by Ashutosh Jogalekar

We shall not cease from exploration.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. —T. S. Eliot

Robert Kurson closes Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 with a deceptively simple scene. Decades into the twenty-first century, he takes his teenage son, armed with an iPhone, an Xbox, and all the distractions of modern technology, to see a Saturn V laid on its side, bursting out of its building. The boy doesn’t check his phone. He doesn’t take a picture. He just stands there, staring at the five enormous F-1 engine nozzles, each taller than a person, and after several silent minutes asks if they can stay longer. The Saturn V guarantees turning every person, no matter how young or old, into that boy.

I had just returned from a visit to NASA myself, standing beneath the behemoth and feeling something close to vertigo. You can know the numbers – 363 feet long, millions of pounds of thrust, nearly a million gallons of propellant – and still be unprepared for the physical reality of it. The rocket overwhelms abstraction. Like Kurson’s son, I found myself wordless, pulled into a long stare, asking the same unspoken question: how did anyone dare build this thing? Rocket Men provides part of the answer.

What the book does better than almost any account of Apollo is make the case that Apollo 8, usually treated as a dress rehearsal for Apollo 11, may have been the most consequential spaceflight of them all. Apollo 11 was about arriving. Apollo 8 was about leaving, about the first time human beings severed the umbilical cord to Earth and committed themselves to a quarter-million-mile journey with no rescue, no precedent, and no margin for error. Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins’s later remark, quoted near the end of the book – that a century from now Apollo 8 might be judged more significant than Apollo 11 – sounds provocative until Kurson patiently shows why it may simply be accurate. Read more »

Rachel is one of the winners of the American Philosophical Association’s 2025 Public Philosophy Op-Ed Contest for one of her essays here at 3QD. There is more information about that and other APA prizes at their website:

The APA committee on public philosophy sponsors the Public Philosophy Op-Ed Contest for the best opinion-editorials published by philosophers. The goal is to honor up to five standout pieces that successfully blend philosophical argumentation with an op-ed writing style. Winning submissions will call public attention, either directly or indirectly, to the value of philosophical thinking. The pieces will be judged in terms of their success as examples of public philosophy, and should be accessible to the general public, focused on important topics of public concern, and characterized by sound reasoning.

Rachel Robison-Greene (Utah State)

“The Temptations of Nostalgia” (3 Quarks Daily)

Rachel Robison-Greene earned her PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2017. Her research interests are largely in meta-ethics, epistemology, and applied ethics (with particular interests in animals, the environment, and technology). She is the author of the book Edibility and in Vitro Meat: Ethical Considerations. She is a regular contributor to the popular blog 3 Quarks Daily. Rachel serves as the Secretary of the Culture and Animals Foundation and is the Chair Elect of the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl.

More information about the APA prizes here.

Congratulations, Rachel!

And Happy Newton’s Day to All!

A Remembering by Nils Peterson

Christmas Eve began with a carol sing at the big Presbyterian Church on Crescent Avenue which many of the rich town people attended. More cathedral than church. My brother and I went to Sunday school there when we were old enough because the small Lutheran church of our parents was not large enough to have one. My father was a chauffeur for one of the rich families.

The caroling was held in a large, handsome meeting room where, in the spring, the flower show would be held. A lot of chairs were set out and there’d be a big tree beautifully decorated and boxes of candy for the children to suck on when it was all over. I remember a particularly revolting lime-green ball sour enough and bitter enough to make even the greediest child spit it out. Some of the gathered Presbyterians had begun their celebrating before the sing, because after about the third carol, some wag would start calling for the “Hallelujah Chorus,” the last song in the songbook, and the calls, catcalls almost for the calls for it increased as the carols went on, grew until at last the leader with a sigh gave up and we hallelujahed our way out of there.

