From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Aug 1 12:05:12 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2005 05:05:12 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Creating a Sustainable Economy and Future on Our Planet Message-ID: <01C59656.99A09900.shovland@mindspring.com> New book by Jim Bell, who appeared on Coast to Coast last night. Free PDF download. http://www.jimbell.com/Book2/Book2.pdf Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pdf Size: 2164049 bytes Desc: not available URL: From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 1 16:58:38 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2005 12:58:38 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: Trends in Thoughts of Suicide in the US Message-ID: Public Health: Trends in Thoughts of Suicide in the US http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050805-4.htm The following points are made by R.C. Kessler et al (J. Am. Med. Assoc. 2005 293:2487): 1) Suicide is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. As a result, the World Health Organization[1] and the US surgeon general[2] have highlighted the need for more comprehensive data on the occurrence of suicidal thoughts and attempts, according to the assumption that such data would be useful for planning national health care policy, as well as for evaluating efforts to reduce suicide and suicide-related behaviors. The latter are among the official national health objectives in the United States.[3] The assumption that information on suicide-related behaviors, including thoughts, plans, gestures, and nonfatal attempts, is important for understanding completed suicides can be called into question because only a small fraction of suicide attempters eventually complete suicide.[4] However, suicide attempts are significant predictors of subsequent completed suicide, as well as important in their own right as indicators of extreme psychological distress. 2) Little is known about trends in suicidal ideation, plans, gestures, or attempts or about their treatment. Such data are needed to guide and evaluate policies to reduce suicide-related behaviors. The objective of this study was to analyze nationally representative trend data on suicidal ideation, plans, gestures, attempts, and their treatment. Data came from the 1990-1992 National Comorbidity Survey and the 2001-2003 National Comorbidity Survey Replication. These surveys asked identical questions to 9708 people aged 18 to 54 years about the past year's occurrence of suicidal ideation, plans, gestures, attempts, and treatment. Trends were evaluated by using pooled logistic regression analysis. Face-to-face interviews were administered in the homes of respondents, who were nationally representative samples of US English-speaking residents. 3) Results of the study: No significant changes occurred between 1990-1992 and 2001-2003 in suicidal ideation, plans, gestures, or attempts, whereas conditional prevalence of plans among ideators increased significantly, and conditional prevalence of gestures among planners decreased significantly. Treatment increased dramatically among ideators who made a suicidal gesture and among ideators who made an attempt. 4) The authors conclude: Despite a dramatic increase in treatment, no significant decrease occurred in suicidal thoughts, plans, gestures, or attempts in the United States during the 1990s. Continued efforts are needed to increase outreach to untreated individuals with suicidal ideation before the occurrence of attempts and to improve treatment effectiveness for such cases.[5] References (abridged): 1. World Health Organization. Prevention of Suicide: Guidelines for the Formulation and Implementation of National Strategies. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization; 1996 2. The Surgeon General's Call to Action to Prevent Suicide. Washington, DC: US Public Health Service; 1999 3. US Department of Health and Human Services. Healthy People 2010, 2nd ed: With Understanding and Improving Health and Objectives for Improving Health. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office; 2000 4. Kuo WH, Gallo JJ. Completed suicide after a suicide attempt. Am J Psychiatry. 2005;162:633 5. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS) [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web site]. Available at: http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/wisqars/default.htm. Accessed March 21, 2005 J. Am. Med. Assoc. http://www.jama.com -------------------------------- Related Material: PUBLIC HEALTH: ON SCHOOL-ASSOCIATED STUDENT SUICIDES The following points are made by J. Kaufman et al (Morb. Mort. Wkly. Rep. 2004;53:476): 1) During 1994-1999, at least 126 students carried out a homicide or suicide that was associated with a private or public school in the United States.(1) Although previous research has described students who commit school-associated homicides, little is known about student victims of suicide. To describe the psychosocial and behavioral characteristics of school-associated suicide victims, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) analyzed data from school and police officials. The results of that analysis indicated that among the 126 students who carried out school-associated homicides or suicides, 28 (22%) died by suicide, including eight who intentionally injured someone else immediately before killing themselves. Two (7%) of the suicide victims were reported for fighting and four (14%) for disobedient behavior in the year preceding their deaths; none were associated with a gang. However, potential indicators of suicide risk such as expressions of suicidal thoughts, recent social stressors, and substance abuse were common among the victims. The authors suggest these findings underscore the need for school staff to learn to recognize and respond to chronic and situational risk factors for suicide. 2) The need for safe schools has prompted considerable interest in understanding and preventing all types of lethal school-associated violence. The finding that 22% of students who carried out such violence took their own lives indicates that a sizeable proportion of lethal school-associated violence was self-directed. In addition, the finding that approximately one in four suicide victims injured or killed someone else immediately before their suicide suggests an overlap between risk for committing school-associated homicide and risk for suicide. Efforts to prevent incidents of lethal school-associated violence should address youth suicidal ideation and behavior. 3) Suicide-prevention efforts are needed not only to address the risk for school-associated violence, but also to reduce the much larger problem of self-directed violence among adolescents overall. In 2001, suicide was the third leading cause of death in the United States among youths aged 13-18 years, accounting for 11% of deaths in this age group.(2) In 2003, approximately one in 12 high school students in the US reported attempting suicide during the preceding 12 months.(3) Data from Oregon indicate that approximately 5% of adolescents treated in hospitals for injuries from a suicide attempt made that attempt at school.(4) 4) The finding that the majority of students who were school-associated suicide victims were involved in extracurricular activities suggests that these students could be familiar to school staff who might recognize warning signs. Although these students were unlikely to stand out (e.g., by fighting or involvement in gangs) in the manner of those who commit school-associated homicides,(1) other established risk factors for suicidal behavior were common (e.g., expression of suicidal thoughts, recent household move, and romantic breakup). These findings support the need for school-based efforts to identify and assist students who describe suicidal thoughts or have difficulty coping with social stressors. School-based prevention efforts are likely to benefit from school officials working closely with community mental health professionals to enhance the abilities of school counselors, teachers, nurses, and administrators to recognize and respond to risk factors for suicide. 5) The findings that one in four of the school-associated suicides were preceded by a recent romantic breakup and nearly one in five suicide victims were under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of their deaths underscore the potential importance of situational risk factors. Youth suicidal behavior often is an impulsive response to circumstances rather than a wish to die. Efforts to help students cope with stressors and avoid substance abuse are important elements of suicide-prevention strategies.(5) References (abridged): 1. Anderson M, Kaufman J, Simon TR, et al. School-associated violent deaths in the United States, 1994-1999. JAMA. 2001;286:2695-702 2. CDC. Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARSTM). Atlanta, Georgia: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, CDC, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, 2004. 3. CDC. Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance--United States, 2003. In: CDC Surveillance Summaries (May 21). MMWR. 2004;53(No. SS-2) 4. CDC. Fatal and nonfatal suicide attempts among adolescents--Oregon, 1988-1993. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 1995;44:312-315, 321-323 5. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. School health guidelines to prevent unintentional injury and violence. MMWR Recomm Rep. 2001;50(RR-22):1-73 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention http://www.cdc.gov -------------------------------- Related Material: PUBLIC HEALTH: METHODS OF SUICIDE AMONG ADOLESCENTS The following points are made by Centers for Disease Control (MMWR 2004 53:471): 1) In 2001, suicide was the third leading cause of death among persons aged 10-19 years.(1) The most common method of suicide in this age group was by firearm (49%), followed by suffocation (mostly hanging) (38%) and poisoning (7%).(1) During 1992-2001, although the overall suicide rate among persons aged 10-19 years declined from 6.2 to 4.6 per 100,000 population,(1) methods of suicide changed substantially. To characterize trends in suicide methods among persons in this age group, CDC analyzed data for persons living in the US during 1992-2001. 2) The results of that analysis indicated a substantial decline in suicides by firearm and an increase in suicides by suffocation in persons aged 10-14 and 15-19 years. Beginning in 1997, among persons aged 10-14 years, suffocation surpassed firearms as the most common suicide method. The decline in firearm suicides combined with the increase in suicides by suffocation suggests that changes have occurred in suicidal behavior among youths during the preceding decade. Public health officials should develop intervention strategies that address the challenges posed by these changes, including programs that integrate monitoring systems, etiologic research, and comprehensive prevention activities. 3) Among persons aged 10-14 years, the rate of firearm suicide decreased from 0.9 per 100,000 population in 1992 to 0.4 in 2001, whereas the rate of suffocation suicide increased from 0.5 in 1992 to 0.8 in 2001. Rate regression analyses indicated that, during the study period, firearm suicide rates decreased an average of approximately 8.8% annually, and suffocation suicide rates increased approximately 5.1% annually. Among persons aged 15-19 years, the firearm suicide rate declined from 7.3 in 1992 to 4.1 in 2001; the suffocation suicide rate increased from 1.9 to 2.7. Rate regression analyses indicated that, during the study period, the average annual decrease in firearm suicide rates for this age group was approximately 6.8%, and the average annual increase in suffocation suicide rates was approximately 3.7%. Poisoning suicide rates also decreased in both age groups, at an average annual rate of 13.4% among persons aged 10-14 years and 8.0% among persons aged 15-19 years. Because of the small number of suicides by poisoning, these decreases have had minimal impact on changes in the overall profile of suicide methods of youths. 4) Among persons aged 10-14 years, suffocation suicides began occurring with increasing frequency relative to firearm suicides in the early- to mid-1990s, eclipsing firearm suicides by the late 1990s. In 2001, a total of 1.8 suffocation suicides occurred for every firearm suicide among youths aged 10-14 years. Among youths aged 15-19 years, an increase in the frequency of suffocation suicides relative to firearm suicides began in the mid-1990s; however, in 2001, firearms remained the most common method of suicide in this age group, with a ratio of 0.7 suffocation suicides for every firearm suicide. 5) The findings in this report indicate that the overall suicide rate for persons aged 10-19 years in the US declined during 1992-2001 and that substantial changes occurred in the types of suicide methods used among those persons aged 10-14 and 15-19 years. Rates of suicide using firearms and poisoning decreased, whereas suicides by suffocation increased. By the end of the period, suffocation had surpassed firearms to become the most common method of suicide death among persons aged 10-14 years. 6) The reasons for the changes in suicide methods are not fully understood. Increases in suffocation suicides and concomitant decreases in firearm suicides suggest that persons aged 10-19 years are choosing different kinds of suicide methods than in the past. Data regarding how persons choose among various methods of suicide suggest that some persons without ready access to highly lethal methods might choose not to engage in a suicidal act or, if they do engage in suicidal behavior, are more likely to survive their injuries.(4) However, certain subsets of suicidal persons might substitute other methods.(5) Substitution of methods depends on both the availability of alternatives and their acceptability. Because the means for suffocation (e.g., hanging) are widely available, the escalating use of suffocation as a method of suicide among persons aged 10-19 years implies that the acceptability of suicide by suffocation has increased substantially in this age group. References (abridged): 1. CDC. Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARSTM). Atlanta, Georgia: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, CDC, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, 2004. 2. National Center for Health Statistics. Multiple cause-of-death public-use data files, 1992 through 2001. Hyattsville, Maryland: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, CDC, 2003 3. Anderson RN, Minino AM, Fingerhut LA, Warner M, Heinen MA. Deaths: injuries, 2001. Natl Vital Stat Rep. 2004;52:1-5 4. Cook PJ. The technology of personal violence. In: Tonry M, ed. Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research, vol. 14. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1991:1-71 5. Gunnell D, Nowers M. Suicide by jumping. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica. 1997;96:1-6 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention http://www.cdc.gov From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 1 16:58:52 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2005 12:58:52 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: Physicians and Military Interrogators Message-ID: Science Policy: Physicians and Military Interrogators http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050805-5.htm The following points are made by M.G. Bloche and J.H. Marks (New Engl. J. Med. 2005 353:6): 1) Mounting evidence from many sources, including Pentagon documents, indicates that military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay have used aggressive counter-resistance measures in systematic fashion to pressure detainees to cooperate. These measures have reportedly included sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation, painful body positions, feigned suffocation, and beatings. Other stress-inducing tactics have allegedly included sexual provocation and displays of contempt for Islamic symbols.[1] The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and others charge that such tactics constitute cruel and inhuman treatment, even torture. 2) To what extent did interrogators draw on detainees' health information in designing and pursuing such approaches? The Pentagon has persistently denied this practice. After the ICRC charged last year that interrogators tapped clinical data to craft interrogation strategies, Defense Department officials issued a statement denying "the allegation that detainee medical files were used to harm detainees."[2] This spring, an inquiry led by Vice Admiral Albert T. Church, the inspector general of the U.S. Navy, concluded: "While access to medical information was carefully controlled at GTMO [Guantanamo Bay], we found in Afghanistan and Iraq that interrogators sometimes had easy access to such information."[3] The implication is that interrogators had no such access at Guantanamo and that medical confidentiality was shielded, albeit with exceptions. Other Pentagon officials have reinforced this message. In a memo made public last month, announcing "Principles . . . for the Protection and Treatment of Detainees," William Winkenwerder, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, said that limits on detainees' medical privacy are "analogous to legal standards applicable to U.S. citizens." 3) However, the inquiry of the authors has determined that this claim is sharply at odds with orders given to military medical personnel -- and with actual practice at Guantanamo. Health information has been routinely available to behavioral science consultants and others who are responsible for crafting and carrying out interrogation strategies. Through early 2003 (and possibly later), interrogators themselves had access to medical records. And since late 2002, psychiatrists and psychologists have been part of a strategy that employs extreme stress, combined with behavior-shaping rewards, to extract actionable intelligence from resistant captives. 4) A previously unreported U.S. Southern Command (SouthCom) policy statement, in effect since August 6, 2002, instructs health care providers that communications from "enemy persons under U.S. control" at Guantanamo "are not confidential and are not subject to the assertion of privileges" by detainees. The statement, from SouthCom's chief of staff, also instructs medical personnel to "convey any information concerning . . . the accomplishment of a military or national security mission . . . obtained from detainees in the course of treatment to non-medical military or other United States personnel who have an apparent need to know the information. Such information," it adds, "shall be communicated to other United States personnel with an apparent need to know, whether the exchange of information with the non-medical person is initiated by the provider or by the non-medical person." The only limit this policy imposes on caregivers' role in intelligence gathering is that they cannot act as interrogators.[4,5] References: 1. Break them down: systematic use of psychological torture by U.S. forces. Cambridge, Mass.: Physicians for Human Rights, 2005 2. Lewis NA. Red Cross finds detainees abuse at Guantanamo. New York Times. November 30, 2004:A1 3. Church report: unclassified executive summary. (Accessed June 16, 2005, at http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Mar2005/d20050310exe.pdf.) 4. Huck RA. U.S. Southern Command confidentiality policy for interactions between health care providers and enemy persons under U.S. control, detained in conjunction with Operation Enduring Freedom. August 6, 2002 (memorandum). (Accessed June 16, 2005, at http://www.southcom.mil/restrict/J1/new%20web%20page/New%20Web %20Pages/AG/Policy/Current%20SC%20Policies/SC%20Current_pols.htm.) 5. Department of the Army. Field manual 34-52: intelligence interrogation. 1992. (Accessed June 21, 2005, at https://atiam.train.army.mil/soldierPortal/atia/adlsc/view/public/6999 -1/FM/34-52/FM34_52.PDF.) New Engl. J. Med. http://www.nejm.org -------------------------------- Related Material: SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY: ON ORDINARY PEOPLE AS TORTURERS The following points are made by S.T. Fiske et al (Science 2004 306:1482): 1) Initial reactions to the events at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were shock and disgust. How could Americans be doing this to anyone, even to Iraqi prisoners of war? Some observers immediately blamed "the few bad apples" presumably responsible for the abuse. However, many social psychologists knew that it was not that simple. Society holds individuals responsible for their actions, as the military court-martial recognizes, but social psychology suggests we should also hold responsible peers and superiors who control the social context. 2) Social psychological evidence emphasizes the power of social context; in other words, the power of the interpersonal situation. Social psychology has accumulated a century of knowledge about how people influence each other for good or ill [1]. Meta-analysis, the quantitative summary of findings across a variety of studies, reveals the size and consistency of such empirical results. Recent meta-analyses document reliable experimental evidence of social context effects across 25,000 studies of 8 million participants [2]. Abu Ghraib resulted in part from ordinary social processes, not just extraordinary individual evil. Meta-analyses suggests that the right (or wrong) social context can make almost anyone aggress, oppress, conform, and obey. 3) Virtually anyone can be aggressive if sufficiently provoked, stressed, disgruntled, or hot [3-5]. The situation of the 800th Military Police Brigade guarding Abu Ghraib prisoners fit all the social conditions known to cause aggression. The soldiers were certainly provoked and stressed: at war, in constant danger, taunted and harassed by some of the very citizens they were sent to save, and their comrades were dying daily and unpredictably. Their morale suffered, they were untrained for the job, their command climate was lax, their return home was a year overdue, their identity as disciplined soldiers was gone, and their own amenities were scant. Heat and discomfort also doubtless contributed. 4) The fact that the prisoners were part of a group encountered as enemies would only exaggerate the tendency to feel spontaneous prejudice against outgroups. In this context, oppression and discrimination are synonymous. One of the most basic principles of social psychology is that people prefer their own group and attribute bad behavior to outgroups. Prejudice especially festers if people see the outgroup as threatening cherished values. This would have certainly applied to the guards viewing their prisoners at Abu Ghraib, but it also applies in more "normal" situations. A recent sample of US citizens on average viewed Muslims and Arabs as not sharing their interests and stereotyped them as not especially sincere, honest, friendly, or warm. 5) Even more potent predictors of discrimination are the emotional prejudices ("hot" affective feelings such as disgust or contempt) that operate in parallel with cognitive processes. Such emotional reactions appear rapidly, even in neuroimaging of brain activations to outgroups. But even they can be affected by social context. Categorization of people as interchangeable members of an outgroup promotes an amygdala response characteristic of vigilance and alarm and an insula response characteristic of disgust or arousal, depending on social context; these effects dissipate when the same people are encountered as unique individuals. References (abridged): 1. S. T. Fiske, Social Beings (Wiley, New York, 2004) 2. F. D. Richard, C. F. Bond, J. J. Stokes-Zoota, Rev. Gen. Psychol. 7, 331 (2003) 3. B. A. Bettencourt, N. Miller, Psychol. Bull. 119, 422 (1996) 4. M. Carlson, N. Miller, Sociol. Soc. Res. 72, 155 (1988) 5. M. Carlson, A. Marcus-Newhall, N. Miller, Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 15, 377 (1989) Science http://www.sciencemag.org -------------------------------- Related Material: MEDICAL BIOLOGY: ON SURVIVING TORTURE The following points are made by Richard F. Mollica (New Engl. J. Med. 2004 351:5): 1) The shocking, unfiltered images from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq have focused the world's attention on the plight of torture survivors. Physicians in the US are confronted as never before with the need to identify and treat the physical and psychological sequelae of extreme violence and torture. Yet this is not a new role for medical practitioners. More than 45 countries are currently suffering from the destruction caused by mass violence.(1) The 20th century has been called the "refugee century", with tens of millions of people violently displaced from their homes. Millions of these people have resettled in the US, and refugees, asylum seekers, and illegal immigrants now commonly enter our health care institutions.(2) 2) Despite routine exposure to the suffering of victims of human brutality, health care professionals tend to shy away from confronting this reality. The author states that he and his colleagues have cared for more than 10,000 torture survivors, and in their experience, whether in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambodia, East Timor, or the US, clinicians avoid addressing torture-related symptoms of illness because they are afraid of opening a Pandora's box: they believe they will not have the tools or the time to help torture survivors once they have elicited their history. 3) Unfortunately, survivors and clinicians may conspire to create a relationship founded on the avoidance of all discussion of trauma. In one instance, a middle-aged Cambodian woman had had an excellent relationship with her American doctor for nine years, but he had no idea that she had been tortured. He had had only partial success in controlling her type 2 diabetes. After attending a training session on treating the effects of terrorism after the events of September 11, 2001, the doctor asked the patient for the first time whether she had undergone extreme violence or torture. She revealed that two of her children had died of starvation in Cambodia, her husband had been taken away violently and disappeared, and she had been sexually violated under the Khmer Rouge. More recently, in the US, her remaining daughter had been nearly fatally stabbed by a gang that burglarized her home. Since September 11, the patient had taken to barricading herself in her house, leaving only to see her doctor. When the doctor became aware of the patient's traumatic history, he used a screening tool to explore the effects of her traumas, diagnosing major depression. Over time, he was able to treat the depression with medication and counseling, eventually bringing the diabetes under control as well. 4) The author concludes: Torture and its human and social effects are now in the global public eye. Medical professionals must relinquish their fears and take the lead in healing the wounds inflicted by the most extreme acts of human aggression. Commitment to a process that begins with a simple but courageous act -- asking the right question -- bespeaks the belief that medicine is a potent antidote to the practices of torturers.(3-5) References: 1. Krug EG, Dahlberg LL, Mercy JA, Zwi AB, Lozano R, eds. World report on violence and health. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2002. 2. Bramsen I, van der Ploeg HM. Use of medical and mental health care by World War II survivors in the Netherlands. J Trauma Stress 1999;12:243-261 3. Goldfeld AE, Mollica RF, Pesavento BH, Faraone SV. The physical and psychological sequelae of torture: symptomatology and diagnosis. JAMA 1988;259:2725-2729. [Erratum, JAMA 1988;260:478 4. Mollica RF. Waging a new kind of war: invisible wounds. Sci Am 2000;282:54-57 5. Cassano P, Fava M. Depression and public health: an overview. J Psychosom Res 2002;53:849-857 New Engl. J. Med. http://www.nejm.org From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 1 16:59:01 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2005 12:59:01 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Daniel Akst: Looks Do Matter Message-ID: Daniel Akst: Looks Do Matter Wilson Quarterly, 2005 Summer http://wwics.si.edu/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=135758 First, the summary from the "Magazine and Journal Reader" feature of the daily bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.7.29 http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/07/2005072901j.htm A glance at the summer issue of The Wilson Quarterly: All about looks Going by the numbers, looks matter in America. Dieting has become a $40-billion industry, and last year Americans spent $8.4-billion on 9.2 million cosmetic surgeries. Forget shallowness, though, writes Daniel Akst, a novelist, because there's a good reason why Americans should care more about appearances. One reason, says Mr. Akst, is the increasing importance of looks to the opposite sex. In one 50-year study, researchers found that the value given to appearances has risen "dramatically" -- for both sexes. On a scale of 1 to 3, the importance of looks rose from 1.5 to 2.11 for men, and from 0.94 to 1.67 among women. Beauty also confers status, argues Mr. Akst. Evidence suggests, he says, that men are better regarded based on how attractive their partners are. And because a correlation exists between status and longevity, "status matters." According to a 2001 study, he says, Academy Award-winning actors outlive nonwinners by about four years. In a report on the study, researchers said such findings "suggest that success confers a survival advantage." Beauty may also lead to greater career success. One study, says Mr. Akst, showed that better-looking people earn 5 to 10 percent more money. Another found that attractive college instructors received higher student ratings, he says. "The more important appearances become," though, "the worse most of us seem to look," he writes. It's not just that two-thirds of Americans are overweight, he says. There is a "broader-based national flight from presentability" under way that has manifested itself in the casual way people dress. Last year, for instance, sales of apparel like warm-up suits netted $39-billion, almost double what was spent on dress suits. --Jason M. Breslow ------------- Everyone knows looks shouldn't matter. Beauty, after all, is only skin deep, and no right-thinking person would admit to taking much account of how someone looks outside the realm of courtship, that romantic free-trade zone traditionally exempted from the usual tariffs of rationality. Even in that tender kingdom, where love at first sight is still readily indulged, it would be impolitic, if not immature, to admit giving too much weight to a factor as shallow as looks. Yet perhaps it's time to say what we all secretly know, which is that looks do matter, maybe even more than most of us think. We infer a great deal from people's looks--not just when it comes to mating (where looks matter profoundly), but in almost every other aspect of life as well, including careers and social status. It may not be true that blondes have more fun, but it's highly likely that attractive people do, and they start early. Mothers pay more attention to good-looking babies, for example, but, by the same token, babies pay more attention to prettier adults who wander into their field of vision. Attractive people are paid more on the job, marry more desirable spouses, and are likelier to get help from others when in evident need. Nor is this all sheer, baseless prejudice. Human beings appear to be hard-wired to respond to how people and objects look, an adaptation without which the species might not have made it this far. The unpleasant truth is that, far from being only skin deep, our looks reflect all kinds of truths about difference and desire--truths we are, in all likelihood, biologically programmed to detect. Sensitivity to the signals of human appearances would naturally lead to successful reproductive decisions, and several factors suggest that this sensitivity may be bred in the bone. Beauty may even be addictive. Researchers at London's University College have found that human beauty stimulates a section of the brain called the ventral striatum, the same region activated in drug and gambling addicts when they're about to indulge their habit. Photos of faces rated unattractive had no effect on the volunteers to whom they were shown, but the ventral striatum did show activity if the picture was of an attractive person, especially one looking straight at the viewer. And the responses occurred even when the viewer and the subject of the photo were of the same sex. Good-looking people just do something to us, whether we like it or not. People's looks speak to us, sometimes in a whisper and sometimes in a shout, of health, reproductive fitness, agreeableness, social standing, and intelligence. Although looks in mating still matter much more to men than to women, the importance of appearance appears to be rising on both sides of the gender divide. In a fascinating cross-generational study of mating preferences, every 10 years different groups of men and women were asked to rank 18 characteristics they might want enhanced in a mate. The importance of good looks rose "dramatically" for both men and women from 1939 to 1989, the period of the study, according to David M. Buss, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas. On a scale of 1 to 3, the importance men gave to good looks rose from 1.50 to 2.11. But for women, the importance of good looks in men rose from 0.94 to 1.67. In other words, women in 1989 considered a man's looks even more important than men considered women's looks 50 years earlier. Since the 1930s, Buss writes, "physical appearance has gone up in importance for men and women about equally, corresponding with the rise in television, fashion magazines, advertising, and other media depictions of attractive models." In all likelihood this trend will continue, driven by social and technological changes that are unlikely to be reversed anytime soon--changes such as the new ubiquity of media images, the growing financial independence of women, and the worldwide weakening of the institution of marriage. For better or worse, we live now in an age of appearances. It looks like looks are here to stay. o The paradox, in such an age, is that the more important appearances become, the worse most of us seem to look--and not just by comparison with the godlike images alternately taunting and bewitching us from every billboard and TV screen. While popular culture is obsessed with fashion and style, and our prevailing psychological infirmity is said to be narcissism, fully two-thirds of American adults have abandoned conventional ideas of attractiveness by becoming overweight. Nearly half of this group is downright obese. Given their obsession with dieting--a $40 billion-plus industry in the United States--it's not news to these people that they're sending an unhelpful message with their inflated bodies, but it's worth noting here nonetheless. Social scientists have established what most of us already know in this regard, which is that heavy people are perceived less favorably in a variety of ways. Across cultures--even in places such as Fiji, where fat is the norm--people express a preference for others who are neither too slim nor too heavy. In studies by University of Texas psychologist Devendra Singh, people guessed that the heaviest figures in photos were eight to 10 years older than the slimmer ones, even though the faces were identical. (As the nation's bill for hair dye and facelifts attests, looking older is rarely desirable, unless you happen to be an underage drinker.) America's weight problem is one dimension of what seems to be a broader-based national flight from presentability, a flight that manifests itself unmistakably in the relentless casualness of our attire. Contrary to the desperate contentions of some men's clothiers, for example, the suit really is dying. Walk around midtown Manhattan, and these garments are striking by their absence. Consumer spending reflects this. In 2004, according to NPD Group, a marketing information firm, sales of "active sportswear," a category that includes such apparel as warm-up suits, were $39 billion, nearly double what was spent on business suits and other tailored clothing. The irony is that the more athletic gear we wear, from plum-colored velour track suits to high-tech sneakers, the less athletic we become. The overall change in our attire did not happen overnight. America's clothes, like America itself, have been getting more casual for decades, in a trend that predates even Nehru jackets and the "full Cleveland" look of a pastel leisure suit with white shoes and belt, but the phenomenon reaches something like an apotheosis in the vogue for low-riding pajama bottoms and flip-flops outside the home. Visit any shopping mall in summer--or many deep-Sunbelt malls year round--and you'll find people of all sizes, ages, and weights clomping through the climate-controlled spaces in tank tops, T-shirts, and running shorts. Tops--and nowadays often bottoms--emblazoned with the names of companies, schools, and places make many of these shoppers into walking billboards. Bulbous athletic shoes, typically immaculate on adults who go everywhere by car, are the functional equivalent of SUVs for the feet. Anne Hollander, an observant student of clothing whose books include Sex and Suits (1994), has complained that we've settled on "a sandbox aesthetic" of sloppy comfort; the new classics--sweats, sneakers, and jeans--persist year after year, transcending fashion altogether. We've come to this pass despite our seeming obsession with how we look. Consider these 2004 numbers from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons: 9.2 million cosmetic surgeries (up 24 percent from 2000) at a cost of $8.4 billion, and that doesn't count 7.5 million "minimally invasive" procedures, such as skin peels and Botox injections (collectively up 36 percent). Cosmetic dentistry is also booming, as is weight-loss surgery. Although most of this spending is by women, men are focusing more and more on their appearance as well, which is obvious if you look at the evolution of men's magazines over the years. Further reflecting our concern with both looks and rapid self-transformation is a somewhat grisly new genre of reality TV: the extreme makeover show, which plays on the audience's presumed desire to somehow look a whole lot better fast. But appearances in this case are deceiving. The evidence suggests that a great many of us do not care nearly enough about how we look, and that even those who care very much indeed still end up looking terrible. In understanding why, it's worth remembering that people look the way they do for two basic reasons--on purpose and by accident--and both can be as revealing as a neon tube top. Let's start with the purposeful. Extremes in casual clothing have several important functions. A big one nowadays is camouflage. Tent-like T-shirts and sweatsuits cover a lot of sins, and the change in our bodies over time is borne out by the sizes stores find themselves selling. In 1985, for example, the top-selling women's size was eight. Today, when, as a result of size inflation, an eight (and every other size) is larger than it used to be, NPD Group reports that the top-selling women's size is 14. Camouflage may also account for the popularity of black, which is widely perceived as slimming as well as cool. That brings us to another motive for dressing down--way down--which is status. Dressing to manifest disregard for society--think of the loose, baggy hipsters in American high schools--broadcasts self-determination by flaunting the needlessness of having to impress anybody else. We all like to pretend we're immune to "what people think," but reaching for status on this basis is itself a particularly perverse--and egregious--form of status seeking. For grownups, it's also a way of pretending to be young, or at least youthful, since people know instinctively that looking young often means looking good. Among the truly young, dressing down is a way to avoid any embarrassing lapses in self-defining rebelliousness. And for the young and fit, sexy casual clothing can honestly signal a desire for short-term rather than long-term relationships. Indeed, researchers have shown that men respond more readily to sexy clothing when seeking a short-term relationship, perhaps because more modest attire is a more effective signal of sexual fidelity, a top priority for men in the marriage market, regardless of nation or tribe. Purposeful slovenliness can have its reasons, then, but what about carelessness? One possible justification is that, for many people, paying attention to their own looks is just too expensive. Clothes are cheap, thanks to imports, but looking good can be costly for humans, just as it is for other species. A signal such as beauty, after all, is valuable in reproductive terms only if it has credibility, and it's been suggested that such signals are credible indicators of fitness precisely because in evolutionary terms they're so expensive. The peacock's gaudy tail, for example, attracts mates in part because it signals that the strutting bird is robust enough not only to sustain his fancy plumage but to fend off the predators it also attracts. Modern humans who want to strut their evolutionary stuff have to worry about their tails too: They have to work them off. Since most of us are no longer paid to perform physical labor, getting exercise requires valuable time and energy, to say nothing of a costly gym membership. And then there is the opportunity cost--the pleasure lost by forgoing fried chicken and Devil Dogs. Eating junk food, especially fast food, is probably also cheaper, in terms of time, than preparing a low-calorie vegetarian feast at home. These costs apparently strike many Americans as too high, which may be why we as a culture have engaged in a kind of aesthetic outsourcing, transferring the job of looking good--of providing the desired supply of physical beauty--to the specialists known as "celebrities," who can afford to devote much more time and energy to the task. Offloading the chore of looking great onto a small, gifted corps of professionals saves the rest of us a lot of trouble and expense, even if it has opened a yawning aesthetic gulf between the average person (who is fat) and the average model or movie star (who is lean and toned within an inch of his or her life). Although the popularity of Botox and other such innovations suggests that many people do want to look better, it seems fair to conclude that they are not willing to pay any significant price to do so, since the great majority do not in fact have cosmetic surgery, exercise regularly, or maintain anything like their ideal body weight. Like so much in our society, physical attractiveness is produced by those with the greatest comparative advantage, and consumed vicariously by the rest of us--purchased, in a sense, ready made. Whether our appearance is purposeful or accidental, the outcome is the same, which is that a great many of us look awful most of the time, and as a consequence of actions or inactions that are at least substantially the result of free will. o Men dressed liked boys? Flip-flops at the office? Health care workers who never get near an operating room but nevertheless dress in shapeless green scrubs? These sartorial statements are not just casual. They're also of a piece with the general disrepute into which looking good seems to have fallen. On its face, so to speak, beauty presents some serious ideological problems in the modern world. If beauty were a brand, any focus group that we convened would describe it as shallow and fleeting or perhaps as a kind of eye candy that is at once delicious and bad for you. As a society, we consume an awful lot of it, and we feel darn guilty about it. Why should this be so? For one thing, beauty strikes most of us as a natural endowment, and as a people we dislike endowments. We tax inheritances, after all, on the premise that they are unearned by their recipients and might produce something like a hereditary aristocracy, not unlike the one produced by the competition to mate with beauty. Money plays a role in that competition; there's no denying that looks and income are traditionally awfully comfortable with each other, and today affluent Americans are the ones least likely to be overweight. By almost any standard, then, looks are a seemingly unfair way of distinguishing oneself, discriminating as they do on the basis of age and generally running afoul of what the late political scientist Aaron Wildavsky called "the rise of radical egalitarianism," which was at the very least suspicious of distinction and advantage, especially a distinction as capricious and as powerful as appearance. Appearance can be a source of inequality, and achieving some kind of egalitarianism in this arena is a long-standing and probably laudable American concern. The Puritans eschewed fancy garb, after all, and Thoreau warned us to beware of enterprises that require new clothes. Nowadays, at a time of increased income inequality, our clothes paradoxically confer less distinction than ever. Gender distinctions in clothing, for instance, have been blurred in favor of much greater sartorial androgyny, to the extent that nobody would any longer ask who wears the pants in any particular household (because the correct answer would be, "everybody"). The same goes for age distinctions (short pants long ago lost their role as uniform of the young), class distinctions (the rich wear jeans too), and even distinctions between occasions such as school and play, work and leisure, or public and private. Who among us hasn't noticed sneakers, for example, at a wedding, in a courtroom, or at a concert, where you spot them sometimes even on the stage? The problem is that, if anything, looks matter even more than we think, not just because we're all hopelessly superficial, but because looks have always told us a great deal of what we want to know. Looks matter for good reason, in other words, and delegating favorable appearances to an affluent elite for reasons of cost or convenience is a mistake, both for the individuals who make it and for the rest of us as well. The slovenliness of our attire is one of the things that impoverish the public sphere, and the stunning rise in our weight (in just 25 years) is one of the things that impoverish our health. Besides, it's not as if we're evolving anytime soon into a species that's immune to appearances. Looks seem to matter to all cultures, not just our image-besotted one, suggesting that efforts to stamp out looksism (which have yet to result in hiring quotas on behalf of the homely) are bucking millions of years of evolutionary development. The degree of cross-cultural consistency in this whole area is surprising. Contrary to the notion that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or at the very least in the eye of the culture, studies across nations and tribal societies have found that people almost everywhere have similar ideas about what's attractive, especially as regards the face (tastes in bodies seem to vary a bit more, perhaps allowing for differing local evolutionary ecologies). Men everywhere, even those few still beyond the reach of Hollywood and Madison Avenue, are more concerned about women's looks than women are about men's, and their general preference for women who look young and healthy is probably the result of evolutionary adaptation. The evidence for this comes from the field of evolutionary psychology. Whatever one's view of this burgeoning branch of science, one thing it has produced (besides controversy) is an avalanche of disconcerting research about how we look. Psychologists Michael R. Cunningham, of the University of Louisville, and Stephen R. Shamblen cite evidence that babies as young as two or three months old look longer at more attractive faces. New mothers of less attractive offspring, meanwhile, have been found to pay more attention to other people (say, hospital room visitors) than do new mothers of better-looking babies. This may have some basis in biological necessity, if you bear in mind that the evolutionary environment, free as it was of antibiotics and pediatricians, might have made it worthwhile indeed for mothers to invest themselves most in the offspring likeliest to survive and thrive. The environment today, of course, is very different, but it may only amplify the seeming ruthlessness of the feelings and judgments we make. "In one study," reports David M. Buss, the evolutionary psychologist who reported on the multi-generational study of mating preferences, "after groups of men looked at photographs of either highly attractive women or women of average attractiveness, they were asked to evaluate their commitment to their current romantic partner. Disturbingly, the men who had viewed pictures of attractive women thereafter judged their actual partners to be less attractive than did the men who had viewed analogous pictures of women who were average in attractiveness. Perhaps more important, the men who had viewed attractive women thereafter rated themselves as less committed, less satisfied, less serious, and less close to their actual partners." In another study, men who viewed attractive nude centerfolds promptly rated themselves as less attracted to their own partners. Even if a man doesn't personally care much what a woman looks like, he knows that others do. Research suggests that being with an attractive woman raises a man's status significantly, while dating a physically unattractive woman moderately lowers a man's status. (The effect for women is quite different; dating an attractive man raises a woman's status only somewhat, while dating an unattractive man lowers her status only nominally.) And status matters. In the well-known "White- hall studies" of British civil servants after World War II, for example, occupational grade was strongly correlated with longevity: The higher the bureaucrat's ranking, the longer the life. And it turns out that Academy Award-winning actors and actresses outlive other movie performers by about four years, at least according to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2001. "The results," write authors Donald A. Redelmeier and Sheldon M. Singh, "suggest that success confers a survival advantage." So if an attractive mate raises a man's status, is it really such a wonder that men covet trophy wives? In fact, people's idea of what's attractive is influenced by the body types that are associated with status in a given time and place (which suggests that culture plays at least some role in ideas of attractiveness). As any museumgoer can tell you, the big variation in male preferences across time and place is in plumpness, and Buss contends that this is a status issue: In places where food is plentiful, such as the United States, high-status people distinguish themselves by being thin. There are reasons besides sex and status to worry about how we look. For example, economists Daniel S. Hamermesh, of the University of Texas, and Jeff E. Biddle, of Michigan State University, have produced a study suggesting that better-looking people make more money. "Holding constant demographic and labor-market characteristics," they wrote in a well-known 1993 paper, "plain people earn less than people of average looks, who earn less than the good-looking. The penalty for plainness is five to 10 percent, slightly larger than the premium for beauty." A 1998 study of attorneys (by the same duo) found that some lawyers also benefit by looking better. Yet another study found that better-looking college instructors--especially men--receive higher ratings from their students. Hamermesh and some Chinese researchers also looked into whether primping pays, based on a survey of Shanghai residents. They found that beauty raises women's earnings (and, to a lesser extent, men's), but that spending on clothing and cosmetics helps only a little. Several studies have even found associations between appearance preferences and economic cycles. Psychologists Terry F. Pettijohn II, of Ohio State University, and Abraham Tesser, of the University of Georgia, for example, obtained a list of the Hollywood actresses with top box-office appeal in each year from 1932 to 1995. The researchers scanned the actresses' photos into a computer, did various measurements, and determined that, lo and behold, the ones who were the most popular during social and economic good times had more "neoteny"--more childlike features, including bigger eyes, smaller chins, and rounder cheeks. During economic downturns, stronger and more rectangular female faces--in other words, faces that were more mature--were preferred. It's not clear whether this is the case for political candidates as well, but looks matter in this arena too. In a study that appeared recently in Science, psychologist Alexander Todorov and colleagues at Princeton University showed photographs of political candidates to more than 800 students, who were asked to say who had won and why based solely on looks. The students chose correctly an amazing 69 percent of the time, consistently picking candidates they judged to look the most competent, meaning those who looked more mature. The losers were more likely to have babyfaces, meaning some combination of a round face, big eyes, small nose, high forehead and small chin. Those candidates apparently have a hard time winning elections. o To scientists, a convenient marker for physical attractiveness in people is symmetry, as measured by taking calipers to body parts as wrists, elbows, and feet to see how closely the pairs match. The findings of this research can be startling. As summarized by biologist Randy Thornhill and psychologist Steven W. Gangestad, both of the University of New Mexico, "In both sexes, relatively low asymmetry seems to be associated with increased genetic, physical, and mental health, including cognitive skill and IQ. Also, symmetric men appear to be more muscular and vigorous, have a lower basal metabolic rate, and may be larger in body size than asymmetric men. . . . Symmetry is a major component of developmental health and overall condition and appears to be heritable." The researchers add that more symmetrical men have handsomer faces, more sex partners, and their first sexual experience at an earlier age, and they get to sex more quickly with a new romantic partner. "Moreover," they tell us, "men's symmetry predicts a relatively high frequency of their sexual partners' copulatory orgasms." Those orgasms are sperm retaining, suggesting that symmetric men may have a greater chance of getting a woman pregnant. It doesn't hurt that the handsomest men may have the best sperm, at least according to a study at Spain's University of Valencia, which found that men with the healthiest, fastest sperm were those whose faces were rated most attractive by women. There's evidence that women care more about men's looks for short-term relationships than for marriage, and that as women get closer to the most fertile point of the menstrual cycle, their preference for "symmetrical" men grows stronger, according to Thornhill and Gangestad. Ovulating women prefer more rugged, masculinized faces, whereas the rest of the time they prefer less masculinized or even slightly feminized male faces. Perhaps predictably, more-symmetrical men are likelier to be unfaithful and tend to invest less in a relationship. Asymmetric people may have some idea that they're behind the eight ball here. William Brown and his then-colleagues at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, looked at 50 people in heterosexual relationships, measuring such features as hands, ears, and feet, and then asked about jealousy. The researchers found a strong correlation between asymmetry and romantic jealousy, suggesting that asymmetrical lovers may suspect they're somehow less desirable. Brown's explanation: "If jealousy is a strategy to retain your mate, then the individual more likely to be philandered on is more likely to be jealous." In general, how we look communicates something about how healthy we are, how fertile, and probably how useful in the evolutionary environment. This may be why, across a range of cultures, women prefer tall, broad-shouldered men who seem like good reproductive specimens, in addition to offering the possibility of physical protection. Men, meanwhile, like pretty women who appear young. Women's looks seem to vary depending on where they happen to be in the monthly fertility cycle. The University of Liverpool biologist John Manning measured women's ears and fingers and had the timing of their ovulation confirmed by pelvic exams. He found a 30 percent decline in asymmetries in the 24 hours before ovulation--perhaps more perceptible to our sexual antennae than to the conscious mind. In general, symmetrical women have more sex partners, suggesting that greater symmetry makes women more attractive to men. To evolutionary biologists, it makes sense that men should care more about the way women look than vice versa, because youth and fitness matter so much more in female fertility. And while male preferences do vary with time and place there's also some remarkable underlying consistency. Devendra Singh, for instance, found that the waist-to-hip ratio was the most important factor in women's attractiveness to men in 18 cultures he studied. Regardless of whether lean or voluptuous women happen to be in fashion, the favored shape involves a waist/hip ratio of about 0.7. "Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe represented two very different images of beauty to filmgoers in the 1950s," writes Nancy Etcoff, who is a psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. "Yet the 36-24-34 Marilyn and the 31.5-22-31 Audrey both had versions of the hourglass shape and waist-to-hip ratios of 0.7." Even Twiggy, in her 92-pound heyday, had a waist/hip ratio of 0.73. o Is it cause for despair that looks are so important? The bloom of youth is fleeting, after all, and the bad news that our appearance will inevitably broadcast about us cannot be kept under wraps forever. Besides, who could live up to the impossible standards propagated by our powerful aesthetic-industrial complex? It's possible that the images of models and actresses and even TV newscasters, most of them preternaturally youthful and all selected for physical fitness, have driven most Americans to quit the game, insisting that they still care about how they look even as they retire from the playing field to console themselves with knife and fork. If the pressure of all these images has caused us to opt out of caring about how we look, that's a shame, because we're slaves of neither genes nor fashion in this matter. By losing weight and exercising, simply by making ourselves healthier, we can change the underlying data our looks report. The advantages are almost too obvious to mention, including lower medical costs, greater confidence, and a better quality of life in virtually every way. There's no need to look like Brad Pitt or Jennifer Lopez, and no reason for women to pursue Olive Oyl thinness (a body type men do not especially prefer). Researchers, in fact, have found that people of both sexes tend to prefer averageness in members of the opposite sex: The greater the number of faces poured (by computer) into a composite, the higher it's scored in attractiveness by viewers. That's in part because "bad" features tend to be averaged out. But the implication is clear: You don't need to look like a movie star to benefit from a favorable appearance, unless, of course, you're planning a career in movies. To a bizarre extent, looking good in America has become the province of an appearance aristocracy--an elect we revere for their seemingly unattainable endowment of good looks. Physical attractiveness has become too much associated with affluence and privilege for a country as democratically inclined as ours. We can be proud at least that these lucky lookers no longer have to be white or even young. Etcoff notes that, in tracking cosmetic surgery since the 1950s, the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery reports a change in styles toward wider, fuller-tipped noses and narrower eyelids, while makeup styles have tended toward fuller lips and less pale skin shades. She attributes these changes to the recalibration of beauty norms as the result of the presence of more Asian, African, and Hispanic features in society. But what's needed is a much more radical democratization of physical beauty, a democratization we can achieve not by changing the definition of beauty but by changing ourselves. Looking nice is something we need to take back from the elites and make once again a broadly shared, everyday attribute, as it once was when people were much less likely to be fat and much more likely to dress decently in public. Good looks are not just an endowment, and the un-American attitude that looks are immune to self-improvement only breeds the kind of fatalism that is blessedly out of character in America. As a first step, maybe we can stop pretending that our appearance doesn't--or shouldn't--matter. A little more looksism, if it gets people to shape up, would probably save some lives, to say nothing of some marriages. Let's face it. To a greater extent than most of us are comfortable with, looks tell us something, and right now what they say about our health, our discipline, and our mutual regard isn't pretty. Daniel Akst is a writer in New York's Hudson Valley. He writes a monthly business column for The New York Times and is the author of several novels, including The Webster Chronicle (2001) and St. Burl's Obituary (1996). Discussions Older men no good in bed I agree with Daniel Akst that the new American wardrobe of jeans, sneakers, and big t-shirts is unbeautiful. (I wouldn't be caught dead in any of these garments.) This wardrobe has certainly played a large role in the decline of general attractiveness. Many women friends of mine, when they gain weight, reach for big sweatshirts and T shirts which make them look fatter than tailored clothing would. That being said, I take issue with the following statement Akst makes: "To evolutionary biologists, it makes sense that men should care more about the way women look than vice versa, because youth and fitness matter so much more in female fertility." After centuries of silence on the issue, we are beginning to discover that youth and fitness do matter a great deal for male fertility. Erectile dysfunction is a common problem for middle-aged men, something that has always been kept secret in our previously male-authored world. Just look at the profits of the company that produces Cialis or Viagra to confirm this. Age takes its toll on a man's ability to have a child just as it does on a woman's. My friend who is 38 would like to get pregnant, but her husband who is 50 is incapable of performing the deed properly. Artificial insemination may be their only recourse. I think evolutionary biologists should collect oral interviews with women and look anew at what seems to me--from an attractive woman's point of view--a glaring misconception. Youth and fitness do matter for male fertility! Posted by: Manmo 07/29/2005 From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 1 16:59:11 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2005 12:59:11 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: It's Not the End Of the Oil Age Message-ID: It's Not the End Of the Oil Age http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/29/AR2005072901672_pf.html Technology and Higher Prices Drive a Supply Buildup By Daniel Yergin Sunday, July 31, 2005; B07 We're not running out of oil. Not yet. "Shortage" is certainly in the air -- and in the price. Right now the oil market is tight, even tighter than it was on the eve of the 1973 oil crisis. In this high-risk market, "surprises" ranging from political instability to hurricanes could send oil prices spiking higher. Moreover, the specter of an energy shortage is not limited to oil. Natural gas supplies are not keeping pace with growing demand. Even supplies of coal, which generates about half of the country's electricity, are constrained at a time when our electric power system has been tested by an extraordinary heat wave. But it is oil that gets most of the attention. Prices around $60 a barrel, driven by high demand growth, are fueling the fear of imminent shortage -- that the world is going to begin running out of oil in five or 10 years. This shortage, it is argued, will be amplified by the substantial and growing demand from two giants: China and India. Yet this fear is not borne out by the fundamentals of supply. Our new, field-by-field analysis of production capacity, led by my colleagues Peter Jackson and Robert Esser, is quite at odds with the current view and leads to a strikingly different conclusion: There will be a large, unprecedented buildup of oil supply in the next few years. Between 2004 and 2010, capacity to produce oil (not actual production) could grow by 16 million barrels a day -- from 85 million barrels per day to 101 million barrels a day -- a 20 percent increase. Such growth over the next few years would relieve the current pressure on supply and demand. Where will this growth come from? It is pretty evenly divided between non-OPEC and OPEC. The largest non-OPEC growth is projected for Canada, Kazakhstan, Brazil, Azerbaijan, Angola and Russia. In the OPEC countries, significant growth is expected to occur in Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Algeria and Libya, among others. Our estimate for growth in Iraq is quite modest -- only 1 million barrels a day -- reflecting the high degree of uncertainty there. In the forecast, the United States remains almost level, with development in the deep-water areas of the Gulf of Mexico compensating for declines elsewhere. While questions can be raised about specific countries, this forecast is not speculative. It is based on what is already unfolding. The oil industry is governed by a "law of long lead times." Much of the new capacity that will become available between now and 2010 is under development. Many of the projects that embody this new capacity were approved in the 2001-03 period, based on price expectations much lower than current prices. There are risks to any forecast. In this case, the risks are not the "below ground" ones of geology or lack of resources. Rather, they are "above ground" -- political instability, outright conflict, terrorism or slowdowns in decision making on the part of governments in oil-producing countries. Yet, even with the scaling back of the forecast, it would still constitute a big increase in output. This is not the first time that the world has "run out of oil." It's more like the fifth. Cycles of shortage and surplus characterize the entire history of the oil industry. A similar fear of shortage after World War I was one of the main drivers for cobbling together the three easternmost provinces of the defunct Ottoman Turkish Empire to create Iraq. In more recent times, the "permanent oil shortage" of the 1970s gave way to the glut and price collapse of the 1980s. But this time, it is said, is "different." A common pattern in the shortage periods is to underestimate the impact of technology. And, once again, technology is key. "Proven reserves" are not necessarily a good guide to the future. The current Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure rules, which define "reserves" for investors, are based on 30-year-old technology and offer an incomplete picture of future potential. As skills improve, output from many producing regions will be much greater than anticipated. The share of "unconventional oil" -- Canadian oil sands, ultra-deep-water developments, "natural gas liquids" -- will rise from 10 percent of total capacity in 1990 to 30 percent by 2010. The "unconventional" will cease being frontier and will instead become "conventional." Over the next few years, new facilities will be transforming what are inaccessible natural gas reserves in different parts of the world into a quality, diesel-like fuel. The growing supply of energy should not lead us to underestimate the longer-term challenge of providing energy for a growing world economy. At this point, even with greater efficiency, it looks as though the world could be using 50 percent more oil 25 years from now. That is a very big challenge. But at least for the next several years, the growing production capacity will take the air out of the fear of imminent shortage. And that in turn will provide us the breathing space to address the investment needs and the full panoply of technologies and approaches -- from development to conservation -- that will be required to fuel a growing world economy, ensure energy security and meet the needs of what is becoming the global middle class. The writer is chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates. His book "The Prize: the Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power" received the Pulitzer Prize. From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 1 19:23:00 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2005 15:23:00 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] =?iso-8859-1?q?Foreign_Policy=3A_Carl_Pope=2C_Bj=F8?= =?iso-8859-1?q?rn_Lomborg=3A_The_State_of_Nature?= Message-ID: Carl Pope, Bj?rn Lomborg: The State of Nature Foreign Policy, 5.7-8 http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3084&print=1 Is the world getting greener? Or are we selling it short for a fistful of greenbacks? Apparently, even committed environmentalists can disagree. When Carl Pope looks out his door, he sees the polar ice caps melting, ecosystems on life support, and clean water disappearing. But Bj?rn Lomborg believes humanity?s backyard has never looked better. Who?s got it right? For young and old, rich and poor, the answer might just mean the world. Our Roof Is Caving in By Carl Pope The global environmental dilemma teems with both risks and opportunities. The world is at considerable peril, yet solutions to the problems we face are at our fingertips. We have been loading the Earth?s atmosphere with mercury from burning coal, chemical plants, and mining for centuries. As a result, the fish caught in our oceans are now a health risk for young women. Yet we have, and can afford, the necessary technology to stop pumping mercury into the environment. The trick is finding the will and prudence to pursue such solutions. Currently, the world?and the United States in particular?lacks the leadership to link the two. Let me show you what I mean. Thirteen?hundred scientists from 95 countries just issued a report called the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which notes that 15 of the 24 ecosystems vital for life on Earth are in a degraded or overdrawn state. That?s like a doctor telling you that 60 percent of your organs are failing. Yet we cannot summon the courage to tackle simple solutions. Keeping tires on American automobiles properly inflated, for instance, would save as much oil as will be found by drilling (and destroying) the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. If you don?t believe a report from 1,300 scientists, consider that the CIA believes that more than 3 billion people will be living in water?stressed regions?from North Africa to China?by 2015. The water tables of major grain?producing areas in northern China are dropping at a rate of 5 feet per year, and per capita water availability in India is expected to drop by 50 to 75 percent over the next decade. The number of chronically malnourished people in sub?Saharan Africa will increase by 20 percent over the next 15 years. That is scary stuff. It?s also unnecessary. Do these alarming trends mean that the sky is falling? No. If the sky were falling, we couldn?t do much except hide. But these trends do mean that the roof over our house will cave in?unless it gets some much?needed repairs. Consider the United States? energy policy. Americans consume 25 percent of the world?s oil. Why? Because consumers lack choices. Even though engineering has made car engines 25 percent more efficient, increased bulk has made fuel economy worse. In some U.S. cities, the waiting list for a hybrid car is longer than the waiting list for a kidney transplant. Instead of pursuing new solutions such as hybrid cars, the United States invades Iraq, bullies Venezuela, and rattles its sabers at Iran. Similarly, China is eagerly building dams that will destroy villages and impoverish thousands while low?technology solutions to increase energy efficiency lie fallow. This global leadership vacuum is dangerous. Anger at the chasm between better energy solutions and our scarcity of leadership is not confined to tree?hugging environmentalists. Listen to former President Ronald Reagan?s secretary of state, George Schultz: ?How many more times must we be hit on the head by a two?by?four before we do something about this acute problem. New ultralight?but?safe materials can nearly redouble fuel economy at little or no extra cost.? The world has a choice. We can let go of the archaic technologies and reckless practices of the past, recognize that solutions are better than anxieties, and watch science pleasantly surprise us. Or we can remain in denial, insist that modest change now is more painful than eventual catastrophe, and reap the whirlwind. Let?s Try Priorities, not Propaganda By Bj?rn Lomborg Yes, we have problems. But we have solved many more. Yes, we can solve those that remain, but not all at once. We need priorities. You say 60 percent of Earth?s ecosystems are in decline, without talking much about people and forgetting the crucial linkage between poverty and pollution. The bottom line is?as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment stresses?that humanity?s lot has improved dramatically in both the rich world and in the developing world. In the poorest countries, life expectancy has more than doubled over the past 100 years. The global malnutrition rate dropped from 50 percent in 1950 to 17 percent today, while the number of people living below the poverty line dropped from 50 percent to less than 25 percent. Access to clean drinking water has risen from 30 percent in 1970 to 80 percent today. We have never had it this good, and it?s likely to get better. The rich world has simultaneously improved the environment. In the United States, the most important environmental indicator, particulate air pollution, has more than halved since 1955, rivers and coastal waters are dramatically cleaner, and forest land is increasing. These trends are generally shared by all developed countries. Why? Because the rich can afford to care for the environment. In the developing world, environmental indicators are getting worse, as you note. In Bombay and Bangkok, air pollution is only getting thicker. But countries in the developing world are simply prioritizing in the same way the West did 100 years ago. They care first about feeding their kids, not cleaning up the air. And if you look at the West, that strategy works. Today, London?s air is the cleanest it has been since medieval times. Some of the richest developing countries are already following suit. In Mexico and Chile, air pollution is going down. We need to keep environmental problems in context and prioritize the ones to solve first. Despite a dramatic drop in U.S. air pollution, it still constitutes the United States? most serious environmental hazard?and kills roughly 135,000 people each year. But you talk about mercury, which is far less detrimental and far less beneficial if cleaned up. That is what I mean by prioritization. The same is true for the developing world. Yes, water is important. But you focus on scarcity, which is a management issue. Why not talk about access to clean drinking water? Despite dramatic improvements, 1 billion people today live without it, resulting in more than 2 million (otherwise preventable) deaths each year. You mention that 37 million more people will be malnourished in sub?Saharan Africa by 2015, but you neglect to point out that the number of well?fed people will increase 10?fold, by more than 374 million. Context and priorities are important. Perhaps the most pressing environmental problem in the world is indoor air pollution, which kills 2.8 million people each year, just behind HIV/AIDS. The pollution is caused by poor people cooking and heating their homes with dung and cardboard. The solution is not environmental (to certify dung) but rather economic, helping these people build enough wealth to afford kerosene. You say the world has a choice. True. But it is rarely your stay?stupid or be?smart choice. We can do almost anything, but we can?t do it all at once. The challenge is to prioritize better. I?ve indicated some top priorities. What do you think we should do first and, even harder, what should wait? Stop Cooking the Books Carl Pope responds True, we need priorities. And safe drinking water ought to be at the very top of the list. I agree. We also share distress that air pollution is killing so many Americans each year?but that doesn?t mean mercury might not be a bigger problem. After all, neurological damage to kids is a very big deal. Having priorities doesn?t always mean Sophie?s choice. If we clean up coal?fired power plants, we solve both air pollution and mercury with one investment. We don?t have to make an all?or?nothing choice between environmental responsibility and economic progress. If we can afford F?16 fighter jets for Pakistan, we can afford clean water and better schools in Karachi. Britain spent a century industrializing in ways that devastated the environment and workers? lives. Yet Taiwan and Singapore forged a more progressive and less destructive path. Economic growth is powered by innovation, and new technology doesn?t have to be environmentally destructive. Developing village?level power technologies using fuel cells, solar power, and agricultural wastes makes more economic and environmental sense in India than massive investments in copper wires and coal turbines. The problem is that bad accounting produces bubbles and busts. Human welfare can increase in two ways, by harvesting ecosystem services and human innovation or by mining ecosystems in ways that deprive the future. We have already done the latter with oceanic fisheries, three quarters of which are no longer sustainable. That?s the scary thing about the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Bj?rn. Honest ecological bookkeeping shows that today?s economic progress may be the result of a bunch of ?off the books? transactions that will leave our children with a bankrupt planet. My first priority is to stop cooking the books. Sophie?s Choice Is Real Bj?rn Lomborg responds I?m glad you agree that we need priorities. But I worry that your commitment is rhetorical. If drinking water is priority No. 1, water scarcity is not. You accept that the 135,000 annual American deaths from air pollution are terrible, but you then suggest that mercury might be even more dangerous. That flies in the face of estimates by both the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the environmental watchdog Resources for the Future. One study from the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution estimates that eliminating mercury emissions from U.S. power plants would ?reduce the numbers of U.S. children experiencing subtle neurological deficiencies by on the order of 10,000 per year.? Isn?t 135,000 annual deaths from air pollution much worse? I?m asking because that is what happens when people agree in principle to prioritize, then refuse to face Sophie?s choice. Prioritizing really means some things must come last. Of course, we can make some investments in the environment without sacrificing economic progress, but we cannot make them all. Because the United States can afford F?16s does not mean it can also afford all environmental initiatives. We have to carefully spend our resources where they will do the most good. The solar installations you champion easily cost $450 apiece. Better?constructed $10 stoves can significantly reduce indoor air pollution. Do we want to help one family a little or 45 families a lot? You return to the 1,300 scientists and their report on the world?s ecosystems. What their results show is that when people are starving, lacking clean drinking water, getting poisoned from indoor air pollution, and dying from easily curable communicable diseases, they let the environment get ravaged, too. Your solution is to deal with the environment first. But shouldn?t we, morally and practically, help them gain wealth first, so they can take care of the environment too? Fighter Jets and Other False Choices Carl Pope responds No, Bj?rn, Sophie?s choice is avoidable. Bad human decisions, not inescapable reality, make the environment appear to be a ?trade?off? with prosperity. Your mercury analysis is sloppy. You use 2001 figures, dating back to when the Bush administration was suppressing data. These suppressed data show that 630,000 U.S. infants annually, not 10,000, are born with dangerous levels of mercury. Eventually, we need to clean up mercury globally. We can afford to modernize U.S. power plants. The Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, founded by Bush regulatory czar John Graham, estimates that cleaning up the mercury emitted from U.S. power plants would save nearly $5 billion in healthcare expenditures annually and cost just $750 million a year. Investments that produce 600 percent returns are not hard choices. Good environmental stewardship saves money in poor countries. To enhance tourism, the Maldives purposefully preserved its barrier reefs. When the tsunami hit that tiny South Asian country in December 2004, the reefs absorbed the brunt of the wave, so what hit the islands was a gentle swell, not a deadly wall of water. China today is experiencing riots because of its poor environmental stewardship. Its ?backyard? coal?fired power plants, a monument to Maoism, make neither economic nor environmental sense. Why not help China to retire them and replace them with wind turbines? Tilting at Windmills Bj?rn Lomborg responds Now you suggest funding windmills in China? I suggest first distributing efficient cookers to combat indoor air pollution, which would save more lives and money. You suggest preserving reefs and mangroves, saving lives in case there is another tsunami. I suggest we first save thousands of times more by tackling curable, infectious diseases. You insist that there are no real trade?offs between the environment and prosperity. But money spent on windmills can?t also be spent on something else. It is not that environmental projects are not worthwhile. It?s just that they are not the only things we need to do. Often, there are other, better projects that must come first. You persist in prioritizing mercury over particulates, which is plain wrong. The data you talk about were not ?suppressed? by the Bush administration, but essentially known since 1999. And they said the 630,000 infants are at ?increased risk.? But not all of those will be affected. U.S. utilities account for less than 25 percent of mercury emissions and most of the fish we eat come from waters where reductions in mercury won?t matter. So, at best, completely eliminating mercury will help 10,000 children. Moreover, your $750 million only addresses a one?third reduction in mercury. And your Harvard study is more careful than you are: The benefits could range anywhere from about $5 billion to just $100 million, quite possibly a loss. I understand why scary numbers are easy to publicize, but pointing out the correct numbers and priorities is not sloppy?it?s just reality. Don?t Treat the Earth Like Enron Carl Pope responds If you look back to the beginning of this exchange, I did not say that mercury was a higher priority than particulates. I did not focus on U.S. power plant emissions alone. You did. I cited the oceanic mercury problem as a symbol of our failure of leadership and the resulting problems that failure creates. You keep posing artificial choices such as the one between cookers and wind turbines. Both are more desirable and more economical than backyard coal furnaces. It is simply not the case that the world?or the United States?does only one thing at a time. Leadership doesn?t mean picking the lowest?hanging fruit, one at a time. It means acting on our wiser, not our greedier, instincts. Where do we get the money? Let those who take from the global commons foot the bill. If the companies that emit mercury were to pay damages, they would be forced to clean up, and the world would be healthier and more prosperous. Current U.S. carbon emissions now top 1.5 billion tons per year?about 25 percent of total global carbon emissions. Scientists? mid?range estimates are that planetary sinks?plants, trees, and other elements that absorb carbon?can handle about 5.5 billion tons without an unacceptable increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. With 5 percent of the world?s population, a fair U.S. share of global carbon emissions is 275 million tons a year. At a modest value of $50 per ton, U.S. carbon emitters owe the world?s poor nations at least $66 billion for this year alone. So, Bj?rn, if U.S. carbon emitters and those in Saudi Arabia, Europe, and Japan pay for what they pollute, we could fund clean drinking water, clean village stoves, wind turbines, and solar cells in India. Of course, if we started making carbon wasters in the United States pay, Economics 101 suggests they will emit much less. Instead of a massive transfer of wealth, charging fairly for carbon emissions would reduce pollution in the United States, generate cash for development in China, Africa, and other developing regions, and reduce climactic instability. This system won?t increase poverty. It may hurt the oil companies. So what? Henry Ford was bad for buggy makers. You ask for my priorities. We should stop cooking the books, make those who take from the global commons pay, and invest that revenue as wisely as we can. The result of these steps will not be Dr. Pangloss?s ?best of all possible worlds.? But I am shocked that anyone believes we will get better results by continuing to treat the Earth as if it were Enron. Less Charming, but Honest Bj?rn Lomborg responds We agree that wise investments will make the world better. But what proposals does that actually include? The question was answered last year by the Copenhagen Consensus project. Thirty specialists from a broad range of fields joined forces with eight top economists, including three Nobel laureates, to make a global priority list. Their top goals were to prevent HIV/AIDS, end agricultural subsidies, and fight malnutrition and malaria. That is where we can do the most good per dollar. The Copenhagen Consensus concluded that substantial responses to climate change (your favorite) would do little good at high cost. You say we should make polluters pay. That?s an excellent idea. But you get a bit too excited. Most analyses show that the carbon damage cost is less than $10 per ton, suggesting a much lower tax and revenue stream. Moreover, just as money is a scarce resource, so too is political will. Given the world?s immense reluctance to enforce carbon taxes and trade liberalization, we should focus on getting the best one?trade?done first. Your Economics 101 suggests that carbon taxes would have a big impact on emissions and climate change, but real economic models show the exact opposite. Carbon taxes would have little impact on emissions or climate change. No matter how much money we raise, we should still spend it wisely. If investing in cookers is more cost effective than windmills, we should do the cookers first. It really isn?t more complicated. Advocacy groups understandably want to focus on headline?grabbing issues, such as mercury, mangroves, and global warming. But when we emphasize some problems, we get less focus on others. It has been hard to get you to say what the world should not do first. Such a strategy is, naturally, less charming. But if we really want to do good in the long run, it is more honest to put those terms on paper. You end by repeating your claim that we are cooking the environmental books. No. We know there are environmental problems. But we face other challenges, too. Let?s tackle the ones where we can do the most good first. The rich world is dealing with many of its environmental problems because it can afford to. If the poor world became wealthier, they would follow suit. Tackling pressing issues such as disease, hunger, and polluted water will do obvious good and give the poor the chance to improve the state of their world. Carl Pope is executive director of the Sierra Club. Bj?rn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), is adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School. From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 1 19:23:09 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2005 15:23:09 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Book World: Honor Among Dealers Message-ID: Honor Among Dealers http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/28/AR2005072801565_pf.html Reviewed by Steve Bogira Sunday, July 31, 2005; BW15 A SHADOW IN THE CITY Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior By Charles Bowden Harcourt. 309 pp. $24 Charles Bowden's A Shadow in the City is a journey into the mind of one veteran soldier in the war on drugs as he increasingly doubts his mission. For more than 20 years, Joey O'Shay has deceived people for a living. And he's been a master at his work. O'Shay isn't his real name, and Bowden won't tell us the city where he works. He seems to be a local narcotics cop detailed to the feds. He started in his mid-twenties, kicking in doors on raids with his crew. On one bust, a man emerged from a bedroom with a .357, fired at O'Shay, and missed. O'Shay shot the man twice in the chest, killing him. The close call and the slaying of a man didn't deter O'Shay. He found himself riding the adrenaline rush, "this sense of being totally alert because in an instant you may be totally dead." But shootouts aren't common in the drug war; most of the battles are psychological. That part of the job thrills O'Shay even more. His work initially consists mainly of getting addicts to reveal their sources: "He finds people who will do anything to get high and finds he gets high by finding them and using them." Moving up from addicts to petty dealers to suppliers of kilos from Mexico and Colombia, O'Shay eventually poses as a dealer himself. He doesn't participate in the actual busts, and often suppliers go to prison unaware that it was O'Shay who did them in. Most undercover drug cops spend a year or two on the job before they've had enough, Bowden says. O'Shay stays at it, wearing out partners "like sets of tires." He can't quit. Obsession "is the ultimate addiction, the strongest drug because it gives the one thing other drugs never deliver. It gives meaning." He's sustained by the certainty that he is good and his prey are evil. But as the years march on, O'Shay starts questioning that conviction. He comes to believe that the drug kingpins work much harder than his fellow narcs, that they're honest "in their own filthy way." And he can't help but realize that the drugs keep flowing in spite of his efforts. Most of A Shadow in the City revolves around a deal involving millions of dollars worth of pure Colombian heroin. O'Shay develops an affection for the supplier, a Caribbean woman identified only as Gloria. His skillful efforts result in the seizure of a large cache of heroin -- and Gloria's arrest. One night, he begins to write down how he feels about the "intricate, filthy, disgusting maze" he concocted to snare her. "I have more respect for the drug dealers I took down than the majority of the bureaucracy I work around," he writes. "Tonight I will drink enough to numb the fact I have destroyed some other humans and most likely their innocent families." The book's power is diminished by its total dependence on unnamed sources and pseudonyms for all the cops and all the dealers. In the drug-enforcement sphere, confidential informants are a necessary evil, but the secrecy allows for scamming, and the results must be viewed skeptically. Likewise in the world of journalism. Bowden is a gifted writer, but his book can be hard going, with its disjointed, hallucinatory glimpses of O'Shay's parallel personae as cop, dealer, father and seeker of truth. And he strains at times in painting O'Shay as a maestro of narcs: "He can read a face in a glance, know a move before it happens. Sense what someone else will do before the thought crosses their mind." And leap tall buildings in a single bound? A Shadow in the City is a condemnation of the drug war, with a top officer saying the point of the war eludes him. But it's also a fascinating personal story about a man whose search for meaning in his life makes him reject his life's work. ? Steve Bogira is the author of "Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse." From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 1 19:23:21 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2005 15:23:21 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: On Seeing the World as Quantum-Mechanical Message-ID: Physics and Society: On Seeing the World as Quantum-Mechanical http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050805-6.htm The following points are made by Richard Conn Henry (Nature 2005 436:29): 1) Historically, we have looked to our religious leaders to understand the meaning of our lives; the nature of our world. With Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), this changed. In establishing that the Earth goes around the Sun, Galileo not only succeeded in believing the unbelievable himself, but also convinced almost everyone else to do the same. This was a stunning accomplishment in "physics outreach" and, with the subsequent work of Isaac Newton (1642-1727), physics joined religion in seeking to explain our place in the Universe. 2) The more recent physics revolution of the past 80 years has yet to transform general public understanding in a similar way. And yet a correct understanding of physics was accessible even to Pythagoras. According to Pythagoras, "number is all things", and numbers are mental, not mechanical. Likewise, Newton called light "particles", knowing the concept to be an "effective theory" --useful, not true. As noted by Newton's biographer Richard Westfall: "The ultimate cause of atheism, Newton asserted, is 'this notion of bodies having, as it were, a complete, absolute and independent reality in themselves.'" Newton knew of Newton's rings and was untroubled by what is shallowly called "wave/particle duality". 3) The 1925 discovery of quantum mechanics solved the problem of the Universe's nature. Bright physicists were again led to believe the unbelievable -- this time, that the Universe is mental. According to Sir James Jeans: "the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter... we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter." But physicists have not yet followed Galileo's example and convinced everyone of the wonders of quantum mechanics. As Sir Arthur Eddington explained: "It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character." 4) In the tenth century, Ibn al-Haytham initiated the view that light proceeds from a source, enters the eye, and is perceived. This picture is incorrect but is still what most people think occurs, including, unless pressed, most physicists. To come to terms with the Universe, we must abandon such views. The world is quantum mechanical: we must learn to perceive it as such. One benefit of switching humanity to a correct perception of the world is the resulting joy of discovering the mental nature of the Universe. We have no idea what this mental nature implies, but -- the great thing is -- it is true. Beyond the acquisition of this perception, physics can no longer help. You may descend into solipsism, expand to deism, or something else if you can justify it -- just don't ask physics for help.[1-3] References: 1. Marburger, J. On the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics http://www.ostp.gov/html/Copenhagentalk.pdf (2002) 2. Henry, R. C. Am. J. Phys. 58, 1087-1100 (1990) 3. Steiner, M. The Applicability of Mathematics as a Philosophical Problem (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998) Nature http://www.nature.com/nature -------------------------------- Related Material: THEORETICAL PHYSICS: ON QUANTUM MEASUREMENT LIMITS The following points are made by V. Giovannetti et al (Science 2004 306:1330): 1) Measurement is a physical process, and the accuracy to which measurements can be performed is governed by the laws of physics. In particular, the behavior of systems at small scales is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, which place limits on the accuracy to which measurements can be performed. These limits to accuracy take two forms. First, the Heisenberg uncertainty relation [1] imposes an intrinsic uncertainty on the values of measurement results of complementary observables such as position and momentum, or the different components of the angular momentum of a rotating object. Second, every measurement apparatus is itself a quantum system: As a result, the uncertainty relations together with other quantum constraints on the speed of evolution [such as the Margolus-Levitin theorem [2]] impose limits on how accurately we can measure quantities, given the amount of physical resources, such as energy, at hand to perform the measurement. 2) One important consequence of the physical nature of measurement is the so-called "quantum back action": The extraction of information from a system can give rise to a feedback effect in which the system configuration after the measurement is determined by the measurement outcome. For example, the most extreme case (the so-called von Neumann or projective measurement) produces a complete determination of the post-measurement state. When performing successive measurements, quantum back action can be detrimental, because earlier measurements can negatively influence successive ones. 3) A common strategy to get around the negative effect of back action and of Heisenberg uncertainty is to design an experimental apparatus that monitors only one out of a set of incompatible observables: "less is more" [3]. This strategy, called "quantum nondemolition measurement" [3-6], is not as simple as it sounds. One has to account for the system's interaction with the external environment, which tends to extract and disperse information, and for the system dynamics, which can combine the measured observable with incompatible ones. Another strategy to get around the Heisenberg uncertainty is to employ a quantum state in which the uncertainty in the observable to be monitored is very small (at the cost of a very large uncertainty in the complementary observable). The research on quantum-enhanced measurements was spawned by the invention of such techniques [3] and by the birth of more rigorous treatments of quantum measurements. 4) Most standard measurement techniques do not account for these quantum subtleties, so that their precision is limited by otherwise avoidable sources of errors. Typical examples are the environment-induced noise from vacuum fluctuations (the so-called "shot noise") that affects the measurement of the electromagnetic field amplitude, and the dynamically induced noise in the position measurement of a free mass (the so-called "standard quantum limit"). These sources of imprecision are not as fundamental as the unavoidable Heisenberg uncertainty relations, because they originate only from a non-optimal choice of measurement strategy. However, the shot noise and standard quantum limits set important benchmarks for the quality of a measurement, and they provide an interesting challenge to devise quantum strategies that can defeat them. 5) In summary: Quantum mechanics, through the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, imposes limits on the precision of measurement. Conventional measurement techniques typically fail to reach these limits. Conventional bounds to the precision of measurements such as the shot noise limit or the standard quantum limit are not as fundamental as the Heisenberg limits and can be overcome using quantum strategies that employ "quantum tricks" such as squeezing and entanglement. References (abridged): 1. H. P. Robertson, Phys. Rev. 34, 163 (1929) 2. N. Margolus, L. B. Levitin, Physica D 120, 188 (1998) 3. C. M. Caves, K. S. Thorne, R. W. P. Drever, V. D. Sandberg, M. Zimmermann, Rev. Mod. Phys. 52, 341 (1980) 4. K. Bencheikh, J. A. Levenson, P. Grangier, O. Lopez, Phys. Rev. Lett. 75, 3422 (1995) 5. G. J. Milburn, D. F. Walls, Phys. Rev. A. 28, 2065 (1983) Science http://www.sciencemag.org -------------------------------- Related Material: QUANTUM PHYSICS: ZERO-POINT FLUCTUATIONS The following points are made by Miles Blencowe (Nature 2003 424:262): 1) In 1927, Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) introduced his famous quantum principle, which states that the uncertainties in the position and the velocity of a particle are inversely proportional to each other: a particle's position or its velocity can be known precisely, but not both at once. This principle is one of the cornerstones of quantum mechanics, and is traditionally relevant to the domain of subatomic particles. But what about more familiar macroscopic objects, comprising many atoms, that we think of as possessing simultaneously well-defined positions and velocities of their center-of-mass? If we could be sufficiently precise in our measurements on such objects, would we encounter the quantum uncertainty principle at work? 2) If you clamp one end of a wooden ruler to the edge of a table and then pluck the other, free end, it vibrates with decaying amplitude and eventually returns to apparent rest. But if you were to look at the free end of the ruler under a sufficiently powerful microscope, it would not be at rest at all, but jiggling up and down in a random fashion. This motion is a consequence of the air molecules striking the ruler, as well as of its countless, fluctuating internal defects, and is an example of thermal brownian motion. 3) There are other, quantum fluctuations in the ruler, though, that are completely masked by this classical thermal motion. These quantum "zero-point" fluctuations have much smaller amplitude and arise from the necessary uncertainty in position and velocity stated in Heisenberg's principle. The situation is analogous to the hydrogen atom, which is stable because the attractive electrostatic force that would like to pull the electron into a tighter volume around the proton is balanced by the repulsive effect of the electron's fluctuating velocity. Similarly, for a macroscopic object such as a crystal beam or a ruler, the elastic restoring force on the bent beam balances the repulsive effect of its fluctuating center-of-mass velocity. 4) Because the magnitudes of the zero-point fluctuations in position and velocity are so small, they can only be detected if the structure is cooled down to very low temperatures. As the temperature is lowered, the amplitude of thermal motion decreases. Eventually, there will be no thermal motion, only pure, temperature-independent zero-point fluctuations. At a temperature of about a hundredth of a kelvin, zero-point fluctuations should dominate in a structure with a mechanical vibration frequency of about one billion cycles per second (1 gigahertz, or GHz). Nature http://www.nature.com/nature From shovland at mindspring.com Mon Aug 1 20:57:15 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2005 13:57:15 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] The Progressive Rapture Message-ID: <01C596A0.ED0BE280.shovland@mindspring.com> We know that there are millions of Jihadist Christrians out there driving around in SUV's joyfully awaiting The Rapture. There may only be 144,000 seats on the Fiery Chariot, but that doesn't bother those who have undergone The Faith Lobotomy. Meanwhile us poor Faithless Progressives are stuck here on planet Earth, trying to figure out how to make it a better place for ourselves as well as for the future Left Behinds. Fortunately for us, and contrary to the blatherings of the Reptilian Noise Machine, we have lots of ideas for doing that. And we are doing it, even though the Fascist Corporate Media are ignoring us, and will continue to ignore us while the Old World crumbles around them. In our two's and three's we are gathering, and the True Spirit of Christ's Love is radiating from us with ever-increasing strength. Those who think we are Wimps will learn their own folly as we take up our whips of cord and drive their evil souls from the Temple. In the end, we Humans will win. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Tue Aug 2 18:21:26 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Tue, 2 Aug 2005 11:21:26 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] driving the money lenders from the temple In-Reply-To: <200508021800.j72I0MR31521@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050802182127.83155.qmail@web30804.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Steve says: >>Those who think we are Wimps will learn their own folly as we take up our whips of cord and drive their evil souls from the Temple.<< --Let's do that with the love the Pharisees failed to show us. That will make their humiliation even more purifying. Michael ____________________________________________________ Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs From HowlBloom at aol.com Wed Aug 3 05:27:11 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2005 01:27:11 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: on islam Message-ID: <1b8.1870419e.3021afaf@aol.com> In a message dated 7/31/2005 12:58:23 AM Eastern Standard Time, shovland at mindspring.com writes: Don't forget that there were vast reserves of gold in Africa that fueled their growth for a long time. They traded a lot of it to India via Madagascar. good point, Steve. Gold and ivory were treasures the empire of Islam sucked from Africa in abundance. These export items were carried the hundreds of miles from central africa to the ports of Zanzibar or Mombasa on the shoulders of newly-enslaved women, children, and, in much smaller numbers, men. Those men and women were tied in long chain gangs by ropes around their necks. They were underfed. If one fell because of weakness, she or he was hacked to death on the spot. She who fell failed as a transport mechanism and failed as a potential export. Here?s a North African eyewitness account quoted in a South African Christian Magazine. In North Africa, the freight was not ivory and gold. It was mere firewood. ?In 1818, Captain Lyon of the Royal Navy reported that the Al-Mukani in Tripoli ?waged war on all its defenceless neighbours and annually carried off 4000 to 5000 slaves.a piteous spectacle! These poor oppressed beings were, many of them, so exhausted as to be scarcely able to walk, their legs and feet were much swelled, and by their enormous size formed a striking contrast with their emaciated bodies. They were all borne down with loads of firewood, and even poor little children, worn to skeletons by fatigue and hardships, were obliged to bear their burden, while many of their inhuman masters with dreadful whip suspended from their waist.all the traders speak of slaves as farmers do of cattle.the defenceless state of the Negro kingdoms to the southward are temptations too strong to be resisted, a force is therefore annually sent.to pillage these defenceless people, to carry them off as slaves, burn their towns, kill the aged and infants, destroy their crops and inflict on them every possible misery.all slavery is for an unlimited time.none of their owners ever moved without their whips - which were in constant use.drinking too much water, bringing too little wood or falling asleep before the cooking was finished, were considered nearly capital crimes, and it was in vain for these poor creatures to plead the excuse of being tired. Nothing could withhold the application of the whip. No slaves dared to be ill or unable to walk, but when the poor sufferer dies, the master suspects that there must have been something 'wrong inside' and regrets not having liberally applied their usual remedy of burning the belly with a red-hot iron.?? (Retrieved July 14, 2005, from the World Wide Web http://www.christianaction.org.za/articles_ca/2004-4-TheScourgeofSlavery.htm Christian Action Magazine) ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From checker at panix.com Wed Aug 3 22:58:47 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2005 18:58:47 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: On Human Impacts on Ecosystems Message-ID: Anthropology: On Human Impacts on Ecosystems http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050805-3.htm [I left out several addresses in recent e-mails. Let me know what dates you missed if you want to get these articles.] The following points are made by Christopher N. Johnson (Science 2005 309:255): 1) What was the impact of early human populations on pristine ecosystems? Studies of this question have focused on the possibility that humans caused extinctions of large mammals. For example, the arrival of modern humans in the Americas ~11,000 years ago coincided with the disappearance of mammoths, ground sloths, and many other large mammals [1]. However, the role of humans is difficult to determine in this case because the climate was also changing rapidly as the last ice age came to an end; climate change, not human impact, may have caused the extinctions. 