C. Brandon Ogbunu and C. Malik Boykin in the Boston Review:

In recent years, biology’s “nature vs. nurture” war has reemerged with advanced weapons, although the central questions have not changed: What makes us human? Why are we different from one another? Nonetheless, the methods used to address them have undergone several revolutions. We now benefit from hundreds of twin and adoption studies, which have provided heritability estimates for dozens of characteristics relating to human behavior and wellness. Simultaneously, we are reaping the benefits of technological breakthroughs that have made it possible to screen thousands of individuals to uncover genes associated with particular traits. Thanks to this, we have been able to correlate genetic signatures with a growing list of physical (e.g., height, skin color), physiological (e.g., risk for type-2 diabetes, hypertension), and behavioral (e.g., risk for depression, autism) traits. At the same time, epidemiology, psychology, and sociology continue to demonstrate the pliability of the human experience across populations, and we continue to learn more about the social forces that create vast differences in the human experience.

In combination, work from the natural and social sciences should have fostered a golden age for the study of human behavior. And yet, conversations about how to explain differences between individuals and groups are more controversial than ever—perhaps not surprisingly, given the political implications of any answer. Recent breakthroughs in molecular biology have compounded the stakes.

More here.

David Chalmers in Edge:

We’ve got these bodies and these brains, which work okay, but we also have minds. We see, we hear, we think, we feel, we plan, we act, we do; we’re conscious. Viewed from the outside, you see a reasonably finely tuned mechanism. From the inside, we all experience ourselves as having a mind, as feeling, thinking, experiencing, being, which is pretty central to our conception of ourselves. It also raises any number of philosophical and scientific problems. When it comes to explaining the objective stuff from the outside—the behavior and so on—you put together some neural and computational mechanisms, and we have a paradigm for explaining those.

When it comes to explaining the mind, particularly the conscious aspects of the mind, it looks like the standard paradigm of putting together mechanisms and explaining things like the objective processes of behavior leaves an explanatory gap. How does all that processing give you a subjective experience, and why does it feel like something from the inside doesn’t look like it’s directly addressed by these methods? That’s what people call the hard problem of consciousness, as opposed to, say, the easy problems of explaining behavior.

Discussion can then spin off in a thousand directions. Could you explain conscious experience in terms of the brain? Does it require something fundamentally new? Does it exist at all? Lately, I’ve been interested in coming at this from a slightly different direction. We’ve got the first-order problem of consciousness, and then it’s often hard for people from AI research, or neuroscience, or psychology to say, “There’s a problem here, but I’m not quite sure what I can do with it.”

More here.

Charlie Parker (1950)

Bird is building a metropolis with his horn.
Here are the gates of Babylon, the walls of Jericho cast down.
Might die in Chicago, Kansas City’s where I was born.

Snowflake in a blizzard, purple rose before the thorn.
Stone by stone, note by note, atom by atom, noun by noun,
Bird is building a metropolis with his horn.

Uptown, downtown, following the river to its source,
Savoy, Three Deuces, Cotton Club, Lenox Lounge.
Might just die in Harlem, Kansas City’s where I was born.

Bird is an abacus of possibility, Bird is riding the horse
of habit and augmented sevenths. King without a crown,
Bird is building a metropolis with his horn.

Bred to the labor of it, built to claw an eye from the storm,
made for the lowdown, the countdown, the breakdown.
Might die in Los Angeles, Kansas City’s where I was born.

Bridge by bridge, solo by solo, set by set, chord by chord,
woodshed to penthouse, blue to black to brown,
Charlie Parker is building a metropolis with his horn.
Might just die in Birdland, Kansas City’s where I was born.

by Campbell McGrath
from Poem Hunter

Joseph O’Neill in the New York Review of Books:

“I claim the right to the United States, for myself and my children and my uncles and cousins, by manifest destiny.” The claimant is Suketu Mehta, in This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto. The reference to manifest destiny isn’t merely trolling. Mehta’s thesis is that extensive migration from poor parts of the globe to the US is as inevitable and justified as the westward migration that built this country. He goes on:

This land is your land, this land is our land, it belongs to you and me. We’re here, we’re not going back, we’re raising our kids here. It’s our country now…. We’re not letting the bastards take it back.

