Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

One of the greatest transformations in the history of life occurred more than 600 million years ago, when a single-celled organism gave rise to the first animals. With their multicellular bodies, animals evolved into a staggering range of forms, like whales that weigh 200 tons, birds that soar six miles into the sky and sidewinders that slither across desert dunes.

Scientists have long wondered what the first animals were like, including questions about their anatomy and how they found food. In a study published on Wednesday, scientists found tantalizing answers in a little-known group of gelatinous creatures called comb jellies. While the first animals remain a mystery, scientists found that comb jellies belong to the deepest branch on the animal family tree.

The debate over the origin of animals has endured for decades. At first, researchers relied largely on the fossil record for clues. The oldest definitive animal fossils date back about 580 million years, although some researchers have claimed to find even older ones. In 2021, for example, Elizabeth Turner, a Canadian paleontologist, reported finding 890-million-year-old fossils of possible sponges. Sponges would make sense as the oldest animal. They are simple creatures, with no muscles or nervous system. They anchor themselves to the ocean floor, where they filter water through a maze of pores, trapping bits of food.

More here.

Layal Liverpool in Nature:

The group behind the radical open-access initiative Plan S has announced its next big plan to shake up research publishing — and this one could be bolder than the first. It wants all versions of an article and its associated peer-review reports to be published openly from the outset, without authors paying any fees, and for authors, rather than publishers, to decide when and where to first publish their work.

The group of influential funding agencies, called cOAlition S, has over the past five years already caused upheaval in the scholarly publishing world by pressuring more journals to allow immediate open-access publishing. Its new proposal, prepared by a working group of publishing specialists and released on 31 October, puts forward an even broader transformation in the dissemination of research. It outlines a future “community-based” and “scholar-led” open-research communication system (see go.nature.com/45zyjh) in which publishers are no longer gatekeepers that reject submitted work or determine first publication dates. Instead, authors would decide when and where to publish the initial accounts of their findings, both before and after peer review. Publishers would become service providers, paid to conduct processes such as copy-editing, typesetting and handling manuscript submissions.

More here.

A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres,
… to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

by Walt Whitman
from The Poetry Foundation

Colin Barras in New Scientist:

Some of our actions have near-instant consequences. Even young children learn for themselves that drinking water is a great way to quench your thirst. But sex doesn’t immediately lead to babies. It generally takes weeks to even register a pregnancy. Months pass before the act of childbirth.

In all of the world’s human societies, there is a strong understanding that sex makes babies. But it presumably required careful observation, deep thinking and an ability to reliably and accurately track the passage of time for ancient people to make the link between the two. It may also have required language so that individuals could discuss and refine their ideas.

And this brings us to non-human animals. Given that no other animal species has our capacity for language and abstract reasoning, do any of the rest of them understand where babies come from?

More here.

Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

In polls, 25 – 50% of Americans say they would donate a kidney to a stranger in need.

This sentence fascinates me because of the hanging “would”. Would, if what? A natural reading is “would if someone needs it”. But there are 100,000 strangers on the waiting list for kidney transplants. Between 5,000 and 40,000 people die each year for lack of sufficient kidneys to transplant. Someone definitely needs it. Yet only about 200 people (0.0001%) donate kidneys to strangers per year. Why the gap between 25-50% and 0.0001%?

Some of you will suspect respondents are lying to look good. But these are anonymous surveys. Lying to themselves to feel good, then? Maybe. But I think about myself at age 20, a young philosophy major studying utilitarianism. If someone had asked me a hypothetical about whether I would donate a kidney to a stranger in need, I probably would have said yes. Then I would have continued going about my business, never thinking of it as a thing real-life people could do.

More here.

Joanna Thompson in Undark:

In 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic rampaged across the globe, the World Health Organization declared that we had plunged into a second, simultaneous catastrophe: an infodemic. This global crisis was characterized by the rapid spread of false information, or misinformation, mostly in digital spaces. The fear was that such inaccuracies would leave the public unmoored, adrift in a sea of untruth. Eventually, this mass disorientation would cause people to harm themselves and one another.

In an effort to combat the rising tide of misinformation, certain agencies, including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.K. Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee, have poured resources into quantifying its spread and impact online. Some of the resulting reports have spawned legislation aimed at limiting online fake news.

But some psychologists and sociologists aren’t convinced that misinformation is as powerful as all that — or that it is a substantially different issue now compared with in the past. In fact, they think that we may be prematurely whipping ourselves into a misinformation moral panic.

More here.

Leonard Benardo in The Ideas Letter:

Welcome to the second edition of The Ideas Letter, where heterodox ideas come to life. Our spotlighted podcast this issue focuses on a long-forgotten 1972 cause célèbre book.  At the time of its release, the tract was fodder for household conversations across the US. Anthony Lewis of The New York Times called it “likely to be one of the most important documents of our age,” arguing that it showed “the complete irrelevance of most of today’s political concerns” to the world’s existential plight. Sound familiar in 2023? It should.

We are also featuring a video panel from the recent Vienna Humanities Festival, chaired by yours truly, which brings out lesser-heard dimensions of the identitarian debate. The politics of identity is front and center in the disagreements you’ll see. Identity (not to mention democracy, human rights, international law, and occupation) are never far from the vexing and toxic debates on Israel/Palestine. And nobody gets more to the heart of the problem with dispassionate passion and analytical chops than Adam Shatz, whose tour de force raises the necessary questions around which debate can advance.