2) Modern humans reached Australia much earlier. Just when they did is still debated, but occupation was widespread by 45,000 years ago and may have begun several thousand years earlier [2] -- well before the climatic upheavals at the end of the last glacial cycle. Australia should therefore provide a clear view of the ecological impacts of human arrival. But environmental changes following human arrival in Australia have been difficult to resolve, because very few precisely dated environmental records extend through the middle of the last glacial cycle. Recent work. (3) provides such a record based on diet reconstructions of the continent's two largest bird species. The results indicate that human arrival resulted in a profound environmental shift. 3) Miller et al [3] studied past diets of the emu (Dromaius novaehollandiae) and an even larger flightless herbivorous bird, the extinct Genyornis newtoni, in the arid and semi-arid regions of the south Australian interior. By analyzing carbon isotopes in individually dated eggshells, they were able to compare the contributions of plants that use the C4 photosynthetic pathway (mainly tropical and arid-adapted grasses) and those that use the C3 pathway (most shrubs, trees, and nongrass herbs) to the diet of the birds that laid the eggs. Their collection of eggshells covers the past 140,000 years, encompassing the whole of the last glacial cycle. 4) Miller et al [3] found a sudden change in emu diet between 50,000 and 45,000 years ago. Before 50,000 years ago, emus had variable diets, with a strong contribution from C4 plants; after 45,000 years ago, they ate mostly C3 plants. Genyornis eggshells were common before 50,000 years ago, but they abruptly disappeared at the same time as the diet of the emu changed. Before then, Genyornis also ate a mixture of C3 and C4 plants, but its diet was much less variable than that of the emu through the same period, which suggests that it was a more specialized feeder. 5) These results point to a major change in vegetation. Perhaps woodland mosaics, with plenty of grass, were converted into monotonous shrubland, or nutritious grasses were replaced by poor-quality species, forcing emus to increase their feeding on nongrass species. Miller et al [3] also measured carbon isotopes in wombat teeth, showing that they changed in the same way at the same time. Nowadays, wombats are mainly grazers; the switch in their diet from C4 grass to C3 shrubs in the middle of the last glacial period can only be explained by a huge change in vegetation. References (abridged): 1. A. D. Barnosky, P. L. Koch, R. S. Feranec, S. L. Wing, A. B. Shabel, Science 306, [70] (2004) 2. J. F. O'Connell, J. Allen, J. Archaeol. Sci. 31, 835 (2004) 3. G. H. Miller et al., Science 309, 287 (2005) 4. R. G. Roberts et al., Science 292, [1888] (2001) 5. F. D. Pate, M. C. McDowell, R. T. Wells, A. M. Smith, Austral. Archaeol. 54, 53 (2002) Science http://www.sciencemag.org -------------------------------- Related Material: EARTH SCIENCE: AN APPARENT ECOSYSTEM EFFECT OF GLOBAL WARMING The following points are made by C.M. O'Reilly et al (Nature 2003 424:766): 1) Although the effects of climate warming on the chemical and physical properties of lakes have been documented, biotic and ecosystem-scale responses to climate change have been only estimated or predicted by manipulations and models. 2) Lake Tanganyika in Africa is a large (mean width, 50 km; mean length 650 km), deep (mean depth, 570 m; maximum depth, 1470 m) north south trending rift valley lake that is an important source of both nutrition and revenue to the bordering countries of Burundi, Tanzania, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The lake has historically supported one of the world's most productive pelagic fisheries, and the annual harvest in recent years has been estimated to be between 165,000 and 200,000 metric tons, with an equivalent value of tens of millions of US dollars. 3) The lake is oligotrophic and permanently thermally stratified with an anoxic hypolimnion. During the cool windy season (May to September), strong southerly winds tilt the thermocline, causing upwelling of deeper nutrient-rich waters at the south end of the lake and initiating seiche activity. Cooling during this season also contributes to a weaker thermocline, and entrainment of deep nutrient-rich waters from the hypolimnion occurs in this time period. Overall, these mixing events provide the dominant source of some limiting nutrients (P, Si) to the surface waters and are important in maintaining the pelagic food web. 4) The authors present evidence that climate warming is diminishing productivity in Lake Tanganyika. In parallel with regional warming patterns since the beginning of the twentieth century, a rise in surface-water temperature has increased the stability of the water column. A regional decrease in wind velocity has contributed to reduced mixing, decreasing deep-water nutrient upwelling and entrainment into surface waters. Carbon isotope records in sediment cores suggest that primary productivity may have decreased by about 20%, implying a roughly 30% decrease in fish yields. The authors suggest their study provides evidence that the impact of regional effects of global climate change on aquatic ecosystem functions and services can be larger than that of local anthropogenic activity or overfishing. Nature http://www.nature.com/nature -------------------------------- Related Material: ECOLOGY: EXTINCTION PATTERNS AND ECOSYSTEMS The following points are made by David Raffaelli (Science 2004 306:1141): 1) The accelerated extinctions of species and changes in biodiversity are no longer disputed issues. Much effort has gone into quantifying biodiversity loss rates for particular animal and plant groups (1). Less clear, however, is the impact of such losses on ecosystems, especially when many different kinds of species of plants and animals are lost simultaneously (2). Yet policy-makers urgently need guidance on the effects of multispecies losses if they are to plan for and advise on the societal consequences of biodiversity changes. The ecological research community has been highly active in attempting to provide such guidance (3,4), but many challenges remain. Foremost among these is that most real extinction events are nonrandom with respect to species identity -- some species are more likely to go extinct than others -- whereas research studies often assume that extinctions are random. 2) Solan et al (5) and Zavaleta and Hulvey (6), reporting on work in two very different types of ecosystem, reveal that the impact of nonrandom species extinctions on ecosystems is markedly different from that predicted by scenarios where extinctions are random. These studies bring us a step nearer to understanding the impact of nonrandom species losses on ecosystems and should help to provide policy-makers with a firmer basis for decision-making. 3) The two studies examine very different habitats (marine versus terrestrial), each with different kinds of organisms (sea-bed invertebrates versus grassland plants), different ecosystem processes (sediment biogeochemistry versus resistance to invasion by exotic species), and different types of experimental approaches (data analysis and modeling versus controlled experimentation). So it is all the more interesting, for scientists and policy-makers alike, that both papers arrive at the same conclusion: Nonrandom extinction events have impacts on ecosystems that are quite different from those predicted by scenarios that assume species extinctions occur at random. 4) Solan et al (5) combine into a model a well-documented data set of invertebrate communities in marine sediments off the coast of Galway, Ireland. This fusion, facilitated by the BIOMERGE initiative, enables the authors to predict what will happen to the cumulative effects of the small-scale sediment disturbances (bioturbation) caused by the movement, feeding, and respiration activities of all 139 species of clams, worms, sea urchins, brittle stars, and shrimps present in this system if species are lost through impacts such as overfishing, habitat destruction, and pollution. The authors scored each species for its body size, mobility, and mode of sediment mixing to calculate an index of bioturbation potential for different species combinations and for different degrees of species richness. In their model, either extinction scenarios could be random or losses could be ordered with respect to the sensitivity of species to environmental stress, body size, and abundance, traits that in turn reflect different kinds of impact. References (abridged): 1. See www.royalsoc.ac.uk/events 2. See www.millenniumassessment.org/en/index.aspx 3. M. Loreau et al., Science 294, 804 (2001) 4. M. Loreau, S. Naeem, P. Inchausti, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning (Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, 2002) 5. M. Solan et al., Science 306, 1177 (2004) 6. E. S. Zavaleta, K. B. Hulvey, Science 306, 1175 (2004) Science http://www.sciencemag.org From checker at panix.com Wed Aug 3 22:58:55 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2005 18:58:55 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: On the Optical Structure of Animal Eyes Message-ID: Evolution: On the Optical Structure of Animal Eyes http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050805-2.htm The following points are made by Michael F. Land (Current Biology 2005 15:R319): 1) The ability to respond to light is common to many forms of life, but eyes themselves -- structures that break up environmental light according to its direction of origin -- are only found in animals. At its simplest, an eye might consist of a small number of light-responsive receptors in a pigmented pit, which shadows some receptors from light in one direction, and others from a different direction. This definition distinguishes an eye from an organ with a single photoreceptor cell, which may indeed be directional because of screening pigment, but which does not allow for spatial vision -- the simultaneous comparison of light intensities in different directions [1]. An alternative starting point for an eye would be for each receptor to have its own pigmented tube, the assemblage forming a convex cushion. In these two proto-eye structures we have the beginnings of the two mutually exclusive ways of building an eye: the single-chambered range of eyes, often misleadingly called "simple", and the compound eyes. 2) Although no eyes survive in fossils from the Precambrian (more than 550 million years ago) it seems certain that eyes like these were present from early in the evolution of the Bilateria [2], long before the Cambrian explosion. Simple pit eyes are still present in flatworms, annelid worms, and molluscs, and in many larval eyes. Proto-compound eyes occur in ark clams and some tube-dwelling polychaetes, where they act as detectors of moving predators. Genetic, developmental, and morphological evidence indicates that from the earliest times eyes had access to two different photoreceptor types: ciliary receptors, in which the photosensitive pigment is displayed on outgrowths of cilia, and rhabdomeric receptors, in which the expanded pigment-containing membrane consists of microvilli. The two receptor types use different transducer cascades, and their opsins -- the protein component of the photopigments -- are also different. Ciliary receptors are typical of deuterostomes (echinoderms and chordates) and rhabdomeric receptors of the protostomes (annelids, molluscs and arthropods), but both types can be found in both lineages. The development of cerebral eyes in both of these lineages has been associated with the Pax-6 control gene, evidently from early in bilaterian evolution. 3) In the Cambrian period, carnivory became important as a way of life and both predators and prey needed better vision. During the hundred million years from about 550 millions years ago, compound and then single-chambered eyes increased greatly in size, in their ability to resolve, and in optical sophistication. One way to improve the performance of a single-chambered proto-eye is to make the eye bigger and the aperture smaller, so that it becomes a genuine pinhole eye. This is a far from ideal solution, because the small aperture lets in little light, and so makes for a very insensitive eye, and increasing the aperture diameter drastically reduces the ability of the eye to resolve. For reasons that remain obscure, this design has been retained in the quite large (1 cm) eyes of the cephalopod Nautilus, even though its relatives (octopus and squid) have eyes with excellent lenses. Giant clams also have small pinhole eyes around their mantles, which do allow them to detect the presence of browsing fish. 4) A much better solution is to provide the eye with a lens, usually spherical in marine animals as a sphere provides the shortest focal length for a structure of a given diameter, and hence the most compact design. Such a structure might be made of protein, or some other substance with a refractive index higher than that of water. Refraction at each surface would bend rays and produce an image behind the lens. There is, however, a serious problem with a lens of this kind. Rays striking the outer regions of the lens are bent too much, so that they are focussed much closer to the lens than rays nearer to the lens center. This defect is known as spherical aberration, and in a spherical lens this is so severe that the image would be effectively unusable. The solution (attributed to James Clerk Maxwell) is for the lens to have a gradient of refractive index, highest in the center and falling to close to that of water in the periphery [3]. Peripheral rays are then bent much less, and overall the focal length of the eye becomes much shorter -- about 2.5 lens radii as opposed to 4 radii for a homogeneous lens. This makes for a lens that resolves well, and has a very high light-gathering power --an F-number of 1.25.[4,5] References (abridged): 1. Land, M.F. and Nilsson, D.-E. (2002). Animal Eyes. Oxford University Press 2. Arendt, D. and Wittbrodt, J. (2001). Reconstructing the eyes of Urbilateria. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B Biol. Sci. 356, 1545-1563 3. Jagger, W.S. (1992). The optics of the spherical fish lens. Vision Res. 32, 1271-1284 4. Land, M.F. (1984). Crustacea. In: Ali, M.A. (Ed.), Photoreception and Vision in Invertebrates.. (1984). Plenum, New York 5. Kr?ger, R.H.H., Campbell, M.C.W., Fernald, R.D., and Wagner, H.-J. (1999). Multifocal lenses compensate for chromatic defocus in vertebrate eyes. J. Comp. Physiol. [A] 184, 361-369 Current Biology http://www.current-biology.com -------------------------------- Related Material: ON THE EVOLUTION OF THE EYE The following points are made by E.J.W. Barrington (citation below): 1) Two main types of highly differentiated photoreceptor system have appeared in the invertebrates: the compound eyes of arthropods and the camera-type eyes of cephalopods. Enough is known of the mode of functioning of these, and of their probable past history, to show that they represent the evolution, along two very different lines, of organs that have some striking points of similarity with the vertebrate eye, not only in their pigments but also in certain details of their structural organization. Indeed, this is an aspect of animal organization which is of considerable significance -- a convergence resulting from the widespread distribution of a common biochemical ground plan. In this instance the common feature is, of course, the nature of the photosensitive pigments. 2) Simple types of eyes are seen in the free-living Platyhelminthes and in the Annelida, where they are often composed of sensory cells associated with screening pigment cells. In their simplest form they may be no more than pigment spots, forming part of the general epithelium, but more usually they sink inwards to form cups. In the Turbellaria the pigment cells are often arranged to form the wall of an open bowl, the bipolar receptor cells projecting into this through its aperture. In such an eye there can be no possibility of forming an image, for there is no refractive structure. These organs are doubtless restricted to the differentiation of light and darkness, and in this way they make it possible for the animal to orientate itself with respect both to the intensity and to the source of the illumination. The distal ends of the receptor cells are differentiated to form a rod border, in which longitudinal striations can be seen with the light microscope... 3) Cup-like arrangements of pigment cells are common in the eyes of polychaetes, but a higher level of differentiation is reached in this group. Not only do the receptor cells themselves have a rod like tip, but the epithelium of the cup may produce secretions that fuse to form one or more lenses. Moreover, groups of sensory cells may be closely collected together to form ommatidia, recalling the unit structures of the compound eye of arthropods. Indeed, in sabellids (Branchiomma, for example) the ommatidia themselves may be grouped together to form a rudimentary type of compound eye. No doubt a similar tendency played an important part in the ancestors of arthropods, contributing to the establishment of their characteristic compound eyes. Convergence was probably involved in the process of arthropodization, so much so that it is necessary to envisage the possibility of an independent evolution of compound eyes in more than one line. The situation in annelids goes some way to make the possibility of the independent evolution of compound eyes acceptable, although it does not reveal the actual ancestry of these organs. Adapted from: E.J.W. Barrington: Invertebrate Structure and Function. Nelson 1967, p.282. -------------------------------- Related Material: ON THE MAMMALIAN CLOCK-EYE T. Roenneberg and M. Merrow (University of Munich, DE) discuss mammalian clocks, the authors making the following points: 1) Even without time cues from the environment, physiological events, from gene expression to behavior, recur with a high regularity but not necessarily in a precise 24 hour rhythm --hence the term "circadian" ("about one day"). Circadian rhythms are controlled by endogenous "clocks" which are synchronized, or "entrained", to the 24-hour day predominantly by light [1]. The central circadian pacemaker in mammals resides above the optic chiasm in the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN). It has long been known that light entrainment in mammals requires the eyes, but it was unclear through which photoreceptor the signal was processed. It came as a surprise that the circadian clock remains perfectly entrainable by light in mutant mice devoid of rods and cones [2]. 2) Researchers are racing to identify the novel receptor in the mammalian retina. Its spectral characteristics have been defined in mice and, more recently, in humans [3,4]. In addition to its role in entrainment, the novel photoreceptor is responsible for several other non-visual light responses, such as melatonin suppression, pupillary constriction and direct effects of light on motor-activity ("masking"), or for many other "vegetative" light effects, for example on cortisol levels or heart rate. Hankins and Lucas (5) have taken our understanding of this novel light input pathway a step further, showing that its influence is already apparent in the primary steps of intra-retinal signal processing. 3) The authors discuss vision vs. irradiation detection. Vision capitalizes on photons, using rods or cones as "pixels" to create a retinal image that is processed in the thalamus and the cortex. While a memory of these "pictures" may be stored in the brain, the retinal picture itself has to be renewable within milliseconds for instant detection of any changes. Visual processing thus requires both fast kinetics and high spatial resolution. In contrast, a detector for the assessment of day and night should not care about a flash of lightning or the shadow of a flying object. Its task is to integrate photons over a long time. This integration mechanism is partially responsible for the difficulties that shift workers have in adjusting their biological clocks to socially enforced schedules -- the competition between indoor and outdoor light cannot be won. A worker who is exposed to 500 lux over an eight-hour night shift collects a similar quantity of photons waiting 15 minutes for the bus, even on a cloudy day. As a result, the circadian system remains entrained to the "real" day -- it cannot adjust to the implemented night shift, so workers try to be active and alert when their physiology is tuned to sleep. In fact, workers on night shifts, with most of the rest of the day free to spend outdoors, may collect more day light than their non-shifting colleagues. The invention of artificial light has ironically created a biological shadow world because we spend more time indoors. 4) In summary: Light is the most reliable environmental signal for adjusting biological clocks to the 24-hour day. Mammals receive this signal exclusively through the eyes, but not just via rods and cones. New evidence has been uncovered for a novel photoreceptor that may be responsible for more than just adjusting the clock. References (abridged): 1. Roenneberg T. and Foster R.G. (1997) Twilight Times-light and the circadian system. Photochem. Photobiol., 66:549-561 2. Freedman M.S., Lucas R.J., Soni B., von Schantz M., Munoz M., David-Gray Z.K. and Foster R. (1999) Non-rod, non-cone ocular photoreceptors regulate the mammalian circadian behavior. Science, 284:502-504 3. Brainard G.C., Hanifin J.P., Greeson J.M., Byrne B., Glickman G., Gerner E. and Rolag M.D. (2001) Action spectrum for melatonin regulation in humans: evidence for a novel circadian photoreceptor. J. Neurosci., 21:6405-6412 4. Thapan K., Arendt J. and Skene D.J. (2001) An action spectrum for melatonin suppression: evidence for a novel non-rod, non-cone photoreceptor system in humans. J. Physiol., 535:261-267 5. Hankins, M.W. and Lucas, R.J. (2002). A novel photopigment in the human retina regulates the activity of primary visual pathways according to long-term light exposure. (in press) Current Biology 2002 12:R163 From checker at panix.com Wed Aug 3 22:59:01 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2005 18:59:01 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: On Optimization Message-ID: Evolution: On Optimization http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050805-1.htm The following points are made by William J. Sutherland (Nature 2005 435:569): 1) The essence of optimization is to calculate the most efficient solution to a given problem, and then to test the prediction. The concept has already revolutionized some aspects of biology, but it has the potential for much wider application. Of course, optimization has long been employed effectively in subjects other than biology. Economists have traditionally calculated the options that result in the greatest profit, and engineers routinely calculate the best design solution, such as the strongest bridge of a given weight. 2) Darwin's theory of natural selection provided an obvious mechanism for explaining optimization in biology: more efficiently designed individuals will leave more offspring. But it was another century before biologists calculated optimal solutions. David Lack pioneered its use in biology with his concept of the optimal clutch size the number of eggs that would produce the greatest number of offspring. The use of optimization has allowed biologists to move from merely describing patterns or mechanisms to being able to predict, from first principles, how organisms should be designed. Optimality models are based on three elements: the choices available; what is being optimized; and the constraints. 3) Physiologists have used optimization to answer a wide range of questions about animal morphology. For example, optimization has been invoked to predict the design of a bone of given weight that minimizes the risk of breaking or buckling; the speed at which it is most efficient to switch from running to walking; and the gut design that provides the highest energy gain from a given diet. The prediction of the triplet code as the most parsimonious means of coding 20 amino acids using the four bases of DNA is another successful example of this methodology. 4) But optimization has its critics. The most common objection centers on the mistaken belief that the aim of this method is to test whether organisms are optimal. Actually, it is the assumptions of optimality that are tested. The failure to find support for a prediction can be used to determine whether an assumption is wrong. For example, if animals do not select the diet that maximizes energy intake, it may be because they are choosing a diet that optimizes a balance of different components, or that avoids the costs associated with obtaining larger prey. Once such possibilities have been identified, a new theory can be devised and its predictions tested. It has been argued that this process is circular but in practice it is no different from the successive predicting and testing that underlies most science.[1-3] References (abridged): 1. Alexander, R. M. Optima for Animals (Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, 1996) 2. Lucas, P. W. Dental Functional Morphology (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2004) 3. Sutherland, W. J. From Individual Behavior to Population Ecology (Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, 1996) Nature http://www.nature.com/nature -------------------------------- Related Material: ECOLOGY: ON OPTIMIZATION OF MAMMALIAN SPACE REQUIREMENTS The following points are made by Steven Buskirk (Science 2004 306:238): 1) For decades ecologists have sought to understand the principles underlying how mammals optimize their space requirements. It is intuitive that mammals need home ranges, areas they routinely traverse that are large enough to meet their energy needs, but small enough to be protected from intrusions by same-species neighbors that occupy adjacent home ranges. Early attempts to understand the relation between body mass and home-range area suggested that home-range area increases at the same rate as metabolism (1). As metabolic rate is proportional to body mass raised to the 3/4 power, then home-range size should also have the same proportion to body mass (2). 2) However, abundant data on the home ranges of mammals, primarily derived from wildlife telemetry studies, suggest that this is not the case. Indeed, the home-range area increases at a higher rate than metabolic rate and, in fact, scales almost linearly with body mass (3,4). Yet parallel evidence from mammalian population density studies is consistent with a metabolic explanation of individual spatial requirements in that the reciprocal of population density (area per animal) appears to scale to the 3/4 power of body mass (5). As large mammals have home ranges bigger than would be predicted from their energetic needs, this implies a maintenance cost that goes beyond the acquisition of essential resources. 3) Jetz et al (2004) have coalesced all of these findings by deriving a general model of mammalian spatial requirements that incorporates body mass, energy requirements, home-range size and, crucially, interactions with same-species neighbors. The authors use an equation from physics for collisions among gas particles to predict the frequency of interactions between home-range owners and intrusive neighbors. They demonstrate that large mammals require a home range that is larger than predicted by resource needs because they share resources with their neighbors to a greater extent than do small mammals. This forced sharing is the result of body size-dependent processes, such as whether the mammal is able to traverse its home range often enough to exclude its neighbors. 4) The general approach of Jetz et al (2004) falls within the realm of allometric macroecology, which attempts to explain biological differences among species by examining patterns over a wide range of body sizes. For terrestrial mammals, this range is represented by the six orders of magnitude that separate the body masses of shrews and elephants. Metabolic rate, the most fundamental of physiological attributes, was shown by Kleiber (1) to be proportional to the 3/4 power of body mass in mammals across an entire range of body sizes, rather than the 2/3 power predicted by a simple surface area to volume relation. Recently the 3/4 exponent was derived from first principles by West et al (1997). References (abridged): 1. M. Kleiber, The Fire of Life (Wiley, New York, 1961) 2. B. K. McNab, Am. Nat. 97, 133 (1963) 3. A. S. Harestad, F. L. Bunnell, Ecology 60, 389 (1979) 4. S. L. Lindstedt et al., Ecology 67, 413 (1986) 5. J. Damuth, Biol. J. Linn. Soc. 31, 193 (1987) Science http://www.sciencemag.org -------------------------------- Related Material: DINOSAURS, DRAGONS, AND DWARFS: THE EVOLUTION OF MAXIMAL BODY SIZE The following points are made by G.P. Burness et al (Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 2001 98:14518): 1) The size and taxonomic affiliation of the largest locally present species ("top species") of terrestrial vertebrate vary greatly among faunas, raising many unsolved questions. Why are the top species on continents bigger than those on even the largest islands, bigger in turn than those on small islands? Why are the top mammals marsupials on Australia but placentals on the other continents? Why is the world's largest extant lizard (the Komodo dragon) native to a modest-sized Indonesian island, of all unlikely places? Why is the top herbivore larger than the top carnivore at most sites? Why were the largest dinosaurs bigger than any modern terrestrial species? 2) A useful starting point is the observation of Marquet and Taper (1998), based on three data sets (Great Basin mountaintops, Sea of Cortez islands, and the continents), that the size of a landmass's top mammal increases with the landmass's area. To explain this pattern, they noted that populations numbering less than some minimum number of individuals are at high risk of extinction, but larger individuals require more food and hence larger home ranges, thus only large landmasses can support at least the necessary minimum number of individuals of larger-bodied species. If this reasoning were correct, one might expect body size of the top species also to depend on other correlates of food requirements and population densities, such as trophic level and metabolic rate. Hence the authors assembled a data set consisting of the top terrestrial herbivores and carnivores on 25 oceanic islands and the 5 continents to test 3 quantitative predictions: a) Within a trophic level, body mass of the top species will increase with land area, with a slope predictable from the slope of the relation between body mass and home range area. b) For a given land area, the top herbivore will be larger than the top carnivore by a factor predictable from the greater amounts of food available to herbivores than to carnivores. c) Within a trophic level and for a given area of landmass, top species that are ectotherms will be larger than ones that are endotherms, by a factor predictable from ectotherms' lower food requirements. 3) The authors point out that on reflection, one can think of other factors likely to perturb these predictions, such as environmental productivity, over-water dispersal, evolutionary times required for body size changes, and changing landmass area with geological time. Indeed, the database of the authors does suggest effects of these other factors. The authors point out they propose their three predictions not because they expect them always to be correct, but because they expect them to describe broad patterns that must be understood in order to be able to detect and interpret deviations from those patterns. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. http://www.pnas.org From checker at panix.com Wed Aug 3 22:59:06 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2005 18:59:06 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: Advantage, China Message-ID: Advantage, China http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/29/AR2005072902172_pf.html Advantage, China In This Match, They Play Us Better Than We Play Them By James McGregor Sunday, July 31, 2005; B01 BEIJING -- We're losing the intelligence war against China. No, not the one with spy satellites, human operatives and electronic eavesdropping. I'm talking about intelligence : having an intelligent understanding of and intelligent discussions about China -- where it's heading, why it's bidding to buy major U.S. companies and whether we should worry. Above all, I'm talking about formulating and pursuing intelligent policies for dealing with China. The Chinese government today understands America much better than our government understands China. Consequently, the Chinese government is much better at pulling our strings than we are at pulling theirs. China's top leaders, diplomats and bureaucrats have a clear framework from which they view the United States, and they are focused and unified in formulating and implementing their policies toward us. In contrast, our government's viewpoint on China is unfocused, fractured and often uninformed. Is China still the Red Menace of the Cold War or a hot new competitor out to eat our economic lunch? Both views as well as a hodgepodge of other interpretations can be found in the halls of the White House, Congress and the Pentagon. Add to that confusion a vicious domestic political culture that brooks no compromise, and the chances of formulating a coherent China policy approach nil. Playing the barbarians off against each other has been a core tenet of Chinese foreign policy since the imperial dynasty days when China's maps depicted a huge landmass labeled the "Middle Kingdom" surrounded by tiny islands labeled England, Germany, France, America, Russia and Africa. China was the center of the world and everyone else was a barbarian. That's why the Chinese are delighted by spectacles such as when rival members of a U.S. congressional delegation screamed at one another in front of their Chinese hosts in the Great Hall of the People. And what should they think of the time top Chinese officials laid out clear policy objectives to an American business audience and a U.S. cabinet member responded by saying "Jesus loves the Chinese people"? Since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, China policy has been a political football that American politicians kick back and forth to score points against one another. In the 1990s, it was a penalty-free game because the United States had the upper hand. China needed our capital, technology, know-how and insatiable consumer market to build its economy, as well as our blessing to join the World Trade Organization (WTO). But those days are over. China's raging consumer market, its massive export machine, voracious appetite for global resources and more than $700 billion in foreign exchange reserves puts the ball in its court. It is difficult to overstate the transformation that has swept China in the past 15 years. To frame it in terms of comparable historical changes in the United States, China has been simultaneously experiencing the raw capitalism of the robber baron era of the late 1800s; the speculative financial mania of the 1920s; the rural-to-urban migration of the 1930s; the emergence of the first-car, first-home, first-fashionable-clothes, first-college-education, first-family-vacation middle-class consumer boom of the 1950s; and even aspects of social upheaval similar to the 1960s. Today Chinese government officials and business executives admire, fear and pity the United States. They admire our entrepreneurial culture, free markets, legal system and ability to unemotionally discard what doesn't work while our best-in-the-world universities and enormous R&D capabilities create new products and services. China's economic reforms over the past 25 years have been aimed at creating a Chinese variation of the U.S. economic system and its ability to unleash entrepreneurial instincts and harness markets to build a world-beating economy. China's fear stems from seeing our high-tech military machine in action. I will never forget standing in front of the Beijing train station during the first Gulf War, amid a sea of Chinese workers, thousands of whom had stopped their bicycles in the street to watch slack-jawed as huge outdoor TV screens displayed footage of American missiles screaming down Baghdad smokestacks. Just a few blocks away in the leadership compound of Zhongnanhai, Chinese officials imagined such destruction raining down on Beijing and realized that their strategy of defending China with swarms of peasant soldiers was as outdated as Maoist philosophy. They immediately embarked on a multi-decade plan to build a military as advanced as ours. Chinese pity comes from their belief that we are a country in decline. More than a few Chinese friends have quoted to me the proverb fu bu guo san dai (wealth doesn't make it past three generations) as they wonder how we became so ill-disciplined, distracted and dissolute. The fury surrounding Monica-gate seemed an incomprehensible waste of time to a nation whose emperors were supplied with thousands of concubines. Chinese are equally astonished that Americans are allowing themselves to drown in debt and under-fund public schools while the media focus on fights over feeding tubes, displays of the Ten Commandments and how to eat as much as we can without getting fat. China is all about unity, focus and leverage. Chinese officials and business executives are obsessed with a single question: What advantage do I have over you? No surprise then that Chinese officials are delighted to be funding ever larger portions of America's budget deficit. They know that if they sat out one U.S. Treasury auction, the U.S. stock markets would tumble. They yawn when Congress threatens to impose huge tariffs on Chinese imports, knowing that the resulting huge price increases at Wal-Mart, Best Buy and the Gap would cost some members of Congress their jobs. And while the Chinese do not relish sharing a border with the nutso North Koreans, they are happy to turn this bad situation to their advantage. The Bush administration desperately needs China's help in quelling the hermit kingdom's nuclear ambitions while we are bogged down in Iraq. Still, China isn't even a fraction as powerful as it pretends to be. Beneath the bluster, it is a nation beset with internal problems. Pollution chokes its air and water. The growing gap between the haves and have-nots and rampant government corruption are triggering almost daily demonstrations. And China has no ideology other than enriching itself. The relentless commercial drive that has shaken China out of its imperial and socialist stupor has now become an end unto itself, leaving a population that is spiritually adrift. So far rapid economic growth, looser lifestyle strictures and straightforward political repression have held things together, but the Communist Party leadership knows that it needs a different formula for long-term success. From a U.S. perspective, China's untempered commercialism suggests a nation out to milk us of everything it can. What is being lost in our vicious battles over China policy is that China and America have manageable differences and many complementary interests. With an intelligent and consistent China policy, the United States could help China and itself at the same time. I offer these humble suggestions as a patriotic American who has lived in Beijing for 15 years -- and as a person who respects the Chinese people and what they are accomplishing. Domestic politics should stop at the U.S. border. Trench warfare on China policy between the political parties and executive branch factions only plays into China's hands. Stop preaching instant democracy. After the Tiananmen massacre, China's state media engendered a "nationalism of resentment." Aimed at cooling the ardor that young Chinese felt for America, the media portrayed the United States as having a secret agenda to keep China poor so that America can stay rich. A key part of this message is that America wants China to democratize because it will plunge the country into chaos. Those who survived the insanity of the Cultural Revolution see the point. Even Chinese people I know who are unhappy with their government believe that a nation with two millennia of top-down rule can only pluralize gradually. America can best help China inch toward political pluralism by trying to strengthen China's court system and rule of law and by making visas plentiful again for Chinese to attend our universities and public policy forums. Let Chinese companies purchase or merge with U.S. companies unless the American company has genuine advanced military technology. We should also require reciprocity. Take the recent China National Offshore Oil Corporation Ltd. (CNOOC) bid to purchase Unocal Corp. Hysteria led to passage of a ridiculous House resolution by 398 to 15 expressing national security concerns about the deal, which involved a scant 0.8 percent of U.S. oil production. Instead, the United States should have responded as China would: Use the deal as leverage. America's politicians should have welcomed the CNOOC deal as long as China changed its own oil policies, which prevent foreign companies from operating gas stations in China, compel them to use Chinese companies when exploring for oil and almost always offer exploration leases for foreigners at the edges of promising fields to help China pinpoint the location of the biggest reservoirs for its own drillers. Develop smart, workable rules on technology exports. Since the mid-1990s, China has been able to purchase almost any commercial technology it desires from Japan, Israel, Russia or the European Union. Bogged down in a bureaucratic quagmire of ever-changing rules and approval processes, U.S. machine tool makers and silicon chip equipment manufacturers have fallen behind. If this continues, we will endanger our own national security base by weakening our technology companies and their R&D capabilities. Nevertheless, many in Washington favor "catch-all control" regulations that could, for example, block a U.S. truck engine manufacturer from doing business with a Chinese firm that supplies some engines for Chinese army trucks. European and Japanese truck engine makers doubtless will be deeply grateful. Vigorously push trade issues that provide a long-term win-win for China and its trading partners. Our focus should be intellectual property rights (IPR) protection. China's original modernization model was to invite foreign firms to manufacture for export in joint-ventures with Chinese companies. China was then supposed to learn to build its own companies and products. But many huge companies have been built through the wholesale theft of intellectual property and rampant copying of products. Within a three-block radius of my Beijing apartment, there are several dozen shops selling any Hollywood movie or American television series of note for $1 per DVD, copies of Prada and Louis Vuitton handbags for $10, nearly perfect copies of Callaway or Taylor Made golf clubs for $150, and fake North Face parkas for $35. Copied pharmaceuticals, car parts and the whole gamut of industrial products are plentiful across China. Worse, more and more such products are being exported. Chinese piracy is rapidly undermining political support for China in Congress and hampering the growth of its most innovative companies. China knows the problem needs fixing but fears job losses and potential unrest in the towns and villages that host copycat factories. New U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman could take a lesson from a predecessor, Charlene Barshefsky, who drafted a road map to guide China to WTO accession. As with WTO, China lacks the political will or consensus to come up with a plan on its own. The U.S. government should also back a new effort by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Chamber of Commerce in China to rate Chinese provinces and cities by their level of IPR enforcement. Public embarrassment and internal competition for foreign investment may prove to be stronger motivators than foreign complaints. I understand America's genuine security concerns regarding China. But they should not be overblown to the point where they undermine our economic security. I also understand that reaching a political consensus isn't easy. But I am worried about the erosion of the sensible center. Chinese and U.S. politicians share the blame. As a global economic power, China can no longer employ IPR policies appropriate for a banana republic. And responsible members of Congress can no longer gin up China hysteria to get votes. The stakes are getting too high. Author's e-mail: [2]jlmcgregor at jlmcgregor.com James McGregor is a journalist-turned-businessman and former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China. His book "One Billion Customers: Lessons From the Front Lines of Doing Business in China" (Simon & Schuster/ The Wall Street Journal Books) will be published in October. From checker at panix.com Thu Aug 4 01:34:48 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2005 21:34:48 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: Grin and Bear It Message-ID: Grin and Bear It http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/29/AR2005072902177_pf.html In an age of technology and terror, the British have come to accept surveillance cameras. Now they . . . By Frances Stead Sellers Sunday, July 31, 2005; B01 Last summer, while my mother was visiting me in the United States, burglars broke into her house in rural England and emptied it of much of what she held most precious. The thieves knew just what they were after, the local bobbies told us as they searched the house for clues. They had carefully removed the most valuable pictures, ornaments and small pieces of furniture. And they were likely to be back with bigger ambitions and a bigger truck. One of the police recommendations? Install a closed circuit television camera (CCTV) in the house in the hope of getting mug shots of the intruders next time they came to help themselves to my mother's possessions. Smile, you're on Culprit Camera. Britain has become the world's premier surveillance society. There are more than 4 million unblinking electronic eyes gazing down on shoppers and travelers across the country (though far, far fewer human brains are dedicated to deciphering the data those eyes record). London's railway stations are overseen by some 1,800 cameras, and another 6,000 are trained on the capital's underground train network and double-decker buses, catching the average commuter on videotape about 300 times a day. It's the very ubiquity of the technology that brought the world that chilling snapshot of the July 7 bombers sauntering through a station en route to mass murder, as well as the four close-ups of the July 21 terrorists fleeing their botched attempts to redouble the havoc. Yesterday, those close-ups were front-page news again, this time superimposed with the suspects' names and arrest dates. Some people have agonized about the Orwellian implications of such surreptitious surveillance, indulging in eye-in-the-sky speculation about the invasion of individuals' privacy. Developments such as face-recognition technology and computerized tracking of out-of-the-ordinary behavior have reawakened anxieties about Big Brother. But for the most part, the British have learned to live with -- and sometimes even appreciate -- the ever watchful eye. And, really, it takes a certain hubris, a strain of self-importance, for Mr. and Ms. Ordinary Citizen to imagine that anyone is watching them, anyway. Who, for heaven's sake, is going to take the time to monitor the monitors? London police initially estimated that they would need a couple of weeks to go through the mind-numbing hours of tape provided to them after the first bombing -- and that would be with the help of special officers drafted for such a high-profile investigation. Think about it: Two weeks worth of nonstop comings and goings -- watching people sit on station platforms, read newspapers, eat sandwiches, scratch their noses, consult their watches, in a kind of life-or-death game of Where's Waldo? Now consider, if you can bear it for one brief moment, watching "A Day in the Life of Frances Sellers." I wish I could pretend it was more exciting. But even the highlights (allow me a little hubris -- there are some) might seem a bit humdrum if you had to endure them day after day, night after night. It must be much the same with other forms of surveillance. As a journalist friend, who once lived with his young family in an apartment in China that was undoubtedly bugged, put it: Who's going to separate the hours of potty-training talk from the few potentially valuable snippets of conversation? Just imagine the lot of the poor Chinese spying flunky, dedicating every minute of his working life to tuning in to the messy minutiae of my colleague's life. Practicality aside, the philosophical argument over privacy essentially bit the dust in Britain more than a decade ago when some unforgettable footage made people I know put aside any reservations they'd had . Recorded at 15:39 on Feb. 12, 1993, and later broadcast nationwide, a grainy CCTV picture showed a trusting toddler taking a stranger by the hand and being led out of a Liverpool shopping center. Just days later, 2-year-old Jamie Bulger was found bludgeoned to death on a railway track, bringing horror to the nightly news programs. The camera hadn't prevented the crime, but its imperfect images allowed the police to measure the comparative heights of the child and his abductors. Without them, the police might have been looking for a very different kind of culprit from the two 11-year-old boys who were later convicted in the toddler's murder. "The Jamie Bulger case was a sea change over here," Peter Fry told me. Fry, who is director of Britain's CCTV User Group, a 600-member association of organizations including local councils and universities that use closed-circuit cameras, says that many people in Britain no longer see the technology as Big Brother but "as a benevolent father." You might expect Fry, in his position, to say that. But in my recent visits to Britain, I've rarely heard people raise objections to CCTV (except-- vociferously -- to the cameras set up to catch speeding motorists; the equipment often ends up being vandalized). And Fry points out that although the technology creates miles of useless footage, it can actually economize on police time. He described to me a pub brawl that ended in a knifing. Thirty people were involved, he said, and the police would have had to take and sift through 30 witness statements, filtering out the effects of inebriation as they divined the truth from 30 differing perspectives. Instead, a half-hour videotape showed just who slit whose throat. The philosophical underpinnings for CCTV observation lie in the ideas of Britain's 18th-century legal theorist Jeremy Bentham. He had a sort of God's-eye view of moral reform, believing that if people thought they were being watched, they'd probably shape up. Inspired by his brother's effort to design a factory where large numbers of unskilled workers could be supervised by a skilled few, Bentham came up with the concept of a "panopticon" -- a prison where criminals could be watched without knowing exactly when, thus conveying the discomfiting "sentiment of an invisible omniscience." "The more constantly the persons to be inspected are under the eyes of the persons who should inspect them," wrote Bentham, "the more perfectly will the purpose of these establishments have been attained." Bentham's theories are reflected in the design of Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary, where prisoners were left to reflect upon their sins in cells radiating out from a central observation point. Over the past decade, London has become a kind of urban panopticon, though it's not clear that the constant possibility of being observed has led to better behavior (Britons hardly being the very model of modern moral rectitude). But Fry argues that CCTV indeed deters certain kinds of planned crime (like car theft), even if it doesn't do much to deter spontaneous eruptions (like the pub brawl). And it probably displaces some other kinds of crime (which presents its own moral conundrums, but I hope you won't think me un-neighborly in my wish that the burglars who broke into my mother's house might be displaced -- and choose the big house up the lane next time around). Americans are, comparatively speaking, camera shy. Of course, video surveillance is widely used in supermarkets and hotel lobbies, but when Washington installed cameras on the Mall in 2002, the questions sparked by civil liberties groups led to their use being strictly regulated. Following the London bombings, though, D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams called for more cameras in parks and commercial districts. Other cities, like Baltimore, have taken advantage of federal antiterrorism funds to increase their surveillance systems in the hope of combating street crime, too. But it's all done against a backdrop of distrust of any kind of official observation, and dispute about how effective the cameras really are. Still, British authorities have bought into the concept in a big way: CCTV was first used primarily in retail stores but in the '70s and '80s gradually moved into public spaces. In an effort to reduce robberies and assaults, London Underground has been using cameras for about three decades now. Between 1994 and 1997, 78 percent of the government's crime prevention budget was spent on CCTV, according to scholars at the University of Hull in Britain. And cameras have been used to monitor protests and trouble spots such as soccer games, where the police have used a mobile surveillance unit known as the Hoolivan (equipped, one can only suppose, with hoolicams), to keep an eye on rowdy fans and zoom in on known troublemakers. Even before the July attacks, CCTV had proven its use in solving high-profile acts of terrorism. In 1999, there was a brief reign of terror in London when a series of nail bombs exploded, apparently aimed at the city's black, south Asian and gay communities. By plowing through some 26,000 hours of videotape, the police were able to find pictures of a man carrying a bag as he approached the site of one bombing and leaving without it. They quickly released an image of him. A 22-year-old fascist sympathizer named David Copeland was soon identified by a co-worker and later convicted for the murder of three of his victims. Some crooks have wised up to the possibility of being caught red-handed, as one detective explained to me when we discussed putting a camera in my mother's house. He once had a lovely video view, he told me, of a truck pulling into a farm yard and turning round to make its getaway -- but the thief had covered the license plate and pulled a hat down over his face. And CCTV certainly won't deter the committed terrorist, least of all a suicide bomber, who's not a bit worried about being caught after the fact, let alone about the possibility of facing earthly justice. Take a closer look at the pictures the British police released of the London bombers. It was at 21 minutes and 54 seconds past 7 a.m. on July 7 that camera 14 in Luton station captured murder in the making; before their successful suicide attacks, the four young bombers appear chillingly relaxed, nonchalant in the face of imminent death. In the July 21 shots, on the other hand, there are signs of confusion, perhaps even panic, in the expressions of the men whose plot so unexpectedly fizzled. Those images have put faces -- and now names -- to men who attempted the unthinkable. But they can't solve the ultimate mystery. What on earth was going on inside those men's heads? Had they been brainwashed, as one of their families has suggested? We won't know the answer to those questions unless we come up with technology that can read people's minds. Now that's really something to worry about. Author's e-mail : [2]sellersf at washpost.com Frances Stead Sellers is an assistant editor of Outlook. She grew up in Britain and holds dual citizenship there and in the United States. From checker at panix.com Thu Aug 4 01:34:57 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2005 21:34:57 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: In a Teenage Waistland, Fitting In Message-ID: In a Teenage Waistland, Fitting In http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/29/AR2005072902176_pf.html Disrespectful? Some legislators say yes. Kids say that's not their goal. By Natasha K. Warikoo Sunday, July 31, 2005; B01 Last year, as part of my doctoral research, I spent a semester observing teenagers at a multicultural high school in Queens, N.Y. One day as I walked down the hall, I noticed a security guard telling a student that the do-rag on his head was "a violation." The guard proceeded to fill out what looked like a parking ticket. I asked another student what was going on, and he told me that the school was cracking down on dress code infractions; three breaches could earn a suspension. His Jamaican-born mother, he later said, didn't like him wearing do-rags because police might interpret them as signs of delinquency, "especially on a black male like me." He'd already been stopped several times to be checked for drugs and, once, on suspicion of stealing the bike he was riding. His own explanation for the do-rag, however, was simple: On days he didn't comb his hair, he used a do-rag to cover it up. It was his solution to a bad hair day. As July slips into August and "back-to-school sale" signs start popping up in mall windows, clothing-based disagreements between adults and teens -- over what's appropriate and what's not -- will be heard in households across the nation. Some of these discussions will be no weightier than the "flip-flop flap" that occurred when a few members of the women's lacrosse team from Northwestern University wore stylish variations of casual footwear to the White House a couple of weeks ago. Others will be decidedly more so: Many schools, shopping malls and other public spaces have developed rules regulating teen dress. Earlier this year, even some state lawmakers tried jumping into the fray, as legislators in Virginia and Florida proposed so-called "droopy drawers" bills, which would have levied a $50 fine on anyone caught exposing underwear -- an act that's almost a given for girls' low-rise pants and boys' baggy hip-hop-style jeans. Both bills failed, but that doesn't mean another won't reappear: A state representative in Louisiana proposed a similar bill in 2004. Adults, it seems, are seeing rebellion, disrespect for authority or even criminality in those thongs and overlarge pants. Algie T. Howell Jr., the state legislator who introduced Virginia's bill, said he decided to propose it after seeing a parade of baggy jeans at a visit to juvenile court. A vote for the bill, he said was "a vote for character." Closer to home, one student told me that his mother "thinks that if you wear these kinds of clothes you are going to turn bad." But how true is that interpretation? As part of my research on teen life, I spoke to hundreds of high schoolers in both the United States and Britain, asking, among other questions, about their clothing styles and what they mean. The surprising answer: While there'll always be the odd, message-sending troublemaker -- like the young woman in Tifton, Ga., who wore a T-shirt referencing her principal's DUI arrest ("Don't Drink and Drive") -- for most teens, adherence to "dangerous" dress often signals an eagerness to conform, both within their peer group, and in the future, as adults. Unsurprisingly, most teens bristle at the idea that they're being judged by their clothing. And for urban teenagers, especially boys like those at the Queens school, this sort of misunderstanding can have serious consequences in their interaction with law enforcement authorities and educators. At best, it fosters a feeling of being excluded. One ninth-grade student, a devoted hip-hop fan, recounted an incident at a pharmacy a few days earlier, when a boy wearing what he called "tight-tight clothes" was allowed to wander freely through the store, while he and his friends, in much looser attire, were watched carefully. Girls also told me they felt misunderstood. One ninth-grader who described her style as "rock and punk," a rarity in her school, told me that "some people" think her black nail polish and dog collar "shows that I am a rebel . . . [But] sometimes I rebel and sometimes I follow the rules." We met in her honors English class; her 89 grade average put her in the top third of her class. So while she was setting herself apart in her hip-hop-dominated school, the rebellion was only a few polish-coats deep. Another girl, a well-manicured 11th-grader with straightened, highlighted hair, abundant gold jewelry and a cell phone permanently attached to her tight jeans, told me, "Some people think I look stupid, because of the way I dress. They think . . . 'She wanna look good all the time and she don't have any time to concentrate on school . . . .' But that's not me." She's a B student, and told me that her current goal was to be less social in order to raise her average even higher. When I asked teens in the schools I visited -- large, urban, featuring a multicultural student body -- to describe their style, "hip-hop" was the most common response. Along with peers, R&B singers and rappers ranked among their most common fashion influences. In their CD collections, artists such as Usher, 50 Cent, P. Diddy and Ludacris took top spots. This connection between rap music and hip-hop fashions may be part of what makes the mainstream nervous about obviously urban fashions. Rap music is seen as the harder side of hip-hop, and a study published in the American Sociological Review found it to be one of the few genres widely disliked by well-educated Americans -- even those who claim diverse music tastes. Another piece of evidence often cited against the over-large pants look is a commonly cited theory of its origin: The look may have been started by men in jail who didn't have belts to hold up their ill-fitting clothes. Yet this association, often at the forefront for adults, tended to escape the kids I spoke to. Like the boy above, whose mother was afraid he'd turn "bad," many said they wore the pants just "because they're more comfortable." Most rap-favoring students had similar aspirations to others students I met. Across the board, 90 percent said they believed they'll attend college. And, like their peers, rap fans aspired to be scientists, stockbrokers and lawyers, among other things. Moreover, though schools sometimes impose dress codes in order to ban gang identification, many boys I spoke to told me they actually use their clothing to signal a disassociation from gangs -- choosing a do-rag instead of a red or blue bandanna, for example. Given the risks of being misunderstood by adults, why do teens dress the way they do? In a nutshell, for status. Most of us would like to be seen as hip and cool by our peers, but for certain teens, this may be the only aspect of life they can control. Uncool middle-class adults can draw upon their wealth, education and contacts to improve status -- they can find a better job, buy a bigger house, work longer hours for more pay. But for teens -- especially those from poorer households-- these means are for the most part unavailable. Hence, peer status really matters. It doesn't, however, preclude other aspirations. Contrary to what adults may believe, these kids don't think it's uncool to do well in school. As one 16-year-old, whose parents emigrated from Guyana in 1982, said: "The people that do good and come out of here [high school] in four years, they are highly respected. But the people that come with big book bags . . . those are considered geeks." Success, then, was defined as being "able to juggle everything." In other words, kids who are failing academically aren't choosing to reject school and what it has to offer; they're having a hard time "juggling everything." Those who do well academically but not with their peers are labeled geeks; others fail in the world of adults, never learning to hoist their pants or off-the-shoulder shirt when the principal walks by, or to wear more appropriate attire at a job interview. Kids need guidance, then, not on how high to wear their pants or what styles supposedly aren't conducive to learning, but rather on how to balance their need for peer respect with their desire for adult success. For this, they may want to look back on a previous generation, the members of which were labeled teenage delinquents when they first took up a uniform originally created for miners and cowboys. These were the baby boomers, of course, in their ubiquitous jeans -- designer versions of which now sell for upwards of $200 a pop. Remember that the next time a teen's underwear peeks at you above his or her waistband. Author's e-mail : [2]natashawarikoo at hotmail.com Natasha K. Warikoo is PhD candidate in sociology at Harvard University and a lecturer in U.S. studies at the University of London. From checker at panix.com Thu Aug 4 01:35:12 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2005 21:35:12 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Ill Will Rising Between China and Japan Message-ID: Ill Will Rising Between China and Japan New York Times, 5.8.3 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/03/international/asia/03nationalism.html By [3]NORIMITSU ONISHI and [4]HOWARD W. FRENCH TOKYO, Aug. 2 - Japanese lawmakers on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed a resolution that plays down this country's militarist policies in World War II, less than two weeks before ceremonies take place across Asia marking the 60th anniversary of the war's end on Aug. 15. Though expressing "regret" for the wartime past, the resolution omitted the references to "invasion" and "colonial rule" that were in the version passed on the 50th anniversary. The action will most likely be seen by China and Japan's other Asian neighbors as further proof of growing nationalism here. A right-wing vandal seemed to capture a growing sentiment last week when he tried to scrape off the word "mistake" from a peace memorial in Hiroshima that said of Japan's war efforts: "Let all the souls here rest in peace, as we will never repeat this mistake." But in the weeks leading to Aug. 15, the leaders of China have been making sure that their view of the war, simply called the Anti-Japanese War there, gets across. China is spending $50 million to renovate a memorial hall for the victims of the Rape of Nanjing in 1937, when Japanese soldiers killed 100,000 to 300,000 civilians, at a time when details of it are disappearing from Japanese school textbooks. Chinese state television is broadcasting hundreds of programs on China's resistance against Imperial Japan. The two countries find themselves playing out old grievances in a new era of direct rivalry for power and influence. Never before in modern times has East Asia had to contend with a strong China and a strong Japan at the same time, and the prospect feeds suspicion and hostility in both countries. China has experienced 25 years of extraordinary economic growth, deeply extending its influence throughout Asia. But just when China's moment in the sun seems to be dawning, Japan is asserting itself: seeking a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, transforming its Self-Defense Forces into a real military and revising its war-renouncing Constitution. Both governments are encouraging nationalism for their own political purposes: China to shore up loyalty as Marxist ideology fades, Japan to overcome long-held taboos against expanding its military. With the impending 60th anniversary, both are trying to forge a future on their version of the past. In Japan, major newspapers have published articles defending the Class A war criminals convicted by the postwar Tokyo Trials, and a growing number of textbooks whitewash Japan's wartime conduct. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi makes annual visits to Yasukuni Shrine, where war dead including Class A war criminals are enshrined. In China, a new television series called "Hero City" tells of how cities across China "fought bravely against Japan under the leadership of the Communist Party." In Beijing on Aug. 13, six former Chinese airmen from the Flying Tigers squadron are to recreate an air duel with Japanese fighters. "On the one hand we have a victim's mentality, and on the other we don't see this much smaller country as being worthy of comparison with us," said Pang Zhongying, a professor of international relations at Nankai University in the northeastern Chinese city of Tianjin. "The reality is that they must accept the idea of China as a rising military power, and we must accept the idea of Japan becoming a normal nation, whether we like it or not." To Japanese conservatives, becoming a normal nation amounts to a revision of the American-imposed peace Constitution that they feel castrated - a term they use deliberately and frequently - their country. Arguing that Japan must draw closer to the United States, Mr. Koizumi's government has reinterpreted the Constitution to allow Japanese troops in Iraq and has reversed a longtime ban on the export of arms to join the American missile defense shield. Recent polls show an increasing percentage of Japanese favoring a revision of the Constitution. The conservative news media have helped demonize China, as well as North Korea, to soften popular resistance to remilitarization. Sankei Shimbun, the country's most conservative daily, recently ran a series about China called "The Threatening Superpower." One of the most emotional issues has been the dozen or so Japanese who were abducted by North Korea, mostly in the 1970's. The whereabouts of one woman, Megumi Yokota, remains a particularly sore point. North Korea said she had died, and late last year gave Japan what it said were her remains. After DNA tests were done, the Japanese government accused North Korea of deliberately handing over someone else's remains, though most independent experts called the tests inconclusive. Shinzo Abe, 50, the acting secretary general of the governing Liberal Democratic Party and the leading member of a young generation of hawks, immediately called for economic sanctions. Hiromu Nonaka, 79, who retired as secretary general about a year ago, said the present situation reminded him of prewar Japan, when politicians manipulated public opinion to rouse nationalism through slogans like "Destroy the brute Americans and British." "Mr. Abe, who has been in the forefront of the abductee issue, turned toward making all of North Korea into the enemy," Mr. Nonaka said. Mr. Abe is also one of several conservative politicians who defend textbooks that have outraged Chinese and South Korean demonstrators by sanitizing Japan's wartime atrocities. References to the women forced into sexual servitude by Japan's wartime authorities, called comfort women, all but disappeared this year from governmentendorsed junior high school textbooks. At a recent news conference, Mr. Abe was asked whether politicians had exaggerated the threat from North Korea and China to influence public opinion and ease Japan toward revising its peace Constitution. "Well, there may be such opinions, but I think it's rubbish," he said. In China and Japan alike, hatred and suspicion of the other are being deliberately fostered, in many cases by the governments themselves. In Tokyo, 291 teachers have been reprimanded in the last year and many may face dismissal for refusing to stand before the rising-sun flag at school enrollment and graduation ceremonies and sing Japan's national anthem, "Kimigayo," or "His Majesty's Reign," considered symbols of Japanese imperialism by most Asians and some Japanese. Those signals of respect used to be optional, or shunned because of their associations with Japan's past militarism. Efforts to control how the Japanese, especially the young, view Japan and China have even reached the comics. Late last year, 47 local Japanese politicians from all over the country protested that a comic series called "The Country Is Burning," published in "Young Jump Weekly," had distorted the Rape of Nanjing. The drawings did not actually depict Japanese soldiers committing atrocities, but showed ditches filled with Chinese cadavers. The magazine's publisher quickly backed down and announced that it would delete or modify the offending passages when the series was reprinted in book form. Hidekazu Inubushi, a politician and leader of the protest, added that forcing respect of the Japanese national anthem and flag was necessary because postwar Japanese education had focused too much on wartime misdeeds and produced graduates who were not proud of their country. "To correct the big mistake in our education in the postwar 60 years, we've got to introduce forceful methods," he said. Today's Chinese have been shaped by an anti-Japanese patriotic education, overseen by a government that is aware that its own domestic credentials depend, in part, on a hard line toward Japan. Having a hated neighbor shores up national solidarity and helps distract people from the failings of the Chinese Communist Party. Besides the party's monopoly on power, few orthodoxies are as untouchable today as hostility toward Japan. Yu Jie, a Chinese author who spent time in Japan researching a book on the two countries' relations, "Iron and Plough," and went on to write another book about his experiences in Japan, discovered that at his own expense. The books are nuanced works, built around lengthy conversations with pacifists, right-wing activists, scholars of every stripe and ordinary Japanese. One chapter, "Looking for Japan's Conscience," warned against speaking of Japanese in blanket terms. "In the 60 years since the war, numerous Chinese and Japanese people have worked for the difficult Sino-Japanese friendship, selflessly emitting a dim yet precious light," he wrote. The books appeared briefly in stores and then disappeared. In a country where censorship is routine, that is a sure sign, the author said, that officials had put pressure on the publisher or the stores to withdraw them. Mr. Yu said China's policy toward Japan was unlikely to become more balanced as long as an authoritarian government remained in place, because Japan offered an unrivaled distraction from China's own problems. "We criticize Yasukuni Shrine, but we have Mao Zedong's shrine in the middle of Beijing, which is our own Yasukuni," he said. "This is a shame to me, because Mao Zedong killed more Chinese than the Japanese did. Until we are able to recognize our own problems, the Japanese won't take us seriously." Norimitsu Onishi reported from Tokyo for this article, and Howard W. French from Shanghai. From checker at panix.com Thu Aug 4 22:39:15 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2005 18:39:15 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: (Darwin's Nightmare) Feeding Europe, Starving at Home Message-ID: Feeding Europe, Starving at Home http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/03/movies/03darw.html By [3]A. O. SCOTT [4]"Darwin's Nightmare," [5]Hubert Sauper's harrowing, indispensable documentary, is framed by the arrival and departure of an enormous Soviet-made cargo plane at an airstrip outside Mwanza, Tanzania. The plane, with its crew of burly Russians and Ukrainians, will leave Mwanza for Europe carrying 55 tons of processed fish caught by Lake Victoria fisherman and filleted at a local factory. Though Mr. Sauper's investigation of the economy and ecology around the lake ranges far and wide - he talks to preachers and prostitutes, to street children and former soldiers - he keeps coming back to a simple question. What do the planes bring to Africa? The answers vary. The factory managers say the planes' cavernous holds are empty when they land. One of the Russians, made uncomfortable by the question, mutters something vague about "equipment." Some of his colleagues, and several ordinary Mwanzans, are more forthright: the planes, while they occasionally bring humanitarian food and medical aid, more often bring the weapons that fuel the continent's endless and destructive wars. In any case, they leave behind a scene of misery and devastation that "Darwin's Nightmare" presents as the agonized human face of globalization. While the flesh of millions of Nile perch is stripped, cleaned and flash-frozen for export to wealthy countries, millions of people in the Tanzanian interior live on the brink of famine. Some of them will eat fried fish heads, which are processed in vast open-air pits infested with maggots and scavenging birds. Along the shores of the lake, homeless children fight over scraps of food and get high from the fumes of melting plastic-foam containers used to pack the fish. In the encampments where the fishermen live, AIDS is rampant and the afflicted walk back to their villages to die. The Nile perch itself haunts the film's infernal landscape like a monstrous metaphor. An alien species introduced into Lake Victoria sometime in the 1960's, it has devoured every other kind of fish in the lake, even feeding on its own young as it grows to almost grotesque dimensions, and destroying an ancient and diverse ecosystem. To some, its prevalence is a boon, since the perch provides an exportable resource that has brought development money from the World Bank and the European Union. The survival of nearly everyone in the film is connected to the fish: the prostitutes who keep company with the pilots in the hotel bars; the displaced farmers who handle the rotting carcasses; the night watchman, armed with a bow and a few poison-tipped arrows, who guards a fish-related research institute. He is paid $1 a day and found the job after his predecessor was murdered. Filming with a skeleton crew - basically himself and another camera operator - Mr. Sauper has produced an extraordinary work of visual journalism, a richly illustrated report on a distant catastrophe that is also one of the central stories of our time. Rather than use voice-over or talking-head expert interviews, he allows the dimensions of the story to emerge through one-on-one conversation and acutely observed visual detail. But "Darwin's Nightmare" is also a work of art. Given the gravity of Mr. Sauper's subject, and the rigorous pessimism of his inquiry, it may seem a bit silly to compliment him for his eye. There are images here that have the terrifying sublimity of a painting by El Greco or Hieronymus Bosch: rows of huge, rotting fish heads sticking out of the ground; children turning garbage into makeshift toys. At other moments, you are struck by the natural loveliness of the lake and its surrounding hills, or by the handsome, high-cheekboned faces of many of the Tanzanians. The beauty, though, is not really beside the point; it is an integral part of the movie's ethical vision, which in its tenderness and its angry sense of apocalypse seems to owe less to modern ideologies than to the prophetic rage of William Blake, who glimpsed heaven and hell at an earlier phase of capitalist development. Mr. Sauper's movie is clearly aimed at the political conscience of Western audiences, and its implicit critique of some of our assumptions about the shape and direction of the global economy deserves to be taken seriously. But its reach extends far beyond questions of policy and political economy, and it turns the fugitive, mundane facts that are any documentary's raw materials into the stuff of tragedy and prophecy. Darwin's Nightmare Opens today in Manhattan. Written (in English, Russian and Swahili, with English subtitles) and directed by [6]Hubert Sauper; director of photography, Mr. Sauper; edited by Denise Vindevogel; produced by Edouard Mauriat, Antonin Svoboda, Martin Gschlacht, Hubert Toint and Mr. Sauper; released by Celluloid Dreams/International Film Circuit. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 107 minutes. This film is not rated. References 3. http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=A.%20O.%20SCOTT&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=A.%20O.%20SCOTT&inline=nyt-per 4. http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=315454&inline=nyt_ttl 5. http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/filmography.html?p_id=414708&inline=nyt-per 6. http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/filmography.html?p_id=414708&inline=nyt-per From checker at panix.com Thu Aug 4 22:39:25 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2005 18:39:25 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Professor Develops Software to Help Grade Essays Message-ID: Professor Develops Software to Help Grade Essays The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.8.5 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i48/48a02902.htm By DAN CARNEVALE Computers routinely grade multiple-choice tests, but can machines be trusted to grade subjective exams, like a multipage essay? Ed Brent, a professor of sociology at the University of Missouri at Columbia, says yes, but that computers should not do it alone. He has developed a computer program that not only grades his students' essays but also gives feedback on how they can improve their work. Mr. Brent assigns a paper on a specific topic -- say, a chapter on group culture in the sociology textbook. Students then submit drafts via a Web site. Within seconds the software corrects each paper, assigning a score and telling the students which points they nailed and which points need work. The computer's grade is not final. Students are encouraged to revise and resubmit their papers to the computer as many times as they wish. Mr. Brent then grades the final copy the old-fashioned way. "The idea is for them to have immediate feedback and helpful suggestions," he says. His computer program, called Qualrus, does not attempt to evaluate a clever anecdote or to criticize an overuse of alliteration. In fact, the software doesn't even bother with spelling, grammar, or punctuation; for those, students can use the spelling and grammar checkers built into their word-processing programs. Mr. Brent's software looks for key words and terms to determine if the assigned topic was covered adequately. It can evaluate the relationship between the terms to look for logical flow and reasoned arguments, he says. The professor supplies a checklist of terms and concepts to the computer program for each subject. The program simply runs through the students' papers to see if those elements are thoroughly presented, analyzing the semantics and assessing the writer's understanding of the topic. If a student leaves something out or gets something wrong, the program will flag those mistakes, to help the student improve the next draft. The program improves student learning while reducing the most tedious aspects of grading papers, Mr. Brent says. Professors can focus on evaluating the overall quality of each paper, he says, without having to count concepts and terms. Development of the Qualrus software was financed in part by a $100,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. Mr. Brent also used money from his private company, Idea Works Inc. A new version of the software, called SAGrader, will be ready in the fall, he says. It will be more versatile, in that professors will be able to plug in assignment guidelines on a wide range of subjects. Qualrus is limited to sociology. Mr. Brent says he hopes to sell SAGrader to other educators. He is in talks with several institutions, book publishers, and individual professors who have taken an interest in the program ([3]http://sagrader.com). Hunting for Plagiarism In addition to grading the content of a paper, the program can compare similarities among papers to see whether one appears to be copied from another. Mr. Brent says he could plug in the texts from assigned readings as well, to make sure students do not copy word for word from those texts. The computer program has its limitations, however. It looks only for specific terms that the professor has programmed into it. If a student uses different words to describe the same concepts, then the computer could misgrade the assignment. When that happens, Mr. Brent says, the students are usually pretty vocal about it. "Sometimes we miss a particular synonym, and we put that in," he says. "Most of the time, though, I agree with the program and not with them." Students may try to get the computer program to do their work for them -- say, by submitting a lousy paper at first just to see what they need to do to get a passing grade. But even then, Mr. Brent says, the students are learning the concepts. "Sure, you can play the system to some extent," he says. "But you have to know enough to do that." Mr. Brent had been using the computer program to grade essays in his class for a year when he approached the university about using the program in one of Missouri's writing-intensive courses. They have at least two major writing assignments, with students revising their papers along the way. But first he needed the blessing of the university's Campus Writing Program. When Martha A. Townsend, director of the program, first heard about Mr. Brent's ideas, she did not even return his phone calls. "My first thoughts were skeptical -- I thought, Is this an educational charlatan?" says Ms. Townsend, an associate professor of English. But "Ed was very persistent," she says. Eventually Mr. Brent persuaded her to allow him to demonstrate the software to the program's faculty board. The board members, who come from various departments of the university, were impressed enough to give him the go-ahead. He has been using the computer program for a writing-intensive course for a year now and is likely to get approval for another year. "It was in that demonstration process, when I finally let him in the door, that I became convinced that he was not trying to avoid the hard work," Ms. Townsend says. "Ed was using this computer program not as a replacement for human feedback, but as a supplement to human feedback." Ms. Townsend sees the tool as a way to improve instructor-student interaction in essay grading. "Students are getting very specific, point-by-point responses to what they wrote," she says. Most telling, Mr. Brent says, has been student reaction. When he polled them, twice as many students said they preferred writing essays for the computer as preferred taking multiple-choice tests. From checker at panix.com Thu Aug 4 22:39:30 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2005 18:39:30 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Economist: Pain perception: Sex and drugs Message-ID: Pain perception: Sex and drugs http://www.economist.com/science/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=4197761 Jul 21st 2005 Men and women seem to perceive pain in different ways. That may mean they sometimes need different pain-relief drugs MALES and females respond to pain differently, even as children. In most places, boys are expected to show a stiff upper lip when they get hurt, while in girls wailing is, well, girlie. In part, this difference is learnt--or, at least, reinforced by learning. But partly, it is innate. It is hard, for instance, to blame upbringing for the finding that boy and girl babies show different responses to pain six hours after birth, or that male rats are more long-suffering than females. It is also life-long. Ed Keogh of the University of Bath, in England, and his colleagues have found that women report feeling pain in more bodily areas than men, and also feel it more often over the course of their lives. Many researchers are therefore concluding that genetics underpins at least some of the difference, and that females really do feel pain more than males. Indeed, some go further. They think that the way men and women experience pain is not only quantitatively different, but qualitatively different, too. In other words, men's and women's brains process pain using different circuits. Some pain scientists therefore think it is only a matter of time before painkillers are formulated differently for men and women in order to account for this difference. Jeffrey Mogil, director of the pain genetics laboratory at McGill University in Montreal, is one of the leading advocates of such "pink and blue" painkillers. Pick a disease at random, he says, and the chances are that females and males will handle the pain associated with it differently. That seems to be true in mice, at least. When new mouse "models" of human disease are created by genetic engineers, Dr Mogil and his colleagues are often asked to test the engineered mice for their responses to pain. They consistently find differences in the way the mutant, diseased mice and their non-mutation-carrying brethren respond to painful stimuli. But, generally, those differences are seen more strongly in one sex than the other. A prescribing headache The latest example of such a difference is in migraine, a condition that is three times more common in women than in men. In 2004, a group of researchers led by Michel Ferrari of Leiden University in the Netherlands reported that they had created what they believed to be the first mouse model of migraine. Since some researchers argue that migraine is associated with heightened sensitivity to pain, they sent their creation to Dr Mogil for testing. He stresses that his data are preliminary. However, he does find a lowered pain threshold in the mouse migraine model compared with healthy mice--but only in females. Dr Mogil is now convinced that the pain response in men and women is mediated by different brain circuits--and not only because of his own observations. Obstetricians and gynaecologists have long known that certain drugs are particularly effective in women. Mothers in childbirth prefer nalbuphine to morphine, for instance. Men, however, report the opposite preference when they are in pain. Both nalbuphine and morphine work by stimulating the brain's endogenous-opioid receptors (endogenous opioids are the molecules that opium-derived drugs mimic). But opioid receptors come in several varieties, two of the most important of which are known as mu and kappa. Morphine binds to the mu receptors, while nalbuphine stimulates the less well-studied kappa receptors. Kappa-receptor agonists, as molecules such as nalbuphine are known, appear to have little or no pain-relieving effect in men. Two years ago, Dr Mogil identified the first gene known to be involved in modulating pain thresholds in women. Variations in this gene have no effect on men's responses to a kappa-receptor agonist called pentazocine, but they do affect the response in women. The protein produced by this gene, melanocortin-1 receptor, also affects hair and skin colour. Working in collaboration with Roger Fillingim of the University of Florida, Gainesville, Dr Mogil found that redheaded women with fair skin--who have a particular version of the receptor--have a heightened response to pentazocine. Jon Levine and Robert Gear, of the National Institutes of Health Pain Centre at the University of California, San Francisco, also think that there are fundamental differences between the sexes when it comes to pain. They have explored the effects of nalbuphine on post-operative pain in men and women who have had their wisdom teeth removed. The results suggest that kappa-opioid agonists not only fail to alleviate pain in men, they can actually make it worse. Dr Gear and Dr Levine believe that as well as an analgesia (ie, pain-suppression) circuit, the brain contains what they call an anti-analgesia circuit--one which, when activated, pumps pain up. They have shown that which circuit is activated depends not only on the type of receptor a drug acts on, but also the dose given. Among their dental patients, low doses of nalbuphine had a short-lasting analgesic effect in the women, but profoundly enhanced pain in the men. However, when they added a low dose of naloxone--a drug that blocks all types of opioid receptor--to the nalbuphine, the sex difference disappeared and pain relief was significantly enhanced in everyone. After refining the relative proportions of the two drugs in the mixture, they have succeeded in finding (and patenting) a combination that is effective in both sexes. Nor is it only the mechanism of pain perception that differs between the sexes. Dr Keogh and his colleagues argue that there are significant differences in the ways men and women cope with pain, as well. This conclusion is based on studies involving hospital patients, as well as others on volunteers who were exposed to a painful stimulus, such as an ice-water arm-bath. Using this, the researchers were able to measure the point at which people first notice pain, as well as their tolerance--the point at which they can no longer stand it. Men were able to minimise their experience of pain by concentrating on the sensory aspects--their actual physical sensations. But this strategy did not help women, who focused more on the emotional aspects. Since the emotions associated with pain, such as fear and anxiety, tend to be negative, the researchers suggest that the female approach may actually exacerbate pain rather than alleviating it. Dr Keogh, a psychologist, sees this difference as an effect of social conditioning--and uses it to point up the dangers of under-estimating social influences in favour of those of the genes. But it is not obvious why such male and female "coping strategies" should not be underpinned by genetics, in the same way that perceptions are. The evolutionary reason why men resist pain better than women is, however, a mystery. After all, pain is there to stop you doing bad things to yourself. Perhaps it is because males and females are exposed to different sorts of pain. Males, for instance, get into fights much more often than females do, and thus get wounded more often. On the other hand, they do not have to undergo the visceral pain of childbirth. And perhaps a willingness to tolerate less pain than men do helps to explain why women live longer than their menfolk. From checker at panix.com Thu Aug 4 22:39:36 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2005 18:39:36 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] BBC: Sex education 'is a legal right' Message-ID: Sex education 'is a legal right' http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/education/4723783.stm Published: 2005/07/28 08:59:22 GMT Parents should be forced by law to teach their children about sex, teachers are expected to argue. Too many teenage girls are becoming pregnant because of lack of knowledge, the Professional Association of Teachers' annual conference will hear. Tony Reynolds, a teacher from Cambridge, said many parents did not deal seriously enough with children's sex education. The UK has one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in western Europe. 