In Evolutionary Psychology, Brian Boyd reviews Jon Adams’ Interference Patterns: Literary Study, Scientific Knowledge, and Disciplinary Autonomy.

Adams objects to a closer link between literature and the sciences especially because he accepts Richard Rorty’s stress on the different questions that different disciplines ask. But neither consilience nor an evolutionary approach to literature imperils pluralism. Consilience requires only that all levels of explanation be compatible. A chemistry that asked only the same questions as physics would no longer be chemistry, but chemistry incompatible with physics would no longer be science. Neither Freudian psychoanalysis nor a biology-denying constructivism proves compatible with evolution or evidence, but within an evolutionary perspective on literature, the latter can be studied from many different angles, so long as they are compatible with other empirical disciplines.

We can study literature from anthropological, economic, political, religious or sociological angles, but with evolution’s power to explain multilevel selection and the complex interplay between competition and cooperation, we can explore sociality with far greater depth and range. Or we can study literature from neurological or psychological angles, using all the temporal and physical breadth of evolution and all the temporal and physical resolution of neuroscience. Or we can study literature as literature, as art, with all the expertise of human readers, scholarship and traditions and where appropriate with all the power of scientific method.

Tariq Ali in The Guardian:

Anthony Powell was the most European of 20th-century British novelists. We need to dispense with the blinkered view that his A Dance to the Music of Time is a novel sequence that can be enjoyed only by English “toffs” or readers of the Daily Telegraph. It’s a prejudice that has dogged Powell for far too long.

What is on offer in the 12 novels that constitute the Dance (published between 1951 and 1975) is not the nuances of class snobbery, but a reflection of the social history of five crucial decades of the last century, beginning with the end of the first world war and ending with the turbulence of the 60s. There is nothing quite like it in English letters. Some years ago I encountered one of our leading literary critics at a party and the following conversation took place:

“What do you think of the Dance?”

“Oh, you’ve read it?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Well, I didn’t like it. You obviously did?”

“I did. Why didn’t you?”

“Closed world.”

A closed world it is not. The sequence contains the most entertaining accounts of bohemian life in London from 1920-58, decades during which Powell not only mingled with that world, but also often enjoyed it more than coming-out parties in Belgravia.

More here.  [Thanks to Maniza Naqvi.]

From The New York Times:

DESPERATE PASSAGE: The Donner Party’s Perilous Journey West.

By Ethan Rarick.

……it is the tale of the Donner party — 81 men, women and children struggling for their lives against the elements in the Sierra Nevada during the winter of 1846-47 — that forms the template for our reaction to all subsequent accounts like it. The pioneers, some of whom resorted to cannibalism, have been both praised and maligned for the decisions they made on the way from Missouri to California.

But Rarick’s account is not really about science; it is about humanity, and his major contribution is his choice to focus on the Reed family. In most tellings, the Donners, for obvious reasons, are at the emotional center of the story. Rarick, instead, finds a greater dramatic vehicle in James Reed — “a man with a full head of hair and a bit of a smirk and iron convictions, others be damned” — who traveled with his wife, Margret; her mother (she died on the trail); and four children. He emphasizes Reed’s championing of the party’s attempt at a new, supposedly faster route to California, a decision that caused significant delay and, in addition to exhausting the travelers and depleting their supplies, prevented them from crossing the Sierra before winter. Likewise, when Reed is banished en route for killing a teamster in a scuffle, and Margret and the children are left at the mercy of the rest of the group, Rarick sees a crucial setback for the Donner party, the loss of its “one true leader.” Reed rides ahead and eventually raises a rescue party; in moving scenes, he is reunited with his family, all of whom, miraculously, survived.

More here.

From Science:

Blue-eyed? Thank a genetic switch that turns off your body’s ability to make brown pigment in your peepers. Researchers have finally located the mutation that causes blue eyes, and the findings suggest that all blue-eyed humans share a single common ancestor born 6000 to 10,000 years ago. Researchers have implicated the OCA2 gene in several eye colors. The gene is involved in the production of melanin, a pigment that gives hair and skin their hues. It also codes for brown eyes and can lead to green or hazel eyes when mutated. Despite years of searching, however, scientists have not found a mutation for blue eyes on the gene.