It’s our America now.

You’ll have spotted that Mehta isn’t asking for a benevolent, liberal-American accommodation of the immigrant. He doesn’t even mention the Declaration of Independence (though he does mention the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). Rather, he is asserting a right of migration that can override the right of nation-states to keep people out. His point of view is the migrant’s, not the native’s.

More here.

Kevin Hartnett in Quanta:

When we design a skyscraper we expect it will perform to specification: that the tower will support so much weight and be able to withstand an earthquake of a certain strength.

But with one of the most important technologies of the modern world, we’re effectively building blind. We play with different designs, tinker with different setups, but until we take it out for a test run, we don’t really know what it can do or where it will fail.

This technology is the neural network, which underpins today’s most advanced artificial intelligence systems. Increasingly, neural networks are moving into the core areas of society: They determine what we learn of the world through our social media feeds, they help doctors diagnose illnesses, and they even influence whether a person convicted of a crime will spend time in jail.

Yet “the best approximation to what we know is that we know almost nothing about how neural networks actually work and what a really insightful theory would be,” said Boris Hanin, a mathematician at Texas A&M University and a visiting scientist at Facebook AI Research who studies neural networks.

More here.

Mohammed Hanif in the New York Times:

The cheerleaders for Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India are cheering for Partition redux, a world-class massacre, ethnic cleansing. The brute power of Hindu supremacy has its own logic, and it requires not only that Kashmiris be denied a future but also that they be humiliated and punished for their past sin of not being grateful Indians. While individual Indian Muslims across the country are being lynched for trading beef or forced to chant Hindutva slogans, Kashmiris are locked up en masse. Thank you, we don’t need collaborators anymore.

When some years ago a leader of Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party said during an election rally that Muslim women should be dug from their graves and raped, he sounded like a deranged fanatic. But increasingly that outburst sounds like one more action point on a Hindu nationalist’s to-do list. Early this week, there were videos of young Hindus claiming that now they can get themselves Kashmiri girls. Many victims of the original Partition were women who were raped or who jumped into wells to avoid being raped. Now young Indian men seem to think another historic opportunity has opened up.

More here.

Helen Pearson at Literary Review:

The authors find little proof of increasing busyness among the population. Yes, as expected, people were spending far more time on digital devices in 2015 than they were in 2000. But the data provides little evidence that people now spend more time multitasking or that they’re switching more often from one activity to another, which might make our time seem fragmented and frantic.

The perception that we’re all super busy might have grown, the authors say, because of the way that certain subgroups of the population who have seen an increase in their workloads – those who are highly educated, in higher-status jobs and in dual-career households with small children – are more likely to have an influential voice in society and the media and so might have helped to create an impression that everyone is now busier.

more here.

Peter E. Gordon at the NYRB:

The German philosopher and social theorist Theodor W. Adorno died fifty years ago this week, in the late summer of 1969. Even at the time of his death, he was entangled in controversy. Student militants, many of them aligned with the so-called “extra-parliamentary opposition,” had once seen him as a political ally. But when they occupied the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe–University Frankfurt, where Adorno kept his office, he called in the police, an act that was seen as unforgivable by the student radicals: How could a theorist of anti-fascism side with the authorities?

Adorno’s decision opened a bitter divide between the so-called Frankfurt School and the more militant members of the student movement that would never truly heal. In late April 1969, when Adorno commenced the first of his lectures on “An Introduction to Dialectical Thinking,” two students rushed the podium, demanding that Adorno engage in a public act of self-criticism.

more here.

Michiko Kakutani in The Guardian:

In novels spanning several hundred years of history, Toni Morrison used her historical imagination and her remarkable gifts of language to chronicle the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow, and their continuing fallout on the everyday lives of black Americans. Violent, heart-wrenching events occur in her fiction: a runaway slave named Sethe cuts the throat of her baby daughter with a handsaw to spare her the fate she suffered herself as a slave (Beloved); a cosmetics salesman hunts down his lover and shoots her dead (Jazz); a woman pours kerosene on her drug-addicted son and sets him on fire (Sula). Such horrifying events are acts of desperation that can be comprehended only in the context of the earlier tragedies these characters or their families have suffered. In fact, if there is one insistent theme in Morrison’s novels, it’s the ways in which the past inexorably shapes the present, erasing innocence, cutting off options of escape, and warping relationships between women and men, parents and children.