'Taking the blame' Mr Reynolds, from Over Community Primary School, said a family in Derby, where three sisters aged 12, 14 and 16 were mothers, showed the seriousness of the situation. Their own mother, Julie Atkins, blamed their pregnancies on schools for not teaching children enough about sex, he added. Mr Reynolds said: "We don't need to go into the rights and wrongs of this case as to me it is clear that schools cannot and should not be left in a position where they may take the blame for the current situation. "The delivery of sex education has to be the joint responsibility of both the home and the school. "Of course, there will be too many parents unwilling or unable to do this at present. "Therefore the government must ensure via legislation that parents have their responsibilities clearly set out." Peer pressure meant many pupils were afraid to ask questions about sex when it is covered in class. Meanwhile, many parents were too embarrassed to tackle the subject at home, he said. The conference is debating Mr Reynolds's motion demanding new laws requiring parents "to take more responsibility for teaching their children about sex and morality". From checker at panix.com Thu Aug 4 22:43:56 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2005 18:43:56 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] AP: Austria Museum Lets Naked People in Free Message-ID: Austria Museum Lets Naked People in Free http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050729/ap_on_fe_st/naked_museum_5;_ylt=Arxdbt3RVeKSr5nvDtOYYoTlWMcF;_ylu=X3oDMTA5bGVna3NhBHNlYwNzc3JlbA By WILLIAM J. KOLE, Associated Press Writer/Fri Jul 29, 6:19 PM ET/ Vienna's prestigious Leopold Museum is usually a pretty buttoned-down place, but on Friday, some of the nudes in its marble galleries were for real. Scores of naked or scantily clad people wandered the museum, lured by an offer of free entry to "The Naked Truth," a new exhibition of early 1900s erotic art, if they showed up wearing just a swimsuit -- or nothing at all. With a midsummer heat wave sweeping much of Europe, pushing temperatures into the mid-90s Fahrenheit in Vienna, the normally staid museum decided that making the most of its cool, climate-controlled space would be just the ticket to spur interest in the show. "We find a naked body every bit as beautiful as a clothed one," said Elisabeth Leopold, who founded the museum with her husband, Rudolf. "If they came only out of lust, we have to accept that. We stand for the truth." Peter Weinhaeupl, the Leopold's commercial director, said the goal was twofold -- help people beat the heat while creating a mini-scandal reminiscent of the way the artworks by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka and others shocked the public when they first were unveiled a century ago. "We wanted to give people a chance to cool off, and bring nakedness into the open," he said. "It's a bit of an experiment. Egon Schiele was a young and wild person in his day. He'd want to be here." Most of those who showed up in little or no attire Friday opted for swimsuits, but a few hardy souls dared to bare more. Among them was Bettina Huth of Stuttgart, Germany, who roamed the exhibition wearing only sandals and a black bikini bottom. Although she used a program at one point to shield herself from a phalanx of TV cameras, Huth, 52, said she didn't understand what all the fuss was about. "I go into the steam bath every week, so I'm used to being naked," she said. "I think there's a double morality, especially in America. We lived in California for two years, and I found it strange that my children had to cover themselves up at the beach when they were only 3 or 4 years old. That's ridiculous." For years, the Austrian capital has been known for a small but lively nudist colony on the Donauinsel, an island in the middle of the Danube River where people disrobe, often startling the unsuspecting joggers, cyclists and rollerbladers who happen upon them. Overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Austria has always been somewhat more conservative than many other European countries. The Viennese were scandalized when native art nouveau masters like Klimt -- best known for his sensuous "The Kiss" and the subject of an upcoming film starring John Malkovich -- began producing works that some critics panned as "indecency," "artistic self-pollution" and borderline pornography. The 180 works on display at the Leopold through Aug. 22 include Klimt's "Nude Veritas," an 1899 painting of a naked young woman with wildflowers in her hair, and Schiele's "Two Female Friends," a 1915 rendition of two nude women entangled in each other's arms. Max Hollein, director of Frankfurt's Schirn Kunsthalle art museum, likened the public uproar at the time to "the visible outcry at the live transmission from last year's Super Bowl when, for a few seconds, CBS broadcast shots of the singer Janet Jackson's exposed nipple." Mario Vorhemes, a 20-year-old Vienna resident who strode into the Leopold on Friday wearing nothing but a green and black Speedo, was nonchalant. "What's the big deal?" he asked. "We're born naked into this world. Why can't we walk around in it without clothes from time to time?" Elina Ranta, a fully clothed tourist from Finland who checked out the art -- and the audience -- left amused. "I thought, 'This is strange. How is this possible in a museum?'" Ranta said. "We've been in many galleries and I've never seen people walking around like this." "In English, my name means 'beach,'" she added. "That's pretty funny under these circumstances, isn't it?" From checker at panix.com Thu Aug 4 22:44:04 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2005 18:44:04 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CBC: Nigel M. de S. Cameron: How we Lost "Bioethics" and How We Can Win it Back Message-ID: Nigel M. de S. Cameron: How we Lost "Bioethics" and How We Can Win it Back The Weekly Newsletter of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network http://www.cbc-network.org/enewsletter/index_8_3_05.htm#article1 [9](from tothesource.com) continued from last week. America is blessed with more than one hundred serious-minded, accredited, four-year Christian (basically evangelical) colleges - as well as many Catholic institutions. Back in the early 90s, I shared a luncheon presentation to the presidents of these evangelical schools with my friend, former Surgeon-General, C. Everett Koop. At that time not one evangelical school offered even a minor in bioethics - though almost all of them have pre-med students; and not one evangelical school had developed a grad program in the field. We pleaded with the presidents to prepare their students for the extraordinary opportunities of leadership in this emerging discussion of human life - especially those who were planning to go to med school. Now, more than a decade later, things have changed - but not much. One school has a minor. One school has a grad program. It just happens to be the school ( Trinity International University) where I taught back in the 90s and was able to press for these programs. In the world of evangelical higher education, no-one else has taken up the challenge. Of course, this was really the challenge of the 70s. That's when "bioethics" got off the ground, and the secularists were wide awake to their opportunities. Yet, three decades later, the evangelical community is still so focused on the symptom (abortion) that it can hardly spare a thought for the disease process (a secular bioethics, pushing secular assumptions about what it means to be human) that has led our culture to think in terms of human life in post-Christian terms. That may not sound so bad - but only if you are unconcerned about euthanasia, have never heard of stem cell research that destroys embryos, and have not been following the new technologies - which some people plan to use to remake human nature itself! [A] second example is equally telling. In Washington, DC, where so much is decided, there are many think-tanks that devise policy and prepare people to shape the future of government in our land. There are liberal groups and conservative groups, and they and their staffs have far more influence on the future of this nation than most Americans know. Guess what! Among them all, there is not one whose chief concern is to focus Christian thinking on bioethics and the future of human nature. Not one. We have groups that share these concerns (like Wilberforce Forum and Family Research Council), and we have pro-life advocacy groups (chiefly the National Right to Life Committee). But a think tank? A center looking at the huge range of biopolicy issues? Not a sign. There are plenty of other discouraging examples. Back in 1983 I started the first serious Christian bioethics journal (Ethics and Medicine), and more than two decades later it is still the only bioethics journal that takes a clear Christian view. A few years later, in my book The New Medicine: Life and Death after Hippocrates, I offered a model to Christians - to use the originally pagan Hippocratic Oath, which is still held in high esteem in medicine, as the basis for a public translation of Christian bioethics distinctives. Despite high praise from C. Everett Koop, Chuck Colson, Harold O.J. Brown, and Richard John Neuhaus, and a review in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, it has hardly been a best seller! In truth, we have abandoned the battlefield. Way back in the early 70s, Paul Ramsey, Princeton professor and profound Christian thinker, sought to set the tone for the emerging bioethics agenda. Very few Christians have followed. The field of serious intellectual inquiry and policy making has been abandoned to the likes of Art Caplan. So we should hardly be surprised when we hear television "bioethicists" prating their contempt for the sanctity of life, when every effort the President makes to raise serious moral concerns on stem cells and cloning is dismissed as the work of the "religious right," and when we are comprehensively out-maneuvered by the secular elite in every biopolicy issue. These issues will define our future, and that of the race. They will dominate the moral agenda of the 21st century. Who lost bioethics? Well, we did. Time to go get it back! And the way to begin is with the churches. This is where we have vast reservoirs of untapped resources; MDs, nurses, researchers, teachers - and pastors whose leadership will be the key to turning around a generation of neglect. Just a few days ago I was invited to spend the day at Rick Warren's "purpose-driven" Saddleback Community Church, in southern California. In the morning, the Center for Bioethics and Culture had arranged their latest "pastors' briefing" to update church leaders on this vast agenda. In the evening, Saddleback pulled in hundreds of their people for one of the most stimulating meetings I can remember. Once I finished speaking, the questions had to be cut off after an hour and a half - incisive, engaged, on everything from embryos to living wills and nanotechnology. My message had been clear: God has called us to be 21st century Christians. We don't need to politicize the church, just to teach people that as patients or relatives or citizens we will all engage these issues - and that this follows from our discipleship as night follows day. [10]read the complete article _________________________________________________________________ The Human Future: Receive a free "The Human Future" wristband! Send us your name and address and the name, address, and email of someone new to the CBC and we will send you both a "The Human Future" wristband! Only the first 10 email entries will receive wristbands so send us an email right away. To purchase wristbands see below. [11][emailicon.gif] [12]Send email for free wristbands What is "the human future?" What does it mean? When there are enough issues crowding into our daily lives as it is, why should we think about such a seemingly irrelevant philosophical discussion as our "human future?" Well, because as Dr. Cameron so poignantly pointed out above, the issues related to the taking, making, and faking of human life are the issues that will dominate the 21st Century. These are not philosophical in nature. These issues are at the forefront of the scientific communities' agenda and have the potential for doing much good and much harm. Much good, by relieving human suffering, and much harm by devaluing the inherent dignity of all human beings. Unfortunately, if you have been following the news lately you will see how a [13]utilitarian based science has dominated the discussion. These articles on [14]Eugenics, [15]Euthanasia, [16]Stem Cell Research, and [17]Egg Donation are only a few to show you that much is at stake for "The Human Future." "The Human Future," then, is about raising the red flag when human dignity is at stake, and it is about grounding science in moral responsibility. Even more importantly, it is about celebrating the beauty and complexity of human life in all of its various stages from the zygote to the death bed and in that way securing a human future for us and the generations beyond us. CBC is about equipping people to face the challenges of the 21st Century and we use all the tools necessary to raise awareness about these issues. We host events, debates, we offers resources and much more. We offer you as many opportunities as we can to engage yourself and those you know in these discussions. Purchase 1 for $5 and support CBC's mission to defend the dignity of humankind. We will send you two wristbands for free if you purchase 10 or more. Free shipping and handling References 4. http://www.cbc-network.org/pdfs/hurlbutinterview.pdf 5. http://www.cbc-network.org/pdfs/hurlbutinterview.pdf 6. http://www.cbc-network.org/enewsletter/index_8_3_05.htm 7. http://www.cbc-network.org/ 8. http://www.cbc-network.org/ 9. http://www.tothesource.org/6_21_2005/6_21_2005.htm 10. http://www.cbc-network.org/redesigned/research_display.php?id=243 From checker at panix.com Thu Aug 4 22:44:16 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2005 18:44:16 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Cultural Differences Complicate a Georgia Drug Sting Operation Message-ID: Cultural Differences Complicate a Georgia Drug Sting Operation New York Times, 5.8.4 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/04/national/04meth.html By [3]KATE ZERNIKE ROME, Ga., July 29 - When they charged 49 convenience store clerks and owners in rural northwest Georgia with selling materials used to make methamphetamine, federal prosecutors declared that they had conclusive evidence. Hidden microphones and cameras, they said, had caught the workers acknowledging that the products would be used to make the drug. But weeks of court motions have produced many questions. Forty-four of the defendants are Indian immigrants - 32, mostly unrelated, are named Patel - and many spoke little more than the kind of transactional English mocked in sitcoms. So when a government informant told store clerks that he needed the cold medicine, matches and camping fuel to "finish up a cook," some of them said they figured he must have meant something about barbecue. The case of Operation Meth Merchant illustrates another difficulty for law enforcement officials fighting methamphetamine, a highly addictive drug that can be made with ordinary grocery store items. Many states, including Georgia, have recently enacted laws restricting the sale of common cold medicines like Sudafed, and nationwide, the police are telling merchants to be suspicious of sales of charcoal, coffee filters, aluminum foil and Kitty Litter. Walgreens agreed this week to pay $1.3 million for failing to monitor the sale of over-the-counter cold medicine that was bought by a methamphetamine dealer in Texas. But the case here is also complicated by culture. Prosecutors have had to drop charges against one defendant they misidentified, presuming that the Indian woman inside the store must be the same Indian woman whose name appeared on the registration for a van parked outside, and lawyers have gathered evidence arguing that another defendant is the wrong Patel. The biggest problem, defense lawyers say, is the language barrier between an immigrant store clerk and the undercover informants who used drug slang or quick asides to convey that they were planning to make methamphetamine. "They're not really paying attention to what they're being told," said Steve Sadow, one of the lawyers. "Their business is: I ring it up, you leave, I've done my job. Call it language or idiom or culture, I'm not sure you're able to show they know there's anything wrong with what they're doing." For the Indians, their lives largely limited to store and home, it is as if they have fallen through a looking glass into a world they were content to keep on the other side of the cash register. "This is the first time I heard this - I don't know how to pronounce - this meta-meta something," said Hajira Ahmed, whose husband is in jail pending charges that he sold cold medicine and antifreeze at their convenience store on a winding road near the Tennessee border. But David Nahmias, the United States attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said the evidence showed that the clerks knew that the informants posing as customers planned to make drugs. Federal law makes it illegal to sell products knowing, or with reason to believe, that they will be used to produce drugs. In these cases, lawyers say, defendants face up to 20 years in prison and $250,000 in fines. In one instance, Mr. Nahmias said, a store owner in Whitfield County pulled out a business card from a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent and told the informant that he was supposed to contact the agent if someone requested large amounts of the materials. When the informant asked if he would call, Mr. Nahmias said, the owner replied, "No, you are my customer." "It's not that they should have known," Mr. Nahmias said. "In virtually or maybe all of the cases, they did know." Like many prosecutors, Mr. Nahmias describes methamphetamine, a highly potent drug that can be injected, ingested or inhaled, as the biggest drug problem in his district. While only about a third of the meth here is made in small labs - the majority of the drug used in this country comes from so-called superlabs in Mexico - those small labs can be highly explosive, posing a danger to children, the environment and the police departments that are forced to clean them up. Their sources, he said, are local convenience stores. "While those people may not think they're causing any harm, the harm they cause is tremendous," Mr. Nahmias said. "We really wanted to send the message that if you get into that line of business, selling products that you know are going to be used to make meth, you're going to go to prison." Operation Meth Merchant started, Mr. Nahmias said, with complaints from local sheriffs that certain stores were catering to the labs. Prosecutors paid confidential informants - some former convicts, others offered the promise of lighter punishment for pending charges - to buy products in stores in six counties beginning in early 2004, and drop hints that they were making drugs. Defense lawyers said some of the defendants probably did know what they were doing when they sold the materials. But on several tapes, provided by the government to the lawyers, who played them for a reporter, it was not always clear that the people behind the counter understood. One recording captures an informant who walked into the Tobacco and Beverage Mart in Trenton, Ga., and asked for Pseudo 60, a particularly potent brand of cold medicine, which contains pseudoephedrine, the key ingredient of methamphetamine. The clerk, Mangesh Patel, 55, said the store no longer carried it. "Police guy came here said don't sell," Mr. Patel said. "Misuse. Public misuse." The informant replied: "I know what they're doing with it, because that's what I'm going to do with it." "Yah," Mr. Patel replied, "public misuse." When the informant found another bottle of pills that he said might work, Mr. Patel told him he could sell only two, under orders from "the police guy." The informant asked if his friend could come in and buy two more. "Yeah," Mr. Patel replied, "But I cannot sell two to one guy." Defense lawyers say the Indians were simply being good merchants and obeying what they believed was the letter of the law. Several refused to sell more than two bottles of cold medicine, citing store policy. They were charged, prosecutors say, because they allowed the "customers" to come back the next day for more. Prosecutors say that should have made it clear to the clerks that the buyers were up to no good. In some cases, the language barriers seem obvious - one videotape shows cold medicine stacked next to a sign saying, "Cheek your change befor you leave a counter." Investigators footnoted court papers to explain that the clue the informants dropped most often - that they were doing "a cook" - is a "common term" meth makers use. Lawyers argue that if the courts could not be expected to understand what this meant, neither could immigrants with a limited grasp of English. "This is not even slang language like 'gonna,' 'wanna,' " said Malvika Patel, who spent three days in jail before being cleared this month. " 'Cook' is very clear; it means food." And in this context, she said, some of the items the government wants stores to monitor would not set off any alarms. "When I do barbecue, I have four families. I never have enough aluminum foil." According to court records, prosecutors first identified Ms. Patel as the woman who sold two bottles of cold medicine to an informant in Fort Oglethorpe, Ga., because her name appeared on the registration of a van parked outside. But the driver of the van worked for a company, owned by her and her husband, that installs security cameras, and Ms. Patel produced records showing that she was picking her son up at a day care center in Tennessee at the moment she was said to be in Georgia. Her misidentification has fueled the belief among the Indians that investigators were operating on cultural bias. This corner of the state is still largely white; Indians began moving here about 10 years ago, buying hotels and then convenience stores, and some whites still say, mistakenly, that "Patel" means "hotel" in Hindi. "They want to destroy all Indian businesses," said Ms. Ahmed, whose husband is in jail. "Because they hate us, or I don't know." Mr. Nahmias said he was willing to consider evidence of language barriers when the cases went to trial later this year. But he denied singling out any group. "We follow the evidence where it goes," he said. Still, the case has set off ripples from the green ridges here to the Indian state of Gujarat, the traditional homeland of Patels, where newspapers have carried articles about the arrests. "We go into temple and they look at you - it's a bad image right now," said Dilip Patel, who owns one of the stores involved. "If I have to go to the City Hall to do some paper, they see me 'Patel,' they look at me I'm a hard man, I'm a bad guy." Malvika Patel's husband, who has Americanized his name from Chirag to Chris, says his wife's arrest made him think about selling his three stores and leaving the country. "We are from so much cleaner society where we are from in India," he said. "We didn't even know what drugs were." Ms. Patel says she has tried to shield herself from the ugly aspects of life here - she does not read newspapers because she wearies of all the crime. Maybe, she said, that was a mistake. "I think you need all this bad knowledge now if you want to live here." From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 6 01:27:43 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 21:27:43 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Economist: Theories of humour: Poking fun Message-ID: Theories of humour: Poking fun http://www.economist.com/science/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=4246393 5.8.4 TUEBINGEN, GERMANY THE true story of how your wife's stalker rang her to discuss killing you isn't supposed to provoke mirth. But when John Morreall, of the College of William and Mary in Virginia, related the events last week to a group of scholars in Tuebingen in Germany, they were in stitches as he divulged the details of how his wife tried to dissuade the confused young man by pleading that her mortgage was too large to pay without her husband's help. So why did they laugh? Dr Morreall's thesis is that laughter, incapacitating as it can be, is a convincing signal that the danger has passed. The reaction of the psychologists, linguists, philosophers and professional clowns attending the Fifth International Summer School on Humour and Laughter illustrates his point. Dr Morreall survived to tell the tale and so had an easy time making it sound funny. One description of how laughter is provoked is the incongruity theory developed by Victor Raskin of Purdue University and Salvatore Attardo of Youngstown State University, both in America. This theory says that all written jokes and many other humorous situations are based on an incongruity--something that is not quite right. In many jokes, the teller sets up the story with this incongruity present and the punch line then resolves it, in a way people do not expect. Alternatively, the very last words of the story may introduce the absurdity and leave the listeners with the task of reconciling it. For instance, many people find it funny that a conference on humour could take place in Germany. Why do people laugh at all? What is the point of it? Laughter is very contagious and this suggests that it may have become a part of human behaviour because it promotes social bonding. When a group of people laughs, the message seems to be "relax, you are among friends". Indeed, humour is one way of dealing with the fact that humans are "excrement-producing poets and imperfect lovers", says Appletree Rodden of the University of Tuebingen. He sees religion and humour as different, and perhaps competing, ways for people to accept death and the general unsatisfactoriness of the world. Perhaps that is why, as Dr Morreall calculates in a forthcoming article in the journal Humor, 95% of the writings that he sampled from important Christian scholars through the centuries disapproved of humour, linking it to insincerity and idleness. Fear of idleness is why many managers discourage laughter during office hours, Dr Morreall notes. This is foolish, he claims. Laughter or its absence may be the best clue a manager has about the work environment and the mood of employees. Indeed, another theory of why people laugh--the superiority theory--says that people laugh to assert that they are on a level equal to or higher than those around them. Research has shown that bosses tend to crack more jokes than do their employees. Women laugh much more in the presence of men, and men generally tell more jokes in the presence of women. Men have even been shown to laugh much more quietly around women, while laughing louder when in a group of men. But laughter does not unite us all. There are those who have a pathological fear that others will laugh at them. Sufferers avoid situations where there will be laughter, which means most places where people meet. Willibald Ruch of Zurich University surveyed 1,000 Germans and asked them whether they thought they were the butts of jokes and found that almost 10% felt this way. These people also tended to classify taped laughter as jeering. Future research will focus on the hypothesis that there is something seriously wrong with their sense of humour. From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 6 01:27:51 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 21:27:51 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Wired: Brain Workouts May Tone Memory Message-ID: Brain Workouts May Tone Memory http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,68409,00.html 5.8.4 By [21]Joanna Glasner It's common knowledge that a proper exercise regimen can do wonders for the body. Only recently, however, have psychologists and gerontologists aggressively applied the same principle to the mind. Among people who work with older adults, the concept of "cognitive fitness" has become a buzzword to describe activities that stimulate underutilized areas of the brain and improve memory. Proponents of brain-fitness exercises say such mental conditioning can help prevent or delay memory loss and the onset of other age-related cognitive disorders. "Most people's idea of fitness stops at the neck," said Patti Celori, executive director of the [25]New England Cognitive Center. "But the brain is the CPU of our body, and most people don't do much to keep it as fit as possible." The NECC runs one of a growing number of programs that work with older adults to improve cognitive abilities. Activities include computer programs designed to stimulate specific areas of the brain, replication of geometric designs using boards with pegs and rubber bands, and visual and auditory memory exercises. Some of the other programs are [26]Maintain Your Brain, initiated a year ago by the Alzheimer's Association; Mind Alert, run by the [27]American Society on Aging; and other regional programs such as the [28]Center for Healthy Aging in Kent, Ohio. For do-it-yourself types, a plethora of books have been published on getting the brain in shape. Paula Hartman-Stein, a geropsychologist at the Center for Healthy Aging, recommends The Better Brain Book, by David Perlmutter and Carol Colman, and The Memory Bible by Gary Small. One purpose of mental exercises is to reinforce the idea that "in aging, not everything is downhill," said Elkhonon Goldberg, a Manhattan neuropsychologist and author of The Wisdom Paradox, which examines how some people grow wiser with age. "There are gains that are subsequent and consequent to a lifelong history of mental activity and mental striving," Goldberg said. He also believes brain exercises can benefit adults suffering from mild cognitive impairment, and he has developed computer puzzles designed to help them stimulate different areas of their brain. It's not clear how much targeted brain exercises can prevent the onset of cognitive disorders in older adults. But some findings indicate that high cognitive ability is tied to a lower risk of Alzheimer's. One of the most extensive and widely cited investigations on the subject, the landmark [29]Nun Study, tracked 100 Milwaukee nuns who had written autobiographies in the 1930s. More than 50 years later, scientists gave them cognitive tests and examined the brain tissue of nuns who died. Those who demonstrated lower linguistic ability in the autobiographies were at greater risk for Alzheimer's disease. A similar [30]study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association surveyed 801 older Catholic nuns, priests and [31]brothers. The results linked reading newspapers and participating in other brain-stimulating activities with a reduced risk of Alzheimer's. A 2000 National Research Council [32]report commissioned by the National Institute on Aging found some brain exercises were worthy of government funding. But skeptics question whether beginning an active regimen of brain teasers late in life will do much to prevent brain disorders. Research to date provides scant evidence that mental exercise can stave off dementia, wrote Margaret Gatz, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California, in an [33]article published by the Public Library of Science. Gatz wrote in an e-mail that she would be more convinced if researchers randomly assigned cognitive training, then followed study subjects over several decades. She also said she was concerned that too much emphasis on the benefits of mental fitness could stigmatize Alzheimer's patients. "If mental exercise is widely believed to prevent (Alzheimer's disease), then individuals who do become demented may be blamed for their disease on the grounds of not having exercised their brains enough," she said. Still, supporters of cognitive-fitness programs are pushing for greater recognition from the federal government. During December information-gathering sessions leading up to the [34]White House Conference on Aging, conference representatives said several speakers have made a case that brain health ought to be promoted in much the same way that physical fitness is today. Few people see much downside in pursuing brain-stimulating activities, said Nancy Ceridwyn, special-projects director at the American Society on Aging. Puzzles, spelling practice, memory exercises or book discussions don't pose much harm. That said, Ceridwyn isn't convinced that all the brain exercises being offered today are practical. She wonders whether workbooks that ask adults to do pages of math problems to get their brains in gear might be unnecessarily torturing people in their twilight years. "How many people are going to get up and say, 'I'm excited about doing my multiplication tables today'?" she said. "Not many." References 21. http://www.wired.com/news/feedback/mail/1,2330,0-28-68409,00.html 22. http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,68409,00.html 25. http://www.cognitivecenter.org/default.asp 26. http://www.alz.org/maintainyourbrain/overview.asp 27. http://www.asaging.org/index.cfm 28. http://www.centerforhealthyaging.com/CHA/ContactUs.htm 29. http://www.alzheimers.org/nianews/nianews6.html 30. http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/287/6/742?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=participation+in+cognitively+stimulating+activities+and+the+risk+of+alzheimers%27s+disease&searchid=1122502876647_490&stored_search=&FIRSTINDEX=0&journalcode=jama 31. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lay_brother 32. http://www.nap.edu/books/0309069408/html/1.html 33. http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020007 34. http://www.whcoa.gov/ From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 6 01:27:57 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 21:27:57 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Economist: Video gaming: Chasing the dream Message-ID: Video gaming: Chasing the dream http://www.economist.com/science/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=4246109 5,8,4 As video gaming spreads, the debate about its social impact is intensifying IS IT a new medium on a par with film and music, a valuable educational tool, a form of harmless fun or a digital menace that turns children into violent zombies? Video gaming is all these things, depending on whom you ask. Gaming has gone from a minority activity a few years ago to mass entertainment. Video games increasingly resemble films, with photorealistic images, complex plotlines and even famous actors. The next generation of games consoles--which will be launched over the next few months by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo--will intensify the debate over gaming and its impact on society, as the industry tries to reach out to new customers and its opponents become ever more vocal. Games consoles are the most powerful mass-produced computers in the world and the new machines will offer unprecedented levels of performance. This will, for example, make possible characters with convincing facial expressions, opening the way to games with the emotional charge of films, which could have broader appeal and convince sceptics that gaming has finally come of age as a mainstream form of entertainment. But it will also make depictions of violence even more lifelike, to the dismay of critics. This summer there has been a huge fuss about the inclusion of hidden sex scenes in "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas", a highly popular, but controversial, game in which the player assumes the role of a street gangster. The sex scenes are not a normal part of the game (see above for a typical image). But the offending scenes can be activated using a patch downloaded from the internet. Senator Hillary Clinton and a chorus of other American politicians have called for federal prosecutors to investigate the game and examine whether the industry's system of self-regulation, which applies age ratings to games, is working properly. Mrs Clinton accused video games of "stealing the innocence of our children" and "making the difficult job of being a parent even harder". As a result of the furore, "Grand Theft Auto" had its rating in America changed--from "M" for mature (over-17s only) to "AO" for adults only (over-18s)--by the industry's rating board. But since most big retailers refuse to stock "AO" titles, of which very few exist, Rockstar Games, the maker of "Grand Theft Auto", is producing a new "M"-rated version without the hidden sexual material. This is merely the latest round in a long-running fight. Before the current fuss over "Grand Theft Auto", politicians and lobby groups were getting worked up over "Narc", a game that depicts drug-taking, and "25 to Life", another urban cops-and-robbers game. Ironically, the "Grand Theft Auto" episode has re-ignited the debate over the impact of video games, just as the industry is preparing to launch its biggest-ever marketing blitz to accompany the introduction of its new consoles. Amid all the arguments about the minutiae of rating systems, the unlocking of hidden content, and the stealing of children's innocence, however, three important factors are generally overlooked: that attitudes to gaming are marked by a generational divide; that there is no convincing evidence that games make people violent; and that games have great potential in education. Start with the demographics. Attitudes towards gaming depend to a great extent on age. In America, for example, half of the population plays computer or video games. However most players are under 40--according to Nielsen, a market-research firm, 76% of them--while most critics of gaming are over 40. An entire generation that began gaming as children has kept playing. The average age of American gamers is 30. Most are "digital natives" who grew up surrounded by technology, argues Marc Prensky of games2train, a firm that promotes the educational use of games. He describes older people as "digital immigrants" who, like newcomers anywhere, have had to adapt in various ways to their new digital surroundings. Just getting by in a foreign land without some grasp of the local language is difficult, says Mr Prensky. Digital immigrants have had to learn to use technologies such as the internet and mobile phones. But relatively few of them have embraced video games. The word "game" itself also confuses matters, since it evokes childish playthings. "What they don't understand, because they've never played them, is that these are complex games, which take 30, 40 or 100 hours to complete," says Mr Prensky. Games are, in fact, played mainly by young adults. Only a third of gamers are under 18. "It's just a generational divide," says Gerhard Florin, the European boss of Electronic Arts, the world's biggest games publisher. "It's people not knowing what they are talking about, because they have never played a game, accusing millions of gamers of being zombies or violent." Digital natives who have played video games since childhood already regard them as a form of entertainment on a par with films and music. Older digital natives now have children of their own and enjoy playing video games with them. The gaming industry is trying to address the generational divide. It is producing games designed to appeal to non-gamers and encouraging casual gamers (who may occasionally play simple web-based games, or games on mobile phones) to play more. This has led to the development of games with a wider appeal. Some of them replace the usual control pad with novel input devices: microphones for singing games, cameras for dancing and action games, and even drums. In addition, the industry has started to cater more to women, who seem to prefer social simulation games such as "The Sims", and to older people, who (if they play games at all) often prefer computerised versions of card games and board games. Other promising avenues include portable gaming, mobile gaming and online downloads of simple games. Many people enjoy gaming, but do not necessarily want to commit themselves to an epic quest that will take dozens of hours to complete. The industry, in short, is doing its best to broaden gaming's appeal, which is of course in its own best interests. For the time being, however, the demographic divide persists, and it does much to explain the polarisation of opinion over gaming and, in particular, worries about violence. It also provides the answer to a question that is often asked about gaming: when will it become a truly mainstream form of entertainment? It already is among the under-40s, but will probably never achieve mainstream status among older people. But aren't critics right to worry that gaming might make people violent? Hardly a week goes by in which a game is not blamed for inspiring someone to commit a violent crime. After all, say critics, acting out violent behaviour in a game is very different from passively watching it in a film. Yet surveys of studies into games and violence have produced inconclusive results, notes Dmitri Williams, who specialises in studying the social impact of media at the University of Illinois. And, in a paper on the subject published in June in Communication Monographs, he notes that such research typically has serious shortcomings. For example, studies have examined only the short-term effects of gaming. There have been no studies that track the long-term effects on the players themselves. Another problem, says Mr Williams, is that it is meaningless to generalise about "game play" when there are thousands of games in dozens of genres. It is, he notes, equivalent to suggesting that all television programmes, radio shows and movies are the same. Better-designed studies that measure the long-term effects of specific types of games are needed. They're beginning to happen. In his paper, Mr Williams describes the first such study, which he carried out with Marko Skoric of the University of Michigan. The study concentrated on a "massively multiplayer online role-playing game" (MMORPG) called "Asheron's Call 2". This type of game requires the player to roam around a fantasy world and kill monsters to build up attribute points. It is "substantially more violent than the average video game and should have more effect, given the highly repetitive nature of the violence", the researchers noted. Two groups of subjects were recruited, none of whom had played MMORPGs before and many of whom had never played video games at all. One group then played the game for a month, for an average of nearly two hours per day. The other group acted as a control. All participants were asked questions about the frequency of aggressive social interactions (such as arguments with their spouses) during the course of the month to test the idea that gaming makes people more aggressive. Moral choices Game players, it turned out, were no more aggressive than the control group. Whether the participants had played games before, the number of hours spent gaming, and whether they liked violent movies or not, made no difference. The researchers noted, however, that more research is still needed to assess the impact of other genres, such as shoot-'em-ups or the urban violence of "Grand Theft Auto". All games are different, and only when more detailed studies have been carried out will it be possible to generalise about the impact of gaming. But as Steven Johnson, a cultural critic, points out in a recent book, "Everything Bad Is Good for You", gaming is now so widespread that if it did make people more violent, it ought to be obvious. Instead, he notes, in America violent crime actually fell sharply in the 1990s, just as the use of video and computer games was taking off (see chart 2). Of course, it's possible that crime would have fallen by even more over the period had America not taken up video games; still, video gaming has clearly not turned America into a more violent place than it was. What's more, plenty of games, far from encouraging degeneracy, are morally complex, subtle and, very possibly, improving. Many now explicitly require players to choose whether to be good or evil, and their choices determine how the game they are playing develops. In "Black & White", for example, the player must groom a creature whose behaviour and form reflects his moral choices (get it wrong and the results can be ugly--see the illustration). Several games based on the "Star Wars" movies require players to choose between the light and dark sides of the Force, equivalent to good and evil. Perhaps most striking is the sequence in "Halo 2", a bestselling shoot-'em-up, in which the player must take the role of an alien. Having previously seen aliens as faceless enemies, notes Paul Jackson of Forrester, a consultancy, "suddenly you are asked to empathise with the enemy's position. It's very interesting. Games are much more complex than the critics realise." The move away from linear narratives to more complex games that allow players to make moral choices, argues Mr Prensky, means that games provide an opportunity to discuss moral questions. "These are wonderful examples for us to be discussing with our kids," he says. Indeed, perhaps the best way to address concerns over the effects of video games is to emphasise their vast potential to educate. Even games with no educational intent require players to learn a great deal. Games are complex, adaptive and force players to make a huge number of decisions. Gamers must construct hypotheses about the in-game world, learn its rules through trial and error, solve problems and puzzles, develop strategies and get help from other players via the internet when they get stuck. The problem-solving mechanic that underlies most games is like the 90% of an iceberg below the waterline--invisible to non-gamers. But look beneath the violent veneer of "Grand Theft Auto", and it is really no different from a swords-and-sorcery game. Instead of stealing a crystal and delivering it to a wizard so that he can cure the princess, say, you may have to intercept a consignment of drugs and deliver it to a gang boss so he can ransom a hostage. It is the pleasure of this problem-solving, not the superficial violence which sometimes accompanies it, that can make gaming such a satisfying experience. Nobody is using "Grand Theft Auto" in schools, of course, since it is intended for adults. But other off-the-shelf games such as "Sim City" or "Rollercoaster Tycoon", which contain model economies, are used in education. By playing them it is possible to understand how such models work, and to deduce what their biases are. (In "Sim City", for example, in which the player assumes the role of a city mayor, no amount of spending on health care is ever enough to satisfy patients, and the fastest route to prosperity is to cut taxes.) Games can be used in many other ways. Tim Rylands, a British teacher in a primary school near Bristol, recently won an award from Becta, a government education agency, for using computer games in the classroom. By projecting the fantasy world of "Myst", a role-playing game, on to a large screen and prompting his 11-year-old pupils to write descriptions and reactions as he navigates through it, he has achieved striking improvements in their English test scores. Another area where games are becoming more popular is in corporate training. In "Got Game", a book published last year by Harvard Business School Press, John Beck and Mitchell Wade, two management consultants, argue that gaming provides excellent training for a career in business. Gamers, they write, are skilled at multi-tasking, good at making decisions and evaluating risks, flexible in the face of change and inclined to treat setbacks as chances to try again. Firms that understand and exploit this, they argue, can gain a competitive advantage. Pilots have been trained using flight simulators for years, and simulators are now used by soldiers and surgeons too. But gaming can be used to train desk workers as well. Mr Prensky's firm has provided simple quiz games for such firms as IBM and Nokia, to test workers' knowledge of rules and regulations, for example. For Pfizer, a drug company, his firm built a simulation of its drug-development process that was then used to train new recruits. Other examples abound: PricewaterhouseCoopers built an elaborate simulation to teach novice auditors about financial derivatives. Some lawyers are using simulators to warm up for court appearances. Convincing older executives of the merits of using games in training can be tricky, Mr Prensky admits. "But when they have a serious strategic training problem, and realise that their own people are 20-year-olds, more and more are willing to take the leap," he says. So games are inherently good, not bad? Actually they are neither, like books, films, the internet, or any other medium. All can be used to depict sex and violence, or to educate and inform. Indeed, the inclusion of violent and sexual content in games is arguably a sign of the maturity of the medium, as games become more like films. Movies provide one analogy for the future of gaming, which seems destined to become a mainstream medium. Games already come in a variety of genres, and are rated for different age groups, just like movies. But just how far gaming still has to go is illustrated by the persistence of the double standard that applies different rules to games and films. Critics of gaming object to violence in games, even though it is common in movies. They worry about the industry's rating model, even though it is borrowed from the movie industry. They call upon big retailers (such as Wal-Mart) not to sell AO-rated games, but seem not to mind that they sell unrated movies that include far more explicit content. In June, Senator Charles Schumer held a press conference to draw attention to the M-rated game "25 to Life", in which players take the role of a policeman or a gangster. "Little Johnny should be learning how to read, not how to kill cops," he declared. True, but little Johnny should not be smoking, drinking alcohol or watching Quentin Tarantino movies either. Just as there are rules to try to keep these things out of little Johnny's hands, there are rules for video games too. Political opportunism is part of the explanation for this double standard: many of gaming's critics in America are Democrats playing to the centre. Another analogy can be made between games and music--specifically, with the emergence of rock and roll in the 1950s. Like games today, it was a new art form that was condemned for encouraging bad behaviour among young people. Some records were banned from the radio, and others had their lyrics changed. Politicians called for laws banning the sending of offending records by post. But now the post-war generation has grown up, rock and roll is considered to be harmless. Rap music, or gaming, is under attack instead. "There's always this pattern," says Mr Williams of the University of Illinois. "Old stuff is respected, and new stuff is junk." Novels, he points out, were once considered too lowbrow to be studied at university. Eventually the professors who believed this retired. Novels are now regarded as literature. "Once a generation has its perception, it is pretty much set," says Mr Williams. "What happens is that they die." Like rock and roll in the 1950s, games have been accepted by the young and largely rejected by the old. Once the young are old, and the old are dead, games will be regarded as just another medium and the debate will have moved on. Critics of gaming do not just have the facts against them; they have history against them, too. "Thirty years from now, we'll be arguing about holograms, or something," says Mr Williams. From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 6 01:28:07 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 21:28:07 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Star Tribune (Minneapolis): Your own corner of the world has its own magazine Message-ID: Your own corner of the world has its own magazine http://www.startribune.com/dynamic/story.php?template=print_a&story=5541591 5.8.4 Bill Dawson Star Tribune If you're a Subaru-driving face painter with a jones for Jane Austen, there's a magazine -- actually, three -- for you. Subiesport ("Your guide to tuning and driving Subarus"), Face Painting International and Jane Austen's Regency World are geared to readers with highly specialized interests. You also can subscribe to Bonsai Today, Atomic Ranch, Face Painting International and Gene Simmons Tongue. "Even the Ford Focus has a magazine," says professor Samir Husni, a University of Mississippi professor and president of Magazine Consulting & Research. Husni calls these "specialized specialty" publications, and they account for a large portion of the 450 or so magazine startups in the first six months of this year. Magazines are being launched faster than at any time since 1998, which means even the narrowest of niches is being filled, Husni says. The catch is that you have to move fast. Only 38 percent of these specialized titles survive a year, and even those have a limited life. Modern Ferret, for instance, recently went belly-up after a 10-year run and one-of-a-kind features including a two-page photo spread of an albino ferret. Fortunately, there's still Ferrets, publishing since 1998, for connoisseurs of these domesticated polecats. Here are sample titles launched in recent years: o Gene Simmons Tongue This quarterly, founded in 2002, includes "coverage of music, movies, style, entertainment, celebrity news, fashion and sex all covered from the perspective of [former KISS guitarist]) Gene Simmons." o Ferrets With the death of Modern Ferret, this bimonthly is striving to be your one-stop source for ferret information. Sample article: "That's not a ferret: Cases of mistaken identity." o New York Dog This bimonthly debuted in September, 2004, and has an obituary section titled "Rex in Peace." Sample article: "Update your dog's summer wardrobe." o Elevated Living This bimonthly describes itself as "the lifestyle magazine for people loving life at elevation." That means living in a location well above sea level, not in a downtown high-rise. o Jane Austen's Regency World Bimonthly for those who enjoy debating the relative merits of Elizabeth Bennett, Emma Woodhouse and Elinor Dashwood. Sample article: "Dilemma! -- Sue Le Blond has a problem with Mr. Darcy." o Subiesport Your guide to tuning and driving Subarus. One article begins, "Marc and Kyra Lein have been into Subarus for years now, dating back to a classic SVX they owned. Through fate, time, and a mutual desire to work on and modify Subarus, both ended up with extremely fast Impreza 2.5RS's of their own." o Atomic Ranch A quarterly for those who live in modest, mid-century ranch houses -- or wish to read about them. Sample article: "The house that Jack built: Sergeant Friday's Palm Springs party pad." o Russian Bride of New York This bilingual magazine was founded in 2004 and has been described in the New York Times as "a kind of Martha Stewart Weddings for young women of Soviet heritage." o Face Painting International Quarterly that seeks to elevate "face and body painting to a new dimension." Sample article: "Belly painting on expectant moms." o Tall magazine Bimonthly is for people of elongation, specifically men at least 6 feet 2 and women at least 5 feet 9. Tagline: "Because life may be short, but we're not." Everard Strong, the publisher, is 6 feet 9. o Cthulhu Sex For connoissuers of erotic horror. Tagline: "Blood, sex and tentacles." Title is from H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu." A Cthulhu is described as "humanity's most basic nightmare" on [3]www.cthulhu.org. o Eco-structure A bimonthly "dedicated to improving the environmental performance of buildings and their surroundings." Sample article: "Highland center educates visitors about sustainability." o Inside Cheerleading Bimonthly is designed to help readers "enjoy, train, perform, compete and live cheerleading to the max!" Sample article: "Camp Survival Guide: Find the best camp for your squad, what to bring to camp and the coolest camp styles." o Mushroom The journal of wild mushrooming. Sample article: "The First Time We Saw Mushrooms: A pair of experienced mushroom-hunters reminisces about the start of it all." o Reality Check Claims to be "your backstage pass to the world of reality TV." Sample article: "Survivor's Rupert: I was the true winner." o ROT (Riders of Tubes) This quarterly is aimed at wave riding's more mature bodyboarders, "while remaining true to the sport's core 13-19-year-old audience," according to [4]www.rcsmagazines.com. o Family Tree Magazine Purpose is to help readers "discover, preserve and celebrate your family history." Sample article: "After a harrowing ride through Canada's House of Commons, the bill that will open access to Canadians' 1911 census records has become law." Bill Dawson is at [5]wdawson at startribune.com. References 3. http://www.cthulhu.org/ 4. http://www.rcsmagazines.com/ 5. mailto:wdawson at startribune.com From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 6 01:28:15 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 21:28:15 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Fortune: First Cloned Dog Has Its Day Message-ID: First Cloned Dog Has Its Day http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,1089546,00.html?promoid=yahoo 5.8.3 The arrival of Snuppy, a cloned Afghan hound, heralds both scientific import and deep symbolic significance. By [17]David Stipp A lot of U.S. researchers are muttering "doggone it" today: South Korean scientists have won the international race to clone a dog. A team led by Seoul National Universitys Woo Suk Hwang, renowned for world-leading stem-cell research, reported in the journal Nature today that it has produced two genetic duplicates of a male Afghan hound. The scientific import of this development is to some extent overshadowed by its political and symbolic importance. To be sure, dog cloning does promise to help scientists study human disease and speed the quest for better therapies in ways that cloning other animals has not. But the announcement is also likely to intensify concern that the U.S. has lost the lead in basic research on stem cells and cloning, two closely linked areas of study in which Hwangs group has recently made stunning advances. Last year his team was the first to clone early-stage human embryos and extract potent embryonic stem cells from one of them, which is a key step on the way to growing replacement tissues for patients with failing organs. The Koreans achievement also brings home, as few advances have, biologys power to touch our lives. Animal cloning has become fairly routine. (See slideshow: [18]A Noah's Ark of Cloned Animals) Genetic knock-offs of mice, rats, cats, rabbits, goats, pigs, cows, and horses have been produced since 1996, when Dolly the sheep proved mammals could be cloned. But the dog is the first cloned creature that has served in the military, orbited the earth, starred in movies, and played competitive Frisbee. U.S. scientists failure to win the dog-cloning race wasnt for lack of trying. In 1997, a crack team at Texas A&M University launched a high-profile, $4 million dog-cloning project backed by billionaire John Sperling, founder of Apollo Group (nasdaq: APOL) and its subsidiary, the online University of Phoenix. The "Missyplicity project" was aimed at cloning Sperlings favorite canine, a mutt named Missy. A company that offers pet-cloning services, Genetic Savings & Clone, was born of the project. But so far, no dog. (The closely-held, Sausalito, Calif.-based firm has led the way in cat-cloning, though, generating more buzz per manufactured unit than any company on earth. So far it has cloned two beloved tabbies for customers at $50,000 a piece.) Genetic Savings issued a terse press release on the Korean first, congratulating its rivals but attributing their win partly to the "greater availability" of dogs for research in South Korea, where animal-protection groups have little sway. "We expect to produce our own canine clones in the near future," it added. Dogs have proved one of the hardest species to clone. The basic method, used to clone Dolly and other animals including the Afghan hounds, involves placing an adult animals DNA, extracted from, say, a skin cell, into an egg cell from the same species that has had its DNA removed. The reengineered ovum is then implanted in a surrogate mother to begin gestation as the genetic twin of the adult DNA donor. The process hasnt worked well with dogs largely because the species fragile egg cells, typically obtained in an immature state from spay clinics, are extremely difficult to mature in the lab, said Texas A&M cloning expert Duane Kraemer, who in 2001 helped create the first cloned cat, CC. (CC now lives with Kraemer.) His group nearly succeeded three years ago, though--one of its Missy clones seemed okay in utero but was stillborn, he said. The Korean team reported that their two cloned dogs resulted from swapping out the DNA in 1,095 egg cells and implanting them in 123 surrogate mothers. Three pregnancies resulted, two of which reached full term. One of the two cloned pups died at three weeks from pneumonia. The lone survivor, dubbed Snuppy, is now 100 days old, said Gerald Schatten, a University of Pittsburgh researcher who advises the Korean team. The Afghan hound was chosen for the experiment, Schatten added, because of the breeds distinctive look and docility--important qualities for Snuppy, who is likely to become as big a celebrity as Lassie. But the Korean work will yield more than photo ops. Dog-cloning should pave the way for the ability to clone dog embryos and then to extract embryonic stem cells from them. This procedure has been demonstrated so far only in mice and humans, Schatten noted. Dogs have long been used to test new drugs by pharmaceutical outfits like [19]Merck, [20]Amgen and [21]Pfizer. The industry's familiarity with dogs as research animals make them especially valuable for studies on embryonic stem cells. In particular, it may be possible to extract the potent stem cells from cloned dog embryos and transform them into the multiple cell types needed to create replacement tissues. After such techniques are perfected in dogs, it might be possible to apply them with little change to developing new tissues for human patients. The ability to clone dogs also opens the door for new kinds of studies on their genes; dogs' metabolic resemblance to humans should make such knowledge highly valuable to medical researchers. For instance, scientists might disable a particular gene in a cloned dog embryo and then observe the effects of the change on fetal development and on postnatal functioning in order to determine what the gene does. Similar DNA tweaking might produce cloned dogs that are genetically predisposed to illnesses such as diabetes, cancer or Alzheimers disease. That would give researchers insight into how such scourges unfold, as well as new avenues to test experimental therapies for them. Cloning dogs with altered genes will also help researchers elucidate the genetic underpinnings of the species incredible diversity, answering questions such as why poodles are smarter than bulldogs, and why Chihuahuas live much longer on average than Irish Wolfhounds. Such knowledge would doubtless yield profound insights on our own species, given that dogs, like us, are semi-educable, highly social animals that live a long time compared with most animals. But the Koreans work isnt likely to enable the commercial cloning of adored Fidos and Fifis anytime soon. Dog-cloning still requires world-class craftsmanship that isnt yet available to pet owners. Genetic Savings, however, is developing a technology called chromatin transfer that promises to make it easier. The firms success remains to be seen. But its feline feats give hope--as that great naturalist Hamlet said, "The cat will mew, and dog will have his day." Next: [22]Slideshow: A Noahs Ark of Cloned Animals RELATED ARTICLES ?[24]The Dogged Scientist, the Old Lab Vial, and the Quest to Stop Cancer ?[25]Why We're Losing the War on Cancer--and How to Win It ?[26]The Quest for Custom Cures ?[27]Stem Cells to Fix the Heart ?[28]Can China Overtake the U.S. in Science? [29]MORE TECHNOLOGY ? [30]First Cloned Dog Has Its Day ? [31]A Noahs Ark of Cloned Animals ? [32]Novartis, Schering Suffer Cancer Drug Setback ? [34]The Dogged Scientist, the Old Lab Vial, and the Quest to Stop Cancer ? [35]Why We're Losing the War on Cancer--and How to Win It ? [36]The Quest for Custom Cures ? [37]Stem Cells to Fix the Heart ? [38]Can China Overtake the U.S. in Science? References 17. http://www.fortune.com/fortune/author_archive?authorname=David%20Stipp&column_id=7&year=2005 18. http://www.fortune.com/fortune/slideshow/0,,1089559,00.html 19. http://www.fortune.com/fortune/fortune500/snapshot/0,14923,C858,00.html 20. http://www.fortune.com/fortune/fortune500/snapshot/0,14923,C100,00.html 21. http://www.fortune.com/fortune/fortune500/snapshot/0,14923,C1042,00.html 22. http://www.fortune.com/fortune/photoessay/0,18467,1089559,00.html 23. http://subs.timeinc.net/CampaignHandler/foab?source_id=26 24. http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,1071596,00.html 25. http://www.fortune.com/fortune/articles/0,15114,598425,00.html 26. http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,1050124,00.html 27. http://www.fortune.com/fortune/articles/0,15114,782027,00.html 28. http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,698529,00.html 29. http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology 30. http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,1089546,00.html 31. http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,1089559,00.html 32. http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,1087907,00.html 33. http://www.fortune.com/fortune/photoessay/0,18467,1089559,00.html 34. http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,1071596,00.html 35. http://www.fortune.com/fortune/articles/0,15114,598425,00.html 36. http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,1050124,00.html 37. http://www.fortune.com/fortune/articles/0,15114,782027,00.html 38. http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,698529,00.html From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 6 01:29:34 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 21:29:34 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Science Blog: Yoga may help prevent middle-age spread Message-ID: Yoga may help prevent middle-age spread Source: http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/8477 A new study led by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center? has found that regular yoga practice may help prevent middle-age spread in? normal-weight people and may promote weight loss in those who are? overweight. The study the first of its kind to measure the effects of yoga on weight? appears in the July/August issue of Alternative Therapies in Health and? Medicine. Funded by the National Cancer Institute, the study involved 15,500? healthy, middle-aged men and women who were asked to complete a written? survey recalling their physical activity (including yoga) and weight? history between the ages 45 and 55. The study measured the impact of yoga? with weight change, independent of other factors such as diet or other? types of physical activity. The researchers found that between the ages of 45 and 55, most people? gained about a pound a year, which is a common pattern as people age and? do not adjust their caloric intake to their declining energy needs.? "However, men and women who were of normal weight at age 45 and regularly? practiced yoga gained about 3 fewer pounds during that 10-year period than? those who didn't practice yoga," said Alan R. Kristal, Dr.P.H., the? study's lead author. For the study, regular yoga practice was defined as? practicing at least 30 minutes once a week for four or more years. But the researchers noted the greatest effect of regular yoga practice was? among people who were overweight. "Men and women who were overweight and? practiced yoga lost about 5 pounds, while those who did not practice yoga? gained about 14 pounds in that 10-year period," said Kristal, a member of? the Hutchinson Center's Public Health Sciences Division and a professor of? epidemiology at the University of Washington School of Public Health and? Community Medicine. What accounts for yoga's apparent fat-fighting potential? Kristal, himself? a longtime yoga student, suspects it has more to do with increased body? awareness than the physical activity itself. "During a very vigorous yoga practice you can burn enough calories to lose? weight, but most people don't practice that kind of yoga," he said. "From? my experience, I think it has to do with the way that yoga makes you more? aware of your body. So when you've eaten enough food, you're sensitive to? the feeling of being full, and this makes it much easier to stop eating? before you've eaten too much." Study co-author Denise Benitez, owner of Seattle Yoga Arts, agrees. "Most? people practice yoga in a way that's not aerobic enough to burn a lot of? calories, so it has to be some other reason." One reason, she speculates, could be that yoga cultivates a form of gentle? inner strength. "When we practice yoga, although it may look easy, there? is some mild discomfort. You bring your body to a physical edge that's? just a little bit challenging. And people who regularly practice yoga? develop the inner resources to stay with a little bit of discomfort. They? develop a softness inside and an ability to stay mindful. So that when you? go home after yoga class and open up the fridge and see a chocolate cake,? you have the resources to stay with the discomfort of not eating that? chocolate cake." Whatever the reason behind the apparent impact of yoga on weight? maintenance and loss, Kristal stresses that these findings need to be? replicated. "I think it's time now to do a carefully controlled, randomized clinical? trial to see if adding yoga to a standard weight-loss program can help? people lose more weight or keep it off longer. The other message,? particularly to people who might be overweight, is that yoga is a? noncompetitive activity. It's something that everybody can do. It brings? so many benefits, and if one of the clinical benefits is that it can help? you control your weight, then that's a great thing." The participants in the yoga study were part of a larger ongoing? Hutchinson Center study involving more than 75,000 residents of western? Washington called the Vitamins and Lifestyle, or VITAL, study. This $4.2? million project, which began in 2000, aims to determine whether vitamin,? mineral or herbal supplements reduce the risk of cancer. ### SIDEBAR YOGA TIPS THAT MAY ENCOURAGE WEIGHT MAINTENANCE OR LOSS Study co-author and yoga teacher Denise Benitez, owner of Seattle Yoga? Arts, offers the following suggestions for enhancing one's yoga practice.? These tips may be particularly helpful for those who wish to maintain or? lose weight: 1. Practice in a room without mirrors, and pay more attention to your? internal experience than to your outer performance. 2. Learn to feel sensations more and more subtly, so that you become? deeply involved in and curious about small movements, sometimes called? micro-movements. 3. In your poses, find an edge for yourself where you are challenged but? not overwhelmed. At this edge, practice maintaining a clear, open and? accepting mental state. 4. Give yourself permission to rest when you feel overworked. 5. Pay close attention to what you are saying to yourself as you practice,? and make an intentional effort to appreciate your own efforts and innate? goodness. 6. Go to class faithfully, arrive early, and talk to a few people in your? class before class begins. 7. Buy your own yoga mat and bring it to class. 8. Realize that the development of qualities like patience, discipline,? wisdom, right effort, kindness, gratitude and many others will arise from? your yoga practice. These qualities create a steady and soft mind. 9. Find a teacher who offers a balance of gentleness and firmness and? whose teaching inspires you to practice from your highest self. 10. Recognize that simply attending class is a major statement of courage,? self-care, and positive momentum. Realize that you are inspiring others as? you become more true to your deepest desires. At Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, our interdisciplinary teams of? world-renowned scientists and humanitarians work together to prevent,? diagnose and treat cancer, HIV/AIDS and other diseases. Our researchers,? including three Nobel laureates, bring a relentless pursuit and passion? for health, knowledge and hope to their work and to the world. For more? information, please visit fhcrc.org. From Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 6 01:29:42 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 21:29:42 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] The Statesman (India): Mind over matter: Principles and Techniques Message-ID: Mind over matter: Principles and Techniques http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=18&theme=&usrsess=1&id=84700 [How dubious would Mr. Mencken be about all this?] Jul 28, 2005??? Biswaroop Roy Chowdhury The field of memory is ever evolving in so far as principles and techniques are concerned. And due to this evolution there is no stopping of refreshment and adaptability for there are as many principles and techniques as one asks. These being easy to learn and to work upon, the principles and techniques work as wonders and remain refreshed forever, if learnt once. This can be understood, perfectly, by the ensuing content. Take the instance of those who drive a car. It proves that 95% of those who drive cars require improving their memory because all of them forget the place where they have parked their vehicle or put its keys. They have driven their car to a shopping centre/ airport/ movie theatre/ friend's place, and having completed their tasks, have returned only to find that they have completely lost it (i.e. forgotten the location of their car). Don't you agree that it's impossible? The car weighing more than 2 tons which they drove, opened and closed the door and locked it as well, has been lost. Surely the brain could not possibly forget such a thing? But the whole process of forgetting can be understood as it is the most easily understandable thing. At the same time one can overcome this problem of forgetting by applying simple principles and techniques. Why it happens is due to absentmindedness. As a person is so occupied with the aim of visit, he /she forgets or finds it relatively unimportant to remember the location of his car. How can one overcome this problem? This again is very simple. One has to apply 3 memory principles and 12 memory techniques. The three memory principles are as under. 1. Our memory is based on Association, i.e. it works by linking things together. For example as soon as your brain registers the word "apple" it will remember link - the colour, the tastes, texture and smells of that fruit, as well as experiences, friends and occasion connected with it. 2. What has to be memorised should have an " image" that should be a multi-sensory image. By this the objects get reinforced into our brains and thus become unforgettable. 3. Last but not the least is the principle of location. In other words, for your brain to remember something that it has imagined and associated, it must also have that memory image in a special location. Here you can take the example of a library. If you walked into a library that had a million books and wished to find a specific one, would it be easier if all the books were piled up in the middle of the floor and you had to randomly search, or if all the books were beautifully and elegantly catalogued and ordered? Obviously the latter. The 12 memory techniques are as under. Association, image and location principles can be well assisted by the following 12 techniques. 1. Synaesthesia/ sensuality- it is called blending of senses, as this blending produces enhanced recall. Therefore, it becomes essential to sensitize increasingly and train regularly your - Vision, Hearing, Sense of Smell, Taste, and Touch. 2. Movement - for any image, movement adds another giant range of possibilities for your brain to "link in" and thus remembers, as your images move, make them three-dimensional. 3. Association - you should link any new information with something stable in your mental environment. 4. Sexuality - we all have a good memory in this area. Use it! 5. Humour - images, which are ridiculous, absurd, funny and surreal are more outstandingly memorable. 6. Imagination - the more you apply your imagination to memory, the better your memory will be. 7. Number - numbering adds specificity and efficiency to the principle of order and sequence. 8. Symbolism - substituting a more meaningful image for a more ordering or boring image increases the probability of recall. 9. Colour - you should use the full range of the rainbow to make your image and ideas more colourful and therefore more memorable. 10. Order and sequence - in combination with the other principles, order and/ or sequence allows for much more immediate and increases the brain's possibilities for "random access". 11. Positivity - positive images are more recallable than negative ones, as latter are blocked by brain and to former, our brain wants to return. So, add as many positivity to your image as possible. 12. Exaggeration - in all your images exaggerate the size, shape, colour and sound. This is the way, as memory principles and techniques are designed to be used, and if you do that you will do wonders. From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 7 02:07:36 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 6 Aug 2005 22:07:36 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Great Sites Message-ID: These are my favorite sites. I'm narrowing my interests to major cultural and genetic changes and differences. So please visit them or subscribe to the lists. I'll continue to cover certain publications that require a password. The New York Times http://nytimes.com This is 99% Establishment, but the depth and breadth of its coverage of the news is incomparable, and I've looked at the major foreign newspapers in all languages to get a feel, at least, for their scope. Arts & Letters Daily http://aldaily.com This covers all aspects of culture. I have mined it every Monday. Arts Journal http://artsjournal.com This covers only the arts and is strong on music. I get an e-message Monday through Friday. World Transhumanism Organization http://transhumanism.org This is the best group promoting the ethical use of technology to upgrade mankind. There are several discussion lists. The Last Ditch http://thornwalker.com/ditch This is the best of the paleo-libertarian sites. The editor makes pithy comments on the news, publishes articles, and carefully selects the best URLs. Too much criticism of U.S. foreign policy for my tastes, in which I have lost interest. There is no hope for a restoration of the Old Republic, which is why it's called The Last Ditch. I do continue to watch for news affecting federal-state-local relations. The following Yahoo! groups: Transhuman Technology http://yahoogroups.com/group/transhumantech subscribe at yahoogroups.com/transhumantech Too many articles are overly technical for my tastes, but it's a great source of news about developments and implications of technology. Evolutionary Psychology http://yahoogroups.com/group/evolutionary-psychology subscribe at yahoogroups.com/evolutionary-psychology I scarcely follow this anymore, since my interests are more in the realm of human differences than in evolutionary commonalities. Rael Science http://yahoogroups.com/group/rael-science-select subscribe at yahoogroups.com/rael-science-select Yes, Rael is the French journalist who purports to have received a message in 1973 from outer space explaining the extraterrestrial origin of life on earth. I have not investigated the evidence offered for the authenticity of the dictated message, any more than I have looked at the evidence of the Golden Places Joseph Smith received. Still, the e-mail list is awfully good on science and its cultural implications. Many of the messages, though, criticize U.S. foreign policy. World Education Club http://yahoogroups.com/group/worldeducationclub subscribe at yahoogroups.com/worldeducationclub This is where you can find most of my e-mails archived. Or you can join my list by sending me an e-message. If your mailbox gets full and messages come back, I'll drop you after a day or over the weekend. You'll have to tell me you've cleaned it out. If you go on vacation and ask that my messages be suspended, I may forget to restore you. In any case, you can always catch up at the World Education Club. Magazines that need passwords: e-mail me for specific articles if the are not available to the general public. The Chronicle of Higher Education http://chronicle.com You've seen many articles from this site, so there's no need to describe it. The Times Literary Supplement http://the-tls.co.uk This is certainly the top book review publication in the world. Part of my problem is that I have months and months of unread copies. New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com (The www is mandatory.) The best lay science publication. Again, too many unread copies. The Economist http://economist.com Twenty or so years ago, I used to read this avidly. Foreign Policy http://foreignpolicy.com To the extent I do read about foreign policy, this publication has more lively debates than any other one. These debates are well within Establishment limits. No call for the restoration of the Old Republic here. From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 7 02:07:43 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 6 Aug 2005 22:07:43 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Economist: The neurology of consciousness: Crick's last stand Message-ID: The neurology of consciousness: Crick's last stand http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4221513 Jul 28th 2005 Francis Crick suggests where to find the seat of consciousness IT IS traditional to begin an article about Francis Crick by quoting his collaborator, James Watson, who wrote, ?I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood.? The immodesty that carried Crick to the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 clearly never left him. His latest paper (and his last, for he died in 2004) proposes to explain, of all things, the neurological basis of human consciousness. Mechanistic explanations of consciousness are hard to come by because consciousness is so poorly understood. Indeed, it is one of the few unexplained phenomena that are genuinely mysterious rather than merely problematical. But Crick, together with his long-time collaborator Christof Koch, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, focused on a part of the mystery that seems tractable. This is the integrated nature of conscious sensation. As the two researchers put it in their paper, which was published this week in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, ?When holding a rose, you smell its fragrance and see its red petals while feeling its textured stem with your fingers.? The part of the brain that caught the two researchers' interest is the claustrum, a thin sheet of grey matter that lies concealed beneath part of the cortex (the outer covering of the brain that carries out the computations involved in seeing, hearing and language). The key to the researchers' claim is that most, if not all, regions of the cortex have two-way connections to the claustrum, as do the structures involved in emotion. It is plausible that the smell, the colour and the texture of the rose, all processed in different parts of the cortex, could be bound together into one cohesive, conscious experience by the claustrum. The authors liken it to a conductor who synchronises and co-ordinates various parts into a united whole. Thus far, this is mere anatomical speculation fuelled by the fact that very little is known about what the claustrum actually does. Crick hoped that his final paper would inspire researchers to begin to develop molecular techniques to disable the claustrum in animals to observe the aftermath. Time will tell whether Crick's spectacular contribution to understanding genetics will be replicated in the sphere of consciousness. From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 7 02:07:50 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 6 Aug 2005 22:07:50 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Business Week: Wikimania and Free Culture Movement Message-ID: Wikimania and Free Culture Movement 10 Challenges for thee Free Culture Movement Source: Businessweek http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2005/08/wikimania_and_f.html 5.8.2 by Olga Kharif Aug. 4 will mark the first day of the world's first international Wiki conference, Wikimania, located, sadly (for the U.S. Wiki fans, anyway), in Frankfurt, Germany. Wikis, which allow thousands of people to collaboratively work on the same documents online, are transforming the way information is produced. Several years ago, Wikipedia.org, the most high-profile Wiki site, has begun to get people involved into collaboratively creating news stories. Now, the site is putting out books, such as "How to Build a Computer" and "Wikijunior Solar System." It's also pulling together a so-called Wikiversity, in which Web users are invited to create online courses on everything from economics to philosophy. What I find particularly interesting is that this powerful technology is actually part of a cultural movement. Many call it the Free Culture movement, to correspond with a book of the same title written by popular blogger and Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig. The idea is that knowledge should be shared freely through technologies such as Wikis. I think that businesses need to take a note of this movement, as it could bring about major changes to the way they protect their intellectual property, create products and services and function. According to FreeCulture.org, the movement has already resulted in eight college chapters around the country. And it has spread far beyond written works. Public Patent Foundation is advocating that all software should be free. Clearly, open-source operating system Linux is rapidly gaining popularity. And, recently, a group of Danish students created the world's first open-source beer. In the next few days, Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales will actually compile a list of things he believes should be free in a write-up on the Lessig blog here. He has particularly specified that he won't be talking about beer. So this will be a serious list and one, hopefully, that will show the direction our society will be going in in the coming years. Wales believes that some other types of knowledge/content that are pay-for today will become free 20 to 50 years down the road. It's going to be interesting to see the ideas that come out of the blog and Wikimania. ----------------------- Source: Corante Tech News Many2Many group weblog on social software http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/08/05/jimbos_problems_a_free_culture_m anifesto.php 5.8.5 Jimbo's Problems: A Free Culture Manifesto I'm in Frankfurt this week for the first Wikipedia conference. Jimmy Wales has been warming up for his Wikimania Keynote on Larry Lessig's blog, talking about 10 things that should be free. The idea for this list comes from Hilbert's problems. In 1900s Mathematician David Hilbert posed 23 problems, 10 were announced at a conference, the full list published later, very influential. He notes that all of these things were obvious, suggested or proposed by others. 10 Challenges for thee Free Culture Movement 1. Free the Encyclopedia! Mission is to create a free encyclopedia for every person on the planet in their own language. For English and German, this work is done (of course there could be be quality control, etc.). French and Japanese in a year or so, ton of work to be done globally. Will be done in 10 years time, an amazing thing when you consider minority languages that have never had an encyclopedia. 2. Free the Dictionary! Not as far along, but picking up speed. A dictionary is only useful when it's full of words you don't know, unlike an encyclopedia. Needs software development, such as WikiData. It is structured information, for cross reference and search. 3. Free the Curriculum! There should be a complete curriculum in every language. A much bigger task than the encyclopedia. Need not just one article about the Moon, but one for every grade level. WikiBooks isn't the only one working on this project. The price of university textbooks is a real burden for students. The book market doesn't take advantage of potential supply of expertise. Not hard to imagine 500 economics professors writing instead of one or two to create a better offering than the traditional model. 4. Free the Music! The most amazing works in history are public domain but not many public domain recordings exist (even in classical music). Proper scores are often proprietary derivative works (such as arrangements for a modern orchestra). Volunteer orchestras, student orchestras could provide the music for free. 5. Free the Art! Show two 400 year old paintings. Routinely get complaints from museums saying there is copyright infringements. National Portrait Gallery of England threatens to sue, a chilling effect, but they have no grounds. Controlling physical access keeps people from getting high quality images "I wouldn't encourage you to break the law, but if you accidentally take a photo of these works it would be great to put it on Wikipedia for the public domain. 6. Free the File Formats! Proprietary file formats are worse than proprietary software because they leave you with no ability to switch at a later time. Your data is controlled. If all of your personal documents are in an open file format, then free software could serve you in the future. Need to educate the public on lock-in. There is considerable progress here and continued European rejection of software patents is critical. 7. Free the Maps! "What could be more public domain than basic information about location on the planet?" -- Stefan Magdalinksi. FreeGIS software, Free GeoData. This will become increasingly important for open competition in mobile data services. 8. Free the Product Identifiers! Hobby Princess blog Huge subculture of people making crafts, selling them on eBay, but need competition from distributors. Increasingly, small producers can have a global market. Such producers need a clobal identifiers. Similar to ISBN, not ASIN (proprietary to Amazon). Suggests the "LTIN: Long Tail Identification Numbers" would be cheap or inexpensive to obtain (has to have some cost to fend off spam). Extensive database freely licensed and easly downloadable to empower multiple rating systems, e-commerc, etc. The alternative is proprietary eBay and Amazon. Small craft producers should be able to get a number and immediately gain distribution across them. 9. Free the TV Listings! A smaller issue, it may seem. But development of free software digital PVRs is going on. Free-as-in-beer listings exist, but this is tenuous. Free listings could be used to power many different innovations in this area. Otherwise we will be in a world where everything you watch will be DRM'ed -- so this is important. 10. Free the Communities! Wikipedia demonstrates the power of a free community. Consumers of web forum and wiki services should demand a free license. Otherwise, the company controls the community. Similar to a feudal serf, company maintained communities have a hold on communities. Are you a serf living on your master's estate, or free to move? Social compact: need to have Open Data and Openly Licensed software for communities to truly be free. Wikicities - for profit, free communities - founded by Jimmy and Angela. Free licensing attracts contributors. He will be adding more on Larry Lessig's blog over the coming weeks. Notes from the extended Q&A are here http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2005/08/jimbos_problems_1.html . Posted by Ross at 10:21 AM From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 7 02:08:29 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 6 Aug 2005 22:08:29 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Independent: Evolution dispute now set to split Catholic hierarchy Message-ID: Evolution dispute now set to split Catholic hierarchy http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article303775.ece By Michael McCarthy The conflict at the highest level of the Catholic Church about the truth of Darwin's theory of evolution breaks out publicly today. Recent comments by a cardinal close to the Pope that random evolution was incompatible with belief in "God the creator" are fiercely assailed in today's edition of The Tablet, Britain's Catholic weekly, by the Vatican astronomer. In an article with explosive implications for the Church, Father George Coyne, an American Jesuit priest who is a distinguished astronomy professor, attacks head-on the views of Cardinal Christoph Sh?nborn, the Archbishop of Vienna and a long-standing associate of Joseph Ratzinger, the German cardinal who was elected as Pope Benedict XVI in April. In an article entitled "Finding Design in Nature" in The New York Times last month, Cardinal Sh?nborn reignited the row between the Church and science by frankly denying that "neo-Darwinian dogma" was compatible with Christian faith. He wrote: "Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo- Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not." His views have provoked alarm among many scientists and liberal Catholics around the world, who thought that Catholicism had come to terms with evolution, and who now see the spectre of creationism rising in the Catholic Church as it has risen among fundamentalist Protestants in the US. Only this week President George Bush said that the theory of "intelligent design" - a version of creationism, which disputes the idea that natural selection alone can explain the complexity of life - should be taught in America schools alongside the theory of evolution. Cardinal Sh?nborn is understood to have been urged to write the article, and to have been helped to place it in The New York Times, by Mark Ryland, a leading figure in the Discovery Institute, a conservative American Christian think-tank that promotes intelligent design. The cardinal's views are publicly and robustly rejected by Fr Coyne, director of the Vatican Observatory, which is a scientific institution sponsored by the Holy See. Fr Coyne, who is 72, has been in charge of the observatory since 1978; he spends half the year in Tucson, Arizona, as a professor in the University of Arizona astronomy department, where he is still actively involved in research. In The Tablet he says that Cardinal Sh?nborn's article has "darkened the waters" of the rapport between Church and science, and says - flatly contradicting the cardinal - that even a world in which "life... has evolved through a process of random genetic mutations and natural selection" is compatible with "God's dominion". For a Vatican official of such seniority openly to attack the views of a cardinal on such a potentially explosive subject as evolution is unprecedented. It also reveals a deep rift at the heart of the Catholic Church's thinking. It is known that Fr Coyne wrote privately to both Cardinal Sh?nborn and the Pope himself protesting against The New York Times article soon after it was published last month. But it is understood that so many scientists, especially Catholic scientists, have since contacted him to express their disquiet, that he felt he had to go public. He is believed to have cleared the article with his Jesuit superiors. The previous pope, John Paul II in 1996 declared to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences that evolution was "no longer a mere hypothesis". In his July article Cardinal Sh?nborn played down this statement as "vague and unimportant". He points instead to comments Pope John Paul gave during an audience in 1985, when he spoke at length of the role of God the creator. Fr Coyne attacks the cardinal's analysis and says that the Pope's later statement was "epoch-making". He goes on: "Why does there seem to be a persistent retreat in the Church from attempts to establish a dialogue with the community of scientists?" The key question behind the debate is the opinion of new Pope. Some fear that the cardinal would never have published such a controversial article in such a prominent medium without his personal approval. But nothing will be known for certain until the Pope speaks for himself. The conflict at the highest level of the Catholic Church about the truth of Darwin's theory of evolution breaks out publicly today. Recent comments by a cardinal close to the Pope that random evolution was incompatible with belief in "God the creator" are fiercely assailed in today's edition of The Tablet, Britain's Catholic weekly, by the Vatican astronomer. In an article with explosive implications for the Church, Father George Coyne, an American Jesuit priest who is a distinguished astronomy professor, attacks head-on the views of Cardinal Christoph Sh?nborn, the Archbishop of Vienna and a long-standing associate of Joseph Ratzinger, the German cardinal who was elected as Pope Benedict XVI in April. In an article entitled "Finding Design in Nature" in The New York Times last month, Cardinal Sh?nborn reignited the row between the Church and science by frankly denying that "neo-Darwinian dogma" was compatible with Christian faith. He wrote: "Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo- Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not." His views have provoked alarm among many scientists and liberal Catholics around the world, who thought that Catholicism had come to terms with evolution, and who now see the spectre of creationism rising in the Catholic Church as it has risen among fundamentalist Protestants in the US. Only this week President George Bush said that the theory of "intelligent design" - a version of creationism, which disputes the idea that natural selection alone can explain the complexity of life - should be taught in America schools alongside the theory of evolution. Cardinal Sh?nborn is understood to have been urged to write the article, and to have been helped to place it in The New York Times, by Mark Ryland, a leading figure in the Discovery Institute, a conservative American Christian think-tank that promotes intelligent design. The cardinal's views are publicly and robustly rejected by Fr Coyne, director of the Vatican Observatory, which is a scientific institution sponsored by the Holy See. Fr Coyne, who is 72, has been in charge of the observatory since 1978; he spends half the year in Tucson, Arizona, as a professor in the University of Arizona astronomy department, where he is still actively involved in research. In The Tablet he says that Cardinal Sh?nborn's article has "darkened the waters" of the rapport between Church and science, and says - flatly contradicting the cardinal - that even a world in which "life... has evolved through a process of random genetic mutations and natural selection" is compatible with "God's dominion". For a Vatican official of such seniority openly to attack the views of a cardinal on such a potentially explosive subject as evolution is unprecedented. It also reveals a deep rift at the heart of the Catholic Church's thinking. It is known that Fr Coyne wrote privately to both Cardinal Sh?nborn and the Pope himself protesting against The New York Times article soon after it was published last month. But it is understood that so many scientists, especially Catholic scientists, have since contacted him to express their disquiet, that he felt he had to go public. He is believed to have cleared the article with his Jesuit superiors. The previous pope, John Paul II in 1996 declared to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences that evolution was "no longer a mere hypothesis". In his July article Cardinal Sh?nborn played down this statement as "vague and unimportant". He points instead to comments Pope John Paul gave during an audience in 1985, when he spoke at length of the role of God the creator. Fr Coyne attacks the cardinal's analysis and says that the Pope's later statement was "epoch-making". He goes on: "Why does there seem to be a persistent retreat in the Church from attempts to establish a dialogue with the community of scientists?" The key question behind the debate is the opinion of new Pope. Some fear that the cardinal would never have published such a controversial article in such a prominent medium without his personal approval. But nothing will be known for certain until the Pope speaks for himself. From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 7 02:08:42 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 6 Aug 2005 22:08:42 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: 'The Starter Wife' and 'The Starter Marriage': Rescue Me Message-ID: 'The Starter Wife' and 'The Starter Marriage': Rescue Me New York Times Book Review, 5.8.7 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/books/review/07SCHILLI.html [First chapter of The Starter Marriage appended.] THE STARTER WIFE By Gigi Levangie Grazer. 359 pp. Simon & Schuster. $24. THE STARTER MARRIAGE By Kate Harrison. 345 pp. New American Library. Paper. $13.95. By LIESL SCHILLINGER OVER 30, single and having a hard time meeting a man? Have you considered drowning? Not to end it all, but to summon a dream date to save you. Don't knock it till you've tried it: it works for the freshly dumped heroines of two new novels spun around the phenomenon of ''starter marriages.'' Meet Gracie, the buffed, silicone-enhanced and Botoxed 41-year-old star of the Malibu fairy tale ''The Starter Wife,'' whose ''forehead was as unlined as the hood of a new Porsche'' but whose studio-executive husband has left her anyway . . . for Britney Spears. And then there's Tip-top Tess, a tight-lipped 35-year-old schoolmarm who belatedly realizes she had ''been careless enough to neglect my marriage, but had never neglected my dental hygiene,'' and whose slow post-breakup learning curve provides the structure for ''The Starter Marriage,'' a glum British fable set in Birmingham (which is to Malibu as the work boot is to Cinderella's glass slipper). The starter marriage is a fashionable concept of late, much batted about in breezy magazine articles alongside topics like French cuffs, spray-on tans and computer-cataloged wardrobe libraries. Typically, the term is defined as a first marriage of short duration, entered into by people too young to have given the ''till death us do part'' clause much thought. It produces no children and no messy legal battles. For the purpose of these novels, however, its boundaries have been stretched to include any marriage -- even one with issue -- that ends after one spouse has turned louse and before either spouse has actually flatlined. ''The Starter Wife'' is the third and funniest in a succession of novels about the cutthroat social mores of the entertainment industry by a woman who has witnessed them up close, Gigi Levangie Grazer (the keeper-wife of the producer Brian Grazer). Her heroine, Gracie Pollock, n?e Peters, wife of the studio bigwig Kenny Pollock, has started to feel ''like a pencil drawing that was being slowly, methodically erased.'' Before marriage bumped her into a life of surgically enhanced grooming and enforced socializing, she was a successful children's book writer. Lately, though, her thoughts are consumed by concerns like ''Why are the tennis court lights on at 8 a.m.?'' and ''The orchids in the foyer are dying.'' A brutal wake-up call rouses her from the enchantment: her husband demands a divorce, via cellphone. Gracie flees with her 3-year-old daughter, Jaden, to a friend's beach house in the celebrity-infested Malibu Colony, where she soon upends herself in a kayak and -- hey presto! -- along comes a leading man with salt-and-pepper hair and swimtrunks as orange as a lifeguard's buoy, who clasps her to his brawny chest. Gazing at her rescuer, Gracie sees her future flash before her eyes: ''He was tall; he was built; he was tan; he had a strong jawline and wide-set dark eyes, my God, he had great hair; and he was in her demographic. And there was no wedding ring. Gracie felt like one of them should speak, since obviously they were going to be married.'' Alas, Poseidon turns out to be a beach bum, former addict and Vietnam vet named Sam Knight, who has slept behind a shrubbery for two decades. But, as Gracie knows, it doesn't do to be picky if you're a rejected ''wife of'' in Hollywood. After little Jaden returns from a weekend with Daddy and his pop tart wearing a ''tight pink T-shirt with the words PORN STAR on it, tied and knotted up under her rib cage, and tiny pink shorts that looked like they had come from Barbie's closet,'' Gracie finds herself in the mood to rationalize. She even writes a pros-and-cons list to help assess Sam's viability as a husband and father. Some pros: ''not underfoot'' and ''could make own meals out of neighbor's trash.'' A con: ''Would he insist on showering from the hose?'' Could there be the remotest hope that Mr. Homeless's fortunes are more blue-chip than initially appears? Could he -- ''My Man Godfrey''-style -- even turn out to be a strayed society scion? Meanwhile, across the continent and across the Atlantic, another newly hatched starter wife is submerged in the British journalist Kate Harrison's second novel. Tip-top Tess has spent 17 years with Barney Leonard when he leaves her for his secretary. Not only has Tess's marriage turned out to be a starter marriage; her life has turned out to be a starter life. Her zeal for housecleaning has vanished; the divorce recovery course she signed up for has yielded only a sad tryst with a traffic cop; and a longtime friend tells her that her ex isn't the problem: ''You asked for it. I think you took him for granted. You were very lucky to land him, Tess. He's a great bloke. Or was.'' This is what we read for escape? The reality is too crushing even for Tess, who accompanies her pupils on a river trip for diversion, though she has harbored an unholy terror of water -- ''even the inviting, harmless depths of turquoise hotel pools'' -- ever since a boating trip with her ex and his office mates landed her chest-deep in the drink. This time the excursion is led by a cheerful widower named Robin, who is manly and appealing even if he has a ''borderline bald forehead'' and ''a mouth so full of teeth that his front ones are protruding.'' Tess, unlike Gracie, has no expectation that a glitter-encrusted rainbow might pop up in the leaden skies of the West Midlands. Besides, Robin has the ''air of authority'' of a commando and a warm handshake. Might he do? Coaxing the bristly Tess into a kayak, Robin helps overcome her fear of drowning by submerging the boat, making her count to three and promising to stand by and save her should the need arise. She submits -- ''Knowing Robin is counting with me makes me certain that everything will be all right'' -- and pops back up to the surface, ''blinking at the light like a newborn foal.'' If Tess can overcome her instinct to fight off all comers, her real life might just begin -- a clean slate that presumably can be rewiped at will should Robin fail to suit. Given the risks, his better option may be to give the kayak another twirl and run for it. Ah, first marriages. The miracle isn't that they happen; it's that second ones do. When Gracie, still blissfully wed, spots a de-spoused Hollywood wife at the outset of Grazer's novel, she notices that the woman looks different: ''She looked . . . older. She looked . . . not so blond. She looked . . . rounder, softer. . . . And something else, Gracie thought. She didn't look mean. She looked, Gracie thought, could it be? Normal.'' That badge of normalcy -- a mark of shame for the sniping ''wife of'' socialites Grazer caricatures in her ruthless, burbling satire -- is Tess's humble goal, and it's a reasonable one for lonely hearts on the lookout for a mate, whether starter or subsequent. But dreamers like Gracie, who are seeking not a real new mate but one they can script to please themselves, will relish the less realistic sheen of Grazer's vivacious and vengeful fantasy, which puts a delectable candy coating on the poison apple of disprized love as they steel their courage to dare another bite. Liesl Schillinger is an arts editor at The New Yorker and a regular contributor to the Book Review. ------------ First chapter of 'The Starter Marriage' http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/books/chapters/0807-1st-harr.html By KATE HARRISON When Barney came into the kitchen on Boxing Day and told me he was leaving me for his secretary, I didn't cry. I didn't cling on to his ankles, begging him to stay. I didn't attack him with the Le Creuset pan I was drying at the time (the thought did occur to me but it was part of a set of five my parents bought us as a wedding present and a gap in the display rack would have added insult to injury). All I said was, 'Let's try to make sure things don't get messy.' He laughed, a dry, coughing sound that made me wince. 'No, of course not. There'd be nothing worse for Tip Top Tess than to make a mess, would there?' And he left the room and the house and our marriage. I finished drying the pan and hung it up before I burst into tears. Tip Top Tess. It's not a sexy nickname, but it is accurate and if wanting things to be neat and tidy is my only fault, I don't think I'm doing too badly. I give to charity, I'm kind to animals and small children and I remember all my friends' birthdays. Since when has tidiness been a crime? So when I spent the first New Year's Eve of my life alone, my resolution was to avoid nastiness, to stay as civilised and proper as I would in any other situation, to keep things shipshape. Ready for when Barney came back. And, as far as my nearests and dearests are concerned, I've been pulling it off. Somehow I've managed to maintain the status quo, or at least the illusion of the status quo, for five months. Only I know how far I've slipped. Until tonight. Then the doorbell rings and it all falls apart. I tiptoe into the hall and peer through the spyhole. Mel's face looms up at me, distorted by the fisheye lens so she looks all eyes and nose ... exactly the features I don't want scrutinising my current living arrangements. I wonder if she's seen me through the glass panel? I'm trapped now, unable to escape upstairs in case she catches a glimpse of movement and realises I'm here. Maybe if I crouch down behind the door and wait, there's a chance she might leave. No harm done. The reproduction Edwardian bell rings again and I feel the reverberation through the wooden frame. Of all my friends, Mel is the least likely to give up easily. After fifteen years as a reporter, she's used to hanging about on doorsteps, playing cat-and-mouse with the criminals or adulterers inside. They always break before she does. She sticks her hand through the letterbox, so I try to manoeuvre my body out of range. This means crouching down even further so that my head is on my knees and I get a close-up view of the carpet. It's worse than I thought. There are grey clusters of dust gathered like storm clouds at the edges of the skirting board and a pair of worn tights under the console table. She definitely can't come in. But my faint hope that she might still get bored and settle for leaving a note is dashed when she screams 'HONEY! I know you're in there! You forgot to turn the telly off.' Oh God. The duh-duh-duh of the EastEnders theme tune booms from the living room, reinforcing my basic error. I feel like a character in a French farce, playing hide-and-seek with my best friend, only I don't feel any urge to laugh. Crying seems the more appropriate response, but my biggest fear is that if I start, I will never stop. 'Come ON, Tess!' she shouts. 'I'm not going anywhere so you might as well open the door.' My legs are aching now: I might have had a chance of sitting, or rather crouching it out before Christmas, when I was going to step classes three times a week and had thighs of steel. But then again, before Christmas I had no need to avoid Mel or anyone else. On my hands and knees I reverse away from the door as far back as the stairs, stand up and then pound loudly on the bottom step as if I'm walking down. I put the security chain in place, take a deep breath and finally open the door a few inches. 'About bloody time! What the hell have you been up to in there?' 'Um ... Sorry, I was in the bath.' She stares at me through the gap in the door. I'm still wearing my work clothes, there are biro marks all over my hands and my hair hasn't been washed in a week. 'Really?' She says. 'Well, now you're out of the bath, don't keep me standing here like a door-to-door salesman. I've brought a bottle of wine.' She waves an Oddbins bag at me. 'It's not a good time.' 'Don't be daft, honey. I'm fed up with you not returning my calls so I thought it was time to take affirmative action.' 'Honestly, Mel, I'm not in the mood ... I appreciate the gesture, but why don't we arrange to go out next week instead?' 'What, so you can cancel on me again?' Her face takes on the same determined expression she used to adopt on anti-apartheid demonstrations when we were students. She was always getting arrested, though I never was: a bolshie busty black woman is bound to attract more attention from the cops than a tidy, skinny white one. 'No way. I am going to stay here until you let me in.' 'Give me a second,' I say, pushing the door to, while I consider my options. They're not exactly promising. If I let her in, she'll see the shocking state of my house and, by implication, the even more shocking state of my mind. But if I leave her outside, it'll give the neighbours something extra to gossip about. I'm sure it's only a matter of days before they present me with a petition about the height of the weeds in my tiny front garden. Victoria Terrace is that kind of street. I can't afford to give the Residents' Association any more reasons to complain ... 'OK, you win.' I fiddle around with the chain, before opening the door. The sunlight illuminates a million dust particles in the hall: I dread to think what it's doing to my poor, tired face. As Mel steps into the hall, I brace myself. 'Don't say I didn't warn you.' 'About what?' She says, then stops short, looking around in confusion, as though she's walked into someone else's house. 'What the hell's happened to Tip Top Tess?' I've been wondering the same myself. My latest theory is that my alter ego slipped away with Barney - since he walked out with his suitcases, simply existing has taken all my energy. There hasn't been any left for the housework. But there's a difference between a dim awareness that I might have let things go, and seeing the reality through someone else's eyes. Which is why I've let nobody across the threshold for five months. 'Mel, it's not as bad as it looks, it's just I haven't had much time lately to do the housework, but -' 'I had no idea things were as bad as this ...' 'Yeah, it's a bit depressing, I grant you. But, look, as you've come over, why don't we go out, grab a pizza?' 'Not till I've had a proper look,' she says, stepping cautiously over the piles of project work and free newspapers I've allowed to build up in the hall. To my worn-out mind, it's a logical place - handy for me to grab what I need before heading to school, and close to the recycling box I keep by the porch. Except I haven't got round to recycling since ... well, since Christmas. 'At least now I can see why you haven't invited me round to supper for a while.' I dash ahead of her to close the door to the kitchen. The mess in there makes the hallway look like Buckingham Palace. 'Well, I haven't really been up to a six-course dinner party.' The living room presents the next logistical problem. Every surface is covered in stuff. These days I tend to slump onto a floor cushion as soon as I get home, but it wouldn't be polite to expect a guest to do the same. I calculate instantly that the armchair will take the least time to clear. It's only holding a few dozen Sunday supplements and an empty pizza box. At least, I hope it's empty. The sofa is a different story, the tan leather barely visible under crisp packets and clothes and exercise books and unopened post. And as for the coffee table ... Mel pulls the tissue-wrapped bottle of wine out of the bag. 'I think it's time we had a little chat.' My heart beats faster. Will I be able to track down two clean glasses anywhere in the house? Perhaps the tooth mug will do for me, the one Barney and I brought back from Corfu in 1994 because its cobalt blue sheen reminded us of the painted houses. It might look a bit less decrepit than the chipped black enamel camping beaker I've been using for all forms of liquid refreshment, from morning coffee to evening whisky nightcap. Who am I kidding? I scrunch the blue tissue paper into a loose ball, and bounce it towards the gap under the sofa. Now I've given in to slob-dom, I must confess there is the occasional frisson of pleasure to be had from adding to the chaos. 'Nice wine,' I say, reading the label. I retrieve the corkscrew from under an upturned foil box that once held chop suey. In the midst of the chaos, I've developed a kind of radar which means I can always locate my Waiter's Friend. The same applies to my other lifeline, the TV remote. I use it now to mute the ever-whinging cast of EastEnders and pass Mel the corkscrew. 