It turns out they were looking in the wrong place. Trying to narrow the site of the mutation, gene mapper Hans Eiberg of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues examined members of a large Danish family, an approach that allowed them to follow DNA as it passed from one generation to another. Then, by comparing people with brown or blue eyes, including people from Jordan and Turkey, the researchers were able to pinpoint the exact mutation. It wasn’t on the OCA gene but rather on a nearby gene called HERC2. The mutation works like a switch that regulates the OCA gene, the team reports in the January issue of Human Genetics, turning off the production of brown eye color and allowing blue eyes to shine through. Because blue eye color is found almost exclusively in people of European descent, Eiberg’s team speculates that the mutation traces back to the Neolithic expansion, when people in the Black Sea region migrated to northern Europe 6000 to 10,000 years ago.

More here.

Frans BM de Waal, Christophe Boesch, Victoria Horner, and Andrew Whiten at the website of Emory University:

A recent study in Science by Esther Herrmann et al (7 September 2007, p. 1360) claims equivalence in technical skills between apes – chimpanzees and orangutans – and two-year-old human children, but inferior social skills in the apes. These results are taken as support for a “cultural intelligence hypothesis.”

The study features an impressive battery of tests, seemingly administered in the same format to apes and children. It has been pointed out before, however, that the easiest way to standardize conditions – by having a human experimenter provide the social cues – introduces handicaps for the apes. When the experimenter is human for all subjects, only the apes are dealing with a species other than their own. This may not be as relevant for physical or technical problems, which focus on inanimate objects, but one expects this to matter for social tasks which rely crucially on the relation between experimenter and subject. The reported findings are consistent with the apes being handicapped specifically in the social domain.

The differences between the set ups for children and apes in this study appear multifold. Human children sit on or next to their parent (introducing potential “Clever Hans” effects), are talked to, are used to dealing with human strangers, and are tested by a member of their own species. The apes are alone, observe the task from behind a barrier, receive no verbal instructions, and are tested by a species not their own. We are not suggesting that human experimenters should never be used, but that the social skills which matter most for apes, especially as they relate to culture, are those shown with conspecific models.

More here.

Note: February is designated as The Black History Month. We will be posting at least one feature a day to honor the individuals and events that have made African American History.

Americans have recognized black history annually since 1926, first as “Negro History Week” and later as “Black History Month.” What you might not know is that black history had barely begun to be studied-or even documented-when the tradition originated. Although blacks have been in America at least as far back as colonial times, it was not until the 20th century that they gained a respectable presence in the history books.

Blacks Absent from History Books

We owe the celebration of Black History Month, and more importantly, the study of black history, to Dr. Carter G. Woodson. Born to parents who were former slaves, he spent his childhood working in the Kentucky coal mines and enrolled in high school at age twenty. He graduated within two years and later went on to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard. The scholar was disturbed to find in his studies that history books largely ignored the black American population-and when blacks did figure into the picture, it was generally in ways that reflected the inferior social position they were assigned at the time.

Established Journal of Negro History

Woodson, always one to act on his ambitions, decided to take on the challenge of writing black Americans into the nation’s history. He established the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now called the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History) in 1915, and a year later founded the widely respected Journal of Negro History. In 1926, he launched Negro History Week as an initiative to bring national attention to the contributions of black people throughout American history.

Woodson chose the second week of February for Negro History Week because it marks the birthdays of two men who greatly influenced the black American population, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.

More here.

William Grimes in The New York Times:

THE BLOODY SHIRT

Terror After Appomattox By Stephen Budiansky

In April 1865 Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, putting an end to four years of savage internecine conflict and settling the issue of slavery forever. “The war is over,” Grant said. “The rebels are our countrymen again.” Not quite. As Stephen Budiansky reminds us in “The Bloody Shirt,” his impassioned account of Southern resistance to Reconstruction, the war was won, but the peace, up for grabs, would be lost, done in by Southern intransigence and Northern apathy.

