From The New York Times:

Today animals sleep in many different ways: brown bats for 20 hours a day, for example, and giraffes for less than 2. Sleep was once considered unique to vertebrates, but in recent years scientists have found that invertebrates likes honeybees and crayfish sleep, as well. The most extensive work has been carried out on fruit flies. “They rest for 10 hours a night, and if you keep them awake longer, they need to sleep more,” said Dr. Giulio Tononi, a psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin. Discovering sleep in vertebrates and invertebrates alike has led scientists to conclude that it emerged very early in animal evolution – perhaps 600 million years ago.

Scientists have offered a number of ideas about the primordial function of sleep. Dr. Tononi believes that it originally evolved as a way to allow neurons to recover from a hard day of learning. “When you’re awake you learn all the time, whether you know it or not,” he said. Learning strengthens some connections between neurons, known as synapses, and even forms new synapses. These synapses demand a lot of extra energy, though. “That means that at the end of the day, you have a brain that costs you more energy,” Dr. Tononi said. “That’s where sleep would kick in.”

More here.

Sara Roy in the London Review of Books:

Last April President Bush said that Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza would allow the establishment of ‘a democratic state in the Gaza’ and open the door for democracy in the Middle East. The columnist Thomas Friedman was more explicit, arguing that ‘the issue for Palestinians is no longer about how they resist the Israeli occupation in Gaza, but whether they build a decent mini-state there – a Dubai on the Mediterranean. Because if they do, it will fundamentally reshape the Israeli debate about whether the Palestinians can be handed most of the West Bank.’

Embedded in these statements is the assumption that Palestinians will be free to build their own democracy, that Israel will eventually cede the West Bank (or at least consider the possibility), that Israel’s ‘withdrawal’ will strengthen the Palestinian position in negotiations over the West Bank, that the occupation will end or become increasingly irrelevant, that the gross asymmetries between the two sides will be redressed. Hence, the Gaza Disengagement Plan – if implemented ‘properly’ – provides a real (perhaps the only) opportunity for resolving the conflict and creating a Palestinian state. It follows that Palestinians will be responsible for the success or failure of the Plan: if they fail to build a ‘democratic’ or ‘decent mini-state’ in Gaza, the fault will be theirs alone.

More here.

Bjorn Carey in LiveScience:

A gigantic ape standing 10 feet tall and weighing up to 1,200 pounds lived alongside humans for over a million years, according to a new study.

Fortunately for the early humans, the huge primate’s diet consisted mainly of bamboo.

Scientists have known about Gigantopithecus blackii since the accidental discovery of some of its teeth on sale in a Hong Kong pharmacy about 80 years ago. While the idea of a giant ape piqued the interest of scientists – and bigfoot hunters – around the world, it was unclear how long ago this beast went extinct.

Now Jack Rink, a geochronologist at McMaster University in Ontario, has used a high-precision absolute-dating method to determine that this ape – the largest primate ever – roamed Southeast Asia for nearly a million years before the species died out 100,000 years ago during the Pleistocene period. By this time, humans had existed for a million years.

More here.

Jane Mayer in The New Yorker:

After September 11th, the Justice Department fashioned secret legal guidelines that appear to indemnify C.I.A. officials who perform aggressive, even violent interrogations outside the United States. Techniques such as waterboarding—the near-drowning of a suspect—have been implicitly authorized by an Administration that feels that such methods may be necessary to win the war on terrorism. (In 2001, Vice-President Dick Cheney, in an interview on “Meet the Press,” said that the government might have to go to “the dark side” in handling terrorist suspects, adding, “It’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal.”) The harsh treatment of Jamadi and other prisoners in C.I.A. custody, however, has inspired an emotional debate in Washington, raising questions about what limits should be placed on agency officials who interrogate foreign terrorist suspects outside U.S. territory.

