by Bill Benzon

My paternal grandfather, Axel Benzon, was a Dane. He and his wife, Louise, immigrated to America early in the 20th Century. He was trained as an engineer, was educated in the classics, and took up photography and woodcarving. He ended his professional career as chief engineer of the main U.S. Post Office in Manhattan.

He kept a diary, the pages of which are generically entitled: “Leaves from my diary.” It’s not handwritten, kept in one of those blank books one can buy at a stationary store. It’s typed on ordinary 8.5 by 11 paper. I’ve got a photocopy of much or most of it, but, judging by his index, not all.

In commemoration of this Memorial Day, May 31, 2016, I would like to share some passages from his diary, passages written just before the United States was drawn into the war. As you read these passages keep in mind that you are reading the reflections of a well-educated middle-class European who had immigrated to the United States.

Read more »

—because despite being enlightened, civilized, advanced, and free, we are trapped—

by Paul North

In the 1930s a Hungarian psychiatrist, Leopold Szondi, began to think that families predetermine the lives of their members, before he was deported to Bergen-Belsen because his family was Jewish. Through a special negotiation he and other intellectuals were released and sent into exile. Szondi settled in Switzerland, where he worked the rest of his long life on tests and treatments for Genotropism, the name he gave to this curse on families. Members of a family share, he thought, a narrow set of psychological tendencies that are transmitted across generations. Who you choose as a life partner, what kind of career you end up practicing, even how much money you make are all determined up to a point by a ‘familial unconscious.'

The familial unconscious contains drives and needs specific to the family and gives them their desires, their limits, their fate. Now, although Szondi wanted to release individuals from the family's unconscious predeterminations, and he invented a therapy to do so, the principle that underpinned his therapy was itself a fateful idea. Instead of staying limited by family traits, he wanted you to learn that: “Wahl macht Schicksal” — “Choice makes fate.” With this principle, Szondi hoped to break through the walls of his patients' familial unconscious. What if he succeeded? Well, through this principle he also locked patients into a new idea of destiny. Fate may not pre-determine you, but it does determine you. The way it determines you now is not necessarily better, only different. Now your fate happens to you choice by choice.

Let us imagine that there is a history for the idea of fate. It is a fiction or a semi-fiction, but that doesn't matter. It will help us to see a pattern. The first stage of the history is ancient, even archaic. We see Greek and Roman worry about fate all over epic poetry and stoic philosophy. In monotheisms, however, and especially in Christianity, fate takes a back seat to a different kind of story, where what happens at the end of time cannot be pre-judged by humans. At the end of all things, whether it comes as a last judgment or a gift of grace, a human-looking God will be there, making all the final decisions.

The philosophical essayist Odo Marquard, who first sketched out this historical tale about fate—the fate of fate, he called it—was right: the weightiest things in life, which used to be completely out of our hands (threads were held by “the fates,” judgments were made by God) at some point were put directly into our hands. After the great monotheisms (this is fiction too: we know they have not ended), everything, Marquard wrote in 1981, comes to be seen as made by human beings, including the highest things, like God, history, and truth. He notes that the expansive new human power of making did not actually put an end to the fate idea. Just because we began to think of ourselves as in charge, as making all things, including our own history, our ideas and ideals, this did not mean that we were free—on the contrary.

Read more »

by Matt McKenna

Angry Birds is one of those generic children’s films that incorporates already popular intellectual property to mitigate the risk of losing money. The logic is that kids might skip a boring film about madcap animated animals, but if these madcap animated animals are the same ones with whom the children already have an established connection through video games, toys, and school supplies, the terribleness of the film won’t impact revenue. It works too: Angry Birds, a movie based on a smartphone video game franchise, has already made $164 million at the box office worldwide. I don’t mean this as a knock on children’s taste in films–the same risk reduction strategy applies to grown-up films as well. I bring up the Angry Birds intellectual property only because the “angry” in Angry Birds reflects the “angry” in America’s current political zeitgeist. So while children aren’t allowed to vote in the upcoming 2016 election, Hollywood is still able to provide them with an alternative entertainment option that promotes anger as the most responsible reaction to current events.

Angry Birds’ protagonist is Red, a bird who isolates himself from his community by being a pugnacious jerk. While the other adult birds are nauseatingly nice, Red is sociopathic: in one of his first scenes, Red assaults a father and smashes the father’s egg to cause a premature birth of the bird within (the baby bird survives, thank goodness). Of course, Red’s nasty disposition is eventually validated when the island is invaded by deceitful pigs who claim to be friendly but wind up stealing the birds’ eggs. Because Red had previously warned his fellow birds that the visitors were up to no good, he is subsequently chosen to lead these once wimpy flock to battle against the duplicitous pigs. By the end, Red defeats the pigs, saves the stolen eggs, and the birds who used to look down on Red now sing songs about how angry and valiant he is.