At home, the chauffeur’s apartment above the garage, there would be a supper of Swedish meatballs and boiled potatoes and lingonberry and sardines and cheeses and cookies. At the right moment, we’d go down the stairs and, across the driveway to the path leading to the big house – crunch of gravel, full moon shining between tree branches, feel of tended grass – to the kitchen door where Marie, the cook, my father’s cousin and my godmother, waited to let us in. Anet is there, the downstairs maid, and Martha, the upstairs maid. They are “the girls,” the three live-in Swedish servants. Marie, the cook, was my father’s cousin, my godmother, and the one responsible for getting my father the chauffeur job in 1932 in the heart of the depression. He had been out of work since he and mother came back from visiting their parents in Sweden to show off how well they were doing in America. Shortly before their return, the stock market crashed. The year, of course, 1929.

Anet was the one who served the Deforests the dinner Marie had cooked. She had her own pantry next to the kitchen where she kept jars of cookies to serve with the lady’s tea. Martha, the upstairs maid, was looked on as being a little racy because she smoked. She quit her job one time and went back to Sweden, but returned in a few months. The rich people never quite forgave her desertion. Read more »

by Ed Simon

Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty. —2 Corinthians 3:17

If God does not exist, then everything is permitted. —Attributed to Fyodor Dostoevsky

It had been twenty centuries since He’d last walked upon the Earth, and it was in the ninth year of the new reign that He quietly appeared again late afternoon on a cold Christmas Eve, this time at a needle-exchange clinic in Alphabet City. Long greasy black hair in front of a scarred tawny face, hunched over, short, hobbled, and ugly, the destitute man of sorrows quietly and at first without notice went from empty chair to empty chair, sitting silently next to the junkies and the HIV infected for a minute or two.  He wasn’t recognizable; He barely looked like all of those Pietas and nativity scenes and Crucifixions affixing the walls of the Met and the Cloisters. And yet, His people slowly recognized Him, and soon others began to recognize Him as well. Brows that had furrowed with deep fear for so long that they had seemingly never felt eased, suddenly felt eased. Eyes that had darted nervously, wondering who was an informant, and had scarcely relaxed for almost a decade, suddenly relaxed. Bodies that ached and were cold suddenly felt whole and warm.

He was in the clinic for maybe less than fifteen minutes, but as he headed the few blocks towards Washington Square Park, the cold and huddled masses of citizens, used to food and fuel shortages and the prediction of yet another swirling polar vortex freezing the northern part of the North American land mass, jabbed each other in hungry ribs with angular elbows, and pointed at the man in the soiled purple wind-breaker and the filthy stocking cap who walked those trash-strewn streets.

A young woman who had been homeless for the past two years, her siblings long since sent by bus to one of the black sites near the border, and herself only managing to survive by purchasing forged citizenship papers for close to three weeks under-the-table pay, and a few hours of her dignity, felt tears in her own brown eyes when she looked into His brown eyes. The gold-plated rosaries that were the last relic of her parents’ love, before they were ostensibly bussed back to Ecuador after they were seized in the middle of the night, seemed warmed by an internal heat as she closed her hand around them in her pocket. Read more »

A glass ashtray turned the weak winter sunlight from the window into this rainbow on a wooden cutting board on our kitchen counter.

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by Katalin Balog

In a recent bestseller, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares argue that artificial superintelligence (ASI), if it is ever built, will wipe out humanity. Unsurprisingly, this idea has gotten a lot of attention. People want to know if humanity has finally gotten around to producing an accurate prophecy of impending doom. The argument is based on an ASI that pursues its goals without limit—no satiation, no rest, no stepping back to ask what for? It seems like a creature out of an ancient myth. But it might be real. I will consider ASI in the light of two stories about the ancient king Midas of Phrygia. But first, let’s see the argument.

What is an ASI?

An ASI is supposed to be a machine that can perform all human cognitive tasks better than humans. The usual understanding of this leaves out a vast swath of “cognitive tasks” that we humans perform: think of experiencing the world in all its glory and misery. Reflecting on this experience, attending to it, appreciating it, and expressing it are some of our most important “cognitive tasks”. These are not likely, to use an understatement, to be found in an AI. Not just because AI consciousness is rather implausible to ever emerge, but also because, even if AI were to become conscious, it would not do these things, not if its developers stuck to the goal of creating helpful assistants for humans. They are designed to be our servants, not autonomous agents who resonate with and appreciate the world.