“In all except the actual results of the physical struggle, I consider the South to have been the real victors in the war,” Albion Tourgée, a North Carolina state judge, said caustically in 1879. “The way in which they have neutralized the results of the war and reversed the verdict of Appomattox is the grandest thing in American politics.” Just how the trick was done is Mr. Budiansky’s subject, as seen through the eyes of a handful of men dedicated to creating a just, biracial society in the South. If “Profiles in Courage” had not already been taken, it would have made the perfect title for this linked set of portraits honoring five men who risked everything to fight for the principles that had cost so many lives. It is an inspiring yet profoundly dispiriting story.

More here.

From Science:

Like a skyscraper skeleton that goes up overnight–but doesn’t get windows for another decade–languages evolve in fits and starts, according to a new study. The idea that languages evolve in bursts, rather than gradually, isn’t new. When applied to species, it’s called punctuated evolution. But the idea is controversial in both fields–and proof has been hard to come by. Now, scientists in the United Kingdom say they’ve mustered the power of mathematics to demonstrate the phenomenon in the evolution of languages. The researchers, headed by evolutionary biologist Quentin Atkinson and mathematician Mark Pagel of the University of Reading, looked at related versions, or homologs, of common words in three of the world’s major language families: Indo-European, Bantu, and Austronesian. Like species, changes in languages can be tracked through the fate of certain words, just as mutations in key genes can tell a species’ history.

The words the researchers tracked are from the so-called Swadesh lists: compilations of heavily used words denoting things such as numbers or body parts that change little over time and are rarely borrowed, making them good clues about how one language relates to another. An example from the Indo-European language family is the words for “water” in English, German (“Wasser”), Hittite (“watar”), and Russian (“voda”). Despite many borrowings, English is much further from Latin languages such as French, according to the Swadesh lists. Consider, for example, the French for water–“eau.”

More here.

Steven Erlanger in the New York Times:

Israel, tiny and bereft of oil, has decided to embrace the electric car.

On Monday, the Israeli government will announce its support for a broad effort to promote the use of electric cars, embracing a joint venture between an American-Israeli entrepreneur and Renault and its partner, Nissan Motor Company.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, with the active support of President Shimon Peres, intends to make Israel a laboratory to test the practicality of an environmentally clean electric car. The state will offer tax incentives to purchasers, and the new company, with a $200 million investment to start, will begin construction of facilities to recharge the cars and replace empty batteries quickly.

The idea, said Shai Agassi, 39, the software entrepreneur behind the new company, is to sell electric car transportation on the model of the cellphone. Purchasers get subsidized hardware — the car — and pay a monthly fee for expected mileage, like minutes on a cellphone plan, eliminating concerns about the fluctuating price of gasoline.

More here.

Sudhir Venkatesh in Slate:

There are quite a number of interesting lessons to be taken away from the transformation of public housing in Chicago.

On the whole, I tend to agree with your sentiment: Losing the projects has led to a loss of awareness of poverty in the United States (a fact that is not going to be helped by the withdrawal of John Edwards from the presidential race). And you are right again in thinking that we are moving toward a European (or Latin American) urban landscape: the poor shunted to the outside while the middle and upper classes reclaim the central city.

It is interesting to note how this movement to demolish distressed public housing began. The objective was to replace concentrated, highly segregated inner-city poverty with “mixed-income” housing in which the black poor would live with the nonblack middle class. Sounds noble enough. The problem was that there was no social science evidence that this kind of mixing was possible or even preferable. Hundreds of millions of dollars were given by HUD to mayors, with minimal oversight. All this rested on the hope that the poor would either live in newly designed mixed-income neighborhoods—or use vouchers to live among the middle class.

Today, we face a difficult situation.

More here.

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Carmen Bomba: Poet
Claribel Alegria

Luisa always felt refreshed when she remembered Carmen Bomba,
the porter and human beast of burden in the Santa Ana marketplace.

Each afternoon when he finished work, he’d
get a little drunk to perk his courage, and pause
before each open window in the neighborhood
to say the verses he’d composed that day.