As in William Faulkner’s work, the past is never dead for Morrison’s people – it’s not even past. Faulkner was clearly an influence on Morrison’s writing, as were Ralph Ellison, Virginia Woolf, Gabriel García Márquez and African American folklore. But Morrison forged from such disparate sources a voice that was all her own – fierce, poetic and Proustian in its ability to fuse time present and time past.

Her 1987 masterpiece Beloved created a harrowing portrait of slavery that possesses all the resonance of a classical myth, while remaining grounded in the awful particulars of American history.

More here.

The Blades

In the new world, as the goddess dictated,
each time a man touched a woman against
her will, each time he exposed himself,
each time he whistled, dropped something
in her drink, photographed her in secret

Jon Cohen in Science:

Drugs work stunningly well to control HIV—but not in everyone, and not without side effects. That’s why a small cadre of patients known as elite controllers has long fascinated researchers: Their immune system alone naturally suppresses HIV for decades without drugs. Now one team, inspired by success in mice, hopes to endow HIV-infected people with tailormade immune cells that target HIV, in effect creating elite controllers in the clinic. The immune strategy has risks, but it builds on increasingly popular cancer treatments with T cells engineered to have surface proteins, called chimeric antigen receptors (CARs), that can recognize markers on the surfaces of tumor cells and destroy the cancer. Such CAR T cells can also be tailored to identify and eliminate HIV-infected cells. This approach was tested in HIV-infected humans long before CAR T cells proved their worth against cancer, but it roundly failed. The field wants “to move what’s been learned from cancer back to HIV, completing the circle,” says Steven Deeks, an HIV/AIDS clinician at the University of California, San Francisco, who first tested a CAR T cell against the virus in the late 1990s.

The new study—conducted by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania; the biotech company Lentigen in Gaithersburg, Maryland; and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City—uses a far more sophisticated CAR approach than the one Deeks tested. “It’s promising and seems to be more potent than what’s been tried in the past,” says stem cell biologist Hans-Peter Kiem, who has tested CAR T cells in leukemia and lymphoma patients at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. For the new work, published online this week in Science Translational Medicine, the researchers engineered T cells to include genes encoding two kinds of CARs, each targeting a different part of HIV’s surface protein. In test tube studies, this “duoCAR T” cell powerfully killed white blood cells infected with a diverse array of HIV variants, the group reports. The team also gave near simultaneous injections of CAR T cells and HIV-infected human cells to the spleens of mice with a “humanized” immune system. (Rodents cannot normally be infected with the AIDS virus.) When the group harvested spleens from the mice a week later, five of six mice had no detectable HIV DNA and their average viral levels had dropped 97.5%.

More here.

Paula Erizanu at the IAI:

What is your view regarding the idea that there might be a subjective or objective morality?

I think it’s very difficult to make the case for an objective morality if you’re using the word ‘objective’ in a strong sense, either to mean a universal morality or a foundational morality that all people everywhere understand and accept in a globalising world.

Ironically, I think the issue arises because individuals and institutions are aware of the existence of conflicting, even incommensurable, moral values and normative orders – subjective and objective, private and public –  but, for a range of strategic or exigent reasons, they want to normalize them, render them congruent or consensual.

By talking about “individuals and institutions”, I suppose I am already blurring the line between public and private, “subjective” and “objective”. Many of the pressing political movements of our times – Black Lives Matter, MeToo – display the problematic moral balance between personal morality and public, professional ethics. When there is a vast imbalance in gender power, when a person is in a position to alter the circumstances of another, sexual “consent” is a very problematic issue. You do not have to be a crass predator to be aware, even in the “heat” of the moment, that you are taking undue advantage of a colleague or a client or a friend, and putting them in an “impossible” situation. Institutional power is being deployed, however subtly or significantly, to achieve a coerced compliance or an exploitative outcome.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Fiction shines a light on the human condition by putting people into imaginary situations and envisioning what might happen. Science fiction expands this technique by considering situations in the future, with advanced technology, or with utterly different social contexts. Seth MacFarlane’s show The Orville is good old-fashioned space opera, but it’s also a laboratory for exploring the intricacies of human behavior. There are interpersonal conflicts, sexual politics, alien perspectives, and grappling with the implications of technology. I talk with Seth about all these issues, and maybe a little bit about whether it’s a good idea to block people on Twitter.

