibility for a singular breakthrough.

Now, two years after Crick’s death at age 88, the science writer Matt Ridley is attempting to revise the historical record. Ridley’s short biography examines the paired strands of Crick’s life and work, but gives the work a further twist: in his account, the heart of Crick’s career merely began in 1953, and lasted until the mid-1960’s, during which time Crick, having deduced DNA’s form, led the scientific charge to understand how it functions. Ridley claims this effort was “in many ways a greater scientific achievement than the double helix,” and his own effort to explain it should deepen his audience’s understanding of both Crick and DNA itself.

More here.

Must Sean Penn always look like he’s squeezing
the last drops out of a sponge and the sponge
is his face? Even the back of his head grimaces.
Just the pressure in his little finger alone
could kill a gorilla. Remember that kid
whose whole trick was forcing blood into his head
until he looked like the universe’s own cherry bomb
so he’d get the first whack at the piñata?
He’s grown up to straighten us all out
about weapons of mass destruction
but whatever you do, don’t ding his car door with yours.
Don’t ask about his girlfriend’s cat.

the rest of Dean Young’s poem at Poetry Magazine here.

Since the late 1990s Fernando Bryce has been producing series of A4 and A3 ink drawings on cream paper that revisit historical periods and events by meticulously reproducing the print media that they left in their wake. Revolución (Revolution, 2004), a series of 219 drawings, for instance, is a panoramic visual account of 1960s’ revolutionary politics. In a similar vein Atlas Peru (2001) forms a kind of illustrated mosaic composed of 495 drawings on the history of Peru since the 1930s. These and other works are a combination of a sort of documentary archaeology, cultural critique and visual investigation into chequered histories and history-making. Bryce’s preferred source materials include political pamphlets, posters, flyers, newspaper articles and images, magazines and periodicals, tourist publications and official or business correspondence. Often he favours relatively obscure, ‘minor’ or forgotten records.

more from Frieze here.

Last night I made it to the first Escort gig. Escort is a giant disco ensemble band started by my friends Dan Balis, Eugene Cho, and Darius Maghen. (You can listen to their single “Starlight” here; click on the record if you want it from iTunes.) Of it, Stylus says:

Forget Metro Area’s arty recontextualization of digital disco, ‘80s R&B, and techno, the nine members of Brooklyn’s Escort unashamedly calls themselves “a modern disco and boogie ensemble,” and deliver one of the most convincing and satisfying throwbacks to the heydays of Prelude & West End Records that I’ve heard in awhile. “Starlight” is great nearly to the point of suspicion, melding together the tight disco-funk of Chic with the exquisite production of an Environ record (Darshan Jesrani of Metro Area is on hand for a dub on the flipside, naturally,) and doing it so well that you not only wonder why it hasn’t been done before, but how you lived without it. Augmented by violins, airy female vocals, and a bubbly synth hook, you’d be forgiven for choosing this to be the summer jam for both 1983 and 2006. Recommended, and then some.

Also read the odd but positive review of the performance at riffmarket (28 July 2006 “I Don’t Miss Broadway”.) They’ll have more shows in the city and you should go.

Via Political Theory Daily Review, Joshua Greene looks at what neuroscience means for the ethics, in Nature Reviews:

The big meta-ethical question, then, might be posed as follows: are the moral truths to which we subscribe really full-blown truths, mind-independent facts about the nature of moral reality, or are they, like sexiness, in the mind of the beholder? One way to try to answer this question is to examine what is in the minds of the relevant beholders. Understanding how we make moral judgements might help us to determine whether our judgements are perceptions of external truths or projections of internal attitudes. More specifically, we might ask whether the appearance of moral truth can be explained in a way that does not require the reality of moral truth.

As noted above, recent evidence from neuroscience and neighbouring disciplines indicates that moral judgement is often an intuitive, emotional matter. Although many moral judgements are difficult, much moral judgement is accomplished in an intuitive, effortless way. An interesting feature of many intuitive, effortless cognitive processes is that they are accompanied by a perceptual phenomenology. For example, humans can effortlessly determine whether a given face is male or female without any knowledge of how such judgements are made. When you look at someone, you have no experience of working out whether that person is male or female. You just see that person’s maleness or femaleness. By contrast, you do not look at a star in the sky and see that it is receding. One can imagine creatures that automatically process spectroscopic redshifts, but as humans we do not. All of this makes sense from an evolutionary point of view.

In Dissent, Michael Walzer and Jean Bethke Elshtain debate just war and Iraq. Walzer:

So Iraq was not similar to the German or Japanese or the (hypothetical) Rwandan case: the war was not a response to aggression or a humanitarian intervention. Its cause was not (as in 1991) an actual Iraqi attack on a neighboring state or even an imminent threat of attack; nor was it an actual, ongoing massacre. The cause was regime change, directly—which means that the U.S. government was arguing for a significant expansion of the doctrine of jus ad bellum. The existence of an aggressive and murderous regime, it claimed, was a legitimate occasion for war, even if the regime was not actually engaged in aggression or mass murder. In more familiar terms, this was an argument for preventive war, but the reason for the preventive attack wasn’t the standard perception of a dangerous shift in the balance of power that would soon leave “us” helpless against “them.” It was a radically new perception of an evil regime.

