Carl Zimmer writes in his blog, The Loom:

The eye has always had a special place in the study of evolution, and Darwin had a lot to do with that. He believed that natural selection could produce the complexity of nature, and to a nineteenth century naturalist, nothing seemed as complex as an eye, with its lens, cornea, retina, and other parts working together so exquisitely.The notion that natural selection could produce such an organ “seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree,” Darwin wrote in the Origin of Species.

For Darwin, the key word in that line was seems. He realized that if you look at the different sort of eyes out in the natural world, and consider the ways in which they could have evolved, the absurdity disappears. The objection that the human eye couldn’t possibly have evolved, he wrote, “can hardly be considered real.”

The more scientists study the eye, the more they recognize that Darwin was right.

More here.

Jenny Desai in Science & Spirit:

To most people, cochlear implants sound like a medical miracle—a device the size of a candy corn that can correct the inability to hear. But many in the Deaf community see the technology as a cultural threat, yet another example of the hearing world’s inability to really listen.

More here.

Sarah Boxer in the New York Times:

The First Annual TMN Tournament of Books, presented by The Morning News (TMN), a daily online magazine (themorningnews.org/tob), and Powells.com, an online bookstore, is under way. The writers aren’t hacks and they aren’t in a stadium. The fans don’t roar and they don’t judge. But the Web tournament is set up exactly like an N.C.A.A. basketball tournament, with ladders, seeds and head-to-head contests.

Round after round, novels from 2004 are pitted against each other until only one of the original 16 is standing. The champion will be announced on Feb. 28. At that point its author may receive a live rooster, which has a cryptic connection to the brother of the writer David Sedaris.

More here.

Daniel H. Pink in Wired:

The future no longer belongs to people who can reason with computer-like logic, speed, and precision. It belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind. Today – amid the uncertainties of an economy that has gone from boom to bust to blah – there’s a metaphor that explains what’s going on. And it’s right inside our heads.

Scientists have long known that a neurological Mason-Dixon line cleaves our brains into two regions – the left and right hemispheres. But in the last 10 years, thanks in part to advances in functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers have begun to identify more precisely how the two sides divide responsibilities. The left hemisphere handles sequence, literalness, and analysis. The right hemisphere, meanwhile, takes care of context, emotional expression, and synthesis. Of course, the human brain, with its 100 billion cells forging 1 quadrillion connections, is breathtakingly complex. The two hemispheres work in concert, and we enlist both sides for nearly everything we do. But the structure of our brains can help explain the contours of our times.

Until recently, the abilities that led to success in school, work, and business were characteristic of the left hemisphere. They were the sorts of linear, logical, analytical talents measured by SATs and deployed by CPAs. Today, those capabilities are still necessary. But they’re no longer sufficient. In a world upended by outsourcing, deluged with data, and choked with choices, the abilities that matter most are now closer in spirit to the specialties of the right hemisphere – artistry, empathy, seeing the big picture, and pursuing the transcendent.

More here.

Henry Fountain in the New York Times:

Scientists may be serious people, engaged in the pursuit of objective truth. But when it comes to naming species, they often let their hair down.

So the insect world has Heerz tooya, Apopyllus now and Pieza pi and Pieza rhea, among thousands of puns and other oddities. (In science, all creatures are binomial, with a capitalized genus name followed by a lower-case species name.) The oceans are home to Ittibittium, a genus of mollusks that are smaller than those named Bittium. There are species named for body parts and bodily functions, for celebrities, painters and writers, for cartoon characters and favorite sports. For those who find it to be all too much, there is even Ba humbugi, a snail from Fiji.

More here.

Sarah Boxer in the New York Times:

Cambridge, Mass., Feb. 18 – You’ve seen Christo’s “Gates” in Central Park. But what about Hargo’s “Gates” in Somerville, Mass.? Sure, Hargo is unabashedly riding on the coattails of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. But it did take him some time to make his gates: 0.002 years, he estimates. That’s a good chunk of a day. You may as well take a look:
not-rocket-science.com/gates.htm.

Just who is Hargo? Is he some kind of genius wrapper? His name is Geoff Hargadon, he is 50 and, in a telephone interview, he would only say, enigmatically, “Art is not my profession.” His last installation was a studio full of discarded ATM receipts. The show was called “Balance.” It was about “people, privacy and money,” he said, adding: “You want to know how much people have? Here it is.”