If Angry Birds wasn't so boring, it's horrifying moral would be the the film’s primary attribute. Reinforcing the current “you're either with us or against us” political climate in America, Angry Birds’ moral hinges on the idea that kindness is for the weak, and aggression is the only way to avoid looking like a sap.

Read more »

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Argumentation is the term used to denote the activity of arguing with a real interlocutor, in real time, over claims that are actually in dispute. When argumentation is properly conducted, the parties involved exchange arguments, objections, criticisms, and rejoinders, all aimed at discerning the truth (or at least what one would be most justified in accepting to be true). To be sure, argumentation does not always result in a consensus among disputants; even when argumentation is impeccably conducted, disagreement often persists. But this is no strike against argumentation. This is for a few reasons. First, the open exchange of reasons, evidence, and criticism is, after all, the best means we have for rationally resolving disputes and pursuing the truth. Insofar as we want a rational resolution, this is not only our best means, it's our only means. Furthermore, even when argumentation does not dispel disagreement, it can provide disputants with a firmer grasp of precisely where they differ. So even if argument doesn't yield consensus, it does yield fecundity. And, as John Stuart Mill famously observed, understanding the views of one's critics is an essential element of understanding one's own views.

We have frequently claimed in this column that argumentation comes naturally to human beings. People aspire to form and maintain true beliefs and eschew false beliefs, and the central way in which they enact this aspiration is by arguing with each other. Of course, that people are naturally disposed to engage in argumentation does not entail that people are naturally adept at it. The pitfalls of human reasoning are abundant, and there is rightly a substantial academic industry devoted to identifying, studying, and cataloguing them.

Yet detecting argumentative pitfalls is itself part of the activity of argumentation. When we argue, for sure, we argue about things. And so most argument has all the vocabulary of any other talk about the world. But when we argue, we aren't just looking at the things we are talking about, we are evaluating what we've said as reasons. And so, we must have a vocabulary that doesn't merely track things we are talking about, but it must also track how we've talked about it. That's what it is to assess whether you think someone's reasoning is acceptable or not. The issue isn't always about whether you accept what an interlocutor says, but it's also about how the things they say logically relate to each other.

Read more »

by Daniel Ranard

Math works pretty well. We can count apples and oranges; we can scribble equations and then launch a rocket that lands gently upright. When an argument is indisputable, we colloquially say “do the math,” and we speak of events that will happen with “mathematical certainty.” Math works so well that you're forced to wonder: why, and what does it mean about our world? I won't fully answer these questions, but I'll offer a few perspectives.

You don't need to know much math to see it works. Say you go apple-picking with a friend; you count 12 as you pick them, and your friend counts 19 of her own. How many apples are in the basket? Maybe you crunch the numbers on a scrap of paper, just to be sure. You manipulate symbols on a page, and afterward you make a claim about reality: you know how many apples you would count if you pulled them out.

But was that math or just common sense? If you're not impressed by addition, let's try multiplication. I suspect many of us encounter our first real mathematical “theorem” when we learn that A times B is B times A. As Euclid wrote circa 300 BC, “If two numbers multiplied by one another [in different orders] make certain numbers, then the numbers so produced equal one another.” This fact may be so familiar you forget its meaning: 4 x 6 = 6 x 4, or rather 6 + 6 + 6 + 6 = 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 4. It may be obvious, but a curious child would still ask, why? The equation demands proof, much like the Pythagorean Theorem. Euclid gave a proof in Book VII, Proposition 16 of the Elements. And though he proved an abstract fact using abstract symbols, the world seems to obey this arithmetic rule: if you have four groups of six apples, Euclid predicts you can always rearrange them into six groups of four.

Maybe it's no surprise we can use arithmetic to make these predictions. But what about the success of more sophisticated math and physics?

Read more »

by Misha Lepetic

“I got my own pure little bangtail mind and
the confines of its binding please me yet.”
~ Neal Cassady, letter to Jack Kerouac

One of the curious phenomena that computing in general, and artificial intelligence in particular, has emphasized is our inevitable commitment to metaphor as a way of understanding the world. Actually, it is even more ingrained than that: one could argue that metaphor, quite literally, is our way of being in the world. A mountain may or may not be a mountain before we name it – it may not even be a mountain until we name it (for example, at what point, either temporally or spatially, does it become, or cease to be, a mountain?). But it will inhabit its ‘mountain-ness' whether or not we choose to name it as such. The same goes for microbes, or the mating dance of a bird of paradise. In this sense, the material world existed, in some way or other, prior to our linguistic entrance, and these same things will continue to exist following our exit.

But what of the things that we make? Wouldn't these things somehow be more amenable to a more purely literal description? After all, we made them, so we should be able to say exactly what these things are or do, without having to resort to some external referents. Except we can't. And even more troubling (perhaps) is the fact that the more complex and representative these systems become, the more irrevocably entangled in metaphor do we find ourselves.

