From Science:

We often think of memories like Polaroid snapshots, images frozen in time. But they're more like the fluid, melting pocket watches of Salvador Dali's painting The Persistence of Memory. Now scientists have developed a method that takes advantage of memory's malleability to block specific fear memories, which could someday lead to new therapies for anxiety disorders and phobias. Each time you recall the ice cream cake and clown from your fifth birthday party, the memory is subject to change. Information about the color of the clown's polka-dotted suit, for example, becomes “unfrozen” and could change from red to blue. This process is called reconsolidation, and scientists have blocked scary memories in rats–such as the association between a specific tone and a painful shock–during reconsolidation with drugs. Unfortunately, these drugs stop protein synthesis in the brain, which would lead to terrible side effects in people.

A different approach to diminishing fear is called extinction training. In experiments with rats, scientists keep playing the ominous tone without a shock, and over time, the animals stop getting scared by the tone. Therapists use a similar method called exposure therapy to help people overcome debilitating fears, such as claustrophobia. But these methods aren't as long-lasting as the dangerous drugs. Earlier this year, scientists reported a happy compromise that worked in rats. They timed extinction training to when the rats' brains were reconsolidating the fearful tone memory, erasing that memory in the process.

More here.

From Nature:

New species might arise as a result of single rare events, rather than through the gradual accumulation of many small changes over time, according to a study of thousands of species and their evolutionary family trees. This contradicts a widely accepted theory of how speciation occurs: that species are continually changing to keep pace with their environment, and that new species emerge as these changes accrue. Known as the 'Red Queen' hypothesis, it is named after the character in Lewis Carroll's book Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There who tells a surprised Alice: “Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

The Red Queen hypothesis rests on the idea that species must continuously evolve just to hang on to their ecological niche. That gradual evolution is driven by the constant genetic churn of sexual selection. A consequence of this is that all of the species in a particular family, or genus, gradually evolve to form new species at the same rate.

But Mark Pagel and his team at the University of Reading, UK, challenge this idea.

More here.

Fascinating article by 3QD friend Adam Waytz in Scientific American:

Of course, status differences are not simply relevant to economic standing, but they appear to be on our minds at all times. As renowned neuroscientist, Michael Gazzaniga, has noted, “When you get up in the morning, you do not think about triangles and squares and these similes that psychologists have been using for the past 100 years. You think about status. You think about where you are in relation to your peers.” Between CEO and employee, quarterback and wide receiver, husband and wife, status looms large. Recent work by social scientists has tackled the topic, elucidating behavioral differences between low-status and high-status individuals, and the methods by which those at the bottom of the totem pole are most successful at climbing to the top.

Psychologist PJ Henry at DePaul University recently published an article demonstrating that low-status individuals have higher tendencies toward violent behavior, explaining these differences in terms of low-status compensation theory.

More here.

Hello,

The voting round of our politics prize (details here) is over. A total of 286 votes were cast for the 46 nominees (click here for full list of nominees). Thanks to the nominators and the voters for participating.

Carla Goller has designed a “trophy” logo that our top twenty vote-getters may choose to display on their own blogs. So here they are, in descending order from the most voted-for:

1. MF Blog: Is the Obama administration still worth defending?
2. 3 Quarks Daily: Embers from my Neighbor’s House
3. Elizabitchez: Middle class values don't solve poverty
4. 3 Quarks Daily: America, the Cold War, and the Taliban
5. 3 Quarks Daily: Is Obama About To Become Just Another War Criminal?
6. News From the Zona: Republican Virtue and Equality
7. Justin E. H. Smith: On Criticizing Israel
8. 3 Quarks Daily: May our Gods be angry: Celestial politics in Bas Congo
9. Wisdom of the West: Blunderbuss
10. Once Upon A Time: Tribalism and the Destructive Politics of Demonization (I): The Largely Unrecognized Possibility for a New Coalition
11. Tom Paine's Ghost: Should scientists speak their minds?
12. Black Agenda Report: The Great Black Hajj of 2009
13. 3 Quarks Daily: Who ended the 6-month ceasefire in Israel/Palestine?
14. Chapati Mystery: Will Pakistan Become a Theocracy? III
15. Black Agenda Report: Liar, Liar!! Barack Obama's Secretary of War
16. Glenn Greenwald: Greg Craig and Obama's worsening civil liberties record
17. Lenin's Tomb: Rwanda, the RPF, and the myth of non-intervention
18. PH2.1: Zero Global Zero
19. The Cedar Lounge Revolution: The market and high incomes
20. I Hate What You Just Said: Thomas Paine, Teabagger

The editors of 3 Quarks Daily will now pick the top six entries from these, and after possibly adding up to three “wildcard” entries, will send that list of finalists to Tariq Ali on December 11. We will also post the list of finalists here on that date.

