From the Edge event at Eastover Farm, an exchange between Richard Dawkins and Freeman Dyson, among other things. Dawkins:

“By Darwinian evolution he [Woese] means evolution as Darwin understood it, based on the competition for survival of noninterbreeding species.”

“With rare exceptions, Darwinian evolution requires established species to become extinct so that new species can replace them.”

These two quotations from Dyson constitute a classic schoolboy howler, a catastrophic misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution. Darwinian evolution, both as Darwin understood it, and as we understand it today in rather different language, is NOT based on the competition for survival of species. It is based on competition for survival WITHIN species. Darwin would have said competition between individuals within every species. I would say competition between genes within gene pools.

Dyson:

First response. What I wrote is not a howler and Dawkins is wrong. Species once established evolve very little, and the big steps in evolution mostly occur at speciation events when new species appear with new adaptations. The reason for this is that the rate of evolution of a population is roughly proportional to the inverse square root of the population size. So big steps are most likely when populations are small, giving rise to the “punctuated equilibrium” that is seen in the fossil record. The competition is between the new species with a small population adapting fast to new conditions and the old species with a big population adapting slowly.

Nicolaus Mills in Dissent:

BEFORE THE MUSEUM of Modern Art’s new building opened in 2004, the late Kirk Varnedoe, MoMA’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, asked design architect Yoshio Taniguchi to make sure that the museum’s 20,000 square feet of open space on its second floor was reinforced so that it could accommodate large-scale work. The MoMA’s retrospective, “Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years,” which contains over 550 tons of steel sculptures on the second floor alone, shows how prescient Varnedoe was.

Like so many contemporary artists whose work is monumental, Serra’s seems perfect for an outdoor show. Site-specific work by him has thrived in locations as different as Storm King Art Center in upstate New York and North Island, New Zealand. But these days Serra is not out to create sculpture that can be looked at as a visual object. He has instead given himself over to his longstanding concern with relationship between a work of art and the person viewing it. His interest is in the process of seeing, not the process of representation.

In a June interview with Charlie Rose, Serra explained the consequences of his concern. Contrasting experiencing his work with that of viewing traditional sculpture, Serra explained that “you’re the subject matter…You’re in the volume of these pieces, and they either spin you out from one to the other, or make a continuous movement throughout. But the subject matter of that experience is yours. So you’re the content. And that’s a shift. That’s a shift from twentieth-century sculpture.”

In the Chronicle of Higher Education:

DePaul University has canceled all of Norman G. Finkelstein’s courses, taken away his office, and put him on administrative leave for his final year, but the controversial political scientist said that would not stop him from coming back to teach this fall. If necessary, he says, he will go to jail.

In an e-mail message, Mr. Finkelstein told The Chronicle that he intended “to show up on the first day of the academic year to teach my classes (students are currently searching for an alternative venue) and to use my regular office in the political-science department. If the university attempts to impede my movements, I intend to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience and go to jail. If incarcerated, I intend to go on a protracted hunger strike until DePaul comes to its senses.”

“It is regrettable,” Mr. Finkelstein continued, “that I have been driven to such drastic actions to defend basic principles of academic freedom and my contractual rights, upon which DePaul has been riding roughshod for so long.”

Mr. Finkelstein lost his bid for tenure at DePaul in June, after a bitter public fight that involved the Harvard University law professor Alan M. Dershowitz.

Mehrene E. Larudee, an assistant professor of international studies who supported Mr. Finkelstein, was denied tenure by DePaul at the same time, in another case that attracted widespread attention and criticism. A university spokeswoman said that Ms. Larudee’s case was not connected with Mr. Finkelstein’s “in any way,” and that Ms. Larudee is still scheduled to teach this year.

In ZeeNews.com (via Sci Tech Daily):

Increasing female foeticide in India could spark a demographic crisis where fewer women in society will result in a rise in sexual violence and child abuse as well as wife-sharing, the United Nations warned.

Despite laws banning tests to determine the sex of an unborn child, the killing of female foetuses is common in some regions of India where a preference for sons runs deep.

As a result, the United Nations says an estimated 2,000 unborn girls are illegally aborted every day in India.

This has led to skewed sex ratios in regions like Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh as well as the capital, New Delhi, where a census in 2001 showed there are less than 800 girls for every 1,000 boys.