In a recent Aeon essay, Robert Epstein briefly guides us through a history of metaphors for how our brains allegedly work. The various models are rather diverse, ranging from hydraulics to mechanics to electricity to “information processing”, whatever that is. However, there is a common theme, which I'll state with nearly the force and certainty of a theorem: the brain is really complicated, so take the most complicated thing that we can imagine, whether it is a product of our own ingenuity or not, and make that the model by which we explain the brain. For Epstein – and he is merely recording a fact here – this is why we have been laboring under the metaphor of brain-as-a-computer for the past half-century.

Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

(this is the sequel to last month's 3QD essay on the Pancake Problems)

I frequently come across a rafter of wild turkeys on bike rides through the countryside near my home. This particular group is recognizable thanks to having a peahen as an honorary member. Just this morning I was treated to a startling surprise: the peahen was busily herding a brood of chicks! I would have thought peacocks and turkeys were too distantly related to successfully breed. Apparently nobody told the peahen. I haven't seen any other peacocks in the neighborhood, so it would seem that she is more than friends with one of her turkey buddies. According to the internet, peacock/turkey hybrids (turcocks? peakeys?) are a thing which can happen.

Going by looks and their natural geographic ranges, my wrong guess was that peacocks and turkeys should be pretty distant on the tree of life. In the not-too-distant past, classification of species depended on such observational data.

Nowadays we can dig directly into the DNA to look for answers about relatedness. In the past decade it became possible to sequence the entire DNA of an organism. Not only that, but it's become fast and cheap. In fifteen years we've gone from the Human Genome Project taking thirteen years and $2.7 billion dollars to sequence the human genome to now being able to do it in days for $1,000. The progress in this field puts Moore's Law to shame.

It's one thing to have the data, it's another to put it to use. To deal with the flood of information pouring out of DNA sequencers an entirely new field called computational molecular biology has sprung up. It's a wonderful combination of biology, mathematics, and computer science.

A good example of this is turnips. Looking at them in the garden you might guess that they are more closely related to radishes than cabbage. In the 1980s Jeffrey Palmer and his collaborators looked at the mitochondrial genomes of turnips and cabbage and found that the genes they contained were nearly identical. What was different was the order of those genes [1]. The random mutations which occurred over the years didn't change the genes themselves, only their position in the DNA.

Even better, Palmer and company saw that the kind of rearrangements which occur are of specific kind. When a mutation occurs, what happens is that a segment of DNA consisting of some number of genes is snipped out, flipped around, and put back in, now in reverse order. For example, if genes were the numbers one through five, a typical sequence of mutations might look like:

Here at each step the segment of genes to be snipped out and reversed is indicated with an underline. Because each mutation reverses the order of some of the genes, folks call it a reversal.

Read more »

by Brooks Riley

In the last year, two extraordinary events have indelibly changed the immediate course of history, for better or worse. In an utterly surprising move, Germany, led by Chancellor Angela Merkel, spontaneously accepted over a million refugees, most of them from the war in Syria, only slightly changing the demographic landscape of that rich, stable, mature and responsible democracy, but making a much bigger splash.

This year, for reasons that are still unclear, America’s Top Wild Card has all but bagged the Republican nomination.

The two events are unrelated, and yet they serve to make one ponder the nature of nationhood and expectation. The two protagonists of these events could not be more different. So too their nations.

Trump has succeeded in the land of the free-for-all, a place where narcissism is rewarded with undivided attention. Trump has just about won the Republican nomination, not because he’s the best man, not because he knows jack all about governing, government, foreign policy or any other policy, not because he’s rich, not because he’s got a new vision, not because he’s promised the moon, not because he wants to help the poor, but because he’s loud. He’s so loud that we can hear him all the way over here on the other side of the Atlantic.

Read more »

by Jalees Rehman

Lingulodinium polyedrum is a unicellular marine organism which belongs to the dinoflagellate group of algae. Its genome is among the largest found in any species on this planet, estimated to contain around 165 billion DNA base pairs – roughly fifty times larger than the size of the human genome. Encased in magnificent polyhedral shells, these bioluminescent algae became important organisms to study biological rhythms. Each Lingulodinium polyedrum cell contains not one but at least two internal clocks which keep track of time by oscillating at a frequency of approximately 24 hours. Algae maintained in continuous light for weeks continue to emit a bluish-green glow at what they perceive as night-time and swim up to the water surface during day-time hours – despite the absence of any external time cues. When I began studying how nutrients affect the circadian rhythms of these algae as a student at the University of Munich, I marveled at the intricacy and beauty of these complex time-keeping mechanisms that had evolved over hundreds of millions of years.

