From Science:

Who says humans aren’t the result of Darwinian evolution? This week, researchers report identifying some 1800 genes that appear to have been the target of natural selection. Some of the genes may be important in understanding the genetics behind disease as well as the evolution of the human brain.

Now a team of scientists at the University of California, Irvine, has used a new computational approach–the “linkage disequilibrium decay” test–to search for signs of selection over the entire human genome. As a rule, the greater the linkage disequilibrium associated with a gene, the more likely that the gene has been under recent selection. Harnessing data from two existing databases of human diversity, the team found some 1800 genes that appeared to have been under selection during the last 10,000 to 50,000 years. According to team leader and genome researcher Robert Moyzis, this is between 10 and 100 times greater than the number found in previous studies. The genes belong to several biologically important categories, including genes important in defense against disease, controlling the cell cycle, protein metabolism, and nervous system functioning, the researchers report online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More here.

Robert Irwin on The Wine of Wisdom: The life, poetry and philosophy of Omar Khayyam by Mehdi Aminrazavi, in the Times Literary Supplement:

Since the Rubáiyat was a kind of Bible for freethinkers, materialists and sensualists, FitzGerald’s translation attracted much criticism from Christian quarters. Edward Byles Cowell, the illustrious Sanskritologist and Persianist, who had first got FitzGerald interested in Persian and provided him with a key manuscript of quatrains attributed to Khayyam, strongly disapproved of the creed of the Rubáiyat: “I admire Omar as I admire Lucretius, but I cannot take him as a guide. In these grave matters I prefer to go to Nazareth, not to Naishapur”. Matthew Arnold, who thought that poetry should conduce to virtuous living, was shocked by the poem’s hedonism. Robert Browning also disapproved and wrote “Rabbi Ben Ezra” as a versified retort. Chesterton judged the Rubáiyat to be brilliant, but evil and “a thing unfit for a white man, a thing like opium”. He thought that the poem was a sad thing and he went on to argue that one should only drink when happy. However, American temperance groups campaigned against the Rubáiyat as “a Bible for drunkards”.

Mehdi Aminrazavi’s The Wine of Wisdom, though it is centrally concerned with the Persian quatrains known as the Rubáiyat, also covers Omar’s career as a mathematician, astronomer and philosopher as well as his poetry in Arabic.

More here.

Maggie Wittlin in Seed:

Steven Pinker climbed onto the stage and immediately laid out his most convincing credential: a fully-stocked reservoir of Jewish linguistic humor. He defined such words as “jewbilation”—pride in finding out that one’s favorite celebrity is Jewish and “meinstein”— slang for, “my son, the genius.”

The crowd was hooked; the man could do no wrong. And so the substance of the lecture began.

Apparently, Ashkenazi Jews—the Eastern European ones—really do have an average IQ that’s eight to 15 points higher than the northern European average. The Cochran/Hardy/Harpending paper says about four out of every thousand northern Europeans have an IQ of 140 or above. So, if Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ of 110, that means 23 out of every thousand Askenazi Jews have above a 140 IQ. Sephardic Jews, those descended from Jews expelled from Spain in the 15th century, have the same IQ distribution as the rest of Europe.

More here.  [Pinker shown with Seed Chief-Editor Adam Bly in picture.]

James Surowicki in The New Yorker:

Over the past two decades, the U.S. has taken the view that the stronger patents are, the better. But patents, by their nature, are imperfect. They may encourage innovation, but, by allowing the patent holder complete control of an invention, they also limit it. Patents reward some inventors at the expense of others: more than one person can have an idea, but only one can patent it. That may be why, in a study of a hundred and fifty years of patent protection, Josh Lerner, of the Harvard Business School, found that countries that introduced stronger protections for patents saw no increase in innovation by their citizens. Similarly, in a study of nineteenth-century innovation based on data from two World’s Fairs, Petra Moser, an economist then at Berkeley, found that countries with patent laws (like Britain) did not innovate more than those without them (like the Netherlands and Denmark).

Protecting patent holders’ rights is important, of course, but the system needs to be rigorous in the way it hands out patents—careful not to grant patents for ideas that are obvious, already well established, or too broad.

More here.