OK, but what about other, more purely intellectual tasks? LLMs are already very competent in text generation, math, and scientific reasoning, as well as many other areas. While doing all those things, LLMs also behave as if they are following goals. So are they similar to us, after all, in that they know many things and are able to work toward goals in the world? Read more »

by Paul Braterman

Last Saturday was the 20^th anniversary of the day on which Judge John Jones III handed down his decisive ruling, in the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, that Intelligent Design was a version of creationism, which is religion and not science, and as such violated the Establishment Clause of the US Constitution and could not be taught within the publicly funded school system. Given changes in the US legal landscape, we need to ask whether this ruling is still secure. And given everything else that is happening in the US at the moment, we may wonder whether this even matters. Here I lay out why I think that the ruling is not necessarily secure, review what is at stake, and argue that it matters very much indeed.

What we now call Christian Nationalism has its roots in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, when creationists such as Tim LaHaye fused together political conservatism, the newly adopted abortion issue, literalist Bible-based religion, and the rejection of evolution science as Humanist, un-American, and as we would now say Woke. We can see the influence of these ideas today in Trump’s administration, where at least three cabinet ministers (Pete Hegseth, Scott Turner at HUD, and Doug Collins at the VA) are creationists, as are Speaker Mike Johnson, Mike Huckabee, ambassador to Israel, and Russell Vought who at the Office of Management and Budget has enormous day-to-day influence. To these we might add Vice President Vance, and Health [sic] Secretary RF Kennedy Jr. These are not creationists, but share their disdain for the scientific and academic establishments; Vance rose to stardom by telling the US Religious Right that “the Professors are the enemy,” while Kennedy’s onslaught on established science is all too well-known. Thus creationism is closely coupled to the rest of the Regime’s war on reality.

As for the claim, pervasive in the creationist literature, that evolution acceptance involves religion denial, I should mention here that Judge Jones himself is a committed Lutheran, and has offered himself as an example of the compatibility of Christian belief and evolution acceptance, while Ken Miller, a crucial witness at the trial and indefatigable campaigner against creationism, is a devout Catholic, author of Finding Darwin’s God, and co-author of a widely used high school textbook, Miller and Levine Biology. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Tim Sommers

“I’d rather entrust the government to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory,” William Buckley once said, “than to the faculty of Harvard University.” If we can put aside his right-reactionary politics and look past the performative anti-intellectualism on display here (from a Yalie!), there is the seed of an interesting question here. Could we replace elections with random selections?

A recent mini-movement among political philosophers has answered, yes, we could. Arguably the leader of this movement, Alexander Guerrero, author of Lotacracy: Democracy Without Elections (2024), has gone further arguing we should eliminate voting in favor of a lottery system to appoint our political representatives. Here’s Guerrero describing his view and its advantages.

We would be better off using randomly chosen citizens, selected to serve on single-issue legislatures (each covering, say, transportation or education or agriculture), who would learn about the relevant issues in detail and engage with each other over an extended period of time to make policy decisions. Instead of a generalist legislature like Congress, we would have 30 single-issue legislatures, each with 300 randomly-chosen citizen legislators serving three-year terms.  A true random selection of citizens age 18 and up could be established using mechanisms like those used for jury selection. Those selected wouldn’t be required to serve, but a significant salary, the promise to accommodate family and work requirements, and the sense that service is a civic duty and honor should encourage them. Without elections, we would lose the sense that ‘our team’ wins or loses. We wouldn’t have teams in the same way. Moving away from a generalist legislative process opens up places for us to identify issues on which we agree rather than having our attention concentrated on those few issues that most deeply divide us. Without campaign promises, political ads and re-elections, we could finally move beyond the capture and control of political institutions by wealthy corporate interests. This would truly return democratic control to the people.