This fall, in response to the exposure of widespread prisoner abuse at American detention facilities abroad—among them Abu Ghraib; Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba; and Bagram Air Base, in Afghanistan—John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona, introduced a bill in Congress that would require Americans holding prisoners abroad to follow the same standards of humane treatment required at home by the U.S. Constitution.

More here.

Children playing with a cardboard box in KwaZulu-Natal, the province with South Africa’s highest rate of HIV, December, 2004. Photograph by Peter Peter

Helen Epstein in NYRB

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

A new autumn has brought another burst of red and yellow leaves. And it has also brought an interesting new idea about why trees put on this show every year.

In recent years, scientists have been roughly divided into two camps when it comes to autumn leaves. One camp holds that autumn colors are just part of preparations for winter. The other holds that the colors are a warning to insects to stay away.

The warning hypothesis came from the late biologist William Hamilton. He pointed out that trees fight off insect larvae with toxins. A more vigorous tree could produce more toxins than a weaker one. It could also produce more vibrant colors in the fall by producing more pigment molecules. (The red in leaves is created by molecules called anthocyanins, for example). Perhaps a tree could send a message to insects looking for a place to lay their eggs: stay away from me or I’ll kill your kids in the spring.

More here.

David Schoonmaker reviews The Best American Science Writing 2005, edited by Alan Lightman, in American Scientist:

Frank Wilczek’s scientific achievements are certainly familiar to me, but his popular writing was not. In “Whence the Force of F=ma?” the Nobelist explores his long-standing problem with the left-hand side of Newton’s second law. It had never occurred to me how insubstantial the concept of force is, so I was intrigued to learn that thinkers like Wilczek have been questioning its value to physics as a concept for more than a century. No less than Bertrand Russell titled the 14th chapter of his book The ABC of Relativity “The Abolition of Force.” Wilczek notes that “the concept of force is conspicuously absent from our most advanced formulations of the basic laws. It doesn’t appear in Schrödinger’s equation, or in any reasonable formulation of quantum field theory, or in the foundations of general relativity.”

Wilczek then gets to the nub of his concern: “If F=ma is formally empty, microscopically obscure, and maybe even morally suspect, what’s the source of its undeniable power?” His answer is that force is more a cultural concept than a physical one. “F=ma by itself does not provide an algorithm for constructing the mechanics of the world. The equation is more like a common language, in which different useful insights about the mechanics of the world can be expressed.”

Score one for risk taking. Frank Wilczek’s insights are worthy and clearly presented, and his prose is lively and engaging. I look forward to reading more from him.

More here.

Andrew Hussey in The Guardian:

It is just before nine on a Friday morning in Edinburgh and a thin, faint rain is falling outside the Scottish Poetry Library in Crichton’s Close, a short step from the tourist tat of the Royal Mile. This is where I meet French novelist and poet Michel Houellebecq, who is squatting on the building’s concrete steps, hunched up in a large black anorak against the drizzle, sucking hard on the first of a long line of cigarettes.

With his pinched face and shambling gait, he is, to say the least, an incongruous figure; he looks more like a local wino than a world-famous man of letters. But Houellebecq, 47, is the nearest thing to a literary superstar France has produced in recent years. His books have been translated into 36 languages and recent film deals have made him a multi-millionaire. He is in Edinburgh to attend a conference which is being held in his honour by the University of St Andrews to coincide with the publication of his new novel, and which has attracted distinguished scholars and critics from all over the Western world.

More here.

Theodore Dalrymple in The New Criterion:

According to Hazlitt, if we wish to know the force of human genius, we have only to read Shakespeare, but if we wish to know the futility of human learning, we have only to read his commentators.