More here.

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

by Billy Collins

Ty Burr in The Washington Post:

Ahmed Nehad in The Nation:

On October 6, blood, pain, and suffering in Palestine were of no interest to the world. They were too mundane, too “normal” to be acknowledged. Never mind that “normal” meant a Gaza that had been smothered by a 17-year Israeli blockade and a 56-year occupation. Never mind that it meant a Gaza where Israeli military invasions had become almost routine; with civilians laid to rest after every attack, and with entire neighborhoods leveled—tens of thousands of homes, mosques, churches, hospitals, cultural centers, and educational institutions crumbling to rubble every couple of years.

Amjad Iraqi, Michael Sfard and Adam Shatz in an LRB podcast:

As the siege on Gaza intensifies, many observers are describing the current Hamas-Israel conflict as a complete overhaul of the region’s status quo. Amjad Iraqi, a senior editor at +972 Magazine, and Michael Sfard, a leading human rights lawyer, join Adam Shatz to discuss the roots and ramifications of the current crisis.

This conversation was recorded on 17 October.

Michael Pettis in Carnegie Endowment for International Peace:

Global debt, according to a recent report by the Institute for International Finance, amounted to nearly $300 trillion in 2021, equal to 356 percent of global GDP. This extraordinarily high debt level represents a 30 percentage-point rise in the global debt-to-GDP ratio in the past five years. No wonder analysts increasingly worry about the possible adverse consequences of excessive debt levels.

Unfortunately, few economists have a clear understanding of why too much debt is a bad thing, let alone how much debt is too much. That makes it hard to know what to worry about and why. Because economists tend to assume that the extent of a country’s debt burden is measured by its national debt-to GDP ratio, they often fail to distinguish between types of debt, instead treating a rise in one country’s debt-to-GDP ratio as equivalent to the same rise in another country’s ratio, even though the two cases may have very different implications.

So when is debt a burden for the economy and why? Crucially, different kinds of rising debt can have very different effects on an economy. Moreover, even in countries that are seen as having too much debt, the adjustment costs can vary significantly.

More here.

Jürgen Habermas in Constellations:

It was nearly 50 years ago when Dick called me for the first time and invited me to come over to Haverford for a discussion. It is not only because of the beginning of our longstanding friendship that I start with that phone call I got in 1972 at the Humanities Center of Cornell University. It moreover led, at this first encounter, to a memorable and rather improbable discovery. The two of us had been brought up on different continents and in different societies, with different backgrounds at different schools and different universities, not to speak of a childhood and youth we spent on opposite sides of a monstrous World War, in which Dick had lost a brother; but in spite of all of these obvious distances in origin and socialization we soon discovered a broad overlap in our philosophical background and also in our present research interests. Hegel, Marx and Kierkegaard, Sartre and existentialism, even Peirce and Dewey and our present research programs in action theory and communication are the catch words to indicate this unexpected convergence of our philosophical orientations. And my surprise was soon confirmed when I read Dick’s book Praxis and Action which I immediately recommended to Suhrkamp for translation.

However, the discovery of these intellectual family bonds is only half of the story; I would not have accepted the invitation to come to Haverford with Ute and our two daughters for a whole term, had Dick not been the impressive personality he indeed was—a host of overwhelming charm and an open-minded, spontaneous and inspiring partner in the ongoing ping-pong of arguments.

More here.

Anthony Quinn at The Guardian:

Here is the story of a wild folie à deux, or a dance of death in which both partners were tragically condemned to survive. Roger Lewis’s biography may not fulfil the promise of “everything” about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor but it surely contains more than you could ever wish to know. “I make no apology for this being a visionary book,” he explains, sonorously, and often the reader does hear a singular voice at work – fearless, funny, provocative, acute, insistent. But oh, it’s exhausting too. Lewis, a Welshman, understands his native weakness: “garrulity”. Or, as Taylor was once overheard to say, as her husband drunkenly dominated another evening with Dylan Thomas recitals and lectures: “Does the man ever shut up?”

Perhaps only an outsize book could comprehend the excess, “the magnificent bad taste and greed and money” that became the keynote of the Burton-Taylor partnership. Lewis, disdaining standard biography as “bogus” and “an affair of ghosts”, adopts an impish, even jesterish approach – bouncing back and forth between eras, zooming in on minor characters, speculating on omissions and obfuscations in the official story.

more here.

Jennifer Szalai at the NY Times:

If social media is to be believed, men can’t stop thinking about the Roman Empire, particularly its “alpha male” elements. Anyone similarly obsessed would do well to pick up a copy of “Emperor of Rome,” an erudite and entertaining new book by the redoubtable classics scholar and feminist Mary Beard.

Beard, whose previous books include “SPQR” and “The Fires of Vesuvius,” points to the conspicuous role played by women in the histories of the emperors that were handed down through the ages. Most enduring has been “the stereotype of the scheming woman,” who (supposedly) manipulated powerful men into doing her bidding (or else poisoned them when they didn’t). Beard, citing more recent examples of women who have been condemned for their husbands’ behavior, remarks that it is still fashionable to “blame the wife.”

more here.