From the London Review of Books:

Penicillin revolutionised the treatment of staphylococcal infections. But its power over them began to wane soon after its general introduction. The first naturally occurring penicillin-resistant staphylococci were noted by Fleming in 1942. Between April and November 1946, 12.5 per cent of Staphylococcus aureus strains isolated at the Hammersmith Hospital in London were penicillin-resistant. By early 1947 the percentage had tripled. The bacteriologist Mary Barber showed that this rise was not due to the development of resistance while patients were being treated, but to the spread of a penicillin-resistant strain in the hospital. Some staphylococci had the ability to make penicillinase, a penicillin-destroying enzyme. The introduction of penicillin gave them an evolutionary advantage over strains killed by the antibiotic.

Methicillin was developed in response. It was resistant to penicillinase.

More here.

‘Summary:  Humans like to think that they are unique, but the study of other primates has called into question the exceptionalism of our species. So what does primatology have to say about war and peace? Contrary to what was believed just a few decades ago, humans are not “killer apes” destined for violent conflict, but can make their own history.’

Robert Sapolsky in Foreign Affairs:

Like the occasional human hermit, there are a few primates that are typically asocial (such as the orangutan). Apart from those, however, it turns out that one cannot understand a primate in isolation from its social group. Across the 150 or so species of primates, the larger the average social group, the larger the cortex relative to the rest of the brain. The fanciest part of the primate brain, in other words, seems to have been sculpted by evolution to enable us to gossip and groom, cooperate and cheat, and obsess about who is mating with whom. Humans, in short, are yet another primate with an intense and rich social life — a fact that raises the question of whether primatology can teach us something about a rather important part of human sociality, war and peace.

More here.

John B. Judis in The New Republic:

In his memoir, Present at the Creation, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson expressed his misgivings about the creation of the CIA in 1947. “I had the gravest forebodings about this organization and warned the President that as set up neither he, the National Security Council, nor anyone else would be in a position to know what it was doing or to control it.” In 1991 and again in 1995, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan introduced bills to abolish the CIA and assign its functions to the State Department, which is what Acheson and his predecessor, George Marshall, had advocated. But Moynihan’s proposal was treated as evidence of his eccentricity rather than of his wisdom and never came to a vote.

It’s time to reconsider Moynihan’s proposal, or least the reasoning behind it. Al Libi’s case, combining gross incompetence with the violation of international law, shows that the problems Moynihan and others cited have, if anything, gotten worse under George W. Bush. The intelligence reform act passed last year didn’t address them; and the current director Porter Goss appears oblivious to them. These problems have for years plagued the two main functions of the agency: intelligence gathering and covert action.

More here.

Daniel Engber in Slate:

Superstar stem-cell researcher Hwang Woo Suk was accused of major scientific fraud on Thursday. A collaborator now claims Hwang faked much of the data for the groundbreaking research he published in May; earlier in the week, a co-author from the University of Pittsburgh withdrew his name from the work. Investigations are now underway in Pittsburgh and Seoul. How do you investigate scientific misconduct?

First, interview everyone who might be involved. In the United States, research institutions conduct their own inquiries into scientific wrongdoing. If the allegation seems credible, a small committee will spend up to a month quietly looking into the matter. They’ll talk to witnesses—most likely members of the lab, collaborators, and the person who made the charge—before confronting the accused researcher with the charges against him. If the committee decides there’s reasonable evidence for misconduct, the issue passes to a larger committee for a formal investigation.

More here.  Also this from Scientific American:

With considerable disappointment, the editors of Scientific American are immediately removing Dr. Woo Suk Hwang from his honored position as Research Leader of the Year on the 2005 Scientific American 50 list.

Dr. Hwang famously announced in Science last June that he and his team at Seoul National University in Korea had cloned human embryonic stem cells from 11 patients. Published accounts appearing this morning, however, report that one of his co-authors, Dr. Sung Il Roh, now says that Dr. Hwang admits that much of the evidence in his Science paper was faked. He further alleges that Dr. Hwang has asked Science to withdraw that paper. Dr. Hwang was not available for comment.

More here.

Will Iredale in the London Times:

Scientists have for the first time found evidence that polar bears are drowning because climate change is melting the Arctic ice shelf.

The researchers were startled to find bears having to swim up to 60 miles across open sea to find food. They are being forced into the long voyages because the ice floes from which they feed are melting, becoming smaller and drifting farther apart.

Although polar bears are strong swimmers, they are adapted for swimming close to the shore. Their sea journeys leave them them vulnerable to exhaustion, hypothermia or being swamped by waves.

According to the new research, four bear carcases were found floating in one month in a single patch of sea off the north coast of Alaska, where average summer temperatures have increased by 2-3C degrees since 1950s.

The scientists believe such drownings are becoming widespread across the Arctic, an inevitable consequence of the doubling in the past 20 years of the proportion of polar bears having to swim in open seas.