Like Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Hargo used recyclable materials for “The Somerville Gates.” Unlike them, he accepts donations to defray the cost of his installation, which was $3.50. The mayor of Somerville did not come to the unveiling, on Valentine’s Day.

More here. (Thanks to Anna Hall, Alia Raza, and Husain Naqvi for sending this along.)

Just before she died, Sontag wrote an introduction to Halldor Laxness’ novel “Under the Glass.” It’s published in this week’s NY Times Book Review. It is a nice, if somewhat melancholy reminder that we lost one of the most talented critics of a generation when Sontag died. She could never say a little without saying a lot. In this case, the discussion of one novel becomes a reflection on the imagination itself.

“The long prose fiction called the novel, for want of a better name, has yet to shake off the mandate of its own normality as promulgated in the 19th century: to tell a story peopled by characters whose options and destinies are those of ordinary, so-called real life. Narratives that develop from this artificial norm and tell other kinds of stories, or appear not to tell much of a story at all, draw on traditions that are more venerable than those of the 19th century, but still, to this day seem innovative or ultraliterary or bizarre . . . “

You may remember Marv Levy as the coach of the Buffalo Bills teams that went to an unprecedented four consecutive Super Bowls, inspiring them with pregame aphorisms such as his famous coinage, “Where else would you rather be than right here, right now?” You may not be aware of his unorthodoxies, at least relative to the National Football League: a vegetarian with a Master’s in English History from Harvard and a penchant for WWI and II allusions in motivating his players, Levy the teacher-coach instilled a team spirit of honorable toughness. (Upon the Bills clinching a playoff spot in 1988, causing joyous fans to tear down the goalposts, Levy remarked to his players: “We’ve liberated Paris, but we’re 600 miles from Berlin.”) His autobiography, just published, contains a large dose of his straight talk and careful thinking, and some pretty corny old-guy humor. It also displays the noble attitude that, absorbed by his players, made the Bills for a long time the most resilient and battle-ready outfit in football.

Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker explores the troubles of the mainstream media, denounced as hopelessly biased by both left and right:

“Conservatives are relativists when it comes to the press. In their view, nothing is neutral: there is no disinterested version of the news; everything reflects politics and relationships to power and cultural perspective. If mainstream journalists find it annoying that conservatives think of them as unalterably hostile, they find it just as annoying that liberals think of them as the friend who keeps letting them down. Mainstream journalists want to think that the public is aware of—and respects—the boundaries that separate real journalism from entertainment, and opinion, and propaganda, and marketing. If, instead, the public not only enjoys the quasi-journalistic pleasures that lie outside the boundaries, but also doesn’t accept that what’s inside really is distinct and superior—well, that would sting.”

Peter Preston reviews Fear: A Cultural History by Joanna Bourke, in The Guardian:

Joanna Bourke, graceful, shrewd, brilliantly compendious in research, has written a history as topical as your morning newspaper and as relevant as the Home Secretary’s last dodgy announcement in the Commons. Time and again, putting American and British experiences together, she raises a wry, cool eyebrow at the hyperbole of hysteria. She assesses risk rather than quavers before it. She puts fear in its proper place – as part of our pattern of life.

More here.

Teller (yes, the quiet half of Penn and Teller) reviews The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History by Peter Lamont, in the New York Times:

When John Elbert Wilkie died in 1934, he was remembered for his 14 years as a controversial director of the Secret Service, during which he acquired a reputation for forgery and skullduggery, and for masterly manipulation of the press. But not a single obituary cited his greatest contribution to the world: Wilkie was the inventor of the legendary Indian Rope Trick. Not the actual feat, of course; it does not and never did exist. In 1890, Wilkie, a young reporter for The Chicago Tribune, fabricated the legend that the world has embraced from that day to this as an ancient feat of Indian street magic.

How did a silly newspaper hoax become a lasting icon of mystery? The answer, Peter Lamont tells us in his wry and thoughtful ”Rise of the Indian Rope Trick,” is that Wilkie’s article appeared at the perfect moment to feed the needs and prejudices of modern Western culture. India was the jewel of the British Empire, and to justify colonial rule, the British had convinced themselves the conquered were superstitious savages who needed white men’s guidance in the form of exploitation, conversion and death. The prime symbol of Indian benightedness was the fakir, whose childish tricks — as the British imagined — frightened his ignorant countrymen but could never fool a Westerner.