Something similar might almost be said —almost, but not quite—of Sherlock Holmes and his commentators. The gulf is not nearly as great as that between Shakespeare and his critics, of course, but if literary genius is required in order to create a mythological world that is more real and alluring to readers than any reality itself, that once read is never forgotten, that for a century has inspired the devotion of the literary and the unliterary unlike, and that is vastly and innocently entertaining without being wholly devoid of instruction, then Conan Doyle had such genius to a very considerable degree.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

“We are losing,” warn Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon on the opening page of The Next Attack . In this chilling new book, they argue that the United States has, in the years since 9/11, frittered away more time than it took to win World War II: The Bush administration has plunged into a war of choice in Iraq that played into Osama bin Laden’s hands and produced “an extraordinary amount of wheel-spinning” instead of shoring up America’s domestic defenses. Meanwhile, the public’s attention has wandered, and the jihadist movement has weathered the loss of its Afghan haven and recast itself into new, more supple forms. “Even in his most feverish reveries,” the authors write, bin Laden could not “have imagined that America would stumble so badly.”This book’s Iraq chapters come as a glum reminder that, all too often, the debate over whether to invade Iraq was hermetically sealed off from the wider question of how best to destroy al Qaeda — as an organization, a network, a brand and an ideology. Even the administration’s critics (and human-rights-minded liberal hawks like George Packer) rarely talked about a potential war’s opportunity cost — about the range of urgent, attainable counterterrorism tasks that would be left undone because Washington had chosen to make the Iraq gamble its top post-9/11 priority.

And there is plenty to do.

More here.

From The New York Times:

This is a large part of the story Jerome Karabel, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, tells in “The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.” Karabel’s tale begins in 1900, when young men like Franklin Delano Roosevelt graduated from academies like Groton, St. Paul’s and Choate, moved easily and almost automatically to Cambridge, New Haven or Princeton and set the cultural tone at the country’s prestigious universities. When they arrived on campus, these scions of the Protestant Establishment didn’t concern themselves overly much with academics. Their main proving grounds were extracurricular activities and social life. Positioning themselves to edit the school paper or join the right secret society, they strove to establish their social worth and to prove how much they embodied the virtues of the Harvard Man, the Yale Man or the Princeton Man. That meant being effortlessly athletic, charismatic, fair, brave, modest and, above all, a leader of men.

In those days, most people who applied to schools like Harvard were admitted because people who weren’t from the right social class didn’t bother applying. But Jews, for reasons that are not clear, never got the message. They applied to Harvard, Yale and Princeton even though they weren’t really wanted. And because many were so academically qualified, they increasingly got in.

More here.

From The Village Voice:

The only real power we the people possess, as individuals and en masse, is our deafening power to resolutely say No to the bullsheet. All those prescient and very pregnant Afrikans who tossed themselves overboard during the Middle Passage figured this out while sailing across the Atlantic in boats only built for Cuban links, as did the self-liberated captives aboard the Amistad who made the epiphanal discovery that sharp steel can tear open throats of any color. Midway through the last century Rosa Parks reminded us about the power of No all over again in far less dramatic, bloodthirsty, and self-annihilating fashion coming home one night on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955. Defying a post-bellum social custom that decades of bowing down had transformed from a rule of law into a robotic law of the father, Ms. Parks said No loud enough for the Supreme Court to hear. She held her ground when convention commanded she clear out so some self-inflated kracka could assert his nobility among the animals. The history of African Americans is full of small, quiet acts of resistance as personal and fundamental as Ms. Parks’s, but few so resonant as to become a liberation movement’s creation myth.

More here.

From The New York Times:

“Team of Rivals” (an apt but uninspiring title) opens in May 1860 with four men awaiting news from the national convention of the Republican Party in Chicago. Thousands of supporters were gathered in Auburn, N.Y., where a cannon was primed to fire a salute to the expected nomination of Senator William Henry Seward for president. In Columbus, Ohio, Gov. Salmon P. Chase hoped that if Seward faltered, the mantle would fall on his shoulders. In St. Louis, 66-year-old Edward Bates, a judge who still called himself a Whig, hoped the convention might turn to him as the only candidate who could carry the conservative free states, whose electoral votes were necessary for a Republican victory. In Springfield, Ill., a former one-term congressman who had been twice defeated for election to the Senate waited with resigned expectation that his long-shot candidacy would be flattened by the Seward steamroller.