'Back in a sec.' It does pong a bit in the kitchen. I never quite got round to taking the rubbish out last week and this is the hottest room of the house. It's still only May but the slight whiff of sweet decay propels me back to the summers of my childhood, when the days were long, the tar melted beneath our feet, and the binmen went on strike.... From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 7 02:08:54 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 6 Aug 2005 22:08:54 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: It Was a Dark and Stormy Galaxy Message-ID: It Was a Dark and Stormy Galaxy New York Times Book Review, 5.8.7 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/books/review/07JONASL.html By GERALD JONAS THE future, as a literary device, was invented in the 19th century. Works of fiction purporting to describe the shape of things to come proliferated in the late 1800's, more or less keeping pace with the advance of evolutionary science. Many of these works took the form of utopias or dystopias -- anti-utopias, often depicted ironically. Earlier, such stories would have been set in obscure corners of the world, like the imaginary land where Lemuel Gulliver encountered the Lilliputians. But with most of the real world already mapped by European explorers, the future inevitably became the location of choice for writers who wanted to illustrate alternative ways of organizing society. Wesleyan University Press has been reissuing some of these early works in scholarly editions complete with context-setting introductions and extensive notes. The latest in the series is THE COMING RACE ($34.95), by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a British aristocrat who pursued a successful political and diplomatic career (he was once offered the throne of Greece but declined, returning to his Hertfordshire estate) while becoming one of the most popular writers of his day. First published in 1871, ''The Coming Race'' represents a curious hybrid. Its premise is unflinchingly futuristic: the inevitable displacement of today's humanity by a more highly evolved ''race.'' But the story unfolds in perhaps the last unexplored place on earth -- the ''hollow'' interior of the planet, a conceit that Bulwer-Lytton borrowed from earlier fantasists. The inhabitants of the interior, who call themselves the Vril-ya, have developed a civilization that far surpasses 19th-century Europe and America in its enlightened use of power. Drawing on an inexhaustible energy source called ''Vril,'' which is controlled by sheer willpower, they have created what the narrator, a naive American who literally stumbles into their realm, sees as a utopia -- a society without crime, war, poverty or gender inequality. In time, he comes to realize that this perfect society is inhospitable to ordinary humans like himself. Bulwer-Lytton was also a playwright who wrote, ''The pen is mightier than the sword.'' Yet he was not noted as a stylist; the opening words of an early novel -- ''It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents'' -- have become iconic as bad writing. In ''The Coming Race,'' his narrative strengths are most apparent in the opening and closing chapters, where his hero must reconcile the evidence of his senses with his own cultural prejudices. But as with most utopias and dystopias, the bulk of the book consists of elaborate recipes for the good life. No Vril-ya community exceeds 30,000 in population, on the grounds that ''no state shall be too large for a government resembling that of a single well-ordered family.'' Democracy is scorned as ''the government of the ignorant.'' Female Vril-ya, ''bigger and stronger'' than the males, are the aggressors in courtship. Once married, however, they are ''amiable, complacent, docile mates'' -- so much so that they freely abandon the Vril-powered wings that allow the young of the race to enjoy the effortless flight of angels. Critics disagree on how many of Bulwer-Lytton's prescriptions are meant ironically. But there is no doubt that he saw Vril itself as a scientific realization of the life force that mystics have tapped into from time immemorial. Readers of his own time were fascinated with it, as were early-20th-century occultists. In his introduction, David Seed, who teaches American literature at the University of Liverpool, notes that Bulwer-Lytton's writings may have influenced Hitler's ideology of a superrace destined to control the world by harnessing ''cosmic forces and ancient wisdom.'' THE TRAVELER (Doubleday, $24.95), by John Twelve Hawks, is a movie-ready thriller that conflates science and mysticism in the modern paranoid manner. Psychically gifted individuals known as Travelers have the ability to visit other dimensions. Because the Travelers often bring back insights that undermine the powers that be, a secret group called the Brethren devotes its considerable resources to wiping them out. Another secret group, the Harlequins -- trained warriors who have no psychic powers -- zealously defend the Travelers. With the advent of computers, surveillance cameras and other tools of the modern security state, the Brethren have almost succeeded in bringing all humanity under the control of what the Harlequins call ''the Vast Machine.'' Will they succeed? Or will a disaffected Harlequin named Maya, teamed with a potential Traveler named Gabriel and assorted pure-hearted folks who live, in Gabriel's phrase, ''off the Grid,'' save the world from the hidden puppet masters? The pseudonymous Twelve Hawks knows how to hide the holes in a fast-moving narrative by piling up believable details about everything from Japanese sword making to the latest eavesdropping technology. And as a metaphor for modern paranoia, the Vast Machine seems a lot closer to the mark than the fantastic apparatus in the ''Matrix'' movies. What is known as near-future science fiction offers visions of contemporary society as it may evolve over the next hundred years or so. Far-future science fiction cuts the imagination loose from current trends to consider transcendent matters, like the meaning of life and the origin and fate of the universe. Robert Reed's novel THE WELL OF STARS (Tor/Tom Doherty, $25.95) is a sequel to his estimable ''Marrow'' (2000), which posited a mysterious interstellar ship, apparently constructed by long-dead aliens, that was so big it could accommodate a population of 100 billion humans and other life-forms without crowding. In ''Marrow,'' individuals and entire species battled for control of the ship in ways that suggested the struggles of all self-aware beings to control their destiny. ''The Well of Stars'' continues the story but forfeits the larger dimension. This time, the threat comes not from within but from outside. A life-form the size of a nebula stands in the ship's path. When the alien's gestures of friendship prove deceptive, the ship's inhabitants must cooperate to survive the encounter. At his best, Reed approaches Arthur C. Clarke in the ability to combine scientific extrapolation with poetic diction. Here, despite some finely conceived nonhuman cultures, the very scale of the confrontation overwhelms the telling. After pages and pages explaining the strategies and weapons employed by the two sides, I still had no clear idea of what was happening or what grand principle, if any, was at stake. The questions raised in the first book of the series remain unresolved. Mere survival seems too narrow a goal for a creation as awesome as ''the Great Ship.'' THE CARPET MAKERS (Tor/Tom Doherty, $24.95), by Andreas Eschbach, is set in an unimaginably far future, after the fall of a galactic empire that lasted 250,000 years. Eschbach, an award-winning author in his native Germany, wisely begins with a tightly focused scene that introduces us to a backward planet dominated by a single enterprise: the laborious knotting of ''hair carpets'' for the Imperial Palace. The beautiful carpets are made of human hair, cut from the heads and armpits of the wives and daughters of the carpet maker, who spends his entire life completing one carpet. The society that supports this enterprise knows little or nothing about the larger culture to which it supposedly belongs. Its customs may seem cruel, but they appear at first to have the virtue of serving a higher purpose. Then Eschbach widens the exposure to reveal, in a series of carefully calculated moves, the immensely crueler truth behind the carpet makers' labors. This is a novel of ideas that evokes complex emotions through the working out of an intricate and ultimately satisfying plot, with echoes of Gene Wolfe, Ursula Le Guin and Isaac Asimov. The smooth English translation is by Doryl Jensen. From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 7 02:09:04 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 6 Aug 2005 22:09:04 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Danica McKellar: Mathematics Message-ID: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 6 Aug 2005 13:55:51 -0400 (EDT) From: Premise Checker To: Human Biodiversity Subject: Danica McKellar: Mathematics Danica McKellar: Mathematics http://danicamckellar.com and click on "mathematics." [Okay, you mathematicians, go to it! She has an intriguing face, quite beautiful, but just enough away from the stereotype to make her fascinating. Are there any other math majors among celebrities?] As some of you already know, Danica took a hiatus from acting for college, and she graduated from UCLA with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics! While she was there, she even co-authored a math proof - new research proving an original math theorem - highly unusual for an undergraduate. In fact, she was the only undergraduate invited to speak at Rutgers University's biannual Statistical Mechanics conference a few years back. Although she has returned to acting full time, she still retains a passion for it, and likes to stay active. Listen to a radio interview Danica did on the connection between mathematics and the arts for Studio 360. And for you hard core mathematicians, here is a PDF of Danica's published proof Percolation and Gibbs states multiplicity for ferromagnetic Ashkin-Teller models on Z2. http://danicamckellar.com/math/percolation.pdf Danica loves math so much that she wants to share it with you, and help you get through some of your tough questions. Only a few questions each month will be forwarded to her for answering, and you can submit your questions to: math at danicamckellar.com Says Danica: Let's face it; by and large math is not easy, but that's what makes it so rewarding when you conquer a problem, and reach new heights of understanding! I'll be answering questions ranging from middle school math to Calculus and beyond, so skim along until you find something helpful or interesting to YOU. I challenge all of you to embrace the mind-sharpening qualities of practicing mathematics. Now let's roll up our sleeves and do some! Doing the math Q: Hi Danica, I heard a question from Mr. Feenie on a "Boy Meets World" episode which he claimed to be unanswerable. After hearing that, I decided to figure it out. If it takes Sam 6 minutes to wash a car by himself, and it takes Brian 8 minutes to wash a car by himself, how long will it take them to wash a car together? Danica Answers: Hm, unanswerable? That's TV for you. :) Let's do it: This is a "rates" problem. The key is to think about each of their "car washing rates" and not the "time" it takes them. Alot of people would want to say "it takes them 7 minutes together" but that's obviously not right, after you realize that it must take them LESS time to wash the car together than either one of them would take. So, what is Sam's rate? How much of a car can he wash in one minute? Well, if he can wash one car in six minutes, then he can wash 1/6 of a car in one minute, right? (think about that until it makes sense, then keep reading). Similarly, Brian can wash 1/8 of a car in one minute. So just add their two rates together to find out how much of a car they can do together, in one minute, as they work side by side on the same car: 1/6 + 1/8 = 7/24 of a car in one minute. That's their combined RATE. (Note: that's a little bit less than 1/3 of a car in one minute). From this point, the way you want to think of it depends on your favorite way of dealing with fractions. You now have their rate. It's 7/24 cars per minute. You can either just take its reciprcal and say: 24/7 minutes for one car, and you're done. Or, equivalently, you can think of the 7/24 cars/minute RATE as 24 minutes for 7 cars. (think about that until it makes sense, too) So just divide 24 by 7 to find out how many minutes it would take to do just one car. You get around 3.42 minutes for one car, just a little less than 3 and 1/2 minutes. Done! Yes, I think they should work together, it gets done much more quickly that way. :) By the way, you said when you watched the TV show you decided that YOU would figure it out, right? How did you do? Q: I'm an adult trying to pass the GED test and you do alot of studying on your own, and no matter what I do, I keep getting wrong answers. I know the equations for parellelograms, the area of circles, etc. But I can't seem to get the right answers. They only grade you on the final answer you get, not on the work. I have no clue where I'm going wrong. I want to take this test so I can go to school and become a drug and alcohol counselor. Thanks so much! -Pat Danica Answers: Hi Pat- First of all, congratulations on having the fortitude to go back and get your high school diploma! And I admire your goal of helping people by becoming a counselor. to you. Now- Let me see if I can shed some light on your problem. Understanding and yet getting the wrong answers usually means one thing: You're making a lot of avoidable, careless mistakes. This is a VERY common problem these days, more than ever before. But it's totally solvable. Believe it or not, I think this is a symptom of a larger issue that our society is facing, and it makes it that much more important that we deal with it. It seems that in our ever-increasingly fast paced information age, we are more and more often finding shorter and faster ways to do every day tasks: Abbreviating whole phrases in emails to "lol" and "imo", our computers type in our own addresses for us on websites, etc. We are accustomed to skipping steps. One of the unfortunate results of this, is that students are more and more often, skipping steps in solving math problems-- skipping the act of writing down every step along the way. And no matter how well they understand the concepts, they believe they cannot "do math" because they so often get the wrong answer. You would be AMAZED, truly amazed, at how much more often you would get the *right* answer, if you took the time to write down every step when you are solving problems. We ALL make careless mistakes, but the chances of making careless mistakes goes up at least tenfold when we skip steps. Other ways to help avoid making careless mistakes, in addition to writing down every step: -Pay attention to WHAT is being asked for- you may have done a perfect job at answering a slightly different question. Did they ask for the radius or the diameter? etc. -Restate the problem on your page; just write down all the info you're given. This is especially helpful for word problems. Trust me, it works. -If parentheses are used in the problem, keep them during the solution until the last step. Especially if you've done any algebra, you know exactly what I'm talking about. :) -Don't try to squeeze too much onto one page. When numbers get scrunched and small, mistakes are made. -Once you've gotten the answer, then REREAD the problem to make sure you solved for exactly what it was g for. So listen, the next time you solve a problem that you know you have the right formula and understanding for, but you get the wrong answer-- do this: Write down every step you can. Write down the formula. Then write down in information you're given, etc. So if the book says that the radius of a circle is 3, and you are supposed to get the area, then literally WRITE DOWN: A=pi*r2 r=3 Then, beginning to solve it, don't do anything in your head without writing it down: A=pi*32 A=9pi You'll get the right answer and you'll understand the value in making this a habit. What takes a few extra moments now, will save you many minutes of frustration and-- your grade. Another note on this: THIS IS HARDER TO DO THAT YOU THINK. We all think to ourselves, "Oh, I'm smarter than this. I don't need to write down every step. That's what you do in kindergarten, etc." So be patient with yourself if you can't discipline yourself to do it right away-- but rest assured that when you choose to practice this method of not skipping steps, your success will follow, I promise. :) Q: I think you are great on "The West Wing"! Here's my current problem, it's in advanced finite math (I'm a high school senior): At the height of the Beatles' popularity, it was estimated that every popular music station played their music 40% of the time. If you tuned through 10 such stations at any given moment, what is the probability that at least *one* of the stations would be playing a Beatles song? Thanks! Danica Answers: A probability question! Okay, let's call "x" the probability that "at least one of the 10 stations would be playing a Beatles song at that moment." That's what we're asked to find. Then let' s call "y" the probability that "none of those 10 stations would be playing a Beatles song at that moment." Notice that x+y = 1, since the two situations are mutually exclusive, but combined they make up ALL possible scenarios. And the probability that one of "ALL possible scenarios" occuring is of course 100%, which equals 1. Okay, so we' ll now determine the value of "y" which is much easier than going through all the necessary calculations required to determine "x" directly. This is a common strategy in probability. So, what is the probability that NONE of the stations are playing a Beatles song? That would be the (multiplicative) product each of the probabilities of each station NOT playing the Beatles. We know from the statement of the problem, that the probability of any given station, at any point in time, PLAYING a Beatles song is 40% = .4. This means that the probability of a station NOT playing a Beatles song is 60%, or .6. (After all, either a station is playing a Beatles song or it's not: the two scenario's probabilities must add up to 1 = 100%) So, if the probability of 1 station NOT playing a Beatles tune at any particular moment is .6, then the probability of all 10 stations NOT playing a Beatles tune at that moment = [.6 raised to an exponent of 10]. Multiply .6 times itself 10 times and you will get a number like: .0060466176. This is our "y." To get "x" we must solve x = 1-y, and we get that x = .9939533824. Translated back into percentages, we get that, at any given time, there is a 99.39533824% chance that the Beatles are playing on at least one of the ten stations. Wow! Did you expect it to be that high? :) Q: Hi Danica, I am working on equivalent fractions. I forget the formula but once I relearn it I'm usually ok. Do you know any tricks for this? Thanks! Dena. Danica Answers: Yes, there is a trick. It' s called "cross-multiplication." Say you have the two fractions, a/b and c/d. To determine whether or not they are equivalent, you can multiply "a" times" d," and also "b" times "c", and if their products (ad and bc) are equal, then you have equivalent fractions. For example, 2/3 and 8/12. You could "cross multiply" and see that 2 times 12 = 24, and 3 times 8 = 24, so the two fractions must be equivalent. Tricks are a good shortcut when you already understand the concepts, but tricks can get you in trouble if you're fundamentally confused. So let's make sure you understand the concept of equivalent fractions. First of all, what does it mean for fractions to be equivalent? It means that they represent the same VALUE. Just like if I wrote down the expressions "5-3" and "10-8". They are *different* ways of writing the same VALUE. They both equal "2." Equivalent fractions do the same thing. They are different ways of writing the same number. 2/3 and 8/12 HAVE THE SAME VALUE. If you were to cut a pie, and you said, "give me 2/3 of that pie" or if you said "give me 8/12 of that pie", you'd end up with the *same* amount of pie. (That's a lot of pie!) So the "real" way of determining if two fractions are equivalent would be to determine if they represent the same value. After all, it is clear that 2/3 does NOT equal 24. We simply used a trick, and "24" has little to do with the *value* of either fraction. A good way to determine if two fractions are equivalent is to REDUCE them. That is, take out common factors in the numerator and denominator. So, with 8/12, you might notice that both 8 and 12 have a factor of "4" in them. So you can reduce the numerator and denominator by 4. Then the fraction becomes 2/3. And certainly, we can see that 2/3 = 2/3. No tricks needed. Hope this helped, and Good luck! Q: I think you are great on "The West Wing" and I just saw you on NYPD Blue! This may be more of a physics question, but I was curious- a friend of mine was talking about an outfielder who could throw a ball from the outfield, have it go no higher than head height, and reach the catcher at home. It seemed IMPOSSIBLE but then I started thinking about the viability of this being possible. Can you help? Here are the assumptions: 1. The outfielder (pt. A) and home plate (pt. B) are 180 feet apart (roughly twice the distance from home plate to 1st base). 2. The ball is released from a height of 6 feet. 3. The ball travels along a curved path (pulled down by the force of gravity (32 ft/sec2)). 4. It reaches home plate at ground level after not traveling at any time above 8 ft above the ground (roughly head height for the tallest human). 5. An official baseball weighs 5 ozs. (although I'm not sure if that's relevant.) Thanks! Danica Answers: A Hi there! Alright, let's solve this. Some physics and algebra knowledge is definitely needed to make it through this proof. I'm going to skip most of the algebra steps, assuming you can do those on your own if you like. So don't be discouraged if you don't follow it all- I answer all sorts of levels of problems on this site. :) First we will assume that there is no wind drag-- just to simplify things. You are right that (with no wind velocity) the weight of the ball does not matter. What we will do is find out what the velocity of the ball would have to be in order for this hypothetical situation to be possible, and then see if a human is capable of it. So, the way we do this is to first find out how long the ball would be in the air. (it will be clear "why" later) I recommend drawing a diagram just to make it clear to yourself. One thing to remember is that we can treat the up/down component of velocity separately from the side to side component of velocity. First, looking only at the up/down motion: The ball gets thrown in the air from 6 ft, goes to 8ft, and then down to 0ft. (the ground). The equation for the height change of the ball (when it starts with zero velocity) is: H = (1/2)gt2 You can find this equation in any elementary physics book. g= the acceleration of gravity, which is 32ft/sec2. (or 9.8 meters/sec2 ) First let's see the time it takes for a ball to reach the ground, when dropped from a height of 8ft. Since it starts with zero velocity, we can use this formula. Solving for "t" when "H" = 8ft, using basic algebra, we get approx. .707 of a second. Since when the ball is arcing across the baseball field, its up/down velocity is zero at the point when it hits 8ft, this .707 of a second also represents the time it takes the ball to go from the highest point of its arc, to the ground. If that sounds completely foreign, there's a great lesson on this concept at: http://www.glenbrook.k12.il.us/gbssci/phys/Class/vectors/u3l2b.html So now we need the first part: the time it takes the ball to go from the pitcher's hand to the highest point of its arc (8ft). Since the ball reaches an up/down velocity of zero at its highest point (meaning that the vertical component of its velocity is zero at that moment), and because the only external force acting on the ball's up/down velocity is gravity, this would be the same amount of time it would take for the ball to be dropped from 8ft, and have it caught by someone at the height of 6ft. So now, using the same above formula, we'd say that the change in height, H, equals 2ft. And solving for "t" we get approx. .354 of a second. So now we know, that in this hypothetical situation, the ball is in the air for approx. 1.061 seconds and travels for 180 feet. So how fast would the ball have to be going? It's a simple rt = d problem. Solving for r, the rate, we get approx. 169.65ft/sec. Using the conversions 3600sec = 1 hour, and 5280ft = 1 mile, we get the rate of approx. 115.7 mph. 115.7 mph? Hm. And that's WITHOUT drag. If there were drag, the ball would be slowing down throughout its journey, so the initial throw would have to be FASTER than this. I've checked the Guiness Book of World Records and it seems that the fastest anyone's ever thrown a baseball was 100.9 mph by Lynn Nolan Ryan (California Angels) at Anaheim Stadium in California on August 20, 1974. As was pointed out by one reader, (Thanks, Alan!) if we assume that the thrower dropped his arm down as he let go of the ball at a height of 4ft, then the thrower would only have to throw the ball with a speed of approx. 101.9 mph. I would have assumed it to be harder to throw a ball with incredible speed from far below shoulder height, but perhaps it's easier. I certainly know more about math than I do about baseball! Of course, you could also run these numbers using a very short (but fast) pitcher. Assume the guy (or gal) is only 5 ft. tall; then a 4 ft release point becomes even more feasible. Experiment, and have fun discovering what math can tell you! Q: I have a calculus question for you: Gravel is being dumped from a conveyor belt at a rate of 30 ft-cubed/min and its coarseness is such that it forms a pile in the shape of a cone whose base diameter and height are always equal. How fast is the height of the pile increasing when the pile is 10 ft high? Danica Answers: Okay, this is a typical "related rates" problem, and it' s a good problem to understand for ALL related rates problems in first year calculus. We need the RATE of the changing height at a certain point in time. We' re told the RATE of the changing volume (30 ft-cubed/min). So we will need to "relate" the "rates" of the height and the volume. So we need to FIRST write down an equation that determines: 1) The relationship between the VALUES of the heights and volumes, h and V. And then we'll take the DERIVATIVE of this equation, which will then give us: 2) The relationship between the RATES of these values, dh/dt and dV/dt. When determining this first, important, equation between the VALUES of height and volume, always start with what you know. Well, we know that for every cone, V = (1/3)h(pi)r2. Additionally, we are told that for THIS cone, the diameter, which equals 2r, is always equal to the height. So we know that r = h/2. Plug this in for r, and we get: V = (1/12)(pi)h3. This is our important equation #1 relating VALUES. Now, to get the #2 "related rates" equation, we must take the derivative of the entire thing with respect to time, t. Don't forget to use the chain rule! dV/dt = (1/12)(pi)3h2dh/dt Now remember that this equation, as it's written, is true for ALL moments in time. And now let' s consider the moment in time that we were asked about: the moment when the height = 10ft. So, at that moment, we can plug in h = 10. We also know dV/dt; we were told in the problem that the "rate the volume is increasing" is constant. It' s 30 ft-cubed/min. So we can certainly plug that value in for this moment in time. Now the only variable left is dh/dt?the rate that the height is growing. And when we solve for it with simple algebra, we've solved the problem! (You should get dh/dt = 6/(5pi) ft/min.) Q: How do you figure out percentages using word problems such as: To finish a certain job, John made 35 parts while Allen made 15. So, how much MORE of the job did John do than Allen? Express your answer in terms of percentages. Thank you! Danica Answers: Percentages rely on parts of a total. So what's the total number of parts made? 35+15 = 50 total parts. How many more parts did John make? 35-15 = 20 more parts than Allen made. So John did 20/50 more of the job than Allen, which equals 2/5 = .4 = 40% more. The answer is: John did 40% more than Allen. As a check, figure out what percentage of the job that each of them did. So John did 35 parts total out of 50. That's 35/50th's of the job, which equals .7 = 70% of the job. And Allen did 15/50th's of the job, which equals .3 = 30% of the job. Thus, you can see that John did 70%-30% = 40% MORE than Allen did. It's always a good idea to check your work like this. Hope that helped! Q: Danica, This is a problem for Calculus II f(x)= x2+2x+3 Problem:Subdivide the function's domain into subintervals on which each function has an inverse, and find the inverse function for each subinterval. Now I found the critical #'s by first finding the derivative which is 2x+2 thus the critical # is x= -1 Then I found the intervals which would be [negative infinity, -1] & [-1, infinity]. But now I can't seem to find the inverse of f(x). So I'm asking; What is the inverse of f(x)? What are the two inverse functions for each interval? Danica Answers: You started correctly! If f(x) = y, then you must solve for x, in terms of y. That will give you the inverse function. [hint: currently the function is in ax2 + bx + c form; subtract the ?y? from both sides and make it look like ax2 + bx + (c-y) and then solve it with the quadratic formula] Then, you'll get an answer--a "function" that says "x = (something with Y in it) with a "+/-" in it, and that will show you that you have two functions represented. And then it is up to you to determine which of the functions is applicable for which domain. [hint: substitute values and see what makes sense] I highly recommend sketching a crude graph of the function. Then turn your head sideways and get a feel for the inverse functions that will come from it. Just do a simple drawing based on the critical value, and what the "zeros" of the function are. Remember, the definition of a function includes the rule that for each value in its domain, there must be a unique function value, not more than one. Sketching graphs can be a GREAT aid in solving many of these problems, and it's very fast to do once you get the hang of it! This function is especially easy to get zero values from. (that means where x=0 on the graph of f(x)). A grouping solution will show you that the zeros are 1 and -3. Good luck! Q: Danica, I teach high school math and just read about your "Figure This!" campaign to promote mathematics. How can I find out more about this? Danica Answers: You can visit www.figurethis.org; it has all sorts of fun math puzzles, and can give you more information about this organization. Best of all, you can get ideas about how to bring math into the "real world" from this site. Have fun! Q: Hi Danica, my advanced calculus prof asked us to prove that the square root of 5, Sqrt(5), is not a rational number. Any suggestions about where to start? Also, I really loved your Wonder Years show, and I've seen you on West Wing, too. Thanks a bunch. Danica Answers: Thanks! Okay- as with most "disprove this" proofs, start by writing down the hypothesis (as if the thing you are trying to disprove were true) and then work with the equation until you get a contradiction. Here the hypothesis is that the square root of 5 is a rational number, and we're going to show that it's a faulty hypothesis. In "math language" this is equivalent to saying that you can write the square root of 5 as a fraction of whole numbers; that's in fact the definition of a rational number. We can assume that this fraction looks like p/q where p and q do not divide each other; that is, they share no common factors (except 1). In other words, we are assuming the fraction is written in reduced form, and we shall also assume that q is greater than 1. (And why can we do this? Here's a "mini sub-proof": This is really the same as proving that Sqrt(5) itself is not a whole number; although this seems obvious, we can easily prove it for those who like the detail: So- let's say that q=1, then Sqrt(5) = p/1, where p is a whole number. This is the same as saying that Sqrt(5) = p. But because Sqrt(5)>2 and Sqrt(5)<3 and no whole number p satisfies those conditions, we arrive at a contradiction and we may now assume that q is GREATER than 1 for the rest of the proof.) Now it's time to work with the original expression and hope for a contradiction to appear, that expression being: Sqrt(5) = p/q. Remember that p/q is a fraction in reduced terms. That is, q does NOT share any factors with p. Since every fraction can be written in reduced form, we are "allowed" to make this assumption. So, let's square both sides of the equation: Sqrt(5) = p/q and we get: 5=p2/q2. But if q does not share any factors with p, then q2 certainly cannot be a factor of p2. Then p2/q2 cannot be a whole number, so it can't be equal to 5! There's the contradiction we needed, which tells us that our original hypothesis was false. We proved it! Q: Hi Danica, my teacher (loves puzzles) has given us a problem, which, can easily be solved using algebra. However, I have trouble grasping the question, please help here it is: "I am three times the age that you were when I was your age. When you get to be my age, our ages will equal 63. How old will we be? Thanks, Glynis, The Netherlands. Danica Answers: This was not easy! Think of three timelines: Before, Now, and Future. Let's call "I" Sam, and let's call "you" Daisy. I'll reword the question here, with added timelines to help make the problem easier to understand: "Sam is NOW three times the age that Daisy was (BEFORE) when Sam (BEFORE) was Daisy's (NOW) age. When (FUTURE) Daisy gets to be Sam's (NOW) age, THE SUM OF their (FUTURE) ages will equal 63. How old will they be? Let's label these ages. For the BEFORE time, Daisy's age = y, and Sam's age = x. Let's say there are m years between BEFORE and NOW, and there are n years between NOW and FUTURE. Since NOW Daisy's age is Sam's age BEFORE, we know that Daisy's age NOW = x, and that Sam's age NOW = 3y. (stop and go over this, make sure you're following so far) We also know that y+m=x, and that x+m = 3y. This is how Sam's and Daisy's ages have progressed from BEFORE to NOW. Let's say that there are n years between NOW and FUTURE. Then their ages will be: Daisy FUTURE = x+n, and Sam FUTURE = 3y +n. We also know that the future ages add up to 63, which means that x+n+3y+n=63. One more thing we know is that in the FUTURE, Daisy will be Sam's age NOW, so x+n = 3y. Put all of our known equations together that will need to be reconciled: y + m = x x +m = 3y x + n +3y + n = 63 x + n = 3y. This is a set of four equations with four unknown variables, which can be solved by regular algebra steps of substitution, etc. I highly recommend making a chart with the timeline and ages data: Put across the top: BEFORE m NOW n FUTURE and along the left write Daisy, and (below that) Sam. This is how I came to better understand the age relationships. The hardest part of most word problems is simply being able to translate English into Math! By the way, you'll get that their future ages are 27 and 36 for Daisy and Sam, respectively. From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 7 02:10:26 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 6 Aug 2005 22:10:26 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: The Irascible Prophet: V. S. Naipaul at Home Message-ID: The Irascible Prophet: V. S. Naipaul at Home New York Times Book Review, 5.8.7 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/books/review/07DONADIO.html By RACHEL DONADIO Two monuments rise like emblems from the green countryside of Wiltshire, England, not far from the secluded house of V. S. Naipaul: Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral. They are signposts in a landscape Naipaul has been traversing for more than half a century, one in which the impulses of culture, civilization and progress have always existed in close and uneasy proximity to the impulses of paganism, religion and disorder. A prophet of our world-historical moment, in his more than 25 works of fiction and nonfiction, Naipaul has examined the clash between belief and unbelief, the unraveling of the British Empire, the migrations of peoples. They are natural subjects for a writer who, as he has recorded in his many fully, semi- and quasi-autobiographical books, was born in Trinidad, where his grandfather had emigrated from India as an indentured servant. His father, a newspaper reporter and aspiring fiction writer, was the model for what is arguably Naipaul's finest novel, ''A House for Mr. Biswas'' (1961). At 18, Naipaul left Trinidad on a scholarship to University College, Oxford, and has lived in England ever since. Alfred Kazin once described him as ''a colonial brought up in English schools, on English ways and the pretended reasonableness of the English mind.'' Knighted in 1990, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul is Britain's only living Nobel laureate in literature, having been [3]awarded the prize in October 2001, a season when many were just awakening to realities Naipaul had been writing about for more than 20 years. Also significant is that he had explored Islamic fundamentalism and other issues of global import not through fiction, but through nonfiction reportage. The novel's time was over, he had said. Others had made the claim before, but it resonated more deeply coming from a contemporary giant. What is more, Naipaul said, only nonfiction could capture the complexities of today's world. It was a profound observation. But did it speak to a larger cultural situation, or was it simply the personal judgment of one cantankerous writer, who in fact continued to publish a novel every few years even after declaring the form dead? Naipaul recently offered some thoughts on the matter, in an interview in the cozy sitting room of his cottage in Wiltshire. Photograph portraits were on the mantle. French novels lined one bookshelf. The sounds of the outside world could be heard: a lawnmower, the buzzing of a fighter jet from a nearby airbase. A compact man of 72, Naipaul has been ill in recent months, and said he is not working on a book at the moment. Although it was unseasonably hot on the splendid sunny afternoon of the longest day of the year, he wore a tweed jacket and corduroy pants. Unsmiling, he settled somewhat stiffly onto a straight-backed armchair and began to chart the trajectory of his thinking. ''What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material,'' he said. ''And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.'' Naipaul's voice is rich and deep and mellowed by tobacco, and when he pronounced the word ''world,'' he savored it, drawing it out to almost three syllables. ''I thought if I didn't have this resource of nonfiction I would have dried up perhaps. I'd have come to the end of my material, and would have done what a writer like [4]Graham Greene did. You know, he took the Graham Greene figure to the Congo, took him to Argentina, took him to Haiti, for no rhyme or reason.'' Naipaul has said he wrote the novel [5]''Half a Life'' (2001) only to fulfill a publisher's contract, and that [6]''Magic Seeds'' (2004) would be his last novel. (Over the years, he has often hinted at retirement, only to publish another book soon after.) Yet the fact that Naipaul has continued to write novels does not undercut his acute awareness of the form's limitations; indeed, it amplifies it. His is the lament of a writer who, through a life devoted to his craft, has discovered that the tools at his disposal are no longer adequate. ''If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account,'' Naipaul said. ''If you're a romantic writer, you write novels about men and women falling in love, etc., give a little narrative here and there. But again, it's of no account.'' What is of account, in Naipaul's view, is the larger global political situation -- in particular, the clash between belief and unbelief in postcolonial societies. ''I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery,'' he said. To what extent, he wondered, had ''people who lock themselves away in belief . . . shut themselves away from the active busy world''? ''To what extent without knowing it'' were they ''parasitic on that world''? And why did they have ''no thinkers to point out to them where their thoughts and their passion had led them''? Far from simple, the questions brought a laserlike focus to a central paradox of today's situation: that some who have benefited from the blessings of the West now seek to destroy it. In November 2001 Naipaul told an audience of anxious New Yorkers still reeling from the attack on the World Trade Center that they were facing ''a war declared on you by people who passionately want one thing: a green card.'' What happened on Sept. 11 ''was too astonishing. It's one of its kind. It can't happen again,'' he said in our conversation. ''But in the end it has had no effect on the world. It has just been a spectacle, like a bank raid in a western film. They will be caught by the sheriff eventually.'' The bigger issue, he said, is that Western Europe, while built on tolerance, today lacks ''a strong cultural life,'' making it vulnerable to Islamicization. He even went so far as to say that Muslim women shouldn't wear headscarves in the West. ''If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture,'' he said. ''It's a form of aggression.'' No matter how uncomfortable or debatable, there is a painful prescience to Naipaul's observations on Islam and the West. That prescience was in evidence once again when, just two weeks after our meeting, bombers struck the London Underground and a city bus, killing more than 50 people. Naipaul was at home in Wiltshire that day, and professed no surprise that the attacks appeared to have been carried out by British citizens. ''We must stop fooling ourselves about what we are witnessing,'' he said in a telephone conversation a week after the July 7 attacks. The debate in Britain about British detainees held at Guantanamo Bay was evidence of the foolishness. ''People here talk about those people who were picked up by the Americans as 'lads,' 'our lads,' as though they were people playing cricket or marbles,'' Naipaul said. ''It's glib, nonsensical talk from people who don't understand that holy war for Muslims is a religious war, and a religious war is something you never stop fighting.'' These remarks, like so many of Naipaul's utterances over the years, seem calculated to provoke. In his interviews as in his life, Naipaul is famously irascible, difficult, contradictory, an ideological lightning rod. Yet in his writing, he is an artist on whom nothing is lost. Naipaul addressed this split in his Nobel acceptance speech, in which he seconded Proust's argument that ''a book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices.'' Naipaul's work is as subtle as his interviews are clamorous. In [7]''Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey,'' his 1981 travelogue through the ironies and intricacies of non-Arab Islamic countries, and in its 1998 follow-up, [8]''Beyond Belief,'' Naipaul listened seriously and empathetically to people in Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia: countries that were converted to Islam over the course of centuries and, in the late 70's, witnessed a rise in both power and Islamic fundamentalism. The books raise but don't necessarily answer deep and vexing questions: Is secularism a precondition of tolerance? Does one necessarily have to abandon one's individual cultural and religious identity to become part of the West? Why do people willingly choose lives that restrict their intellectual freedom? What becomes of modern societies founded on Islam, whose strictest aherents long for a return to the time of Muhammad? Like Salim, the protagonist of his classic novel [9]''A Bend in the River,'' who describes himself as ''a man without a side,'' Naipaul has cultivated political detachment. In his Nobel acceptance speech, he said: ''I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.'' This is both true and incomplete. Naipaul's cold, unsparing look at the corruption and disarray of the postcolonial world, his disdain for Marxist liberation movements and his view that Islamic society leads to tyranny are implicitly political positions, and have made him the object of much political criticism. He has been sharply criticized by, among others, Derek Walcott, the Caribbean poet and Nobel laureate, and Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist, who said ''although Naipaul was writing about Africa, he was not writing for Africans.'' The scholar and critic Edward Said, who died in 2003, called ''Beyond Belief'' ''an intellectual catastrophe.'' Naipaul, he added, thinks ''Islam is the worst disaster that ever happened to India, and the book reveals a pathology.'' But what spares Naipaul's work from the ideology of critics who would dismiss him as anti-Muslim and admirers who would laud him for essentially the same thing is its unsentimental, often heartbreaking detail. In ''Among the Believers,'' Naipaul speaks with Mr. Jaffrey, a newspaper journalist and British-Indian-educated Shiite in Tehran who supported Khomeini as a way of bringing about the Islamic dream of a ''society of believers.'' Mr. Jaffrey ate a plate of fried eggs as he spoke. In ''Beyond Belief,'' Naipaul revisits one of the journalist's colleagues, who also relishes his lunch. Ideology is abstract; fried eggs are not. Naipaul's nonfiction has the force, the almost unbearable density of detail and the moral vision of great fiction. It comes as no surprise that Dickens and Tolstoy are his heroes. For all Naipaul's talk about the limitations of the novel, the power of his work is ultimately rooted in a novelist's preternatural attentiveness to individual human lives and triumphs, to the daily things we do that make us who we are, and are the key to our survival. A breakthrough in Naipaul's own understanding of himself as a writer and his turning away from the novel toward nonfiction came in a remarkable essay he wrote on Joseph Conrad. First published in The New York Review of Books in 1974, it appears in his 2003 collection, [10]''Literary Occasions.'' It is not entirely surprising that Naipaul would turn to the work of the Polish ?migr?; both were raised in one world and willed themselves into becoming artists in another, England. ''I suppose that in my fantasy I had seen myself coming to England as to some purely literary region, where, untrammeled by the accidents of history or background, I could make a romantic career for myself as a writer,'' Naipaul wrote in that essay. ''It came to me that the great novelists wrote about highly organized societies,'' he wrote. ''I had no such society; I couldn't share the assumptions of the writers; I didn't see my world reflected in theirs. My colonial world was more mixed and secondhand, and more restricted. The time came when I began to ponder the mystery -- Conradian word -- of my own background.'' Along the way, Naipaul kept coming up against Conrad. ''I found that Conrad -- 60 years before, in the time of a great peace -- had been everywhere before me,'' he wrote. ''Not as a man with a cause, but a man offering . . . a vision of the world's half-made societies as places which continuously made and unmade themselves, where there was no goal, and where always 'something inherent in the necessities of successful action . . . carried with it the moral degradation of the idea.' Dismal, but deeply felt: a kind of truth and half a consolation.'' Yet in our conversation, although Naipaul said he thought Conrad was ''great'' because he ''wished to look very, very hard at the world,'' he also insisted that Conrad ''had no influence on me.'' ''Actually, I think 'A Bend in the River' is much, much better than Conrad,'' he said. ''I think the best part of Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' is the reportage part. The fictional part is excessive and feeble. And there is no reportage in my thing. I was looking and creating that world. I actually think the work I've done in that way is better than Conrad.'' Naipaul also dismissed the idea there might be a direct link between his Conrad essay and subsequent works in which he explored some of the same places and themes. ''These things might appear like that. But that's only for a person on the outside,'' he said. A different picture emerges from Naipaul's bibliography. After the Conrad essay, Naipaul in fact followed Conrad's itinerary to the Congo -- the subject of his nonfiction essay on Mobutu, ''A New King for the Congo''(1975), and of ''A Bend in the River'' (1979); and to Aceh, Indonesia, for ''Among the Believers'' and ''Beyond Belief.'' Naipaul has also gone where Conrad went as a narrator, cultivating a kind of finely wrought ambiguity and moving toward reportage. ''To understand Conrad,'' as he wrote in his essay, ''it was necessary to begin to match his experience. It was also necessary to lose one's preconceptions of what the novel should do and, above all, to rid oneself of the subtle corruptions of the novel or comedy of manners.'' In conversation, another dynamic becomes apparent, in which the more dismissive Naipaul is of a writer, the more likely it is that he has engaged deeply with that writer's work. Sitting a few feet away from a bookshelf of French novels, Naipaul called Proust ''tedious,'' ''repetitive,'' ''self-indulgent,'' concerned only with a character's social status. ''What is missing in Proust is this idea of a moral center,'' he said. Naipaul also had little respect for Joyce's ''Ulysses'' -- ''the Irish book,'' he sniffily called it -- and other works ''that have to lean on borrowed stories.'' Lately, he has found Stendhal ''repetitive, tedious, infuriating,'' while ''the greatest disappointment was Flaubert.'' All this points to another idea: Modernism is over. ''We are all overwhelmed by the idea of French 19th-century culture. Everybody wanted to go to Paris to paint or to write. And of course that's a dead idea these days,'' Naipaul said. ''We've changed. The world has changed. The world has grown bigger.'' Which brings us back to the limitations of the novel. The writer must leave the sitting room and travel abroad into the active, busy world. It is the tragic vision only a novelist can reach: that the world cannot be contained in the novel. And yet, for all his laments, Naipaul is not invested in the notion that Western civilization is in decline. ''That's a romantic idea,'' he said brusquely. ''A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying. . . . It's a university idea. People cook it up at universities and do a lot of lectures about it. It has no substance.'' The ''philosophical diffidence'' of the West, he maintains, will prevail over the ''philosophical shriek'' of those who intend to destroy it. Naipaul formulated those terms in a lecture he delivered in 1992 at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank in New York. (Called ''Our Universal Civilization,'' it appears in his 2002 essay collection, [11]''The Writer and the World.'') In it, he cites a remarkable passage from Conrad: ''A half-naked, betel-chewing pessimist stood upon the bank of the tropical river, on the edge of the still and immense forests; a man angry, powerless, empty-handed, with a cry of bitter discontent ready on his lips; a cry that, had it come out, would have rung through the virgin solitudes of the woods as true, as great, as profound, as any philosophical shriek that ever came from the depths of an easy chair to disturb the impure wilderness of chimneys and roofs.'' As for evidence of the diffidence: ''I think it actually is all around us. It's all around us,'' Naipaul said. But where, exactly? ''There are millions and millions of people all around us,'' was all he would say. In [12]''India: A Million Mutinies Now'' (1990), his third nonfiction book about India, Naipaul celebrated the million manifestations of daily life, of lives undefeated by the chaos, disarray and poverty of the larger society. A Hindu by birth, though not observant, Naipaul finds India a place of great hope. It is, he says, the country where belief and unbelief coexist most peaceably. The economic development of India -- and China -- he said, will ''completely alter the world,'' and ''nothing that's happening in the Arab world has that capacity.'' Yet Naipaul called it ''a calamity'' that, even with its billion people, ''there are no thinkers in India'' today. India is also where he turns for a theory of history. ''The only theory is that everything is in a state of flux,'' he said. This is his own ''personal idea,'' he said, but one linked to a philosophical concept in Indian religion. ''I find it impossible to contain the history of Europe in my head. It's so much movement, so much movement,'' he said. ''Even when you go back to the Roman times there are these tribal groups pressing all the time, pressing and pressing and pressing,'' he continued, pushing his fists together for emphasis and fixing his gaze intently at the near distance. He has recently been reading the letters of Mary Wortley Montagu, an Englishwoman who traveled across the Ottoman Empire in the 18th century. The chaos of history pressed in on the Wiltshire sitting room. ''You have this picture of the devastation the Turks had created in Hungary,'' he said. ''Who ever thought that world would have changed if you were living at that time? But it has changed. And what we're living in will of course change again.'' Dismal, but deeply felt: a kind of truth and half a consolation. Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book Review. From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 8 01:35:49 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 7 Aug 2005 21:35:49 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Wiki: Golden Plates Message-ID: Golden Plates - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Plates [Links omitted for readability.] The Golden Plates is the name most frequently used to refer to the "gold plates" that Joseph Smith, Jr. said he received from the angel Moroni and used as the ancient source for the English translation of The Book of Mormon. In reference to the plates, the Book of Mormon was commonly known as the "Golden Bible" during the 1830s. Smith later became the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement. Contents * 1 Story of the plates + 1.1 Joseph obtains the plates + 1.2 Palmyra, New York + 1.3 Harmony, Pennsylvania + 1.4 Translation + 1.5 Special witnesses + 1.6 Other spiritual witnesses + 1.7 Plates returned to Moroni * 2 Physical description * 3 Other plates in the Latter Day Saint tradition + 3.1 Criticisms * 4 Plates outside of the Latter Day Saint tradition Story of the plates Joseph obtains the plates In the 1820s, Joseph Smith, Jr. lived with his father and mother Joseph Sr. and Lucy Mack on a farm on the edge of Manchester Township near Palmyra, New York. For a number of years prior to 1827, he reported visitations from either an angel or a spirit, later identified as a resurrected angel Moroni. According to Smith, Moroni had been a Nephite, a member of one of the nations detailed in The Book of Mormon. Moroni indicated that a record of his people, engraved on gold plates, was deposited in a hill not far from the Smith farm and that Smith would one day receive and translate them. In successive years, Smith would travel to the hill, now known as the Hill Cumorah, but was forbidden to obtain the plates. Finally in late September of 1827, at the age of 21, Smith claimed that he had finally been allowed to receive the antique history. According to various reports, he brought a "60-lb." object "wrapped up in a tow frock" into his father's home (William Smith, "Sermon in the Saints' Chapel," Deloit, Iowa June 8, 1888, Saints Herald 31 (1884):643-44). Besides Joseph Jr., six of Joseph's siblings lived at home. According to Joseph's brother William's account, their father put the plates into a pillow case and asked "What, Joseph, can we not see them?" Joseph Jr. replied, "No. I was disobedient the first time but I intend to be faithful this time. For I was forbidden to show them until they are translated, but you can feel them." Again, according to William's account: "We handled them and could tell what they were. They were not quite as large as this Bible. Could tell whether they were round or square. Could raise the leaves this way (raising a few leaves of the Bible before him). One could easily tell that they were not a stone hewn out to deceive or even a block of wood. Being a mixture of gold and copper, they were much heavier than stone, and very much heavier than wood." Palmyra, New York Shortly after Smith claimed to receive the plates, rumors of their presence began to circulate among the residents of Palmyra. Several of Smith's neighbors made attempts to find and seize the plates, leading Joseph, Jr. (the translator) to keep them hidden and to operate in great secrecy. Smith's associate, Josiah Stowell, later claimed that he was the first person to receive the plates from Smith's hands. Stowell handled and lifted the plates which remained wrapped in a cloth that resembled a cloak or a pillow case. Other associates of Smith who reported that they handled the plates through the cloth included Smith's mother, Lucy Mack Smith, and his brothers Hyrum and William. Soon after acquiring the plates, Smith locked them in a box he procured from his brother Hyrum. Some of Smith's neighbors discovered the box's hiding place and smashed it. Meanwhile, however, Smith claimed a premonition had previously caused him to move the plates to a safer spot. (Joel Tiffany, Tiffany's Monthly 5 (1859): 167). Smith then acquired a wooden "Ontario glass-box". The plates were placed into this second box which was then nailed shut. Several witnesses reported lifting the plates while the were sealed in the box. Martin Harris recalled that his wife and daughter had lifted them and that they were "about as much as [his daughter] could lift". Harris then went to the Smith house himself while Joseph was away. Harris later recalled: "While at Mr. Smith's I hefted the plates, and I knew from the heft that they were lead or gold, and I knew that Joseph had not credit enough to buy so much lead." (Tiffany's Monthly 5 (1859): 168-69). Harmony, Pennsylvania Excitement around the Palmyra area and growing opposition encouraged Smith to relocate to his father-in-law's farm in Harmony, Pennsylvania. According to Smith's brother-in-law, who helped Smith and his wife Emma move, the box containing the plates was placed "into a barrel about one-third full of [dry] beans"; after the plates were so secured, the barrel was filled up with more beans. Residents of Harmony also reported encounters with the plates, either sealed in the box or covered by a cloth. Smith's brother-in-law Isaac Hale recalled that he was "shown a box, in which it is said they were contained, which had, to all appearances, been used as a glass box of the common sized window glass." Hale said that he "was allowed to feel the weight of the box, and they gave me to understand that the book of plates was then in the box -- into which, however, I was not allowed to look." (Isaac Hale Statement, reprinted in Dan Vogel, Early Mormon Documents IV:286.) Translation Emma later recalled that "she often wrote for Joseph Smith during the work of translation..." (Joseph Smith III to James T. Cobb, Feb. 14, 1879, Letterbook 2, pp. 85-88, RLDS Archives, courteously shared with Richard Lloyd Anderson by Smith family scholar Buddy Youngreen). By her account: "The plates often lay on the table without any attempt at concealment, wrapped in a small linen table cloth, which I had given him to fold them in. I once felt of the plates as they thus lay on the table tracing their outline and shape. They seemed to be pliable like thick paper, and would rustle with a metallic sound when the edges were moved by the thumb, as one does sometimes thumb the edges of a book." (Saints' Herald 26 (1879):290) Special witnesses As Smith and his associates neared the end of their translation of the plates, Smith revealed that a number of special witnesses would be called to testify of the reality of the Golden Plates. There are two sets of witnesses: the Three Witnesses and the Eight Witnesses. Both sets of witnesses signed joint statements in June of 1829 which were subsequently published along with the text of the Book of Mormon. The Three Witnesses -- Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris -- claimed to have seen an angel descend from heaven and present the plates. They claimed to have seen the plates but not touch them. They heard a voice from heaven declaring that the book was translated by the power of God and that they should bear record of it. The Eight Witnesses were members of the families of Joseph Smith and David Whitmer. Like the Three Witnesses, the Eight signed a joint statement in June 1829. Many of these men had previously handled the plates either when they were in one of the boxes or wrapped in a cloth. According to their statement, they also saw and hefted the plates, "the translator of this work, has shown unto us the plates of which hath been spoken, which have the appearance of gold; and as many of the leaves as the said Smith has translated we did handle with our hands; and we also saw the engravings thereon, all of which has the appearance of ancient work, and of curious workmanship." Other spiritual witnesses Mary Whitmer, the wife of Peter Whitmer, Sr., also reported seeing the plates in supernatural or visionary experiences (see Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses by Richard Lloyd Anderson). She said she saw the angel Moroni, conversed with him, and was shown the gold plates as a comfort and testimony to her while she kept house for a large party during the translation work (Peterson, H. Donl. Moroni: Ancient Prophet, Modern Messenger. Bountiful, Utah, 1983. pp. 114, 116). Most of her immediate family was directly involved with Joseph Smith and/or the translation. Plates returned to Moroni After the work of translation was complete and after the visionary experiences of the Special Witnesses, Smith reported that the plates were returned to Moroni in the summer of 1829. Many Latter Day Saints believe that Moroni returned the plates to the Hill Cumorah and that other ancient records lie buried there. Physical description Smith said Moroni used the term "gold plates" rather than "golden plates." Smith's brother William believed that the plates were "a mixture of gold and copper." Other witnesses said the plates had the "appearance of gold" and were sheets of metal about 6 inches wide by 8 inches high and somewhat thinner than common tin. The plates were said to be bound together with three rings, and made a book about 6 inches thick. Reports from Smith and others who lifted the plates (while wrapped in cloth or contained within a box) agree that they weighed about 60 pounds. In his famous letter to Chicago Democrat publisher John Wentworth ([1]), Smith wrote: "These records were engraven on plates which had the appearance of gold, each plate was six inches [150 mm] wide and eight inches [200 mm] long, and not quite so thick as common tin... The volume was something near six inches [150 mm] in thickness, a part of which was sealed." These plates are typically referred to as the "gold plates" or other similar phrases. William Smith (Joseph's brother) wrote in an 1883 account: "I was permitted to lift them as they laid in a pillow-case; but not to see them, as it was contrary to the commands he had received. They weighed about sixty pounds [22 kg if troy pounds, 27 kg if avoirdupois] according to the best of my judgment." Other plates in the Latter Day Saint tradition In addition to the Golden Plates, there are several other mentions of ancient records recorded on metal plates in the Latter Day Saint tradition. The text of the Book of Mormon itself refers to several other sets of plates: * The brass plates -- originally owned by Laban, containing the writings of Old Testament prophets up to the time shortly before the Babylonian Exile, as well as the otherwise unknown prophets Zenos and Zenoch, and possibly others. * The plates of Nephi (sometimes the "large plates of Nephi") -- the source of the text abridged by Mormon and engraved upon the Golden Plates. * The small plates of Nephi -- the source of the First Book of Nephi, the Second Book of Nephi, the Book of Jacob, the Book of Enos, the Book of Jarom, and the Book of Omni, which replaced the lost 116 pages. * The twenty-four plates found by the people of Limhi containing the record of the Jaredites, translated by King Mosiah and abridged by Moroni as the Book of Ether. In addition to plates relating to the Book of Mormon, Smith acquired a set of 6 plates known as the Kinderhook Plates in 1843. James J. Strang, one of the rival claimants to succeed Smith also claimed to discover and translate a set of plates known as the Voree Plates. Criticisms A criticism involves the descrepancy concerning the weight of the plates. If the plates were of pure gold, 60 pounds would be a very low for an estimate of its weight. Dan Vogel writes: A block of solid tin measuring 7 x 8 x 6 inches, or 288 cubic inches, would weigh 74.67 pounds. If one allows for a 30 percent reduction due to the unevenness and space between the plates, the package would then weigh 52.27 pounds. Using the same calculations, plates of gold weigh 140.50 pounds; copper, 64.71 pounds; a mixture of gold and copper, between 65 and 140 pounds. (Vogel, The Making of a Prophet, 600) While this does not cast doubt on the existence of the plates, it challenges the assumption that they were pure gold. Referring to Smith's statement that the plates "had the appearance of gold," some have speculated that the metal of the plates was tumbaga, the name given by the Spaniards to a versatile alloy of gold and copper which could "be cast, drawn, hammered, gilded, soldered, welded, plated, hardened, annealed, polished, engraved, embossed, and inlaid." Tumbaga can be treated with a simple acid like citric acid to dissolve the copper on the surface. What is then left is a shiny layer of 23-karat gold on top of a harder, more durable copper-gold alloy sheet. This process was widely used by the pre-Columbian cultures of central America to make religious objects. Tumbaga plates of the dimensions Joseph Smith described would weigh between fifty-three and eighty-six pounds. With the lack of physical evidence today, the Golden Plates remain solely an article of faith rather than an actual artifact or religous relic. Plates outside of the Latter Day Saint tradition Other cultures have kept records on metal plates, and those found to date have been extremely thin, so as to facilitate their being engraven into with a pointed utensil. For utilitarian reasons alone, to make it both easier and feasible, the plates would need to be thin enough to allow depressions to be made into them simply by applying pressure, rather than having to scratch and dig as thicker plates would necessitate. Michael R. Ash points to the discovery of objects made from tumbaga, a gold-copper alloy in South America. He writes that using this alloy would make the plates more rigid and lighter. [2] This claim is congruent with William Smith's idea (cited above) that the plates might be part gold and part copper. Orichalcum, the legendary metal of Atlantis and the Temple of Solomon, is held by many to match this same description. In 500 B.C (concurrent with the Book of Mormon), Darius the Great of Persia inscribed his history on a gold plate and sealed it in a stone box in the temple at Persepolis. [3], [4]. The BBC wrote a news story about a six page gold book on display in Bulgaria. This is claimed to be the world's oldest multiple-page book. The book is written in the lost Etruscan language. Unique book goes on display. From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 8 01:36:06 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 7 Aug 2005 21:36:06 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Economist: Modelling conflict: Rules of engagement Message-ID: Modelling conflict: Rules of engagement http://economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4197737&CFID=60149428&CFTOKEN=122d592-080ff44f-c382-402f-bbdb-c7f42ed6965f 5.7.21 Scientists find surprising regularities in war and terrorism ON JULY 19th, IraqBodyCount, a group of academics who are attempting to monitor the casualties of the conflict in that country, published a report suggesting that almost 25,000 civilians have been killed in it so far. In other words, 34 a day. But that is an average. On some days the total is lower, and on some higher--occasionally much higher. It is this variation around the mean that interests Neil Johnson of the University of Oxford and Michael Spagat of Royal Holloway College, London. They think it is possible to trace and model the development of wars from the patterns of casualties they throw up. In particular, by analysing IraqBodyCount's data and comparing them with equivalent numbers from the conflict in Colombia, they have concluded that, from very different beginnings, these conflicts are evolving into something rather similar to one another. The groundwork for this sort of study was laid by Lewis Fry Richardson, a British physicist, with a paper on the mathematics of war that was published in 1948. Using data from conflicts that took place between 1820 and 1945, Fry Richardson made a graph displaying the number of wars that had death tolls in various ranges. The outcome was startling: rather than varying wildly or chaotically, the probability of individual wars having particular numbers of casualties followed a mathematical relationship known as a power law. Power-law relationships crop up in many fields of science and are often a characteristic of complex and highly interacting systems (which war certainly is). Earthquake frequencies and stockmarket fluctuations are both described by power laws, for example. Power laws also have properties that make them different from statistical distributions such as the normal curve (or bell curve, as it is familiarly known). Unlike a bell curve, a power-law distribution has only one tail and no peak. Small tremors occur frequently, but over a few decades enormously large earthquakes will also occur with reasonable frequency. As will deadly wars and attacks. In May, Aaron Clauset and Maxwell Young, of the University of New Mexico, modified Fry Richardson's method to look at terrorist attacks. Instead of total casualties in a conflict, they plotted the deaths from individual incidents. Again, they got a power law. Actually, they got two. Power-law relationships are characterised by a number called an index. For each ten-fold increase in the death toll, the probability of such an event occurring decreases by a factor of ten raised to the power of this index, which is how the distributions get their name. Terrorist attacks within G7 countries could be distinguished from those inside non-G7 countries by their different indices. G7 countries were more likely to suffer large attacks. Indeed, in an article published earlier this year by Britain's Institute of Physics, Mr Clauset and Mr Maxwell said that "if we assume that the scaling relationship and the frequency of events do not change in the future, we can expect to see another attack at least as severe as September 11th within the next seven years." Dr Johnson and Dr Spagat took the method a couple of steps further. They extended Mr Clauset's and Mr Maxwell's idea of looking at the sizes of individual incidents within a campaign to other sorts of conflict, and also looked at how those conflicts have changed over time. As they report in a paper published recently in arXiv, an online archive, they found, yet again, that the data follow power laws. And for both of the wars they studied, the indices of those power laws have been approaching the value Mr Clauset and Mr Maxwell found for non-G7 terrorism, though from different directions. In other words, for the war in Iraq, the data indicate a transition from an index characteristic of more lethal, conventional war between armies to one closer to terrorism. No real surprise there, perhaps, though it is interesting to see perceptions on the ground reflected in the maths. For the Colombian conflict, though, the data show the opposite, a transition from a war characterised by smaller, less cohesive forces to a more unified rebel front--something that ought to worry Colombia's government. Dr Johnson and Dr Spagat put forward as an explanation a mathematical model they have developed. It consists of a group of self-contained "attack units", each of a particular strength. Such units can join together or fragment into smaller pieces. Over time, an equilibrium of joining and breaking is reached, but where that equilibrium lies depends on the strength of any central organisation. The model explains the power-law behaviour seen in both conventional wars and terrorist attacks. Different rates of fragmentation lead to different indices--conventional war is fought with robust armies that are unlikely to fragment, while terrorists are more likely to have shifting alliances. Dr Spagat points out that, if their model is correct, it makes casualty data useful in a situation where intelligence about the enemy is hard to come by--as seems to be the case in Iraq at the moment. For instance, it should be possible to distinguish an insurgency with a rigid command structure from a group of smaller, randomly linked units. Learning about the distribution of earthquakes may not prevent the Big One, but for war and terrorism, power-law statistics may teach governments something about how to defeat the enemy, and make war less deadly. From The Economist [55]Colombia's paramilitary demobilisations Jul 21st 2005 [56]A wave of bombings in Iraq Jul 21st 2005 [57]The uncertainty principle and codes Jun 21st 2001 Country Briefing: [58]Colombia, [59]Iraq More articles about... [60]War in Iraq [61]Jargon and statistics [62]Wars [63]Colombia's wars [64]Terrorism Websites The [65]report from IraqBodyCount is available online. [66]ArXiv posts a [67]paper by [68]Mr Johnson and [69]Mr Spagat, and a [70]study by [71]Mr Clauset and Mr Young. Royal Holloway College provides [72]conflict analysis resources. Wikipedia gives details and links about [73]Fry Richardson and [74]power-law relations. See also the [75]Institute of Physics. [I own a copy of Richardson's classic Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. It's a scarce book. Copies at http://bookfinder.com range from $50 to $100.] References 55. http://economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?Story_id=4198496 56. http://economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?Story_id=4198920 57. http://economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?Story_id=S%26%2884%28QA%3B%2B%0A 58. http://economist.com/countries/Colombia/index.cfm 59. http://economist.com/countries/Iraq/index.cfm 60. http://economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/display.cfm?id=348966 61. http://economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/display.cfm?id=348972 62. http://economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/display.cfm?id=540162 63. http://economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/display.cfm?id=1223026 64. http://economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/display.cfm?id=1604388 65. http://www.iraqbodycount.net/press/pr12.php 66. http://arxiv.org/ 67. http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0506213 68. http://www.lincoln.ox.ac.uk/fellows/johnson/ 69. http://www.rhul.ac.uk/Economics/About-Us/spagat.html 70. http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0502014 71. http://www.cs.unm.edu/~aaron/ 72. http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/pkte/126/Pages/ccar.htm 73. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Fry_Richardson 74. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law 75. http://www.iop.org/ From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 8 01:36:13 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 7 Aug 2005 21:36:13 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Wiki: Lewis Fry Richardson Message-ID: Lewis Fry Richardson - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Fry_Richardson [I omit all the links to make this more readable. To get them, just click on the URL.] Lewis Fry Richardson (October 11, 1881 - September 30, 1953) was a mathematician, physicist and psychologist. One of seven children, he was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, into a well-off, merchant Quaker family, and was the son of Catherine Fry and David Richardson. Contents * 1 Education and early working life * 2 Pacifism * 3 Weather forecasting * 4 Mathematical analysis of war * 5 Research on the length of coastlines and borders * 6 Lewis Fry Richardson Medal * 7 References Education and early working life He entered Bootham School in York in 1894 and fell under the dual influences of pacifist Quaker beliefs and, under master J. Edmund Clark, science, in particular, meteorology. In 1898 he attended Durham College of Science, to study mathematics, physics, chemistry, zoology and botany, before graduating from King's College, Cambridge with a first-class degree in the Natural Science Tripos in 1903. Richardson's working life reflected his eclectic interests: * National Physical Laboratory (1903-1904, 1907-1909) * University College Aberystwyth (1905-1906) * National Peat Industries (1906-1907) - as a chemist * Sunbeam Lamp Company (1909-1912) - as manager of the physical and chemical laboratory * Manchester College of Technology (1912-1913) * Meteorological Office (1913-1916) - as superintendent of Eskdalemuir Observatory * Friends Ambulance Unit in France between 1916 and 1919 * Works at the Meteorological Office at Benson, Oxfordshire between 1919 and 1920. * In 1920 is made Head of the Physics Department at Westminster Training College. * Between 1929 and 1940 is principal of the Paisley Technical College, now the University of Paisley. Pacifism Richardson's Quaker beliefs entailed an ardent pacifism that exempted him from military service during World War I as a conscientious objector though this subsequently disqualified him from holding any academic post. Richardson worked from 1916 to 1919 for the Friends' Ambulance Service attached to the 16th French Infantry Division. After the war, he rejoined the Meteorological Office but was compelled to resign on grounds of conscience when it was amalgamated into the Air Ministry in 1920. He subsequently pursued a career on the fringes of the academic world before retiring in 1940 to research his own ideas. Weather forecasting Richardson's interest in meteorology led him to propose a scheme for weather forecasting by solution of differential equations, the method used today, though, when he published Weather Prediction by Numerical Process in 1922, suitable fast computing was unavailable. He, somewhat eccentrically, envisaged bands of messengers on motor-cycles cruising the Royal Albert Hall to communicate arithmetical results between banks of clerks in order to obtain the necessary numerical solutions. He was also interested in atmospheric turbulence and performed many terrestrial experiments. The Richardson number, a dimensionless parameter in the theory of turbulence is named after him. He famously summarised the field in the parody: Big whorls have little whorls that feed on their velocity, and little whorls have smaller whorls and so on to viscosity. Mathematical analysis of war Richardson also attempted to apply his mathematical skills in the service of his pacifist principles, in particular in understanding the roots of international conflict. As he had done with weather, he analyzed war using differential equations. Considering the armament of two nations, Richardson posited an idealized system of equations whereby the rate of a nation's armament build-up is directly proportional to the amount of arms its rival has and also to the grievances felt toward the rival, and negatively proportional to the amount of arms it already has itself. Solution of this system of equations allows insightful conclusions to be drawn regarding the nature, and the stability or instability, of various hypothetical conditions which might obtain between nations. He also originated the theory that the propensity for war between two nations was a function of the length of their common border. And in Arms and Insecurity (1949), and Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (1950), he sought to statistically analyze the causes of war. Factors he assessed included economics, language, and religion. In the preface of the latter, he wrote: "There is in the world a great deal of brilliant, witty political discussion which leads to no settled convictions. My aim has been different: namely to examine a few notions by quantitative techniques in the hope of reaching a reliable answer." Research on the length of coastlines and borders While studying the causes of war between two countries, Richardson decided to search for a relation between the probability of two countries going to war and the length of their common border. While collecting data, he realised that there was considerable variation in the various gazetted lengths of international borders. For example, that between Spain and Portugal was variously quoted as 987 or 1214 km while that between The Netherlands and Belgium as 380 or 449 km. As part of his research, Richardson investigated how the measured length of a border changes as the unit of measurement is changed. He published empirical statistics which led to a conjectured relationship. This research was quoted by mathematician Beno?t Mandelbrot in his 1967 paper How Long Is the Coast of Britain?. Suppose the coast of Britain is measured using a 200 km ruler, specifying that both ends of the ruler must touch the coast. Now cut the ruler in half and repeat the measurement, then repeat again: Notice that the smaller the ruler, the bigger the result. It might be supposed that these values would converge to a finite number representing the "true" length of the coastline. However, Richardson demonstrated that the measured length of coastlines and other natural features appears to increase without limit as the unit of measurement is made smaller. Note that Richardson's results do not mean that the coastline of Britain is actually infinitely long. This would require the ability to measure with infinitesimally small rulers, something which quantum physics says cannot be done, as there is a lower limit to the smallness of a measurement, the Planck length. What Richardson's results do show is that natural geographic features, when considered over a wide range of scales, do not behave in the same way as the objects of Euclidean geometry. At the time, Richardson's research was ignored by the scientific community. Today, it is seen as one element in the birth of the modern study of fractals. Richardson died in Kilmun, Argyll, Scotland. Lewis Fry Richardson Medal This is a medal awarded (since 1997) by the European Geophysical Society. http://www.copernicus.org/EGU/egs/award6s.htm References Richardson, Lewis Fry, "Generalized foreign politics," The British Journal of Psychology, monograph supplement #23, 1939. From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 8 01:36:27 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 7 Aug 2005 21:36:27 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Journal of Clinical Epidemiology: Trends in old-age mortality in seven European countries, 1950-1999 Message-ID: Trends in old-age mortality in seven European countries, 1950-1999 Journal of Clinical Epidemiology Volume 57, Issue 2 , February 2004, Pages 203-216 F. Janssen [Corresponding Author Contact Information] , [E-mail The Corresponding Author] , a, J. P. Mackenbacha, A. E. Kunsta and for NEDCOMa, a, a, a, a, b, b, a, b, 1 a Department of Public Health, Erasmus MC, University Medical Center Rotterdam, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR, Rotterdam, The Netherlands b Population Research Centre, Faculty of Spatial Sciences, University of Groningen, P.O. Box 800, 9700 AV, Groningen, The Netherlands Accepted 24 July 2003. Available online 20 May 2004. Abstract Objective Different from the general observed decline in old-age mortality, for The Netherlands and Norway there have been reports of stagnation in the decline since the 1980s. We detect periods of stagnation in recent old-age mortality trends, and explore for which causes of death the recent stagnation is most apparent. Study design and setting We applied Poisson regression analysis to total and cause-specific mortality data by age (80+), period (1950-1999), and sex for seven European low-mortality countries. Results We found large heterogeneity in the pace of decline in the countries under investigation, with periods of stagnation being widespread. In the 1980s and 1990s, stagnation was observed in Denmark, The Netherlands, and Norway (males). Continued mortality decline was observed especially in France. Although smoking has had a marked influence on the trends in old-age mortality, the role of smoking in the recent stagnation seems only modest and restricted to Norway. Mortality from cardiovascular diseases showed important crossnational variations in the pace of decline. Mortality from diseases specifically related to old age increased recently in all countries, except France. Conclusion Old-age mortality seems highly plastic and susceptible to many factors, with both favorable and unfavorable effects on trends over time. Author Keywords: Mortality; Trends; Causes of death; Elderly; Smoking; Europe Article Outline 1. Background 2. Data and methods 2.1. Data 2.2. Statistical analysis 2.3. Concordance 3. Results 4. Discussion 4.1. Evaluation of data and methods 4.2. Explanations of the trends observed 4.3. Implications Acknowledgements Appendix I. The concordance table used for bridging five revisions of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) References 1. Background The general tendency in the trends in old-age mortality (80+) in low-mortality countries since the 1950s has been a declining one [1, 2, 3 and 4 ]. This tendency has contributed to the current increase in the number, the proportion, and the mean age of elderly people in these populations. Because these developments will have huge implications for policy, society, and the demand of health care services, there has been much interest in possible future trends in life expectancy, especially in the debate on the limit to life expectancy [5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 ]. On the one hand, proponents of "the limited-lifespan paradigm" state that biologic and practical constraints on reducing old-age mortality set an upper limit to life expectancy of approximately 85 years [5, 9 and 10 ]. On the other hand, "the mortality-reduction paradigm" is adhered to by researchers who argue that life expectancy will continue to increase?at least for some time to come?due to substantial reductions in mortality rates at all ages, including the oldest old [6, 8 and 11 ]. They support their view by referring to mortality development in subpopulations with extreme good health, to foreseen biomedical progress, and to historic observations that old-age mortality has been decreasing continuously. Recently, however, research on old-age mortality has shown some exceptions to this continuous decline in old-age mortality. For The Netherlands and Norway, there have been reports of stagnation or even increases in old-age mortality since the 1980s [2, 13 and 14 ]. This raises the question of whether the mortality decline among elderly in low-mortality countries has been as consistent as previously reported, and whether these developments coincide with the idea that life expectancy continues to increase in the future. However, before making inferences about future trends in old-age mortality, it is important to investigate the determinants of trends in old-age mortality. Although there have been studies on old-age mortality in the past that acknowledge the heterogeneity of the trends between countries [2, 15 and 16 ], they were mostly descriptive in nature. As a result, little is known about the reasons behind the crossnational differences in the pace of mortality decline among the elderly. Knowing about the determinants of trends in old-age mortality could provide important clues on future mortality among the elderly population, especially in the short and medium term. Studying the trends in cause-specific mortality can generate evidence on the determinants of the trends in all-cause mortality among the elderly, because many of the intermediate factors or risk factors that could determine mortality trends among the elderly are related to specific causes of death. In doing so, we will emphasize the role of smoking. It is commonly known that smoking has a strong negative effect on survival. The impact of smoking on mortality trends may vary considerably between countries [17 ]. In fact, the stagnation observed in some countries could be the result of the increased lifetime exposure to smoking for those birth cohorts who reached old age at the end of the 20th century [18 and 19]. The objective of this article is to describe mortality trends among the elderly in Denmark, England and Wales, Finland, France, The Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden, and to contribute to the explanation of these trends. Focus will be on the trends from 1980 onwards. The research questions we will address are: (a) in which countries did trends in mortality at old age show signs of stagnation instead of continued decline, (b) to what extent did mortality increase for causes of death related to smoking, and (c) for which other specific causes of death did an increase occur? In this analysis we will extend earlier studies on trends in old-age mortality by using detailed mortality data over a long period of time (1950?1999), with a distinction by specific causes of death and 5-year age groups up to 100+. Furthermore, in our analysis an extensive effort was made to carefully bridge the different revisions of the International Classification of Diseases (IDC). 2. Data and methods 2.1. Data Data were obtained from national statistical offices and related institutes on total mortality, cause-specific mortality, and population at risk for Denmark, England and Wales, Finland, France, The Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden, for the years 1950?1999 (National Institute of Public Health [Denmark], ONS [England and Wales] [Twentieth Century Mortality], Statfin [Finland], INDE and INSERM [France], Statistics Netherlands, NIDI [The Netherlands], Statistics Norway and National Board of Health and Welfare [Sweden]). For Denmark, Finland, and Norway data were available only from 1951, for Sweden from 1952. Data for France were available until 1997 and for Denmark until 1998. The selection of countries was restricted to low-mortality countries in North Western Europe. The seven countries we included were selected on the basis of the quality of the data [1 and 2] and on the availability of cause of death data. For most countries, data on the total number of death by 5-year age groups were available, with a maximum age ranging from 85+ to 100+. For The Netherlands and France, deaths by single year of age were available to us (no maximum age) (see for France, http://www.ined.fr/publications/cdrom_vallin_mesle/continu.htm . Tables de mortalit? fran?aises 1806?1997 et projections jusqu'en 2102 by J. Vallin and F. Mesl? [INED]). To calculate mortality rates we used the midyear-population at risk. Population data were available either by single year of age (France, The Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, England, and Wales 1961?1999), or by 5-year age groups (Denmark, Norway, England, and Wales 1950?1960), with the maximum age ranging from 85+ to no maximum age. For those aged 80 and over we had additional data on total mortality and population data available from the Kannisto-Thatcher Database on Old Age Mortality (K-T Database) at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (http://www.demogr.mpg.de/databases/ktdb) [2 ]. The data were grouped by both year of death and year of birth of the deceased and by single year of age (no maximum age). We used these data (1) to redistribute the population numbers and deaths in the older age groups over 5-year age groups up to 100+, (2) to redistribute the population numbers and total deaths for those aged 80 and over from 5-year age groups into data by single year of age, and (3) to check whether the population and mortality data from the different data sources (Kannisto-Thatcher Database and national data) were consistent. For the causes of death, we obtained data on their prevalence as the underlying cause of death. These data were available by three-digit codes, 5-year age groups, sex, and year of death for all countries. The maximum age ranged from 85+ for England and Wales and The Netherlands (until 1969), and 90+, 95+, and 100+ for all other countries and periods. The deaths per cause in the older age groups were redistributed over 5-year age groups up to 100+ based on the distribution of total mortality in these age groups. Table 1 lists the causes of death we selected and their relative share in all-cause mortality among those aged 80 and over in 1995?1999. Cancers have been designated "smoking-related" if their population attributable risk was larger than 0.25 (according to the American Cancer Study) [20]. Table 1. List of selected causes of death and their relative share in all-cause mortality in the period 1995?1999,a males and females, aged 80 and over [Full Size Table] DK = Denmark; E&W = England and Wales; FIN = Finland; F = France; NL = The Netherlands; NO = Norway; S = Sweden. COPD = chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases. 2.2. Statistical analysis We analyzed the mortality data by means of a (log-linear) Poisson regression model with linear splines. The dependent variable was the number of deaths, with the person-years at risk as offset variable. As independent variables, we used age (single year of age for total mortality and 5-year age groups for cause-specific mortality) and year of death. Spline functions divide the overall trend into a number of separate, adjacent segments [21 ]. In our analysis, we used five segments each covering a period of 10 years (1950?1959, 1960?1969, 1970?1979, 1980?1989, 1990?1999). The analysis using splines thus yielded estimates of annual changes in mortality within each 10-year period, thereby taking into account the overall trend. Comparison of these five decade-specific rates of change enabled us to detect and quantify changes in the secular trend in mortality, such as a stagnation of the decrease in mortality for a specific country. "Stagnation" of the mortality decline was defined as either a leveling off of the mortality decline leading to small declines or a reversal into increasing mortality. All our analyses are conducted using SAS package version 8. In addition, in Fig. 1 for total mortality, directly standardized observed and fitted mortality rates were calculated, using the total population of England and Wales in 1999 as the reference. [Enlarge Image] (34K) [Enlarge Image] (31K) Fig. 1.. Trends in standardized observed and fitted all-cause mortality rates in seven countries, 1950?1999, aged 80 and over. (A) Males. (B) Females. The use of 5-year age groups in the cause of death analyses was due to the restriction that these data were not available to us by single year of age. To evaluate to what extent a possible change over time in the distribution of deaths within a 5-year age group could affect our results, we compared the results for total mortality using data by 5 years of age with the results for total mortality using data by single year of age. Because this comparison generated virtually the same results, we expected that, although age patterns can differ for the specific causes of death, the bias when using the data by 5-year age groups will be minimal. 2.3. Concordance When analyzing trends in causes of death for a longer period, numerous revisions of the World Health Organization (WHO) International Classification of Diseases (ICD) have to be taken into account, because they can lead to biases in the trends. In our analysis we had to bridge four or five different ICD revisions per country. For this purpose we constructed a general concordance table in which the different three-digit codes for a specific cause of death in successive ICD revisions were linked (see Janssen et al. [14] for more information; see also Appendix 1 ). To accurately bridge the revision from ICD6/7 to ICD8 for ischemic heart disease we obtained the numbers of death for one additional four-digit code (422.1) under ICD6/7. These numbers were not available for Finland until 1963, and Sweden until 1961. We estimated them on the basis of the ratio of the number of deaths from ischemic heart diseases with and without 422.1 calculated for the first year in which 422.1 was coded. On the basis of this general concordance table, data on the required three-digit codes were obtained from the different countries. For Finland, however, not all causes of death were available by three-digit code and part of the data we had to request by short list consisting of slightly different groups of causes of death. In depth analysis of the Finnish mortality trends suggested that this approximation has not led to irregularities. Cause-specific trends based on the concordance table can, however, still contain irregularities due to (1) remaining problems with ICD revisions, because at the level of three-digit codes the continuity of the medical content of some causes of death could not always be optimized; (2) incidental changes in coding rules, for example, changes within ICD revisions in the reporting of causes of death by physicians or in coding rules applied at the statistical offices; and (3) incidental outliers, that is, causes of death with a single year of exceptional mortality levels. In addition to the use of the concordance table, it was therefore necessary to trace these irregularities and to control for them when assessing long-term trends in mortality. We identified outliers and incidental changes in coding rules on the basis of visual analysis of cause-specific trends for males and females combined for those aged 60 and over, and using country-specific background information on the irregularities observed. To evaluate the existence of remaining problems with ICD revisions, we identified possible mortality jumps due to the ICD revisions, using cause-specific regression models (with splines) applied to data for males and females combined, aged 60 and over. To these regression models we added transition variables indicating the ICD revisions, that is, ICD6/7to8, ICD8to9 or ICD9to10. In this way these regression models generated parameter estimates for the transition variables. A transition variable was included in our final regression model if: (1) the parameter estimate corresponding to this variable was statistically significant, (2) the significant effect could not be attributed to nonlinear trends or to a single outlier, for instance, an influenza epidemic nearby; and (3) the observed effect could be traced back to a ICD transition problem, for example, due to a four-digit code not included in the concordance table or an effect on one cause of death mirrored by an opposite effect on a complementary cause of death. For France, no check on the concordance was needed, because J. Vallin and F. Mesl? reconstructed coherent series of data for causes of death, the results of which are available from a Web site (http://matisse.ined.fr/%7Etania/causfra/data/) [22 and 23]. From this Web site the cause of death data we distinguished could be extracted using ICD9 codes. 3. Results Old-age mortality showed an overall decline and a convergence in the mortality level between countries over time (Fig. 1 ). However, there was a large heterogeneity in the pace of decline, with periods of stagnation (defined as either a leveling off of the mortality decline leading to small declines or a reversal into increasing mortality) being widespread. In the 1950s, and to a lesser extent in the 1960s, mortality in the Nordic countries declined slightly or even increased. From the 1980s onwards, small declines or even increases were observed in Denmark, The Netherlands, and among Norwegian males. In contrast, mortality decline continued in England and Wales (females), and especially in France, resulting in the lowest mortality level in the 1990s. Striking is the huge mortality decline in Finland in the 1970s, which was followed by a much more modest decline in the 1980s. The mortality rates were higher among males compared to females, with the mortality level of males in the 1990s being about equal to the mortality level of females in the 1950s. To identify the periods of stagnation more precisely, we quantified the pace of all-cause mortality decline within each of the 5 decades by means of annual changes (%) (Table 2 ). If the confidence intervals for successive decades do not overlap the changes in the pace of mortality decline are statistically significant. Stagnation was more widespread among males compared to females. In Denmark, mortality decline leveled off from the 1970s onwards for males, and from the 1980s onwards for females. Mortality decline among Dutch males turned into increase in the 1980s, followed by a small decline in the 1990s. Among Dutch females mortality decline levelled off in the 1980s and 1990s. Among Norwegian males the small (nonsignificant) increase in the 1980s changed into a modest decline in the 1990s. Table 2. Annual trends in total mortality by country and decade (1950-1999), males and females, aged 80 and over [Full Size Table] Bold indicates a significant increase. Underlined indicates annual changes (%)??0.60. The annual trends for the "smoking-related diseases," that is, smoking-related cancers and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), showed an overall pattern of long-term increases (Table 3 ). Due to this overall increase these diseases had an increased share in total mortality, and thus their trends had increasingly more effect on the trends observed for all-cause mortality. Since the 1980s, mortality from smoking-related diseases among men decreased in Finland and France, whereas in Denmark, The Netherlands, and Norway in the 1980s mortality still increased rapidly. However, only Norway showed a clear persistence of the increase among males in the 1990s. For females, recent increases are more frequent, and are most pronounced in Norway, Denmark, and The Netherlands. Overall, lung cancer reveals the strongest increases, but COPD showed a more unfavorable trend in the 1990s. Table 3. Annual trends in mortality from smoking-related diseases by country and decade (1950?1999), males and females, aged 80 and over [Full Size Table] Bold indicates an increase. COPD = chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Mortality from cardiovascular diseases declined, at least after the 1960s (Table 4 ). During the last 2 decades, declines were largest in France and England and Wales and smallest in Norway and The Netherlands. Trends in mortality from ischemic heart disease (IHD) were least favorable with increases in mortality in the 1950s and 1960s. Mortality from IHD also increased in the 1980s in Norway (males) and Finland. Mortality from cerebrovascular diseases increased in the 1950s, followed by a sustained decrease in mortality. Striking were the enormous decreases in mortality from stroke in France since the 1980s. For both IHD and stroke, the mortality decrease in France sets in later compared to the other countries. Mortality from "other cardiovascular diseases" decreased, especially in Finland and England and Wales, whereas in Denmark and Norway mortality increased since the 1980s. Table 4. Annual trends in mortality from cardiovascular diseases by country and decade (1950?1999), males and females, aged 80 and over [Full Size Table] Bold indicates an increase. For the "other causes of death," that is, total mortality minus "smoking-related diseases" and all cardiovascular diseases, mortality since the 1980s increased in all countries, except France (Table 5 ). The increases are most pronounced in Denmark and The Netherlands, in the 1990s. Especially mortality from diseases specifically related to old-age (infectious diseases, pneumonia, dementia, and ill-defined conditions) increased substantially. Differences between the countries, however, exist in which of these causes showed the largest mortality increases. In France, the increase in diseases specifically related to old age has been offset by the continuation of the strong decline for "other diseases." Caution, however, should be exercised when interpreting the annual changes for causes of death with a low mortality level in 1980 and 1990, especially infectious diseases, diabetes mellitus, dementia (males), and all ill-defined causes (in England and Wales, Finland, and Sweden). Annual changes for such causes tend to be large, even though the change is small in absolute terms. Table 5. Annual trends in mortality from "other causes of death" by country and decade (1980?1999), males and females, aged 80 and over [Full Size Table] Bold indicates an increase. 4. Discussion This article provides important new findings on the trends in old-age mortality (80+) in seven low-mortality countries. First, although old-age mortality tends to decline and to converge, there is large heterogeneity in the pace of decline in the countries under investigation, with periods of stagnation being widespread. Since the 1980s, stagnation was observed in Denmark, The Netherlands, and Norway, whereas England and Wales and especially France showed a continuation of a strong mortality decline. Second, the long-term mortality increase for smoking-related cancers and COPD turned into declines since the 1980s among males. Only for Norway the mortality increase among males clearly persisted. Third, mortality from cardiovascular diseases showed clear crossnational variations in the general decline since the 1970s. Fourth, mortality from diseases specifically related to old age (infectious diseases, pneumonia, dementia, and ill-defined conditions) increased recently in all countries except France. Previous studies on trends in old-age mortality also report some heterogeneity in the speed of the mortality decline, but found only rare periods of stagnation [2 and 15]. The overall conclusion reached in most of these studies therefore has been a continued decline in old-age mortality [2, 4, 15, 24 and 25 ]. The present study, however, shows that periods of stagnation are more frequent than previously observed. This conclusion could be reached by, on the one hand, extending the observation period to the 1990s, and on the other hand, by looking in more detail at the trends within specific decades in stead of broader periods. Our results thus show a more differentiated picture than suggested by previous analyses on old-age mortality. The heterogeneity between countries and periods as observed in this analysis and in previous analyses suggests that the findings obtained in this study may not be considered to be representative of other countries nor of earlier periods. 4.1. Evaluation of data and methods The mortality and population data used in this study stem from countries considered to have good or excellent population and vital registries [1 and 2]. Reported survivorship counts are highly accurate [2 and 26 ]. Comparison of our mortality data to the mortality data from the Kannisto-Thatcher Database?in which the data was checked for age-heaping and were subjected to a number of checks for plausibility?showed only small discrepancies, that had no appreciable effects on our results. Analyses of long-term trends in causes of death have to deal with several transitions between ICD revisions. Considerable effort was made to bridge these ICD revisions by carefully constructing a concordance table and by controlling for the remaining biases due to these revisions in our regression model. Further checks showed minimal sensitivity. Thus, even though some residual effects of problems with ICD revisions could not be excluded, we expect that these problems do not affect the results to any substantial extent. More difficult to tackle were changes within an ICD revision, either in coding practices at the Statistical Offices or in the reporting of causes of death by physicians. Although all countries under investigation use the coding rules of the WHO, the national statistical offices might change, over time, their interpretation of these international coding rules. Because changes in coding practices most probably led to quite abrupt and sometimes temporal changes, the changes could be traced and controlled for. Changes in the reporting of causes of death on the death certificate by physicians, however, result in more gradual shifts that could not be controlled for. The causes of death expected to suffer substantial effects are diabetes mellitus, dementia, and "all ill-defined causes." The huge increases for dementia that were observed especially in the 1980s could partly be explained by a growing propensity of physicians to report dementia as an underlying cause of death. The recent increases in "all ill-defined causes" (especially in England and Wales, Denmark, Sweden, and The Netherlands) could be the result of less detailed and less accurate diagnosis and reporting by physicians. An increase in the doctor's tendency to list only one cause on the death certificate could perhaps explain the huge increases observed for pneumonia in The Netherlands and Denmark in the 1990s, because diseases that were formerly reported mainly as secondary causes of death could increasingly be listed as primary causes of death. The more stable trends for diabetes mellitus seem to be less affected by this coding problem. Thus, especially the recent increases found for dementia, "all ill-defined causes" and pneumonia should be viewed with caution. Moreover, one should be aware of the opposite effects these increases in mortality might have on other diseases. For example, an increasing tendency to report these diseases as the underlying cause of death may result in an overestimation of the recent decreases observed for cardiovascular diseases. However, this cannot account for the recent declines observed for cardiovascular diseases, because in absolute terms, the decline in cardiovascular diseases was much larger than the increases for diseases prone to changes in reporting causes of death (data not shown). Diseases that have a more straightforward diagnosis, like smoking-related cancers and likely COPD as well, are probably relatively resistant to changes in coding practices. 