When you’re certain you cannot be fooled, you become easy to fool. Indian street magicians have a repertory of earthy, violent tricks designed for performance outdoors — very different from polite Victorian parlor and stage magic. So when well-fed British conquerors saw a starving fakir do a trick they couldn’t fathom, they reasoned thus: We know the natives are too primitive to fool us; therefore, what we are witnessing must be genuine magic.

More here.

Katherine Hobson in U.S. News & World Report:

Fidgeting is not enough. That’s the message from the author of the much-buzzed-about recent study that threatened to turn us into a nation of obsessive toe tappers and knuckle crackers, all with the aim of burning calories. “Nonexercise activity thermogenesis,” a fancy term for exercise accumulated as part of your daily routine, actually involves a bit more. Standing up. Putting one foot in front of the other. In other words, walking (the “wiggling” in the press release got people focused on fidgeting their way to skinniness).

James Levine, the Mayo Clinic endocrinologist who conducted the study, is the poster child for NEAT. He hates the gym. “I walk in and immediately walk out,” he says, speaking by phone from his office. There is a slight whirring on the line. It’s his treadmill. Levine so believes in the power of NEAT that he has mounted his computer over his inexpensive treadmill. He ambulates at about 0.7 mph all day. He types. He drinks coffee. He has meetings (there’s another treadmill in the office for guests). He does step off to write letters by hand. At 5 foot 9 and 155 pounds, he says he doesn’t watch what he eats.

More here.

Nat Ives in the New York Times:

As more Americans become comfortable with the Web, though, major marketers are increasingly asking agencies to produce elaborate, interactive online campaigns – even for grocery store goods that hardly anyone researches or buys online.

One of the shiniest lures online is the developing field of viral advertising, in which companies try to create messages so compelling, funny or suggestive that consumers spontaneously share them with friends, often through e-mail or cellphone text messages. The goal is the exponential spread of ads that are endorsed by consumers’ own friends.

More here.

From the Seattle Times:

In the Islamic Republic of Iran, gay male sex still carries the death penalty and lesbians are lashed, but hundreds of people are having their gender changed legally, bolstered by the blessings of members of the ruling Shiite clergy.

“Approval of gender changes doesn’t mean approval of homosexuality. We’re against homosexuality,” says Mohammed Mahdi Kariminia, a cleric in the holy city of Qom and one of Iran’s foremost proponents of using hormones and surgery to change sex. “But we have said that if homosexuals want to change their gender, this way is open to them.”

…

No Muslim society has tackled the question with the open-mindedness of Shiite Iran. That’s probably because the father of the revolution himself, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, penned the groundbreaking “fatwas” that approved gender reassignment four decades ago.

Khomeini reasoned that if men or women wished so intensely to change their sex, to the point that they believed they were trapped inside the wrong body, then they should be permitted to transform that body and relieve their misery. His opinion had more to do with what isn’t in the Quran than what is. Sex change isn’t mentioned, Khomeini’s thinking went, and so there are no grounds to consider it banned.

More here.

Paul Krugman reviews The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know About America’s Economic Future by Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Scott Burns, in the New York Review of Books:

America in 2030 will be “a country whose collective population is older than that in Florida today.” It will be in “desperate trouble” because the expense of caring for all those old people will cause a fiscal crisis. The nation will be plagued by “political instability, unemployment, labor strikes, high and rising crime rates.” That’s the picture painted in The Coming Generational Storm by Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns, a book that has helped to feed a rising tide of demographic alarm. But is that picture right? Yes and no.

More here.

Jeff Hecht in New Scientist:

Modern humans made their appearance 35,000 years earlier than we previously thought. According to new dates for two fossils found in Ethiopia almost 40 years ago, we have been around for 195,000 years.

The skulls were discovered along the Omo River in 1967 by anthropologist Richard Leakey and his team and were originally thought to be 130,000 years old.

At the time, other researchers doubted they were older than just 100,000 years. But modern radiometric and geological techniques now show that Leakey’s date was actually an underestimate.