Having set the stage for the nominating convention, Goodwin recounts the drama of Lincoln’s surprising first-ballot strength (102 votes to Seward’s 173½, Chase’s 49, and Bates’s 48). On the second ballot Lincoln pulled almost even with Seward, and amid rising excitement in a convention hall packed with a leather-lunged home-state cheering section, he won a stunning victory on the third ballot. All three of his shocked rivals believed the better man had lost. Lincoln’s subsequent election as president did not change their minds.

The Republican victory without a single electoral vote (and scarcely any popular votes) from the 15 slave states provoked seven of them to secede and form the Confederate States of America. In this crisis, Lincoln took the unparalleled step of appointing to his cabinet all three of his rivals plus a fourth, Simon Cameron, Pennsylvania’s favorite son. Seward got the top spot as secretary of state; Chase became secretary of the Treasury, Bates attorney general and Cameron secretary of war. Could this “team of rivals,” each of them initially convinced of his superiority to the inexperienced president, work together in harmony? Joseph Medill, the editor of The Chicago Tribune and one of Lincoln’s most loyal supporters, later asked the president why he had made these appointments. “We needed the strongest men of the party in the cabinet,” Lincoln replied. “These were the very strongest men. Then I had no right to deprive the country of their services.” They were indeed strong men, Goodwin notes. “But in the end, it was the prairie lawyer from Springfield who would emerge as the strongest of them all.”

More here.

Robert Skidelsky in the New York Review of Books:

The attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, together with the concurrent collapse of the high-tech bubble, exposed America’s fragility, but this was masked by the hyperactivity of the Bush administration. The “war on terror” planted American armies in Afghanistan and Iraq; the Clinton surpluses were succeeded by the Bush deficits to shore up the economy and finance the military operations. However, as the Iraq escapade foundered and the deficits ballooned, the sense of relative decline reasserted itself. Unlike in 1987, there was now a clear candidate for the succession: China. This was especially so as the US economy became dependent on China’s bankrolling its huge trade deficit. The dream of an “American century” receded, to be replaced by the nightmare of a “Chinese century.”

Focus on China is overdue.

More here.

Mark Dowie in Orion Magazine:

In early 2004 a United Nations meeting was convened in New York for the ninth year in a row to push for passage of a resolution protecting the territorial and human rights of indigenous peoples. The UN draft declaration states: “Indigenous peoples shall not be forcibly removed from their lands or territories. No relocation shall take place without the free and informed consent of the indigenous peoples concerned and after agreement on just and fair compensation and, where possible, with the option to return.” During the meeting an indigenous delegate who did not identify herself rose to state that while extractive industries were still a serious threat to their welfare and cultural integrity, their new and biggest enemy was “conservation.”

Later that spring, at a Vancouver, British Columbia, meeting of the International Forum on Indigenous Mapping, all two hundred delegates signed a declaration stating that the “activities of conservation organizations now represent the single biggest threat to the integrity of indigenous lands.” These rhetorical jabs have shaken the international conservation community, as have a subsequent spate of critical articles and studies, two of them conducted by the Ford Foundation, calling big conservation to task for its historical mistreatment of indigenous peoples.

More here.

Steven Weinberg in Physics Today:

Albert Einstein was certainly the greatest physicist of the 20th century, and one of the greatest scientists of all time. It may seem presumptuous to talk of mistakes made by such a towering figure, especially in the centenary of his annus mirabilis. But the mistakes made by leading scientists often provide a better insight into the spirit and presuppositions of their times than do their successes.¹ Also, for those of us who have made our share of scientific errors, it is mildly consoling to note that even Einstein made mistakes. Perhaps most important, by showing that we are aware of mistakes made by even the greatest scientists, we set a good example to those who follow other supposed paths to truth. We recognize that our most important scientific forerunners were not prophets whose writings must be studied as infallible guides—they were simply great men and women who prepared the ground for the better understandings we have now achieved.