4.2. Explanations of the trends observed Our findings suggest both favorable trends in old-age mortality (e.g., the continued decline in England and Wales, and especially France, and the huge decline in Finland in the 1970s), but also unfavorable trends (e.g., stagnation since the 1980s in Denmark, The Netherlands, and to a lesser extent Norway). In this section, we will discuss possible explanations of these trends. Although many smokers die already before the age of 80, our results indicate that smoking is a possible determinant of mortality trends even among the oldest old. Smoking-related cancers and COPD contributed to the recent stagnation, especially in Norway, for which mortality from these causes of death increased recently. The absence of clear increases in Denmark and The Netherlands in the 1990s suggests that the contribution of smoking-related diseases to the recent stagnation as observed in The Netherlands and Denmark was more modest. However, by looking merely at the trends in these smoking-related diseases, other diseases, of which smoking is a risk factor as well, would be neglected. The recent declines observed for cardiovascular diseases?that are not correlated with the trends for lung cancer?suggest that smoking did not contribute much to the recent stagnation as observed in The Netherlands and Denmark. On the contrary, the significant decline in smoking prevalence among elderly men in recent periods [27 ], suggests a favorable effect of smoking on recent trends in mortality from cardiovascular diseases (and other causes of death), for which current smoking levels are more important than life-time smoking exposures [28 ]. Thus, although smoking has had a marked influence on the trends in old-age mortality, the role of smoking in the stagnation since the 1980s seems only modest and restricted to Norway. Another explanation for the recent stagnation in Denmark, The Netherlands, and Norway could be that further improvement in old-age mortality in these countries is no longer possible, due to low levels of mortality already attained and a limit to life expectancy being approached. However, we observed further improvements in old-age mortality in both England and Wales and France, who had reached the same low level of mortality as Denmark, The Netherlands, and Norway around the 1980s. Life expectancy at age 80 in 1980?1990 was slightly higher in France (7.52) compared to Denmark (7.43) and Norway (7.49), suggesting that the limit to life expectancy is not yet being approached in the latter countries [29]. Mortality trends were unfavorable for infectious diseases, pneumonia, dementia, and ill-defined causes of death. The recent increase of mortality from these causes of death?which were not only restricted to Denmark and The Netherlands but appeared in all countries except France?could be partly artificial due to changes in the coding and reporting of causes of death (as discussed above). However, part of the recent increase in these causes, which are specifically related to old age, might be real, and perhaps due to increased frailty. Increased comorbidity or increased frailty among elderly in itself could easily lead to an increased occurrence of symptoms or comorbid conditions as causes of death. Increased frailty could be due to decreased mortality selection as a result of the declines in all-cause mortality and cardiovascular mortality in earlier periods and ages, and indirectly due to improvements in medical care. The increasing proportions of elderly people surviving to old ages might be expected to be less healthy compared to their more selected predecessors [30], resulting in increases in (cardiovascular) morbidity [31 ] and in mortality increases from diseases specifically related to old age. Although recent studies on disability among the elderly suggest that disability among the elderly is declining [32, 33 and 34 ], we still think that increased frailty might have played a role in explaining the recent increases in diseases specifically related to old age. Another important finding from our study is the crossnational variations in the pace of decline in cardiovascular disease, which is still the most important cause of death among the elderly. In the last 2 decades declines for cardiovascular disease mortality were highest in England and Wales and France and lowest in Norway, The Netherlands, and Denmark (1980s only). Previous research on trends in cardiovascular mortality [35, 36 and 37 ] suggested the importance of several factors like physical activity, hypertension control, diet, smoking, and accessibility of medical care. It might be possible that the developments in some of these risk factors were more beneficial in England and Wales and France compared to the other countries. Strikingly favorable were the trends in old-age mortality in France and Finland (1970s). France showed the strongest decline for cardiovascular diseases, and, contrary to the other countries, did not witness an increase from "other causes of death." Within "other causes of death" the declining trend for "other diseases" is striking. The latter trend seems the result of the reported declines of acute respiratory diseases and digestive diseases among the French elderly [38 ]. Changes in alcohol consumption might be one of the factors involved. The sharp decline in all-cause mortality in the 1970s in Finland was also observed among those aged 60 and over [39], and seems the result of rapid economic and social progress in this period [39, 40 and 41 ]. Together with the development of a national health and social care system, this has resulted in improvements in the living conditions and health care, also for the elderly [41 ]. In addition, a favorable effect of rapid declines in behavioral risk factors, like diet, blood pressure, and serum cholesterol levels, in part caused by preventive campaigns, can be expected [42 ]. In Finland, old-age mortality thus seems to have been highly susceptible to improvements in living conditions and in both preventive and secondary health care. 4.3. Implications Our finding that periods of stagnation were widespread both in the 1950s and since the 1980s, challenges the idea that mortality at old age is bound to decline steadily in the near future [6, 8 and 11 ]. Old-age mortality seems highly plastic and susceptible to many factors, both favorable and unfavorable. These factors should be taken into account when making projections of future old-age mortality and its implications on social and health care policies. Acknowledgements This article is part of a project that is financed by the sector of Medical Sciences of the Organisation for Scientific Research, The Netherlands (ZonMw). We are grateful to Jacques Vallin (INED, France), Martine Bovet (INSERM, France), Hillka Ahonen (Statfin, Finland), Annika Edberg (National Board of Health and Welfare, Sweden), ?rjan Hemstr?m (Sweden), Allan Baker and Glenn Meredith (ONS, England and Wales), Knud Juel (National Institute of Public Health, Denmark), and Jens-Kristian Borgan (Statistics Norway) for providing cause-specific mortality and population data, and for giving useful information on national coding practices. 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Wilmoth, The future of human longevity: a demographer's perspective. Science 280 5362 (1998), pp. 395?397. Full Text via CrossRef 13. W.J. Nusselder and J.P. Mackenbach, Lack of improvement of life expectancy at advanced ages in The Netherlands. Int J Epidemiol 29 1 (2000), pp. 140?148. Abstract-EMBASE | Abstract-GEOBASE | Abstract-Elsevier BIOBASE | Abstract-MEDLINE | $Order Document | Full Text via CrossRef 14. F. Janssen, W.J. Nusselder, C.W.N. Looman, J.P. Mackenbach and A.E. Kunst, Stagnation in mortality decline among elders in The Netherlands. Gerontologist 43 (2003), pp. 722?734. Abstract-MEDLINE | Abstract-PsycINFO | $Order Document 15. G. Caselli, Future longevity among the elderly. In: G. Caselli and A. Lopez, Editors, Health and mortality among elderly populations, Clarendon Press, Oxford (1996), pp. 235?265. 16. G.C. Myers, Comparative mortality trends among older persons in developed countries. , Clarendon Press, Oxford (1996). 17. T. Valkonen and F. van Poppel, The contribution of smoking to sex differences in life expectancy. Four Nordic countries and The Netherlands 1970?1989. Eur J Public Health 7 (1997), pp. 302?310. Abstract-EMBASE | $Order Document 18. J.J. Barendregt, C.W.N. Looman and H. Br?nnum-Hansen, Comparison of cohort smoking intensities in Denmark and the Netherlands. Bull World Health Organ 80 1 (2002), pp. 26?32. Abstract-EMBASE | Abstract-GEOBASE | Abstract-MEDLINE | $Order Document 19. A.D. Lopez, N.E. Collishaw and T. Piha, A descriptive model of the cigarette epidemic in developed countries. Tob Control 3 3 (1994), pp. 242?247. 20. N.J. Wald and A.K. Hackshaw, Cigarette smoking: an epidemiological overview. Br Med Bull 52 1 (1996), pp. 3?11. Abstract-EMBASE | Abstract-MEDLINE | $Order Document 21. D.R. McNeil, T.J. Trussell and J.C. Turner, Spline interpolation of demographic data. Demography 14 2 (1977), pp. 245?252. Abstract-EconLit | Abstract-MEDLINE | $Order Document 22. J. Vallin and F. Mesl?, Les causes de d?c?s en France de 1925 ? 1978. , INED, PUF, Paris (1988). 23. J. Vallin and F. Mesl?, Comment suivre l'evolution de la mortalite par cause malgre les discontinuites de la statistique? Le cas de la France de 1925 a 1993. , INED, Paris (1996). 24. H. Kesteloot, Evolution of all-cause and cause-specific mortality in the age-class 75?84 years during the period 1970?1996. A worldwide overview. Verh K Acad Geneeskd Belg 63 5 (2001), pp. 405?430 (discussion, 431) . 25. H. Kesteloot, S. Sans and D. Kromhout, Evolution of all-causes and cardiovascular mortality in the age-group 75?84 years in Europe during the period 1970?1996; a comparison with worldwide changes. Eur Heart J 23 5 (2002), pp. 384?398. Abstract-EMBASE | Abstract-MEDLINE | $Order Document 26. A.G. Condran, C.L. Himes and S.H. Preton, Old-age mortality patterns in low-mortality countries: an evaluation of population and death data at advanced ages, 1950 to the present. Popul Bull UN 30 (1991), pp. 23?60. 27. B. Forey, J. Hamling, P. Lee and N. Wald, Editors, International smoking statistics. A collection of historical data from 30 economically developed countries, Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, Oxford University Press, London, Oxford (2002). 28. R. Doll, R. Peto, K. Wheatley, R. Gray and I. Sutherland, Mortality in relation to smoking: 40 years' observations on male British doctors. BMJ 309 6959 (1994), pp. 901?911. Abstract-EMBASE | Abstract-Elsevier BIOBASE | Abstract-MEDLINE | $Order Document 29. V. Kannisto, The advancing frontier of survival: life tables for old age. , Odense University Press, Odense, Denmark (1996). 30. E. Grundy, Demography and gerontology: mortality trends among the oldest old. Ageing Soc 17 6 (1997), pp. 713?725. Full Text via CrossRef 31. L. Bonneux, J.J. Barendregt, K. Meeter, G.J. Bonsel and P.J. van der Maas, Estimating clinical morbidity due to ischemic heart disease and congestive heart failure: the future rise of heart failure. Am J Public Health 84 1 (1994), pp. 20?28. Abstract-EMBASE | Abstract-MEDLINE | $Order Document 32. R.F. Schoeni, V.A. Freedman and R.B. Wallace, Persistent, consistent, widespread, and robust? Another look at recent trends in old-age disability. J Gerontol B Psychol Sci Soc Sci 56 4 (2001), pp. S206?S218. Abstract-EMBASE | Abstract-MEDLINE | Abstract-PsycINFO | $Order Document 33. D.M. Cutler, Declining disability among the elderly. Health Aff (Millwood) 20 6 (2001), pp. 11?27. Abstract-MEDLINE | $Order Document | Full Text via CrossRef 34. I. Winblad, M. Jaaskelainen, S.L. Kivela, P. Hiltunen and P. Laippala, Prevalence of disability in three birth cohorts at old age over time spans of 10 and 20 years. J Clin Epidemiol 54 10 (2001), pp. 1019?1024. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (68 K) 35. C. Sarti, D. Rastenyte, Z. Cepaitis and J. Tuomilehto, International trends in mortality from stroke, 1968 to 1994. Stroke 31 7 (2000), pp. 1588?1601. Abstract-EMBASE | Abstract-Elsevier BIOBASE | $Order Document 36. K. Kuulasmaa, H. Tunstall-Pedoe, A. Dobson, S. Fortmann, S. Sans, H. Tolonen, A. Evans, M. Ferrario and J. Tuomilehto, Estimation of contribution of changes in classic risk factors to trends in coronary-event rates across the WHO MONICA Project populations. Lancet 355 9205 (2000), pp. 675?687. SummaryPlus | Full Text + Links | PDF (166 K) 37. R. Cooper, J. Cutler, P. Desvigne-Nickens, S.P. Fortmann, L. Friedman, R. Havlik, G. Hogelin, J. Marler, P. McGovern, G. Morosco, L. Mosca, T. Pearson, J. Stamler, D. Stryer and T. Thom, Trends and disparities in coronary heart disease, stroke, and other cardiovascular diseases in the United States: findings of the national conference on cardiovascular disease prevention. Circulation 102 25 (2000), pp. 3137?3147. Abstract-EMBASE | Abstract-Elsevier BIOBASE | Abstract-MEDLINE | $Order Document 38. F. Mesl? and J. Vallin, Mortality trends at older and oldest ages in France since 1950 (Evolution de la mortalite aux ages eleves en France depuis 1950). Dossiers et Recherches 68. , Institut National d'Etudes Demographiques [INED], Paris (1998). 39. T. Martelin, Trends in elderly mortality in the Nordic countries. Comp Gerontol [C] 1 (1987), pp. 39?48. Abstract-MEDLINE | $Order Document 40. J.M. Sverre, A comparative study of trends in mortality rates of the ageing population in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland, 1966?1986. Scand J Soc Med 23 4 (1995), pp. 227?232. Abstract-EMBASE | Abstract-MEDLINE | $Order Document 41. S.L. Kivela, Changes in mortality among the elderly Finnish population 1951?1979. Soc Sci Med 21 7 (1985), pp. 799?805. Abstract | Abstract + References | PDF (684 K) 42. E. Vartiainen, P. Puska, J. Pekkanen, J. Tuomilehto and P. Jousilahti, Changes in risk factors explain changes in mortality from ischaemic heart disease in Finland. BMJ 309 6946 (1994), pp. 23?27. Abstract-EMBASE | Abstract-MEDLINE | $Order Document Appendix I. The concordance table used for bridging five revisions of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) [Corresponding Author Contact Information] Corresponding author. Tel.: +31-(0)10-4087714; fax: +31-(0)10-4089449 1 The Netherlands Epidemiology and Demography Compression of Morbidity research group, which also includes J. Barndregt, L. Bonneux, C. de Laet, W. Nusselder, A. Peeters, A. Al Mamun, and F. Willekens. From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 8 01:37:48 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 7 Aug 2005 21:37:48 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Science: Biodemographic Trajectories of Longevity Message-ID: Biodemographic Trajectories of Longevity Volume 280, Number 5365, Issue of 8 May 1998, pp. 855-860. Review James W. Vaupel, * James R. Carey, Kaare Christensen, Thomas E. Johnson, Anatoli I. Yashin, Niels V. Holm, Ivan A. Iachine, V?in? Kannisto, Aziz A. Khazaeli, Pablo Liedo, Valter D. Longo, Yi Zeng, Kenneth G. Manton, James W. Curtsinger Old-age survival has increased substantially since 1950. Death rates decelerate with age for insects, worms, and yeast, as well as humans. This evidence of extended postreproductive survival is puzzling. Three biodemographic insights--concerning the correlation of death rates across age, individual differences in survival chances, and induced alterations in age patterns of fertility and mortality--offer clues and suggest research on the failure of complicated systems, on new demographic equations for evolutionary theory, and on fertility-longevity interactions. Nongenetic changes account for increases in human life-spans to date. Explication of these causes and the genetic license for extended survival, as well as discovery of genes and other survival attributes affecting longevity, will lead to even longer lives. J. W. Vaupel is at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, D-18057 Rostock, Germany; Odense University Medical School, DK-5000 Odense C, Denmark; the Center for Demographic Studies, Duke University, Durham, NC 27706, USA; and Andrus Gerontology Center, the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0191, USA. J. R. Carey is in the Department of Entomology, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA 95616-8584, USA. K. Christensen, N. V. Holm, I. A. Iachine, and V. Kannisto are at Odense University Medical School, DK-5000 Odense C, Denmark. T. E. Johnson is at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309-0447, USA. A. I. Yashin is at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, D-18057 Rostock, Germany, and the Center for Demographic Studies, Duke University, Durham, NC 27706, USA. A. A. Khazaeli and J. W. Curtsinger are in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN 55108, USA. P. Liedo is with El Colegio de la Frontera Sur, Tapachula 30700, Mexico. V. D. Longo is at the Andrus Gerontology Center at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0191, USA. Y. Zeng is at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, D-18057 Rostock, Germany, and the Institute of Population Research, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China. K. G. Manton is at the Center for Demographic Studies at Duke University, Durham, NC 27706, USA. * To whom correspondence should be addressed at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Doberaner Strasse 114, D-18057 Rostock, Germany. E-mail: jwv at demogr.mpg.de Humanity is aging. The social, economic, and health-care consequences of the new demography (Table 1) will drive public policy worldwide in coming decades (1). Growth of the older population is fueled by three factors. Baby-boom generations are growing older. The chance of surviving to old age is increasing. And the elderly are living longer--because of remarkable, largely unexplained reductions in mortality at older ages since 1950 (2-4). Biodemography, the mating of biology and demography, is, we argue, spawning insights into the enigma of lengthening longevity (5). Table 1. Estimated population, proportion of population, and growth of population above age 60 for the world and for selected countries in 1970 and 1997 and projected for 2025. Countries are ranked by percentage 60+ in 1997. Data are from (46). Country Millions 60+ Percent 60+ Growth 1970 1997 2025 1970 1997 2025 1997/1970 2025/1997 World 300.0 530.0 1200.0 8 9 15 1.8 2.3 Italy 9.0 13.0 18.0 16 23 33 1.4 1.4 Sweden 1.6 2.0 2.7 20 22 29 1.3 1.4 Germany 15.0 18.0 28.0 20 21 32 1.2 1.6 Japan 11.0 27.0 40.0 11 21 33 2.5 1.5 U.S.A. 29.0 44.0 83.0 14 17 25 1.5 1.9 China 57.0 118.0 290.0 7 10 20 2.1 2.5 India 29.0 64.0 165.0 6 7 12 2.2 2.6 Mexico 3.0 6.5 18.0 6 7 13 2.2 2.7 Increases in Old-Age Survival For Sweden, accurate statistics on mortality are available going back for more than a century. Female death rates at older ages have fallen since 1950, with large absolute reductions at advanced ages (Fig. 1). The pattern is similar for males, although from conception to old age males suffer higher death rates than females, and progress in reducing male mortality has generally been slower than for females. Consequently, most older people in Sweden--and nearly all other countries--are women. Fig. 1. Shaded contour maps (47) of death rates (48) for Swedish females from age 0 to 112 and years 1875 to 1995 (49), with contours on a ratio scale of mortality doublings (A) and on an arithmetic scale (B). The color of each small rectangle denotes the level of the death rate at that age and year. White rectangles indicate ages and years when no female deaths were recorded. Dark red rectangles at the highest ages mark the deaths of the last survivor of a cohort. The vertical black line marks the year 1950, when increases in old-age survival accelerated. The horizontal black line is at age 85. The large relative reductions in mortality at younger ages, especially before 1950, are apparent when a ratio scale is used to set contours (A). The vertical light line at 1919 in (A) is a consequence of deaths from the Spanish flu epidemic. The low level of mortality at ages below age 70 and the large absolute reductions in mortality at advanced ages are highlighted when an arithmetic scale is used (B). [View Larger Version of this Image (44K GIF file)] For other developed countries, trends in mortality since 1900 have been roughly similar to those in Sweden. For example, old-age survival has also increased since 1950 for female octogenarians in England, France, Iceland, Japan, and the United States (Fig. 2). If there were an impending limit to further declines in death rates at older ages, countries with low levels of mortality would tend to show slow rates of reduction. There is, however, no correlation between levels of mortality and rates of reduction (2). In most developed countries the rate of reduction has accelerated, especially since 1970 (2, 4). Japan, which enjoys the world's longest life expectancy and lowest levels of mortality at older ages, has been a leader in the quickening pace of increase in old-age survival (Fig. 2). Since the early 1970s female death rates in Japan have declined at annual rates of about 3% for octogenarians and 2% for nonagenarians. Mortality among octogenarians and nonagenarians has been low in the United States (Fig. 2). The reasons for the U.S. advantage and the recent loss of this advantage to Japan and France are not well understood (4, 6). Fig. 2. Deaths per 1000 women at ages 80 to 89 from 1950 to 1995 for Japan (dashed black line), France (blue line), Sweden (green line), England and Wales (red line), Iceland (gray line), the United States (light blue line), and U.S. whites (brown line). The U.S. data (light blue line) may be unreliable, especially in the 1960s. Source: (49, 50). [View Larger Version of this Image (26K GIF file)] The reduction in death rates at older ages has increased the size of the elderly population considerably (2, 4, 7). In developed countries in 1990 there were about twice as many nonagenarians and four to five times as many centenarians as there would have been if mortality after age 80 had stayed at 1960 levels. Reliable data for various developed countries indicate that the population of centenarians has doubled every decade since 1960, mostly as a result of increases in survival after age 80 (7). The decline in old-age mortality is perplexing. What biological charter permits us (or any other species) to live long postreproductive lives (8)? A canonical gerontological belief posits genetically determined maximum life-spans. Most sexually reproducing species show signs of senescence with age (9), and evolutionary biologists have developed theories to account for this (10). The postreproductive span of life should be short because there is no selection against mutations that are not expressed until reproductive activity has ceased (11-13). The logic of this theory and the absence of compelling countertheories (14) have led many to discount the evidence of substantial declines in old-age mortality. Often it is assumed that the reductions are anomalous and that progress will stagnate (15). Only time can silence claims about the future. And empirical observations are not fully acceptable until they are explicable. We have therefore focused on testing hypotheses and developing new concepts. Mortality Deceleration A key testable hypothesis is that mortality accelerates with age as reproduction declines. We estimated age trajectories of death rates (Fig. 3) for Homo sapiens, Ceratitis capitata (the Mediterranean fruit fly), Anastrepha ludens, Anastrepha obliqua, and Anastrepha serpentina (three other species of true fruit fly), Diachasmimorpha longiacaudtis (a parasitoid wasp), Drosophila melanogaster, Caenorhabditis elegans (a nematode worm), and Saccharomyces cerevisiae (baker's yeast). To peer into the remote realms of exceptional longevity we studied very large cohorts. Fig. 3. Age trajectories of death rates (48). (A) Death rates from age 80 to 122 for human females. The red line is for an aggregation of 14 countries (Japan and 13 Western European countries) with reliable data, over the period from 1950 to 1990 for ages 80 to 109 and to 1997 for ages 110 and over (49). The last observation is a death at age 122, but data are so sparse at the highest ages that the trajectory of mortality is too erratic to plot. Although the graph is based on massive data, some 287 million person-years-at-risk, reliable data were available on only 82 people who survived past age 110. The exponential (Gompertz) curve that best fits the data at ages 80 to 84 is shown in black. The logistic curve that best fits the entire data set is shown in blue (16). A quadratic curve (that is, the logarithm of death rate as a quadratic function of age) was fit to the data at ages 105 and higher; it is shown in green. (B) Death rates for a cohort of 1,203,646 medflies, Ceratitis capitata (17). The red curve is for females and the blue curve for males. The prominent shoulder of mortality, marked with an arrow, is associated with the death of protein-deprived females attempting to produce eggs (51). Until day 30, daily death rates are plotted; afterward, the death rates are averages for the 10-day period centered on the age at which the value is plotted. The fluctuations at the highest ages may be due to random noise; only 44 females and 18 males survived to day 100. (C) Death rates for three species of true fruit flies, Anastrepha serpentina in red (for a cohort of 341,314 flies), A. obliqua in green (for 297,087 flies), and A. ludens in light blue (for 851,100 flies), as well as 27,542 parasitoid wasps, Diachasmimorpha longiacaudtis, shown by the thinner dark blue curve. As for medflies, daily death rates are plotted until day 30; afterward, the death rates are for 10-day periods. (D) Death rates for a genetically homogeneous line of Drosophila melanogaster, from an experiment by A.A.K. and J.W.C. The thick red line is for a cohort of 6338 flies reared under usual procedures in J.W.C.'s laboratory. The other lines are for 17 smaller cohorts with a total of 7482 flies. To reduce heterogeneity, eggs were collected over a period of only 7 hours, first instar larvae over a period of only 3 hours, and enclosed flies over a period of only 3 hours. Each cohort was maintained under conditions that were as standardized as feasible. Death rates were smoothed by use of a locally weighted procedure with a window of 8 days (52). (E) Death rates, determined from survival data from population samples, for genetically homogeneous lines of nematode worms, Caenorhabditis elegans, raised under experimental conditions similar to (53) but with density controlled (21). Age trajectories for the wild-type worm are shown as a solid red line (on a logarithmic scale given to the left) and as a dashed red line (on an arithmetic scale given to the right); the experiment included about 550,000 worms. Trajectories for the age-1 mutant are shown as a solid blue line (on the logarithmic scale) and as a dashed blue line (on the arithmetic scale), from an experiment with about 100,000 worms. (F) Death rates for about 10 billion yeast in two haploid strains: D27310b, which is a wild-type strain, shown in red; and EG103 (DBY746), which is a highly studied laboratory strain, shown in blue (34). Surviving population size was estimated daily from samples of known volume containing about 200 viable individuals. Death rates were calculated from the estimated population sizes and then smoothed by use of a 20-day window for the EG103 strain and a 25-day window for the D27310b strain. Because the standard errors of the death-rate estimates are about one-tenth of the estimates, the pattern of rise, fall, and rise is highly statistically significant. (G) Death rates for automobiles in the United States, estimated from annual automobile registration data. An automobile "dies" if it is not re-registered (26, 54). The blue and dashed blue lines are for Chevrolets from the 1970 and 1980 model years; the red and dashed red lines are for Toyotas from the same years. [View Larger Version of this Image (29K GIF file)] For humans (Fig. 3A), death rates increase at a slowing rate after age 80. A logistic curve that fits the data well from age 80 to 105 indicates that death rates may reach a plateau (16). A quadratic curve fit to the data at ages 105+ suggests a decline in mortality after age 110. For four species of true fruit flies in two genera and for a parasitoid wasp (Fig. 3, B and C), death rates rise and then fall. The data on medflies (Fig. 3B) generated considerable controversy when published because it was generally believed that for almost all species mortality inexorably increases at ages after maturity (9, 17). Previously unpublished data on three species from a different genus and a species from a different order (Fig. 3C) demonstrate that mortality decline is not unique to medflies. Theories of aging will have to confront the vexing observation of mortality decline. Mortality deceleration can be an artifact of compositional change in heterogeneous populations (18). Previously unpublished Drosophila data (Fig. 3D) demonstrate that a leveling off of death rates can occur even when heterogeneity is minimized by rearing genetically homogeneous cohorts under very similar conditions. The mortality trajectories for C. elegans (Fig. 3E) are based on data from experiments more extensive than earlier ones. The trajectory for the wild-type strain decelerates when about a quarter of the cohort is still alive, similar to observations for Drosophila. For age-1 mutants mortality remains low throughout life, which demonstrates that simple genetic changes can alter mortality schedules dramatically. Data from about 10 billion individuals in two strains of S. cerevisiae were used to estimate mortality trajectories (Fig. 3F). Because the yeast were kept under conditions thought to preclude reproduction, death rates were calculated from changes in the size of the surviving cohort. Although they need to be confirmed, the observed trajectories suggest that for enormous cohorts of yeast, death rates may rise and fall and rise again. The trajectories in Fig. 3 differ greatly. For instance, human mortality at advanced ages rises to heights that preclude the longevity outliers found in medflies (3, 16, 17). Such differences demand explanation. But the trajectories also share a key characteristic. For all species for which large cohorts have been followed to extinction (Fig. 3), mortality decelerates and, for the biggest populations studied, even declines at older ages. A few smaller studies have found deceleration in additional species (19). For humans, the insects, and the worms, the deceleration occurs at ages well past normal reproductive ages. If older individuals contribute to the reproductive success of younger, related individuals, then they promote the propagation of their genes. Hence, in social species, the effective end of reproduction may be much later than indicated by fertility schedules (20). The deceleration of human mortality, however, occurs after age 80 and the leveling off or decline after age 110, ages that were rarely if ever reached in the course of human evolution (8) and ages at which any reproductive contribution is small. In our early experiments, flies and worms were held in containers, with the density of living individuals declining with age. To check whether mortality deceleration could be an artifact of such changes in crowding, we held density constant--and still observed deceleration (21). Biodemographic Explanations It is not clear how to reconcile our two key findings--that mortality decelerates and that human mortality at older ages has declined substantially--with theory about aging. The proximate and ultimate causes of postreproductive survival are not understood (12, 22). Theories that leave "non-zero late survival ... unexplained" are unsatisfactory (13). Three biodemographic concepts--mortality correlation, heterogeneity in frailty, and induced demographic schedules--point to promising directions for developing theory. Mortality correlation. Demographers have long known that death rates at different ages are highly correlated across populations and over time (23). In addition to environmental correlation, there may be genetic correlation: Mutations that raise mortality at older ages may do so at younger ages as well, decreasing evolutionary fitness (12). A pioneering Drosophila experiment found mortality correlation and no evidence of mutations with effects only at late ages (24). Postreproductive life-spans might be compared with postwarranty survival of equipment (25). Although living organisms are vastly more complex than manufactured products, they too are bound by mechanical constraints that may impose mortality correlations. The trajectory of mortality for automobiles (Fig. 3G) decelerates, suggesting the possibility that both deceleration and mortality correlation are general properties of complicated systems (26). Heterogeneity in frailty. All populations are heterogeneous. Even genetically identical populations display phenotypic differences. Some individuals are frailer than others, innately or because of acquired weaknesses. The frail tend to suffer high mortality, leaving a select subset of survivors. This creates a fundamental problem for analyses of aging and mortality: As a result of compositional change, death rates increase more slowly with age than they would in a homogeneous population (18). The leveling off and even decline of mortality can be entirely accounted for by models in which the chance of death for all individuals in the population rises at a constant or increasing rate with age (18). A frailty model applied to data on the life-spans of Danish twins suggests that mortality for individuals of the same genotype and with the same nongenetic attributes (such as educational achievement and smoking behavior) at some specified age may increase even faster than exponentially after that age (27). On the other hand, mortality deceleration could result from behavioral and physiological changes with age. Verification of the heterogeneity hypothesis hinges on empirical estimation of the variation in frailty within a population. If at specified ages cohorts of Drosophila (or some other species) could be subjected to a stress that killed the frail and left the survivors neither weaker nor stronger, then comparison of the trajectories of mortality for the stressed cohorts with the trajectories for control cohorts would reveal the degree of heterogeneity (28). In practice, however, stresses generally weaken some survivors and strengthen others. Experiments with multiple intensities of stress, including nonlethal levels, may permit experimental estimates of heterogeneity in frailty. Induced demographic schedules. A key construct underlying evolutionary theory is the Lotka equation, which determines the growth rate of a population (or the spread of an advantageous mutation) given age schedules of fertility and survival (29). The simplistic assumption in the Lotka equation that fertility and survival schedules are fixed is surely wrong for most species in the wild: Environments in nature are uncertain and changing (30). Many species have evolved alternative physiological modes for coping with fluctuating conditions, including dauer states (C. elegans), stationary phase (yeast), diapause (certain insects), and hibernation. In social insects the same genome can be programmed to produce short-lived workers or long-lived queens (9). That is, alternative demographic schedules of fertility and survival can be induced by environmental conditions. To reproduce medflies need protein--and this is only occasionally available in the wild. Medflies fed sugar and water can survive to advanced ages and still reproduce when fed protein. Regardless of when medflies begin reproducing, their subsequent mortality starts low and rises rapidly. This is a striking example of how, depending on the environment, organisms can manipulate their age-specific fertility and survival (31). In nematodes, exposure to nonlethal heat shock or other stresses early in life induces increases in both stress resistance and longevity (32). In Drosophila, stress can also produce increases in subsequent longevity, attributable in part to the induction of molecular chaperones (33). Deletion of the RAS2 gene in S. cerevisiae doubles the mean chronological life-span of yeast in stationary phase (34). RAS2 mutants exhibit striking similarities to long-lived nematode mutants, including increases in stress resistance (32, 34). Rodents raised on restricted diets have extended life-spans and increased resistance to environmental carcinogens, heat, and reactive oxidants (35). These findings suggest that stress-related genes and mechanisms may affect longevity across a broad range of species (32-35). In sum, induced physiological change can lower mortality substantially. There is also evidence for physiological remolding to cope with damage in organisms (9, 36). An individual does not face fixed fertility and survival schedules, but dynamically adopts alternative schedules as the environment and the individual's capabilities change. For this and other reasons (30, 37), Lotka-based evolutionary theory needs rethinking. Post-Lotka equations should incorporate "grandparental and multigenerational terms, ... homeostatic feedback and fluctuating environments" (37), as well as induced demographic schedules. Although simplistic, the Lotka equation captures a fundamental insight: It is reproductive success that is optimized, not longevity. Deeper understanding of survival at older ages thus hinges on intensified research into the interactions between fertility and longevity (19, 31, 38). Survival Attributes The concepts of mortality correlation, heterogeneity in frailty, and induced demographic schedules can be tied together by a general question: How important are an individual's survival attributes (that is, persistent characteristics, innate or acquired, that affect survival chances) as opposed to current conditions in determining the chance of death? For humans, nutrition and infections in utero and during childhood may program the development of risk factors for several important diseases of middle and old age (39). Conflicting evidence suggests that current conditions may affect old-age survival chances much more than conditions early in life (2, 40). A frailty model applied to Danish twin data sheds some even-handed light on this controversy. The model suggests that about 50% of the variation in human life-spans after age 30 can be attributed to survival attributes that are fixed for individuals by the time they are 30; a third to a half of this effect is due to genetic factors and half to two-thirds to nongenetic survival attributes (related to, for example, socioeconomic status or nutritional and disease history). The model suggests that the importance of survival attributes may increase with a person's life expectancy. For persons who at age 30 can expect to survive into their 90s, more than 80% of the variation in life-span may be due to factors that are fixed by this age (41). How many survival attributes account for most of the variation in life-spans? The number required to "survive ad extrema" may be "hundreds, not tens-of-thousands" (37); research over the next decade may resolve this question. For nematode worms and yeast, the mutation of a single gene can result in a qualitative change in the age trajectory of mortality (Fig. 3E) (34). For other species, including Drosophila and humans, no genes with such radical demographic effects have yet been discovered, but some polymorphisms, such as ApoE alleles in humans, alter substantially the chance of surviving to an advanced age (42). The emerging field of molecular biodemography seeks to uncover how variation at the microscopic level of genetic polymorphisms alters mortality trajectories at the macroscopic level of entire populations. Analyses of data on Danish twins and other populations of related individuals indicate that 20 to 25% of the variation in adult life-spans can be attributed to genetic variation among individuals; heritability of life-span is also modest for a variety of other species (43). The possibility that genetic polymorphisms may play an increasing role with age is supported by evidence of increases with age in the genetic component of variation in both cognitive and physical ability (44). Although genes and other survival attributes are fixed for individuals, their distribution in a cohort changes with age as the frail die. Hence, it is possible to develop survival attribute assays based on demographic analysis of changes with age in the frequency of fixed attributes. In longitudinal research in progress, we are gathering information on lifestyle and environmental conditions as well as DNA from 7000 Chinese octogenarians and nonagenarians, 3000 Chinese centenarians, and 14,000 elderly Danes. Survival-attribute assays applied to these data may uncover a suite of genetic and nongenetic determinants of longevity. 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Science 281: 996-998 [Abstract] [Full Text] From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 8 01:37:55 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 7 Aug 2005 21:37:55 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Founders.net: The Determinants of Health from a Historical Perspective Message-ID: The Determinants of Health from a Historical Perspective http://www.founders.net/fn/papers.nsf/0/4d32bc73b6c6532c852565bb00716270?OpenDocument OUR CONCEPTIONS OF THE DETERMINANTS of health change periodically. At certain times socioeconomic factors have figured predominantly in policy-making; at other times the emphasis has been largely on identifying the causes of disease and treating the sick. Theories about the determinants of health--indeed, the definition of health--necessarily affect how illness is defined, what public policies are initiated, and how resources are allocated. The National Health Services was introduced in the United Kingdom in 1948. At that time, it was believed that the gradient in health across the social classes (the highest social class had the lowest mortality rates, and the lowest social classes had the highest mortality rates) would be decreased if the financial barriers to health care were removed.^1 Similar arguments were used when Canada introduced its national insurance program for health-care services nearly two decades later. In the 1970s the Merrison Royal Commission on the National Health Service in the United Kingdom^2 was surprised to find that the gradient in mortality across social classes had actually widened even though mortality rates had continued to fall. In 1977, the Labour government established a research group, headed by Douglas Black, the Chief Scientist in the Department of Health and Social Security, to look more broadly at the factors influencing health. A major conclusion of this compelling report, often referred to as the "Black Report,"^3 was that, while health care contributed to improved health and well-being, there were socioeconomic factors of equal or greater importance in determining health and well-being. These factors were primarily causing the gradient in health across social classes. The publication of the "Black Report" unleashed a vigorous and, at times, acrimonious debate and a deluge of studies. Black's working group was itself split over how resources should be allocated to reduce the inequalities in health. As Sir Douglas Black explained: We were all agreed that education and preventive measures, specifically directed towards the socially deprived, were necessary. But the sociological members of the group (Townsend and Smith) considered that the consequent expenditure should be obtained by diversion from the acute services. On the other hand the medical members-- and that means both of us (Black and Morris)--felt that the acute services played a vital part in the prevention of chronic disability and could not be further cut back without serious effects on emergency care, on the training of doctors for both hospital Work and for family practice and on the length of waiting lists. We spent a long time, without real success, trying to resolve this matter.^4 The relative importance of investments in health care versus investments in other determinants of health is still an unresolved issue. The "Black Report," recent population-based epidemiological studies, and new insights from medical science have begun to give us a better understanding of how socioeconomic factors influence the health and well-being of populations.^5 Some quite striking perspectives have emerged from recent studies of the records in Western countries over the last three hundred years. The early period of our history provides some insights about our changing social environments and health. PRE-INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION Ester Boserup has provided an informative account of hunter- gatherer societies and the Agricultural Revolution.^6 The hunter- gatherer societies had limited supplies of food and were constantly moving. Since only a small number of young children could be coped with under such conditions, birth spacing, infanticide, and short life expectancy constrained population growth. These groups, in addition to being affected by changes in food sources, were also exposed to physical hazards, predators, and, presumably, in certain environments, to pathogens. The basic social structure of the hunter-gatherer societies was the troop or tribe (usually fewer than one hundred individuals). Because the groups were so small, there was a great deal of social interaction and support. Since social support appears to influence health and well-being,^7 the individuals in these simple social units may not have suffered from the negative effects on health of social deprivation that are found in societies today. A different social framework emerged in the agricultural evolutionary stage, about ten thousand years ago, and began what some have called our experiment with civilization. Populations became less nomadic. New social environments with hierarchies were created through the establishment of farming communities and towns. Mechanisms for the control of land, food production, irrigation systems, and organization of labor evolved to ensure that these more complex systems could work. These new social orders did not have the collective, communal aspects of the hunter-gatherer societies. As Boserup points out, many hunter-gatherer societies stayed away from the new order to protect their communal form of existence. It has been suggested that hunter-gatherer societies knew of the technologies necessary for agriculture long before the development of agriculture. In the towns and cities that emerged, the quality of the water supply and sanitation systems became factors influencing health. The increased population density created extreme vulnerability to any new infectious agent that swept into the population. In addition, wars were largely fought over controlling the sources of food and its distribution. In this period, as today, war often contributed to famine and epidemics. Although medicine emerged as a profession during this period, the causes of disease were poorly under- stood and therapies were limited in their effectiveness. Despite these factors, there was steady population growth: from approximately 10 million in 8000 B.C. to approximately 750 million in A.D. 1750. Towards the end of this period insight into socioeconomic policies and the health of populations was gained. In the sixteenth century the authorities in England recognized that famines were man-made rather than natural disasters. Food was available, but the lower classes could not gain access to it.^8 The state interfered and surplus food was supplied to the poor. This intervention angered farmers, producers, and merchants and contributed to the grievance against Charles I and the Civil War. After the revolution the new government abandoned the Tudor-Stuart program of food relief. This policy change subjected England to nearly two centuries of periodic famines. For the poorer members of the population, food riots became common. The issue was not food production, but distribution. After the Industrial Revolution, the government reinstated the old Tudor-Stuart program. One of the criticisms that has been raised about the role of better nutrition in the improved health of populations is the observation that prior to the Industrial Revolution the peerage in England had the same mortality rate as the general population even though they had access to abundant supplies of food.^9 One explanation is that an abundance of food did not ensure that the upper-class children had a better diet than the general population.^10 After the Industrial Revolution, and its associated cultural and' social changes, the life expectancy and height (a measure of the adequacy of nutrition during childhood) of the peers increased rapidly, while those of the general population lagged behind. Interestingly, a health gradient between the peers and the rest of the population emerged only after the Industrial Revolution. THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION Although there were many technological innovations that affected socioeconomic development following the Agricultural Revolution, a major change occurred when it became possible to harness fossil fuels as a source of energy. Prior to this, slaves or serfs were used for most physical labor. Unfortunately, there is little data detailing the differences in the health and well-being of serfs and slaves versus those who were more privileged before the Industrial Revolution. As Rosenberg and Birdzell have emphasized, the Industrial Revolution was associated with vastly enhanced prosperity for Western societies, which led to better health, the disappearance of slavery and serfdom, and the development of democracy and universal surfrage.^11 During this period we find a substantial improvement in health and a dramatic rise in population. The world population has increased from approximately 750 million in 1750 to nearly 6 billion today. The decline in mortality rates over the past 150 years is one of the great triumphs in human history. A UN report in 1953 attributed the trend to four factors: 1) public health measures; 2) advances in medical knowledge and therapeutics; 3) improved personal hygiene; and 4) improved standards of living.^12 McKeown and Brown, attempting to better understand why health improved, explored factors influencing the major decline in mortality rates in the United Kingdom after 1840.^13 They found that the bulk of the change in mortality rates could not be explained through medical intervention because there were no effective treatments for the major causes of death during most of this period. Furthermore, a large decline in mortality from airborne diseases could not be easily explained by the improved water and sanitation systems at the end of the 1800s. McKeown's conclusion was that the decrease in mortality was due to improved prosperity and nutrition.^14 Critics pointed out that while McKeown's argument about improved nutrition was obviously part of the story, he gave too little credit to public health measures and medicine. He also did not account for discrepancies, such as why the mortality rate of infants and young children in the United Kingdom did not begin to fall until 1900 when the decline in death from tuberculosis started much earlier.^15 Reves showed that the increase in child spacing that occurred in the United Kingdom around the beginning of this century was sufficient to increase the median age of exposure, and thus decrease susceptibility, to infectious diseases.^16 In earlier societies, child spacing was, in part, driven by culture, population density, access to resources, and survival of the society. The dynamics of the practice of child spacing cannot be determined by a simple formula. However, increased birth spacing has been shown to have a positive effect on a nation's health. Improved water systems and sanitation greatly decreased the number of deaths due to waterborne diseases. The greatest decline occurred during the latter part of the nineteenth century, when water and sanitation systems in Britain were improved. Also in the nineteenth century, the hygiene movement and its public health accomplishments^17 reversed the deterioration of the British environment that was associated with the growth of urban centers during the Industrial Revolution. The socially conscious citizens of an increasingly prosperous society drove their economic and political institutions to improve the urban environment, thereby improving health and well-being for the society. Following McKeown's pioneering work, Fogel^18 and others^19 have provided new evidence about the relation between improved nutrition and changes in mortality rates during the Industrial Revolution. They shifted attention from famine (only a small factor in preindustrial mortality rates} to chronically poor or inadequate nutrition as a determinant of health. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, national food production in countries like England and France was not sufficient to provide adequate nourishment to the lower class. The bottom 20 percent of the labor force took in enough calories to stay alive but not enough to do much work.^20 In addition, undernourishment led to weakened immune systems and increased vulnerability to infectious diseases^21 Height and weight measurements have long been used as a means of better understanding the relationship between nutritional status and mortality. An individual's height in adulthood reflects the effects of the nutritional experience during the growing years, including the fetal period. Height at maturity is inversely associated with risk of chronic diseases and dying in the later stages of adult life.^22 Weight represents the balance between nutrition in adult life and energy demands. The association of height with adult mortality rates reveals not the effect of adult nutrition but of nutritional levels (and disease history) from conception to maturity. Individuals who are poorly nourished or overnourished in adult life show higher mortality rates than individuals who maintain an ideal weight for height. However, short men who maintain an ideal weight are at a greater risk of death than are taller men.^23 Height is determined by genetic factors and nutrition, and the relative importance of each in explaining individual variation in height is still being debated. However, population mean height over time, which is used in these population studies, is primarily determined by environmental factors.^24 In Western countries, where records are available, the improvement in nutritional status during infancy and childhood, as estimated by changes in the mean height of the populations, is associated with a decline in mortality rates. Examination of English and American data has shown that Americans achieved mean heights and levels of life expectancy by the middle of the eighteenth century which were not achieved by the British upper classes until the beginning of the twentieth century.^25 The evidence from these studies also shows that the lower classes in England did not show a marked increase in height until this century. Countries in which access to nutritious food varies by social class, for whatever reasons, tend to show class gradients in height and health status. In countries that have a high degree of income equity and equitable access to good food, height differentials by socioeconomic class have largely disappeared.^26 The historical records since the Industrial Revolution show fluctuations in mean heights in populations in Western countries that appear to be related to socioeconomic factors such as the state of the economy, income distribution, and the effects of urbanization. These studies of the relationship between poor nutrition during early life and health and well-being in later life have shown that chronic health problems are more common among short or stunted men than among tall men.^27 Rejection rates for recruits into the Union army in the US Civil War, based on medical conditions, were, coincidentally, inversely correlated with the height of the potential recruits. Fogel^28 notes that individuals in the last century who survived into the later stage of adult life were not freer of chronic disease than are persons of the same age today. He makes the point that reliance on cause-of-death information has led to a significant misrepresentation of the distribution of health conditions and an un- fortunate separation of the epidemiology of chronic diseases from contagious diseases. Poor development during early life, as a result of poor nutrition, not only increases the risk of dying from contagious diseases, it also increases the likelihood of chronic disorders in adult life. The evidence also indicates that this phenomenon is not disease-specific, but is related to the development of the immune system and other organ systems.^29 A historical analysis of the influences of economic growth and improved prosperity on health and well-being is constrained by the limited information available. Thus, while the case for improved nutrition, particularly during childhood, seems clear, the role of other factors, such as better nurturing of children, the environments in which individuals live and work, and other socioeconomic factors-, cannot be readily determined. More recent studies have begun to show the roles of these other factors. COMPETENCE, COPING SKILLS, AND HEALTH AND WELL-BEING The strong and pervasive relationship between an individual's place in the social structure of society and his health status is striking. Kitagawa and Hauser showed compelling evidence of different rates of mortality according to socioeconomic class in the United States between 1930 and 1960.^30 For several major causes of death, the rates were highest for the lower social classes. Even though the mortality rates in the United States have continued to decline, the social gradient in health, as measured by levels of income and education, is still present and the differences in mortality rates have widened.^31 This suggests that the widening in mortality rates is related to changing socioeconomic circumstances, such as increasing inequalities in income, education, and housing, a falling standard of living for a large segment of the US population, and limited access to health care for the poor and least educated. Although life expectancy has improved for all social classes in the United Kingdom for the last sixty years, the gradient in social class mortality has been widening.^32 In contrast, in Scandinavian countries the gradient in health has not widened and life expectancy has increased for all social classes.^33 It has recently been reported that the mortality rate for the lowest social class in Sweden is less than that for the top social class in the United Kingdom.^34 One of the best studies of the relation between socioeconomic factors and the health of the middle class is the Whitehall civil service study. This longitudinal study provides direct measures of the health of individuals against their position in a well-defined job hierarchy.^35 A striking finding from this study is the clear social gradient in health. As in larger population studies,^36 among those lower in the hierarchy there was found to be a higher risk of death from coronary heart disease, strokes, cancer, gastrointestinal disease, accidents, and suicides. The Whitehall study reported that the risk of dying of a heart attack for those in the bottom tier was more than 2.5 times that of the top tier. Marmot has shown that adjusting for conventional risk factors, such as cholesterol, blood pressure, and smoking, accounts for about 25 percent of the civil service social gradient in coronary heart disease. The remainder of the risk is related to factors in the social environments in which those in the civil service live and work. What in the social environment influences our vulnerability to a wide range of diseases and has an effect equal to or greater than more conventional risk factors? Since the civil service is largely a middle-class population, the "something" that influences health is not affecting some underprivileged minority, but is affecting a larger population. There are many beneficial medical interventions available today for sick or injured individuals. There are also a number of interventions of questionable benefit. In the Whitehall study, it was concluded that differences in medical care could not account for the three-fold differences in mortality among civil servants.^37 The Whitehall study also shows that life-style (e.g., smoking) is strongly influenced by an individual's position in the social hierarchy. The study also reinforced a key conclusion from the historical analysis: the mean height of the civil servants, in each job classification, correlates with position in the job hierarchy, sickness-absence rate, and risk of dying.^38 An individual's sense of achievement, self-esteem, and control over his or her work and life appears to affect health and well- being. Studies in Sweden have shown that individuals in high demand jobs who see themselves as having little control over their work have a much higher incidence of coronary heart disease than do people in similar jobs who believe they have control.^39 Similarly, the Whitehall study found that a high proportion of people in the lower tiers of the civil service feel they have less control of their work than do individuals in the top tiers of the civil service.^40 How competence and coping skills relate to vulnerability to disease may be explained by improved understanding of the links between the brain and the endocrine pathways and the immune system.^41 We now understand some of the biological pathways through which individuals, coping with the demands of the environment in which they live and work, can influence the host defense system and disease expression. One set of animal experiments found that a friendly, supportive environment influences the process of diet-induced atherosclerosis. In these studies, two groups of rabbits were fed a cholesterol-rich diet. Those that were treated kindly (i.e., had music played to them) had 60 percent fewer incidences of atherosclerosis than those given the usual laboratory treatment.^42 Another research group working with monkeys found that an unstable social environment can accelerate coronary artery atherosclerosis, and that animals in the Same colony, fed the same high cholesterol diets, show very different degrees of coronary artery occlusion depending upon their position in the hierarchy of the group.^43 Emerging evidence from fields such as psychology and the neuro- sciences points to how nurturing or stimulation influence brain development, particularly when it is most plastic.^44 The modifications and connections that are formed among the billions of cells in the cerebral cortex occur very rapidly during the first few months of life and continue throughout childhood. The development of the brain is strongly influenced by the quality of the nourishment and nurturance given to infants and children. The stimuli affect not only the number of brain cells in the cortex and the number of connections among them, but also the way the nerve cells are "wired." The stages in the development of the brain appear to be linked so that events early in life affect the development and function of the brain at later stages. In addition, in adverse environments activated stress hormones can have a negative effect on brain development and can damage neurons, leading to permanent defects in memory and learning.^45 Studies have suggested that children who were better nurtured in early life are healthier and do better in adult life.^46 There is evidence from studies in animals ranging from rats to nonhuman primates that show that this relationship exists.^47 This new understanding of the mind-body influence on disease expression also has relevance to some of the earlier observations. Could the post-1900 improvement in infant mortality in Britain^48 have been due, in part, to the link between breast-feeding and immune system responses, including the mother's early response to antigens in the infant's saliva? A mother, who is in circumstances that she has difficulty coping with and whose mind-body dynamics are suppressing her immune capability, may not be adequately building the defenses of the child she is feeding. McKeown observed the steady decline throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in mortality from tuberculosis, a disease which affects primarily children and young adults.^49 We know that tuberculosis is influenced not only by family age, structure, and crowding but also by host response capability, which may well be affected by the social environment as well as adequacy of nutrition. Thus, it may be that the increased prosperity and control people had over their lives after the Industrial Revolution, accompanied by improved nutrition, increased the population's host defense capabilities and this inhibited expression of the disease. The relationship among the nervous system, the endocrine system, and the immune system is emerging as a pathway that can help our understanding of the changes in health which are associated with changing social and economic conditions. People's positions in the hierarchy of a society, the degree of control they enjoy, and the adequacy of their diet appear to be important factors in determining vulnerability to a wide range of diseases. The relationship between the quality of nurturing and adequacy of nutrition in early childhood and health risks in adult life has implications not only for health policies but for policies concerning the competence and coping skills of the population (human capital). This is a key factor in determining economic growth. We need to better understand how economic forces influence the quality of social environments and human development. Countries with major improvements in health status and less in- equality in health tend to be countries that are prosperous and have a high degree of social and income equity, and a small proportion of children living in poor social environments. Are societies that are more coherent or communitarian in character likely to provide better environments for health than are extremely individualistic, fragmented societies? How does economic growth and prosperity determine the quality of social environments? ECONOMIC GROWTH, PROSPERITY, AND HEALTH AND WELL-BEING In a recent essay on economic growth, The Economist said: "true enough, economists are interested in economic growth. The trouble is that, even by their standards, they have been terribly ignorant about it. The depth of that ignorance has long been their best kept secret."^50 A key issue has been the inability of the theoretical frame- work of neoclassical economics to cope with the role of technological innovation as an endogenous force in economic growth. The new framework of understanding of the determinants of economic growth, that embraces the role of technological innovation,^51 makes it important to understand better the relationships between technological innovation, economic growth, and the effects of these changes on society. In his analysis of the improvements in the health of populations since the Industrial Revolution, Fogel points out that technological innovation can be a mixed blessing for populations that have to live through the associated socioeconomic changes^52 For example, there have been periods of technological change and vigorous economic growth which produced limited, if any, improvements in the health status of the populations.^53 As Sen has pointed out, how societies create and distribute their wealth determines the health and well-being of the population.^54 In periods of profound technological change, with associated changes in wealth creation and distribution, individuals, particularly the young, will be at risk. Changes since World War II in Eastern Europe and Japan illustrate this relationship. The decline in the economies of Eastern Europe has been associated with a decline in the health status of the populations while the improved prosperity of Japan has been associated with a marked improvement in health status. In a recent analysis for the World Bank on the decline in health status in Eastern Europe, Hertzman concluded that, in addition to the deterioration in the physical environment, a strong factor seems to be the deterioration in the quality of the social environment in which families live and work.^55 In contrast, the extraordinary improvement in the health of the Japanese^56 is associated with enhanced prosperity and what appears to have been a remarkable ability to sustain the quality of social environments and reasonable income equity throughout the society. Wilkinson has found in his analysis of a number of Western countries that life expectancy is correlated with the degree of in- come equity in the society.^57 A recent study of Northern England showed a widening inequality in health that was linked to increasing income inequality.^58 How societies create and distribute the resources necessary to sustain their populations is a fundamental question. Adam Smith concluded that there were sectors of the economy that produced the wealth that made other activities in society possible. Smith described these sectors in his chapter entitled "Of the Accumulation of Capital, or of Productive and Un-Productive Labour:" The labour of some of the most respectable orders in the society is, like that of menial servants, unproductive of any value, and does not fix or realise itself in any permanent subject, or vendible commodity, which endures after that labour is past, and for which an equal quantity of labour could afterwards be procured. The sovereign, for example, with all the officers both of justice and war who serve under him, the whole army and navy, are unproductive labourers. They are the servants of the public, and are maintained by a part of the annual produce of the industry of other people. Their service, how honourable, how useful, or how necessary soever, produces nothing for which an equal quantity of service can afterwards be procured. The protection, security and defence of the commonwealth, the effect of their labour this year will not purchase its protection, security, and defence for the year to come. In the same class must be ranked, some both of the gravest and most important, and some of the most frivolous professions: churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters of all kinds, players, buffoons, musicians, opera-singers, opera-dancers etc.^59 The new understanding of the factors determining economic growth has implications for Smith's splitting of the economy into productive and nonproductive labor. Since both sectors are important to a society, the productive labor section can be considered the primary wealth-creating sector (the engine of economic growth) and the other sector, the secondary wealth-creating component (the quality of the environment in which we live and work). When the primary wealth-creating sector falters, the income that flows to the secondary sector decreases, with associated changes in our social environment that can reduce our quality of life. The old economic theory tended to treat all outputs in the economy as being equal in wealth creation. The new concept clearly brings out the importance of a better understanding of a healthy primary wealth-creating sector and the synergy between this sector and the secondary wealth- creating sector. Many activities in the secondary sector, like some aspects of education, health care, and the support of children, are key parts of the infrastructure for all innovative economies. Britain is regarded by many as a nation that has failed to make investments during this century in new technologies on the scale necessary to maintain its wealth-creating capacity, and its economy has fallen behind those of other developed countries.^60 An interesting question is how many of the inequalities in health in the United Kingdom, particularly in the regions of major economic decline,^61 are products of the failure to invest in the key technological innovations that determine economic growth? Krugman makes the point that the United States has two major problems: slow growth in productivity and rising poverty.^62 To increase the nation's wealth through enhanced productivity, ideas, and innovation is key. To help control expenditures, he points out, it is necessary to make the nation's health-care system more cost- effective. In a sense, we are back to the debate in the "Black Report" concerning the need to allocate resources wisely in the secondary wealth-creating sector of our economies. In Canada this debate has become part of the policy considerations concerned with health in the provincial governments.^63 In Manitoba, the new Centre for Health Policy and Evaluation has shown from its analysis of the records of their health-care system^64 (a proxy for the health status of the population) that there is a clear gradient in health against measures of social deprivation. It is not lack of access to health care that is setting this gradient but the underlying social economic factors (unemployment, income, and education) as in Marmot's study of the Whitehall civil service. As might be expected, the most deprived part of the population places the greatest demands on the health-care system. Manitoba is trying to confront the need for reallocation of resources, from the least appropriate health-care expenditures to the social needs of the population in greatest difficulty, particularly children in poverty. As Sen has pointed out, it is not the level of wealth a country has that improves the health of the population, but its commitment to allocate resources to key sectors, such as mothers and children, education, and adequate nutrition.^65 Canada, for the past twenty years, has not been creating sufficient wealth to sustain its consumption in the public and private sectors. Consequently, it has borrowed to maintain its standard of living, leading to the largest external debt per capita (private and public sector) in the developed world.^66 Canada faces the challenge of trying to sustain its social systems, including health care, social support, and education with diminished resources while simultaneously trying to rebuild the economy. To sustain quality social environments with diminished resources is a difficult task. It is possible that societies with high-quality social capital will be better able to adjust than will fragmented individualistic societies. Societies that have a strong, coherent sense of what is important, and a collective will, will probably be most successful. Putnam's description of what constitutes "civic societies" appears to be important in this regard.^67 It is time to integrate our understanding of the determinants of health and the determinants of economic growth. Governments and their societies are mistaken to concentrate on the economics of business cycles rather than the long-term forces affecting economic growth, prosperity, and health and well-being. Fogel has concluded that 50 percent of the economic growth in Britain since the Indus- trial Revolution has been due to better nutrition of the population.^68 A society that handicaps large segments of its population during periods of major technological change may be handicapping its future economic growth. We now have a better understanding of the relationships among economic growth, prosperity, and health and well-being, and the need for a long-term, integrated perspective on the determinants of health and economic growth. Can we make intelligent and wise use of this understanding? ENDNOTES 1 William Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services (New York: Macmillan, 1942). 2 Great Britain Royal Commission on the National Health Service, "Report of the Royal Commission on the National Health Service (The Merrison Report)" (London: HMSO, 1979). 3. Douglas J. Black, Cyril Smith, and Peter Townsend, Inequalities in Health: The Black Report (New York: Penguin Books, 1982). Since the contribution of socio- economic factors was not a thesis the Thatcher government wished to have widely publicized, the government only allowed 260 copies of the report to be published. It was subsequently published by Penguin Books under the title Inequalities in Health. 4. Ibid. 5. Margaret Whitehead, The Health Divide (London: Health Education Council, 1987). 6. Ester Boserup, Population and Technological Change (Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 1981). 7. Lisa Berkman and S. Leonard Syme, "Social Networks, Host Resistance, and Mortality: A Nine-Year Follow-up Study of Alameda County Residents," American Journal of Epidemiology 109 (2) ( 1979): 186 -204. 8. Robert W. Fogel, "The Conquest of High Mortality and Hunger in Europe and America: Timing and Mechanisms," in David Landes, Patrice Higgonet, and Henry Rosovsky, eds., Favorites of Fortune: Technology, Growth and Economic Development Since the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991 ). 9. Robert W. Fogel, "Nutrition and the Decline in Mortality since 1700: Some Preliminary Findings in Long-Term Factors in American Economic Growth," in Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, eds., Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 41 (Chicago, II1.: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 10. The quality of early childhood nutrition can set health risks in adult life. See David J.P. Barker, Fetal and Infant Origins of Adult Diseases (London: BMJ, 1992). 11. Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell, How the West Grew Rich (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1986). 12. The United Nations, The Determinants and Consequences of Population Trends, Population Studies no. 17 (New York: United Nations Publication, 1953). 13. Thomas McKeown and R. G. Brown, "Medical Evidence Related to English Population Changes in the Eighteenth Century," Population Studies 9 (1955): 119- 41. 14. Thomas McKeown, The Modern Rise of Population (New York: Academic Press, 1976). 15. Randall Reyes, "Declining Fertility in England and Wales as a Major Cause of the Twentieth Century Decline in Mortality," American Journal of Epidemiology 122 (1985): 112-26; Simon Szreter, "The Importance of Social Intervention in Britain's Mortality Decline c. 1850-1914: A Re-interpretation of the Role of Public Health," The Society for the Social History of Medicine 1 (1988): l-17. 16. Reyes, "Declining Fertility in England and Wales as a Major Cause of the Twentieth Century Decline in Mortality." 17. Ibid. Anthony S. Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain, report on Public Health and Social Conditions (London: J. M. Dent, 1983). 18. Robert W. Fogel, "Economic Growth, Population Theory, and Physiology: The Bearing of Long-Term Processes in the Making of Economic Policy," working paper no. 4638 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, April 1994). 19. Edward A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1954-1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). Patrick Galloway, "Differentials in Demographic Responses to Annual Price Variations in Pre-Revolutionary France: A Comparison of Rich and Poor Areas in Rouen, 1681-1787," European Journal of Populations 2 (1986): 269-305. Zvi Eckstein, Paul T. Schultz, and Kenneth I. Wolpin, "Short-Run Fluctuations in Fertility and Mortality in Pre-industrial Sweden," European Economic Review 26 (1985): 297-317. Alfred Perrenoud, "The Mortality Decline in a Long-Term Perspective," in Tommy Bengtsson, Gunnar Fridlizius, and Roll Ohlsson, eds., Pre-lndustrial Population Change (Stockholm: Almquist and Wikseli, 1984), 41-69. 20. Wohl, Endangered Lives. Public Health in Victorian Britain. Herman Freudenberger and Gaylord Cummins, "Health, Work, and Leisure Before the Industrial Revolution," Explorations in Economic History 13 (1976): 1-12. 21. Ranjit Kumar Chandra, "Nutrition and Immunity: Lessons from the Past and New Insights into the Future," ( 1990 McCollum Award Lecture) American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 53 (1991): 1087-102. 22. Wohl, Endangered Lives. Public Health in Victorian Britain. Michael G. Marmot, Martin J. ShipIcy, and Geoffrey Rose, "Inequalities in Death--Specific Explanations of a General Pattern?," Lancet I (1984): 1003-1006. Hans T. Waaler, "Height, Weight and Mortality: The Norwegian Experience," Acta Medica Scandinavica suppl. 679 (1984): 1-51. A. Meridith John, The Plantation Slaves of Trinidad, 1783-1816: A Mathematical and Demographic Inquiry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 23. Wohl, Endangered Lives. Public Health in Victorian Britain. Marmot et al., "Inequalities in Death--Specific Explanations of a General Pattern?." 24. Wohl, Endangered Lives. Public Health in Victorian Britain. 25. Fogel, "The Conquest of High Mortality and Hunger in Europe and America: Timing and Mechanisms." 26. Go H. Bruntland, Knut Liestl, and Lars Walle, "Height, Weight, and Menarcheai Age of Oslo Schoolchildren During the Last 60 Years," Annals of Human Biology 7 (1980): 307-22. 27. Wohl, Endangered Lives. Public Health in Victorian Britain. Chandra, "Nutrition and Immunity: Lessons from the Past and New Insights into the Future." 28. Fogel, "The Conquest of High Mortality and Hunger in Europe and America: Timing and Mechanisms." 29. Barker, Fetal and Infant Origins of Adult Diseases. 30. Evelyn Mac Kitagawa and Philip M. Hauser, Differential Mortality in the United States: A Study in Socioeconomic Epidemioiogy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973). 31. Gregory Pappas, Susan Queen, Wilbur Hadden, and Gail Fisher, "The Increasing Disparity in Mortality Between Socioeconomic Groups in the United States, 1960 and 1986," New England Journal of Medicine 329 (1993): 103-109. 32. George Davey-Smith, Mel BartIcy, and David Blanc, "The Black Report on Socio- economic Inequalities in Health 10 Years On," BM] 301 (1990): 373-77. 33. Whitehead, The Health Divide. Eero Lahelma and Tapani Valkonen, "Health and Social Inequalities in Finland and Elsewhere," Social Science and Medicine 31 (1990): 257-65; Jonathan S. Feinstein, "The Relationship between Socioeconomic Status and Health: A Review of the Literature," The Milbank Quarterly 71 (1993): 279; Denny Vagero and Olle Lundberg, "Health Inequalities in Britain and Sweden," Lancet I1 (1989): 35. 34. Feinstein, "The Relationship between Socioeconomic Status and Health: A Review of the Literature." 35. Chandra, "Nutrition and Immunity: Lessons from the Past and New Insights into the Future." Michael G. Marmot, "Social Inequalities in Mortality: The Social Environment in Class and Health," in Richard G. Wilkinson, ed., Class and Health (London: Tavistock Publications, 1986), 21-34. Michael G. Marmot, George Davey-Smith, Stephen Stansfeld et al., "Health Inequalities Among British Civil Servants: The Whitehall II Study," Lancet I (1991): 1387-393. Fiona North, S. Leonard Syme, Amanda Feehey, Jennifer Head, Martin J. ShipIcy, and Michael G. Marmot, "Explaining Socio-Economic Differences in Sickness Absence: The Whitehall II Study," BM] (1993). 36. Vera Carstairs and Russell Morris, Deprivation and Health In Scotland (Scotland: Aberdeen University Press, 1991). 37. Chandra, "Nutrition and Immunity: Lessons from the Past and New Insights into the Future." 38. Ibid. 39. Robert Karasek and Totes Theore!l, Health Vi7ork: Stress, Productivity, and the Reconstruction of Working Life (New York: Basic Books, 1990). 40. Michael G. Marmot and Tores Theorell, "Social Class and Cardiovascular Disease: The Contribution of Work," International Journal of Health Services 18 (1988): 659-74. 41. Seymour Reichlin, "Neuroendocrine-Immune Interactions," New England ]ournal of Medicine 329 (1993): 1246. Robert M. Sapolsky, Stress, The Aging Brain, and the Mechanisms of Neuron Death (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992). 42. Robert M. Nerem, Murina J. Levesque, and J. Fredrick Cornhill, "Social Environment as a Factor in Diet-induced Atherosclerosis," Science 208 (1980): 1475. 43. Jay R. Kaplan, Stephen B. Manuck, Thomas B. Clarkson, and Robert W. Prichard,"Animal Models of Behavioral Influences on Atherogenesis," Advanced Behavioral Medicine 1 (1985): 115. 44. Carnegie Corporation of New York, "Starting Points, Meeting the Needs of Your Youngest Children," report of the Carnegie Task Force on Meeting the Needs of Young Children (New York: Carnegie Corporation of New York, 1994). Gerald D. Fischbach, "Mind and Brain," Scientific American 267 (1992): 48 -57. 45. Reichlin, "Neuroendocrine-Immune Interactions." Kaplan et al., "Animal Models of Behavioral Influences on Atherogenesis." 46. Kristina Orth-Gomer and Jeffrey V. Johnson, "Social Network Interaction and Mortality: A Six Year Follow-Up Study of a Random Sample of the Swedish Population," Journal of Chronic Diseases 40 (10) (1987): 949-57. 47. Ibid. Stephen J. Soumi, "Adolescent Depression and Depressive Symptoms: Insights from Longitudinal Studies with Rhesus Monkeys," Journal of Youth and Adolescence 20 (1991): 273- 87. 48. McKeown, The Modern Rise of Population. 49. McKeown and Brown, "Medical Evidence Related to English Population Changes in the Eighteenth Century." 50. "Economic Growth, Explaining the Mystery," The Economist (4 January 1992}: 15-18. 51. Richard G. Lipsey, Giobalisation, Technological Change and Economic Growth (Ireland: Northern Ireland Economic Council Report, July 1993). 52. Fogel, "The Conquest of High Mortality and Hunger in Europe and America: Timing and Mechanisms." 53. Ibid. 54. Amartya Sen, "The Economics of Life and Death," Scientific American (May 1993): 40 - 47. 55. Clyde Hertzman and Wendy Ayers, "Environment and Health in Central and Eastern Europe," Report for the World Bank, No. 12270-ECA, 1993. 56. Michael G. Marmot and George Davey-Smith, "Why are the Japanese Living Longer?" BMJ 299 (1989): 1547-51. 57. Richard G. Wilkinson, "Divided We Fall," BMJ 308 (1994): 1113; Richard G. Wilkinson, "National Mortality Rates: The lmpact of Inequality?," American Journal of Public Health 82 (1992): 1082. 58. Peter Phillimore, Alastair Beattie, and Peter Townsend, "Widening Inequality of Health in Northern England, 1981-91," BMJ 308 (1994): 1125. 59. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Everyman's Library, Alfred A. Knopf, lnc., 1910). 60. Bernard Elbaum and William Laxonick, eds., The Decline o[tbe British Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Ralf Dahrendorf, On Britain (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1982). 61. Michael Eames, Yoav Ben-Shlomo, and Michael G. Marmot, "Social Deprivation and Premature Mortality: Regional Comparison Across England," BMJ 307 (1993): 1097. 62. Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity, Economic Sense and Nonsense in the Age of Diminished Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1994). 63. Nurturing Health: A Framework on the Determinants of Health" (Toronto: Premier's Council on Health Strategy, Government of Ontario, 1991). 64. Norman Frohlich and Cameron Mustard, Socio-Economic Characteristics (Winnipeg: Manitoba Centre for Health Policy and Evaluation, 1994). 65. Sen, "The Economics of Life and Death." 66. Peter J. Nicholson, "Competitiveness and the Canadian Economy" (Toronto: The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, 1992). 67. Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work, Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). 68. Fogel, "The Conquest of High Mortality and Hunger in Europe and America: Timing and Mechanisms." John W. Frank is Director of Research at the Institute for Work and Health, Toronto, and a Fellow of The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research's Population Health Program at the University of Toronto. ]. Fraser Mustard is President of The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Toronto, Canada. ..... [1]Show details for Doc Info Doc Info References 1. http://www.founders.net/fn/papers.nsf/0/4d32bc73b6c6532c852565bb00716270!OpenDocument&ExpandSection=2#_Section2 From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Mon Aug 8 04:49:54 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sun, 07 Aug 2005 22:49:54 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] Wiki: Golden Plates In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <42F6E472.20705@solution-consulting.com> Frank, I am not sure why you sent this, but it is a fair and balanced (Fox? Golden Plates - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Plates > [Links omitted for readability.] > > The Golden Plates is the name most frequently used to refer to the > "gold plates" that Joseph Smith, Jr. said he received from the angel > Moroni and used as the ancient source for the English translation of > The Book of Mormon. In reference to the plates, the Book of Mormon was > commonly known as the "Golden Bible" during the 1830s. Smith later > became the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement. > > Contents > > * 1 Story of the plates > + 1.1 Joseph obtains the plates > + 1.2 Palmyra, New York > + 1.3 Harmony, Pennsylvania > + 1.4 Translation > + 1.5 Special witnesses > + 1.6 Other spiritual witnesses > + 1.7 Plates returned to Moroni > * 2 Physical description > * 3 Other plates in the Latter Day Saint tradition > + 3.1 Criticisms > * 4 Plates outside of the Latter Day Saint tradition > > Story of the plates > > Joseph obtains the plates > > In the 1820s, Joseph Smith, Jr. lived with his father and mother > Joseph Sr. and Lucy Mack on a farm on the edge of Manchester Township > near Palmyra, New York. For a number of years prior to 1827, he > reported visitations from either an angel or a spirit, later > identified as a resurrected angel Moroni. According to Smith, Moroni > had been a Nephite, a member of one of the nations detailed in The > Book of Mormon. Moroni indicated that a record of his people, engraved > on gold plates, was deposited in a hill not far from the Smith farm > and that Smith would one day receive and translate them. > > In successive years, Smith would travel to the hill, now known as the > Hill Cumorah, but was forbidden to obtain the plates. Finally in late > September of 1827, at the age of 21, Smith claimed that he had finally > been allowed to receive the antique history. According to various > reports, he brought a "60-lb." object "wrapped up in a tow frock" into > his father's home (William Smith, "Sermon in the Saints' Chapel," > Deloit, Iowa June 8, 1888, Saints Herald 31 (1884):643-44). Besides > Joseph Jr., six of Joseph's siblings lived at home. According to > Joseph's brother William's account, their father put the plates into a > pillow case and asked "What, Joseph, can we not see them?" Joseph Jr. > replied, "No. I was disobedient the first time but I intend to be > faithful this time. For I was forbidden to show them until they are > translated, but you can feel them." Again, according to William's > account: > > "We handled them and could tell what they were. They were not > quite as large as this Bible. Could tell whether they were > round or square. Could raise the leaves this way (raising a few > leaves of the Bible before him). One could easily tell that > they were not a stone hewn out to deceive or even a block of > wood. Being a mixture of gold and copper, they were much > heavier than stone, and very much heavier than wood." > > Palmyra, New York > > Shortly after Smith claimed to receive the plates, rumors of their > presence began to circulate among the residents of Palmyra. Several of > Smith's neighbors made attempts to find and seize the plates, leading > Joseph, Jr. (the translator) to keep them hidden and to operate in > great secrecy. > > Smith's associate, Josiah Stowell, later claimed that he was the first > person to receive the plates from Smith's hands. Stowell handled and > lifted the plates which remained wrapped in a cloth that resembled a > cloak or a pillow case. Other associates of Smith who reported that > they handled the plates through the cloth included Smith's mother, > Lucy Mack Smith, and his brothers Hyrum and William. > > Soon after acquiring the plates, Smith locked them in a box he > procured from his brother Hyrum. Some of Smith's neighbors discovered > the box's hiding place and smashed it. Meanwhile, however, Smith > claimed a premonition had previously caused him to move the plates to > a safer spot. (Joel Tiffany, Tiffany's Monthly 5 (1859): 167). Smith > then acquired a wooden "Ontario glass-box". The plates were placed > into this second box which was then nailed shut. Several witnesses > reported lifting the plates while the were sealed in the box. Martin > Harris recalled that his wife and daughter had lifted them and that > they were "about as much as [his daughter] could lift". Harris then > went to the Smith house himself while Joseph was away. Harris later > recalled: > > "While at Mr. Smith's I hefted the plates, and I knew from the > heft that they were lead or gold, and I knew that Joseph had > not credit enough to buy so much lead." (Tiffany's Monthly 5 > (1859): 168-69). > > Harmony, Pennsylvania > > Excitement around the Palmyra area and growing opposition encouraged > Smith to relocate to his father-in-law's farm in Harmony, > Pennsylvania. According to Smith's brother-in-law, who helped Smith > and his wife Emma move, the box containing the plates was placed "into > a barrel about one-third full of [dry] beans"; after the plates were > so secured, the barrel was filled up with more beans. > > Residents of Harmony also reported encounters with the plates, either > sealed in the box or covered by a cloth. Smith's brother-in-law Isaac > Hale recalled that he was "shown a box, in which it is said they were > contained, which had, to all appearances, been used as a glass box of > the common sized window glass." Hale said that he "was allowed to feel > the weight of the box, and they gave me to understand that the book of > plates was then in the box -- into which, however, I was not allowed > to look." (Isaac Hale Statement, reprinted in Dan Vogel, Early Mormon > Documents IV:286.) > > Translation > > Emma later recalled that "she often wrote for Joseph Smith during the > work of translation..." (Joseph Smith III to James T. Cobb, Feb. 14, > 1879, Letterbook 2, pp. 85-88, RLDS Archives, courteously shared with > Richard Lloyd Anderson by Smith family scholar Buddy Youngreen). By > her account: > > "The plates often lay on the table without any attempt at > concealment, wrapped in a small linen table cloth, which I had > given him to fold them in. I once felt of the plates as they > thus lay on the table tracing their outline and shape. They > seemed to be pliable like thick paper, and would rustle with a > metallic sound when the edges were moved by the thumb, as one > does sometimes thumb the edges of a book." (Saints' Herald 26 > (1879):290) > > Special witnesses > > As Smith and his associates neared the end of their translation of the > plates, Smith revealed that a number of special witnesses would be > called to testify of the reality of the Golden Plates. There are two > sets of witnesses: the Three Witnesses and the Eight Witnesses. Both > sets of witnesses signed joint statements in June of 1829 which were > subsequently published along with the text of the Book of Mormon. > > The Three Witnesses -- Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin > Harris -- claimed to have seen an angel descend from heaven and > present the plates. They claimed to have seen the plates but not touch > them. They heard a voice from heaven declaring that the book was > translated by the power of God and that they should bear record of it. > > The Eight Witnesses were members of the families of Joseph Smith and > David Whitmer. Like the Three Witnesses, the Eight signed a joint > statement in June 1829. Many of these men had previously handled the > plates either when they were in one of the boxes or wrapped in a > cloth. According to their statement, they also saw and hefted the > plates, "the translator of this work, has shown unto us the plates of > which hath been spoken, which have the appearance of gold; and as many > of the leaves as the said Smith has translated we did handle with our > hands; and we also saw the engravings thereon, all of which has the > appearance of ancient work, and of curious workmanship." > > Other spiritual witnesses > > Mary Whitmer, the wife of Peter Whitmer, Sr., also reported seeing the > plates in supernatural or visionary experiences (see Investigating the > Book of Mormon Witnesses by Richard Lloyd Anderson). She said she saw > the angel Moroni, conversed with him, and was shown the gold plates as > a comfort and testimony to her while she kept house for a large party > during the translation work (Peterson, H. Donl. Moroni: Ancient > Prophet, Modern Messenger. Bountiful, Utah, 1983. pp. 114, 116). Most > of her immediate family was directly involved with Joseph Smith and/or > the translation. > > Plates returned to Moroni > > After the work of translation was complete and after the visionary > experiences of the Special Witnesses, Smith reported that the plates > were returned to Moroni in the summer of 1829. Many Latter Day Saints > believe that Moroni returned the plates to the Hill Cumorah and that > other ancient records lie buried there. > > Physical description > > Smith said Moroni used the term "gold plates" rather than "golden > plates." Smith's brother William believed that the plates were "a > mixture of gold and copper." Other witnesses said the plates had the > "appearance of gold" and were sheets of metal about 6 inches wide by 8 > inches high and somewhat thinner than common tin. The plates were said > to be bound together with three rings, and made a book about 6 inches > thick. Reports from Smith and others who lifted the plates (while > wrapped in cloth or contained within a box) agree that they weighed > about 60 pounds. > > In his famous letter to Chicago Democrat publisher John Wentworth > ([1]), Smith wrote: > > "These records were engraven on plates which had the appearance > of gold, each plate was six inches [150 mm] wide and eight > inches [200 mm] long, and not quite so thick as common tin... > The volume was something near six inches [150 mm] in thickness, > a part of which was sealed." These plates are typically > referred to as the "gold plates" or other similar phrases. > > William Smith (Joseph's brother) wrote in an 1883 account: > > "I was permitted to lift them as they laid in a pillow-case; > but not to see them, as it was contrary to the commands he had > received. They weighed about sixty pounds [22 kg if troy > pounds, 27 kg if avoirdupois] according to the best of my > judgment." > > Other plates in the Latter Day Saint tradition > > In addition to the Golden Plates, there are several other mentions of > ancient records recorded on metal plates in the Latter Day Saint > tradition. > > The text of the Book of Mormon itself refers to several other sets of > plates: > * The brass plates -- originally owned by Laban, containing the > writings of Old Testament prophets up to the time shortly before > the Babylonian Exile, as well as the otherwise unknown prophets > Zenos and Zenoch, and possibly others. > > * The plates of Nephi (sometimes the "large plates of Nephi") -- the > source of the text abridged by Mormon and engraved upon the Golden > Plates. > > * The small plates of Nephi -- the source of the First Book of > Nephi, the Second Book of Nephi, the Book of Jacob, the Book of > Enos, the Book of Jarom, and the Book of Omni, which replaced the > lost 116 pages. > > * The twenty-four plates found by the people of Limhi containing the > record of the Jaredites, translated by King Mosiah and abridged by > Moroni as the Book of Ether. > > In addition to plates relating to the Book of Mormon, Smith acquired a > set of 6 plates known as the Kinderhook Plates in 1843. > > James J. Strang, one of the rival claimants to succeed Smith also > claimed to discover and translate a set of plates known as the Voree > Plates. > > Criticisms > > A criticism involves the descrepancy concerning the weight of the > plates. If the plates were of pure gold, 60 pounds would be a very low > for an estimate of its weight. > > Dan Vogel writes: > > A block of solid tin measuring 7 x 8 x 6 inches, or 288 cubic > inches, would weigh 74.67 pounds. If one allows for a 30 > percent reduction due to the unevenness and space between the > plates, the package would then weigh 52.27 pounds. Using the > same calculations, plates of gold weigh 140.50 pounds; copper, > 64.71 pounds; a mixture of gold and copper, between 65 and 140 > pounds. (Vogel, The Making of a Prophet, 600) > > While this does not cast doubt on the existence of the plates, it > challenges the assumption that they were pure gold. Referring to > Smith's statement that the plates "had the appearance of gold," some > have speculated that the metal of the plates was tumbaga, the name > given by the Spaniards to a versatile alloy of gold and copper which > could "be cast, drawn, hammered, gilded, soldered, welded, plated, > hardened, annealed, polished, engraved, embossed, and inlaid." > > Tumbaga can be treated with a simple acid like citric acid to dissolve > the copper on the surface. What is then left is a shiny layer of > 23-karat gold on top of a harder, more durable copper-gold alloy > sheet. This process was widely used by the pre-Columbian cultures of > central America to make religious objects. > > Tumbaga plates of the dimensions Joseph Smith described would weigh > between fifty-three and eighty-six pounds. > > With the lack of physical evidence today, the Golden Plates remain > solely an article of faith rather than an actual artifact or religous > relic. > > Plates outside of the Latter Day Saint tradition > > Other cultures have kept records on metal plates, and those found to > date have been extremely thin, so as to facilitate their being > engraven into with a pointed utensil. For utilitarian reasons alone, > to make it both easier and feasible, the plates would need to be thin > enough to allow depressions to be made into them simply by applying > pressure, rather than having to scratch and dig as thicker plates > would necessitate. Michael R. Ash points to the discovery of objects > made from tumbaga, a gold-copper alloy in South America. He writes > that using this alloy would make the plates more rigid and lighter. > [2] This claim is congruent with William Smith's idea (cited above) > that the plates might be part gold and part copper. Orichalcum, the > legendary metal of Atlantis and the Temple of Solomon, is held by many > to match this same description. In 500 B.C (concurrent with the Book > of Mormon), Darius the Great of Persia inscribed his history on a gold > plate and sealed it in a stone box in the temple at Persepolis. [3], > [4]. > > The BBC wrote a news story about a six page gold book on display in > Bulgaria. This is claimed to be the world's oldest multiple-page book. > The book is written in the lost Etruscan language. Unique book goes on > display. > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Aug 9 01:38:32 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2005 18:38:32 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] "Zero Energy Homes" Message-ID: <01C59C48.61477AE0.shovland@mindspring.com> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8852127/site/newsweek/ Aug. 15, 2005 issue - Nicholas and Loan Gatai used to cringe when they received power bills that routinely topped $200. Last September the Sacramento, Calif., couple moved into a new, 1,500-square-foot home in Premier Gardens, a subdivision of 95 "zero-energy homes" just outside town. Now they're actually eager to see their electric bills. The grand total over the 10 months they've lived in the three-bedroom, stucco-and-stone house: $75. For the past two months they haven't paid a cent. Almost unknown outside California, ZEH communities are the leading edge of technologies that might someday create houses that produce as much energy as they consume. Premier Gardens, which opened last summer, is one of a half-dozen subdivisions in California where every home cuts power consumption by at least 50 percent, mostly by using low-power appliances and solar panels. Several more are under construction this year, including the first ZEH community for seniors. Aside from the bright patch of solar modules on the roof, Premier Gardens looks like a community of conventional homes. But inside, it's clear why they save energy. "Spectrally selective" windows cut power bills by blocking solar heat in the summer and retaining indoor warmth in cold weather. Fluorescent bulbs throughout use two thirds the juice of incandescents. A suitcase-size tankless hot-water heater in the garage, powered by gas, saves energy by warming water only when the tap is turned on. The rest of the energy savings comes from the solar units. Set flush with the roof tiles, the two-kilowatt photovoltaic panels unobtrusively turn the sun's rays into AC power with the help of an inverter in the garage. An LED readout shows the system's electrical output. Just looking at it can give owners a warm feeling. "When I pull into the garage, sometimes I just like to look at the Sunny Boy [inverter] to see how much power we've generated," says homeowner Kurt Gonzales, whose family bought a 2,200-square-foot house. In ZEHs, the solar production doesn't just feed the home it serves. If the panels are generating more power than the home is using-when the house is empty during a sunny day-the excess flows into the utility's power grid. Gonzales and other residents are billed by "net metering": they pay for the amount of power they tap off the grid, less the kilowatts they feed into it. If a home generates more power in one month than it uses, the bill is zero. That sounds like a bad deal for the power company, but it's not. The Sacramento Municipal Utility District's solar expert Mike Keesee says that's because solar homes produce the most power on the hot sunny afternoons when everyone rushes home to turn up the air conditioner. "It helps us lower usage at peak power times," says Keesee. "That lets us avoid building costly plants or buying expensive power at peak usage time." Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Tue Aug 9 03:04:17 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Mon, 08 Aug 2005 21:04:17 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] "Zero Energy Homes" In-Reply-To: <01C59C48.61477AE0.