“The 2001 census was a wake-up call for all of us and much public awareness have been created on female foeticide since then,” Ena Singh, assistant representative for the United Nations Population Fund in India told Reuters.

“But initial figures show sex ratios are still declining as female foeticide is becoming more widespread across the country and it is likely to be worse in the next census in 2011.”

Jeffrey Rosen in next Sunday’s NYT Magazine:

Goldsmith had been hired the year before as a legal adviser to the general counsel of the Defense Department, William J. Haynes II. While at the Pentagon, Goldsmith wrote a memo for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warning that prosecutors from the International Criminal Court might indict American officials for their actions in the war on terror. Goldsmith described this threat as “the judicialization of international politics.” No one was surprised when he was hired in October 2003 to head the Office of Legal Counsel, the division of the Justice Department that advises the president on the limits of executive power. Immediately, the job put him at the center of critical debates within the Bush administration about its continuing response to 9/11 — debates about coercive interrogation, secret surveillance and the detention and trial of enemy combatants.

Nine months later, in June 2004, Goldsmith resigned. Although he refused to discuss his resignation at the time, he had led a small group of administration lawyers in a behind-the-scenes revolt against what he considered the constitutional excesses of the legal policies embraced by his White House superiors in the war on terror. During his first weeks on the job, Goldsmith had discovered that the Office of Legal Counsel had written two legal opinions — both drafted by Goldsmith’s friend Yoo, who served as a deputy in the office — about the authority of the executive branch to conduct coercive interrogations. Goldsmith considered these opinions, now known as the “torture memos,” to be tendentious, overly broad and legally flawed, and he fought to change them. He also found himself challenging the White House on a variety of other issues, ranging from surveillance to the trial of suspected terrorists. His efforts succeeded in bringing the Bush administration somewhat closer to what Goldsmith considered the rule of law — although at considerable cost to Goldsmith himself. By the end of his tenure, he was worn out. “I was disgusted with the whole process and fed up and exhausted,” he told me recently.

From Harvard Magazine:

Gordon McKay’s name today graces 40 Harvard professorships, numerous fellowships, and a building. He made a fortune in shoe machinery and gave it all (now grown to half a billion dollars) to support applied sciences at the University. His inventiveness, shrewdness, cultural ambitions, and complex love life all helped shape the foundations of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. McKay was born in Pittsfield, in western Massachusetts. He was a fine violinist as a boy, and his taste for high culture stayed with him for life, but he was trained as an engineer. He worked on a railroad and on the Erie Canal before acquiring a machine shop. His first patented invention perfected Blake’s stitching machine.

Ingenuity is good, but nothing beats good timing. When the Civil War began, the government suddenly needed lots of cheap, sturdy boots. In 1862, McKay filled an army order for 25,000 pairs. Yet he realized the real money lay in shoe machinery. From 1862 to 1890, alone and with others, McKay patented some 40 sewing, nailing, tacking, lasting, and pegging machines for mass-producing shoes. Rather than sell his machines, he leased them for royalties—a few cents on every shoe made (anticipating the way Bill Gates supplied Microsoft’s operating system to computer manufacturers, with payments per unit shipped). The shoe machines kept tallies of their output, and manufacturers had to buy stamps to match, redeemable for shares in Mc Kay’s company. Later they had to buy his nails and wire, too. Thanks to such anticompetitive (and now illegal) practices, McKay’s machines by the late 1870s produced half the nation’s shoes—120 million pairs, yielding $500,000 a year.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

Luciano Pavarotti, 71, who died last night of pancreatic cancer at his home in Modena, Italy, combined a lustrous lyric tenor voice with a radiant and expansive personal charm to win the largest and most diversified audience ever accorded an opera singer.

Luciano Pavarotti was born Oct. 12, 1935, in Modena, a city renowned for its love of opera. Even his father, a baker by trade, sang tenor in local productions. His mother labored in a cigarette factory with the mother of soprano Mirella Freni, who became a frequent leading lady to Pavarotti on world stages. Standing over six feet tall and somewhat athletic in his youth, Pavarotti excelled in soccer as a young man. He gravitated to opera as a profession and was good enough to qualify for voice training at Modena’s Istituto Magistrale, which he said saved him from his mother’s attempt to make him into an accountant.