The scientists, led by Ian McDougall at the Australian National University in Canberra, used a different dating approach for two types of material found with the skulls. Argon/argon radiometric dating was carried out on volcanic ash layers, while the analysis of other sedimentary layers provided further data.

They found that the sediments had collected only during relatively brief eras of extremely heavy monsoons – lasting about 1000 years in a 40,000-year cycle. This allowed the team to pin down the skulls’ age to within a short interval in geological time.

More here.

William S. Kowinski reviews Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe by Simon Singh, in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Despite its title, this book is not about the Big Bang or the origin of the universe. It is a history of some of the major discoveries, theories, personalities and controversies that contributed to the basic Big Bang explanation and its present acceptance. It is essentially a textbook on cosmology in Western science from before Copernicus, and a conservative one (in a scientific sense) at that.

Simon Singh is best known for his TV documentary (“Proof”) and best- selling book (“Fermat’s Enigma”) about Andrew Wiles, who solved one of mathematics’ most celebrated mysteries. But the former BBC TV producer earned his Ph.D. in physics, so this book’s subject is clearly close to his heart. The subtextual through-line is the story of how science works, in the real world context of personalities, professional relationships and political, economic and religious interests. For instance, while the 15th century Catholic Church was notoriously resistant to the scripture-defying idea that the Earth wasn’t the still-point center of the universe, the 20th century Pope Pius XII became a booster of the Big Bang at a time when scientists weren’t so sure, because it posited a beginning and hence (he thought) a creation and creator.

But scientists themselves can be almost as influenced by their faith in their favored models, such as the Big Bang’s main rival for much of the 20th century, the Steady State theory (the universe without beginning or end). Several eminences held onto it because it was aesthetically pleasing and philosophically elegant. Perhaps the dirty little secret least familiar to nonscientists is the degree to which science is hostage to human failings of ego, status and reward.

More here.

From New Scientist:

There’s a revolution afoot in India. Unlike any other developing nation, India is using brainpower rather than cheap physical labour or natural resources to leapfrog into the league of technologically advanced nations. Every high tech company, from Intel to Google, is coming to India to find innovators. Leading the charge is Infosys, the country’s first billion-dollar IT company.

More here.

Anne Eisenberg in the New York Times:

Vehicles that move slowly down the street, pausing regularly to take photographs with remote-controlled cameras, tend to make the police a bit nervous. But one trailer loaded with imaging equipment that made its way through the streets of central Philadelphia wasn’t spying – although at first, Secret Service agents had their doubts.

Both the vehicle and a plane that flew over the same area were taking authorized pictures of each building and its surroundings, at the behest of the downtown improvement district. Now the terabytes of imaging data are being used to build a three-dimensional model of central Philadelphia, down to the last cornice, mailbox and shrub.

The city model can then be integrated with other information, like listings of shops and rental space, so that one day people who’d rather be in Philadelphia will be able to be there virtually, from their computers. Apartment seekers, for example, will be able to click their way through the neighborhood, taking a virtual walk and checking out the view from the windows of apartments that strike their fancy.

More here.

David Carr reviews Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World’s Most Powerful University by Richard Bradley, in the New York Times:

Richard Bradley’s last book, a decidedly unauthorized biography of John F. Kennedy Jr., rode a wave of controversy to become a No. 1 best seller. But that kind of notoriety seemed like a far reach for his new one, “Harvard Rules,” which hits the streets this week. A searing portrait of Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, it did not seem destined for big sales, in part because while academic politics are most notable for their low stakes, they generally have even lower public appeal.

But last month, Dr. Summers suggested that the low number of women in the sciences had something to do with genetics and gender – insert firestorm here – and suddenly a book that would not seem to have any appeal beyond Harvard Square began to take on national resonance.

Mr. Bradley’s book is landing at the precise moment when Mr. Summer’s difficulties are peaking. For 90 minutes on Tuesday night, more than 250 members of the Harvard faculty confronted Dr. Summers, with a number of them stating that he had besmirched the reputation of the university through a series of intemperate remarks and had wielded his power in unseemly ways. One attendee told The Harvard Crimson that it was “likely” the faculty would give a vote of no confidence for Dr. Summers when they meet in an emergency session Tuesday. The burgeoning crisis nicely dovetailed with the thesis of “Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World’s Most Powerful University” (HarperCollins, $25.95).

More here.