In Salmagundi, excerpts from Benjamin Barber, Martha Nussbaum, Peter Singer, Breyten Bretyenbach, Orlando Paterson, Guity Nashat, Akeel Bilgram, James Miller, Vladimir Tismaneanu, and Carlyn Forche’s discussion on “Jihad, McWorld, Modernity“, a symposium about the “Clash of Civilizations”.

Benjamin Barber:

Though we framed this debate to some degree in terms of the clash of civilizations, and that is certainly a provocative term which the events of 9/11 would seem to inspire, I take that phrase, the “clash of civilizations,” to be little more than an expression of parochial bigotry. It speaks in no way to the world we live in and is, frankly, hardly even worth discussing, although some people here may strongly disagree. It’s the kind of language that is redolent of a world of 18th century imperialism, a world of “us and them,” and it clarifies nothing. I would just remind those of you who are enamored of Sam Huntington’s phraseology that, in the book that gave us this expression, he argues not only that there is a clash of civilizations, but that the clash is aided and abetted by a fifth column in the United States made up of African Americans, who are undermining the West and its ideals. So if you’ve taken that book seriously, I suggest you read it again more carefully and revise your estimation.

The more serious charge, though, is that there is a special problem called Islam, and that Islam has created a world in which fundamentalists regard not just the West, but democracy, pluralism, freedom, and global markets as the enemy of an ancient, militant, intolerant doxology and that the West’s destruction is necessary to the survival of that doxology. That is an argument that’s been put in somewhat more civil and polite terms by a variety of thinkers, including Bernard Lewis, but there are others as well. Paul Berman, for one, has made a rather peculiar argument that Islamic fundamentalism is a new form of totalitarianism not entirely unlike the Soviet and fascist variants. I reject that charge in its entirety, and note that all religions stand in a tension with secular society and that every civilization the world has known has had the task of working out that tension, adjudicating the relevant differences and stresses. That is the essence of what a civilization is about—and though some cultures have been more successful than others in maintaining a healthy balance between religious and secular demands, there is an essential pattern we can see at work in contemporary Islamic societies.

From Guardian:

The “disappearing act” by Agatha Christie over 11 days in 1926 has always been a subject of huge curiosity and mystery. Why did a famous and successful woman cut and run, leaving her car abandoned in a way that suggested self-injury, to fetch up in a genteel hotel in Harrogate – where she remained oblivious to newspaper headlines and a national hunt to find her while acting perfectly normally as a guest? There may well have been another ingredient in the mystery, namely envy. Agatha Christie was already famous, so it followed that what she did was simply for publicity. She must be seeking higher sales figures and pity.

I have to say that her driving off into the night seems to me the most natural thing in the world. She had recently lost a beloved mother, and all bereaved daughters know that this is worse than anything a blunt instrument can inflict. Then comes the stab wound, when her adored husband says he’s leaving her for someone else and never loved her anyway. Suddenly she’s on the edge of an abyss of loneliness and self-loathing; nothing she has done is worth a damn. It would be the action of a thoroughly ordered mind to shut down and hide, like a wounded animal seeking oblivion.

More here.

From MSNBC:

For years, scientists have studied how leaves prepare for the annual show of fall color. The molecules behind bright yellows and oranges are well understood, but brilliant reds remain a bit of a mystery. In response to chilly temperatures and fewer daylight hours, leaves stop producing their green-tinted chlorophyll, which allows them to capture sunlight and make energy. Because chlorophyll is sensitive to the cold, certain weather conditions like early frosts will turn off production more quickly.

Meanwhile, orange and yellow pigments called carotenoids—also found in orange carrots—shine through the leaves’ washed out green. “The yellow color has been there all summer, but you don’t see it until the green fades away,” said Paul Schaberg, U.S. Forest Service plant physiologist. “In trees likes aspens and beech, that’s the dominant color change.”

Scientists know less about the radiant red hues that pepper northern maple and ash forests in the fall. The red color comes from anthocyanins, which unlike carotenoids, are only produced in the fall. They also give color to strawberries, red apples, and plums. On a tree, these red pigments beneficially act as sunscreen, by blocking out harmful radiation and shading the leaf from excess light. They also serve as antifreeze, protecting cells from easily freezing. And they are beneficial as antioxidants.

More here.