No one who has experienced, or reflected on, the politics of the twentieth century can doubt that there are evil regimes. Nor can there be any doubt that we need to design a political/military response to such regimes that recognizes their true character. Even so, I do not believe that regime change, by itself, can be a just cause of war.

First it was Orhan Pamuk. Now Elif Shafak is being tried for “insulting Turkishness”. In openDemocracy:

“Can you go out? Can you walk on the streets without fear of assassination or an assault from Turkish nationalists?” asked the Belgian journalist at the end of the line as he was conducting a phone interview with me over the weekend. “Are you safe in Turkey?”

Am I safe in Turkey…? I wanted to ask him back: Tell me please, are you safe in Belgium? And I wanted to keep asking: Are we safe on this planet…?

Each and every one of us, wherever we might have put down our roots, can we effortlessly and assertively answer that question affirmatively and claim that yes indeed, we are safe and sound, and so are our children? I don’t think so. In the post 9/11 world, in a world where the number of those who believe in a “clash of civilizations” increases day by day, no one is safe anymore.

From The Guardian:

This week Monica Ali was behind the blue shutters of her Portuguese second home, relaxing with her family, as discontent among a vocal minority in the Bangladeshi community boiled over into an explicit threat to block filming of her successful first novel, Brick Lane.

The film-makers have taken the threat seriously enough to abandon filming further scenes in Brick Lane itself, the narrow east London street which has been one of the most diverse in the capital for centuries – a sanctuary to successive waves of immigrants, including Huguenot silk weavers and Jewish refugees, where a Christian church became a synagogue and then a mosque, now lined with the curry houses, sweetshops and silk warehouses which have become tourist attractions.

More here.

From Science:

Crawling about like a silky crimson caterpillar and capturing prey by spitting goo, the velvet worm hardly seems like an evolutionary milestone. But for decades, many scientists have pegged it as such, claiming it as the only surviving example of a group of invertebrates that gave rise to the majority of today’s animal species. Now, a new analysis of the velvet worm’s brain suggests this “living fossil” may not be so ancient after all.

DNA evidence suggests velvet worms are closely related to crabs and spiders, possibly as a very early member of the group that gave rise to both. But fossil analysis seems to push the worm’s origins much farther back, relating it to a look-alike in 540-million-year-old rocks.

More here.

Stanley Hoffmann on America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy by Francis Fukuyama, Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy by Stephen M. Walt, and Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower by John Brady Kiesling, in the New York Review of Books:

The US is back to debating what to do next but the setting of this debate is quite different from that of the past. In addition to the familiar world of interstate conflicts, some of the most horrible wars of recent years have been internal; and some of the most spectac-ular acts of violence have been committed by private groups of terrorists not allied to any state. More than a few of the members of the UN—Zimbabwe, Somalia, Uzbekistan—are “failed” or murderous states, whose inhabitants live in a nightmare of chaos and violence. The “realists,” i.e., those who believe national interests are fundamental—must now take into account the UN, which for all its flaws serves to certify legitimacy, as the current administration discovered when it defied the predominant opinion of the Security Council in attacking Iraq.

It is also a world in which globalization—partly under American leadership—erodes effective sovereignty of states (although least for the US) and creates a world economy that offers a very complex combination of permanent competition—especially for oil— and incentives to cooperate, not only for states but for private interests. There is now a transnational society that includes multinational corporations, nongovernmental organizations, criminals, and terrorists. This global economy, with its unprecedented combination of private and state capitalisms, can be immensely destructive, as when it eliminated millions of jobs in developed countries. It deepens inequality—at home and abroad.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

The Washington Post has an article today called And the Evolutionary Beat Goes On . . .. It is based on some interviews with scientists who are documenting evidence of natural selection in humans. I won’t be surprised if it gets emailed hither and yon, but not for the text, which is based on stuff that’s been out for some months now. No, it’s got a slick animation with the following caption: “A morphing demonstration of human evolution shows the transformation from a small lemur, up the evolutionary ladder into a human: seen here as legendary evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould.”

The article goes into all sorts of contortions to accommodate this movie. In the lead, it reads,

Stephen Jay Gould would have been pleased.

No, not about his mug shot at the endpoint of evolution in the illustration above, but about the growing evidence that evolution is not just real but is actually happening to human beings right now.

But the article ends on an entirely different note…

Come to think of it, the late Stephen Jay Gould might have been upset with the above illustration. Contrary to the popular imagination, evolution is not a linear process that culminates in the triumphal ascent of humans at the top of the genetic heap. The process is analogous to a bush, where twigs and leaves push out in every direction.

So…the paper is showing something that further promotes a popular misconception about evolution–the evolutionary ladder. Nice job, folks.

In fact, of course, the movie is even more misleading…

More here.  [Be sure to click the link Carl provides above to see the silly morph.]