More here.

Colleen Walsh in The Harvard Gazette:

The mass shootings over the weekend in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, killed at least 31 people and wounded scores more. Those incidents were just the latest such deadly attacks in the United States, which has tallied more than 250 since Jan. 1, according to a new report by Gun Violence Archive. The group defines a mass shooting as one that claims the lives of at least four victims. David Hemenway, professor of  health policy at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, and author of the 2006 book “Private Guns, Public Health,” has spent much of his career studying gun violence. He spoke with the Gazette recently about what can be done to stop mass shootings.

GAZETTE: How do other countries, where mass killings are less common, handle gun issues differently?

HEMENWAY: First, it’s important to recognize the other high-income countries start off with many fewer guns and much stronger gun laws. Second, often when there is a mass shooting in another country it’s a time when everyone is thinking about guns, and it becomes an opportunity to think about what kinds of gun laws are needed. Typically it is a time when countries improve their gun laws, making them stronger, not solely to prevent mass shootings but to also to help prevent other firearm-related problems, such as homicides, suicides, gun robbery, gun intimidations, and gun accidents.

More here.

Rachel Connolly at The Baffler:

But there is a catch. This groundbreaking research is relevant mostly to people of European descent. In short: white people. While every GWAS uses a vast amount of genetic data, it is often of European origin only. And while it is well known that findings from the genetic data of one ethnic group cannot be easily generalized to another population, the practice persists. This is acknowledged as a flaw by researchers in almost every study I consulted, and yet none had taken steps to mitigate it. Additionally, the disparity has hardly been reported on.

In the second paragraph of the July anorexia study, the researchers state plainly that only genetic data of European origin was used—but not one of the mainstream news outlets celebrating this groundbreaking scientific advance included any mention of this. It wasn’t in the Guardian, which ran a selection of letters and news pieces on the study, or in the Wall Street Journal.

more here.

Richard Carwardine at Literary Review:

Frederick Douglass – runaway slave, radical activist, brilliant orator and writer, tireless advocate for his race, political office-holder – lays claim to being the most influential African-American of all time. Certainly, no other black American life has been more remarkable or significant, and few other lives, black or white, have lent themselves, as did Douglass’s, to the publication of three separate and bestselling autobiographies, each of them an essential source for a biographer. In his mid-twenties, newly established as an abolitionist celebrity, he wrote Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, a dramatic account in simple but vivid prose of his twenty years as a Maryland slave; further autobiographies, published in 1855 and 1881, stylishly recorded his activities as a campaigner for emancipation and racial equality both during the civil war that secured black freedom and in its aftermath, when the halting steps towards black civil rights faltered.

more here.

Emma Taggart in My Modern Met:

Today, many science books are full of detailed photos that reveal the intricate parts of plant life, but prior to the invention of photography (and macro photography), it was up to botanical illustrators and researchers to record the fascinating forms of flora and fauna. One scientist who recorded his findings with drawings is Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, a German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, and physician.

Made during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, his brilliantly colorful and highly stylized drawings, watercolors, and sketches reveal how different forms of plant life appear under the microscope. Although each hand-drawn organism looks like something from a science fiction book, Haeckel’s body of work sheds light on the incredible hidden intricacies of real, natural forms that inhabit the Earth.

Born in Germany in 1834, Ernst Haeckel studied medicine at the University of Berlin and graduated in 1857. While he was a student, his professor Johannes Müller, took him on a summer field trip to observe small sea creatures off the coast of Heligoland in the North Sea, sparking his life-long fascination for natural forms and biology. In 1859, when Haeckel was 25, he traveled to Italy where he spent time in Napoli discovering his artistic talent. In the same year, he went to Messina where he studied the structures of radiolarians (microscopic protozoa that produce intricate mineral skeletons). He published 59 scientific illustrations between 1860 and 1862, along with the original microscope slides.

More here. (Note: Thanks to dear friend Bim Bissel)