He taught elementary school and sold insurance while vying in opera competitions. Among his early instructors were Modena tenor Arrigo Pola, who sensed his brilliance and taught him for free, and Ettore Campogalliani in the city of Mantua. Pavarotti underwent intensive regimens on posture, spending six months alone on how to hold his jaw. After several misses, Pavarotti won an opera contest in 1961 and made his debut that year as Rodolfo in “La Boh?me.” After years touring Europe, he made his American debut in 1965 with the Greater Miami Opera in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” when he substituted for another tenor at the last minute.

More here.

Kate Zambreno in Rain Taxi Review of Books:

Varieties of Disturbance: Stories by Lydia Davis:
At a recent unstimulating dinner party, I was perusing my host’s bookshelves and pulled out a copy of Lydia Davis’s Samuel Johnson is indignant, and turned to one of the stories in that collection, “Boring Friends,” which seemed appropriate for such an occasion:

We know only four boring people. The rest of our friends we find very interesting. However, most of the friends we find interesting find us boring: the most interesting find us the most boring. The few who are somewhere in the middle, with whom there is reciprocal interest, we distrust: at any moment, we feel, they may become too interesting for us, or we too interesting for them.

What other contemporary American author writes so well about things often thought but left unsaid, and certainly not written down and framed as literature? In her previous collections as well as her most recent, Varieties of Disturbance, Davis’ domestic surreality reads as if Jane Bowles had been able to liberate her fragments from her multitude of notebooks, a suburban Gertrude Stein choosing as her material the thoughts of the wives Alice B. Toklas sat with, the “some domestic complication in all probability” alluded to but otherwise ignored in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

The poetry of the everyday, the mundane, is the fabric of Davis’s quietly hysterical worlds; she does not patch together the whole quilt, instead giving us neat little squares with more than occasional threads of brilliance. In these stories she agonizes over interactions between both strangers and intimates, disturbances (to quote the title) both banal and serious, the awkwardness of social rituals, the unspoken hostility between spouses, the uneasy disrepair of a long held friendship, and more — unraveling the meaning of all in graceful spirals.

More here.

From Edge:

The day remained on topic, as Brockman had invited only half a dozen journalists, to avoid slowing down the thinkers with an onslaught of too many layman’s questions. The object was to have them talk about ideas mainly amongst themselves in the manner of a salon, not unlike his online forum edge.org. Not that the day went over the heads of the non-scientist guests. With Dyson, Lloyd, genetic engineer George Church, chemist Robert Shapiro, astronomer Dimitar Sasselov and biologist and decoder of the genome J. Craig Venter, six men came together, each of whom had made enormous contributions in interdiscplinary sciences, and as a consequence have mastered the ability to talk to people who are not well-read in their respective fields. This made it possible for an outsider to follow the discussions, even though moments made one feel just that, as when Robert Shapiro cracked a joke about RNA that was met with great laughter from the scientists.

Freeman Dyson, a fragile gentleman of 84 years, opened the morning with his legendary provocation that Darwinian evolution represents only a short phase of three billion years in the life of this planet, a phase that will soon reach its end.

More here.

A visit to the “Free Theatre” feels like a conspiratorial meeting. The secret, but always sold-out performances are announced by mobile phone text message. Actor Denis Tarasenko says that many colleagues are envious of his work in Khalezin’s group, “because we can act freely.” The ensemble takes part in festivals in Europe. Khalezin will present “Generation Jeans,” a compelling monologue about inner freedom and rock music, at the Spielart in Munich in November. The British paper The Guardian gave the play “Being Harold Pinter” the best ranking possible. Pinter himself was so enthusiastic about the collage that has been assembled from his Nobel Prize for Literature speech, plays and letters from political prisoners in Belarus, that he gave the “Free Theater” the rights to his plays for free. The stagings, packed with strong imagery and experimentation, are captivating. At the end of the Kane piece, the actor whispers: “Look, look how I’m disappearing. Look, look.” Then the candle flame goes out – which Belarussians understand as the death of their already comatose nation. “Belarussians are not used to this kind of contemporary relevance in their theatre,” says Khalezin. “Many respond like children. They’re shocked: Aaarrrgghh.”

more from Sign and Sight here.