I am not a huge fan of this view, but I have to say Guerrero deserves a lot of credit for his tightly argued, imaginative work. As John Rawls emphasized in developing his own theory of “justice as fairness,” the best way to evaluate ethical and normative political views is to have well-developed, comprehensive alternatives to compare. Guerrero has certainly developed – across 464 pages – a comprehensive alternative to democracy as currently practiced. Also, props to Guerrero for the bravado involved in even imaging an alternative to conventional democratic politics – especially in such detail.

Lotacracy is not entirely unprecedented. Athens had one. Sort of. Our current jury system can be seen that way. And there have been recent experiments with lotacracy around the world, for example, in Canada. But these lotteries have been been quite limited, deliberative rather than legislative, and advisory only.

Guerrero says he has four main reasons to prefer lotteries to elections. Read more »

by Christopher Hall

“This business of a poet,” said Imlac, “is to examine, not the individual, but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances. He does not number the streaks of the tulip, or describe the different shades of the verdure of the forest. He is to exhibit in his portraits of nature such prominent and striking features as recall the original to every mind, and must neglect the minuter discriminations, which one may have remarked and another have neglected, for those characteristics which are alike obvious to vigilance and carelessness.” —Johnson, Rasselas

If poets are to take Imlac’s advice – and I’m not necessarily sure they should – then the proper season for doing so must be winter. No streaks of the tulip to distract us, and the verdure of the forest has been restricted to a very limited palette. Then the snow comes, and the world becomes a suggestion of something hidden, accessible only to memory or anticipation, like a toy under wrapping. Perhaps “general properties and large appearances” are accessible to us only as we gradually delete the details of life; we certainly don’t seem to have much access to them directly. This is knowledge by negation; winter is the supreme season for apophatic thinking.

In the poems I’m going to look at here, when snow comes, it often comes precisely as this kind of obliterator of detail, but it would be difficult to consistently see a restorative counter-movement toward the “knowledge of nature” and “modes of life,” as Imlac says later. Sometimes negation is only that, and loss is loss. Robert Penn Warren’s “Love Recognized” opens with deadening repetition and lack of precision:

There are many things in the world and you

Are one of them. Many things keep happening and

You are one of them, and the happening that

Is you keeps falling like snow

On the landscape of not-you, hiding hideousness, until

The streets and the world of wrath are choked with snow.

“Many things in the world,” “Many things keep happening” – the stammering opening is in the language of someone not sure how to articulate something, hoping that simply by rearranging the same words and making a few minor additions some meaning may be aimed at. The division made here between self and world is the simplest possible: “you” verses “not-you.” But at least the snow comes to hide “hideousness” and the “world of wrath.” Read more »

Sughra Raza. Underbelly Color and Shadows. Santiago, Chile, Nov, 2017.

Digital photograph.

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by Sherman J. Clark

There is no other way of guarding oneself from flatterers except letting men understand that to tell you the truth does not offend you. —Machiavelli

A friend recently described to me his research in quantum physics. Later, curious to understand better, I asked ChatGPT to explain the concepts. Within minutes, I was feeling remarkably insightful—my follow-up questions seemed penetrating, my grasp of the implications sophisticated. The AI elaborated on my observations with such eloquence that I briefly experienced what I can only describe as Stephen Hawking-adjacent feelings. I am no Stephen Hawking, that’s for sure. But ChatGPT made me feel like it—or at least it seemed to try. Nor am I unique in this experience. The New York Times recently described a man who spent weeks convinced by ChatGPT that he had made a profound mathematical breakthrough. He had not.

To be clear: Chat GPT was very helpful to me as I tried to understand my friend’s work. It explained field equations, wave functions, and measurement problems with admirable clarity. The information was accurate, the explanations illuminating. I am not talking here about AI fabrication or unreliability. And in any event, it does not matter whether a law professor understands quantum physics. The danger wasn’t in what I learned or failed to learn about physics—it was in what I was l was at risk of doing to myself.

Each eloquent elaboration of my amateur observations was training me in the wrong intellectual habits: to confuse fluent discussion with deep understanding, to mistake ChatGPT’s eloquent reframing of my thoughts for genuine insight, to experience satisfaction where I should have felt appropriate humility about the limits of my comprehension. I was nurturing hubris precisely where I needed to develop humility. And, crucially, intellectual sophistication does not guarantee immunity. Anyone who has spent time on a college campus knows that intellectual hubris has always flourished among the highly educated. It is hardly a new phenomenon that cleverness and sophistication can be put to work in service of ego and self-deception.