More here.

Bernard Holland in the New York Times:

Music lovers, critics and writers worry too much about acoustics. Truly bad acoustics – whether you hear too little or too much – cannot be ignored, but the imperfect world that lingers between the two extremes just has to be dealt with. The hall is too bright (Walt Disney in Los Angeles); the hall is dead (Royal Festival Hall in London). There are devils everywhere intent on spoiling your listening pleasure. Go to concerts, and hear people cough and cellphones ring. Stay at home, and your CD player skips or an ambulance goes by the door.

Relax. Rise above it. The ear and the mind connected to it have marvelous powers to adjust to less-than-perfect environments. Herbert von Karajan once told me that his early years of conducting truly awful orchestras in backwater opera houses did wonders for his powers of imagination. As the Tallis Scholars began to sing in the Church of St. Paul the Apostle near Lincoln Center recently, the loud hum of what sounded like a ventilation system made the heart sink. But oddly, after 10 minutes it was forgotten, as if the brain had isolated an intruder and removed it to a place out of earshot.

More here.  [This post dedicated to Tony Cobitz.]

Kathryn Hughes reviews Evelyn Welch’s book, in The Guardian:

Dashing out to the shops in early modern Venice or Florence you would have seen some strikingly familiar sights. There were groups of giggling teenage girls touching and trying everything. Harassed housewives scooted round, grabbing basics as if in an obstacle race. Solitary men lingered and pondered and lingered some more over status-boosting luxury purchases. Cheapskates hunted for a bargain, while others spent up to their credit limit, returning home sick and giddy with the realisation of what they had just done.

Evelyn Welch’s Shopping in the Renaissance, however, is concerned with a lot more than proving that nothing much changes over the centuries when you’re in desperate need of a pint of milk or some new curtains. Her interest in shopping arises from its status as an invisible activity, so embedded in the rhythms and disciplines of the everyday that it barely breaks the surface of our consciousness. We do it, just as the Italians of the Renaissance did it, almost without noticing. But by making shopping explicit, argues Welch, by seeing it for what it is – a whole series of social, cultural as well as financial transactions all bound up in the exchange of a few warm coins or a handshake – it should be possible to get deep into the mindset of early modern Europe.

More here.

Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times:

A federal judge ruled today that a Pennsylvania school board’s policy of teaching intelligent design in high school biology class is unconstitutional because intelligent design is clearly a religious idea that advances “a particular version of Christianity.”

In the nation’s first case to test the legal merits of intelligent design, Judge John E. Jones III dealt a stinging rebuke to advocates of teaching intelligent design as a scientific alternative to evolution in public schools.

The judge found that intelligent design is not science, and that the only way its proponents can claim it is, is by changing the very definition of science to include supernatural explanations.

Eleven parents in Dover, Pa., sued their school board a year ago when the board voted that ninth grade biology students should be read a brief statement saying there are “gaps in the theory” of evolution and that intelligent design is another explanation they should examine. The case is Kitzmiller et. al. v. Dover.

The six-week trial in federal district court in Harrisburg gave intelligent design the most thorough academic and legal airing it has had since the movement’s inception about 15 years ago. The judge heard evidence from scientists in the forefront of the design movement, as well as scientists and other experts who are critics.

More here.  And Sean Carrol has more here at Cosmic Variance.

“A piecemeal atlas of the world I think in” was William T. Vollmann’s phrase for a book he wrote almost ten years ago. That world is certainly worth mapping. It is full of contemporary history, politics, guns, prostitution, drugs, crowds, and violence. But it is also the shifting residence of a lonely, obsessive reader and writer determined to make sense of things. The work in question is in fact called The Atlas (1996), and contains fifty-five items of varying length, written alternatively in the first and third person, from the point of view of a male traveler, set in an impressive list of locations around the globe, from Afghanistan to Zagreb, and from Grand Central Station to the Yukon.

more in the New York Review of Books here.

Salaman Rushdie’s thoughts on the Indian Italian paintings of Francesco Clemente.