Good luck!

Abbas

Titles and excerpts of all 3QD posts can now be delivered to your inbox once a day. This is done between 1AM and 2AM, NYC time, early every morning. You can also choose one of the other ways of getting 3QD mentioned in the title to this post.

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The Darwinian controversy continues, but some things should be clear. If Darwin gives comfort and even delight to atheists who claim him as a patron, they are mistaken in their choice of hero. He never even divested himself entirely of a certain qualified belief in a Master Designer, though he rejected the sweetest blandishments of natural theology. For all his brilliance, he was prone to confusion about the most serious matters, including the far-reaching ramifications of his own theory. It was a robust confusion, however, the conflict of an austere intellect, a sense of the marvelous, and a lacerated heart. Compassion guided him toward his theory, and an icy mind confirmed its truth. That truth remains dubious for many, whether simple religious believers trying to live righteous lives or scientists and philosophers viewing life through the lens of intelligent design. To try to settle the questions they raise is far beyond my powers, although the simple and righteous who maintain the literal truth of Genesis do not figure in a serious discussion. But in any case the wonder of Darwin endures, that of a man who searched the world’s pain and tried to comprehend it, who like a great novelist truly bore in his mind and heart as much earthly life as they could hold. There is rich matter for all who seek it in his life and works.

more from Algis Valiunas at The New Atlantis here.

Americans would like things to be better. According to public opinion surveys in recent years, everyone would like their child to have improved life chances at birth. They would prefer it if their wife or daughter had the same odds of surviving maternity as women in other advanced countries. They would appreciate full medical coverage at lower cost, longer life expectancy, better public services, and less crime. When told that these things are available in Austria, Scandinavia, or the Netherlands, but that they come with higher taxes and an “interventionary” state, many of those same Americans respond: “But that is socialism! We do not want the state interfering in our affairs. And above all, we do not wish to pay more taxes.” This curious cognitive dissonance is an old story. A century ago, the German sociologist Werner Sombart famously asked: Why is there no socialism in America? There are many answers to this question. Some have to do with the sheer size of the country: shared purposes are difficult to organize and sustain on an imperial scale. There are also, of course, cultural factors, including the distinctively American suspicion of central government.

more from Tony Judt at the NYRB here.

In 1987, the singer David Yow and the bassist David Sims were at loose ends after their band, Scratch Acid, broke up. Based in Austin, Scratch Acid was a volcanic, loopy, and virtuosic group led by one of the few singers who can convincingly claim Iggy Pop as an influence. Yow and Pop both use their bodies as much as their voices to transmit information, and that information always includes the message “Anything goes.” Pop was famous for cutting himself and smearing himself with peanut butter; Yow, at the one Scratch Acid show I saw, in the eighties, pulled what looked like peanut butter, or worse, out of his pants and threw it into the audience. (It was flour, water, and food coloring.) Yow is less herky-jerky than Pop—he throws his body around without any particular rhythmic predictability, seeming to engage with an invisible opponent. Sometimes they do a jig; other times he crouches as if grabbed from behind, or kicks as if shaking off the pincers of a persistent crab.

more from Sasha Frere-Jones at The New Yorker here.

The Pillow

The pillow said:
at the end of the long day
only I know
the confident man’s confusion,
the nun’s desire,
the slight quiver in the tyrant’s eyelash,
the preacher’s obscenity,
the soul’s longing
for a warm body where flying sparks
become a glowing coal.
Only I know
the grandeur of unnoticed little things;
only I know the loser’s dignity,
the winner’s loneliness
and the stupid coldness one feels
when a wish has been granted.

by Mourid Barghouti

translation Radwa Ashour
from Midnight and Other Poems
Publisher: Arc Publications, Todmorden, Lancashire, 2009

From The Washington Post:

What an act of faith for novelist Mary Gordon to imagine that her new book, “Reading Jesus,” has a prayer. She admits upfront that she's not a Bible scholar; in fact, she had “never actually read the full Gospel” until she began this audacious plan to record and publish her reflections on Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. She fears scriptural scholars will find her approach “naive to the point of irresponsibility,” and she knows that conservative evangelicals who regard the Gospels as the literal expression of God's truth will scoff at the musings of this damnably liberal, feminist intellectual. But off she goes anyhow, girded only by her considerable intelligence and disarming sincerity, determined to look squarely at the Gospels, how she reads them and how she maintains what she calls her “hopeful faith.” “I am trying for a tone that is personal and self-questioning,” she says, “a tone and diction that neither shouts nor threatens. . . . Above all, I have no interest in making a doctrinal point, no desire to convert.”