What makes AI different is that it has become our companion in this self-deception. We are forming relationships with these systems—not metaphorically, but in the practical sense that matters. Read more »

by Lei Wang

Lately I have the feeling that everything is speaking to me. This is concerning, not least because there is a family tendency towards mild schizophrenia. As a delinquent intellectual, I have read only a tablespoon of Jung and have never gone to analysis; in fact, I have resisted treating life like literature. I know that not everything is symbolic, that sometimes things happen for no good reason, or at least not any reason that I can claim to know. And yet recently I have been treating everything as a sign: IF the universe were speaking to me, what would it be trying to say?

And I have also been saying back to the universe, “Hey, I got your message!” When the toilet kept running after a midnight flush, disrupting my sleep, I thought it was trying to tell me I had been inconsiderate of my downstairs neighbor, flushing so late. “Thank you,” I said to the toilet. “I got it. Your job here is done.” And immediately the messenger quieted. Yes, every college student knows: correlation, not causation.

But tell that to my Hyperactive Agency Detection Device: what the neuroscientist Justin Barrett calls the part of our nervous systems that is alert for some kind of intelligence beneath reality, probably because once upon a time it was helpful to think the grass moved not from the wind but from something prowling inside it. The Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD) is liberal with giving away a sense of agency. It’s the mechanism by which we attribute essence and personality to our stuffed animals, even if they’re not “real”; it’s how people have AI boyfriends nowadays. Conspiracy theorists have a lot of HADD.

The other day, procrastinating on writing, I was fixing a beloved broken necklace clasp by transferring a clasp from a different, less beloved necklace (I have not gone so far as to believe my necklaces care about this hierarchy). Anyway—a tricky business, having neither pliers nor delicate fingers. I managed three steps in this way, but in the final step, the tiny lobster clasp flew off the desk. I heard it land on the hardwood floor. I swept; I scoured; I was late to my Zoom. I couldn’t find it anywhere in the world on my hands and knees and yet it was everywhere in my consciousness. For hours. My body, which usually finds many ways to be distracted and get itself snacks, had transformed into pure hunter. Read more »

Two Hands

First time I saw Escher’s two hands drawing themselves I thought,
how cool this picture is in its absurd beauty, then much later,
as in now, it comes to me as I give my cognition another chance,
another shot at understanding, more clout in the process of perception,
I think, this is a fundamental truth, a reality truer than the day-to-day
fever dreams of imagination, a truth offering “Eureka!” the word ever followed
by an exclamation point which has just explicitly summed and shattered
the boundary between ignorance and understanding. 

There they are, two hands poised with pencils, expressing
the extraordinary, uncomplicated truth that from
cradle to grave we are all drawing shifting renditions
of ourselves.

by Jim Culleny
12/16/25

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by Azra Raza

In June 1976, an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris was hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine along with two German radicals, diverted to Entebbe, Uganda, and received with open support from Idi Amin. There, the hijackers separated the passengers—releasing most non-Jewish travelers while holding Israelis and Jews hostage—and demanded the release of Palestinian prisoners. As the deadline approached, Israeli commandos flew secretly to Entebbe, drove toward the terminal in a motorcade disguised as Idi Amin’s own and stormed the building. In ninety minutes, all hijackers and several Ugandan soldiers were killed, 102 hostages were freed, and three died in the crossfire. The only Israeli soldier lost was the mission commander, Yoni Netanyahu.

Two years later, I traveled to Uganda myself to visit my parents, who were there while my father helped draft the nation’s new constitution for Idi Amin’s regime. I had no idea that this brief stop in Entebbe would return to haunt me decades later—when, in 2003, I was detained for over five hours at Ben Gurion Airport with my nine-year-old daughter, questioned endlessly about why I had ever set foot in Entebbe at all.