Lingulodinium polyedrum (scanning electron micrograph Image Credit: FWC Fish and Wildlife Research Institute, via Flickr)

Over the course of a quarter of a century, I have worked in a variety of biological fields, from these initial experiments in marine algae to how stem cells help build human blood vessels and how mitochondria in a cell fragment and reconnect as cells divide. Each project required its own set of research methods and techniques, each project came with its own failures and successes. But with each project, my sense of awe for the beauty of nature has grown. Evolution has bestowed this planet with such an amazing diversity of life-forms and biological mechanisms, allowing organisms to cope with the unique challenges that they face in their respective habitats. But it is only recently that I have become aware of the fact that my sense of biological beauty was a post hoc phenomenon: Beauty was what I perceived after reviewing the experimental findings; I was not guided by a quest for beauty while designing experiments. In fact, I would have been worried that such an approach might bias the design and interpretation of experiments. Might a desire for seeing Beauty in cell biology lead one to consciously or subconsciously discard results that might seem too messy?

I was prompted to revisit the role of Beauty in biology while reading a masterpiece of scientific writing, “Dreams of a Final Theory” by the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg in which he describes how the search for Beauty has guided him and many fellow theoretical physicists to search for an ultimate theory of the fundamental forces of nature. Weinberg explains that it is quite difficult to precisely define what constitutes Beauty in physics but a physicist would nevertheless recognize it when she sees it.

Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

At an Australian cricket club in Manhattan so dimly lit that I lift the nearest tea light so I can see the menu, I feel oddly at home; it is likely the haze of cultural nostalgia in these surroundings. As a Pakistani I grew up with cricket though I’m not much of a cricket fan and have had little direct exposure to it apart from a single visit to Lord’s Cricket Ground in London where I chose to talk to the gardener about the oldest trees on the premises instead of taking the famous cricket tour with my family, but here in New York, in the company of the Kashmiri-American poet Rafiq Kathwari, in the midst of cricket paraphernalia, framed action shots and lived-in colonial furniture, I’m on an unexpected bridge to a familiar time and place. I’m struck by the complexity of this nostalgia as I talk about life in our other countries, countries of birth, countries awaiting a rebirth, with the author of “In Another Country:” a collection of poems.

We talk about the personal-political in poetry. Cricket as a post-raj cultural idiom becomes even more poignant when I’m reminded of the traumas of Kashmir tied to the partition of India and Pakistan and of the intense political friction between the two countries that manifests itself every time the two countries are engaged in a cricket match against each other. Kashmir doesn’t play. It is played. And the political game is the ghost of the “great game” that the British began and that the Indian and Pakistani governments continue to play.

In South Asia, we know Kashmir as the land of immense natural beauty, mystics and poets, and a culture of great aesthetic delicacy and depth. In the West, Kashmir is synonymous with wool; not many know or care about the place or its long history of conflict.

As a voice of Kashmir and of the Kashmiri diaspora, Rafiq Kathwari’s most phenomenal gesture in this book of narrative poems that probe into psycho-social, historical and political, is his “protagonist” of sorts— the most haunting, fierce and charming persona in the book: his mother.

Read more »

by Paul Braterman

Glen Roy is a valley in the Western Scottish Highlands, just south of the Great Glen (home to Loch Ness), and draining through Glen Spean to Loch Linnhe, an inlet of the Atlantic. It is remarkable for the presence of the Roads, a series of parallel, almost horizontal, grooves in the hills on the sides of the glen. Clearly shorelines; but of what body of water? And why are there more than one of them?

Darwin thought the Roads represented vanished marine shorelines, one above the other as the result of vertical movement. Agassiz explained them, rather, as successive shorelines of a glacial lake, now vanished because the retaining glacier has melted away. If so, and if global warming is real, we might expect to see vanishing lakes today, as the glaciers retreat. We can, and we do, as my friend Peter Hess explains.

Roads of Glenroy, L., from Darwin, C. R., Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 129: 39-81, 1839. Observations on the parallel roads of Glen Roy, and of other parts of Lochaber in Scotland, with an attempt to prove that they are of marine origin

Charles Darwin visited the Glenroy area in 1838, two years after his return from his round the world voyage on the Beagle. During that voyage, he had examined the geology as well as the plants and animals of the places he visited, and among them was the coastal area of Chile. This is marked by raised beaches inland where once had been shoreline, and Darwin correctly described these as the effects of uplift, which we now know to be driven by plate tectonics. So it was natural that Darwin should have applied a similar explanation to the Roads, suggesting that the Cairngorms, like the Andes, were a zone of uplift, and that the Roads were ancient beaches of the Atlantic, now some ten miles away. The alternative theory, that they represented shorelines of an ancient lake, ran up against a seemingly conclusive objection; such a lake could only have formed if there had been a barrier across the valley, but there was no trace of this.

Read more »