…

She's not always the devil's advocate, but such pugnacious statements electrify her book. After all, this isn't Christopher Hitchens burping up an objection that any first-year theology student could dispel without breaking a communion wafer. Although Gordon is a confirmed believer, she admits, “There are at least as many good reasons for being appalled by Jesus as there are for being drawn to him.” She wants to read the Gospels while acknowledging her own bafflement, her own sense of disappointment and betrayal. What of those “embarrassing,” “cringe-inducing” miracles that make Jesus sound like some TV charlatan? How can Christians tolerate Jesus's rejection of his family, his lack of respect for the dead? Or the moral despair inspired by his demand that his followers be perfect? And aren't Jesus's efforts to confound his listeners a sign that he's “adolescently churlish, at worst punitively sadistic”?

All those difficult challenges lead up to a brief but stinging examination of anti-Semitism in the Gospels. Laid out here in the starkest terms is the real torment any Christian must confront. How much misery must a text cause, she makes us wonder, before we no longer can consider it sacred? As a well-trained literary critic, Gordon is interested in how we read, how we form meaning from these stories “through a glass, darkly.” And she wittily points out that orthodoxy isn't the only colored lens between the text and us. Most adult Christians, she notes, come to the New Testament contaminated with all kinds of vague, wildly misleading impressions from childhood, when the words were “inscribed on the soft wax of our consciousness.” Reading from the King James Version about Jesus healing the multitude of “divers diseases,” I remember being surprised that so many ancient people had the bends.

Gordon admits that she's constantly tempted by the example of Thomas Jefferson, who took scissors to the New Testament and simply cut out those parts that weren't in harmony with his Enlightenment rationality. But she won't let herself stoop to such violent bowdlerizing. She's drawn to the ambiguities; she agonizes over the contradictions rather than ignoring them. “I am committed to the questions,” she says in closing, “unsusceptible to final answers.” If you're looking for revelation, look elsewhere, but if it's enlightenment you're after, Gordon is a thoughtful and stirring guide.

More here.

From Science:

Testosterone has a reputation for causing violent and antisocial behavior. But that's a bad rap, according to a new study. Women given the hormone acted more fairly in an economic game than did those given a placebo. Interestingly, however, women in the placebo group were more antisocial if they thought they had received testosterone, indicating that our negative attitudes toward the hormone have a powerful sway on behavior. Scientists led by Ernst Fehr, a professor of neuroeconomics at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, suspected that testosterone is really about gaining and maintaining social status. And although status concerns lead to aggression, they theorized that testosterone does not necessarily make a person more self-seeking.

The team tested this idea by recruiting 121 women in their 20s to play a game that tests fairness. Two players, A and B, have to agree on the division of 10 money units, in this case Swiss francs. A proposes a division; B can only accept or reject. If B rejects the offer, neither gets any money. All the women were given a dose of either testosterone or a placebo under the tongue. Then 60 women designated as A played the game three times with three different partners, communicating through a computer. A “fair” offer would be a 50-50 split. So, according to common wisdom, A would make more unfair offers if she were high on testosterone. The status hypothesis predicts the opposite: An unfair offer is more likely to evoke a rejection, which is an affront to A's status. So A is more likely to make an offer that B will accept.

The status hypothesis won. The women given the testosterone made significantly higher offers on average, the group reports online today in Nature: 3.9 francs versus 3.4 francs for the placebo group. “Our interpretation of this finding is that testosterone renders concerns for social status more prominent,” says Fehr.

More here.