There is a story by Italo Calvino about a time when the moon was closer to the earth than it is today, when lovers could leap off the earth to walk upon its satellite and look up at their home planet hanging upside-down above their heads. Separation, inversion, the fascination of the leap: these are the characteristics of Clemente’s paintings. His is a traveller’s art. “In each place where I was,” he says, “the continuity of memories, the tradition of the place, has been broken, somewhere, sometime; I don’t know why. Really, you can’t look at any place in the world from the place itself. You have to look from somewhere else to see what is there.” These ideas, of the fragmentation of cultures and of the creative benefits of displacement, are close, also, to my heart. “The only ones who see the whole picture,” one of my half-remembered characters says somewhere, in some half-forgotten book, “are the ones who step out of the frame.” Fragments are what we have left and the artist must assemble them into meaningful form, so that they can reveal some, at least, of their broken mysteries, the way the shards of Heraclitus’s lost book still, after 2,000 years, retain the power of significant speech. The Self-Portrait with Smoke reassembles a fragmentary self in just this way, uniting the artist’s dissociated and replicated physical elements with the most transient and evanescent of bonds.

more from The Guardian here.

From The New York Times:

When Egyptologists entered the tomb for the first time more than four decades ago, they expected to be surprised. Explorers of newly exposed tombs always expect that, and this time they were not disappointed – they were confounded. There, carved in stone, were the images of two men embracing. Their names were inscribed above: Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep. Though not of the nobility, they were highly esteemed in the palace as the chief manicurists of the king, sometime from 2380 to 2320 B.C., in the time known as the fifth dynasty of the Old Kingdom. Grooming the king was an honored occupation.

Archaeologists were taken aback. It was extremely rare in ancient Egypt for an elite tomb to be shared by two men of apparently equal standing. The usual practice was for such mortuary temples to be the resting place of one prominent man, his wife and children. And it was most unusual for a couple of the same sex to be depicted locked in an embrace. In other scenes, they are also shown holding hands and nose-kissing, the favored form of kissing in ancient Egypt. What were scholars to make of their intimate relationship?

More here.

From Scientific American:

Morphine and other opioids work wonders for pain. Unfortunately, their effectiveness declines over time while their addictiveness grows, meaning patients need the drug even as it affords them less and less relief. But new research into the cellular workings of opioids offers a promising new pathway to improved pain relief–without the addiction–by triggering one receptor and blocking another.

Medicinal chemist Philip Portoghese of the University of Minnesota and his colleagues began by studying two of the four major opioid receptors in the cells of the central nervous system. Each bears the name of a Greek letter and the chemists focused on the Mu and Delta receptors. Previous research had shown that drugs that linked up with Mu receptors lasted longer with less addiction when combined with drugs that blocked Delta receptors. But it was not known whether the two channels worked separately or in concert to improve the overall effect. So Portoghese and his colleagues built a drug that triggered the Mu receptor while blocking the Delta receptor–dubbed MDAN, for Mu Delta agonist antagonist. They administered various versions of the drug to mice and then tested their sensitivity to pain by focusing a hot light on their tails and recording the time it took the animals to move them. The MDAN drug proved roughly 50 times more effective than morphine in blocking pain, the researchers report in this week’s online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More here.

Thanks a million to everyone who contributed to our collection to send an art student, whose scholarship was cut off, to school in the spring. In one week we have collected the full amount of $1,533.85 thanks to your generosity. When I went to give my friend the check, she showed me some anatomical figurative studies she was working on (done in BIC Medium Blue ballpoint pen on paper!). I asked if I could photograph them and exhibit them at 3QD and she agreed. So here they are (click to enlarge any image):

She also wrote this message down for the readers of 3QD:

Unfortunately there is no way for me to truly express my gratitude, because it is so immense, it is even unfathomable to myself. It is a chain reaction when something so kind is done, even if it may be subconscious. The happiness felt within bleeds onto others and they too feel the pleasure that the other has received. I don’t really have a family, but I have been so lucky to meet the people I have in my life. For my friends are my family. Because of this I have strong family values and care greatly for anyone I affiliate myself with. Especially Margit and Abbas. They are two of the most brilliant people I know, and ever will know. I love them unconditionally as I would a mother, a father, a sister, or a brother. It means the world to me that someone has so much faith in me, and it gives me the drive to pursue my dreams. I believe in my success and myself. Through this kind act, I have learned a lot. And this will never be forgotten. I have always thought of myself as a selfless person, but the generosity displayed by your trust will be redistributed as I continue my life. I wish I could thank each and every one of you for helping, but I suppose I will leave that up to Abbas. This is the nicest thing that anyone has ever done for me, and I don’t think it has quite settled in yet. Still, I am so grateful, and wish you all the best in life. Unfortunately there are no words to truly express my gratitude, so I will simply leave this with a thank you.

Thank you, my friend.

Sughra Raza. Meadowstream, Long Pond, Maine. 1999.

More on the winter solstice here and here.