From Respectful Insolence:

Alright, I’ll come right out and admit it up front. There was no part one to this piece. Well, there was, but it wasn’t on this blog, and I didn’t write it. PZ did in response to some really idiotic arguments from ignorance that Deepak Chopra displayed as part of an “argument” (and I use the term loosely) that there is some mystical other quality that explains life other than genes. He paraded a litany of arguments that so conclusively demonstrated that he had no clue about even the basics of molecular biology that I as a physician cringed and hid my head in shame when I read it, given that Dr. Chopra is, at least nominally, a medical doctor. PZ did a fine job of fisking Chopra’s nonsense (with one minor quibble that I mentioned in the comments). Even the people leaving comments on Chopra’s article were in general pretty hostile to his drivel and pointed out the large number of misstatements of our understanding of genetics, logical fallacies, and credulous arguments from ignorance that flew hither and yon from Chopra’s keyboard. I thought that, having thoroughly embarrassed himself once, Chopra would slink away for a while before dropping another woo-bomb onto an unsuspecting blogosphere. I even thought that Chopra had a shred of self-respect that would prevent him from embarrassing himself again that soon.

I was mistaken.

He’s back, with The Trouble With Genes, Part II (also found here).

More here.

Jeffrey J. Williams in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Literary theorists, and probably other scholars, might be divided into two types: settlers and wanderers. The settlers stay put, “hovering one inch” over a set of issues or topics, as Paul de Man, the most influential theorist of the 1970s, remarked in an interview. Their work, through the course of their careers, claims ownership of a specific intellectual turf. The wanderers are more restless, starting with one approach or field but leaving it behind for the next foray. Their work takes the shape of serial engagements, more oriented toward climatic currents. The distinction is not between expert and generalist, or, in Isaiah Berlin’s distinction, between knowing one thing like a hedgehog and knowing many things like a fox; it is a different application of expertise.

Stanley Fish, for instance, might seem a protean public commentator, but he has actually “hawked the same wares,” as he once put it, returning to certain issues of interpretation as well as to the texts of John Milton over the course of his career. J. Hillis Miller, on the other hand, has morphed over a long career from a traditional commentator on Dickens and 19th-century British literature to phenomenological readings of modernist poets and novelists, then shifted again to become the primary American proponent of deconstruction, and more recently has taken on the role of defender of the humanities, ethics, and the future of literary studies.

While the difference between the two types might seem a conscious choice, it is probably more an expression of disposition. Settlers gravitate toward consistency, stability, and depth, looking for different facets of the same terrain, whereas wanderers are pulled toward the new and the next, finding the facets that motivate them in different terrain. It is perhaps a relation to time: Settlers are drawn to Parmenidean sameness, wanderers to the Heraclitean flux.

Terry Eagleton has been a quintessential wanderer.

More here.

William K. Purvez in Scientific American:

Spider silk is not a single, unique material–different species produce various kinds of silk. Some possess as many as seven distinct kinds of glands, each of which produces a different silk.

Why so many kinds of silk? Each kind plays particular roles. All spiders make so-called dragline silk that functions in part as a lifeline, enabling the creatures to hang from ceilings. And it serves as a constant connection to the web, facilitating quick escapes from danger. Dragline silk also forms the radial spokes of the web; bridgeline silk is the first strand, by which the web hangs from its support; yet another silk forms the great spiral.

The different silks have unique physical properties such as strength, toughness and elasticity, but all are very strong compared to other natural and synthetic materials. Dragline silk combines toughness and strength to an extraordinary degree. A dragline strand is several times stronger than steel, on a weight-for-weight basis, but a spider’s dragline is only about one-tenth the diameter of a human hair. The movie Spider-Man drastically underestimates the strength of silk—real dragline silk would not need to be nearly as thick as the strands deployed by our web-swinging hero in the movie.

More here.

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez was “the painter of the painters”, declared Édouard Manet – but he was much more than that. The days when artists played a leading role in national or international politics are long gone (what does this say about the cliquey introspection of today’s art world?), but while Velázquez’s work is justly celebrated for its aesthetic achievements, far less well known is the role he played in articulating the political imperatives of his masters.

The work has become divorced from its poli tical context largely because it is so seductive as art. The breathtaking ease of the brushwork, the huge but seemingly effortless restraint with which Velázquez controlled his colour palette and pictorial composition, the sheer facility of draughtsmanship: all are amply demonstrated at a forthcoming exhibition at the National Gallery in London – amazingly, the first ever monograph show in the UK of Velázquez’s work.

more from The New Statesman here.

Trevelyan, like Michelet and like Hume, was not afraid to display and manipulate feeling, to conjure and to care. Today’s popular historians must write self-consciously, carefully and with respect for the sensibilities of their subjects; but they can be confident about writing within this tradition, writing with feeling, and about it. There are dangers in too great an identification between author and subject, which can lead to a mapping of modern sensibilities and narratives of life onto the past. But in the best hands, what I’d like to call “emotional history” can combine an original authorial voice, literary awareness and an unashamed quality of love to produce modern popular classics which will last as long as readers find in them something which moves as well as instructs. Emotional history is no less scholarly and no less sophisticated about sources than any other kind. Deducing what someone feels from documentary evidence uses exactly the same techniques as coming to any other sort of conclusion, and since all historical judgements are necessarily partial and subjective, it is equally valid.

more from the TLS here.