From Time:

Top 10 of Everything in 2009: All Lists

• Albums
• Animal Stories
• Apologies
• Art Exhibitions
• Awkward Moments
• Best Biz Deals
• Breakups
• Buzzwords
• Children's Books
• Crime Stories
• Editorial Cartoons
• Facebook Stories
• Fashion Faux Paus
• Fashion Moments
• Feuds
• Fiction Books
• Fleeting Celebrities
• Gadgets
• Green Ideas
• Heroes
• iPhone Apps
• Late-Night Jokes
• Magazine Covers
• Medical Breakthroughs
• Movie Performances
• Movies
• New Species
• News Stories
• Nonfiction Books
• Oddball News Stories
• Pariahs
• Pictures of the Year
• Plays and Musicals
• Political Gaffes
• Quotes
• Religion Stories
• Scandals
• Scientific Discoveries
• Songs
• Sports Moments
• T-shirt-Worthy Slogans
• TV Ads
• TV Episodes
• TV Series
• Tweets
• Underreported Stories
• Untruths
• Video Games
• Viral Videos
• Worst Business Deals

Abbas Milani in The New Republic:

There are, arguably, strategic reasons for the United States to keep silent on the fate of the democratic movement. But history is not one of them. Rather, the regime’s version of events (past and present) is self-serving and, at critical junctures, altogether baseless. Documents (some recently declassified) from various U.S. archives show a rather different version of foreign policy toward Iran. The Shah may have been a U.S. ally in the cold war, but the relationship was fraught. Behind closed doors, the United States pushed hard for the country to democratize. During the periods when the United States failed to stand on the side of the Iranian people, it paid a horrible price. It is worth revisiting this history, not simply because it debunks the Manichaean theory of the past touted by the mullahs, but also because it contains important lessons for how the United States can navigate the current crisis in Iran.

More here.

For Justin E. H. Smith:

Robert F. Worth in the New York Times:

Monday’s protests showed a striking escalation in direct attacks on the country’s theocratic foundation and not just on the June presidential election, which the opposition has attacked as fraudulent.

The new violence came as Iran’s chief prosecutor, Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejehi, warned of even harsher measures if the protests did not cease.

“So far, we have shown restraint,” Mr. Mohseni-Ejehi said, according to IRNA. “Anyone who in any way endangers security must be dealt with.”

On Monday, protesters burned pictures of Ayatollah Khamenei, and even the father of the 1979 revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. They held up Iranian flags from which the “Allah” emblem, added after the revolution, had been removed.

More here.

Raymond Tallis over at New Humanist:

Contemporary neuroscience is one of mankind’s greatest intellectual achievements. As a researcher for many years into new methods of rehabilitating people with neurological damage, in particular due to strokes, I have been thrilled by the promise of new technologies such as sophisticated brain scanning to help us to understand the processes of recovery and (more importantly) suggest treatments that would promote the kinds of reorganisation in the brain associated with return of function. In contrast, I am utterly dismayed by the claims made on behalf of neuroscience in areas outside those in which it has any kind of explanatory power; by the neuro-hype that is threatening to discredit its real achievements.

Hardly a day passes without yet another breathless declaration in the popular press about the relevance of neuroscientific findings to everyday life. The articles are usually accompanied by a picture of a brain scan in pixel-busting Technicolor and are frequently connected to references to new disciplines with the prefix “neuro-”. Neuro-jurisprudence, neuro-economics, neuro-aesthetics, neuro-theology are encroaching on what was previously the preserve of the humanities.

Matt Grist of the Royal Society's social brain project responds:

The reason policy makers might be interested in brains and behaviour is that policy has to do (but not only to do) with aggregate level effects of individual actions. So if it can be shown that brains have certain shortcomings or potentialities not previously understood, then this is useful for informing policy direction. However, it is not clear that any policy yet has been informed by neuroscience. Even so-called “nudge” policies such as auto-enrollment in private pensions could have been devised from behavioural observations alone (observations attentive to the power of inertia in human decision-making). Part of the idea of our project is to have a conversation about what neuroscience does add to purely behavioural research.

Perhaps it adds nothing at all beyond what Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, speaking at the RSA, called, “the seductive allure of neuroscientific explanations”. Camilla Batmanghelidjh, after fourteen years experience of supporting neglected and abused children through her organisation the Kids Company, has come to believe vehemently that punishing and blaming such children is counterproductive. Such a punitive method is based on the mistake of thinking that the kids see before them an array of choices, one of them presenting itself as the morally correct one, yet which they choose to ignore. She argues that in fact what is needed is to get these kids into a position where they can see the full array of choices in the first place. This is done through structured activities that build-up the kids” capacity to see the world from the point of view of others, to gain control of their emotions, and to feel self-worth. The work Ms Batmanghelidjh has done has been highly successful. However, she has now embarked on research with neuroscientific partners so that she can present evidence of her success in terms of brain scans. We, as a society of empiricists, seem to need the neuroscientific level of explanation to convince us such a social policy is right. So the role of neuroscience in policy may simply sometimes be one of corroboration.