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C59C48.61477AE0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <42F81D31.1070502@solution-consulting.com> It is interesting that I used those tankless water heaters when I lived in Argentina in 1966-67. They were kind of spooky, sitting right by the shower. They sounded like a jet taking off, when I started to shower, they'd roar into life. Lynn Steve Hovland wrote: > A suitcase-size tankless hot-water heater in the garage, >powered by gas, saves energy by warming water only when the tap is turned >on. > > > From checker at panix.com Thu Aug 11 21:18:12 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2005 17:18:12 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: The Rise of the Digital Thugs Message-ID: The Rise of the Digital Thugs New York Times, 5.8.7 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/business/yourmoney/07stalk.html By TIMOTHY L. O'BRIEN EARLY last year, the corporate stalker made his move. He sent more than a dozen menacing e-mail messages to Daniel I. Videtto, the president of MicroPatent, a patent and trademarking firm, threatening to derail its operations unless he was paid $17 million. In a pair of missives fired off on Feb. 3, 2004, the stalker said that he had thousands of proprietary MicroPatent documents, confidential customer data, computer passwords and e-mail addresses. Using an alias of "Brian Ryan" and signing off as "Wounded Grizzly," he warned that if Mr. Videtto ignored his demands, the information would "end up in e-mail boxes worldwide." He also threatened to stymie the online operations of MicroPatent's clients by sending "salvo after salvo" of Internet attacks against them, stuffing their computers so full of MicroPatent data that they would shut down. Another message about two weeks later warned that if he did not get the money in three days, "the war will expand." Unbeknownst to the stalker, MicroPatent had been quietly trying to track him for years, though without success. He was able to mask his online identity so deftly that he routinely avoided capture, despite the involvement of federal investigators. But in late 2003 the company upped the ante. It retained private investigators and deployed a former psychological profiler for the Central Intelligence Agency to put a face on the stalker. The manhunt, according to court documents and investigators, led last year to a suburban home in Hyattsville, Md., its basement stocked with parts for makeshift hand grenades and ingredients for ricin, one of the most potent and lethal biological toxins. Last March, on the same day that they raided his home, the authorities arrested the stalker as he sat in his car composing e-mail messages he planned to send wirelessly to Mr. Videtto. The stalker has since pleaded guilty to charges of extortion and possession of toxic materials. What happened to MicroPatent is happening to other companies. Law enforcement authorities and computer security specialists warn that new breeds of white-collar criminals are on the prowl: corporate stalkers who are either computer-savvy extortionists, looking to shake down companies for large bribes, or malicious competitors who are trying to gain an upper hand in the marketplace. "It's definitely a growing issue and problem, and it's something we think will definitely increase in both the numbers and severity," said Frank Harrill, an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who specializes in computer crimes and who has investigated corporate stalkers and online extortionists. The reason, he said, is that "the Internet is ceasing to be a means for communication and commerce and is becoming the means for communication and commerce." Though the number of corporate stalkers appears to be growing - along with the number of payoffs to online extortionists - quantifying the dimensions of the threat is difficult. Last fall, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh published a study of online extortion involving small and medium-sized businesses, saying that the Internet's global reach had produced "a profound change in the nature of crime, as the existence of information systems and networks now makes criminal acts possible that were not before, both in increased scope and ease." THE study also concluded that while the threat of cyberextortion was real and mounting, data and research about the subject were scant. That is because most businesses, particularly blue-chip companies, are concerned about negative publicity from computer security breaches and do not want to report digital bullying and intrusions to law enforcement officials. "Cyberextortion was the main threat I identified that I thought corporations were overlooking," said Gregory M. Bednarski, the author of the Carnegie Mellon study, who now works at PricewaterhouseCoopers as a computer security consultant. "Unfortunately, I think that's still the issue - most companies are still not taking cyberextortion seriously enough. They just don't see themselves as vulnerable." MicroPatent, based in East Haven, Conn., realized firsthand how vulnerable its data was. The company was also an exception in the world of cyberextortion victims: it chose not only to fight back and to contact the authorities, but it also assembled its own team of specialists familiar with the strategies and weaponry of cybercriminals. Even so, MicroPatent's stalker, using hijacked Internet accounts and pirated wireless networks, was remarkably elusive. "What this means is that the criminals are getting smarter," said Scott K. Larson, a former F.B.I. agent and a managing director of Stroz Friedberg, a private investigation firm that helped hunt down MicroPatent's stalker. "There's an arms race going on in cyberspace and in cybercrimes." MicroPatent, a business that court papers describe as one of the world's largest commercial depositories of online patent data, first came under attack four years ago. Someone penetrated the company's databases and began transmitting phony e-mail messages to its customers. The messages were what are known as "spoofs," online communications - embroidered with pilfered company logos or names and e-mail addresses of MicroPatent employees - that are meant to trick recipients into believing that the messages were authorized. The spoofs, according to court papers and investigators, contained derogatory comments about MicroPatent in the subject lines or text. Some included sexually explicit attachments, such as sex-toy patents that a computer hacker had culled from the company's online files. MicroPatent and its parent company, the Thomson Corporation, did not respond to several phone calls seeking comment. But others with direct knowledge of the hunt for the company's stalker said MicroPatent, which had grown rapidly through acquisitions, had a computer network containing stretches of online turf that were once used by acquirees but were abandoned after the takeovers. Those digital back alleys offered access to the entire MicroPatent network to people with old passwords. Once inside, they could inhabit the network undetected - in much the same way that anyone with a key to one abandoned house on a block of abandoned houses can live in a populous city without anyone knowing he is there. And MicroPatent's stalker was lurking on one of its network's nether zones. By 2003, MicroPatent had become so frustrated with its unknown stalker that it reached out to the F.B.I. for help. But with its resources spread thin, the F.B.I. could not pin down the stalker's identity, his motivations or how he managed to trespass on MicroPatent's electronic turf. A year later, MicroPatent hired Stroz Friedburg and secured the services of Eric D. Shaw, a clinical psychologist who had once profiled terrorists and foreign potentates for the C.I.A. The first order of business, investigators said, was to narrow the field of MicroPatent's potential stalkers and to try to isolate the perpetrator. "You need to take the temperature of the person on the other side and determine how seriously you need to take them," said Beryl Howell, who supervised the MicroPatent investigation for Stroz Friedburg. "Is it a youngster or is it someone who's angry? Is it someone who's fooling around or someone who's much more serious?" Investigators said their examination of the stalker's communications indicated that he was much more than a hacker on a joy ride. That would be consistent with what law enforcement authorities and computer security specialists describe as the recent evolution of computer crime: from an unstructured digital underground of adolescent hackers and script-kiddies to what Mr. Bednarski describes in his study as "information merchants" representing "a structured threat that comes from profit-oriented and highly secretive professionals." STEALING and selling data has become so lucrative, analysts say, that corporate espionage, identity theft and software piracy have mushroomed as profit centers for criminal groups. Analysts say cyberextortion is the newest addition to the digital Mafia's bag of tricks. "Generally speaking, it's pretty clear it's on the upswing, but it's hard to gauge how big of an upswing because in a lot of cases it seems companies are paying the money," said Robert Richardson, editorial director of the Computer Security Institute, an organization in San Francisco that trains computer security professionals. "There's definitely a group of virus writers and hackers in Russia and in the Eastern European bloc that the Russian mob has tapped into." Mr. Richardson is a co-author of an annual computer-security study that his organization publishes with the F.B.I. The latest version said that while corporate and institutional computer break-ins increased slightly last year from 2003, average financial losses stemming from those intrusions decreased substantially in all but two categories: unauthorized access to data and theft of proprietary information. Among 639 of the survey's respondents, the average loss from unauthorized data access grew to $303,234 in 2004 from $51,545 in 2003; average losses from information theft rose to $355,552 from $168,529. The respondents suffered total losses in the two categories of about $62 million last year. While many cyberextortionists and cyberstalkers may be members of overseas crime groups, several recent prosecutions suggest that they can also be operating solo and hail from much less exotic climes - like the office building just down the street. In March, a federal judge in San Francisco sentenced a Southern California businessman, Mark Erfurt, to five months in prison, followed by three and a half years of home detention and supervised release, for hacking into the databases of a competitor, the Manufacturing Electronic Sales Corporation, and disrupting its business. In June, the F.B.I. in Los Angeles arrested Richard Brewer, a former Web administrator for a trade show company, accusing him of disabling his employer's Web site and threatening further damage unless he was paid off. And last month in New York, the Westchester County district attorney's office charged a Tarrytown businessman, Gerald Martin, with hacking into a competitor's computer network in order to ruin its business by tampering with its phone system. Small-fry stuff, some of this, except that even local law enforcement officials say the episodes are multiplying. "We have 590,000 people in our county, but we're seeing lots of examples of lax or lackadaisical computer security," said Sgt. Mike Nevil, head of the computer crimes unit of the Ocean County, N.J., prosecutor's office. "We've seen lots of examples of people going onto a competitor's computer network and clearing out whatever information they can get." For its part, MicroPatent initially believed that its problems were the work of a competitor. It sued one company that it suspected but later dropped that lawsuit. After Ms. Howell's team joined the fray in late 2003, MicroPatent and its consultants began to isolate the stalker, using a small list of candidates distilled from earlier investigative work. Dr. Shaw's analysis of e-mail messages led them to believe that they were tracking a technologically sophisticated man, older than 30, with a history of work problems and personal conflicts, who was compulsively obsessed with details and who might own weapons. The stalker was extremely angry and "holding a grudge," Dr. Shaw recalled. "People like that can be very dangerous. He referred to himself as a soldier behind enemy lines." Within a few weeks, Dr. Shaw's analysis led the investigative team to focus on Myron Tereshchuk, a 43-year-old Maryland entrepreneur who ran his own patent business and had once been rebuffed by MicroPatent when he applied to the company for a job. And Mr. Tereshchuk was indeed their man. Members of Ms. Howell's investigative team all said that Dr. Shaw's profiling was a breakthrough in the pursuit, but that without the subsequent involvement of local and federal law enforcement officials, Mr. Tereshchuk would not have been captured. "It's about grinding out a lot of data; it's not about intuition - though years of working clinically with patients is certainly important," Dr. Shaw said. "The Myron case involved a fair amount of case management because we needed to keep him talking, we needed to keep him engaged, so we could set him up for an arrest." Indeed, the detective work that led to his arrest offers a revealing glimpse into how the new cat-and-mouse game is played in cyberspace - especially when the cloak of secrecy offered by newfangled wireless devices makes digital criminals so hard to track. In early 2004, private investigators began corresponding with the stalker, sending spoofed e-mail back to him in the "voice" of a MicroPatent lawyer. At the same time, federal authorities began physically tracking Mr. Tereshchuk's comings and goings in the real world. By February, the stalker had also become an active e-mail correspondent with Mr. Videtto, the MicroPatent president. It was then that the stalker made a series of mistakes. Among them, he began to brag. In an e-mail message titled "Fire them all," he informed Mr. Videtto that he had found valuable MicroPatent documents by going "Dumpster diving to the Dumpster and recycle bins located in a parking lot on Shawnee Road" in Alexandria, Va., where the company maintained a branch office. That allowed investigators to zero in on his location, further buttressing the notion that Mr. Tereshchuk, who lived nearby, was the author of the scheme. In the same message, the stalker wrote angrily that staff members at the United States Patent and Trademark Office in northern Virginia had snubbed him and given preferential treatment to MicroPatent employees. Several years earlier, a patent office worker accused Mr. Tereshchuk of threatening to bomb the agency. A computer forensics expert embedded a Web bug, a kind of digital tracking device, in one of the e-mail messages that Mr. Videtto sent to the stalker. But the stalker screened his e-mail with decoding devices that included a hex editor, software that allows users to preview the contents of incoming files, and he uncovered the bug. "Was it a script to capture my IP address?" the stalker wrote tauntingly to Mr. Videtto after finding the Web bug, referring to his Internet Protocol address. "I'll look at it later with a hex editor." Investigators said the failed bug worried them because they thought it might scare off the stalker, but by this point Mr. Tereshchuk had already demanded his $17 million extortion payment. He also clumsily revealed his identity by demanding that the money be sent to the person accused of threatening to bomb the patent office. And he kept sending e-mail messages telling Mr. Videtto that he had MicroPatent's customer lists, patent applications, customer credit card numbers and the Social Security numbers of some employees, as well as the employees' birth dates, home addresses and the names of their spouses and children. The stalker also threatened to flood the computer networks of MicroPatent clients with information pilfered from the company, overwhelming the customers' ability to process the data and thereby shuttering their online operations - a surreptitious digital attack known as distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S. Such assaults, analysts and law enforcement officials say, have become a trademark of cyberextortionists. Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles are currently investigating a group of possible cyberextortionists linked to a television retailer indicted there last August. The retailer was accused of disrupting competitors' online operations, and prosecutors have called suspects in that case the "D.D.O.S. Mafia." "D.D.O.S. attacks are still one of the primary ways of extorting a company, and we're seeing a lot of that," said Larry D. Johnson, special agent in charge of the United States Secret Service's criminal division. "I think the bad guys know that if the extortion amounts are relatively low a company will simply pay to make them go away." Mr. Tereshchuk's apparent ability to start a D.D.O.S. attack attested to what investigators describe as his unusual technological dexterity, despite evidence of his psychological instability. It also explained how he was able to evade detection for years, and his methods for pulling off that feat surfaced after the F.B.I. began following him. Using wireless computing gear stashed in an old, blue Pontiac, and fishing for access from an antenna mounted on his car's dashboard, Mr. Tereshchuk cruised Virginia and Maryland neighborhoods. As he did so, federal court documents say, he lifted [3]Yahoo and America Online accounts and passwords from unwitting homeowners and businesspeople with wireless Internet connections. The documents also say he then hijacked the accounts and routed e-mail messages to MicroPatent from them; he used wireless home networks he had commandeered to hack into MicroPatent's computer network and occasionally made use of online accounts at the University of Maryland's student computer lab, which he had also anonymously penetrated. BY late February of last year, however, the F.B.I. had laid digital traps for Mr. Tereshchuk inside the student lab, which was near his home. As investigators began to close in on him, his e-mail messages to Mr. Videtto became more frantic. A note sent on Feb. 28 told Mr. Videtto that if he forked over the $17 million then "everything gets deactivated, sanitized, and life will go on for everybody." In his last e-mail message, sent several days later, he dropped his guard completely: "I am overwhelmed with the amount of information that can be used for embarrassment," he wrote. "When Myron gets compensated, things start to get deactivated." On March 10, 2004, federal agents swarmed Mr. Tereshchuk's home, where they found the hand-grenade components and ricin ingredients. The agents arrested him in his car the same day, in the midst of writing his new crop of e-mail messages to Mr. Videtto. Late last year, Mr. Tereshchuk was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to a criminal extortion charge filed by the United States attorney's office in Alexandria. Earlier this year he pleaded guilty to criminal possession of explosives and biological weapons, charges that the United States attorney's office in Baltimore had filed against him. Possessing illegal toxins carries a maximum term of life in prison. Mr. Tereshchuk is expected to be sentenced this fall. From checker at panix.com Thu Aug 11 21:18:34 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2005 17:18:34 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: On Lobotomy Message-ID: History of Medicine: On Lobotomy http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050812-6.htm The following points are made by Barron H. Lerner (New Engl. J. Med. 2005 353:119): 1) In the early 1900s, relatives frequently committed their loved ones to long stays in understaffed, overcrowded, and often filthy mental institutions. The therapeutic options for severe mental illness were quite limited. One option, the lobotomy, also known as leucotomy, was devised in 1935 by the Portuguese neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz (1847-1931). It involved drilling holes in the skull and using a blade to sever nerve fibers running from the frontal lobes to the rest of the brain. Moniz believed that psychiatric symptoms were caused by faulty nerve connections established over a period of years. If these nerves were severed and new connections were allowed to form, he postulated, patients' symptoms would improve. Lobotomies were originally used to treat patients with depression but were later often performed to treat schizophrenic patients suffering from agitation and paranoid delusions. 2) The principal US proponent of lobotomy was the neurologist Walter J. Freeman, of George Washington University Medical School. In June 1937, at the annual meeting of the American Medical Association, Freeman and his colleague James W. Watts, a neurosurgeon, presented data on 20 patients who had undergone lobotomy.{1,2] Their paper launched a fierce debate on the procedure. On the one hand, certain members of the medical profession consistently condemned it as brutal, unscientific, and harmful. This appears to have been the case with the 1941 lobotomy performed on Rosemary Kennedy, the mildly retarded sister of John F. Kennedy, whose cognitive functions were severely worsened by the operation. The negative image of lobotomy entered the popular culture through Ken Kesey's 1962 novel ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST and the movie based on it, in which the rebellious hero becomes nearly catatonic after undergoing the operation. 3) On the other hand, Freeman's data painted quite a different picture. The condition of 13 of the 20 patients, he and Watts claimed, had improved. In one case, a 63-year-old housewife who had had increasing anxiety and agitation for a year, they said, "now manages home and household accounts, enjoys people, attends theater, drives her own car."[2] Bolstered by such results, which were confirmed by later studies, Freeman's enthusiasm for lobotomy increased. In 1946, he devised the so-called transorbital lobotomy, in which he used a mallet to pound an ice pick through the patient's eye socket into the brain, then moved the pick around blindly to sever the nerve fibers. He traveled the world promoting his new procedure. 4) Certain physicians, especially those who treated the roughly 400,000 patients in state mental hospitals, embraced the lobotomy. So did the media, thanks in part to Freeman's showmanship. Tens of thousands of lobotomies were performed in the United States before the introduction of chlorpromazine and other neuroleptic medications made the operation all but obsolete by the 1960s. In 1949, Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for inventing the procedure. 5) One of the virtues of historical scholarship is its dynamism: each scholar, building on new information and insights, can revise the conclusions of earlier works. The first book to evaluate lobotomy, Elliot S. Valenstein's GREAT AND DESPERATE CURES,[3] was highly critical of Freeman and his operation, which Valenstein saw as providing a cautionary tale about overzealous physicians. Joel Braslow's MENTAL ILLS AND BODILY CURES argued that a major motivation for lobotomies was to create "apathetic, indifferent, and docile" patients who would be more compliant than they had been.[4] But Jack D. Pressman, in LAST RESORT, emphasized the importance of evaluating historical events within the context of their own time.[5] Although the notion of cutting brain tissue in order to make people submissive is repugnant from our modern perspective, the ability to discharge psychiatric patients even to a limited existence at home was perceived as a therapeutic triumph in the 1940s and 1950s. References: 1. El-Hai J. The lobotomist: a maverick medical genius and his tragic quest to rid the world of mental illness. New York: Wiley, 2005 2. Laurence WL. Surgery used on the soul-sick: relief of obsessions is reported. New York Times. June 7, 1937:1, 10 3. Valenstein ES. Great and desperate cures: the rise and decline of psychosurgery and other radical treatments for mental illness. New York: Basic Books, 1986 4. Braslow J. Mental ills and bodily cures: psychiatric treatment in the first half of the twentieth century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997 5. Pressman JD. Last resort: psychosurgery and the limits of medicine. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998 New Engl. J. Med. http://www.nejm.org -------------------------------- Related Material: ON THE FUNCTIONS OF THE HUMAN FRONTAL LOBES Notes by ScienceWeek: The human cerebral hemispheres (collectively termed the "cerebrum") represent 85 percent of the brain by weight, and for nearly two centuries one sustained research effort, involving a large number of researchers, has been to identify which parts of the cerebral hemispheres are involved with which mental functions. Such identifications must be made carefully and in context, since essentially every part of the brain is directly or indirectly connected to every other part, with all parts in principle capable of interaction. Still, for certain higher functions, a high degree of localization is apparent. Apart from their large size in humans, what is most evident about the human cerebral hemispheres is the high degree of convolution, a tortuous array of foldings of tissue, one consequence of which is an enormous increase in surface area. This increase in surface area is of some significance, since the entire convoluted surface of the hemispheres comprises a laminated rind of neurons and supporting cells approximately 2 millimeters thick, the rind called the "cerebral cortex". The total surface area of the cerebral cortex comprises approximately 1.6 square-meters, and it is within this relatively thin layer of neurons that most of the processing for the so-called "higher functions" is accomplished. The convolutions of the cerebrum thus make it possible to have an enormous number of neurons distributed in two dimensions in the cerebral cortex without the necessity for an excessively large head. Seen in toto, each cerebral hemisphere consists of 4 lobes: frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital (named after the bones under which they lie), and it has been the frontal lobe, the large fore-part of the brain, which has been the most mysterious in terms of function. The most functionally well-defined region of the frontal lobe is the "primary motor area", which lies at the border between the frontal lobe and the parietal lobe, and which is involved in the voluntary control of movement. The back part of the frontal lobe anterior to the motor region is called the "prefrontal region", and prefrontal cortex is apparently involved in planning complex cognitive behaviors. In recent years, "*functional imaging" techniques, which are essentially non-invasive and which can be used with healthy and awake human subjects, have become important new approaches to an old problem. In general, the human frontal cortex apparently helps mediate "working memory", a system that is used by the brain for temporary storage and manipulation of information, and that is involved in many higher cognitive functions. Working memory apparently includes two components: short-term storage (on the order of seconds), and executive processes that operate on the contents of storage. The following points are made by E.E. Smith and J. Jonides (Science 1999 283:1657): 1) The authors present a review of current research concerning the functions of the human frontal lobes as revealed by experiments using *positron emission tomography or *functional magnetic resonance imaging to image subjects while the subjects engage in cognitive tasks designed to reveal processes of interest. 2) The authors report that studies of storage indicate that different frontal regions are activated for different kinds of information: storage for verbal materials activates Broca's area (an area specialized for the production of language) and left-hemisphere prefrontal areas adjacent to primary motor cortex; storage of spatial information activates right-hemisphere prefrontal cortex adjacent to primary motor cortex; storage of object information activates other areas of prefrontal cortex. Selective attention and task management, two of the fundamental executive processes, both activate regions of prefrontal cortex. The authors conclude: "Neuroimaging analyses of executive processes are quite recent, and they have yet to lead to clear dissociations between processes. Perhaps the highest priority, then, is to turn further attention to executive processes and their implementation in frontal cortex." Science http://www.sciencemag.org -------------------------------- Notes by ScienceWeek: functional imaging: In general, in this context, the term "functional imaging" refers to any technique which images neural activity produced by specific behaviors (functions). positron emission tomography: Positron emission tomography is a technique for producing cross-sectional images of the body after ingestion and systemic distribution of safely metabolized positron-emitting agents. The images are essentially functional or metabolic, since the ingested agents are metabolized in various tissues. Fluorodeoxyglucose and H(sub2)O(sup15) are common agents used for cerebral applications, and in cerebral applications of central importance to the technique is the fact that changes in the cellular activity of the brains of normal, awake humans and unanesthetized laboratory animals are invariably accompanied by changes in local blood flow and also changes in oxygen consumption. functional magnetic resonance: Magnetic resonance imaging is a technique involving images produced by mobile protons of a tissue excited by the application of a magnetic field, and when used in functional cerebral imaging, the basis of the technique is that it images very small metabolic, blood-flow, and perfusion-diffusion changes in vivo, in real time, and with no risk to the subject. From checker at panix.com Thu Aug 11 21:18:43 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2005 17:18:43 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Counterpunch: Amina Mire: Pigmentation and Empire Message-ID: Amina Mire: Pigmentation and Empire: The Emerging Skin-Whitening Industry http://counterpunch.com/mire07282005.html [Thanks to Laird for this.] 5.7.28 By AMINA MIRE Skin-whitening or skin-bleaching is a practice whereby women (and some men) use various forms of skin-whitening products in order to make their skin appear as white as possible. As an anti-aging therapy, skin-whitening promises to "restore" as well as to"transform" the aging skins of women and make them smooth, wrinkle-free-younger-looking. In this context, the natural aging process is systematically framed as a pathological condition which must be interrupted through measures such as "elective surgery" and or by bleaching out the signs of aging such as "age spots." In this way, in the case of white women, skin-whitening is presented as a legitimate intervention designed to 'cure' and mitigate the disease of aging. Skin-whitening as a biomedical intervention is predicated on the pathologization of the natural aging processes in all women, white women in particular. At least in the United States, racially white eastern and southern European women have used skin-whitening in order to appear as 'white' as their 'Anglo-Saxon' "native" white sisters. In the United States, women of colour also have practiced skin-whitening. Many of the early skin-bleaching commodities such as Nodinalina skin bleaching cream, a product which has been in the US market since 1889, contained 10 per cent ammoniated mercury. Mercury is a highly toxic agent with serious health implications. According to Kathy Peiss , in 1930, a single survey found advertising for 232 different brand names of skin-bleaching creams promoted in mainstream magazines to mainly white women consumers in the United States. If dark skinned eastern and southern Europeans can "pass" for white with a little help from skin-bleaching creams, those with sufficiently light skin tones but who are legally categorized as racially black by their invisible " one drop" of "black blood", could also "pass" for white as well. The "appearance of whiteness" is the key to accessing the exclusive cultural and economic privileges whiteness accrues. The fear of the infiltration of "invisible' blackness has fuelled both the marketing strategies of industry and the anxieties of white women that they may not appear "white enough". Peiss writes: Dorothy Dignam's ads for Nadinola skin bleach and Nadine face power, appearing in mass circulation women's magazine, resurrected the Old South. "This line made in the South was largely sold to the Negro market; the advertising was a planned attempt to capture the white market also. Her paean to "the beauty secret of Southern women," featuring plantations, magnolia blossoms, and hoop-skirted bells, erased any hint of Nadinola's black clientele. Although usually rendered obliquely, racial prejudice was an explicit talking point for manufacturers Albert F. Wood: "A white person objects to a swarthy brown-hued or mulatto-like skin, therefore if staying much out of doors use regularly Satin Skin Vanishing Greaseless Cream to keep the skin normally white (Peiss 1998,150). But even though the anxiety of bearing the invisible mark of black blood has, in part, fuelled white women's skin-whitening practices, Peiss rejects the actual possibility that some women of colour may have passed for white by using skin-whitening creams. This is because, according to Peiss, African American women had "disabling" African features that would not allow them to pass for white. In this way, while skin-whitening helped 'dark skinned' eastern and southern European immigrant women to blend into the "secure" domain of whiteness, the racial border between whiteness and blackness is magically secured by the social and political order of the colour line. Women might purchase a skin whitener that covered and colored the skin and simultaneously disclaim its status as paint. For women of European descent, whitening could be absorbed within acceptable skincare routine and assimilated into the ruling beauty ideas, the natural face of white genteel womanhood-although, as Jessie Benton Fr?mont testified, one glance at the hands could undo this careful effort to naturalize artifice. For African Americans, the fiction was impossible: Whitening cosmetics, touted as cures for "disabling" African features, reinforced a racialized aesthetic through a makeover that appeared anything but natural. What these more than "skin deep," uniquely "disabling" African features were is not stated by Peiss. However, this crude insinuation hints at Peiss' refusal to entertain the possibility that skin-whitening may have been used not just by eastern and southern dark skinned women to "pass for Anglo-Saxons," but that women of colour who were sufficiently light skinned have also practiced skin-whitening in order to "pass" for white. Since appearing white is the "only game in town," there are no other grounds outside of appearance on which whiteness as an exclusive racial identity can be secured. Piess's historical documentation of the history of the formation and consolidation of the American beauty industry clearly demonstrates that skin-whitening has facilitated the "racial passing" of certain dark skinned women from eastern and southern Europe. In this context, the practice of skin-whitening is implicated in the American history of racial segregation and racial "passing." Peiss's analysis precludes the possibility of African Americans with light skins passing for white by using skin-whitening creams, while claiming that eastern and southern European women with "dark skin tones" could do so, implicitly offers skin-whitening as 'legitimate' when practicd by 'white' women and as 'illegitimate' and futile for women of colour. This is also the paradigm of much of the published medical literature on the health risks associated with the use of skin-whitening creams with toxic chemical agents. Even though white women have been using both lead and mercury based skin-whitening creams in order to whiten their faces and bodies for centuries, when it comes to warning the public about the dangers associated with this deadly practice, it is often the terribly damaged faces of women of colour which are used for visual illustration. For example, almost all the medical literature published by western medical and dermatology journals offer us women of colour as victims of the dubious desire for unattainable corporeal whiteness. This same unattainable desire is often reinforced with horrifying images of the damaged faces and bodies of women of color after using cheap skin-whitening creams containing toxic chemical agents such as ammoniated mercury, corticosteroids, and hydroquinone. The faces of Black South Africans permanently damaged by long-term use of Over-the-Counter (OTC) 2 per cent hydroquinone based skin-whitening cream. The emphasis on such 'health risks'has facilitated the production, and marketing around the world, of new and, conceivably, 'safer' but highly expensive skin-whitening commodities and combatant technologies. The emerging 'high-end' skin-whitening commodities are marketed mainly to affluent Asian women to modify skin tone, also to white women as anti-aging therapy. So, as one might might expect, race, class and gender dynamics inform the marketing strategy of the new skin-whitening corporate drive. The symbolic and literal 'whitening' of darker bodies still conditions the advertising rhetoric for skin-whitening products. In Africa, the practice of skin-whitening is traditionally associated with white colonial oppression . Those who practiced skin-whitening, were and are still condemned as self-hating dupes, suffering from an inferiority complex. Consequently, those engaging in this practice often do so covertly. So it is only when users of skin-whitening seek medical help from the devastating effects of bodily damage caused by the use of toxic skin-whitening creams that news about this practice gets to the public domain. Tsitsi Dangarembga's novel Nervous Conditions (1988) succinctly captures the contradiction between the colonizing effects of white supremacy and African women's yearning for respectability and idealized feminine aesthetics of beauty. Lucia was my mother's sister, several years younger than my mother and a wild woman in spite of or may be because of her beauty. She was dark like my mother, but unlike my mother her complexion always had a light shinning from underneath the skin, so she could afford to scoff at the skin-lightening creams that other girls used. The association in the above quote of girls with "bad skin" with the use of skin-lightening cream is interesting. On the one hand, it suggests that skin-whitening has a therapeutic function. On the other hand, it may be referring to one of the sinister side effects of the use of skin-whitening: the systemic darkening of the affected area of the skin due to the accumulation of toxic skin-whitening residue inside the skin called exogenous ochrinosis (cf.2). Currently, many African countries have banned the commercial trafficking of skin-whitening. However, skin-whitening products, including those containing highly toxic chemical agents, are currently aggressively marketed to white women in North America as "anti-aging therapy." It is not clear how 2 per cent hydroquinone based skin-whitening cream can cause a permanent disfigurement of African women's faces and bodies while 4 per cent hydroquinone based skin-whitening cream can be promoted to white women as anti-aging therapy. The following ad is for a skin-whitening cream called Lustra which contains 4 per cent hydroquinone. This is the same chemical agent which has caused the disfigurement of the South African woman in the above image and of countless other women around the world. This product is manufactured by a major US- based pharmaceutical company. Lustra skin-whitening cream is extensively promoted on internet shops, beauty salons and dermatology offices in the United States. The primary clientele of Lustra are white middle-class women Currently, transnational biotechnology, pharmaceutical and cosmetics corporations are engaged in the research and development and the mass marketing of a plethora of new forms of skin-whitening products which can "bleach-out" the "dark skin tones" of women of colour and can remove corporeal evidence of the aging processes, 'unhealthy life-style' and overall pollution from the skin of white women. In North America and Europe, the emerging high-end skin-whitening products have been promoted as new 'therapeutic' regimes which can 'cleanse,' 'purify' and 'regenerate' aging skin. Consequently, in North America and Europe, skin-whitening commodities aimed at white women are often sold under the bannerof 'anti-aging skincare.' In other parts of the world skin-whitening commodities are promoted to 'whiten' and 'brighten' the 'dark skin tones' of women of colour. This growing industry is a lucrative one whose reach is greatly facilitated by systematic use of the internet as the main medium for the dissemination of advertising messages for skin-whitening products and related technologies. Some of the leading transnational corporations engaged in the 'trafficking' of skin-whitening products have extensive e-business domains. Often these companies set up internet domains and e-shops in specific countries such as China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, just to name a few. In addition to such e-business sales drives, extensive use of the internet allows these corporations to avoid both the negative political implications and legal regulatory restrictions they could face if they were to openly promote skin-whitening commodities in North America and European markets. The 'ethnic' skin-whitening market around the world is decentralized as well being covert. This is because many of the skin-whitening products which target poor women, particularly black women, including women of colour living in North America and Europe, are relatively cheap but often contain highly toxic chemical agents such as mercury, hydroquinone and corticosteroids. In Europe and North America, the 'ethnic" skin-whitening products are usually sold in 'ethnic-oriented' grocery stores and "beauty" salons. Many of these low end' but toxic skin-whitening products are manufactured in the Third World and are imported both legally and illegally to North America and Europe. Even though the western health authorities are well aware of the health risks associated with these toxic skin-whitening products they have taken very littlem if any, action to control their importation or to regulate their sales. The other, more robust trend is the marketing of expensive skin-whitening products to affluent Asian women in living in Pacific Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, China, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and others. This represents the largest slice of the skin-whitening global market. Partly because of the covert nature of the trafficking and informal circulation of toxic skin-whitening commodities, it is hard to gain accurate estimates of the market share of the 'low end' but highly toxic skin-whitening market. Similarly, because the 'high end' and, presumably less toxic skin-whitening commodities targeted to whites are promoted under the purview of 'anti-aging therapy,' it is as difficult to gain an accurate or even a generally reliable estimate of the North America and European market shares of skin-whitening products targeted to white women. However, in Asia, where the skin-whitening market outside of Europe and North America is anchored, in 2001, in Japan alone, the skin-whitening market was estimated to be worth $ 5.6. billion. According to the same report, the fastest growing skin-whitening market in Asia is China. In 2001, China's skin-whitening market was estimated to be over $ 1.3 billion. Based on the readily available mass of online advertising for emerging 'high end' skin-whitening products by transnational corporations, these products claim that they can 'improve' the 'appearance' as well as the 'health' of users. These skin-whitening commodities have powerful pharmaceutical properties; they can penetrate the skin and suppress the synthesis of the skin pigment, melanin . Indeed, the suppression of 'dark' pigment, melanin, is listed as an explicit example of skin-whitening health promotion benefits. Frantz Fanon wrote about the "corporeal malediction" of dark skin and here's the antidote! The damned of the earth can thus swiftly alleviate their condition by peaceful, albeit commercial means. In many of the advertisements for skin-whitening I come across during my research, a discursive link is made between youthfulness and whiteness and whiteness and racial superiority. Second, in these advertisements, the aging process of white women is often implicitly racialized by the construction of 'hyper-pigmentation,' 'age-spots,' 'dull' skin tone,' as signs of "pigmentation pathologies". Consequently, skin-whitening advertising directed to white women often promises to 'cleanse,' 'purify,' 'transform' and 'restore' white women's 'smooth' and 'radiant' youthful white skin. Such advertising tries to expand the skin-whitening market with the covert rhetoric of racializing aesthetics. One recurring theme which runs through most of the promotional ads for skin-whitening posted at Asia registered internet sites is the claim that skin-whitening cosmetics can transform the 'yellow' skin tones of Asian women to flawlessly 'radiant' white. These advertisements often deploy the visual technique of 'before' images of 'unhappy,' 'dark' faces of 'Asian-looking' models and 'after' images of smiling 'whitened' faces of the same models . I now want to take the reader to the internet-based advertisements for skin-whitening products by the world's largest cosmetics company a leading promoter of new skin-whitening cosmetics the L'Oreal cosmetics company. L'Oreal's advertisements for skin-whitening products posted at internet sites run by L'Oreal subsidiaries such as Lanc?me, Vichy Laboratories and L'Oreal Paris systematically deploy a mixture of racializing rhetoric and dazzling visual images. Many of these advertisements which are directed mainly to Asian women use images and narratives with implicit references to the aesthetic 'inferiority' of 'dark' and 'yellow' skin tones of Asian women. In these ads, this implied is often reinforced with illustrations of the pathological nature of 'dark' and 'yellow' skin tones of 'Asian-looking' models. With over US$14 billion sales in 2003, L'Oreal is the largest cosmetics company in the world. The company can be best understood as an economic 'super-structure' consisting of, at least, 12 major subsidiaries such as Lanc?me Paris, Vichy Laboratories, La Roche-Posay Laboratoire Pharmacaceutique, Biotherm, L'Oreal Paris, Garnier, L'Oreal professional Paris, Giorgio Armani Perfumes, Maybelline New York, Ralph Lauren, Helena Rubinstein skincare, Shu Uemura, Maxtrix, Redken, SoftSheen-Carlson(TM). Not all of the above listed L'Oreal subsidiaries deal with the promotion of skin-whitening cosmetics. However, this extensive list of L'Oreal subsidiaries illustrates the company's economic power and structural complexity. L'Oreal is also a 20 per cent shareholder of a major French based pharmaceutical firm, Sanofi-Synth?labo. A recent merger worth 60? billion with another European based pharmaceutical firm, Aventis, makes Sanofi-Aventis the third largest pharmaceutical company in the world behind Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline. I emphasize the financial link between Sanofi-Aventis and L'Oreal cosmetics in the present work partly to highlight L'Oreal's close connection with the pharmaceutical industry. Skin-whitening, in this context, can be thought of as a lucrative 'spin-off' both for L'Oreal as well as a way to valorize research and development of pharmaceuticals outside the highly regulated biomedical domain. The influence of the pharmaceutical industry is evidenced by much of L'Oreal's promotional rhetoric for skin-whitening cosmetics and related technologies. L'Oreal's ads for skin-whitening cosmetics increasingly blur the line between cosmetic and pharmaceutical claims. Such close integration between the cosmetics and pharmaceutical industries has serious social, medical, and political implications. In fact, L'Oreal has already designated some of its subsidiaries, such as Vichy Laboratories and LA Roche-Posay Laboratoire Pharmaceutique, as quasi-pharmaceutical outlets through which the company can successfully promote skin-whitening and other cosmetics under the rubric of skincare biomedicine. The following ads for Vichy Laboratories attest to this opportunistic cosmetic/pharmaceutical industrial cross-fertilization. Discover your healthy skin profile: skin type and hydration. Make an appointment with your Vichy dermatological skin care consultant to identify your skin type, its hydration level and receive a skin diagnosis and personalized skincare recommendation. Vichy Laboratories are devoted to the health of your skin. Backed by dermatological research, Vichy offers you a complete line of skincare products containing Vichy Thermal Spa Water. Dehydration, dryness, skin aging and dull complexion. Vichy, health skin's answer to all skin conditions. Not all of Vichy's advertising messages are couched in such biomedical rhetoric. For instance, when targeting women of colour, Asian women in particular, their 'dark' or 'yellow' skin tones are often conceptualized as pathological targets amenable to 'fixing' and transformation. L'Oreal's internet domains registered in South Korea and China, Singapore, Taiwan aggressively promote skin-whitening products with such provocative brand names as "BI-White," "White "Perfect" and "Blanc Expert." In one of the most stunning acts of commodity racism, an ad for Vichy's skin-whitening brand, "BI-White," features what appears to be an Asian woman peeling off her black facial skin with a zipper. As her black skin is removed a new 'smooth,' 'whitened' skin with no blemishes takes its place. The implications of this image are blunt and chilling. Blackness is false, dirty and ugly. Whiteness is true, healthy, clean and beautiful. "BI-White:The skin Pigmentation ID." Source: [221]http://www.vichy.com/gb/biwhite. L'Oreal calls this marketing strategy 'Geocosmetics: More than half of Korean women experience brown spots and 30 per cent of them have a dull complexion. Over-production of melanin deep in the skin that triggers brown spots and accumulation of melanin loaded dead cells at the skin's surface create a dull and uneven complexion. Vichy Laboratories has been able to associate the complementary effectiveness of Kojic Acid and pure Vitamin C in an everyday face care: BI-White. Another L'Oreal advertisement for skin-whitening brand is called "White Perfect." This particular skin-whitening brand is sold in L'Oreal's Asian markets and online e-shops. In that way, those who live outside Asia can purchase this and other L'Oreal skin-whitening brands over the internet. In this ad, the racist aesthetics of "White-Perfect" reinforces the biomedicalized intervention of Asian women's skin coded by the sign of "Melanin-Block(TM)." L'Oreal's advertisements for skin-whitening cosmetics are often reinforced by constant interplay between the ideological precepts of white supremacy and the technologically-mediated suppression or "blocking" of the capacity for Asian women's bodies and skins to produce skin pigment, melanin. One of the ways in which L'Oreal enacts the biomedicalization of women's bodies and the racialization of the aging processes of women (gendered degeneracy) is through the visual technology of dismembering women's bodies. A close examination of L'Oreal's advertisings for skin-whitening products shows a systematic fragmentation of women's bodies. Almost all the L'Oreal advertising images which I have came across use cropped faces of women. One of the visual techniques used by L'Oreal is the pairing of two cropped faces: one of which bears certain pseudo-pathologies such as 'age spots,' premature-aging,' 'hyper-pigmentation,' and 'wrinkles.' The other cropped image would feature the whitened, 'smooth, wrinkle-free' face of a woman. As a result, L'Oreal's advertising often visually conceptualizes the practice of skin-whitening both as a violent technological fragmentation of women's bodies as well as an instrument of bodily transformation. As the following advertising for L'Oreal's skin-whitening brand, Blanc Expert, shows, the visual fragmentation of women's bodies is often reinforced by the claims of the power of these skin-whitening products to penetrate deep inside the body thereby transforming both the inside and the outside of the users of these products. Lanc?me's exclusive Melo-No Complex(TM) limits the activity of the messenger NO, a newly-discovered stimulator of melanin, produced by keratinocytes. The complex, by targeting keratinocytes, boosts whitening action by 15 times. A powerful combination of active whitening ingredients targets melanocytes to more effectively inhibit the source of melanin production and as a result, diminishes the skin's yellowish tone. The image symbolically illustrates the technological prowess of advanced skin-whitening biotechnology; its ability to penetrate, fragment, colonize, and discipline the bodies of women. In this image, the fragmentation of women's bodies is symbolically illustrated by a beam of light shot through a tube. Upon penetrating the skin, this phallic beam of light produces a new "radiant," white face. In this powerful visually fragmenting technology, the symbolic order of masculinist technology and the aesthetics of white supremacy are rendered as flesh in the "flawless", perfectly whitened and fragmented face of a woman of colour. In this context, the aggressive world-wide marketing of skin-whitening commodities can be legitimated as benevolent 'cures' designed to transform and transcend the "dark" "diseased," bodies of women of colour. Ironically, not all women of colour can afford the "radiant" whitened faces this technology promises. The following is a price list for L'Oreal's Blanc Expert line. As I indicated earlier, this particular skin-whitening brand name is aggressively promoted to Asian women. Blanc Expert Mela-No Cx Blacc Expert Advanced Whitening Spot Corrector (30 ml= $125 US), Blanc Expert Mela-NO Cx Supreme Whitening Spot Corrector (30ml= $100 US ), Blanc Expert Advanced Whitening & Anti-Dark Circles Eye (100ml= $ 77 US), Blanc Expert Mela NO Cx Advanced Whitening Night Renovator (100ml= $ 83 US). This one has the 'cutest' and the most ironic name: Blanc Expert Mela-No Cx UV Expert Extra Large Double Protection SPF 50/PA+++ (30 ml= $59 US). This list clearly demonstrates two important points: that these products are highly expensive and that they contain relatively small amounts of skin-whitening products. There is a common joke in Africa to describe the practice of face whitening: "Fanta Faces & Coca Cola Bodies." Fanta, in this context, refers to the orange colour of a soft drink. The dark colour of the Coke soft drink in contrast refers to the unbleached bodies of African women. This analogy is particularly apt because, like skin-bleaching cosmetics, Coca Cola and Fanta soft drinks are western products which are extensively marketed in Africa. In its broadest sense, skin-whitening as 'anti-aging therapy' aims at intervening, 'halting' and if possible, 'reversing' the aging processes of mainly white women. I have suggested earlier that advertisements for skin-whitening products which are marketed to white women often use language suffused with the racialization of the aging processes of white women and the biomedicalization of women of colour's skin tones. In this market, the paradigmatic face against which both women of colour and middle aged white women must be appraised, and ultimately found wanting, is the 'smooth/ radiant/youthful-looking' white face unmarked by age, labour or class. This technologically-produced 'radiant,' 'age-spot-free,' 'pigmentation-free' young-looking white face is now the universal standard for the "beautiful" face. The cover of the 2002 L'Oreal Annual Report underscores the emergence of the "smooth". 'radiant', technologically produced, "air brushed" white face. In this image, a female with exceedingly blue eyes and perfectly white skin gazes vacantly. Her face shows no hint of life or emotions. This image is simultaneously as frightening as it is ambiguous. It is difficult to tell whether we are confronting a computer-generated animation or an image of an actual woman. This ambiguity is not innocent. The image at once suggests the corporeal possibility of a perfectly white skin and also whiteness as an abstract aesthetics. The ambiguity of the corporeality of this image can be read as an ironic comment on the image itself. In this reading, this computer-generated visual simulacrum recuperates the exclusionary aesthetics of whiteness. L'Oreal has also developed other powerful tools which are designed to monitor the states of women's skin and bodies. One instrument of surveillance is a silicon-based semiconductor sensory device called SkinChip?. First developed for biometric fingerprinting ID and related surveillance technologies, this technology has now been adapted as a 'diagnostic' tool designed to monitor changes in the 'interiors' of women's skin such as "pigmentation" and "hydration" levels and other 'pathological' signs. Monitoring the "interior" of women's skin to gauge their "pigmentation" status has the potential to usher in a new and sinter form of eugenicist white supremacist aesthetics. The fact that SkinChip has been imported from biometric surveillance technology is not insignificant. Surveillance technologies such as SkinChip also reinforce the aesthetics of white supremacy and the global expansion of skin-whitening as a capitalist commodity. L'Oreal is currently developing a personal-size version of the SkinChip device so that women can regularly monitor what is happening "inside" their bodies and on their skins. I hope that I have demonstrated that the emerging skin-whitening industry is a lucrative globalized economic enterprise with profound social and political implications. L'Oreal's advertising for skin-whitening commodities reinforces and consolidates the globalized ideology of white supremacy and the sexist practice of the biomedicialization of women's bodies. It is in this specific context of the continuum of the western practice of global racism and the economic practice of commodity racism that the social, political and cultural implications of skin-whitening must be located and resisted. Consequently, feminist/antiracist and anti-colonial responses must confront this social phenomenon as part and parcel of our old enemy, the "civilising mission" ; the violent moral prerogative to cleanse and purify the mind and bodies of the "dark/dirt/savage". On March 10, 2004, two weeks prior to the American invasion of Iraq, Time magazine's cover featured the former Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein. The caption reads: "Life After Saddam: an inside look at Bush's high-risk plan to occupy Iraq and remake the Middle East" . Hussein's face is painted white by a white man wearing a white casual shirt with matching casual white pants and a white baseball hat using a white paint brush. The colour of the dictrator's unpainted skin looks exceedingly black and menacing. The lower half of the dictator's face and neck are riddled with bullet holes. Amina Mire is at the University of Toronto and can be reached at [222]amina.mire at utoronto.ca From checker at panix.com Thu Aug 11 21:18:54 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2005 17:18:54 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Brighter and Blander: A Feathered Role Reversal Message-ID: Brighter and Blander: A Feathered Role Reversal New York Times, 5.8.9 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/09/science/09obse.html [There have been many novels and stories about a device that forces everyone to tell the truth. The results are invariably disasterous. The article below is yet another one about new technology to ferrett out deception. We should wonder whether there will be too much of said technology.] By [3]HENRY FOUNTAIN A New Kind of Paper Trail Companies have gone to great lengths, and expense, to develop technologies to assure that checks, credit cards and important documents are authentic. Most credit cards carry holograms, and checks are often printed with security inks that cannot be easily duplicated. But there may be a much easier way to prevent document forgery or similar kinds of fraud. Scientists in England have come up with a simple technique to scan the surface of paper or other materials for the microscopic imperfections inherent in them. These flaws create a built-in "fingerprint," a unique digital code that can be used for authentication. A piece of paper or plastic may look smooth, but under a microscope there is a certain amount of roughness. Paper, for instance, is made up of tiny fibers that are compressed into a sheet, creating countless random high points and hollows. The technique, developed by researchers at Imperial College London, Durham University and the University of Sheffield, measures this inherent roughness using a basic laser with four detectors. As a section of material is scanned, the detectors continuously measure the intensity of the reflections off the surface at four angles. An average intensity is calculated, and changes from this average are converted into a short digital code (requiring only about 200 to 500 bytes of storage space). The researchers, who described the technique in the July 28 Nature, said the probability of the code being the same for two pieces of paper or other material was basically zero. The technique worked even when the researchers crumpled up a sheet of paper into a ball and smoothed it out, scorched it in an oven or scribbled heavily on it with a pen. The researchers say such built-in fingerprints would be highly secure, since there is no way to control surface imperfections when manufacturing paper or plastic. The technique could even be used with cardboard packaging as a built-in tracking code. Surf This It's not that the world needs any more evidence of the power of hurricanes, but scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory have provided some anyway. Ivan, the storm that killed more than 90 people in the Caribbean and United States last September, created waves as high as 91 feet when it churned through the Gulf of Mexico, the researchers report in the current Science. The scientists were fortunate that an array of pressure sensors they set up on the seabed some 75 miles south of Gulfport, Miss., for another research project were in the path of Ivan. (They were even more fortunate that the sensors survived the hurricane, which when it passed through the area was a Category 4 storm, the second most powerful.) Measurements of the water pressure can be used to calculate wave height. The sensor data showed that of 146 waves at three of the sensors, 24 were higher than 50 feet, and the tallest measured 91 feet. But the researchers say that the sensors may have missed the biggest waves, as the instruments were off when the most powerful part of the storm passed overhead. They estimate that some waves could have been 130 feet high. The waves dissipated in the rough gulf waters before reaching shore. But waves of such magnitude could easily destroy an oil platform, say, or a fishing boat. The largest waves would have peak-to-peak lengths of more than 600 feet, and a cargo ship or other large boat caught in such a wave likely would break in two. Moons of Saturn The greatest moments of the Cassini mission to Saturn involved the exploration of the moon Titan, which with its atmosphere and lakes of methane lakes is one of the most fascinating bodies in the solar system. But Cassini has spent time exploring Saturn's more mundane reaches. The latest is the moon Mimas, which the spacecraft flew by last week. Images taken during the flyby show Mimas, which is about 250 miles in diameter, to be deader than a doornail and heavily pockmarked with craters. The images are available at [4]nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/main. From checker at panix.com Fri Aug 12 16:04:44 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 12:04:44 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: 2 New Methods to Sequence DNA Promise Vastly Lower Costs Message-ID: 2 New Methods to Sequence DNA Promise Vastly Lower Costs New York Times, 5.8.9 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/09/science/09dna.html By [3]NICHOLAS WADE A new way of decoding DNA, potentially far cheaper and quicker than the existing method, has been developed by researchers at the Harvard Medical School. The Harvard team, led by Jay Shendure and George M. Church, describes the method in the current issue of Science. Last week, another new method for sequencing DNA was announced by a company in Branford, Conn., 454 Life Sciences. The two methods, if they work, will represent a remarkable scaling down of Big Science, essentially putting the equivalent of a $50 million genome-sequencing center on the desk of every researcher and physician. The methods are giant strides toward the goal of sequencing the human genome so cheaply that it could be done routinely for medical reasons. The rallying cry for this goal is the $1,000 genome. "The $1,000 genome has been my passion and obsession ever since I was a graduate student," Dr. Church said. A price tag of even $20,000 or so, which now seems attainable in the next few years, would bring whole genome sequencing within the same range as other medical procedures. The new sequencing methods are quite similar in approach. They load the DNA fragments to be sequenced onto ultrasmall beads and visualize the sequence of each fragment through reactions that cause the beads to light up. A principal difference lies in the cost of the equipment. The DNA sequencing machine now being sold by 454 Life Sciences costs $500,000. Jonathan M. Rothberg, chairman of the board, says a single machine does the job of a $50 million sequencing center. The Harvard machine is even cheaper. It uses "off-the-shelf instrumentation and reagents," the authors say, explaining how researchers can set up sequencing centers with mostly standard equipment. The most expensive element is a $140,000, computer-controlled digital microscope needed to record the color changes on a slide containing millions of DNA-carrying beads. For labs that already possess such a microscope, as many do, the equipment costs would be small. All they need do is follow the free recipe provided by Dr. Church. Instead of using bacteria to amplify fragments of DNA by reproducing them, the Harvard method captures each fragment in a drop of liquid, which contains all the ingredients for the chemical amplification method - the polymerase chain reaction. The contents of each drop are loaded onto beads that are then embedded in a gel, with 14 million beads being packed into an area the size of a dime, and fluorescent chemical probes are used to indicate what the DNA sequences are. The machine developed by 454 Life Sciences uses the same amplification method, which was developed by Devin Dressman and colleagues at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore. But the beads are made to signal their sequence by activating luciferase, the light producing enzyme in fireflies , and the flashes from each bead are recorded by a light-sensitive chip. Dr. Church and Dr. Rothberg are enthusiastic about their own methods. Dr. Church says his method is more accurate and the equipment is far cheaper. Dr. Rothberg says his machines can sequence novel genomes whereas the Harvard method is good only for resequencing, or looking for variations in a genome of known sequence. The first human genome to be completed, by the Human Genome Project in 2003, probably cost about $800 million. Doing a second human genome by the traditional methods would now cost around $20 million. The two new methods promise to be much cheaper. Dr. Rothberg says a human genome could be resequenced now by his method for $1 million. Dr. Church estimates that he can do a human genome for $2 million now and for $20,000 in the future. From checker at panix.com Fri Aug 12 16:04:50 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 12:04:50 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Explaining Those Vivid Memories of Martian Kidnappers Message-ID: Explaining Those Vivid Memories of Martian Kidnappers New York Times, 5.8.9 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/09/health/09alien.html?pagewanted=print By [3]BENEDICT CAREY "Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens," by Susan Clancy. Harvard University Press, $22.95. People who have memories of being abducted by aliens become hardened skeptics, of a kind. They dismiss the procession of scientists who explain away the memories as illusions or fantasy. They scoff at talk about hypnosis or the unconscious processing of Hollywood scripts. And they hold their ground amid snickers from a public that thinks that they are daft or psychotic. They are neither, it turns out, and their experiences should be taken as seriously as any strongly held exotic beliefs, according to Susan Clancy, a Harvard psychologist who interviewed dozens of self-described abductees as part of a series of memory studies over the last several years. In her book "Abducted," due in October, Dr. Clancy, a psychologist at Harvard, manages to refute and defend these believers, and along the way provide a discussion of current research into memory, emotion and culture that renders abduction stories understandable, if not believable. Although it focuses on abduction memories, the book hints at a larger ambition, to explain the psychology of transformative experiences, whether supposed abductions, conversions or divine visitations. "Understanding why people believe weird things is important for anyone who wishes to know more about people - that is, humans in general," she writes. Dr. Clancy's accounting for abduction memories starts with an odd but not uncommon experience called sleep paralysis. While in light dream-rich REM sleep, people will in rare cases wake up for a few moments and find themselves unable to move. Psychologists estimate that about a fifth of people will have that experience at least once, during which some 5 percent will be bathed in terrifying sensations like buzzing, full-body electrical quivers, a feeling of levitation, at times accompanied by hallucinations of intruders. Some of them must have an explanation as exotic as the surreal nature of the experience itself. Although no one has studied this group systematically, Dr. Clancy suggests based on her interviews, that they tend to be people who already have some interest in the paranormal, mystical arts and the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors. Often enough, their search for meaning lands them in the care of a therapist who uses hypnotism to elicit more details of their dreamlike experiences. Hypnotism is a state of deep relaxation, when people become highly prone to suggestion, psychologists find. When encouraged under hypnosis to imagine a vivid but entirely concocted incident - like being awakened by loud noises - people are more likely later to claim the scene as a real experience, studies find. Where, exactly, do the green figures with the wraparound eyes come from? From the deep well of pop culture, Dr. Clancy argues, based on a review of the history of U.F.O. sightings, popular movies and television programs on aliens. The first "abduction" in the United States was dramatized in 1953, in the movie "Invaders From Mars," she writes, and a rash of abduction reports followed this and other works on aliens, including the television series "The Outer Limits." One such report, by a couple from New Hampshire, Betty and Barney Hill, followed by days a particularly evocative episode of the show in 1961. Mr. Hill's description of the aliens - with big heads and shiny wraparound eyes - was featured in a best-selling book about the experience, and inspired the alien forms in Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" in 1977, according to Dr. Clancy. Thus does life imitate art, and vice versa, in a narrative hall of mirrors in which scenes and even dialogues are recycled. Although they are distinct in details, abduction narratives are extremely similar in broad outline and often include experimentation with a sexual or procreative subtext. "Oh! And he's opening my shirt, and - he's going to put that thing in my navel," says one 1970's narrative, referring to a needle. "I can feel them moving that thing around in my stomach, in my body," the narrative, excerpted in the book, continues. The passage echoes other abduction accounts, past and future. In a laboratory study in 2002, Dr. Clancy and another Harvard psychologist, Richard McNally, gave self-described abductees a standardized word-association test intended to measure proneness to false-memory creation. The participants studied lists of words that were related to one another - "sugar," "candy," "sour," "bitter" - and to another word that was not on the list, in this case, "sweet." When asked to recall the word lists, those with abduction memories were more likely than a group of peers who had no such memories to falsely recall the unlisted word. The findings suggest a susceptibility to what are called source errors, misattributing sources of remembered information by, say, confusing a scene from a barely remembered movie with a dream. In another experiment, the researchers found that recalling abduction memories prompted physiological changes in blood pressure and sweat-gland activity that were higher than those seen in post-traumatic stress syndrome. The memories produced intense emotional trauma, and each time that occurs it deepens the certainty that something profound really did happen. Although no one of those elements - sleep paralysis, interest in the paranormal, hypnotherapy, memory tricks or emotional investment - is necessary or sufficient to create abduction memories, they tend to cluster together in self-described abductees, Dr. Clancy finds. "In the past, researchers have tended to concentrate on one or another" factor, she said in an interview. "I'm saying they all play a role." Yet abduction narratives often have another, less explicit, dimension that Dr. Clancy suspects may be central to their power. Consider this comment, from a study participant whom Dr. Clancy calls Jan, a middle-age divorc?e engaged in a quest for personal understanding: "You know, they do walk among us on earth. They have to transform first into a physical body, which is very painful for them. But they do it out of love. They are here to tell us that we're all interconnected in some way. Everything is." At a basic level, Dr. Clancy concludes, alien abduction stories give people meaning, a way to comprehend the many odd and dispiriting things that buffet any life, as well as a deep sense that they are not alone in the universe. In this sense, abduction memories are like transcendent religious visions, scary and yet somehow comforting and, at some personal psychological level, true. Dr. Clancy said she regretted not having asked the abductees she interviewed about religious beliefs, which were not a part of her original research. The reader may regret that, too. The warmth, awe and emotion of abduction stories and of those who tell them betray strong spiritual currents that will be familiar to millions of people whose internal lives are animated by religious imagery. When it comes to sounding the depths of alien stories, a scientific inquiry like this one may have to end with an inquiry into religion. From checker at panix.com Fri Aug 12 16:04:57 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 12:04:57 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: M.B.A. Students Bypassing Wall Street for a Summer in India Message-ID: M.B.A. Students Bypassing Wall Street for a Summer in India http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/10/business/worldbusiness/10intern.html By [3]SARITHA RAI BANGALORE, India, Aug. 9 - This summer, Omar Maldonado and Erik Simonsen, both students at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University, did something different. Bypassing internship opportunities on Wall Street, just a subway ride away from their Greenwich Village campus, they went to India to spend the summer at an outsourcing company in Gurgaon, a suburb of New Delhi. "The India opportunity grabbed me," said Mr. Maldonado, a Boston native whose family is from the Dominican Republic. "I wanted to get a global feel for investment banking and not just a Wall Street perspective." He and Mr. Simonsen, both 27, are spending three months at Copal Partners, an outsourcing firm with 100 analysts. It produces merger and acquisition pitch books and provides equity and credit analysis and other research to global banks and consultant groups, including those on Wall Street. Mr. Maldonado and Mr. Simonsen, of Riverside, Calif., are part of a virtual invasion of India by American students. Graduate students from top schools in the United States, most from master of business administration programs, are vying for internships at India's biggest private companies. For many, outsourcing companies are the destinations of choice. India is not just a line on an American student's r?sum?, said Kiran Karnik, president of the outsourcing industry trade body, Nasscom, "but also culturally fulfilling." Many students travel while in India, giving them a view of the country and its long history, he said. Nasscom is now trying to track the ever-increasing numbers of foreign interns. Many are in India to study globalization firsthand, Mr. Karnik said; that is often not possible in China because, unlike India, English is not widely spoken there. Mr. Karnik said he had met more than a dozen interns from the Harvard Business School who were spending this summer in India. "I expect a bigger horde of students to arrive next year because the ones here said they had a great time and will go home to talk about it," he said. Elsewhere, too, the trend is on the rise. Four students from Fuqua School of Business at Duke University are interning in India, compared with only one last year and none in 2003. Of this year's interns, three are at [4]Infosys Technologies, an outsourcing company in Bangalore, and the fourth is in Chennai at GlobalGiving, an organization based in Bethesda, Md., that helps support social, economic and environmental projects around the world. At Georgetown University, Stanley D. Nollen, a professor of international business at the Robert Emmett McDonough School of Business, said India was of growing interest to students. "No longer is India thought of as a land of snake charmers and bride burnings," he said. "Now India means the world's best software services, and increasingly, pharmaceuticals and auto parts." Professor Nollen directs the school's programs for M.B.A. students in India, which include "residencies" - academic courses that are centered on consulting projects for companies operating in India. A group of 49 students arrived this month and went to companies like Philips India Software and MindTree Consulting, both in Bangalore; the motorcycle-making unit of Eicher in Chennai; and the [5]ICICI Bank in Mumbai. India can be a jolt to a first-time American visitor. In Gurgaon, a small town despite its tall office complexes and shiny new malls, Mr. Maldonado and Mr. Simonsen share an apartment where the power fails several times a day. Temperatures are regularly above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer. The two men said they came prepared to find inadequate infrastructure, but were not prepared for the daily frustrations of Gurgaon. There is no mass transportation system, and shopping, even for something as basic as an umbrella, can take hours. They rumble to work in an auto rickshaw - a motorized three-wheeler that seats two and is a ubiquitous form of transport in Indian cities. But the sophistication of the work being done in Copal's Gurgaon office contrasts with the chaotic city outside. Mr. Simonsen said he was amazed. "I came expecting to see number-crunching and spreadsheet type of work; I didn't expect American banks to farm out intricate analytics," he said. The two students are working on a project that analyzes investment opportunities for clients across 23 countries. Infosys Technologies, the country's second-largest outsourcing firm after Tata Consultancy Services, discovered how popular India had become as an internship destination for Americans when the company began recruiting: for the 40 intern spots at its Bangalore headquarters, the company received 9,000 applications. Only those with a cumulative grade-point average of 3.6 or more made it to a short list, and then they were put through two rounds of interviews. The final 40, who cut a wide academic swathe from engineering schools like M.I.T. and Carnegie Mellon to business schools like Stanford, Wharton and Kellogg, have since arrived on campus for average stays of three months. The interns work in areas from marketing to technology. They live in a 500-room hotel complex on Infosys's expansive campus in the suburbs of Bangalore, exchanging coupons for meals at the food court and riding the company bus downtown to decompress at the many pubs and bars. Among the Infosys interns is Caton Burwell, 28, from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. "India has come to symbolize globalization and I wanted to participate in the workings of the global economy," he said. "Besides, it would look great on my r?sum?." Mr. Burwell said that, since arriving in India, he had developed a better grasp of the workings of the global economy and the logic behind the choices companies and countries make. "Being here is a powerful experience; it is impossible not to think differently," he said. Also, his attitude toward outsourcing has changed since meeting Indian employees, who he said work very hard and care a great deal about the quality of their work. "To come here, meet these people, and to return home and turn your back on outsourcing is hard," he said. Jeffrey Anders, 29, from the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T., is similarly stirred. Mr. Anders is halfway through his internship at the business process outsourcing division of [6]Hewlett-Packard India in Bangalore. "I can't help but feel that I am witnessing the creation of a new global economic order, a new reality that most people back home don't realize is coming," said Mr. Anders. After a meeting with the recruiting head of Hewlett-Packard India's back-office unit at a conference at M.I.T., Mr. Anders came to India to help build a group of Indian economists and statisticians to perform complex analytics and predictive modeling for Western multinationals. "These highly educated and qualified people are not stopping at call centers and back-office work," he said. "They are getting ready to compete for every job." Meanwhile, Indian companies are looking at summer internships as a way of building a diverse work culture. "Bringing investment bankers here provides our Indian team a perspective and context of Wall Street," said Joel Perlman, co-founder of Copal Partners, a company based in London that has four employees each in New York and London and another 100 or so in India. Other companies, and even the schools themselves, are looking at internships as a step toward attracting bright young Americans to work in India. Infosys, for instance, hired Joshua Bornstein, a former intern from Claremont McKenna College in California, nearly two years ago as its first American employee based in India. "In this increasingly global economy, we would expect to see India become an even greater source of employment for our students," Sheryle Dirks, director of the Career Management Center at Fuqua, said. Mr. Anders, from the Sloan school, works in a new Hewlett-Packard building, where he sometimes works out at the gym in the basement and eats at the cafeteria on the terrace. The employees work in open cubicles, similar to those in offices anywhere in the West. His team consists of four Indians, all with M.B.A.'s like him, and they operate globally, collaborating with teams in California and elsewhere. Interns like Mr. Anders are getting a close view of social changes that are happening in India. Outsourcing has created thousands of better-paying jobs and spawned communities of young people who can afford cars, apartments and iPods. "I thought the stipend was the down side," said Mr. Anders, "but coming here is a priceless experience." From checker at panix.com Fri Aug 12 16:05:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 12:05:02 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Sigma Xi: Evolution's Many Branches Message-ID: Evolution's Many Branches http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/44476?&print=yes [28]Douglas Erwin Assembling the Tree of Life. Edited by Joel Cracraft and Michael J. Donoghue. xvi + 576 pp. Oxford University Press, 2004. $59.95. Big problems often require big science. For example, synchrotrons, cyclotrons, linear accelerators and interplanetary spacecraft all cost too much for single investigators. Thus high-energy experimental physicists and planetary geologists have been forced to come up with communal approaches to research and to acquire the political skills needed to get their projects funded. The advent of farms of DNA sequencers and of the necessary computational power to make them useful has brought molecular biology into the era of big science as well with a variety of efforts to sequence whole genomes, including the Human Genome Project. Related developments include various proteomic and structural biology projects and the sprouting of new departments of systems biology, in which computer scientists and underemployed physicists mix freely with biologists. But big science is not driven exclusively by problems requiring large, expensive instruments. Innovation in instrumentation can also be a factor, opening up new avenues for exploration and reopening old questions that had been abandoned because progress was so difficult. The effort to produce a Tree of Life--a "correct and verifiable family tree" of all life, both living and extinct--is unquestionably big science. This formidable undertaking will require the mobilization of vast numbers of systematists to acquire and analyze reams of morphological, behavioral and molecular data, and the informatics involved in the unenviable task of classifying and storing phylogenetic information is complex. The end result will show the evolutionary relationships between all organisms, from those whose diversity is still poorly explored--such as crenarchaea (sulfur-metabolizing organisms that thrive at high temperatures) and heterokonts (which include water molds, diatoms and brown algae)--to nematodes, probably the most species-rich group of animals. What might be the justifications for constructing a Tree of Life? E. O. Wilson nominates simply having a complete accounting of life on Earth, promoting conservation, searching for new biological products and improving our understanding of community assembly (how species coadapt to live together in a given spot). Not surprisingly, Wilson makes an effective case that a Tree of Life will revolutionize ecology by marrying NASA-like technology with old-fashioned fieldwork to allow rapid characterization of broad swaths of the members of a community. Assembling the Tree of Life grew out of a 2002 symposium (sponsored jointly by the American Museum of Natural History, Yale University, The International Union of Biological Science and the international biodiversity science program DIVERSITAS) that produced a synthesis of knowledge about evolutionary relationships among the major branches of the Tree of Life. The book is the first comprehensive scientific attempt to consider the tree of life since the publication in 1989 of The Hierarchy of Life (the proceedings of a Nobel Symposium, edited by Bo Fernholm and others). Although we are not yet within reach of Wilson's dream, we are much closer to it than one might have expected in 1989. The "debate" between molecules and morphology, which was a centerpiece of The Hierarchy of Life, has vanished with the recognition that no one source of information can provide an infallible guide; rather, a variety of combined-evidence approaches are required. Editors Joel Cracraft and Michael J. Donoghue have two ambitious and at times contradictory aims: to demonstrate to readers outside the field of systematics the broader significance of building the Tree of Life (that is, to explain why systematists need big science) and to provide a current assessment of phylogenetic efforts across the tree. The contributors, who include nearly 100 systematic biologists, are more successful in achieving the latter goal. There is no question that individual chapters will be useful for those seeking a meaty overview of a particular clade. Most of the systematic chapters are written by the premier experts in the area and include a brief synopsis of the morphology of the group, some anatomical highlights and comments on diversity. The better chapters include detailed and critical commentaries on previous phylogenetic analyses and discuss where they might have gone wrong; the chapter by Maureen A. O'Leary and colleagues on mammalian phylogeny is particularly noteworthy in this regard. The early chapters on microbial phylogeny provide a wealth of information on the problems of phylogenetic reconstruction in the face of an unknown degree of lateral gene transfer and serve as an excellent primer on the evolutionary history of these groups. The differing perspectives on phylogenetic relationships offered by Sandra L. Baldauf and colleagues, by Norman R. Pace and by W. Ford Doolittle illustrate the magnitude of the problem. The chapter on early algal evolution by Charles F. Delwiche and others provides an outstanding illustration of how critical a phylogenetic perspective is to unraveling the evolutionary history of a clade. It is particularly unfortunate that the authors of many of the chapters on animal groups did not make a similar effort; many of those authors appear to view a phylogeny as an end in itself, rather than as a tool to advance other questions. The volume is a treasury of unexpected information. Who knew that in the 1830s France imported 50 million leeches annually for medicinal bloodletting (and that the government collected a tax of one franc per thousand leeches)? And who would have guessed that the key to unraveling lepidopteran phylogeny lies in "an almost infinite variety of small, drab moths from multiple evolutionary lineages"? Curiously, different authors in the volume appear to mean different things by the Tree of Life. Most appear to be principally concerned with the topology of the tree--with the relationships between various subclades and species that the tree depicts. Others, including Wilson, seem more concerned with taxonomic descriptions, databases of images of types and the like--an effort that has also been described as the Encyclopedia of Life. The distinction between these disparate views is critically important for identifying the scope and likely cost of the project as well as for deciding how it should be carried out. If a tree alone is the goal, the new effort at DNA bar-coding might be all that is required. One can even imagine the whole process being automated, with organisms fed into a hopper at one end and the critical sequences isolated, sequenced and added to GenBank (the genetic sequence database of the National Institutes of Health) as the biological exudates are heaped on a growing recycling pile. Of course most of the contributors to this volume are not really interested in topology alone,which would provide us with none of the critical information that accompanies proper systematic treatments--information about functional adaptations essential for understanding evolutionary pattern and process, for example. What is missing from the volume? Understandably, most clades are not treated in much detail, with the exception of one subclade of aberrant, highly encephalized primates. Cnidarians (such as jellyfish and corals) get short shrift, which is rather unusual given that significant advances have been made recently in understanding the group. But Douglas J. Eernisse and Kevin J. Peterson, in their detailed discussion of metazoan phylogeny, do discuss the recent evidence that the calcareous and siliceous sponges arose independently. Happily, arthropods and their ecdysozoan relatives have been allotted just five chapters (some enthusiasts will doubtless be disappointed). [29]click for full image and caption [30]Ernst Haeckel's tree of life There are two more telling omissions. Although the editors' introduction provides a very brief historical synopsis of tree-building, complete with Darwin's canonical figure from The Origin of Species and Ernst Haeckel's 1866 Tree of Life, a contribution by a historian of science on evolving approaches to the subject would have been most welcome. The second omission is more procedural or methodological: Few contributions explicitly address our current abilities to actually produce a rigorous, well-substantiated tree of life. This is far from a simple matter, as the most serious discussion of this shortcoming (in the chapter by O'Leary and others) makes clear. Building supertrees is more complicated than adding up previously published trees or building a massive character matrix. The initial steps in resolving this problem have been quite positive, but ultimately the viability of the Tree of Life enterprise requires addressing these and related methodological issues. Some might suggest that it would have been inappropriate to include such dirty laundry in this volume, but I would argue that to have done so might have gotten additional computer scientists and mathematicians interested in these problems. Reviewers are expected to offer some platitudinous comments on the appropriate readership for a volume, although whether this is for the edification of librarians or the gratification of the publisher continues to elude me. The question is particularly apt in the case at hand, for the intended readership is as poorly resolved as some of the topologies. In their introduction, the editors note the impact of Fernholm's The Hierarchy of Life. My observations suggest that it is one of the more widely stolen library volumes, which is a sort of impact metric, and perhaps Assembling the Tree of Life will also disappear from shelves. It should probably be required reading for first-year biology graduate students, but otherwise the effort to demonstrate the significance of the Tree of Life project is largely preaching to the converted. The first three chapters (by Terry L. Yates and others, Rita R. Colwell and Douglas J. Futuyama) provide some stimulating insights into how the Tree of Life could be useful in human health, conservation and agriculture. The 26 systematic chapters are most likely to appeal to specialists in related areas and to students and teachers seeking a solid, tree-based introduction to specific clades. So why do we need to construct the Tree of Life? Because ultimately it is, like a synchrotron or a spaceship, a tool that will allow future generations of scientists to address a whole new set of questions--about the ecological and evolutionary processes that have produced the diversity of life on Earth. Reviewer Information Douglas H. Erwin is a senior scientist and Curator of Paleobiology at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution, and an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute. His new book on the end-Permian mass extinction, Extinction: How Life Nearly Died 250 Million Years Ago, will be published by Princeton University Press in the fall. References 25. http://service.bfast.com/bfast/click?bfmid=43945&sourceid=0040348489&categoryid=homepage 26. http://www.americanscientist.org/template/EnewsletterLanding 27. http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookshelfReviews/issue/741 28. http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AuthorDetail/authorid/1411 30. http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/44476?&print=yes#44627 31. http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/44476?&print=yes&print=yes From checker at panix.com Fri Aug 12 16:17:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 12:17:02 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] ABC: (Flew) One of World's Leading Atheists Now Believes in God, More or Less, Based on Scientific Evidence Message-ID: One of World's Leading Atheists Now Believes in God, More or Less, Based on Scientific Evidence http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=315976 [Doesn't Flew realize that the designer is more of a mystery than the world itself? It is quite true, of course, that current scientists do not understand the origin of life. What is increasing is our understanding of how complex systems evolve. To say, though that "science" will *someday* understand the origin of life, does involve quite a bit of optimism on the part of what we think we can get out of three-pound brains. Adopting a rule, "always keep looking, never stop and say there must have been design," is a very good rule from the standpoint of keeping scientific investigations open, but it does prejudge the issue. My own atheism has this weak point, which I do not try to make inconspicuous. Rather, I have come to talk about the evidence for Hell more than the evidence for God. I know very little about the arguments for the existence of the Hell and the existence of the Devil, beyond saying that both are attested to in various sacred writings. Any references?] NEW YORK Dec 9, 2004 ? A British philosophy professor who has been a leading champion of atheism for more than a half-century has changed his mind. He now believes in God more or less based on scientific evidence, and says so on a video released Thursday. At age 81, after decades of insisting belief is a mistake, Antony Flew has concluded that some sort of intelligence or first cause must have created the universe. A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature, Flew said in a telephone interview from England. Flew said he's best labeled a deist like Thomas Jefferson, whose God was not actively involved in people's lives. "I'm thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins," he said. "It could be a person in the sense of a being that has intelligence and a purpose, I suppose." Over the years, Flew proclaimed the lack of evidence for God while teaching at Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele, and Reading universities in Britain, in visits to numerous U.S. and Canadian campuses and in books, articles, lectures and debates. There was no one moment of change but a gradual conclusion over recent months for Flew, a spry man who still does not believe in an afterlife. Yet biologists' investigation of DNA "has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved," Flew says in the new video, "Has Science Discovered God?" The video draws from a New York discussion last May organized by author Roy Abraham Varghese's Institute for Metascientific Research in Garland, Texas. Participants were Flew; Varghese; Israeli physicist Gerald Schroeder, an Orthodox Jew; and Roman Catholic philosopher John Haldane of Scotland's University of St. Andrews. The first hint of Flew's turn was a letter to the August-September issue of Britain's Philosophy Now magazine. "It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism," he wrote. The letter commended arguments in Schroeder's "The Hidden Face of God" and "The Wonder of the World" by Varghese, an Eastern Rite Catholic layman. This week, Flew finished writing the first formal account of his new outlook for the introduction to a new edition of his "God and Philosophy," scheduled for release next year by Prometheus Press. Prometheus specializes in skeptical thought, but if his belief upsets people, well "that's too bad," Flew said. "My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato's Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads." Last week, Richard Carrier, a writer and Columbia University graduate student, posted new material based on correspondence with Flew on the atheistic www.infidels.org Web page. Carrier assured atheists that Flew accepts only a "minimal God" and believes in no afterlife. Flew's "name and stature are big. Whenever you hear people talk about atheists, Flew always comes up," Carrier said. Still, when it comes to Flew's reversal, "apart from curiosity, I don't think it's like a big deal." Flew told The Associated Press his current ideas have some similarity with American "intelligent design" theorists, who see evidence for a guiding force in the construction of the universe. He accepts Darwinian evolution but doubts it can explain the ultimate origins of life. A Methodist minister's son, Flew became an atheist at 15. Early in his career, he argued that no conceivable events could constitute proof against God for believers, so skeptics were right to wonder whether the concept of God meant anything at all. Another landmark was his 1984 "The Presumption of Atheism," playing off the presumption of innocence in criminal law. Flew said the debate over God must begin by presuming atheism, putting the burden of proof on those arguing that God exists. From checker at panix.com Fri Aug 12 16:17:13 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 12:17:13 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Denis Dutton on Madame Bovary's Ovaries Message-ID: Denis Dutton on Madame Bovary's Ovaries http://denisdutton.com/barash_review.htm Survival of the Fittest Characters [1]Washington Post Book World, August 7, 2005 Denis Dutton ______________________________________________________________ [3]Madame Bovarys Ovaries: a Darwinian Look at Literature , by David P. Barash and Nanelle R. Barash. New York: Delacourt Press, 2005, 272 pp. $24.00 paper, $32.00 cloth. Human nature, evolved over millions of years and present in our genes, expresses itself not only in bedrooms, boardrooms, and battlefields but in creative human pursuits, including literature. This, anyway, is the premise of an amusing, if over-ambitious, book by psychologist/zoologist David P. Barash and his college-student daughter, Nanelle. The Barashes line up exemplary works of fiction from Homer to Saul Bellow alongside the major claims of evolutionary psychology. The prehistoric origins of human conduct and desires, so the idea goes, should be able to tell us something about the conduct and values of characters in fiction. The results are mixed: Some of the Barashes' explanations are far-fetched, but others have the power to jolt us into an altered view of familiar literary stories and characters. Among the authors' best insights is their description of Jane Austen's fiction in terms of sexual selection theory. Darwinian evolution depends on natural selection: Unfit individuals die off in a hostile environment, while the survivors pass their fitness on to descendants. But for Darwin, there is also a second, parallel and quite distinct process that drives evolution: sexual selection. The heavy, cumbersome peacock's tail, far from helping the bird survive, is a distinct hindrance, making peacocks more prone to being eaten by predators. This remarkable tail is a product not of natural, but of sexual selection: Peahens choose to mate with peacocks sporting the most gorgeous feathers, which indicate both healthy genes and the capacity to produce offspring with more gorgeous feathers, increasing the likelihood that the mother's gene line will survive into the future. By making discriminating mating choices over thousands of generations, it is actually peahens, and not their males, who by their choices have bred the peacock's tail. Likewise, discriminating human females are central to the world of Jane Austen, whom the Barashes call "the poet laureate of female choice." Selecting a good mate is Austen's major theme. She is particularly adept at bringing out, against the vast intricacies of a social milieu, the basic values women seek in men, and men tend to want in women (shortlist: good looks, health, money, status, IQ, courage, dependability and a pleasant personality -- in many different weightings and orderings). Not being a peacock, Mr. Darcy does not have iridescent feathers, but for human females his commanding personality, solid income, intelligence, generosity, and the magnificent Pemberley estate do very nicely. Cinderella is used to exemplify the well-known research of Martin Daly and Margo Wilson showing that children are statistically at much greater risk of murder or abuse by stepparents than by biological parents. In this connection, the Barashes also discuss Sarah Hrdy's study of the way dominant male langur monkeys kill the infant offspring of rivals before mating with the infants' mothers. In real life we may all know plenty of loving stepparents, but as the Barashes explain, historical statistics are sadly on the side of the European folk-tale tradition with its stereotype of the wicked stepmother. The battles of elephant seals are brought to bear on the rivalry between Agamemnon and Achilles. The Barashes use evolutionary principles to explain the tragic outrage of Othello in a world whose double standard treats straying women much more severely than philandering men. A discussion of John Steinbeck's portrayal of male friendship in Of Mice and Men follows a clear and pertinent analysis of reciprocity among animals. This includes a fascinating account of the process by which a vampire bat unsuccessful in a hunt can coax a well-fed fellow bat into vomiting up a meal of blood. That too is friendship, maybe, though I learned from this book more about vampire bats than about Steinbeck. It is easy to make fun of animal analogies, but in fairness, the Barashes are mostly modest and persuasive in drawing their comparisons. Nevertheless, despite the authors' enthusiasm for their subject, there is a curious flatness to Madame Bovary's Ovaries. First, the Barashes tend to pick and choose literary evidence as it suits their case, a procedure generally verboten in research psychology. They provide an adequate, if unsurprising, evolutionary explanation of Emma Bovary's adultery (a female searching for better genes). But what about another important event in the story, Emma's suicide? Maybe there is an evolutionary explanation for suicide as a solution for a person cornered in an intolerable social situation, but it's not hinted at here. At the same time, the authors also now and then claim for evolutionary psychology more than the evidence warrants. Catcher in the Rye is a tale of youthful alienation and rebellion. Parents, we're told, push their children around, and "it makes perfect sense that adolescents in particular are prone to fight back." Such conflict is bound to occur between "every young individual and the adult world that he or she must learn to negotiate." Fine, but platitudes about Holden Caulfield's rebelliousness hardly need validation by Darwin, and none is given here. The Barashes have slipped into doing the most ordinary brand of criticism without seeming to realize it. In fact, Madame Bovary's Ovaries is less a Darwinian look at literature than a discussion of evolutionary psychology that happens to trawl through fiction for examples. If readers don't know The Grapes of Wrath or the Iliad firsthand, they'll likely have seen the movies or read the Cliffs Notes, which will be good enough. The authors might as easily have clipped crime or human interest stories from last month's newspapers, except that fiction normally supplies interior monologues or narratives that reveal motivations. This is a plus if you're trying to explain how evolved psychology works. But by reducing literature to a convenient collection of anecdotes and case studies, the Barashes fail to engage broader features of an expressive and communicative art. There is nothing here about literary style, tone, and the crucial interaction between authors and their audiences. From both a human and aesthetic perspective, literature does not just report on what happened but shows us how individuals make sense of what happened. It is about the beliefs, attitudes, and modes of perception that distinguish us from each other. Literature also serves the human craving for novelty and surprise, including twists and shocks that go against our normal, evolved expectations and desires. The Barashes' approach can explain the vicarious pleasure we might get in following the choices and indecisions of a Jane Austen character as she settles on her man. It can explain any story of a mother who fights to protect her children from danger. But it has more trouble with the likes of a Medea, who murders her children to satisfy her consuming hatred for their father. The family story of Jason and Medea is one of the most revoltingly entertaining soap operas in literature, exactly because it perverts all expectations of a mother's normal conduct toward her children. David and Nanelle Barash wisely insist that they are not trying to provide the decisive framework to explain literature. They give us a few of the patterns of human behavior that contemporary science can explain, showing that reproduction, survival and social reciprocity are bread and butter topics of the fiction we love. Yes, Sophocles, Shakespeare and Flaubert knew the human race at least as well as any psychologist. The science in this book comes out better than the literary criticism, but classic literature remains, as ever, the ultimate winner. David and Nanelle Barash have written an [4]entertaining piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education summarizing their views. For another treatment of the relation between Darwinism and literary studies, take a look at the work of Joseph Carroll. I've reviewed Carroll's latest book [5]here. If you have access to the Johns Hopkins University Press journal [6]Philosophy and Literature through your library, I'd also recommend an excellent article in the latest issue. It's "[7]Literature and Evolution: a Bio-Cultural Approach," by the Nabokov scholar and literary theorist, Brian Boyd. -- D.D. [8]Denis Dutton teaches philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. References 1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/04/AR2005080401595.html 2. http://www.denisdutton.com/ 3. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&camp=1789&tag=denisduttonco-20&creative=9325&path=ASIN/0385338015/qid=1123382462/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_ur_2_1 4. http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=ma6s0ryboo4uyna4dh4g8219cnzrqk 5. http://denisdutton.com/carroll_review.htm 6. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/philosophy_and_literature/toc/phl29.1.html 7. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/philosophy_and_literature/v029/29.1boyd.html 8. mailto:constant.force at netaccess.co.nz From checker at panix.com Fri Aug 12 16:17:19 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 12:17:19 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: David P. Barish: Red in Tooth, Claw, and Trigger Finger Message-ID: CHE: David P. Barish: Red in Tooth, Claw, and Trigger Finger (fwd) The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.8.12 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i49/49b01901.htm I well remember an exhibit at the Bronx Zoo when I was a child. (It has since been copied by zoos throughout the world.) It offered a view of the "world's most dangerous creature," and was, of course, a mirror. No reasonable person -- least of all anyone with environmental sensibilities -- can doubt the veracity of that assertion, intended to shock the zoogoer into a healthy degree of eco-friendly self-reflection. Nor can anyone doubt that human beings are dangerous not only to their planet and many of its life-forms, but, most of all, to themselves. Homo sapiens has much to answer for, including a gory history of murder and mayhem. The anthropologist Raymond Dart spoke for many when he lamented that "the atrocities that have been committed ... from the altars of antiquity to the abattoirs of every modern city proclaim the persistently bloodstained progress of man." An unruly, ingrained savagery, verging on bloodlust, has been a favorite theme of fiction, including, for example, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and William Golding's Lord of the Flies, while Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde developed an explicit notion of duality: that a predisposition to violence lurks within the most outwardly civilized and kindly person. There even seems to be a curious, Jekyll-and-Hyde-like ambivalence in humanity's view of itself. On the one hand, we have Protagoras' insistence that "man is the measure of all things," linked theologically to the biblical claim that "God made man in his own image." The upshot: Human beings are not only supremely important but maybe even supremely good. At the same time, however, there is another, darker perspective, promoted not only by environmental educators but also by certain Christian theologians as well as nonsectarian folks who so love humanity that they hate human beings -- largely because of what those human beings have done to other human beings. In extreme cases, the result has been outright loathing, often stimulated by the conviction that humanity is soiled by original sin and is, moreover, irredeemable, at least this side of heaven. According to the zealous John Calvin, "the mind of man has been so completely estranged from God's righteousness that it conceives, desires, and undertakes, only that which is impious, perverted, foul, impure, and infamous. The human heart is so steeped in the poison of sin, that it can breathe out nothing but a loathsome stench." Misanthropy can also be purely secular, as in this observation from Aldous Huxley: The leech's kiss, the squid's embrace, The prurient ape's defiling touch: And do you like the human race? No, not much. In a similar vein, human beings stand accused of being not only murderous but uniquely so, an indictment that has been largely transformed into a guilty verdict, at least in much of the public mind. Writing in 1904, William James described man as "simply the most formidable of all the beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically on its own species." A half-century later, that view was endorsed by no less an authority than the pioneering ethologist and Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz, who popularized the idea that lethally armed animals (wolves, hawks, poisonous snakes) are also outfitted with behavioral inhibitions that prevent the use of those weapons against conspecifics. Human beings emerge as the sole exception, since our lethality is "extrabiological," rendering us anomalous in our uninhibited murderousness. Paradoxically, such claims have been widely and even warmly embraced. "Four legs good, two legs bad," we eagerly learned from George Orwell, not least because Homo sapiens is supposed to be uniquely branded, among all living things, with this mark of Cain. There appears to be a certain pleasure, akin to intellectual self-flagellation, that many people -- college students, it appears, most especially -- derive in disdaining their own species. Maybe anathematizing Homo sapiens is a particularly satisfying way of rebelling, since it entails enthusiastic disdain of not merely one's culture, politics, and socioeconomic situation, but one's species, too. At the same time, such a posture is peculiarly safe because species-rejecting rebellion does not require casting aside citizenship, friends, and family, or access to one's trust account; having denounced one's species, nobody is expected to join another. In any event, Cain is a canard. We have no monopoly on murder. Human beings may be less divine than some yearn to think, but -- at least when it comes to killing, even war -- we aren't nearly as exceptional, as despicably anomalous and aberrant in our penchant for intraspecies death-dealing, as the self-loathers would have it. The sad truth is that many animals kill others of their kind, and as a matter of course, not pathology. When the anthropologist Sarah Hrdy first reported the sordid details of infanticide among langur monkeys of India, primatologists resisted the news: It couldn't be true, they claimed. Or if it was, then it must be because the monkeys were overcrowded, or malnourished, or otherwise deprived. They couldn't possibly stoop to killing members of their own species (and infants, to make matters even worse); only human beings were so depraved. But, in fact, that is precisely what they do. More specifically, it is what male langur monkeys commonly do when one of them takes over control of a harem of females. The newly ascendant harem-keeper proceeds, methodically, to kill any nursing infants, which, in turn, induces the previously lactating (and nonovulating) females to begin cycling once again. All the better to bear the infanticidal male's offspring. We now know that similar patterns of infanticide are common among many other species, including rats and lions, as well as other nonhuman primates. In fact, when field biologists encounter a "male takeover" these days, they automatically look for subsequent infanticide and are surprised if it doesn't occur. The slaughter of innocents is bad enough (by human moral standards), although not unknown, of course, in our own species. But from a strictly mechanistic, biological perspective, it makes perfect sense. It might also seem more "justifiable" than, say, adults killing other adults, if only because the risk to an infanticidal male is relatively slight (infants can't do much to defend themselves), and the evolutionary payoff is comparatively great: getting your genes projected into the future via each bereaved mother, who would otherwise continue to nourish someone else's offspring instead of bearing your own. But the evidence is overwhelming that among many species, adults kill other adults, too. Lorenz was right, up to a point. Animals with especially lethal natural armaments tend, in most cases, to refrain from using them against conspecifics. But not always. In fact, the generalization that animals -- predators and prey excepted -- occupy a peaceful kingdom was itself greatly overblown. Maybe some day the lion will lie down with the lamb, but even today lions sometimes kill other lions, and rams knock down (thereby knocking off) other rams. The more hours of direct observation biologists accumulate among free-living animals, the more cases of lethality they uncover. Indeed, a Martian observer spending a few weeks among human beings might be tempted to inform his colleagues, with wonderment and some admiration, that Homo sapiens never kills conspecifics. She would be as incorrect as those early reports that wolves invariably inhibit lethal aggression by exposing their necks, or that chimpanzees make love instead of war. In fact, wolves do kill other wolves, showing little mercy for outliers and other strangers. And chimpanzees make war. Of course, if one defines war as requiring the use of technology, then our chimp cousins aren't warmongers after all. But if by war we mean organized and persistent episodes of intergroup violence, often resulting in death, then chimps are champs at it. Jane Goodall has reported extensively on a four-year running war between rival troops of chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, in Tanzania. Similar accounts have emerged from other populations, in the Budongo and Kibale forests, in Uganda; Mahale Mountains National Park, in Tanzania; and Ta? National Park, in the Ivory Coast. Chimpanzee wars are not an aberration. As to why they occur, the anthropologist Richard Wrangham explains that "by wounding or killing members of the neighboring community, males from one community increase their relative dominance over their neighbors. ... This tends to lead to increased fitness of the killers through improved access to resources such as food, females, or safety." These episodes typically involve border patrols leading to organized attacks in which a coalition (composed almost exclusively of males) will attack, and often kill, members of the neighboring troop (once again, almost exclusively males). At this point, some readers -- struggling to retain the perverse pride that comes from seeing human beings as, if not uniquely murderous, then at least unusually so -- may want to backpedal and point out that chimps are, after all, very close to Homo sapiens. But lethal fighting -- if less organized than chimpanzee warfare -- has been identified in hyenas, cheetahs, lions, and many other species. In one study, nearly one-half of all deaths among free-living wolves not caused by humans were the result of wolves' killing other wolves. Even ants are incriminated. According to Edward O. Wilson, America's supreme ant-ologist, "alongside ants, which conduct assassinations, skirmishes, and pitched battles as routine business, men are all but tranquilized pacifists." In their great tome of ant lore, Wilson and Bert H?lldobler concluded that ants are "arguably the most aggressive and warlike of all animals. They far exceed human beings in organized nastiness; our species is by comparison gentle and sweet-tempered." The ant lifestyle is characterized, note the authors, by "restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week." The primatologists Alexander Harcourt and Frans de Waal (the latter having written extensively about "natural conflict resolution," and, if anything, predisposed to acknowledge the pacific side of animals) conclude that regrettably but undeniably "lethal intergroup conflict is not uniquely, or even primarily, a characteristic of humans." The bottom line: Our species is special in many ways, and we may even be especially accomplished when it comes to killing our fellow human, but insofar as same-species lethality goes, we are not alone. Jonathan Swift was no sentimental lover of the human species, verging, and sometimes settling, on outright misanthropy. Thus, during one of Gulliver's voyages, the giant king of Brobdingnag describes human beings as "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth." Swift himself wrote, "I hate and detest that animal called Man, yet I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth." It is Gulliver's final voyage, however, to the land of the admirable, rational, equably equine Houyhnhnms that constitutes what is probably the most sardonically critical account of humanity, in all its Yahoo nature, ever written. Sir Walter Scott wrote that this work "holds mankind forth in a light too degrading for contemplation." Especially degrading -- for Swift, Scott, and, as the story unfolds, the Master of the Houyhnhnms -- is the human capacity for lethal violence, especially during war: "Being no stranger to the art of war, I [Gulliver] gave him a description of cannons, culverins, muskets, carbines, pistols, bullets, powder, swords, bayonets, battles, sieges, retreats, attacks, undermines, countermines, bombardments, seafights; ships sunk with a thousand men; twenty thousand killed on each side; dying groans, limbs flung in the air: smoke, noise, confusion, trampling to death under horse's feet: flight, pursuit, victory, fields strewed with carcasses left for food to dogs, and wolves, and birds of prey; plundering, stripping, ravishing, burning and destroying. And, to set forth the valour of my own dear countrymen, I assured him that I had seen them blow up a hundred enemies at once in a siege, and as many in a ship; and beheld the dead bodies drop down in pieces from the clouds, to the great diversion of all the spectators." Omitted, for obvious reasons: machine guns, submarines, mustard gas, mechanized artillery, land mines, fighter planes, bombers, cluster bombs, nuclear warheads, and other weapons of mass destruction (and this is a woefully incomplete list), not to mention the use of commercial airliners as weapons of mass destruction, or the use of lies about weapons of mass destruction to justify an invasion that results in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. Let's face it, human beings are a violent, murderous lot, destructive of each other no less than of their environment. But let's also admit that such misdeeds, grievous as they are, derive less from a one-of-a-kind bloodlust than from the combination of all-too-natural aggressiveness with ever-advancing technology -- which is itself natural, too. Tennyson was correct, after all. Nature really is red in tooth and claw -- not always, to be sure, but more often than a romanticized view of the animal world would have us believe. And not only when it comes to predators' dispatching their prey. Also, not merely in tooth and claw, but in antler and horn and stinger and tusk, and in butcher knife and Kalashnikov. We aren't so much separated from nature as connected to it, for worse as for better, empowered by our culture to act -- often excessively, because of the potent technological levers at our disposal -- upon impulses that are widely shared. And so, one and a half cheers for Homo sapiens, the world's most dangerous creature, whose dangerousness resides not in the originality of its sin, but in the reach of its hands. David P. Barash is a professor of psychology at the University of Washington. His most recent book, written with Nanelle R. Barash and based on an article originally appearing in The Chronicle Review, is Madame Bovary's Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature (Delacorte, 2005). From HowlBloom at aol.com Sat Aug 13 05:08:59 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Sat, 13 Aug 2005 01:08:59 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] why do we need to SEE sex and violence? Message-ID: <13e.19284c06.302eda6b@aol.com> Judging from the following item, our perceptual system seems preprogrammed to stop, pause, and rivet on sights that promise sex or threaten violence. Makes sense. Sex makes sure that when we die our genes go marching on. Avoiding violence makes sure our body and mind live to see another day. Gawking at violence from a distance hopefully helps us learn how to avoid it?or overcome it-- in the future. Now the question is this. Is this fixation on violence and sex a product of Western Culture. Or is it universal in humans? If it?s universal in humans, does it also show up in lab rats, pigeons, and anolis lizards? In other words, does it go back to a common ancestor of birds, mammals, and lizards? At what age does this phenomenon appear in humans? When are babies able to perceive sex and violence? When do these two become emotionally potent to kids? Howard Retrieved August 13, 2005, from the World Wide Web http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7845 NewScientist.com Erotic images can turn you blind * 18:09 12 August 2005 * NewScientist.com news service * Gaia Vince Researchers have finally found evidence for what good Catholic boys have known all along ? erotic images make you go blind. The effect is temporary and lasts just a moment, but the research has added to road-safety campaigners? calls to ban sexy billboard-advertising near busy roads, in the hope of preventing accidents. The new study by US psychologists found that people shown erotic or gory images frequently fail to process images they see immediately afterwards. And the researchers say some personality types appear to be affected more than others by the phenomenon, known as ?emotion-induced blindness?. David Zald, from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and Marvin Chun and colleagues from Yale University in Connecticut, showed hundreds of images to volunteers and asked them to pick a specific image from the rapid sequence. Most of the images were landscape or architectural scenes, but the psychologists included a few emotionally charged images, portraying violent or sexually provocative scenes. The closer these emotionally charged images occurred prior to the target image, the more frequently people failed to spot the target image, the researchers found. ?We observed that people failed to detect visual images that appeared one-fifth of a second after emotional images, whereas they can detect those images with little problem after neutral images,? Zald says. Primitive brain ?We think there is essentially a bottleneck for information processing and if a certain type of stimulus captures attention, it can jam up the bottleneck so subsequent information can?t get through,? Zald explains. ?It appears to happen involuntarily. The stimulus captures attention and once allocated to that particular stimulus, no other stimuli can get through? for several tenths of a second. He believes that a primitive part of the brain, known as the amygdala, may play a part. That region is involved in evaluating sensory input according to its emotional relevance and has an autonomic role, influencing heart rate and sweating. ?It is possible that emotionally-charged stimuli produce preferential rapid routing of the impulse that bypasses the slower cortical route via the amygdala," Zald told New Scientist. "Patients with amygdala lesions pick out the target image without reacting to violent images, although they show normal blindness reactions when sexual images are introduced, which suggests another mechanism may also be involved.? Harm avoiders The researchers think emotion-induced blindness could lead to drivers simply not seeing another car or pedestrian if they have just witnessed an emotionally charged scene, such as an accident or sexually explicit billboard. The effect could exacerbate the more obvious problem of drivers simply being distracted by large, arresting images. "It's the responsibility of drivers to ensure that when they are behind the wheel they keep their eyes on the job in hand," says a spokeswoman from Brake, a UK road safety organisation. And some people are more vulnerable than others. The study assessed participants using a personality questionnaire, rating them according to their level of ?harm avoidance?. Those scoring highly were more fearful, careful and cautious; those scoring low were more carefree and more comfortable in difficult or dangerous situations. The researchers found that those with low harm avoidance scores were better able to stay focused on a target image than those with high harm avoidance scores. ?People who are more harm avoidant may not be detecting negative stimuli more than other people, but they have a greater difficulty suppressing that information,? Zald suggests. The Brake spokeswoman says companies should think about the consequences of placing emotionally charged billboards at dangerous road junctions: ?We should be concerned if drivers are experiencing split-second breaks in concentration, which could result in an accident or death on the roads.? Journal reference: Psychonomic Bulletin and Review (August 2005 issue) Related Articles * Early blindness frees brain-power for hearing * http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18524845.200 * 29 January 2005 * Porn panic over eroto-toxins * http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18424750.800 * 27 November 2004 * Women's better emotional recall explained * http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2576 * 22 July 2002 Weblinks * David Zald, Vanderbilt University * http://www.psy.vanderbilt.edu/faculty/zalddh/zaldhomepage.htm * Marvin Chun, Yale University * http://www.yale.edu/psychology/FacInfo/Chun.html * Brake, UK road safety organisation * http://www.brake.org.uk/ * Psychonomic Bulletin and Review * http://www.psychonomic.org/PBR/ Close this window Printed on Sat Aug 13 05:53:57 BST 2005 ---------- Howard Bloom Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute www.howardbloom.net www.bigbangtango.net Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org for two chapters from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Sat Aug 13 13:06:00 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Sat, 13 Aug 2005 07:06:00 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Explaining Those Vivid Memories of Martian Kidnappers In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <42FDF038.306@solution-consulting.com> Clancy's hypothesis is almost certainly the best one I have seen, and explains the phenomena. She ignores the other side, where people report being abducted while wide awake. A psychiatrist friend brought two patients to my office because of my skill in hypnosis. These two recalled being abducted while in northwest Utah, raising copper wire from the Great Salt Lake from an old telephone line. They were unsure about whether it was legal, so it was a bit hush-hush. My MD friend wanted me to hypnotize them to get more info; I have never seen such abject terror in human beings before or since. It was extremely puzzling. I finally took a kind of agnosticism about it; I don't believe in abductions, but I cannot explain their reactions any other way. Lynn Premise Checker wrote: > Explaining Those Vivid Memories of Martian Kidnappers > New York Times, 5.8.9 > http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/09/health/09alien.html?pagewanted=print > > By [3]BENEDICT CAREY > > "Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens," > by Susan Clancy. Harvard University Press, $22.95. > > People who have memories of being abducted by aliens become hardened > skeptics, of a kind. They dismiss the procession of scientists who > explain away the memories as illusions or fantasy. They scoff at talk > about hypnosis or the unconscious processing of Hollywood scripts. And > they hold their ground amid snickers from a public that thinks that > they are daft or psychotic. > > They are neither, it turns out, and their experiences should be taken > as seriously as any strongly held exotic beliefs, according to Susan > Clancy, a Harvard psychologist who interviewed dozens of > self-described abductees as part of a series of memory studies over > the last several years. > > In her book "Abducted," due in October, Dr. Clancy, a psychologist at > Harvard, manages to refute and defend these believers, and along the > way provide a discussion of current research into memory, emotion and > culture that renders abduction stories understandable, if not > believable. Although it focuses on abduction memories, the book hints > at a larger ambition, to explain the psychology of transformative > experiences, whether supposed abductions, conversions or divine > visitations. > > "Understanding why people believe weird things is important for anyone > who wishes to know more about people - that is, humans in general," > she writes. > > Dr. Clancy's accounting for abduction memories starts with an odd but > not uncommon experience called sleep paralysis. While in light > dream-rich REM sleep, people will in rare cases wake up for a few > moments and find themselves unable to move. Psychologists estimate > that about a fifth of people will have that experience at least once, > during which some 5 percent will be bathed in terrifying sensations > like buzzing, full-body electrical quivers, a feeling of levitation, > at times accompanied by hallucinations of intruders. > > Some of them must have an explanation as exotic as the surreal nature > of the experience itself. Although no one has studied this group > systematically, Dr. Clancy suggests based on her interviews, that they > tend to be people who already have some interest in the paranormal, > mystical arts and the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors. Often > enough, their search for meaning lands them in the care of a therapist > who uses hypnotism to elicit more details of their dreamlike > experiences. > > Hypnotism is a state of deep relaxation, when people become highly > prone to suggestion, psychologists find. When encouraged under > hypnosis to imagine a vivid but entirely concocted incident - like > being awakened by loud noises - people are more likely later to claim > the scene as a real experience, studies find. > > Where, exactly, do the green figures with the wraparound eyes come > from? From the deep well of pop culture, Dr. Clancy argues, based on a > review of the history of U.F.O. sightings, popular movies and > television programs on aliens. The first "abduction" in the United > States was dramatized in 1953, in the movie "Invaders From Mars," she > writes, and a rash of abduction reports followed this and other works > on aliens, including the television series "The Outer Limits." > > One such report, by a couple from New Hampshire, Betty and Barney > Hill, followed by days a particularly evocative episode of the show in > 1961. Mr. Hill's description of the aliens - with big heads and shiny > wraparound eyes - was featured in a best-selling book about the > experience, and inspired the alien forms in Steven Spielberg's "Close > Encounters of the Third Kind" in 1977, according to Dr. Clancy. > > Thus does life imitate art, and vice versa, in a narrative hall of > mirrors in which scenes and even dialogues are recycled. Although they > are distinct in details, abduction narratives are extremely similar in > broad outline and often include experimentation with a sexual or > procreative subtext. "Oh! And he's opening my shirt, and - he's going > to put that thing in my navel," says one 1970's narrative, referring > to a needle. > > "I can feel them moving that thing around in my stomach, in my body," > the narrative, excerpted in the book, continues. The passage echoes > other abduction accounts, past and future. > > In a laboratory study in 2002, Dr. Clancy and another Harvard > psychologist, Richard McNally, gave self-described abductees a > standardized word-association test intended to measure proneness to > false-memory creation. The participants studied lists of words that > were related to one another - "sugar," "candy," "sour," "bitter" - and > to another word that was not on the list, in this case, "sweet." > > When asked to recall the word lists, those with abduction memories > were more likely than a group of peers who had no such memories to > falsely recall the unlisted word. The findings suggest a > susceptibility to what are called source errors, misattributing > sources of remembered information by, say, confusing a scene from a > barely remembered movie with a dream. > > In another experiment, the researchers found that recalling abduction > memories prompted physiological changes in blood pressure and > sweat-gland activity that were higher than those seen in > post-traumatic stress syndrome. The memories produced intense > emotional trauma, and each time that occurs it deepens the certainty > that something profound really did happen. > > Although no one of those elements - sleep paralysis, interest in the > paranormal, hypnotherapy, memory tricks or emotional investment - is > necessary or sufficient to create abduction memories, they tend to > cluster together in self-described abductees, Dr. Clancy finds. "In > the past, researchers have tended to concentrate on one or another" > factor, she said in an interview. "I'm saying they all play a role." > > Yet abduction narratives often have another, less explicit, dimension > that Dr. Clancy suspects may be central to their power. Consider this > comment, from a study participant whom Dr. Clancy calls Jan, a > middle-age divorc?e engaged in a quest for personal understanding: > "You know, they do walk among us on earth. They have to transform > first into a physical body, which is very painful for them. But they > do it out of love. They are here to tell us that we're all > interconnected in some way. Everything is." > > At a basic level, Dr. Clancy concludes, alien abduction stories give > people meaning, a way to comprehend the many odd and dispiriting > things that buffet any life, as well as a deep sense that they are not > alone in the universe. In this sense, abduction memories are like > transcendent religious visions, scary and yet somehow comforting and, > at some personal psychological level, true. > > Dr. Clancy said she regretted not having asked the abductees she > interviewed about religious beliefs, which were not a part of her > original research. The reader may regret that, too. > > The warmth, awe and emotion of abduction stories and of those who tell > them betray strong spiritual currents that will be familiar to > millions of people whose internal lives are animated by religious > imagery. > > When it comes to sounding the depths of alien stories, a scientific > inquiry like this one may have to end with an inquiry into religio > n. > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Aug 13 15:24:04 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 13 Aug 2005 08:24:04 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] why do we need to SEE sex and violence? Message-ID: <01C59FE0.5E4B96F0.shovland@mindspring.com> Because we like both of them. Some people really like being in war zones, either as participants or observers, even at the risk of being injured or killed. Patton "loved to see the arms and legs fly." Some say killing another human gives them a great sense of power. World War I was seen as an opportunity for "cleansing." Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: HowlBloom at aol.com [SMTP:HowlBloom at aol.com] Sent: Friday, August 12, 2005 10:09 PM To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Subject: [Paleopsych] why do we need to SEE sex and violence? << File: ATT00000.txt; charset = UTF-8 >> << File: ATT00001.html; charset = UTF-8 >> << File: ATT00002.txt >> From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 13 15:52:19 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 13 Aug 2005 11:52:19 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] why do we need to SEE sex and violence? In-Reply-To: <13e.19284c06.302eda6b@aol.com> References: <13e.19284c06.302eda6b@aol.com> Message-ID: Howard, Many cultures besides out have erotic literature. The Karma Sutra in India, the Thousand Nights and One in Arabia, the Tale of Genji in Japan. And they all have tales of great warriors. What's unique about the West, I think, is the notion of companionate marriage, as opposed to arragned marriage. Think Romeo and Juliet of Renaissance Italy. The West has also developed unique ideas about the self and moral agency. I'm trying to get a better fix on these ideas. As far as animals go, you can find many precursors to things human. What is a stretch is to go from animals directly to the modern West. In fact, understanding the Occident (which comprises Classical, Western, and what I call Darwinian civilizations) is *the* problem in human history. On 2005-08-13, HowlBloom at aol.com opined [message unchanged below]: > Date: Sat, 13 Aug 2005 01:08:59 EDT > From: HowlBloom at aol.com > Reply-To: The new improved paleopsych list > To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org > Subject: [Paleopsych] why do we need to SEE sex and violence? > > > Judging from the following item, our perceptual system seems preprogrammed > to stop, pause, and rivet on sights that promise sex or threaten violence. > Makes sense. Sex makes sure that when we die our genes go marching on. > Avoiding violence makes sure our body and mind live to see another day. Gawking > at violence from a distance hopefully helps us learn how to avoid it??or > overcome it-- in the future. > Now the question is this. Is this fixation on violence and sex a product > of Western Culture. Or is it universal in humans? If it??s universal in > humans, does it also show up in lab rats, pigeons, and anolis lizards? In other > words, does it go back to a common ancestor of birds, mammals, and lizards? > At what age does this phenomenon appear in humans? When are babies able to > perceive sex and violence? When do these two become emotionally potent to > kids? Howard > Retrieved August 13, 2005, from the World Wide Web > http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7845 NewScientist.com Erotic images can turn you blind * > 18:09 12 August 2005 * NewScientist.com news service * Gaia Vince > Researchers have finally found evidence for what good Catholic boys have known all > along ?? erotic images make you go blind. The effect is temporary and lasts just > a moment, but the research has added to road-safety campaigners?? calls to ban > sexy billboard-advertising near busy roads, in the hope of preventing > accidents. The new study by US psychologists found that people shown erotic or > gory images frequently fail to process images they see immediately afterwards. > And the researchers say some personality types appear to be affected more > than others by the phenomenon, known as ??emotion-induced blindness??. David > Zald, from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and Marvin Chun and > colleagues from Yale University in Connecticut, showed hundreds of images > to volunteers and asked them to pick a specific image from the rapid sequence. > Most of the images were landscape or architectural scenes, but the > psychologists included a few emotionally charged images, portraying violent or > sexually provocative scenes. The closer these emotionally charged images occurred > prior to the target image, the more frequently people failed to spot the > target image, the researchers found. ??We observed that people failed to detect > visual images that appeared one-fifth of a second after emotional images, > whereas they can detect those images with little problem after neutral images,?? > Zald says. Primitive brain ??We think there is essentially a bottleneck for > information processing and if a certain type of stimulus captures attention, it > can jam up the bottleneck so subsequent information can??t get through,?? Zald > explains. ??It appears to happen involuntarily. The stimulus captures > attention and once allocated to that particular stimulus, no other stimuli can get > through?? for several tenths of a second. He believes that a primitive part > of the brain, known as the amygdala, may play a part. That region is involved > in evaluating sensory input according to its emotional relevance and has an > autonomic role, influencing heart rate and sweating. ??It is possible that > emotionally-charged stimuli produce preferential rapid routing of the impulse > that bypasses the slower cortical route via the amygdala," Zald told New > Scientist. "Patients with amygdala lesions pick out the target image without > reacting to violent images, although they show normal blindness reactions when > sexual images are introduced, which suggests another mechanism may also be > involved.?? Harm avoiders The researchers think emotion-induced blindness could lead > to drivers simply not seeing another car or pedestrian if they have just > witnessed an emotionally charged scene, such as an accident or sexually explicit > billboard. The effect could exacerbate the more obvious problem of drivers > simply being distracted by large, arresting images. "It's the responsibility > of drivers to ensure that when they are behind the wheel they keep their eyes > on the job in hand," says a spokeswoman from Brake, a UK road safety > organisation. And some people are more vulnerable than others. The study assessed > participants using a personality questionnaire, rating them according to > their level of ??harm avoidance??. Those scoring highly were more fearful, > careful and cautious; those scoring low were more carefree and more comfortable in > difficult or dangerous situations. The researchers found that those with low > harm avoidance scores were better able to stay focused on a target image than > those with high harm avoidance scores. ??People who are more harm avoidant > may not be detecting negative stimuli more than other people, but they have a > greater difficulty suppressing that information,?? Zald suggests. The Brake > spokeswoman says companies should think about the consequences of placing > emotionally charged billboards at dangerous road junctions: ??We should be > concerned if drivers are experiencing split-second breaks in concentration, which > could result in an accident or death on the roads.?? Journal reference: > Psychonomic Bulletin and Review (August 2005 issue) Related Articles * Early > blindness frees brain-power for hearing * > http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18524845.200 * 29 January 2005 * Porn panic over eroto-toxins * > http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18424750.800 * 27 November 2004 * Women's > better emotional recall explained * > http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2576 * 22 July 2002 Weblinks * David Zald, Vanderbilt University * > http://www.psy.vanderbilt.edu/faculty/zalddh/zaldhomepage.htm * Marvin Chun, Yale > University * http://www.yale.edu/psychology/FacInfo/Chun.html * Brake, UK > road safety organisation * http://www.brake.org.uk/ * Psychonomic Bulletin > and Review * http://www.psychonomic.org/PBR/ Close this window Printed on Sat > Aug 13 05:53:57 BST 2005 > > ---------- > Howard Bloom > Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of > History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the > 21st Century > Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; > Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute > www.howardbloom.net > www.bigbangtango.net > Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic > of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The > Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American > Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, > Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International > Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for > Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. > For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: > www.paleopsych.org > for two chapters from > The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, > see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer > For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big > Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net > > From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 13 17:49:29 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 13 Aug 2005 13:49:29 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Explaining Those Vivid Memories of Martian Kidnappers In-Reply-To: <42FDF038.306@solution-consulting.com> References: <42FDF038.306@solution-consulting.com> Message-ID: I don't think one can rule out each and every case of alien abduction, or of other strange phenomena, since that would involve giving better explanations in each and every single case. But I noticed way back in high school or college that explaining away strange phenomena as the product of the "unconscious" (nowadays we'd talk about the brain) failed nearly as badly, for we simply don't know how the "unconscious" works. That said, the status on strange phenomena has been unchanged for 150 years. Lots of unexplained things out there, some of which go beyond ordinary coincidences (or so a good number of scientists who appear to be serious in every other way attest). But no accumulation of these events into general laws or even trends. There may be some websites that have systematized strange phenomena into various categories, but, as with so much on the Net, they will be of various degrees of reliability. You sent me a URL for a site that reported that the military was looking into possible military uses of (what was it? I forget) but abandoned the attempt. I don't think businesses have persisted for very long in finding commercial applications, either. Strange phenomena are likely to remain on my back burner. On 2005-08-13, Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. opined [message unchanged below]: > Date: Sat, 13 Aug 2005 07:06:00 -0600 > From: "Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D." > Reply-To: The new improved paleopsych list > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Explaining Those Vivid Memories of Martian > Kidnappers > > Clancy's hypothesis is almost certainly the best one I have seen, and > explains the phenomena. She ignores the other side, where people report being > abducted while wide awake. A psychiatrist friend brought two patients to my > office because of my skill in hypnosis. These two recalled being abducted > while in northwest Utah, raising copper wire from the Great Salt Lake from an > old telephone line. They were unsure about whether it was legal, so it was a > bit hush-hush. My MD friend wanted me to hypnotize them to get more info; I > have never seen such abject terror in human beings before or since. It was > extremely puzzling. I finally took a kind of agnosticism about it; I don't > believe in abductions, but I cannot explain their reactions any other way. > Lynn > > Premise Checker wrote: > >> Explaining Those Vivid Memories of Martian Kidnappers >> New York Times, 5.8.9 >> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/09/health/09alien.html?pagewanted=print >> >> By [3]BENEDICT CAREY >> >> "Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens," >> by Susan Clancy. Harvard University Press, $22.95. >> >> People who have memories of being abducted by aliens become hardened >> skeptics, of a kind. They dismiss the procession of scientists who >> explain away the memories as illusions or fantasy. They scoff at talk >> about hypnosis or the unconscious processing of Hollywood scripts. And >> they hold their ground amid snickers from a public that thinks that >> they are daft or psychotic. >> >> They are neither, it turns out, and their experiences should be taken >> as seriously as any strongly held exotic beliefs, according to Susan >> Clancy, a Harvard psychologist who interviewed dozens of >> self-described abductees as part of a series of memory studies over >> the last several years. >> >> In her book "Abducted," due in October, Dr. Clancy, a psychologist at >> Harvard, manages to refute and defend these believers, and along the >> way provide a discussion of current research into memory, emotion and >> culture that renders abduction stories understandable, if not >> believable. Although it focuses on abduction memories, the book hints >> at a larger ambition, to explain the psychology of transformative >> experiences, whether supposed abductions, conversions or divine >> visitations. >> >> "Understanding why people believe weird things is important for anyone >> who wishes to know more about people - that is, humans in general," >> she writes. >> >> Dr. Clancy's accounting for abduction memories starts with an odd but >> not uncommon experience called sleep paralysis. While in light >> dream-rich REM sleep, people will in rare cases wake up for a few >> moments and find themselves unable to move. Psychologists estimate >> that about a fifth of people will have that experience at least once, >> during which some 5 percent will be bathed in terrifying sensations >> like buzzing, full-body electrical quivers, a feeling of levitation, >> at times accompanied by hallucinations of intruders. >> >> Some of them must have an explanation as exotic as the surreal nature >> of the experience itself. Although no one has studied this group >> systematically, Dr. Clancy suggests based on her interviews, that they >> tend to be people who already have some interest in the paranormal, >> mystical arts and the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors. Often >> enough, their search for meaning lands them in the care of a therapist >> who uses hypnotism to elicit more details of their dreamlike >> experiences. >> >> Hypnotism is a state of deep relaxation, when people become highly >> prone to suggestion, psychologists find. When encouraged under >> hypnosis to imagine a vivid but entirely concocted incident - like >> being awakened by loud noises - people are more likely later to claim >> the scene as a real experience, studies find. >> >> Where, exactly, do the green figures with the wraparound eyes come >> from? From the deep well of pop culture, Dr. Clancy argues, based on a >> review of the history of U.F.O. sightings, popular movies and >> television programs on aliens. The first "abduction" in the United >> States was dramatized in 1953, in the movie "Invaders From Mars," she >> writes, and a rash of abduction reports followed this and other works >> on aliens, including the television series "The Outer Limits." >> >> One such report, by a couple from New Hampshire, Betty and Barney >> Hill, followed by days a particularly evocative episode of the show in >> 1961. Mr. Hill's description of the aliens - with big heads and shiny >> wraparound eyes - was featured in a best-selling book about the >> experience, and inspired the alien forms in Steven Spielberg's "Close >> Encounters of the Third Kind" in 1977, according to Dr. Clancy. >> >> Thus does life imitate art, and vice versa, in a narrative hall of >> mirrors in which scenes and even dialogues are recycled. Although they >> are distinct in details, abduction narratives are extremely similar in >> broad outline and often include experimentation with a sexual or >> procreative subtext. "Oh! And he's opening my shirt, and - he's going >> to put that thing in my navel," says one 1970's narrative, referring >> to a needle. >> >> "I can feel them moving that thing around in my stomach, in my body," >> the narrative, excerpted in the book, continues. The passage echoes >> other abduction accounts, past and future. >> >> In a laboratory study in 2002, Dr. Clancy and another Harvard >> psychologist, Richard McNally, gave self-described abductees a >> standardized word-association test intended to measure proneness to >> false-memory creation. The participants studied lists of words that >> were related to one another - "sugar," "candy," "sour," "bitter" - and >> to another word that was not on the list, in this case, "sweet." >> >> When asked to recall the word lists, those with abduction memories >> were more likely than a group of peers who had no such memories to >> falsely recall the unlisted word. The findings suggest a >> susceptibility to what are called source errors, misattributing >> sources of remembered information by, say, confusing a scene from a >> barely remembered movie with a dream. >> >> In another experiment, the researchers found that recalling abduction >> memories prompted physiological changes in blood pressure and >> sweat-gland activity that were higher than those seen in >> post-traumatic stress syndrome. The memories produced intense >> emotional trauma, and each time that occurs it deepens the certainty >> that something profound really did happen. >> >> Although no one of those elements - sleep paralysis, interest in the >> paranormal, hypnotherapy, memory tricks or emotional investment - is >> necessary or sufficient to create abduction memories, they tend to >> cluster together in self-described abductees, Dr. Clancy finds. "In >> the past, researchers have tended to concentrate on one or another" >> factor, she said in an interview. "I'm saying they all play a role." >> >> Yet abduction narratives often have another, less explicit, dimension >> that Dr. Clancy suspects may be central to their power. Consider this >> comment, from a study participant whom Dr. Clancy calls Jan, a >> middle-age divorc?e engaged in a quest for personal understanding: >> "You know, they do walk among us on earth. They have to transform >> first into a physical body, which is very painful for them. But they >> do it out of love. They are here to tell us that we're all >> interconnected in some way. Everything is." >> >> At a basic level, Dr. Clancy concludes, alien abduction stories give >> people meaning, a way to comprehend the many odd and dispiriting >> things that buffet any life, as well as a deep sense that they are not >> alone in the universe. In this sense, abduction memories are like >> transcendent religious visions, scary and yet somehow comforting and, >> at some personal psychological level, true. >> >> Dr. Clancy said she regretted not having asked the abductees she >> interviewed about religious beliefs, which were not a part of her >> original research. The reader may regret that, too. >> >> The warmth, awe and emotion of abduction stories and of those who tell >> them betray strong spiritual currents that will be familiar to >> millions of people whose internal lives are animated by religious >> imagery. >> >> When it comes to sounding the depths of alien stories, a scientific >> inquiry like this one may have to end with an inquiry into religion. From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Aug 13 17:53:39 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 13 Aug 2005 10:53:39 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Explaining Those Vivid Memories of Martian Kidnappers Message-ID: <01C59FF5.440947F0.shovland@mindspring.com> I have done past life exercises and even though I'm not a hard core believer in this, it is interesting that the "memories" are so specific. For example my most recent "past life" is that of a German soldier in WWII who ultimately dies on the Russian front. The memory is that of walking down a country road on a beautiful fall day, enjoying the moment, not thinking about what might come. Abductees also have very specific memories or else very good imaginations :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Premise Checker [SMTP:checker at panix.com] Sent: Saturday, August 13, 2005 10:49 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Explaining Those Vivid Memories of Martian Kidnappers I don't think one can rule out each and every case of alien abduction, or of other strange phenomena, since that would involve giving better explanations in each and every single case. But I noticed way back in high school or college that explaining away strange phenomena as the product of the "unconscious" (nowadays we'd talk about the brain) failed nearly as badly, for we simply don't know how the "unconscious" works. That said, the status on strange phenomena has been unchanged for 150 years. Lots of unexplained things out there, some of which go beyond ordinary coincidences (or so a good number of scientists who appear to be serious in every other way attest). But no accumulation of these events into general laws or even trends. There may be some websites that have systematized strange phenomena into various categories, but, as with so much on the Net, they will be of various degrees of reliability. You sent me a URL for a site that reported that the military was looking into possible military uses of (what was it? I forget) but abandoned the attempt. I don't think businesses have persisted for very long in finding commercial applications, either. Strange phenomena are likely to remain on my back burner. On 2005-08-13, Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. opined [message unchanged below]: > Date: Sat, 13 Aug 2005 07:06:00 -0600 > From: "Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D." > Reply-To: The new improved paleopsych list > To: The new improved paleopsych list > Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] NYT: Explaining Those Vivid Memories of Martian > Kidnappers > > Clancy's hypothesis is almost certainly the best one I have seen, and > explains the phenomena. She ignores the other side, where people report being > abducted while wide awake. A psychiatrist friend brought two patients to my > office because of my skill in hypnosis. These two recalled being abducted > while in northwest Utah, raising copper wire from the Great Salt Lake from an > old telephone line. They were unsure about whether it was legal, so it was a > bit hush-hush. My MD friend wanted me to hypnotize them to get more info; I > have never seen such abject terror in human beings before or since. It was > extremely puzzling. I finally took a kind of agnosticism about it; I don't > believe in abductions, but I cannot explain their reactions any other way. > Lynn > > Premise Checker wrote: > >> Explaining Those Vivid Memories of Martian Kidnappers >> New York Times, 5.8.9 >> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/09/health/09alien.html?pagewanted=print >> >> By [3]BENEDICT CAREY >> >> "Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens," >> by Susan Clancy. Harvard University Press, $22.95. >> >> People who have memories of being abducted by aliens become hardened >> skeptics, of a kind. They dismiss the procession of scientists who >> explain away the memories as illusions or fantasy. They scoff at talk >> about hypnosis or the unconscious processing of Hollywood scripts. And >> they hold their ground amid snickers from a public that thinks that >> they are daft or psychotic. >> >> They are neither, it turns out, and their experiences should be taken >> as seriously as any strongly held exotic beliefs, according to Susan >> Clancy, a Harvard psychologist who interviewed dozens of >> self-described abductees as part of a series of memory studies over >> the last several years. >> >> In her book "Abducted," due in October, Dr. Clancy, a psychologist at >> Harvard, manages to refute and defend these believers, and along the >> way provide a discussion of current research into memory, emotion and >> culture that renders abduction stories understandable, if not >> believable. Although it focuses on abduction memories, the book hints >> at a larger ambition, to explain the psychology of transformative >> experiences, whether supposed abductions, conversions or divine >> visitations. >> >> "Understanding why people believe weird things is important for anyone >> who wishes to know more about people - that is, humans in general," >> she writes. >> >> Dr. Clancy's accounting for abduction memories starts with an odd but >> not uncommon experience called sleep paralysis. While in light >> dream-rich REM sleep, people will in rare cases wake up for a few >> moments and find themselves unable to move. Psychologists estimate >> that about a fifth of people will have that experience at least once, >> during which some 5 percent will be bathed in terrifying sensations >> like buzzing, full-body electrical quivers, a feeling of levitation, >> at times accompanied by hallucinations of intruders. >> >> Some of them must have an explanation as exotic as the surreal nature >> of the experience itself. Although no one has studied this group >> systematically, Dr. Clancy suggests based on her interviews, that they >> tend to be people who already have some interest in the paranormal, >> mystical arts and the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors. Often >> enough, their search for meaning lands them in the care of a therapist >> who uses hypnotism to elicit more details of their dreamlike >> experiences. >> >> Hypnotism is a state of deep relaxation, when people become highly >> prone to suggestion, psychologists find. When encouraged under >> hypnosis to imagine a vivid but entirely concocted incident - like >> being awakened by loud noises - people are more likely later to claim >> the scene as a real experience, studies find. >> >> Where, exactly, do the green figures with the wraparound eyes come >> from? From the deep well of pop culture, Dr. Clancy argues, based on a >> review of the history of U.F.O. sightings, popular movies and >> television programs on aliens. The first "abduction" in the United >> States was dramatized in 1953, in the movie "Invaders From Mars," she >> writes, and a rash of abduction reports followed this and other works >> on aliens, including the television series "The Outer Limits." >> >> One such report, by a couple from New Hampshire, Betty and Barney >> Hill, followed by days a particularly evocative episode of the show in >> 1961. Mr. Hill's description of the aliens - with big heads and shiny >> wraparound eyes - was featured in a best-selling book about the >> experience, and inspired the alien forms in Steven Spielberg's "Close >> Encounters of the Third Kind" in 1977, according to Dr. Clancy. >> >> Thus does life imitate art, and vice versa, in a narrative hall of >> mirrors in which scenes and even dialogues are recycled. Although they >> are distinct in details, abduction narratives are extremely similar in >> broad outline and often include experimentation with a sexual or >> procreative subtext. "Oh! And he's opening my shirt, and - he's going >> to put that thing in my navel," says one 1970's narrative, referring >> to a needle. >> >> "I can feel them moving that thing around in my stomach, in my body," >> the narrative, excerpted in the book, continues. The passage echoes >> other abduction accounts, past and future. >> >> In a laboratory study in 2002, Dr. Clancy and another Harvard >> psychologist, Richard McNally, gave self-described abductees a >> standardized word-association test intended to measure proneness to >> false-memory creation. The participants studied lists of words that >> were related to one another - "sugar," "candy," "sour," "bitter" - and >> to another word that was not on the list, in this case, "sweet." >> >> When asked to recall the word lists, those with abduction memories >> were more likely than a group of peers who had no such memories to >> falsely recall the unlisted word. The findings suggest a >> susceptibility to what are called source errors, misattributing >> sources of remembered information by, say, confusing a scene from a >> barely remembered movie with a dream. >> >> In another experiment, the researchers found that recalling abduction >> memories prompted physiological changes in blood pressure and >> sweat-gland activity that were higher than those seen in >> post-traumatic stress syndrome. The memories produced intense >> emotional trauma, and each time that occurs it deepens the certainty >> that something profound really did happen. >> >> Although no one of those elements - sleep paralysis, interest in the >> paranormal, hypnotherapy, memory tricks or emotional investment - is >> necessary or sufficient to create abduction memories, they tend to >> cluster together in self-described abductees, Dr. Clancy finds. "In >> the past, researchers have tended to concentrate on one or another" >> factor, she said in an interview. "I'm saying they all play a role." >> >> Yet abduction narratives often have another, less explicit, dimension >> that Dr. Clancy suspects may be central to their power. Consider this >> comment, from a study participant whom Dr. Clancy calls Jan, a >> middle-age divorcee engaged in a quest for personal understanding: >> "You know, they do walk among us on earth. They have to transform >> first into a physical body, which is very painful for them. But they >> do it out of love. They are here to tell us that we're all >> interconnected in some way. Everything is." >> >> At a basic level, Dr. Clancy concludes, alien abduction stories give >> people meaning, a way to comprehend the many odd and dispiriting >> things that buffet any life, as well as a deep sense that they are not >> alone in the universe. In this sense, abduction memories are like >> transcendent religious visions, scary and yet somehow comforting and, >> at some personal psychological level, true. >> >> Dr. Clancy said she regretted not having asked the abductees she >> interviewed about religious beliefs, which were not a part of her >> original research. The reader may regret that, too. >> >> The warmth, awe and emotion of abduction stories and of those who tell >> them betray strong spiritual currents that will be familiar to >> millions of people whose internal lives are animated by religious >> imagery. >> >> When it comes to sounding the depths of alien stories, a scientific >> inquiry like this one may have to end with an inquiry into religion. << File: ATT00000.txt >> From Euterpel66 at aol.com Sat Aug 13 22:04:41 2005 From: Euterpel66 at aol.com (Euterpel66 at aol.com) Date: Sat, 13 Aug 2005 18:04:41 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Explaining Those Vivid Memories of Martian Kidnappers Message-ID: <1f9.fc492aa.302fc879@aol.com> A few years ago, I was visiting my aunt in VA and she very casually said that her deceased husband said that he had been abducted by aliens from childhood. I don't know why I didn't pursue the comment, but I didn't .Perhaps it was because my uncle was the very last person I would have ever imagined would have said such a thing, and my aunt was the last person I would ever imagine would admit that her husband had said such a thing. Both were extremely intelligent educated people. He was an aerospace engineer for Grumman and she had a degree in art history. When I got home I became more curious about the whole thing and started recalling my interactions with this family. My uncle was a big man. He was 6'7". Whenever we visited their house, he always disappeared into his study and I recall my mother thought this was an insult.She didn't like my father's sister any better. She thought my aunt was a snob. I remember my uncle as a kind and gentle man who seemed extremely shy. The only time I can remember his ever coming to our house was to help my father put up ceiling tiles when we were building our house. I suppose I should question my aunt about my uncle's admission, but somehow it seems an intrusion. Lorraine Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. ---Andre Gide http://hometown.aol.com/euterpel66/myhomepage/poetry.html In a message dated 8/13/2005 9:04:29 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, ljohnson at solution-consulting.com writes: Clancy's hypothesis is almost certainly the best one I have seen, and explains the phenomena. She ignores the other side, where people report being abducted while wide awake. A psychiatrist friend brought two patients to my office because of my skill in hypnosis. These two recalled being abducted while in northwest Utah, raising copper wire from the Great Salt Lake from an old telephone line. They were unsure about whether it was legal, so it was a bit hush-hush. My MD friend wanted me to hypnotize them to get more info; I have never seen such abject terror in human beings before or since. It was extremely puzzling. I finally took a kind of agnosticism about it; I don't believe in abductions, but I cannot explain their reactions any other way. Lynn Premise Checker wrote: Explaining Those Vivid Memories of Martian Kidnappers New York Times, 5.8.9 _http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/09/health/09alien.html?pagewanted=print_ (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/09/health/09alien.html?pagewanted=print) By [3]BENEDICT CAREY "Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens," by Susan Clancy. Harvard University Press, $22.95. People who have memories of being abducted by aliens become hardened skeptics, of a kind. They dismiss the procession of scientists who explain away the memories as illusions or fantasy. They scoff at talk about hypnosis or the unconscious processing of Hollywood scripts. And they hold their ground amid snickers from a public that thinks that they are daft or psychotic. They are neither, it turns out, and their experiences should be taken as seriously as any strongly held exotic beliefs, according to Susan Clancy, a Harvard psychologist who interviewed dozens of self-described abductees as part of a series of memory studies over the last several years. In her book "Abducted," due in October, Dr. Clancy, a psychologist at Harvard, manages to refute and defend these believers, and along the way provide a discussion of current research into memory, emotion and culture that renders abduction stories understandable, if not believable. Although it focuses on abduction memories, the book hints at a larger ambition, to explain the psychology of transformative experiences, whether supposed abductions, conversions or divine visitations. "Understanding why people believe weird things is important for anyone who wishes to know more about people - that is, humans in general," she writes. Dr. Clancy's accounting for abduction memories starts with an odd but not uncommon experience called sleep paralysis. While in light dream-rich REM sleep, people will in rare cases wake up for a few moments and find themselves unable to move. Psychologists estimate that about a fifth of people will have that experience at least once, during which some 5 percent will be bathed in terrifying sensations like buzzing, full-body electrical quivers, a feeling of levitation, at times accompanied by hallucinations of intruders. Some of them must have an explanation as exotic as the surreal nature of the experience itself. Although no one has studied this group systematically, Dr. Clancy suggests based on her interviews, that they tend to be people who already have some interest in the paranormal, mystical arts and the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors. Often enough, their search for meaning lands them in the care of a therapist who uses hypnotism to elicit more details of their dreamlike experiences. Hypnotism is a state of deep relaxation, when people become highly prone to suggestion, psychologists find. When encouraged under hypnosis to imagine a vivid but entirely concocted incident - like being awakened by loud noises - people are more likely later to claim the scene as a real experience, studies find. Where, exactly, do the green figures with the wraparound eyes come from? From the deep well of pop culture, Dr. Clancy argues, based on a review of the history of U.F.O. sightings, popular movies and television programs on aliens. The first "abduction" in the United States was dramatized in 1953, in the movie "Invaders From Mars," she writes, and a rash of abduction reports followed this and other works on aliens, including the television series "The Outer Limits." One such report, by a couple from New Hampshire, Betty and Barney Hill, followed by days a particularly evocative episode of the show in 1961. Mr. Hill's description of the aliens - with big heads and shiny wraparound eyes - was featured in a best-selling book about the experience, and inspired the alien forms in Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" in 1977, according to Dr. Clancy. Thus does life imitate art, and vice versa, in a narrative hall of mirrors in which scenes and even dialogues are recycled. Although they are distinct in details, abduction narratives are extremely similar in broad outline and often include experimentation with a sexual or procreative subtext. "Oh! And he's opening my shirt, and - he's going to put that thing in my navel," says one 1970's narrative, referring to a needle. "I can feel them moving that thing around in my stomach, in my body," the narrative, excerpted in the book, continues. The passage echoes other abduction accounts, past and future. In a laboratory study in 2002, Dr. Clancy and another Harvard psychologist, Richard McNally, gave self-described abductees a standardized word-association test intended to measure proneness to false-memory creation. The participants studied lists of words that were related to one another - "sugar," "candy," "sour," "bitter" - and to another word that was not on the list, in this case, "sweet." When asked to recall the word lists, those with abduction memories were more likely than a group of peers who had no such memories to falsely recall the unlisted word. The findings suggest a susceptibility to what are called source errors, misattributing sources of remembered information by, say, confusing a scene from a barely remembered movie with a dream. In another experiment, the researchers found that recalling abduction memories prompted physiological changes in blood pressure and sweat-gland activity that were higher than those seen in post-traumatic stress syndrome. The memories produced intense emotional trauma, and each time that occurs it deepens the certainty that something profound really did happen. Although no one of those elements - sleep paralysis, interest in the paranormal, hypnotherapy, memory tricks or emotional investment - is necessary or sufficient to create abduction memories, they tend to cluster together in self-described abductees, Dr. Clancy finds. "In the past, researchers have tended to concentrate on one or another" factor, she said in an interview. "I'm saying they all play a role." Yet abduction narratives often have another, less explicit, dimension that Dr. Clancy suspects may be central to their power. Consider this comment, from a study participant whom Dr. Clancy calls Jan, a middle-age divorc?e engaged in a quest for personal understanding: "You know, they do walk among us on earth. They have to transform first into a physical body, which is very painful for them. But they do it out of love. They are here to tell us that we're all interconnected in some way. Everything is." At a basic level, Dr. Clancy concludes, alien abduction stories give people meaning, a way to comprehend the many odd and dispiriting things that buffet any life, as well as a deep sense that they are not alone in the universe. In this sense, abduction memories are like transcendent religious visions, scary and yet somehow comforting and, at some personal psychological level, true. Dr. Clancy said she regretted not having asked the abductees she interviewed about religious beliefs, which were not a part of her original research. The reader may regret that, too. The warmth, awe and emotion of abduction stories and of those who tell them betray strong spiritual currents that will be familiar to millions of people whose internal lives are animated by religious imagery. When it comes to sounding the depths of alien stories, a scientific inquiry like this one may have to end with an inquiry into religio n. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 15 01:21:48 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 14 Aug 2005 21:21:48 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] BBC: How hugs can aid women's hearts Message-ID: How hugs can aid women's hearts http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4131508.stm Women's heart health may benefit more from hugs than men's, a study suggests. A team from the University of North Carolina studied the effects of hugging on both partners in 38 couples. The study showed hugs increased levels of oxytocin, a "bonding" hormone, and reduced blood pressure - which cuts the risk of heart disease. But, writing in the Psychosomatic Medicine, the researchers said women recorded greater reductions in blood pressure than men after their hugs. During the study, the men and women were taken to separate rooms to test their blood pressure and levels of oxytocin, which is released during childbirth and breastfeeding, and cortisol, a stress hormone. The couples were then reunited and asked to sit together and talk about a time when they were particularly happy. They then watched five minutes of a romantic film before being left to talk to each other for a further 10 minutes. Next, the couples were asked to hug for 20 seconds. Protection Both men and women were seen to have higher levels of oxytocin after the hug. People in loving relationships were found to have higher levels of the hormone than others. But the study also found all women had reduced levels of cortisol following the hug, as well as reporting the blood pressure benefits. The researchers, led by psychologist Dr Karen Grewen, wrote in Psychosomatic Medicine: "Greater partner support is linked to higher oxytocin levels for both men and women. "However, the importance of oxytocin and its potentially cardioprotective effects may be greater for women." Dr Charmaine Griffiths, spokesperson for the British Heart Foundation, said: "Scientists are increasingly interested in the possibility that positive emotions can be good for your health. "This study has reinforced research findings that support from a partner, in this case a hug from a loved one, can have beneficial effects on heart health." She added: "British Heart Foundation researchers have already demonstrated links between a positive emotional state, such as happiness, and low levels of the stress hormone, cortisol. "This growing body of research only goes to highlight how important social support is for everyone, not just those in a relationship." From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 15 01:21:55 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 14 Aug 2005 21:21:55 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Entrenched Epidemic: Wife-Beatings in Africa Message-ID: Entrenched Epidemic: Wife-Beatings in Africa http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/11/international/africa/11women.html By SHARON LaFRANIERE LAGOS, Nigeria - It was a typical husband-wife argument. She wanted to visit her parents. He wanted her to stay home. So they settled it in what some here say is an all-too-typical fashion, Rosalynn Isimeto-Osibuamhe recalled of the incident in December 2001. Her husband, Emmanuel, followed her out the door. Then he beat her unconscious, she says, and left her lying in the street near their apartment. Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe, then 31 and in the fifth year of her marriage, had broken an unwritten rule in this part of the world: she had defied her husband. Surveys throughout sub-Saharan Africa show that many men - and women, too - consider such disobedience ample justification for a beating. Not Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe. A university graduate and founder of a French school, she packed her clothes and walked out as soon as she got back from the hospital. So far, although her resolve sometimes wavers and she does not want a divorce, she has not gone back. "He doesn't believe I have any rights of my own," she said in an interview outside her French classroom. "If I say no, he beats me. I said: 'Wow. That is not what I want in life.' " Women suffer from violence in every society. In few places, however, is the abuse more entrenched, and accepted, than in sub-Saharan Africa. One in three Nigerian women reported having been physically abused by a male partner, according to the latest study, conducted in 1993. The wife of the deputy governor of a northern Nigerian province told reporters last year that her husband beat her incessantly, in part because she watched television movies. One of President Olusegun Obasanjo's appointees to a national anticorruption commission was allegedly killed by her husband in 2000, two days after she asked the state police commissioner to protect her. "It is like it is a normal thing for women to be treated by their husbands as punching bags," Obong Rita Akpan, until last month Nigeria's minister for women's affairs, said in an interview here. "The Nigerian man thinks that a woman is his inferior. Right from childhood, right from infancy, the boy is preferred to the girl. Even when they marry out of love, they still think the woman is below them and they do whatever they want." In Zambia, nearly half of women surveyed said a male partner had beaten them, according to a 2004 study financed by the United States - the highest percentage of nine developing nations surveyed on three continents. In South Africa, researchers for the Medical Research Council estimated last year that a male partner kills a girlfriend or spouse every six hours - the highest mortality rate from domestic violence ever reported, they say. In Harare, Zimbabwe's capital, domestic violence accounts for more than 6 in 10 murder cases in court, a United Nations report concluded last year. Yet most women remain silent about the abuse, women's rights organizations say. A World Health Organization study has found that while more than a third of Namibian women reported enduring physical or sexual abuse by a male partner, often resulting in injury, six in seven victims had either kept it to themselves or confided only in a friend or relative. Help is typically not easy to find. Nigeria, Africa's largest nation with nearly 130 million people, has only two shelters for battered women, both opened in the last four years. The United States, by contrast, has about 1,200 such havens. Moreover, many women say wifely transgression justify beatings. About half of women interviewed in Zambia in 2001 and 2002 said husbands had a right to beat wives who argue with them, burn the dinner, go out without the husband's permission, neglect the children or refuse sex. To Kenny Adebayo, a 30-year-old driver in Lagos, the issue is clear-cut. "If you tell your wife she puts too much salt in the dinner, and every day, every day, every day there is too much salt, one day you will get emotional and hurt her," he said. "We men in Africa hate disrespect." Nigeria's penal code, in force in the Muslim-dominated north, specifically allows husbands to discipline their wives - just as it allows parents and teachers to discipline children - as long as they do not inflict grievous harm. Assault laws could apply, but the police typically see wife-beating as an exception. Domestic violence bills have been proposed in six of Nigeria's three dozen provinces but adopted in just two. Women's rights activists say that the prevalence of abuse is emblematic of the low status of women in sub-Saharan Africa. Typically less educated, they work longer hours and transport three times as much weight as men, hauling firewood, water and sacks of corn on their heads. Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe does not fit that standard profile. Articulate, with a fashionable haircut and a sociology book in her bag, she speaks in a confident, even assertive tone of voice. Her diary is full of plans for various projects she hopes to undertake. "I am an organizer," she said in a series of interviews. "I am a leader." But that did not save her from a seemingly endless string of beatings during her eight-year marriage to her husband, Emmanuel. By Nigerian standards, Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe said, her parents were progressive. Her father occasionally beat her mother, but he also encouraged his daughter, the oldest of seven children, to pursue her studies and, later, her careers as a marketing executive, French teacher and host of a French educational television show. She was only about 16 when she met Emmanuel. Like her, he went on to graduate from a university, specializing in accounting. Slim and handsome, he slapped her only once during their long courtship, she said. She thought it was an aberration. It wasn't. Now 35, Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe says that Emmanuel beat her more than 60 times after she married him in 1997. He beat her, she says, while she was pregnant with their son, now 6. He threw a lantern at her. He held a knife to her head, she said, while a friend pleaded with him not to kill her. Emmanuel Osibuamhe, 36, now says he was wrong to beat his wife. But in a two-hour interview in his office, which doubles as barber shop, he insisted that she drove him to it by deliberately provoking him. Pacing the floor in freshly pressed pants, polished shoes and yellow shirt, he grew increasingly agitated as he recalled how she challenged his authority. "You can't imagine yourself beating your wife?" he said. "You can't imagine yourself being pushed to that level? But some people just push you over the edge, and you do things that you are not supposed to do." "For God's sake," he added. "You are the head of the home as the man. You must have a home that is submissive to you." To him, that means accepting that he is the head of the household and makes the final decisions. It also means that all property be in his name and that his wife ask his permission before she visits her family, he said. When Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe eventually sought help, others only seemed to support her husband's view. She went to the police. "They told me I am not a small girl," she recalled. "If I don't want to be married, I should get divorced." She told her father-in-law. He advised her that "beating is normal." She told her local pastor, who counseled her that "I shouldn't make him so angry," telling her "whatever my husband says, I should submit." She found support, finally, at Project Alert on Violence Against Women, a nonprofit organization that runs one of Nigeria's two shelters. She lived at the shelter for weeks. She titled her statement detailing the violence "A Cry for Help." Bridget Osekwe, the senior program officer, said the group's files contained 200 cases like Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe's. Even some women who are economically independent like Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe, she said, are loath to divorce their husbands for fear of social disgrace. "In this society, a woman must do everything she can to make her marriage work," said Josephine Effah-Chukwuma, who set up Project Alert in 1999. "If it fails, the woman gets the blame." Since she moved out, Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe said, her husband has hit her a dozen times, once knocking her to the floor of their church. She is torn over whether it is possible for him to change. She worries about how she will raise her son, now living with his grandparents, should she divorce. "Should I stay because of the baby and then get killed?" she asked. But at another point she asked a reporter to make sure that in any account of her story, her last name would be hyphenated to include his. Her diary is filled with notes on how his views are wrong. "Marriage to you: A slavery relationship!" she wrote this January. She has now found a new outlet as the creator and host of a local television show on domestic violence. After the first program was broadcast, she said, she was deluged with calls from women like herself. She hopes to pursue their cause through a little foundation she has formed called "Happy Family." "An African man believes his wife is like a piece of property, is like a car, is like a shoe, is like something for him to trample on," Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe said. "Our men need education." So do "our mothers, our fathers, our sons," she added. "The whole society needs to be overhauled." From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 15 01:22:03 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 14 Aug 2005 21:22:03 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Alternet: Weird Science on the Religious Right Message-ID: Weird Science on the Religious Right http://www.alternet.org/story/24000/ By Stan Cox, AlterNet. Posted August 11, 2005. Seven of the greatest hits (or misses) of conservative Christian 'science' show just how little fact goes into these beliefs, and how much damage they can cause. --- "God said it. I believe it. That settles it." This familiar bumper sticker slogan appears to sum up the Religious Right's decision-making process on matters of heated public debate. But when policies involving human biology and behavior are being hammered out, faith alone isn't always sufficient to win over voters and decision-makers. At such times, a bit of scientific evidence comes in handy, and some of the Religious Right's operatives aren't too choosy about where they get it. Consider the following seven claims, the quality of the scientific evidence that supports them and the potential consequences, were they to be widely accepted: "Condoms are full of holes" That's according to Concerned Women For America and many other right-wing groups. How big are those holes? Big enough that an HIV particle or even a sperm can easily wander through, if you believe this scary diagram from abortionfacts.com: condom holes http://www.alternet.org/images/managed/Story+Image_thumb_holes.jpg Organizations that advertise gaping holes of 5 microns (.0002 inch) or more in condoms often turn out to be misapplying data from a 1993 paper by scientist C.M. Roland. Possibly confused by the title of the journal in which Roland published his work -- Rubber World -- they fail to note that his experiments were done with latex gloves, not condoms. On the other hand, a 1998 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) report noted that when 1-micron holes were intentionally drilled in condom latex, a sensitive test could detect them, but the same test could find no holes in undrilled condoms. That indicated that condoms have no holes bigger than 1 micron, unless researchers poke the holes themselves. And in a 50-micron-thick condom, even a 1-micron-wide hole is really a narrow tunnel that would have little chance of reaching through the entire thickness, let alone allowing HIV particles through. The overall conclusion of the FDA study: "All the latex films representing a wide range of formulations and ages were effective barriers to transmission of the small virus. Thus, permeation through quite thin, stretched samples with this very sensitive test was not found." The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) fact sheet on condoms states that "Laboratory studies have demonstrated that latex condoms provide an essentially impermeable barrier to particles the size of STD pathogens." And, of course, a far larger sperm cell has no chance of escape. That information is buried in the midst of a previously informative CDC document that was largely gutted under the Bush Administration. While noting, correctly, that condoms are not 100 percent effective, the current fact sheet no longer contains information on proper use of condoms. Condom failure is actually overwhelmingly due to mistakes or accidents during their use, not manufacture or testing, so the fact sheet now put out by the CDC, and influenced by the Religious Right, may be making unwanted pregnancy and HIV infection more likely, not less so. A footnote: Concerned Women for America's "full of holes" claim was based on a press release by the National Physicians Center for Family Resources. That obscure group came under fire this summer in Congress for the Bush administration's 4Parents.gov website, which it produced. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. and 145 nongovernmental organizations condemned the site for misleading teenagers about condoms and other sexual issues. "Phonics is the only effective way to teach reading" Have you ever wondered why right-wing Christian parents and educators are so intent on promoting phonics (a method of teaching reading that stresses basic symbol-sound relationships) and so abhor "whole language" learning (in which children learn words by reading them in context)? The answer you'll get from phonics advocates is simply that it works, as indicated by better test scores (at least when the tests include questions on phonics!). But there appears to be consensus among researchers outside the Religious Right that the most effective approach is a broad, integrated one that incorporates some phonics training and a lot of reading. The most pertinent research I've seen on the Christian phonics fixation (by the way, why do those last two words begin with different letters?) was done by Mark Thogmartin. Here are excerpts of some of the reasons he heard from phonics enthusiasts, as he listed them in a 1997 issue of Home Education magazine: * "More holistic approaches to reading instruction are more child-centered and seem to assert the inherent goodness of the child, which is opposed to the basic Christian doctrine of a sinful nature derived from the fall of Adam." * "A phonics approach to reading instruction, with its usual dependence on drill and rote memorization, is more compatible with the rigidly disciplined environment of most Christian schools." * "Often, theorists who believe in a more holistic, meaning-centered reading instruction philosophy have ... suggested that a child's ability to extract the meaning from print is the primary objective of reading any passage. This may sound almost blasphemous to Christians who believe in the literal, verbal inspiration of scripture." Probably the chief reason for the Christian Rights's crusade against whole-language learning is a concern about its association throughout the 20th century with the left side of the U.S. political spectrum. Indeed, conservative Christian writer Samuel Blumenfeld has suggested, according to Thogmartin, that whole-language-style methodology "was initiated as a deliberate attempt by socialists to lower the literacy rates in America. An illiterate society would be more dependent on the 'Big Brother' socialist government, making a socialist takeover much easier." "Abortion causes breast cancer" The heavily publicized "ABC Hypothesis" -- that having an abortion increases a woman's risk of developing breast cancer -- is not supported by valid research. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), it is "well established" that "induced abortion is not associated with an increase in breast cancer risk." But ABC proponents such as Karen Malec, president of the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer, claim that the NIH is party to a coverup, and that in fact "abortion causes breast cancer." To support that assertion, they often cite research in which women suffering from breast cancer, as well as women who are cancer-free, are asked whether they have ever had an abortion. But in such situations, say ABC's critics, healthy women are less likely to be forthcoming about past abortions than are those who are currently undergoing treatment for a grave illness. Studies that avoid that bias by relying wholly on medical records have found no link. Many environmental and genetic factors interact throughout a woman's life to push or pull her down a road either toward or away from breast cancer. No one factor can be said to "cause" the disease -- certainly not one like abortion, for which even a valid statistical association cannot be detected. In an attempt to seal her argument, Malec often claims that abortion "causes" breast cancer through the simple mechanism of preventing childbirth. Perhaps inadvertently shedding some light on her underlying motivations, she has written that "experts universally agree that having a child provides a woman with a natural protection against breast cancer and that it is healthier for a married woman not to postpone her first full-term pregnancy." "Remote prayer cures disease" There could well be all sorts of "mind-body" mechanisms through which prayer in the presence of a patient, or by the patient herself, might provide medical benefits. But what if so-called "remote intercessory prayer" -- that is, praying for a far-away patient without that patient's knowledge -- could be proven to produce medically detectable results? That would really be something, wouldn't it? Amazingly, in 2001, a paper demonstrating the effectiveness of remote prayer turned up in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine. In that study, scientists at Columbia University showed that by saying appropriate prayers, groups of people in the US, Australia, and Canada apparently increased the pregnancy rate in women who had undergone in vitro fertilization in Korea. But before long, critics led by Bruce Flamm, a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, Irvine, showed that the study was suspiciously designed and statistically flawed. Then it came to light that one of the paper's three authors, Daniel Wirth, lacked a medical degree but did sport an impressive criminal record. A year after the paper was published, Wirth, a faith-healing con man, was indicted for stealing $3.4 million in income and property through the use of false identities. He pled guilty to conspiracy charges in May 2004. (The charges were unconnected to the prayer study). In October 2004, the Journal of Reproductive Medicine published a correction stating that another of the paper's authors, Rogerio A. Lobo, had requested that his name be removed from the paper. An investigation by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had found that Lobo first learned of the study six to 12 months after its completion. To date, no statistically significant evidence of successful remote intercessory prayer has been published. Private prayer has no obvious implications for government policy, unless research on the subject is paid for by taxpayers. And -- you guessed it -- that has indeed happened. The National Institutes for Health, through its National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, has funded research on remote intercessory prayer at least twice since 1992. "Emergency contraception is a health hazard" The so-called "morning-after pill" -- a single tablet containing hormones similar to those in birth control pills but in a larger dose -- prevents pregnancy by blocking fertilization or implantation of the egg. Side effects may include some flu-like symptoms, which appear to be less severe than common side effects of early pregnancy, and of shorter duration. David Reardon, Director of the anti-abortion Elliot Institute, offers this retort to FDA researchers who have declared the pill safe: "Actually, what they really mean by 'safe' is simply that women aren't dropping down dead." Like other critics of emergency contraception on the Religious Right, unencumbered by any scientific evidence, he conjures up dark images of devastating long-term health risks from taking the pill. What has Christian extremists up in arms about emergency contraception is that it may prevent implantation and development of an already fertilized egg, which they regard as the death of a human being. That belief, of course, has long been the subject of philosophical debate. Exaggerating health hazards is simply a way of doing an end run on the philosophical question and getting the pill's use restricted or banned outright. In 2004, the FDA refused to permit over-the-counter sales of Barr Laboratories' "Plan B" emergency contraception product. In so doing, the agency overruled its own scientific advisory panel, which had recommended that such sales be allowed. In May 2005, The Nation and the Washington Post quoted one conservative evangelical member of the advisory panel, W. David Hager, as he boasted to an Asbury College congregation -- in a videotaped sermon -- of his role in getting Plan B restricted: "After two days of hearings, the committees voted to approve this over-the-counter sale by 23 to 4. I was asked to write a minority opinion that was sent to the commissioner of the FDA. For only the second time in five decades, the FDA did not abide by its advisory committee opinion, and the measure was rejected. Now the opinion I wrote was not from an evangelical Christian perspective. ... But I argued it from a scientific perspective, and God took that information, and He used it through this minority report to influence the decision." He added, "Once again, what Satan meant for evil, God turned into good." The FDA is revisiting the question of over-the-counter sales of Plan B and will issue a ruling by the end of this month. "Terri Schiavo could have gotten better" When Schiavo's autopsy was released publicly on June 15, 2005, it showed, in the words of the district medical examiner, that her brain damage "was irreversible, and no amount of therapy or treatment would have regenerated the massive loss of neurons." The report did not state that Schiavo was in a "permanent vegetative state" (PVS), because PVS is defined in clinical terms and not demonstrated through autopsy. The Religious Right has latched onto the report's silence on PVS, continuing to insist that, based on the autopsy, "we really can't know how she died." Pointing to the absence of a PVS diagnosis in the autopsy report, a spokesperson for the organization Focus on the Family said that "People are grasping at straws to justify the dehydration death of Terri Schiavo." Of course, before Schiavo's death, clinical observation by medical experts did confirm that she was in a permanent vegetative state from which she could never recover. Evidence to the contrary, of course, could have provided a compelling reason to continue life support indefinitely. And for a while, hopes for restoration of Schiavo's consciousness appeared to rest on one man: William Hammesfahr, M.D. The Schiavo family selected the Clearwater, Fla. neurologist to testify before Florida's Sixth Circuit Court in 2002 that his "vasodilation therapy" could revive Schiavo. But the court order that followed was scathing in its assessment of Hammesfahr's arguments: It is clear that this therapy is not recognized in the medical community ... and what undermines his credibility is that he did not present to this court any evidence other than his generalized statements as to the efficacy of his therapy on brain damaged individuals like Terry Schiavo. He testified that he has treated about 50 patients in the same or worse condition than Terry Schiavo since 1994 but he offered no names, no case studies, no videos and no tests results to support his claim that he had success in all but one of them. The Court was also skeptical about Hammesfahr's claim to be a "Nobel Prize nominee," and with good reason. He based the claim on nothing more than a letter written on his behalf by Rep. Mike Bilirakis, R-Fla., who is not eligible to make Nobel nominations. "Humans are not descended from pre-human ancestors." For a good story, give me that old-time creationism, with its 6,000-year-old Earth and big flood. But that's not an easy sell when you're dealing with school boards and other government institutions. So these days, the anti-evolution Right talks mostly about intelligent design (ID). Many proponents of ID -- which is creationism dressed up in a white lab coat -- have accomodated scientific reality to some extent by admitting, for example, that the Earth really is 4.5 billion years old or that natural selection can occur within certain strict limits. However, they are unwavering in their insistence that individual species are the products of custom design, not natural selection. And that applies doubly to our own species. As they labor to explain how humans were created -- while trying to avoid being buried under a growing mountain of physical and genetic data that demonstrates our primate ancestry -- ID thinkers have exhibited some impressive creativity of their own. Among their efforts to reconcile the intelligent design of humans with real science, the award for Most Imaginative goes to Jonathan Wells. A Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute in Seattle and author of the creationist classic Icons of Evolution (2000), Wells wrote the following as part of a paper he presented to the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences, a forum established by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church: Some people believe that the first human beings were created fully grown. But ... a creature that begins life without passing through birth and childhood would be so unlike us that we could not regard it as truly human, regardless of how great the superficial resemblance. And because human babies are totally dependent on other creatures for their survival during early development, animals capable of raising the first human babies must have been a necessary part of the original plan. Human babies need milk to survive and grow, so mammals had to exist before humans appeared. And not just any mammal. The first human baby presumably had to be nurtured by a creature very much like itself -- a humanlike primate. This creature, in turn, could only have been nurtured by a creature intermediate in some respects between it and a more primitive mammal. In other words, a plan for the emergence of human beings must have included something like the succession of prehistoric forms we find in the fossil record. Intelligent Design is an attempt to squeeze a creation story -- any creation story, whether it features Adam and Eve or motherly monkeys -- through cracks in the First Amendment and into public classrooms. This process is at various stages of completion in Kansas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and other states. And President Bush himself recently endorsed the teaching of ID. Well, you have to admit that when the Religious Right and its innovative researchers get involved, science is anything but dry and dull. But when society is trying to come to a collective decision on science-related issues that can have profound consequences for millions of people, we need something more substantial than gripping fiction and colorful characters. Stan Cox is a plant breeder and writer in Salina, Kansas. From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 15 01:38:00 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 14 Aug 2005 21:38:00 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: General Disobeyed Orders to End Affair, Officials Say Message-ID: General Disobeyed Orders to End Affair, Officials Say http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/13/politics/13general.html [I have googled and got thousands of hits, including the one from Prison Planet about a military coup involving Byrnes. Welcome to Paranoid Nation! My more mundane idea is that Byrnes was a dissident, that he was watched extra closely, and that an extra-marital affair was turned up, something that would ordinarily be overlooked, esp. when the man was about to get divorced.] By DAVID S. CLOUD WASHINGTON, Aug. 12 - A four-star general relieved of his command this week for adultery was ordered last January to break off the affair but continued to have contact with the woman, two senior Army officials said on Friday. A major reason the general, Kevin P. Byrnes, was dismissed as head of the Army Training and Doctrine Command was that the inspector general found that he had violated the direct order from the Army chief of staff, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case is still being adjudicated. Army officials disclosed the details of the inspector general's inquiry to explain the unusual decision to relieve a four-star officer with a distinguished record. The order to break off contact with the woman, whose identity has not been made public, came after the inspector general began an inquiry into an accusation that General Byrnes was involved in an adulterous affair, the officials said. General Schoomaker told him to cease contacts with the woman until the inspector general completed the inquiry, the officials said. But the inspector general later found that General Byrnes continued to make telephone calls to her, although the officials would not say if the contacts went beyond calls. "He was told to knock it off, and he ignored it and continued the affair," a senior Army official said. Several Army officers said they considered the punishment surprisingly harsh for a general who was nearing retirement. The Army officials also disclosed that another senior officer, Gen. Dan K. McNeill, has been appointed to determine if any additional action should be taken against General Byrnes. Possible penalties range from a reprimand to a court-martial. General Byrnes faces uncertainty over whether his rank will be reduced to major general, with a resulting loss of retirement benefits. The Army's Manual on Court Martial describes adultery as "unacceptable conduct," and Army officials say that it is barred under a provision of the Uniform Code of Military Justice that prohibits bringing discredit on the military. General Byrnes separated from his wife, Carol, in mid-2004, but the couple did not divorce until earlier this month. A lawyer for General Byrnes, Lt. Col. David H. Robertson, said Wednesday that the general had been relieved because of an accusation about "a consensual, adult relationship." The statement said the person was a female civilian. From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 15 01:38:08 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 14 Aug 2005 21:38:08 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] ParaPolitics Forum: United States Military Forces Begin Coup Message-ID: ParaPolitics Forum - EU / UN / Globalist Agendas - United States Military Forces Begin Coup http://www.parapolitics.info/phorum/read.php?f=36&i=709&t=709 [Here's one roundup of articles about the coup now going on. This was not reported in the New York Times.] United States Military Forces Begin Coup Author: [9]Admin Date: 08-10-05 13:34 United States Military Forces Begin Coup, Top US General Arrested By Anti-Coup Factions, Russian and Chinese Military Forces Go To High Alert By: Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Russian Subscribers [coup-cover1.jpg] Russian Intelligence Analysts are reporting this evening that an apparent coup is taking place in the United States and that both Russian and Chinese Forces have been ordered to their highest non-nuclear defense status. This troubling news comes on the eve of joint Military exercises previously planned between both Russian and China, and as we can read as reported by the Guardian Unlimited News Service in their article titled "China and Russia flex their muscles as they join forces to play the war game [10]http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,1545389,00.html" and which says; "Next week will see far larger war games involving Chinese and Russian troops in and around the Shandong peninsula in the Yellow sea. Regional observers say such military cooperation is unprecedented and could mark the start of something new. [11]http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,1545389,00.html "The China-Russia exercise is intended to send a message to Taiwan," said Andrew Yang of the Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies in Taipei. "But it's also a very significant move in terms of the developing relationship between Russia and China and joint efforts to manage regional security. "China considers it's time to increase strategic cooperation with Russia to balance the US role in the region. Both are interested in demonstrating this is a multipolar rather than a unipolar world," Dr Yang said." [12]http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,1545389,00.html One of the Coup Leaders in the United States, General Kevin P. Byrnes, and who is also one of their top Military Generals, has been arrested and taken prisoner by US Counter-Coup Forces, and as we can read as reported by the Newsday News Service in their article titled Senior general is relieved of duties at commander of key Army training organization" [13]http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny--armygener alreliev0809aug09,0,2729727.story?coll=ny-region-apnewyork and which says; "The Army, in a rare disciplinary act against a four-star officer, said Tuesday it relieved Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes of his command after a Pentagon investigation into unspecified "personal conduct." Byrnes, a native of New York City, was relieved as commander of U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command on Monday by Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker, according to a brief statement issued by Army headquarters at the Pentagon." [14]http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny--armygener alreliev0809aug09,0,2729727.story?coll=ny-region-apnewyork Russian Military Analysts are further reporting that US Military Forces still loyal to General Byrnes and the other Coup Leaders are continuing their preparations and as evidenced by a number of large scale Military movements within the Continental United States Regions. These reports further state that the Coup Leaders efforts are being hampered by the ordering last week of 7 Armor Brigades loyal to the Coup Leaders to depart immediately to the Iraqi War Zone. Speculation behind the reasons leading to these Coup Leader efforts centers upon the belief within the American Military Establishment that war with Iran is imminent and all that remains is the triggering event forecast by many World Intelligence Organizations to occur this month in the United States. Like the rest of the world knows, should the American Coup Leaders fail in their efforts Total Global War will be the result of any American attack upon Iran, and as exampled by yesterdays article from the Uruknet News Service in their article titled "Why Iran will lead to World War 3 [15]http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m14453&date=09-aug-2005_05:46_ECT" and which says; "In the short term, however, the plan is fraught with difficulties. At present, there is no wiggle room in the worlds oil supply for massive disruptions and most experts are predicting shortages in the 4th quarter of this year. If the administrations war on Iran goes forward we will see a shock to the worlds oil supplies and economies that could be catastrophic. That being the case, a report that was leaked last week that Dick Cheney had STRATCOM (Strategic Command) draw up contingency plans for a tactical nuclear war against Iran, is probably a bit of brinksmanship intended to dissuade Iran from striking back and escalating the conflict. [16]http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m14453&date=09-aug-2005_05:46_ECT It makes no difference. If Iran is attacked they will retaliate; that much is certain. It is always the mistake of extremists to misjudge the behavior of reasonable men; just as it is always the mistake of reasonable men to mistake the behavior of extremists. We should not expect the Bush administration to make a rational choice; that would be a dramatic departure from every preceding decision of consequence. The President of the United States always has the option of unleashing Armageddon if he so chooses. Normally, however, sanity prevails. When the bombs hit the bunkers in Iran; World War 3 will be underway." [17]http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m14453&date=09-aug-2005_05:46_ECT To the outcome of these present events we are not in the knowing, other than to state that should these American Military Coup Leaders fail the result will be Total Global War. To the American Presidents position as to which side of the Coup he is supporting there is also much speculation due to his fleeing of the United States to Saudi Arabia, and which we had previously reported on in our August 8th report titled "Bush Flees United States for Saudi Arabia as Israel Accelerates Attack Timetable in Continuing Secret War with America, US Prepares For Martial Law [18]http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index795.htm". Russian FSB also reports that the American Presidents demand to the Saudi King that all monies belonging to the Bush Family through their many Saudi linked companies be returned has been granted, and as we can read as reported by the United Press International News Service in their article titled "Saudis to retrieve $360 billion abroad [19]http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/?feed=TopNews&article=UPI-1-200508 07-09573600-bc-saudi-funds.xml" and which says, "Saudi Arabia said Sunday it was working to bring back to the kingdom a total of $360 billion invested abroad in the last 18 months." [20]http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/?feed=TopNews&article=UPI-1-200508 07-09573600-bc-saudi-funds.xml The FSB further reports the Saudi payment of these debts to the Bush Family were made in gold reserves and which are now in the process of being returned to the United States by the American President and his family members who accompanied him to Saudi Arabia. To the American peoples themselves not knowing of how these Coups work themselves out their remains the ominous possibility that we had reported on yesterday that they will be placed under Martial Law, and to which their Military Leaders have already prepared for, and as we can read as reported by the WSWS News Service in their article titled "Pentagon devising scenarios for martial law in US [21]http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/aug2005/mart-a09.shtml" and which says; "As for the claims that these military plans are driven by genuine concern over the threat of terrorist attacks, these are belied by the actual conduct of the American ruling elite since 9/11. The Bush administration has done everything possible to suppress any investigation into the circumstances of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagonmost likely because its own negligence, possibly deliberate, would be exposed. While the Pentagon claims that its plans are a response to the danger of nuclear, biological or chemical attacks, no serious practical measures have been taken to forestall such attacks or minimize their impact. The Bush administration and Congress have refused even to restrict the movement of rail tank cars loaded with toxic chemicals through the US capital, though even an accidental leak, let alone a terrorist attack, would cause mass casualties. [22]http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/aug2005/mart-a09.shtml In relation to bioterrorism, the Defense Science Board determined in a 2000 study that the federal government had only 1 of the 57 drugs, vaccines and diagnostic tools required to deal with such an attack. According to a report in the Washington Post August 7, in the five years since the Pentagon report, only one additional resource has been developed, bringing the total to 2 out of 57. Drug companies have simply refused to conduct the research required to find antidotes to anthrax and other potential toxins, and the Bush administration has done nothing to compel them. As for the danger of nuclear or dirty-bomb attacks, the Bush administration and the congressional Republican leadership recently rammed through a measure loosening restrictions on exports of radioactive substances, at the behest of a Canadian-based manufacturer of medical supplies which conducted a well-financed lobbying campaign. [23]http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/aug2005/mart-a09.shtml Evidently, the administration and the corporate elite which it represents do not take seriously their own warnings about the imminent threat of terrorist attacks using nuclear, chemical or biological weaponsat least not when it comes to security measures that would impact corporate profits. The anti-terrorism scare has a propaganda purpose: to manipulate the American people and induce the public to accept drastic inroads against democratic rights. As the Pentagon planning suggests, the American working class faces the danger of some form of military-police dictatorship in the United States." [24]http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/aug2005/mart-a09.shtml The devastating suddenness of all of these events will no doubt stun these Americans, who even in these last hours, and before total madness strikes, continue to ignore the very world they live in, and whom their Military Leaders are driving towards the abyss. [25]http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/aug2005/mart-a09.shtml [26]http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index796.htm [27]Reply To This Message Nuclear Terror Drill to Go Live? Let's Hope Not Author: [28]Admin Date: 08-10-05 18:16 Nuclear Terror Drill to Go Live? Let's Hope Not Infowars.com | August 10, 2005 by R. Leland Lehrman August 10, 2005 12:56PM Santa Fe, New Mexico (Mother Media) - On June 29th, United States Northern Command (NORTHCOM) posted news of a nuclear terrorism drill on its website: [29]http://www.northcom.mil/index.cfm?fuseaction=news.showstory&storyi d=C9BFBBAC-F3CA-BD2E-008C7B34AFE33114: "Heres the scenarioA seafaring vessel transporting a 10-kiloton nuclear warhead makes its way into a port off the coast of Charleston, S.C. Terrorists aboard the ship attempt to smuggle the warhead off the ship to detonate it." It went on to say that "Sudden Response 05 will take place this August on Fort Monroe and will be carried out as an internal command post exercise. The exercise is intended to train the JTF-CS staff to plan and execute Consequence Management operations in support of Federal Emergency Management Agency Region IVs response to a nuclear detonation." As Alex Jones of infowars.com and others have pointed out, terror "drills" are now known to be the favorite "cover story" for New World Order terrorist operations [30]http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/july2005/090705bombingexercis es.htm, as evidenced by the eerily accurate terrorism drills happening on both 9/11 and 7/7. Recently, former CIA/DIA analyst Philip Giraldi has informed us that "Vice-President Cheney has tasked STRATCOM with "drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11- type terrorist attack on the United States [31]http://www.itszone.