The cosmological constant

In thinking of Einstein’s mistakes, one immediately recalls what Einstein (in a conversation with George Gamow²) called the biggest blunder he had made in his life: the introduction of the cosmological constant.

More here.

Wang Shuhai in the China Daily:

A friend of mine once told me a joke: A job hunter, a philosophy major, went here, there and everywhere in his search for employment, but in vain. Having run out of options, he swallowed his pride and took up the offer of playing a bear in a costume at a zoo. He was locked up in a cage, where he was supposed to imitate various bear-like movements to entertain visitors.

To his horror, another bear appeared in the cage and started approaching him. He panicked and was on the brink of collapse when the bear said: “Don’t be afraid. I’m also a philosophy major.”

Funny and somewhat ridiculous, the joke does reveal an essential truth. In a society geared towards immediate gains, philosophy seems unable to produce tangible benefits. For the majority, philosophy seems virtually useless.

More here.

J. M. Tyree in The Revealer:

If there is a controversy over Intelligent Design, as the President believes, then the scientists have already lost.

Yet aside from its nonentity status as a scientific theory — a “theory” must be provable or disprovable (“falsifiable”) by experiment, therefore Intelligent Design doesn’t qualify — there is another curious flaw in the design of Intelligent Design (ID) that has gone little noticed. ID isn’t just bad science, it’s a funny sort of religion. If somebody told you that Intelligent Design Theory could have anti-Christian implications, you might get exasperated, and understandably so, given the political leanings of the theory’s proponents. But, in fact, the harder you look at Intelligent Design, the less genuinely Christian it feels.

More here.

The riots in France have spread beyond Paris to Marseille, Dijon, and Normandy. For those who haven’t been following the story, here’s a timeline from The Tocqueville Connection.

Wednesday, October 19:

– Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy declares a “war without mercy” on violence in the suburbs.

Tuesday, October 25:

– During a visit to the suburb of Argenteuil, Sarkozy is pelted with stones and bottles. He describes rebellious youths in such districts as “rabble”.

Thursday, October 27:

– Two boys in the suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, Bouna Traore, a 15-year-old of Malian background, and Zyed Benna, a 17-year-old of Tunisian origin, flee a police identity check. They scale the wall of an electrical relay station and are electrocuted as they try to hide near a transformer.

– Youths in the suburb, hearing of the deaths, go on a rampage, burning 23 vehicles and vandalising buildings and hurling stones and bottles at riot police.

Friday, October 28:

– Four hundred youths clash with police in Clichy-sous-Bois, throwing stones, bottles and Molotov cocktails. Twenty-three officers are hurt and their colleagues are forced to fire rubber bullets to push back mobs. A shot is fired at a riot police van without causing injury. Thirteen people are arrested and 29 vehicles are burned.

From The Guardian:

When children’s novelist Adèle Geras found that she and Margaret Atwood had both chosen the same subject – Odysseus’ wife, Penelope – for their latest books, she looked forward to the chance to talk to her about it.

“This is, as I absolutely knew it would be way back in March, a real virtuoso piece. A corker. Fantastic. Intelligent. Every bit as good as promised. I love it and will treasure the very beautiful volume that was sent to me.

I was particularly interested to see where Atwood’s emphases and my own differed and converged. We both, for instance, broken up a prose narrative with poetry. The idea of turning The Odyssey around so that Penelope’s story is foregrounded occurred to us both. In Atwood’s book, Penelope speaks from the land of the dead in a voice that is laconic, humorous and clever. It’s my feeling that this may be how the author herself speaks, but I’ve no way of knowing. Penelope’s weaving is important in both our novels, but I’ve turned Odysseus’ adventures into pictures appearing on his wife’s loom – a notion that originates in Penelope Shuttle’s (yes, really) poem, Penelope. Argos the dog plays a part in my story but not in Atwood’s”.

More here.