If there’s one thing I know, it’s that Old Master paintings don’t go anywhere. They stay flat against the wall in their black and gold frames, or pinned like butterflies as reproductions in books. Yet here I am in the National Gallery, watching some of the greatest works of art in the world bounce up and down, dance from one room to the next, shift this way and that, as couriers, handlers, registrars and curators remove gods and monarchs from their packing cases.

Nearly four centuries ago, Diego Velázquez painted the gods of the classical world as if they were real people. He portrayed Mars, god of war, Venus, the goddess who loved him, and Vulcan, her cuckolded husband, as if they were characters in a tragicomic novel, with compassion for their foibles. Perhaps his ability to imagine so acutely the failures of divinities came about because, as painter to the king of Spain, he lived close to the melancholy and ironies of royal existence. His portraits of Philip IV and his minister Olivares, of infantas and dwarves, see a weakness in royal and humble faces alike, a humanity and a pathos that have rightly made Velázquez one of the most honoured of all artists.

more from The Guardian here.

From BBC News:

Scientists working with the conservation group WWF have discovered stunning orchid species in the forests of Papua New Guinea. They say eight are definitely new species, and a further 20-odd may prove to be new to science as well.

The discoveries include the succulent bloom of Cadetia kutubu, named after Lake Kutubu in its home region.

Papua New Guinea is incredibly rich in orchids. Of some 25,000 species known worldwide, 3,000 come from PNG.

More here.

From Nature:

Has anyone ever told you that you have the same expressions as your siblings or parents? You might think you picked that up by hanging around with your family too long. But scientists now say that such family ‘signatures’ may be genetic.

To separate the impact of mimicry from genetic inheritance, scientists at the University of Haifa, Israel, looked at people who were born blind.

The authors note that their blind subjects considered it to be a common public misconception that they can learn expressions by touch. The participants said that without a mental model of what a face looks like, it is hard to translate expressions felt through the hands to expressions on their own face.

Picture: expressions are similar between blind participants (left) and their relatives (right).

More here.

Ruby Chishti. My birth will take place a thousand times no matter how you celebrate it. 2001.

Cast fabric, stitched and stuffed with straw, yarn.

More on this quirky, wonderful Pakistani artist and her work here, here and here.

When Jones writes (in “The Work of Poets”) “Willie Cooper, what are you doing here, this early in your death?” he’s written a perfectly intelligible English sentence and described a perfectly intelligible human sentiment; yet he has also, at the same time, echoed some of the most affecting lines in all of Rilke, from that poet’s “Requiem fur eine Freundlin.” I won’t quote the Rilke, but I will say that, as with all really effective allusions, the predecessor text becomes our algebra, our way out of mere esteem. You feel esteem everywhere in Jones—for phrases (the engine of an old truck hung “from a rafter like a ham”), for cadences (“The hackberry in the sand field will be there long objectifying”), for turns of thought:

My rage began at forty. The unstirred person, the third-
person,
void, the you of accusations and reprisals, visited me.
Many nights we sang together; you don’t even exist.
—From A Defense of Poetry

more from Poetry Magazine here.

In Second Nature, Nobel ­Prize–­winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman proposes what he calls ­“brain-­based epistemology,” which aims at solving the mystery of how we acquire knowledge by grounding it in an understanding of how the brain ­works.

Edelman’s title is, in part, meant “to call attention to the fact that our thoughts often float free of our realistic descriptions of nature,” even as he sets out to explore how the mind and the body interact. He favors the idea that the brain and mind are unified, but has little patience with the claim that the brain is a computer. Fortunately for the general reader, his explanations of brain function are accessible, buttressed by concrete examples and ­metaphors.

more from the Wilson Quarterly here.

Battlestar Galactica (Sci Fi, Fridays at 9 p.m. ET), now entering its third season, is not science fiction—or “speculative fiction” or “SF,” or whatever you’re supposed to call it these days. Ignore the fact that the series is a remake of a late-’70s Star Wars knockoff. Forget that its action variously unfolds on starships and on a colonized planet called New Caprica. And never mind its stunning special effects, which outclass the endearingly schlocky stuff found elsewhere on its network. Sullen, complex, and eager to obsess over grand conspiracies and intimate betrayals alike, it is TV noir. Listen to Adm. William Adama (Edward James Olmos) gruffly rumble along as a weary soldier in a crooked universe. Check out the way that Hitchcock kisses lead seamlessly to knives in the gut. Just look at the Venetian blinds.

more from Slate here.