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Cl

Dear Readers,

Thanks so much for all the comments with great ideas, encouragement, and feedback. Forty-eight percent of those who took the survey said a flat-out “No” to the audio ads idea (and I have to sheepishly admit, I was one of them!), and many in the comments gave good reasons why such ads would be too intrusive and just generally irritating. We have a good thing going here, and trust me, we have no intention of screwing it up. So, no audio ads!!!

We will not have pledge drives or institute subscriptions either (at least for now, never say never, right?). We might have a bit more advertising in the right-hand column. We will figure out a way to keep going. (I gotta’ get more paid writing gigs!) Don’t worry, we’re going nowhere. But if you occasionally feel like making a small donation as a token of your appreciation, that’d be great!

Thanks for being so supportive. I think we have the smartest, most thoughtful, most civil, loveliest readers in the world, and we appreciate you at least as much as you do us!

I awoke at 5 am out of excitement this morning as I am about to go pick up Robin from the Brixen train station here in the Sudtirol. He is coming for a three day visit via South Africa, and we have much to do and see (and cook and eat) so be ready, Azra and Morgan, to take up the slack!

Thanks again.

Yours,

Abbas

The costs of running 3QD have been rising, especially in time terms. We are trying to generate some revenue through advertising, and one possibility is to run a 5-second audio ad when you first come to 3 Quarks Daily. I realize that this sounds quite annoying, and we will not do it if you say no, but it may really help us. Will you please take this 1-question survey? It should take only a few seconds:

Survey Now Closed

Thanks very much. The survey will automatically close after 1,000 responses have been collected, and we will report the results.

Tom Shachtman in Smithsonian Magazine:

Where’s the coldest spot in the universe? Not on the moon, where the temperature plunges to a mere minus 378 Fahrenheit. Not even in deepest outer space, which has an estimated background temperature of about minus 455°F. As far as scientists can tell, the lowest temperatures ever attained were recently observed right here on earth.

The record-breaking lows were among the latest feats of ultracold physics, the laboratory study of matter at temperatures so mind-bogglingly frigid that atoms and even light itself behave in highly unusual ways. Electrical resistance in some elements disappears below about minus 440°F, a phenomenon called superconductivity. At even lower temperatures, some liquefied gases become “superfluids” capable of oozing through walls solid enough to hold any other sort of liquid; they even seem to defy gravity as they creep up, over and out of their containers.

Physicists acknowledge they can never reach the coldest conceivable temperature, known as absolute zero and long ago calculated to be minus 459.67°F. To physicists, temperature is a measure of how fast atoms are moving, a reflection of their energy—and absolute zero is the point at which there is absolutely no heat energy remaining to be extracted from a substance.

More here.

Julian Dibbell in Wired:

The Albion Park section of Second Life is generally a quiet place, a haven of whispering fir trees and babbling brooks set aside for those who “need to be alone to think, or want to chat privately.” But shortly after 5 pm Eastern time on November 16, an avatar appeared in the 3-D-graphical skies above this online sanctuary and proceeded to unleash a mass of undiluted digital jackassery. The avatar, whom witnesses would describe as an African-American male clad head to toe in gleaming red battle armor, detonated a device that instantly filled the air with 30-foot-wide tumbling blue cubes and gaping cartoon mouths. For several minutes the freakish objects rained down, immobilizing nearby players with code that forced them to either log off or watch their avatars endlessly text-shout Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Get to the choppaaaaaaa!” tagline from Predator.

The incident, it turns out, was not an isolated one. The same scene, with minor variations, was unfolding simultaneously throughout the virtual geography of Second Life. Some cubes were adorned on every side with the infamous, soul-searing “goatse” image; others were covered with the grinning face of Bill Cosby proffering a Pudding Pop.

Soon after the attacks began, the governance team at San Francisco-based Linden Lab, the company that runs Second Life, identified the vandals and suspended their accounts. In the popular NorthStar hangout, players located the offending avatars and fired auto-cagers, which wrapped the attackers’ heads in big metallic boxes.

More here.