While in Uganda, my siblings and I fell instantly in love with the country—the sheer beauty of the land, the dark mystery of Bat Valley with tens of thousands of fruit bats rising in the evenings as a black cloud from the edge of the city near William Street, the riotous, ever-changing foliage that seemed to reinvent itself every few steps, and the magnificent wildlife we encountered in breathtaking abundance on our unforgettable safari. That trip remains one of the best trips of my life filled with the warmest memories of the country and the people.

Years later, as I began to understand Uganda beyond my youthful impressions, the work of Mahmood Mamdani offered me a far deeper, more sobering lens—revealing the political currents and historical wounds beneath the beauty we had so casually admired.

What makes Slow Poison instantly gripping is not merely Mamdani’s brilliance as a scholar, but the far rarer gift he brings to this book: the authority of one who lived the history he recounts. Read more »

by Steve Szilagyi

The appetite for Beatles product cannot be sated. Last month, Apple Corps Ltd. released Anthology 4, a new compilation in The Beatles Anthology series, as part of a broader thirtieth-anniversary remastered Anthology Collection. The Anthology series, for those who don’t know, consists of newly mixed outtakes of Beatles songs, previously unreleased tracks, and updated mixes of the two “new” Beatles songs, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love.” That is 155 tracks of Beatles music presented in alternate versions—versions that are, in most cases, markedly inferior to the originals.

Most Beatles fans already own these songs in their original incarnations on LP, CD, and MP3—along with the many remastered, remixed, reordered, and reissued versions that have appeared since the Beatles’ catalog was belatedly released on CD in 1987. Since then, we’ve had authorized issues of the BBC radio recordings, the failed Decca audition tapes, and the long-circulating Star-Club Recordings. And serious Beatles obsessives have, for decades now, been trading bootlegs: hundreds of alternate takes, studio chatter, Christmas messages, and fan-club recordings.

Yet despite this surfeit, Anthology 4 debuted in the Top Ten on five Billboard album charts. This comes only a few years after the public turned Peter Jackson’s eight-hour Beatles band-practice documentary, Get Back, into a critical, financial, and strategic success for Apple Corps and Disney+. Read more »

by Laurence Peterson

If you have to argue, you’ve already lost. —Unknown

There is so much about the Trump regime that is troublingly peculiar: the base cruelty, the arrogant racism and sexism, the evangelistic ignorance, the fearless disregard for existing law, the super-conspicuous corruption; one can go on and on. What I want to focus on here today is how he, and his toadies and operatives in the administration, lie to all of us. As I shall try to explain below, the intention underlying the lies can vary somewhat depending on the part of the population being addressed at any given time, but one feature seems to stand out in almost all of the messaging: the content of the communication is not as important as the expression or implication of possible contempt for the recipients of that content.

Just in the last few days, Trump has escalated the military buildup off Venezuela to such an outsized point that it is rather clear that an attempt is being fostered to instigate a commission of some kind of rash mistake (by either side, with only the slightest degree of plausible deniability) that will result in hostilities between Americans and Venezuelans (or Colombians), which would then result in a manufacture of consent amongst the American electorate to tolerate a more vigorous attempt at regime change than they seem to be willing to countenance right now. It is also evident that there are other forces in the administration pushing in other directions, and that Trump enjoys playing them off against each other, but commitment to the first component appears to be the dominant component of Venezuela policy. Whatever the outcome of the jockeying, the Trump stance has (until very recently) been consistently expressed as an attempt to combat the importation of illegal drugs into the United States, especially fentanyl and cocaine, despite the demonstrated fact that Venezuela plays at best a very minor role in the trafficking of either drug to the US. In the very midst of all this, Trump pardoned the ex-President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted by a US court (and imprisoned there), of, you guessed it, trafficking 400 tons of cocaine into the US. Hernandez is even alleged to have said “We are going to shove the drugs up the noses of the gringos, and they won’t even know it.”