I always thought of myself as a colour-blind reader, until I read this novel and found that ultimate cliché of black life that is inscribed in the word “soulful” taking on new weight and sense for me. But what does soulful even mean? The dictionary has it this way: “expressing or appearing to express deep and often sorrowful feeling’. The culturally black meaning adds several more shades of colour. First shade: soulfulness is sorrowful feeling transformed into something beautiful, creative and self-renewing, and – as it reaches a pitch – ecstatic. It is an alchemy of pain. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, when the townsfolk sing for the death of the mule, this is an example of soulfulness. Another shade: to be soulful is to follow and fall in line with a feeling, to go where it takes you and not to go against its grain. At its most common and banal: catching a beat, following a rhythm.

more from Guardian Review here.

Thomas McGuane’s recent book of stories, Gallatin Canyon (2006), compels a look back over nearly forty years of work. McGuane has steadily produced novels, stories and screenplays, and essays on sports and pastimes like fishing and horseback riding. He has been quietly influential and subtly subversive.[1] Coursing through his work is a current of strident silliness—funny names, wacky characters, outsize occurrences—that flows from Mark Twain, picks up Ring Lardner and others early in the twentieth century, and adds Joseph Heller and Thomas Pynchon, post–World War II.

In spite of this, McGuane is hard to place. The humor is evident from the start, but there is something stylishly askew. The early novels The Sporting Club (1969), The Bushwhacked Piano (1971), and Ninety-two in the Shade (1973), while full of oddballs in slapstick situations, also feature formalities of diction and syntactical quirks (“Stanton beckoned”; “Little comfort derived from the slumberous heat of the day”) that seem plucked from the Victorians. The Sporting Club’s protagonist even puts himself to sleep reading Thackeray.

more from The Believer here.

From Nature:

A genetic survey of more than 34,000 people has revealed the first gene known to have a decisive effect on height in people of average stature. A change to just a single letter of genetic code is linked to a height boost of almost a centimetre in a healthy person, all other things being equal. Although up to 90% of variation in people’s height is thought to be down to genetics, identifying the genes involved is difficult because there are thought to be hundreds of them, each with an almost imperceptible effect.

Researchers therefore combed through almost the entire genome of nearly 5,000 volunteers in search of tiny changes, called polymorphisms, that correspond to variations in height. Eventually they found a single-letter DNA substitution, buried in a gene called HMGA2, that influences height. People with two copies of the ‘tall’ variant of HMGA2 are, on average, almost a centimetre taller than those with two copies of the ‘short’ version. Those with one copy of each are somewhere in the middle.

More here.

From The New York Times:

The race to decode the human genome may not be entirely over: the loser has come up with a new approach that may let him prevail in the end. In 2003, a government-financed consortium of academic centers announced it had completed the human genome, fending off a determined challenge from the biologist J. Craig Venter. The consortium’s genome comprised just half the DNA contained in a normal cell, and the DNA used in the project came from a group of people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. But the loser in the race, Dr. Venter, could still have the last word. In a paper published today, his research team is announcing that it has decoded a new version of the human genome that some experts believe may be better than the consortium’s.

Called a full, or diploid genome, it consists of the DNA in both sets of chromosomes, one from each parent, and it is the normal genome possessed by almost all the body’s cells. And the genome the team has decoded belongs to just one person: Dr. Venter.

More here.

JoAnn Verburg. Untitled. 1983.

More here and here.

Current show at MoMA. Review in The New Yorker here.

Will Li in The Situationist:

“Some acted selflessly … though that meant they risked infection themselves.

Others fled infected cities in an attempt to save themselves.

And some who were sick made it their mission to deliberately infect others.” BBC News.

Ebola? Influenza? The movie “28 Days Later?” . . . or “Corrupted Blood” Disease in World of Warcraft?

In September of 2005, Blizzard Entertainment added a dungeon to their extremely popular MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) World of Warcraft (WoW). This dungeon featured an enemy at the end who, when killed, could infect players with a curse which could instantly kill weaker characters and eventually kill stronger ones. But, as reported in another BBC News report, rather than being confined to those playing in the dungeon, the disease inadvertently spread, passing from player to player, carried by computer programmed characters (non-player characters or NPCs), even manifesting on several game servers.

Ultimately, it killed thousands of player characters (temporarily) and led to “reports from the disaster zones with some describing seeing “hundreds” of bodies lying in the virtual streets of the online towns and cities.”