Donald Barthelme was the Stephen Sondheim of haute fiction—a dexterous assembler of witty, mordant, intricate devices that, once exploded, exposed the sawdust and stuffing of traditional forms. His stories weren’t finely rendered portrait studies in human behavior or autobiographical reveries à la Johns Updike and Cheever, but a row of boutiques showcasing his latest pranks, confections, gadgets, and Max Ernst/Monty Python–ish collages. Like Sondheim’s biting rhymes and contrapuntal duets, Barthelme’s parlor tricks and satiric ploys were accused early on of being cerebral, preeningly clever, hermetically sealed, and lacking in “heart”of supplying the clattering sound track to the cocktail party of the damned. Yet, like Sondheim, Barthelme was no simple Dr. Sardonicus, licensed cynic. His radiograms from the observation deck of his bemused detachment evidently touched depths and won converts, otherwise his work wouldn’t have inspired so many salvage operations intended to keep his name alive and his enterprise afloat. Mere smarty show-offs don’t garner this kind of affection from a younger breed of astronauts. Just as there always seems to be a Sondheim musical poised for Broadway revival (Company in 2006, Sunday in the Park with George right now), Barthelme’s bundle of greatest hits and obscure outtakes has been parceled out in a series of reprintings and repackagings since his death in 1989. He’s always poised on the verge of being majorly rediscovered without ever quite making it over the crest, despite the valiant huffing done on his behalf.

more from Bookforum here.

As a group, the pictures also summon up more ancient associations. They offer a counterclaim to other allusions to the Venus of Willendorf (Austria, 30,000 B.C.E.) in contemporary art. This tiny statue, with its mute pendant head and protruding belly, breasts and thighs, is thought to be a fertility deity. The sculpture plays a significant role in the quite brilliant opening chapter of Camille Paglia’s (probably deservedly maligned) book, “Sexual Personae”.

Paglia describes this figurine as containing women’s essential power: that of the dark, primitive mysterious forces of procreation and destruction, of instinct and blood, rooted in the earth. Paglia says, “She isthe too-muchness of nature… She is remote as she kills and creates. She is the cloud of archaic night.”

Stubby, oversized confederates of the Venus of Willendorf are a staple of Jeff Koons production; she is embodied in the early Vacuum Cleaners, in the Rabbit, and the Puppy, among other works. By utilizing this sign, Koons argues that commercial culture furnishes society with primordial energy in order that it may be psychically healed.

more from artcritical here.

Loneliness shadows science fiction, and is made more acute by its customary settings amid the emptiness of space, with solitary voyagers or beleaguered bands of adventurers encountering the hostilities of planets that deny the consolations of familiarity. The opening images of Walter M. Miller’s brilliant “I Made You” (1954) are typical:

It sat on the crag by night. Gaunt, frigid, wounded, it sat under the black sky and listened to the land with its feet, while only its dishlike ear moved in slow patterns that searched the surface of the land and the sky The land was silent, airless. Nothing moved, except the feeble thing that scratched in the cave.

The “feeble thing” turns out to be a man, about to be destroyed by the suffering robot that he has created.

more from the TLS here.

The Hippopotamus
T.S. Eliot

The broad-backed hippopotamus

Rests on his belly in the mud;

Although he seems so firm to us

He is merely flesh and blood.

Flesh and blood is weak and frail,

Susceptible to nervous shock;

While the True Church can never fail

For it is based upon a rock.

The hippo’s feeble steps may err

In compassing material ends,

While the True Church need never stir

To gather in its dividends.

The ‘potamus can never reach

The mango on the mango-tree;

But fruits of pomegranate and peach

Refresh the Church from over sea.

At mating time the hippo’s voice

Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,

But every week we hear rejoice

The Church, at being one with God.

The hippopotamus’s day

Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;

God works in a mysterious way—

The Church can sleep and feed at once.

I saw the ‘potamus take wing

Ascending from the damp savannas,

And quiring angels round him sing

The praise of God, in loud hosannas.

Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean

And him shall heavenly arms enfold,

Among the saints he shall be seen

Performing on a harp of gold.

He shall be washed as white as snow,

By all the martyr’d virgins kist,

While the True Church remains below

Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.

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