Also in the last few days, The Guardian reported that Trump owned two mortgages he claimed were primary dwellings, the very charge that Trump directed his Department of Justice to (unsuccessfully) indict former New York City prosecutor Letitia James on. James, it will be remembered, was the prosecutor who in 2022 filed a civil suit against Trump that resulted in penalties and a fine of four hundred million dollars (which was later voided as excessive; James plans to appeal this).

I have chosen these incidents as illustrative of my contention because they are so obviously contradictory and involve actions so hypocritical that it is impossible, if one is paying any attention to them at all, to avoid a conclusion that Trump and his administration have absolutely no respect for the recipients of this information, or that they are at all concerned about any possible consequences of presenting such blatantly offensive duplicity as its modus operandi to innumerable multitudes of citizens. They are, in the most direct way, putting up the biggest of middle fingers to the very ones they took an oath to serve and protect. How is this possible? What does it mean that we have come to this absurd point? Read more »

by Carol A Westbrook

Who can remember back to the first poets,
The greatest ones,…so lofty and disdainful of renown
They left us not a name to know them by —Howard Nemerov, The Makers

In this poem, Howard Nemerov, Poet Laureate from 1988-1990, reminds us that we have no idea when poetry—that is speech—began. The origin of speech is lost in the depths of prehistory, but archaeologists are working hard to get a better understanding of how speech began, because it is one of the few things that makes us unique as human beings.

Social animals communicate in order to coordinate activities, share resources, and improve their chance of survival. There are many examples of animals communicatio: bees, for example, do an elaborate dance to tell others where they found food; whales and elephants also exchange information and coordinate activities. But humans are the only animals that communicate by speech.

At one time it was thought that closely related animals like the great apes, chimps and bonobos would be capable of speech if only they were raised like human babies. There were several attempts to do this by raising young chimps in human families and monitoring their acquisition of language. But while these chimps learned to understand some human speech, they fell far behind their human brothers and sisters in vocalizing more than a word or two. They never learned to speak properly more than a few words, and it soon became apparent that these apes must have been lacking certain anatomic features that were present only in humans.

Scientists have a fairly comprehensive understanding of the evolution of the human species, supported by the fossil record and DNA studies.

As seen on the picture on the right, our likely earliest ancestor is called Australopithecus, and is thought to have existed about 3.4 million years ago (mya).. The term Hominid (Family Hominidae) includes all great apes including humans (orangutans, gorillas, chimps, bonobos, and us) while hominim (Tribe Hominim) is a narrow group within hominids, referring specifically to modern humans, our extinct ancestors, and all species more closely related to us than the chimpanzees, after our evolutionary split from chimpanzees.  After Australopithecus came homo habilis, the maker, who made and used stone tools. Next came homo erectus, who used fire; then came Neanderthal and Homo sapiens, two species who evolved from a common ancestor. At what point did speech arise? Read more »

by Dilip D’Souza

On a stargazing trip between September 19 and September 23 this year, I spied a supernova.

Well, not quite. I took plenty of photographs of a spectacular night sky through the four nights I spent out in the open. Then I came home and looked through them, still filled with wonder at what I had captured. Then I read some astronomy news. Then I returned to my photographs and looked through again, this time in some frantic urgency.

Then I had to (figuratively) sit down. For there it was. The supernova. In my photograph.

That is: On September 23, there was news that an amateur astronomer in Australia, John Seach, had discovered a supernova in Sagittarius two days earlier. In fact, and astonishingly, he had discovered two supernovae on successive days. The brighter of the two was only visible in the Southern hemisphere. But the other one was in the constellation of Sagittarius. Because I had pointed my camera at the Milky Way so often through my trip, Sagittarius was in several of my photographs.

I pored over all of them. I had several images from before September 21, and several more from after. All I needed to do was find a dot in a post-September 21 photograph that wasn’t there in a pre-September 21 photograph. You might wonder how, in images with thousands of dots – that’s how spectacular the night sky was – I could even think of finding a specific one. But the report from Australia had an image locating the supernova just “below” Sagittarius. So I knew pretty much exactly where in my photographs to look for it.

And to my amazed delight, I actually did find such a dot, precisely where I expected it. There on September 22. Not there on September 20. The supernova, on my laptop. Read more »