The very human reactions of individuals confronted with “Corrupted Blood” disease has since prompted researchers at the Tufts University School of Medicine to look into the virtual disease (and possible others) as disease models which could lend insight into human behavior. The August 21, 2007 BBC News article is excerpted below.

* * *

Researcher Professor Nina Fefferman, from Tufts University School of Medicine, said: “Human behaviour has a big impact on disease spread. And virtual worlds offer an excellent platform for studying human behaviour.

John B. Judis in The New Republic:

Bush carried West Virginia and won the election partly because he ran a better campaign than John Kerry. But that wasn’t the only reason. There was something odd about the support for Bush in places like West Virginia. Unlike voters in New York City, voters in Martinsburg had little to fear from terrorist attacks; yet they backed Bush, while New Yorkers voted for Kerry. If gay marriage were legalized, Martinsburg would be unlikely to host massive numbers of same-sex weddings; yet voters I talked to were haunted by the specter of gay marriage.

Some pundits have tried to explain away this mystery by arguing that Bush backers voted for their values rather than their interests. But this explanation is unsatisfying, since many of those voters didn’t opt for “family values” in 1992 and 1996, when the country elected a well-known philanderer as president.

In fact, many political scientists can’t begin to explain what took place in West Virginia in 2004. In recent years, the field has become dominated by rational choice theorists, who have tried to develop complex mathematical equations to predict voting behavior. These equations rest on a view of voters as calculating consumers choosing a product on the basis of relative cost and utility–a view that generally leaves little room for the possibility of voters acting irrationally.

There is, however, one group of scholars–members of the relatively new field of political psychology–who are trying to explain voter preferences that can’t be easily quantified.

[H/t: Gabriel Cohen.] Here you can find my musings about this dynamic.

In The Age (via Political Theory Daily Review):

DID an extraterrestrial impact set off a catastrophic chain of events that led indirectly to the dawn of agriculture in the Middle East nearly 13,000 years ago?

It may sound like something out of a Hollywood science fiction movie, combining the global disaster themes of Deep Impact and The Day After Tomorrow. Yet the evidence looks increasingly solid.

There is little doubt that a megaflood of glacial meltwater cascading off the North American continent into the Atlantic Ocean spurred the birth of agriculture and civilisation in the Middle East around 12,900 years ago. What was not known until recently is that this event, known as the Agassiz megaflood, may have been triggered by a comet exploding above or plunging into the ice sheet north of the modern Great Lakes.

According to two geologists at the University of Oregon, Dr Douglas Kennett and Dr Jon Erlandson, there is reason to believe a large chunk of a comet exploded above or crashed directly into the Laurentide ice sheet, rupturing the ice dams on the easterly margin of Lake Agassiz and causing frigid water to flood into the North Atlantic.

The primary evidence consists of a carbon-rich layer of soil, dating to around 13,000 years ago, found at 50 Clovis-age sites across North America. The Clovis people, the first wave of human colonists to reach North America from Siberia, had only recently colonised the Americas.

F THE VENICE BIENNALE is still a treasure trove of trends for early adapters, look for cutting-edge art and fashion this year to feature . . . Harry Truman. Two artists as different as Francis Alÿs and Louise Bourgeois—Alÿs in a video that samples a Truman speech, Bourgeois in a series of blue marker drawings called Untitled (Harry Truman), 2005—refer to the little haberdasher, hardly the kind of figure usually called upon to electrify an artistic experience. Why Harry Truman? Why now?

more from artforum here.

The rioting in Budapest in October 2006 following Ferenc Gyurscány’s “lying speech” woke up the outside world to the existence of deep divisions in Hungarian society. At first, the international press was only to happy to see the “parallel” between the demonstrations and the 1956 revolution, a version of events put forward by the demonstrators themselves. Later, when it emerged that many belonged to the far-Right, there was a shrill cry of disapproval, then attention moved elsewhere. But a new controversy around a monument to the ’56 revolution shows that political antagonism in Hungary, played out via historical symbols, shows no sign of abating. If commentators in Hungary are talking about a “civil war mentality” in the country, then that is something Europe needs to understand better. Eurozine asks Hungarian journalists, authors, and publishers how it has come to this.

more from Eurozine here.