Pankaj Mishra over at the NYRB blog:

Obama’s long speech on Afghanistan did not refer even once to India or Kashmir. Yet India has a large and growing presence in Afghanistan, and impoverished young Pakistanis, such as those who led the terrorist attack on Mumbai last November, continue to be indoctrinated by watching videos of Indian atrocities on Muslims in Kashmir. (Not much exaggeration is needed here: an Indian human rights group last week offered evidence of mass graves of nearly 3000 Muslims allegedly executed over the last decade by Indian security forces near the border with Pakistan.) Another terrorist assault on India is very likely; it will further stoke tensions between India and Pakistan, enfeebling America’s already faltering campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda.

There are many reasons for this silence. Strident Indian protests destroyed the chances of Richard Holbrooke adding Kashmir to his responsibilities as special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Assuming the presidency, Obama inherited the Bush administration’s policy of building up India as a strategic American ally and counterweight to China in Asia. Encouraged by an affluent and increasingly assertive Indian-American lobby, the Bush administration offered a civil nuclear agreement to India. India, unlike Iran, has long refused to sign the NPT; the nuclear deal was yet another one of the Bush administration’s defiant assertions of American exceptionalism, opening up India, after a long period of sanctions, to American defense companies (Lockheed Martin alone hopes to cut deals worth $15 billion over the next five years).

It is true that India does not seem to have the same exalted place in the Obama administration’s worldview. As the US and China become even more economically interdependent, notions of “containing” the Middle Kingdom through pro-America allies now look less like realpolitik than a symptom of anachronistic cold-war thinking in Condoleezza Rice’s State Department.

In Zomia’s small societies, with their simple technologies, anti-authoritarian tendencies, and oral cultures, Scott sees not a world forgotten by civilization, but one that has been deliberately constructed to keep the state at arm’s length. Zomia’s history, Scott argues, is a rejection of the mighty lowland states that are seen as defining Asia. He calls Zomia a “shatter zone,” a place where people go to escape the raw deal that complex civilization historically has been for those at the bottom: the coerced labor and conscription into military service, the taxation for wars and pharaonic building projects, the epidemic diseases that came with intensive agriculture and animal husbandry. What Zomia presents, Scott argues in his book “The Art of Not Being Governed,” is nothing less than a refutation of the traditional narrative of steady civilizational progress, in which human life has improved as societies have grown larger and more complex. Instead, for many people through history, Scott argues, civilized life has been a burden and a menace.

more from Drake Bennett at the Boston Globe here.

It is not surprising that anti-Muslim populism has found some of its most ferocious supporters among former leftists, for they, too, have lost their faith – in world revolution, or whatnot. Many of these leftists, before their turn to revolution, came from religious backgrounds. So they suffered a double loss. In their hostility to Islam, they like to talk about defending “Enlightenment values,” whereas in fact they lament the collapse of faith, whether religious or secular. There is, alas, no immediate cure for the kind of social ills exposed by the Swiss referendum. The Pope has an answer, of course. He would like people to return to the bosom of Rome. Evangelical preachers, too, have a recipe for salvation. Neo-conservatives, for their part, see the European malaise as a form of typical Old World decadence, a collective state of nihilism bred by welfare states and soft dependence on hard American power. Their answer is a revived western world, led by the United States, engaged in an armed crusade for democracy. But, unless one is a Catholic, a born-again Christian, or a neo-con, none of these visions is promising. The best we can hope for is that liberal democracies will muddle through this period of unease – that demagogic temptations will be resisted, and violent impulses contained. After all, democracies have weathered worse crises in the past.

more from Ian Buruma at The Guardian here.

Letter to Mary

I tried to get to see your grandchildren. I phoned the only
shop at Sepanaphudi. A manual operator put me through.
I asked him if he knew the Theleles. Yes, he said, they’re
all here, who do you want to speak to?

I phoned the next day, spoke to one of them. Didn’t get
his name but he knew mine. Mr Robert? – Come and see
us quickly. Bring clothes, girls’ clothes, and food. We are
all without job. Can you come tomorrow? Put off by his
desperation, I didn’t go.

I’ll still come one of these days and visit your grave. Long
ago you carried me from the noise into the sunlight. How
much I’ve tried to pay my debt to you. Only to find that
debts of guilt are endless. And debts of love? There are
no debts of love.

by Robert Berold

from All the Days
publisher: Deep South, Grahamstown, 2008