Read the title carefully; then read it again. Just about everything in this marvelous book has been weighed and assessed more than is usual. William Mann doesn’t settle for the obvious, the given, the rubber stamp. And so, it seems to me, we’re being gently guided before the book begins. For if there was a phenomenon, a storm, a force or a myth that would be called “Hepburn” long before her death (and for how long afterwards we do not know), then is it possible that “Kate” was the girl, the woman, the body that bore up under the legend? There’s something rare and frightening about actors and actresses. It amounts to a kind of religious worship in which these figures are experienced, “known” by millions of strangers, “loved” by those who will never meet them, when they—the person inside, the person wearing the name and the legend—may sometimes realize, “Well, there’s not much left for me, is there?” You may remember that Katharine Hepburn called her own book (published in 1991, and emphatically not ghostwritten) Me, as if she had always had the fear of being left out. I can only add that if she’d lived to face Mr. Mann’s book, I think she would have put it down, dry-eyed but full of tears, and admitted, quietly: “me.”

more from the NY Observer here.

From Edge:

Edge was recently in Venice for the 2nd World Conference on the Future of Science which was held on September 20th-23rd 2006, at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the Isle of San Giorgio Maggiore.

Daniel C. Dennett, who took on Cardinal Ratzinger in his book Breaking the Spell, had hoped some day to confront him personally on his own turf, but due to a sudden promotion, Ratzinger was unavailable and sent his deputy, Monsignor Sanchez Sorondo, Chancellor of the Vatican. Dennett, was on his game when he delivered the final talk of the conference on “The Domestication of the Wild Memes of Religion” in front of the packed audience. Later, back at Hotel Monaco and Grand Canal, Dennett, Michael Gazzaniga, the Monsignor, among others, were relaxing around the bar, when a posse of Italian paparazzi suddenly stormed through the bar heading to the dock outside. Two speedboat taxis pulled up and deposited Paris Hilton and her entourage on the dock. In one Fellini moment: end of discussion of natural selection, of Charles Darwin, of the Pope, of Daniel C. Dennett. The Edgies went tabloid for the rest of the evening.

Fortunately for Edge readers, Professor Dennett, who bonded with the paparazzi, was there with his digital camera to capture the moment.

More here. Picture on the left shows Paris Hilton Arriving at Hotel Monaco [photo by Daniel C. Dennett].

From The Hindu:

IN the tribal belt of Orissa, in the infamous Kalahandi district, there is a village, Dasi, where the people live in extreme poverty and deprivation. Hunger and malnutrition are a way of life here, and the future seems bleak. In such conditions, in 2000, the Ma Thakurani Self Help Group was formed by Parivartan, a development organisation working with the poor in Kalahandi for more than a decade. The purpose was to bring poor women together; and to practise credit and thrift activities. In the village lies a bhatti, a parlour for illicit liquor consumption where many men-folk consume alchohol, get drunk, become violent and create havoc.

The Ma Thakurani Self Help Group consists of 13 women. Together, they save, borrow, meet and discuss issues. Together, they make a difference in each other’s lives. One day, after their monthly SHG meeting, the members of the Ma Thakurani SHG group passed by the bhatti. The men as usual were inebriated; they foul mouthed the women, and accused the SHG of ruining the village. The women had already had enough. For 15 years, they had borne the brunt of the drunken men and the bhatti. They decided to do something about this situation in the village; they decided to take charge. They called a Village Committee meeting and expressed that something needed to be done about the bhatti; it had to be shut. They received a lot of support from other villagers, and under pressure, the bhatti owner, committed that he will shut the liquor shop.

The members accepted the challenge, much to the ward official’s surprise and everyone else’s too.

More here.

Ruth Pavey reviews the novel by Atiq Rahimi, translated by Sarah Maguire and Yama Yari, in The Independent:

The novel is set in 1979, a time of reckless political upheaval in Afghanistan just before the Soviet Union’s vain attempt to impose order by invasion. Using a technique of total immersion, Atiq Rahimi plunges the reader straight into the pain and bewilderment of a character thinking in the first person, so wounded by a brutal attack that he hardly knows whether he is awake or asleep, alive or dead, as he lies in a roadside sewer, hearing a child’s voice calling him “Father”. This is a short novel, and the reader is a quarter of the way through before learning that the confused thoughts we are sharing are those of Farhad, an educated young man who has been out drinking with a friend and forgotten the curfew.

More here.

Kevin Purday reviews Why We Love by Helen E. Fisher, in Metapsychology:

This book is an ambitious attempt to map the physiological basis of what we call love. The author is an anthropologist but in this work she cooperates with specialists in several fields, most notably specialists in brain scanning, to try to gain a genuinely comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of love. She is currently a research professor at Rutgers University and is already well known for her books The First Sex, and Anatomy of Love.

The book is a melange of anthropology — stories of falling in love from cultures all over the world, history — numerous historical accounts of love, literature — many quotations about love from poetry and novels, animal biology — analogies between human love and ‘love’ in many different species of animal, and human biology/psychology — in-depth accounts of the physiology and psychology of love. It is a heady mixture.

More here.