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?t=38408" and that "the plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons." Investigators and counter-intelligence specialists are concerned that this upcoming August nuclear terror scenario might go live to create the pretext for tactical nuclear war against Iran. Mother Media contacted NORTHCOM Public Affairs this morning and learned that the Fort Monroe drill may begin tomorrow, 8/11. Mother Media hopes that mass awareness of New World Order methods could prevent the attacks, whether tomorrow, next week or next year. In the course of the conversation with NORTHCOM Public Affairs, Mother Media also learned that CNN recently launched their military operations news special "Situation Room" from inside the NORTHCOM situation room in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Wolf Blitzer is the show's famously hawkish and pro-Israel host. Imagine that - a new CNN "Situation Room" military focus news program debuts in NORTHCOM headquarters days prior to a nuclear terror drill. They're not even bothering to pretend there's separation between the press and the government anymore. CNN here makes it obvious that they are now the New World Order's propaganda mouthpiece. At the war crimes trials, let's not forget it. Adding to the drama, the four-star commander of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) at the Fort Monroe base where the nuclear terror drill is to occur, Kevin P. Byrnes was just relieved of his command [32]http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/3303832 amidst allegations of sexual misconduct. Veteran investigator Greg Szymanski has uncovered another plausible motive [33]http://www.arcticbeacon.com/articles/article/1518131/31291.htm: "Sources close to the military who remain anonymous said Byrnes was part of a U.S. military faction discontented with the Bush administration war policies in Iraq and the potential for a nuclear disaster in Iran. In an effort to stop the Bush administration in its tracks, sources say Byrnes was about to lead a coup against the hawks in the military and executive branch determined to lead America into a global conflict, leading to devastating ramifications for the country, as well as financial and social chaos. Rumors inside the military say that a growing faction of discontented high-ranking officers are attempting internally to try and stop the Bush administrations imminent plans for war with Iran in an effort to avert global war. Although the exact number of high-ranking military involved is undetermined, sources have disclosed it appears to be evenly split between pro Bush and anti Bush factions. Even though speculation abounds about an attempted coup relating to the Byrnes firing, no one would question the strange rumblings of war against Iran and warnings of terrorist threats on the homeland that are beginning to circulate from administration officials and media talking heads almost on a daily basis. Further, ominous reports are even coming from the Washington Post this week that the Pentagon has developed its first ever war plans for operations within the United States, plans justifying and making necessary preparations for martial law in case of a homeland terrorist attack." If you look at NORTHCOM's website, you will find a discussion of the situations under which Posse Comitatus, the restriction against military policing in America, can legally be suspended [34]http://www.northcom.mil/index.cfm?fuseaction=news.factsheets&facts heet=5. One of those conditions is an attack by a nuclear or other weapon of mass destruction. Another is "insurrection." Diabolically standing over all of these scenarios is Global Cleanse 2000 [35]http://www.infowars.com/articles/sept11/binladen_bros_tip_off_nasa _sept_11,htm.htm or just Global 2000, a population control methodology developed by the New World Order which includes triggered natural disasters, wars and diseases designed to reduce the world population by two thirds. Rene Welch, who had access to the Global Cleanse 2000 database in the late eighties, recently appeared on Mother Media's radio program to discuss her findings. In response to this author's article, Israel, Iran and a Nuclear False Flag Attack [36]http://www.physics911.net/nuclearfalseflag.htm, reports have been flowing into Mother Media's office confirming and buttressing this story. One former Air Force member writes that all military leaves have been cancelled after September 7th and that Homeland Security is beefing up security at local Draft Board Offices. Writing as TeaParty2Come, this source paints an ominous picture: "About 3 weeks ago I was surfing some of the sites I enjoy posting on, when someone posted in all caps that they had just heard from an officer friend in the military that all leaves had been cancelled for the month of September. Obviously aware of the false flags our government is famous for, this person sounded desperate, asking for help in confirming or denying this "rumor" from anyone who had connections in the military. I happened to ask a co-worker friend of mine whose son in-law is in the Army (82nd) about checking out the "rumor". Well guess what, they've had to move up their leave to this coming week to come home because his unit has to be back by September 7th where upon all leaves are cancelled! They have seen a steady build up of heavy materials just sitting in storage facilities. He also commented that they were rushed through a training course on new weapons systems they just rolled out. He thought this very odd and a first. This sent shivers all through me. Not to push any panic buttons I spoke with a dear woman with whom I work whose son is in the Army in an artillery unit. She is a former Captain, her husband is a former Colonel and Vietnam vet and successful attorney here in our area who also happens to be dying from the effects of Agent Orange. Lo and behold their son was told all leaves are cancelled for September and in December they may get leave, but can travel no further than 17 kilometers from their base. My niece is married to a young man in the Army stationed on the East Coast he is also 82nd, his leave has also been cancelled. Their first baby is due in December. ...I'm not prone to fits of paranoia but I have to tell you, I have begun stocking water and canned goods. I am ex Air Force, I was on three ring standby most of my enlistment and was in a constant training mode. I know how this works and it doesn't sound good. The draft board offices are in place with staff waiting for the word to go. I read an article from a guy who works in one of those offices, he said Homeland Security came in there early last month and put up bullet proof glass on the windows and iron bars, they installed blast proof glass on the doors, and removed the mail drop box slots on the outside of the building. When he asked what was going on they identified themselves as Homeland Security and said don't worry about the rest and left. It's coming no doubt about it. Sorry I can't be more positive, but this is what I have heard with my own ears from three independent military member sources in different parts of the country." A source in New Mexico passed this on to Mother Media a couple weeks ago: "A friend came by today. His relative is fairly high-level in regional counter-terrorism. My friend says his relative told him they are preparing for the strong possibility that there will be 7 U.S. cities attacked with small, backpack-held nuclear devices by 'al-Qaida types.' It sounds like the propaganda -- the cover stories for PNAC or whomever these bad guys are -- has begun." The sheer number of warnings and events, subtle hints and overt threats is now too much to ignore. More background and warning signs, especially as regards Israel and Iran can be found in my article at physics911.net [37]http://www.physics911.net/ entitled Israel, Iran, Mossad and a Nuclear False Flag Attack [38]http://www.physics911.net/nuclearfalseflag.htm. Americans should alert friends and family members and active citizens should inform their neighbors and local authorities. Mother Media has contacted FBI counterintelligence director David Szady, who is in charge of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spying investigation [39]http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=6890, with some this information and plans to distribute it widely throughout the local, national and international media. An FBI investigation directed by Szady caught AIPAC using Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin to spy on America's Iran policy [40]http://www.physics911.net/franklinindictment.htm and more. Given that AIPAC is committed to war with Iran [41]http://www.itszone.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?t=38408, we can imagine why they were interested in official American policy on Iran. It is still possible to stop this insanity, but it will require serious citizen initiative. Good Luck, Fellow Citizens, and God Bless You. [42]http://www.infowars.com/articles/terror/nuclear_terror.htm [43]Reply To This Message Four Star General Fired For Organizing Coup Against Neo-Cons? Author: [44]Admin Date: 08-11-05 10:25 Four Star General Fired For Organizing Coup Against Neo-Cons? Reporter suggests Brynes discovered plan to turn nuke exercise into staged terror attack Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones / August 10 2005 The head of Fort Monroe's Training and Doctrine Command, four star general Kevin P. Byrnes, was fired Tuesday apparently for sexual misconduct according to official sources. Other sources however have offered a different explanation for Byrnes' dismissal which ties in with the Bush administration's unpopular plan to attack Iran and the staged nuclear attack in the US which would provide the pretext to do so. According to reporter Greg Szymanski, anonymous military sources said that Brynes was the leader of a faction that was preparing to instigate a coup against the neo-con hawks in an attempt to prevent further global conflict. Indications are that, much like popular opinion amongst the general public, half the military oppose the neo-con's agenda and half support it. Further revelations were imparted by journalist Leland Lehrman who appeared today on The Alex Jones Show. Lehrman's army sources, including a former Captain in intelligence, became outraged when they learned that the official story behind 9/11 was impossible. They told Lehrman that the imminent Northcom nuclear terror exercise [45]http://www.northcom.mil/index.cfm?fuseaction=news.showstory&storyi d=C9BFBBAC-F3CA-BD2E-008C7B34AFE33114 based in Charleston, S.C, where a nuclear warhead is smuggled off a ship and detonated, was originally intended to 'go live' - as in the drill would be used as the cover for a real false flag staged attack. This website has relentlessly discussed similar style drills which took place on the morning of 9/11 and on the morning of 7/7 in London. "Speculation exists that he had potentially discovered the fact that it was gonna go live and that he was trying to put a stop to it or also speculation indicates that he may be part of a military coup designed to prevent the ridiculous idea of doing a nuclear war with Iran, " said Lehrman. Lehrman said that other sources had told him all army leave had been cancelled from September 7th onwards, opening the possibility for war to be declared within that time frame. Northcom officials also admitted to Lehrman that CNN had been using its situation room as a studio. Earlier this week, Washington Post reported [46]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/07/AR 2005080700843_pf.html that the Pentagon has developed its first ever war plans for operations within the continental United States, in which terrorist attacks would be used as the justification for imposing martial law on cities, regions or the entire country. American Conservative Magazine recently reported [47]http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/august2005/020805nukeiran.htm that Dick Cheney had given orders to immediately invade Iran after the next terror attack in the US, even if there was no evidence Iran was involved. Government and media mouthpieces have been fearmongering for weeks about how a nuclear attack within the US is imminent. Now would be the most opportune time for the Globalists to stage a major attack, as it would head off any potential indictments against the Bush administration for their involvement in illegally outing CIA agent Valerie Plame. While rumors circulating about indictments having already taken place against Bush and Cheney should rightly be treated very carefully, the fact that there is an ongoing criminal investigation into the matter is something that's admitted and shouldn't be viewed as speculation. [48]http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/august2005/100805fourstargene ral.htm [49]Reply To This Message Total411.info on the NORAD exercise / 4 Star General Stories Author: [50]Admin Date: 08-11-05 11:10 Key General fired as nuke terror drill set for Aug 17 News is flying in regard to the nuclear terror drill set for this month. It is feared by informed researchers that an actual nuclear detonation may be piggybacked on the drill, as was the modus operandi in the 9/11 and 7/7 inside jobs. As reported at this site, the drill involving a nuclear warhead being smuggled into Charleston, South Carolina is to involve the Atlanta-area FEMA office and be run out of Fort Monroe, Virginia. Today, the four-star general in charge of Fort Monroe was fired. Anonymously-sourced and speculative reports on the leading alternative media websites posited General Kevin Byrnes was fired for attempting to prevent the drill from going live. (See Lehrman/Physics911.net [51]http://www.physics911.net/nuclearterror.htm, Szymanski/Arctic Beacon [52]http://www.arcticbeacon.com/articles/article/1518131/31291.htm, Jones,Watson/PrisonPlanet [53]http://prisonplanet.com/articles/august2005/100805fourstargeneral. htm, Skolnick/Cloak/= . Now a Washington Times report, also anonymously-sourced, highlights the flimsy basis on which he was fired -- adultery. Not the Jeff Gannon kind of military adultery popular in the White House; but involvement, while separated from his wife, with a woman in a separate command. It also turns out Rumsfeld tried to chase him out the military three years ago. Looks like he finally found a pretext. From WashTimes August 10 [54]http://washingtontimes.com/national/20050809-110419-1753r.htm: An official announcement yesterday did not specify why Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, 52, was removed from his command of all soldier training and doctrine development, but two retired Army officers said it was for having an extramarital affair. Adultery is illegal in the military, constituting conduct unbecoming an officer. The sources said they think the woman was not a subordinate of Gen. Byrnes at U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, Fort Monroe, Va. It is rare in modern times for the Army to relieve a four-star general. ... Gen. Byrnes, one of 11 four-star Army generals, was nearing the end of a three-year term at U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command when Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, relieved him of command yesterday. [...] Gen. Byrnes had been under investigation for some time and had been in the throes of a divorce. A number of officers went to bat [for Byrnes] in 2002 when Mr. Rumsfeld threatened to end his career at lieutenant general. Mr. Rumsfeld was upset at Gen. Byrnes for fighting proposed troop cuts being outlined by the defense secretary's aide, Stephen Cambone. Then-Army Secretary Thomas White and top generals interceded and convinced Mr. Rumsfeld to keep him. Shortly thereafter, Gen. Byrnes won nomination to a fourth star and the TRADOC command... And, like the sevaeral drill occuring on 9/11, the Fort Monroe Casemate for August 5 reports a series of terror drills at the base on August 17. [55]http://tradoc.monroe.army.mil/casemate/stack/080505exercise.htm: An antiterrorism exercise to test the effectiveness of installation plans and procedures in response to a terrorist attack will take place here Aug. 17. A series of live emergency response drills are scheduled throughout the day, according to Bill Moisant, Fort Monroes antiterrorism officer. ... Impacts could include extremely thorough security checks at gates, restricted movement near emergency response drill sites and temporary closure of some customer service activities. Moisant explained that the Fort Monroe Crisis Action Team, first responders, supporting agencies, and assigned and tenant organizations will be evaluated on their ability to respond to a simulated terrorist incident. He said the exercise could involve City of Hampton police and fire officials, as well as other off-post agencies. [,..] Exact times and locations of exercise site events are not indicated due to OPSEC requirements. Cooperation by personnel and agencies affected by the exercise is greatly appreciated. The exercise is not open to the general public or local news media. PERMA-LINK [56]http://www.total411.info/2005/08/key-general-fired-as-nuke-terror- drill.html 'Amalgam Warrior' now 'Almagam Phantom' The names of several NORAD wargames and terror drills are being changed, including some, such as Amalgam Warrior , which was used to piggyback in the actual 9/11 inside job attacks. From THE WASHINGTON TIMES, August 10, 2005: The U.S.-Canadian military commands responsible for protecting North America... have changed the names of key readiness exercises... U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs have struck the word "warrior" from one major exercise and replaced it with "phantom," according to a July internal message from command headquarters. The message went to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Joint Chiefs and other senior leaders. ... A NORAD spokesman, Air Force Master Sgt. John Tomassi, [claimed] "warrior" and other words were changed with Indians in mind. [But] He said, "They have been using these names for quite some time, and I don't know of any complaints." An exercise called "Amalgam Chief" has been changed to "Amalgam Arrow," the message states. And an exercise dubbed "Amalgam Fabric Brave" is now "Amalgam Fabric Dart." "Fabric Indian" was deleted in favor of "Fabric Sabre." Northern Command and NORAD are keeping exercise labels of "Northern Edge," "Vigilant Shield," "Ardent Sentry," "Amalgam Mute" and "Vital Archer." The bottom line: warrior, chief, brave and Indian are out; phantom, arrow and dart are in. NORAD is a U.S.-Canadian organization commanded by U.S. Adm. Timothy J. Keating, who also heads Northern Command. ... Its largest exercise to practice those tactics is the twice-yearly Amalgam Warrior, which is scheduled for next April and is now Amalgam Phantom. [...] Amalgam Fabric Brave, which is now Amalgam Fabric Dart, involves deploying fighter jets to various NORAD regions to check their response times. [...] Phantom seems appropriate given the nonexistent nature of many or all of the alleged hijackers on 9/11. PERMA-LINK [57]http://www.total411.info/2005/08/amalgam-warrior-now-almagam-phant om.html References 9. http://www.parapolitics.info/phorum/profile.php?f=36&id=1 10. http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,1545389,00.html 11. http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,1545389,00.html 12. http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,1545389,00.html 13. http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny--armygeneralreliev0809aug09,0,2729727.story?coll=ny-region-apnewyork 14. http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny--armygeneralreliev0809aug09,0,2729727.story?coll=ny-region-apnewyork 15. http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m14453&date=09-aug-2005_05:46_ECT 16. http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m14453&date=09-aug-2005_05:46_ECT 17. http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m14453&date=09-aug-2005_05:46_ECT 18. http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index795.htm 19. http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/?feed=TopNews&article=UPI-1-20050807-09573600-bc-saudi-funds.xml 20. http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/?feed=TopNews&article=UPI-1-20050807-09573600-bc-saudi-funds.xml 21. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/aug2005/mart-a09.shtml 22. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/aug2005/mart-a09.shtml 23. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/aug2005/mart-a09.shtml 24. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/aug2005/mart-a09.shtml 25. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/aug2005/mart-a09.shtml 26. http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index796.htm 27. http://www.parapolitics.info/phorum/read.php?f=36&i=709&t=709#REPLY 28. http://www.parapolitics.info/phorum/profile.php?f=36&id=1 29. http://www.northcom.mil/index.cfm?fuseaction=news.showstory&storyid=C9BFBBAC-F3CA-BD2E-008C7B34AFE33114 30. http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/july2005/090705bombingexercises.htm 31. http://www.itszone.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?t=38408 32. http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/3303832 33. http://www.arcticbeacon.com/articles/article/1518131/31291.htm 34. http://www.northcom.mil/index.cfm?fuseaction=news.factsheets&factsheet=5 35. http://www.infowars.com/articles/sept11/binladen_bros_tip_off_nasa_sept_11,htm.htm 36. http://www.physics911.net/nuclearfalseflag.htm 37. http://www.physics911.net/ 38. http://www.physics911.net/nuclearfalseflag.htm 39. http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=6890 40. http://www.physics911.net/franklinindictment.htm 41. http://www.itszone.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?t=38408 42. http://www.infowars.com/articles/terror/nuclear_terror.htm 43. http://www.parapolitics.info/phorum/read.php?f=36&i=710&t=709#REPLY 44. http://www.parapolitics.info/phorum/profile.php?f=36&id=1 45. http://www.northcom.mil/index.cfm?fuseaction=news.showstory&storyid=C9BFBBAC-F3CA-BD2E-008C7B34AFE33114 46. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/07/AR2005080700843_pf.html 47. http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/august2005/020805nukeiran.htm 48. http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/august2005/100805fourstargeneral.htm 49. http://www.parapolitics.info/phorum/read.php?f=36&i=711&t=709#REPLY 50. http://www.parapolitics.info/phorum/profile.php?f=36&id=1 51. http://www.physics911.net/nuclearterror.htm 52. http://www.arcticbeacon.com/articles/article/1518131/31291.htm 53. http://prisonplanet.com/articles/august2005/100805fourstargeneral.htm 54. http://washingtontimes.com/national/20050809-110419-1753r.htm 55. http://tradoc.monroe.army.mil/casemate/stack/080505exercise.htm 56. http://www.total411.info/2005/08/key-general-fired-as-nuke-terror-drill.html 57. http://www.total411.info/2005/08/amalgam-warrior-now-almagam-phantom.html From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 15 01:38:12 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 14 Aug 2005 21:38:12 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CNN: Border emergency declared in New Mexico Message-ID: Border emergency declared in New Mexico - Aug 12, 2005 http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/08/12/newmexico/ [On the other hand, this was not reported in the New York Times, either. Google News returns only ten sources for this. Lou Dobbs interviewed the governor last night. [So how *do* you distinguish good from bogus information on the Internet?] Governor says area 'devastated' by human and drug smuggling (CNN) -- New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson declared a state of emergency Friday in four counties along the Mexican border that he said have been "devastated" by crimes such as the smuggling of drugs and illegal immigrants. The declaration said the region "has been devastated by the ravages and terror of human smuggling, drug smuggling, kidnapping, murder, destruction of property and the death of livestock. ... "[It] is in an extreme state of disrepair and is inadequately funded or safeguarded to protect the lives and property of New Mexican citizens." New Mexico shares 180 miles of border with the Mexican state of Chihuahua. "The situation is out of hand," Richardson said Friday night on CNN, noting that one 54-mile stretch is particularly bad. The Mexican government issued a statement in which it acknowledged the problems along the border, but said it continues to make consistent efforts to target them along with U.S. authorities. It said some of Richardson's views stem from "generalizations that do not correspond to the spirit of cooperation and understanding that are required for dealing with problems of common concern along the border." Richardson's declaration makes $750,000 in state emergency funds available to Dona Ana, Luna, Grant and Hidalgo counties. Richardson pledged an additional $1 million in assistance for the area, his office said in a news release. He said on CNN that the funds will be used to hire additional law enforcement personnel and pay officers overtime. In announcing the state of emergency, Richardson -- a Democrat who served in President Clinton's Cabinet -- criticized the "total inaction and lack of resources from the federal government and Congress" in helping protect his state's residents along the border. "There's very little response from the Border Patrol," he said on CNN. "They're doing a good job, but they don't have the resources." The governor announced the move after a helicopter and ground tour of the border near Columbus, New Mexico, the statement said. He said on CNN that he "saw the trails where these illegal routes take place" as well as fenced areas along the border where the fence is "literally nonexistent." According to Richardson's statement announcing the declaration, "Recent developments have convinced me this action is necessary -- including violence directed at law enforcement, damage to property and livestock, increased evidence of drug smuggling, and an increase in the number of undocumented immigrants." He called on Mexico to "bulldoze the abandoned town of Las Chepas, which is directly over the border from Columbus." The statement went on to say that "Las Chepas is a notorious staging and resting area for those who smuggle drugs and immigrants into the United States." Some of the pledged funds will be used to create a field office for the New Mexico Office of Homeland Security to focus specifically on the border. There will also be new efforts to protect livestock in the area near Columbus, "along a favorite path for illegal immigration where a number of livestock have been stolen and killed," the statement said. Richardson said he wanted residents of the four counties "to know my administration is doing everything it can to protect them." Alejandro Cano, secretary of industrial development for the Mexican state of Chihuahua -- which borders New Mexico -- pledged to support Richardson's efforts, the statement said. Richardson told CNN he met with Mexican governors several weeks ago on border security. "My people on my side asked me to take this step, and I've done so reluctantly," Richardson told CNN. "As governor, I have to protect the people I represent." He noted he is the nation's only Hispanic governor, and "we're a state that's been very good to legal migrants. ... This action, I believe, had to be taken." The Mexican Foreign Ministry sent Richardson a letter Friday saying it has requested that Mexican consuls in Albuquerque and El Paso, Texas, meet "as soon as possible" with New Mexico officials "to promote pertinent action by the authorities of both countries in the framework of existing institutional mechanisms." From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Mon Aug 15 15:30:25 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 09:30:25 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] CNN: Border emergency declared in New Mexico In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4300B511.3060600@solution-consulting.com> This morning, Wall Street Journal weighed in: http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110007108 Their take: Democrats may have an issue against republicans that will resonate with the ordinary people who fear their culture and jobs are disappearing. Lynn Premise Checker wrote: > Border emergency declared in New Mexico - Aug 12, 2005 > http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/08/12/newmexico/ > > [On the other hand, this was not reported in the New York Times, > either. Google News returns only ten sources for this. Lou Dobbs > interviewed the governor last night. > > [So how *do* you distinguish good from bogus information on the > Internet?] > > Governor says area 'devastated' by human and drug smuggling > > (CNN) -- New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson declared a state of emergency > Friday in four counties along the Mexican border that he said have > been "devastated" by crimes such as the smuggling of drugs and illegal > immigrants. > > The declaration said the region "has been devastated by the ravages > and terror of human smuggling, drug smuggling, kidnapping, murder, > destruction of property and the death of livestock. ... > > "[It] is in an extreme state of disrepair and is inadequately funded > or safeguarded to protect the lives and property of New Mexican > citizens." > > New Mexico shares 180 miles of border with the Mexican state of > Chihuahua. > > "The situation is out of hand," Richardson said Friday night on CNN, > noting that one 54-mile stretch is particularly bad. > > The Mexican government issued a statement in which it acknowledged the > problems along the border, but said it continues to make consistent > efforts to target them along with U.S. authorities. > > It said some of Richardson's views stem from "generalizations that do > not correspond to the spirit of cooperation and understanding that are > required for dealing with problems of common concern along the > border." > > Richardson's declaration makes $750,000 in state emergency funds > available to Dona Ana, Luna, Grant and Hidalgo counties. > > Richardson pledged an additional $1 million in assistance for the > area, his office said in a news release. > > He said on CNN that the funds will be used to hire additional law > enforcement personnel and pay officers overtime. > > In announcing the state of emergency, Richardson -- a Democrat who > served in President Clinton's Cabinet -- criticized the "total > inaction and lack of resources from the federal government and > Congress" in helping protect his state's residents along the border. > > "There's very little response from the Border Patrol," he said on CNN. > "They're doing a good job, but they don't have the resources." > > The governor announced the move after a helicopter and ground tour of > the border near Columbus, New Mexico, the statement said. > > He said on CNN that he "saw the trails where these illegal routes take > place" as well as fenced areas along the border where the fence is > "literally nonexistent." > > According to Richardson's statement announcing the declaration, > "Recent developments have convinced me this action is necessary -- > including violence directed at law enforcement, damage to property and > livestock, increased evidence of drug smuggling, and an increase in > the number of undocumented immigrants." > > He called on Mexico to "bulldoze the abandoned town of Las Chepas, > which is directly over the border from Columbus." > > The statement went on to say that "Las Chepas is a notorious staging > and resting area for those who smuggle drugs and immigrants into the > United States." > > Some of the pledged funds will be used to create a field office for > the New Mexico Office of Homeland Security to focus specifically on > the border. > > There will also be new efforts to protect livestock in the area near > Columbus, "along a favorite path for illegal immigration where a > number of livestock have been stolen and killed," the statement said. > > Richardson said he wanted residents of the four counties "to know my > administration is doing everything it can to protect them." > > Alejandro Cano, secretary of industrial development for the Mexican > state of Chihuahua -- which borders New Mexico -- pledged to support > Richardson's efforts, the statement said. > > Richardson told CNN he met with Mexican governors several weeks ago on > border security. > > "My people on my side asked me to take this step, and I've done so > reluctantly," Richardson told CNN. "As governor, I have to protect the > people I represent." > > He noted he is the nation's only Hispanic governor, and "we're a state > that's been very good to legal migrants. ... This action, I believe, > had to be taken." > > The Mexican Foreign Ministry sent Richardson a letter Friday saying it > has requested that Mexican consuls in Albuquerque and El Paso, Texas, > meet "as soon as possible" with New Mexico officials "to promote > pertinent action by the authorities of both countries in the framework > of existing institutional mechanisms." > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From Thrst4knw at aol.com Mon Aug 15 20:21:13 2005 From: Thrst4knw at aol.com (Thrst4knw at aol.com) Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 16:21:13 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Explaining Those Vivid Memories of Martian Kidnappers Message-ID: <1c3.2ebc7bed.30325339@aol.com> It has long been established that alien abductee reportees are not usually psychotic or gullible. The research goes back decades. Even the anti-paranormal publications like Skeptical Inquirer eventually picked up on this, as much as they probably would rather have been able to refer to these people as crackpots or lunatics. It simply isn't true. On the other hand, it also doesn't appear to be true that they are reporting veridical events in most cases. The psychological explanations in the literature have for years been more in terms of fantasy proneness or other forms of imaginative talent rather than pathology or chicanery. The history of this 'abduction' topic parallels the history of hypnosis in some interesting ways. Hypnosis itself was considered first miraculous, then mysterious, then paranormal, then fakery of various kinds, and finally now a valid way of studying normal if somewhat less well understood and still fascinating psychological processes like dissociation, absorption, fantasy, and role taking. Today, abduction experiences are generally considered by researchers to be real, non-pathological, emotionally intense, imaginative experiences rather than psychotic hallucinations, alcoholic tales, the effluent of a weak mind, or deliberate fakery. The mainstream view is consistent with the author quoted in the NYT articles, and vice versa, from what I understand. So it turns out that there is, remarkably, already a fairly good sized scientific literature on the psychology of human exceptional experiences: exploring the relationship between hypnotic responding talent, fantasy proneness talent, dissociation talent, memory, confabulation, expectancy, involuntariness, and so on. There are even scientific explorations of the spiritual side of these experiences, by people like Kenneth Ring. The "spiritual" variations focus on how meaning is attributed in exceptional experiences and how people's lives are changed by them, rather than on how and why the experiences are produced. Overall, there are some pretty reliable findings in the former area, although the latter is somewhat less amenable to study. For an example of the former, talented people don't even need hypnosis or relaxation to produce the characteristic experiences of hypnotic responding. I don't believe in abductions, but I cannot explain their reactions any other way kind regards, Todd -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Thrst4knw at aol.com Mon Aug 15 20:52:45 2005 From: Thrst4knw at aol.com (Thrst4knw at aol.com) Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 16:52:45 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] 1 in 25 dads is a cuckold Message-ID: <1b8.1946e62b.30325a9d@aol.com> Some previous estimates were even higher, so maybe this is good news for some of us? http://www.world-science.net/othernews/050812_dadsfrm.htm One in 25 dads could unknowingly be raising another man?s child, researchers find Aug. 12, 2005 Courtesy BMJ Specialty Journals and World Science staff Around one in 25 dads could unknowingly be raising another man?s child, new research suggests. The study is published in the September issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. The implications are huge, said the researchers, because of the growing reliance of judicial and health systems on DNA profiling and genetic testing, such as organ donation and criminal identification. More frequent testing means more parents are likely to learn about their children?s true status, with devastating consequences for some families, they warned. More instances of the phenomenon, which scientists politely term ?paternal discrepancy,? may come to light through the ever-more common paternity tests being conducted in Western countries, the researchers said. In the United States, rates of such tests more than doubled to 310,490 between 1991 and 2001. The authors based their conclusions on an array of international, published scientific research and conference findings, covering the period between 1950 and 2004. In the U.K., around a third of pregnancies are unplanned, the researchers said, around one in five women in long term relationships has had an affair. Other developed countries have reported similar figures. There are few support services to help those affected, added the researchers, Mark Bellis of Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, U.K., and colleagues. And there is little guidance on what roles healthcare or criminal justice system workers should play in disclosing paternal discrepancy. ?In a society where services and life decisions are increasingly influenced by genetics, our approach to [paternal discrepancy] cannot be simply to ignore this difficult issue,? wrote the researchers. * * * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 15 22:54:22 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 18:54:22 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: Lifestyle May Be Key to Slowing Brain's Aging Message-ID: Lifestyle May Be Key to Slowing Brain's Aging http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/13/AR2005081300855_pf.html Scientists Test Simple Ways to Keep One's Wits By Rob Stein Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, August 14, 2005; A01 Like many Americans sliding into middle age, Kimberly McClain started worrying that her memory was beginning to slip. "It was little things. I couldn't remember what I had for dinner the night before. I had to check to make sure I'd paid the insurance that month. I'd walk into a room and realize I had no idea why I was there," said the Los Angeles marriage counselor, who is 44. So McClain started a program designed to help -- a detailed regimen that includes daily memory exercises. "I'm much clearer now," McClain said. "I have no problem finding my keys. I can tell you what I had for dinner last night. I'm not walking into a room thinking, 'Why did I come in here?' " McClain is among the increasing number of Americans who are performing mental calisthenics, taking Italian classes, deciphering crossword puzzles and hunting for other ways to try to keep their minds from fading. A large body of evidence indicates that people who are mentally active throughout their lives are significantly less likely to suffer senility, and a handful of studies have found that mental exercises can boost brain function. Elderly people who go through training to sharpen their wits, for example, score much better on thinking tests for years afterward. The minds of younger people who drill their memories seem to work more efficiently. But it remains far from clear exactly which of the myriad use-it-or-lose-it methods promoted by researchers, self-help books and health groups protect the brain in the long term, and actually reduce the risk for dementia. So scientists, increasingly employing high-tech brain scans, have launched an incipient wave of research to determine what works and why. "We're right at the cusp of understanding this," said Sherry Willis of Pennsylvania State University. "Because brain imaging work has become so much more technologically sophisticated, we're now at the point where we literally look inside people's brains to try to understand what's going on." With the population aging, and the number of cases of Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia rising rapidly, experts say preventing mental deterioration from occurring in the first place will be crucial to minimizing the mounting suffering and costs. "It's really critical that we find ways to prevent, or at least delay the onset of, cognitive decline," said Neil Buckholtz of the National Institute on Aging. "Once the pathology is established in the brain, it's very difficult to treat. We need better ways to prevent the disease in the first place, which could make a huge difference for the future." Several large studies are examining antioxidants such as selenium, vitamins C and E and folate, as well as the popular herbal remedy ginkgo biloba. Researchers also remain hopeful that anti-inflammatory painkillers such as Celebrex and the hormone estrogen may prove useful, despite safety concerns. Other researchers are exploring whether cholesterol drugs might protect the brain as well as the heart. It has become increasingly clear that the same strategies that cut the risk for heart attacks and strokes -- eating well, lowering cholesterol and blood pressure, avoiding obesity and diabetes, and exercising regularly -- protect the brain, too. "We don't have to wait until tomorrow when we have some kind of wonder drug," said Arthur Kramer of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has found that sedentary elderly people who start exercising regularly are sharper and experience growth in crucial brain areas. "Many things that we can do today can engender cognitive vitality and successful aging, and one of them is exercise." Among the most tantalizing evidence are studies that have given rise to the use-it-or-lose-it theory. Several large projects have found that people who are more educated, have more intellectually challenging jobs and engage in more mentally stimulating activities, such as attending lectures and plays, reading, playing chess and other hobbies, are much less likely to develop Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia. Scientists suspect that a lifetime of thinking a lot may create a "cognitive reserve" -- a reservoir of brain power that people can draw upon even if they suffer damaging silent strokes or protein deposits that are the hallmarks of Alzheimer's. "Some people might have brain networks that are more efficient and so have a greater capacity to compensate for disease," said Yaakov Stern of Columbia University, who is using brain scans to try to zero in on the circuits that matter most. "So when they are challenged by disease, those networks continue to operate longer." But it is also possible that such people are born with brains that lead them to pursue intellectually stimulating lives, and are inherently less prone to dementia. Educated, successful people also tend to have more money and get better medical care. "There's a lot of things that highly educated people do to take care of themselves," said Jerome Yesavage of Stanford University, who is evaluating the benefits of combining cognitive training exercises with a drug already used to slow the progression of Alzheimer's. "You have to be cautious. We don't want to create false hopes that you can prevent Alzheimer's." In one of the first major attempts to test whether mental training works, a federally funded study involving more than 2,800 elderly people found that those who received 10 brain-training lessons scored much better on thinking tests, and the effect lasted for at least three years. The training taught strategies aimed at improving reasoning skills, the processing of new information, and memory, such as mnemonic devices for remembering names. Many researchers suspect, however, that people may benefit most from engaging in a rich diversity of stimulating activities. New experiences may be far more important than repeating the same task over and over. Moreover, it may be key to combine mental stimulation with social interaction, which studies have found also appears highly beneficial. Experts say the task should be enjoyable, because stress and other negative emotions appear harmful. So scientists have launched a series of pilot studies examining more real-life approaches. In Indiana, one team of researchers is testing whether elderly people who take quilting classes fare better, while another is following groups of elderly people as they participate in an adult version of the Odyssey of the Mind competition originally developed for schoolchildren. Outside Chicago, a husband-and-wife team of researchers is experimenting with acting classes. In Baltimore, Johns Hopkins aging experts are studying whether volunteering as tutors and librarians helps. All report promising, though preliminary, findings. "It was pretty amazing," said Michelle Carlson of Hopkins, whose team found that elderly volunteers scored much better on problem-solving tests and that their frontal lobes seem to have been reinvigorated. "We observed changes that appeared to show that their brains were functioning more like younger adults'." But none of the researchers said the findings are strong enough to merit specific recommendations. "I think we'll get there, but we're not there yet," Carlson said. Other researchers say that although the evidence may remain inconclusive, it is promising enough for people to start doing the things that look as though they may help. "It's hard to prove a lot of these things, but I'm convinced there's enough evidence that there is a cause-and-effect relationship," said Gary Small of the University of California at Los Angeles, who developed the "memory prescription" that McClain uses. The prescription combines a healthful diet with daily exercise, relaxation techniques and memory exercises, such as making a mental note of one piece of a family member's wardrobe each morning. Small tested the approach in a pilot study that included McClain. Not only did those on the prescription score better on memory tests, but brain scans lit up in ways that indicated key areas of their gray matter appeared to be working more efficiently, he said. "One of the most striking findings was how it affected function in the area of the brain that creates everyday working memory," Small said. "We may not have conclusive proof. But the evidence is strong. And these are all healthy choices for other reasons." Even if such strategies work, getting large numbers of people to fundamentally alter their daily lives remains daunting, many experts acknowledge. "We all know how difficult it is for all of us to exercise regularly even though we know we should. Now we're telling people they need to be more mentally active, too: 'Turn off "Wheel of Fortune" ' or 'Do your own taxes.' That's going to be a difficult public health message," said Michael Marsiske of the University of Florida. Marsiske and other experts note, however, that it has been done before. "The major way we've reduced the death rate from heart disease is through lifestyle changes: eating better, exercising more, smoking less," said David A. Bennett of Rush University in Chicago. "It would require a lot of people to change the way they live, but there's no reason to think we can't have the same impact on Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia." From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 15 22:54:28 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 18:54:28 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Candian Press: British bigamist undone as 3 wives attend his sickbed; gets suspended sentence Message-ID: British bigamist undone as 3 wives attend his sickbed; gets suspended sentence http://www.canada.com/news/oddities/story.html?id=520e2027-8b9d-450b-b566-951b0f314207 Cassandra Vinograd Canadian Press Thursday, August 11, 2005 LONDON (AP) - Some people bring flowers, others bring balloons. But when Melvyn Reed's three wives showed up to visit him in hospital they brought an unexpected end to his years as a bigamist. British police confirmed Thursday that after Melvyn Reed woke from his triple bypass heart operation earlier this year, his complicated marital affairs took a turn for a worse. All three of his spouses had turned up at the same time, despite his efforts to stagger their visits. Upon realizing that something was amiss, the wives held a meeting in the parking lot and learned they were all married to the same man, the British news media reported. The 59-year-old company director from Kettering, in central England, turned himself in on May 12. A spokeswoman for the Crown Prosecution Service said Reed pleaded guilty July 19 to two charges of bigamy at Wimbledon Magistrates' Court in south London, and was given a four-month suspended sentence and ordered to pay 70 pounds (about $150 Cdn) in costs, police said. Reed, his three wives and Reed's lawyer, Laurence Grant, could not immediately be reached for comment. The London Metropolitan Police said Reed married his first wife, Jean Grafton, in 1966, then left her without divorcing her. He went on to marry Denise Harrington in 1998, then married Lyndsey Hutchinson in 2003. The British media have widely reported that Reed recently moved back in with his first wife. They say she is the mother of his three grown children. London's police said Harrington and Hutchinson had sought advice on getting their marriages annulled. But news reports say lawyers have advised the women that their marriages were never valid. From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 15 22:54:31 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 18:54:31 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Economist: Materials science: Pasta alla fisica Message-ID: Materials science: Pasta alla fisica http://www.economist.com/science/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=4269826 Aug 11th 2005 Physicists have solved the long-standing puzzle of how spaghetti breaks IT WAS a problem that baffled the master himself. Richard Feynman--maverick physics genius, Nobel laureate and father of modern quantum theory--could not work out why, when a strand of dried spaghetti is snapped, it almost never breaks in half but instead fragments into three or more pieces. At dinner with Daniel Hillis, an old friend and computer scientist, the two became obsessed with this and spent hours theorising and experimenting. In the end, they left with a kitchen full of pulverised pasta and no reasonable answer. Basile Audoly and S?bastien Neukirch of the University of Paris VI think, however, that they have succeeded where Feynman failed. Their calculations, revealed in a forthcoming paper in Physical Review Letters, suggest that the key to the problem lies in so-called flexural waves. Each time part of a bent strand breaks, a series of these waves ripples down the length of the pasta. The mistake Feynman probably made was to assume that the strain released when a bent strand breaks allows the two half-strands to relax and become straight again. Instead, according to their equations, the passing waves cause parts of the daughter strands to curve even further. This triggers other breakages which, in turn, trigger further waves, causing the strand to fragment. To put their mathematical solution to the test, they devised a rigorous experiment. And, like all good researchers, they describe their materials and methods in a way that allows others to repeat what they did: "A Barilla no. 1 dry spaghetti pasta of length L=24.1cm was clamped and bent into an arc of circle," they write. "Twenty-five experiments were carried out with various pasta diameters." By snapping 1,000 photos per second as they released the bent strands, they were able to see the travelling waves and to show that the motion of the strands followed their equation exquisitely. Videos of all this can be viewed [4]here. Dr Audoly's and Dr Neukirch's research does have a serious point, of course. The steel struts that help to hold up skyscrapers and bridges are slightly less trivial examples of thin rods whose tendency to break needs to be understood. Knowing the mechanisms by which these rods fragment is important not only for designing such structures but also for reconstructing what has gone wrong when one fails. Having out-thought Feynman, though, it is hard to see what should be next on the pasta research agenda. Perhaps a suitably profound problem is that of the slowing down of time--a well-established part of the theory of relativity. Or, to put it in pasta terms, does a watched pot take longer to boil? From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 15 22:54:55 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 18:54:55 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] AP: Harvard to investigate origins of life Message-ID: Harvard to investigate origins of life http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apscience_story.asp?category=1501&slug=Harvard%20Evolution Monday, August 15, 2005 ? Last updated 6:03 a.m. PT THE ASSOCIATED PRESS CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Harvard University is joining the long-running debate over the theory of evolution by launching a research project to study how life began. The team of researchers will receive $1 million in funding annually from Harvard over the next few years. The project begins with an admission that some mysteries about life's origins cannot be explained. "My expectation is that we will be able to reduce this to a very simple series of logical events that could have taken place with no divine intervention," said David R. Liu, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard. The "Origins of Life in the Universe Initiative" is still in its early stages, scientists told the Boston Sunday Globe. Harvard has told the research team to make plans for adding faculty members and a collection of multimillion-dollar facilities. Evolution is a fundamental scientific theory that species evolved over millions of years. It has been standard in most public school science texts for decades but recently re-emerged in the spotlight as communities and some states debated whether school children should also be taught about creationism or intelligent design. The theory of intelligent design says life on earth is too complex to have developed through evolution, implying that a higher power must have had a hand in creation. Harvard has not been seen as a leader in origins of life research, but the university's vast resources could change that perception. "It is quite gratifying to see Harvard is going for a solution to a problem that will be remembered 100 years from now," said Steven Benner, a University of Florida scientist who is one of the world's top chemists in origins-of-life research. From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 15 22:55:24 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 18:55:24 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Religious Belief Is Found to Be Less Lacking Among Social Scientists Message-ID: Religious Belief Is Found to Be Less Lacking Among Social Scientists News bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.8.15 http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/08/2005081504n.htm By DAVID GLENN Is godlessness moving from one end of the campus to the other? Perhaps so, according to a new survey described here on Sunday at the annual meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. Scholars in the natural sciences, the study found, are now more likely to identify themselves as nonreligious than are their counterparts in the social sciences. The finding, which is based on a recent survey of 1,646 scholars at 21 top-tier research universities, stands in counterpoint to several well-known studies from the mid-20th century, all of which found that social scientists were the least religious group on campus. The new study covers scholars in three natural-science fields (physics, chemistry, and biology) and four social sciences (sociology, economics, political science, and psychology). Among the natural scientists, 55.4 percent of the respondents identified themselves as atheists or agnostics. Only 47.5 percent of the social scientists said the same. The single most irreligious field covered in the study is biology, at 63.4 percent. The least irreligious is economics, at 45.1. In the entire study, only two respondents -- both of them chemists -- said that they agreed with the statement, "The Bible is the actual word of God and it should be taken literally." (Roughly a quarter of the respondents agreed with the statement, "The Bible is the inspired word of God, but not everything in it should be taken literally.") The study's authors -- Elaine Howard Ecklund, a postdoctoral fellow in sociology at Rice University, and Christopher P. Scheitle, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Pennsylvania State University -- are in the early stages of a large-scale project that will assess the spiritual practices and ethical beliefs of religious and nonreligious scholars in the seven fields. Ms. Ecklund said that she hoped to explore how both religious and nonreligious scholars "understand the relationships between religion and spirituality and such questions as how to develop a research agenda and how to make ethical decisions involving human subjects." Their project has been financed by a $283,000 grant from the John Templeton Foundation, a Philadelphia-based philanthropy that often supports studies of the intersection between religion and science. Ms. Ecklund and Mr. Scheitle conducted the survey in May and June, and they have only begun to analyze the data. Their project will also involve approximately 300 in-depth interviews with scholars who responded to the initial survey. In her presentation, Ms. Ecklund said that she strongly suspected that gender differences could explain the apparent shift of unbelief from the social sciences to the natural sciences. In contrast to the new survey, a well-known 1969 study by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education found that scholars in the natural sciences were far more likely than social scientists to identify themselves as religious. Since then, however, women have entered the academy in large numbers -- and they have entered the social sciences at higher rates than the natural sciences. (In the new study, for example, only 16.7 percent of the natural scientists were women, compared with 27 percent of the social scientists.) Across the American population, Ms. Ecklund said, women are consistently more likely than men to say that they are religious. So, all else equal, women's greater presence in the social sciences might account for the fact that those fields are now less irreligious than their hard-science counterparts. Ms. Ecklund has not yet performed the statistical tests that might confirm or refute her gender hypothesis. In their paper, Ms. Ecklund and Mr. Scheitle write that they hope that their study, once completed, will "increase our overall knowledge of cognitive moral reasoning processes and the role of science in providing spiritual insights, even for scientists who are not part of an established religion and who do not study specifically religious topics." In the new study, the proportion of nonreligious scholars is roughly consistent across all age groups: 52.3 percent of respondents younger than 36, for example, are nonreligious, compared with 54.2 percent of the respondents age 66 and older. The same is true of self-reported Protestants: Their proportions are roughly equal (around 17 percent) across all age levels. Self-reported Catholics, however, were much more prevalent among the younger academics: 11.2 percent of respondents under 36, but only 1.4 percent of those over 65, said they were Catholic. The opposite trend was apparent among Jews: 21.1 percent of the oldest group, but only 11.2 percent of the youngest, said they were Jewish. From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 15 22:55:45 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 18:55:45 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] John Derbyshire: The Great Syllogism Message-ID: John Derbyshire: The Great Syllogism http://www.olimu.com/WebJournalism/Texts/Commentary/GreatSyllogism.htm National Review Online June 10th, 2003 ____________________________ Reader, I have been vouchsafed a revelation, a sudden flash of understanding, a satori, a glimpse of the inner workings of the universe, of the waters that are under the earth, of the hidden tissues that connect aspects of reality not normally thought of as being related to each other in any way at all. Illuminated by that flash was quite a large part of the entire political landscape of the present-day USA, as if seen from a plane through a sudden gap in the clouds. I am going to lay out my revelation in three parts: a preamble, then a syllogism, then a conclusion. The syllogism seems to me so all-encompassing and revelatory that, shucking off false modesty, I am going to call it The Great Syllogism. (Students of classical logic may complain that it is not, strictly speaking, a syllogism at all more like a dilemma. Syllogism has taken my fancy, though, and Merriam-Websters Third seems to permit this usage. How many students of classical logic are there nowadays anyway?) Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin. * Preamble. Not so much a preamble as a actual amble, conducted here in the outer New York suburbs, through some leafy streets with houses standing on plots that vary from one-sixth to one-half of an acre, and that show up in real-estate catalogs, when they do show up, at prices from the low 300s to the high 600s. The time: around nine thirty on a weekday morning. My state of mind: I had finished my breakfast, read the newspaper, seen the kids off to school and the wife off to work, attended to some e-mail chores, and read some news and opinion pieces on the internet. Among the latter was [2]Peter Woods review of John Ogbus Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb. Then I set out to walk my dog. There arent many people around in the burbs at this time of the morning. Other than a couple of encounters with neighbors, the human beings I saw fell into three categories. * Garden-service contractors. These people pull up in vans and trucks, unload mowers, trimmers and blowers, and set to work keeping the gardens neat and tidy. Lots of these, very noisy and a bit of a nuisance on that account, but better they should do this on weekdays than at weekends. * Home-improvement contractors. I passed three or four houses that were being fixed up in one way or another having an extension built, getting a new roof or siding put on. * An elderly lady out walking. She had a baby with her, presumably a grandchild, in a stroller being pushed by a childrens nurse. The garden-service people are solidly Central-American Indian types, though often working for a white boss. They are small-built, dark-skinned and black-haired. When I give them a friendly greeting they seem pleased and greet me back, smiling, but in a way suggesting that Good morning! is just about the limit of their English-language skills. The construction people are a mix of white and Hispanic, the one constant factor being that everyone acting in a supervisory way is white. One of the roofing team the owner of the firm, it sounds like is talking up to his man on the roof. He is doing this through a third party, who translates his Noo Yawk English into Spanish. The elderly lady out walking with her grandchild is white, but the childrens nurse pushing the stroller is a Mayan sculpture come to life. The wordless smile with which she returns my greeting shows gold teeth. I dont see any black people at all, nor any East Asians. * Syllogism. (1) At any point in time this one, for example the United States economy needs different kinds of workers in different numbers. It needs a certain number of lawyers, accountants, architects and doctors. It needs a certain number of network supervisors, computer programmers, web designers, schoolteachers, tax preparers and nurses. It needs a certain number of garden-service workers, lumberjacks, auto mechanics, plumbers, steel-fixers, cops, soldiers and child-minders. (2) Always scornful of privileges bestowed by accidents of birth or place, this country has a deep attachment to the idea of meritocracy. In recent decades we have developed an equally strong emotional investment in the concept of racial equality. (3) Our very best efforts at creating a meritocratic education system always turn up the same unhappy results: students of Ashkenazi-Jewish and East or South Asian ancestry are over-represented among the educational successes, while students of West African ancestry are over-represented among the educational failures. (4) All sorts of theories are available to explain (3) John Ogbus is only the latest. Unfortunately we dont know which theory is true. Possibly just one of the theories is true. Possibly the true cause is something nobody has thought of yet. More likely the truth contains elements, in different proportions, from several theories. (5) Until we understand the causes of (3), the most meritocratic system of education we can devise will produce a society with a highly-paid cognitive elite in which persons of Ashkenazi-Jewish and East or South Asian ancestry are over-represented, a class of manual and service workers in which black people are over-represented, and a clerical or small-entrepreneurial class in which white gentiles are over-represented. (6) Such a society would be grossly offensive to American sensibilities. (See (2) above.) It would also, in all probability, be unhappy and unstable. (7) Adjustments to the meritocratic principle therefore need to be made: affirmative action, imposed diversity quotas in businesses, anti-discrimination laws, and so on. We must trade off some meritocracy for social harmony. (8) The effect of these adjustments is as it is intended to be! to move up into the clerical class people who, in a pure-meritocratic system, would be in the manual class. (And, to a less significant degree, to move up into the cognitive-elite class people who would otherwise be clerks.) (9) Corresponding adjustments to shift down into the manual class people who would, on a pure-meritocratic principle, be in the clerical class, are politically impossible. (10) Therefore the manual class is seriously under-staffed. (11) Millions of Third-worlders are only too glad to come to the USA to do manual or low-level service work. (12) Unfortunately the immigration laws do not allow them to come here. (13) The immigration laws should therefore be changed to permit a large inflow of unskilled aliens from the Third World. (14) Such changes are unpopular with large parts of the American public, who fear the cultural and economic consequences. (15) Politicians know (14) and therefore will not change the immigration laws. And so: (16) For the sake of social harmony, we have no choice but to turn a blind eye while several million unskilled aliens enter our country and stay here illegally. * Conclusion. The paradox is that this particular way of avoiding one kind of social disharmony racial stratification by class introduces a different kind: the colonization of large parts of our cities by non-English-speaking foreigners who, because of their illegal status, are stuck outside the mainstream of American life. Also because of that same status, they are looked on with mistrust by citizens and legal immigrants. This unhappy state of affairs is none the less considered, by most of us, to be the lesser of two evils. Rough, dirty and strenuous work must be done. If, as we suspect is the case, the choice is between having that work done by (a) large angry black people, or (b) small friendly brown people, well buy the package: affirmative action plus massive unrestrained illegal immigration. Our political classes, who of course know all that I have been saying here, had a plan to finesse the situation by simply regularizing the illegals, thus at least removing the stigma of law-breaker from them. That plan went up in the smoke of 9/11. It was, in any case, grossly unfair to legal immigrants, who have to jump through numberless hoops to get the right to live here (it took me seven years). We are stuck with the present situation, with the Great Syllogism. Probably we are storing up untold trouble for ourselves. The latest news in my own neighborhood is that an exceptionally vicious Central American gang named Mara Salvatrucha is now entrenched here on Long Island. (Working as landscapers and busboys by day and criminals at night, says the [3]New York Post. Which puts those cheery lawn-service workers in a new light.) Americans, though, do not lose much sleep over the prospect of future evils. This is a big, empty country filled with boundless optimism. [4]David Brooks has remarked that the usual reaction of Americans when faced with disapproval, anxiety, and potential conflict is to move away. Similarly, given the choice between a pressing problem today and a reckless policy likely to deliver far worse problems tomorrow, we opt for the second. The future, after all, is full of possibilities, and by the time that second batch of problems arrives, we may have found some way to cope with them. Lets hope that that is what happens. Ross Perot used to speak of the giant sucking sound of manufacturing jobs fleeing the U.S. to low-wage countries south of the border. The giant sucking sound I am actually hearing, ten years later, is the sound of millions of unskilled Third Worlders being pulled into this country by the vacuum at the bottom of the labor market a vacuum we have ourselves created by deciding that such low-quality work should not be done by Americans, especially not by those Americans most likely to be assigned to it by our educational system. We no longer believe in the dignity of labor. We all want our kids to go to law school, and have convinced ourselves that they have a right to do so. What do you think the slogan No child left behind means? It means that no American child should have to become a low-status worker. Thats what it means, and that is what we honestly and sincerely wish, because we fear we know what an American-born class of low-status workers would look like. Everything else follows by pure logic. From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 15 22:55:57 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 18:55:57 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] ParaPundit: Whites Still Do Manual Labor In Wisconsin Message-ID: Whites Still Do Manual Labor In Wisconsin http://www.parapundit.com/archives/002938.html#002938 2005 August 14 Sunday Whites Still Do Manual Labor In Wisconsin Over at [9]No Speed Bumps Dan reports on how [10]during a vacation trip in Wisconsin he found white people doing all the manual labor jobs that are done by Hispanics in Texas. Two weeks ago I vacationed near Oshkosh, Wisconsin. One thing strikingly different than living in Texas was that there were few Hispanics. In Texas, Hispanics are found in all walks of life, from doctors to janitors. With so many impoverished Hispanics illegally moving to Texas over the southern border each year, they have taken over most of the lower-skill jobs because they will work for less than American citizens. Go to any restaurant, hotel, or construction site and all of the basic manual labor tasks are being done by low-income Hispanics. Anyway, while on vacation, in the hotels we stayed in all of the maid staff and other help were white. The same was true of all of the restaurants we ate in, from the cooks, to the bus boys, to the grounds keepers. I felt like we were in a time machine and in a strange land. An interesting note about the maid staff at the hotels was the good cheer that they were in. They were constantly chatting among themselves and seemed very content as they went about their work. This reminded me that, yes, there is dignity to manual labor, and yes, white people can still do manual labor. This runs counter to the fashionable argument today justifying the open border policy with Mexico. The argument goes that America could just not function without all of the low-skill workers coming in to do all of the manual labor. Well, that is ridiculous. It may drive prices up some, if American citizens (whether white, black, or any other race) must do the work but the work will still get done, one way or another. One of the big whopper lies told by open borders advocates such as George W. Bush is that there are "jobs that Americans won't do". This is nonsense. One only need travel to those places where the bulk of the population is still white to see that this claim is false propaganda. As for the argument that a lack of cheap immigrant labor will drive up prices, it rests on three fallacies: * That low skilled labor makes up much of total costs. Wrong-o sleigh bell lovers. The bottom quintile of the United States population earns [11]only 3.5% of national income. 20% get 3.5%. If we deported all the illegal aliens and stopped all low skiilled and moderate skilled immigration the bottom 20% would see some significant increase in their wages. But that increase would be unlikely raise total prices by even a couple of percent. We don't pay them that much. A 10% or 20% increase in their salaries won't matter much to the rest of the population. * That there are no substitutes for cheap labor. Again, wrong-o sleigh bell lovers. Necessity is the mother of invention. In all likelihood, faced with higher labor costs industry would be more eager to develop and buy more capital equipment and to arrange the methods of purveying goods and services to decrease the amount of labor needed. In fact, we have an example available for what the lack of cheap immigrant labor will do to an industry. [12]The Australian wine industry is more automated than the American wine industry due to lack of cheap immigrant labor in Australia. Ben Franklin was right. We'd advance more rapidly without simple minds available to do simple tasks cheaply. * That there are no external costs to cheap unskilled immigrant labor. And once again, wrong-o sleigh bell lovers. Low skilled laborers can not afford to pay for their own medical care. They don't pay enough in taxes to pay for the educations of their children. They do not make enough to pay for their retirements in the United States. The list goes on. Oh, and they commit crime at higher rates. So they cost crime victims and also the criminal justice system. A year for an inmate at Rikers Island in New York costs $47,000. Criminals are expensive for the rest of us in many ways. The Open Borders advocates are deeply dishonest. America's elites are corrupt. They lie. They can not be trusted. America is going down a very wrong path. Our leaders in business and politics are to blame. But so are apathetic members of the public. It is time to wake up and demand a stop to massive immigration. The costs have become far too high and will be with us for decades to come. By Randall Parker at 2005 August 14 06:44 PM [13]Immigration Economics | [14]TrackBack Comments in vermont too. many more latinos work in oregon than 10 years ago though, and i hear that similar things are going on in the south. i suspect that for a variety of reasons the upper midwest and new england (distance, climate, cost of living) will resist latino labor the longest. Posted by: [15]razib on August 14, 2005 08:55 PM Resistance is futile. Viva La Rasa. Posted by: [16]Mark on August 14, 2005 10:59 PM There would be a net savings from reversing the antimerit immigrant flow, some of which would be passed on to the consumers. If the bottom 20% gets paid so little that their wages could double without the rich even noticing it, shifting 4% of the total income away from the top 80% over several years, that is a worthwhile price to pay. There is no economic need to increase the size of the bottom end; it isn't about money, it's about power. How to get power, when there are no ideas; won't they use immigration to increase racial conflict, and say that officials must have more power? Posted by: [17]John S Bolton on August 14, 2005 11:26 PM For some reason my trackbacks to this post don't take, so ping! Posted by: [18]Dave Schuler on August 15, 2005 07:47 AM Eastern Washington, North Idaho, and Montana are alot like Wisconsin in that low end labor jobs are done primarly by whites. We have very few illegal aliens in this part of the country. This is good because we have much less of the "servant" culture that you see in California and other places. People clean their own homes and often do their own yard work. If you have someone else do these things, they are done by outside services operating more like independent business people rather than as "domestics". Not having the illegal immigrants means that we have a much more "do it yourself" mentality than, say, in Southern California. I do not like that "class" mentality that illegal immigration has produced in places like California and Texas. I think having distinct social classes, especially if they are of different races, is very destructive to the future of the U.S. The "open-borders" people need to be grilled over this issue. Posted by: [19]Kurt on August 15, 2005 10:01 AM razib - don't underestimate the number of mexicans in the upper midwest - chicago has the 2nd highest mexican population in the u.s. after l.a. granted this isn't wisconsin, but.... randall - in a similar, practical manner that you approach alternative energy solutions, i.e. can't tell people to drive less or other inconveniences that would be a political non-starter in america today; what would be your political platform for immigration that would be politically feasible? i would love to know what you'd recommend, having put considerable thought to this issue, assuming something like you were an advisor to your senator. thanks. Posted by: [20]Jim on August 15, 2005 01:22 PM I spent a few days in Sierra Vista, AZ, a booming town about 15 miles north of the Mexican border. Strikingly, the maids in my motel were white, as were a lot of the other service workers. The answer to this paradox is that Sierra Vista is within the narrow band heavily policed by the Border Patrol. If illegal aliens are found there, they are deported. But if they make it far enough north to Tucson or Phoenix, well, they're Ollie Ollie Home Free. Posted by: [21]Steve Sailer on August 15, 2005 02:03 PM Jim, Perhaps I don't understand your question. Politically feasible? I think a candidate for the Presidency could run on a platform to deport all the illegals and win. The dollar cost to the government of deporting all the illegals would be pretty low. The anger about the immigrant deluge is building. But politicians are chasing the votes of Hispanics, the Democrats see them as a solid Democrat voting bloc (and they are), and some business interests want cheap labor. I'd tell a US Senator to submit a bill to fund a barrier along the entire length of the border. I'd also propose upping the number of Border Patrol by 20,000 and setting them loose in the interior with orders to round up all illegals. Congress should give instructions to DHS to resume interior enforcement. Posted by: [22]Randall Parker on August 15, 2005 03:33 PM References 9. http://nospeedbumps.com/ 10. http://nospeedbumps.com/?p=334 11. http://www.heritage.org/Research/Taxes/bg1791.cfm 12. http://www.parapundit.com/archives/002778.html 13. http://www.parapundit.com/archives/cat_immigration_economics.html 14. http://www.futurepundit.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi?__mode=view&entry_id=2938 15. http://www.gnxp.com/ 16. mailto:dfsf at hotmail.com 17. http://www.johnsbolton.net/ 18. http://www.theglitteringeye.com/ 19. mailto:kurt2100kimo at yahoo.com.tw 20. mailto:knuckleballnews at yahoo.com 21. http://www.iSteve.com/ 22. http://futurepundit.com/ From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Aug 16 00:06:28 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 17:06:28 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] CNN: Border emergency declared in New Mexico Message-ID: <01C5A1BB.ADD01A20.shovland@mindspring.com> I don't think either the Democrats or Republicans have a populist approach to this. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Monday, August 15, 2005 8:30 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] CNN: Border emergency declared in New Mexico This morning, Wall Street Journal weighed in: http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110007108 Their take: Democrats may have an issue against republicans that will resonate with the ordinary people who fear their culture and jobs are disappearing. Lynn Premise Checker wrote: > Border emergency declared in New Mexico - Aug 12, 2005 > http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/08/12/newmexico/ > > [On the other hand, this was not reported in the New York Times, > either. Google News returns only ten sources for this. Lou Dobbs > interviewed the governor last night. > > [So how *do* you distinguish good from bogus information on the > Internet?] > > Governor says area 'devastated' by human and drug smuggling > > (CNN) -- New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson declared a state of emergency > Friday in four counties along the Mexican border that he said have > been "devastated" by crimes such as the smuggling of drugs and illegal > immigrants. > > The declaration said the region "has been devastated by the ravages > and terror of human smuggling, drug smuggling, kidnapping, murder, > destruction of property and the death of livestock. ... > > "[It] is in an extreme state of disrepair and is inadequately funded > or safeguarded to protect the lives and property of New Mexican > citizens." > > New Mexico shares 180 miles of border with the Mexican state of > Chihuahua. > > "The situation is out of hand," Richardson said Friday night on CNN, > noting that one 54-mile stretch is particularly bad. > > The Mexican government issued a statement in which it acknowledged the > problems along the border, but said it continues to make consistent > efforts to target them along with U.S. authorities. > > It said some of Richardson's views stem from "generalizations that do > not correspond to the spirit of cooperation and understanding that are > required for dealing with problems of common concern along the > border." > > Richardson's declaration makes $750,000 in state emergency funds > available to Dona Ana, Luna, Grant and Hidalgo counties. > > Richardson pledged an additional $1 million in assistance for the > area, his office said in a news release. > > He said on CNN that the funds will be used to hire additional law > enforcement personnel and pay officers overtime. > > In announcing the state of emergency, Richardson -- a Democrat who > served in President Clinton's Cabinet -- criticized the "total > inaction and lack of resources from the federal government and > Congress" in helping protect his state's residents along the border. > > "There's very little response from the Border Patrol," he said on CNN. > "They're doing a good job, but they don't have the resources." > > The governor announced the move after a helicopter and ground tour of > the border near Columbus, New Mexico, the statement said. > > He said on CNN that he "saw the trails where these illegal routes take > place" as well as fenced areas along the border where the fence is > "literally nonexistent." > > According to Richardson's statement announcing the declaration, > "Recent developments have convinced me this action is necessary -- > including violence directed at law enforcement, damage to property and > livestock, increased evidence of drug smuggling, and an increase in > the number of undocumented immigrants." > > He called on Mexico to "bulldoze the abandoned town of Las Chepas, > which is directly over the border from Columbus." > > The statement went on to say that "Las Chepas is a notorious staging > and resting area for those who smuggle drugs and immigrants into the > United States." > > Some of the pledged funds will be used to create a field office for > the New Mexico Office of Homeland Security to focus specifically on > the border. > > There will also be new efforts to protect livestock in the area near > Columbus, "along a favorite path for illegal immigration where a > number of livestock have been stolen and killed," the statement said. > > Richardson said he wanted residents of the four counties "to know my > administration is doing everything it can to protect them." > > Alejandro Cano, secretary of industrial development for the Mexican > state of Chihuahua -- which borders New Mexico -- pledged to support > Richardson's efforts, the statement said. > > Richardson told CNN he met with Mexican governors several weeks ago on > border security. > > "My people on my side asked me to take this step, and I've done so > reluctantly," Richardson told CNN. "As governor, I have to protect the > people I represent." > > He noted he is the nation's only Hispanic governor, and "we're a state > that's been very good to legal migrants. ... This action, I believe, > had to be taken." > > The Mexican Foreign Ministry sent Richardson a letter Friday saying it > has requested that Mexican consuls in Albuquerque and El Paso, Texas, > meet "as soon as possible" with New Mexico officials "to promote > pertinent action by the authorities of both countries in the framework > of existing institutional mechanisms." > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Aug 16 00:31:59 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 17:31:59 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] 250 miles per gallon? They're doing it Message-ID: <01C5A1BF.3E7AFC40.shovland@mindspring.com> Tinkerers fiddle with hybrids to increase efficiency Bottom of Form 1 CORTE MADERA, California (AP) -- Politicians and automakers say a car that can both reduce greenhouse gases and free America from its reliance on foreign oil is years or even decades away. Ron Gremban says such a car is parked in his garage. It looks like a typical Toyota Prius hybrid, but in the trunk sits an 80-miles-per-gallon secret -- a stack of 18 brick-sized batteries that boosts the car's high mileage with an extra electrical charge so it can burn even less fuel. Gremban, an electrical engineer and committed environmentalist, spent several months and $3,000 tinkering with his car. Like all hybrids, his Prius increases fuel efficiency by harnessing small amounts of electricity generated during braking and coasting. The extra batteries let him store extra power by plugging the car into a wall outlet at his home in this San Francisco suburb -- all for about a quarter. He's part of a small but growing movement. "Plug-in" hybrids aren't yet cost-efficient, but some of the dozen known experimental models have gotten up to 250 mpg. They have support not only from environmentalists but also from conservative foreign policy hawks who insist Americans fuel terrorism through their gas guzzling. And while the technology has existed for three decades, automakers are beginning to take notice, too. So far, DaimlerChrysler AG is the only company that has committed to building its own plug-in hybrids, quietly pledging to make up to 40 vans for U.S. companies. But Toyota Motor Corp. officials who initially frowned on people altering their cars now say they may be able to learn from them. "They're like the hot rodders of yesterday who did everything to soup up their cars. It was all about horsepower and bling-bling, lots of chrome and accessories," said Cindy Knight, a Toyota spokeswoman. "Maybe the hot rodders of tomorrow are the people who want to get in there and see what they can do about increasing fuel economy." Plugged or unplugged? The extra batteries let Gremban drive for 20 miles with a 50-50 mix of gas and electricity. Even after the car runs out of power from the batteries and switches to the standard hybrid mode, it gets the typical Prius fuel efficiency of around 45 mpg. As long as Gremban doesn't drive too far in a day, he says, he gets 80 mpg. "The value of plug-in hybrids is they can dramatically reduce gasoline usage for the first few miles every day," Gremban said. "The average for people's usage of a car is somewhere around 30 to 40 miles per day. During that kind of driving, the plug-in hybrid can make a dramatic difference." Gremban promotes the CalCars Initiative, a volunteer effort encouraging automakers to make plug-in hybrids. Backers of plug-in hybrids acknowledge that the electricity to boost their cars generally comes from fossil fuels that create greenhouse gases, but they say that process still produces far less pollution than oil. They also note that electricity could be generated cleanly from solar power. Gremban rigged his car to promote the nonprofit CalCars Initiative, a San Francisco Bay area-based volunteer effort that argues automakers could mass produce plug-in hybrids at a reasonable price. But Toyota and other car companies say they are worried about the cost, convenience and safety of plug-in hybrids -- and note that consumers haven't embraced all-electric cars because of the inconvenience of recharging them like giant cell phones. Automakers have spent millions of dollars telling motorists that hybrids don't need to be plugged in, and don't want to confuse the message. Nonetheless, plug-in hybrids are starting to get the backing of prominent hawks like former CIA director James Woolsey and Frank Gaffney, President Reagan's undersecretary of defense. They have joined Set America Free, a group that wants the government to spend $12 billion over four years on plug-in hybrids, alternative fuels and other measures to reduce foreign oil dependence. Gaffney, who heads the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Security Policy, said Americans would embrace plug-ins if they understood arguments from him and others who say gasoline contributes to oil-rich Middle Eastern governments that support terrorism. "The more we are consuming oil that either comes from places that are bent on our destruction or helping those who are ... the more we are enabling those who are trying to kill us," Gaffney said. Now vs. later DaimlerChrysler spokesman Nick Cappa said plug-in hybrids are ideal for companies with fleets of vehicles that can be recharged at a central location at night. He declined to name the companies buying the vehicles and said he did not know the vehicles' mileage or cost, or when they would be available. Others are modifying hybrids, too. Monrovia-based Energy CS has converted two Priuses to get up to 230 mpg by using powerful lithium ion batteries. It is forming a new company, EDrive Systems, that will convert hybrids to plug-ins for about $12,000 starting next year, company vice president Greg Hanssen said. University of California, Davis, engineering professor Andy Frank built a plug-in hybrid from the ground up in 1972 and has since built seven others, one of which gets up to 250 mpg. They were converted from non-hybrids, including a Ford Taurus and Chevrolet Suburban. Frank has spent $150,000 to $250,000 in research costs on each car, but believes automakers could mass-produce them by adding just $6,000 to each vehicle's price tag. Instead, Frank said, automakers promise hydrogen-powered vehicles hailed by President Bush and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, even though hydrogen's backers acknowledge the cars won't be widely available for years and would require a vast infrastructure of new fueling stations. "They'd rather work on something that won't be in their lifetime, and that's this hydrogen economy stuff," Frank said. "They pick this kind of target to get the public off their back, essentially." From waluk at earthlink.net Tue Aug 16 01:14:09 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Gerry Reinhart-Waller) Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 18:14:09 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] 250 miles per gallon? They're doing it In-Reply-To: <01C5A1BF.3E7AFC40.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C5A1BF.3E7AFC40.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <43013DE1.1060109@earthlink.net> Well and good, Steve. But one robin does not a springtime make. Even if it is parked in your garage. Regards, Gerry Reinhart-Waller Steve Hovland wrote: >Tinkerers fiddle with hybrids to increase efficiency > >Bottom of Form 1 >CORTE MADERA, California (AP) -- Politicians and automakers say a car that >can both reduce greenhouse gases and free America from its reliance on >foreign oil is years or even decades away. >Ron Gremban says such a car is parked in his garage. >It looks like a typical Toyota Prius hybrid, but in the trunk sits an >80-miles-per-gallon secret -- a stack of 18 brick-sized batteries that >boosts the car's high mileage with an extra electrical charge so it can >burn even less fuel. >Gremban, an electrical engineer and committed environmentalist, spent >several months and $3,000 tinkering with his car. >Like all hybrids, his Prius increases fuel efficiency by harnessing small >amounts of electricity generated during braking and coasting. The extra >batteries let him store extra power by plugging the car into a wall outlet >at his home in this San Francisco suburb -- all for about a quarter. >He's part of a small but growing movement. "Plug-in" hybrids aren't yet >cost-efficient, but some of the dozen known experimental models have gotten >up to 250 mpg. >They have support not only from environmentalists but also from >conservative foreign policy hawks who insist Americans fuel terrorism >through their gas guzzling. >And while the technology has existed for three decades, automakers are >beginning to take notice, too. >So far, DaimlerChrysler AG is the only company that has committed to >building its own plug-in hybrids, quietly pledging to make up to 40 vans >for U.S. companies. But Toyota Motor Corp. officials who initially frowned >on people altering their cars now say they may be able to learn from them. >"They're like the hot rodders of yesterday who did everything to soup up >their cars. It was all about horsepower and bling-bling, lots of chrome and >accessories," said Cindy Knight, a Toyota spokeswoman. "Maybe the hot >rodders of tomorrow are the people who want to get in there and see what >they can do about increasing fuel economy." > >Plugged or unplugged? >The extra batteries let Gremban drive for 20 miles with a 50-50 mix of gas >and electricity. Even after the car runs out of power from the batteries >and switches to the standard hybrid mode, it gets the typical Prius fuel >efficiency of around 45 mpg. As long as Gremban doesn't drive too far in a >day, he says, he gets 80 mpg. >"The value of plug-in hybrids is they can dramatically reduce gasoline >usage for the first few miles every day," Gremban said. "The average for >people's usage of a car is somewhere around 30 to 40 miles per day. During >that kind of driving, the plug-in hybrid can make a dramatic difference." > >Gremban promotes the CalCars Initiative, a volunteer effort encouraging >automakers to make plug-in hybrids. >Backers of plug-in hybrids acknowledge that the electricity to boost their >cars generally comes from fossil fuels that create greenhouse gases, but >they say that process still produces far less pollution than oil. They also >note that electricity could be generated cleanly from solar power. >Gremban rigged his car to promote the nonprofit CalCars Initiative, a San >Francisco Bay area-based volunteer effort that argues automakers could mass >produce plug-in hybrids at a reasonable price. >But Toyota and other car companies say they are worried about the cost, >convenience and safety of plug-in hybrids -- and note that consumers >haven't embraced all-electric cars because of the inconvenience of >recharging them like giant cell phones. >Automakers have spent millions of dollars telling motorists that hybrids >don't need to be plugged in, and don't want to confuse the message. >Nonetheless, plug-in hybrids are starting to get the backing of prominent >hawks like former CIA director James Woolsey and Frank Gaffney, President >Reagan's undersecretary of defense. They have joined Set America Free, a >group that wants the government to spend $12 billion over four years on >plug-in hybrids, alternative fuels and other measures to reduce foreign oil >dependence. >Gaffney, who heads the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Security Policy, >said Americans would embrace plug-ins if they understood arguments from him >and others who say gasoline contributes to oil-rich Middle Eastern >governments that support terrorism. >"The more we are consuming oil that either comes from places that are bent >on our destruction or helping those who are ... the more we are enabling >those who are trying to kill us," Gaffney said. > >Now vs. later >DaimlerChrysler spokesman Nick Cappa said plug-in hybrids are ideal for >companies with fleets of vehicles that can be recharged at a central >location at night. He declined to name the companies buying the vehicles >and said he did not know the vehicles' mileage or cost, or when they would >be available. >Others are modifying hybrids, too. >Monrovia-based Energy CS has converted two Priuses to get up to 230 mpg by >using powerful lithium ion batteries. It is forming a new company, EDrive >Systems, that will convert hybrids to plug-ins for about $12,000 starting >next year, company vice president Greg Hanssen said. >University of California, Davis, engineering professor Andy Frank built a >plug-in hybrid from the ground up in 1972 and has since built seven others, >one of which gets up to 250 mpg. They were converted from non-hybrids, >including a Ford Taurus and Chevrolet Suburban. >Frank has spent $150,000 to $250,000 in research costs on each car, but >believes automakers could mass-produce them by adding just $6,000 to each >vehicle's price tag. >Instead, Frank said, automakers promise hydrogen-powered vehicles hailed by >President Bush and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, even though hydrogen's >backers acknowledge the cars won't be widely available for years and would >require a vast infrastructure of new fueling stations. >"They'd rather work on something that won't be in their lifetime, and >that's this hydrogen economy stuff," Frank said. "They pick this kind of >target to get the public off their back, essentially." > > > > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Tue Aug 16 03:26:03 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 21:26:03 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] AP: Harvard to investigate origins of life In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <43015CCB.4020907@solution-consulting.com> I can't help but wonder if the Intelligent Design folks were stimulii for this project, like "let's prove these folks are crackpots." I believe that science is often reactive; I get ideas from objecting to something someone else believes. I did a bit of editing to emphasize my concept. Lynn Premise Checker wrote: > Harvard to investigate origins of life > http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apscience_story.asp?category=1501&slug=Harvard%20Evolution > > > Monday, August 15, 2005 ? Last updated 6:03 a.m. PT > > THE ASSOCIATED PRESS > > > > "My expectation is that we will be able to reduce this to a very > simple series of logical events that could have taken place with no > divine intervention," said David R. Liu, a professor of chemistry and > chemical biology at Harvard. > > > Evolution is a fundamental scientific theory that species evolved over > millions of years. It has been standard in most public school science > texts for decades but recently re-emerged in the spotlight as > communities and some states debated whether school children should > also be taught about creationism or intelligent design. > > The theory of intelligent design says life on earth is too complex to > have developed through evolution, implying that a higher power must > have had a hand in creation. > > Harvard has not been seen as a leader in origins of life research, but > the university's vast resources could change that perception. > > "It is quite gratifying to see Harvard is going for a solution to a > problem that will be remembered 100 years from now," said Steven > Benner, a University of Florida scientist who is one of the world's > top chemists in origins-of-life researc > h. > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Tue Aug 16 03:44:46 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 21:44:46 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] ParaPundit: Whites Still Do Manual Labor In Wisconsin In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4301612E.4070803@solution-consulting.com> More thanks for Frank's efforts. This is exactly right. The fast-food restaurant where I get my lunch salad used to be staffed by ordinary causasians, often with obvious mild retardation. They were good workers, and I enjoyed them. Now I can barely understand the girl at the register and sometimes I have to ask her to say it in Spanish because her English is so poor. I am deeply discouraged and disillusioned by President Bush's attitude about illegal emmigration. Lynn Premise Checker wrote: > Whites Still Do Manual Labor In Wisconsin > http://www.parapundit.com/archives/002938.html#002938 > > 2005 August 14 Sunday > Whites Still Do Manual Labor In Wisconsin > > Over at [9]No Speed Bumps Dan reports on how [10]during a vacation > trip in Wisconsin he found white people doing all the manual labor > jobs that are done by Hispanics in Texas. > > Two weeks ago I vacationed near Oshkosh, Wisconsin. One thing > strikingly different than living in Texas was that there were few > Hispanics. In Texas, Hispanics are found in all walks of life, from > doctors to janitors. > > With so many impoverished Hispanics illegally moving to Texas over > the southern border each year, they have taken over most of the > lower-skill jobs because they will work for less than American > citizens. Go to any restaurant, hotel, or construction site and all > of the basic manual labor tasks are being done by low-income > Hispanics. > > Anyway, while on vacation, in the hotels we stayed in all of the > maid staff and other help were white. The same was true of all of > the restaurants we ate in, from the cooks, to the bus boys, to the > grounds keepers. I felt like we were in a time machine and in a > strange land. > > An interesting note about the maid staff at the hotels was the good > cheer that they were in. They were constantly chatting among > themselves and seemed very content as they went about their work. > This reminded me that, yes, there is dignity to manual labor, and > yes, white people can still do manual labor. > > This runs counter to the fashionable argument today justifying the > open border policy with Mexico. The argument goes that America > could just not function without all of the low-skill workers coming > in to do all of the manual labor. Well, that is ridiculous. It may > drive prices up some, if American citizens (whether white, black, > or any other race) must do the work but the work will still get > done, one way or another. > > One of the big whopper lies told by open borders advocates such as > George W. Bush is that there are "jobs that Americans won't do". This > is nonsense. One only need travel to those places where the bulk of > the population is still white to see that this claim is false > propaganda. > > As for the argument that a lack of cheap immigrant labor will drive up > prices, it rests on three fallacies: > * That low skilled labor makes up much of total costs. Wrong-o > sleigh bell lovers. The bottom quintile of the United States > population earns [11]only 3.5% of national income. 20% get 3.5%. > If we deported all the illegal aliens and stopped all low skiilled > and moderate skilled immigration the bottom 20% would see some > significant increase in their wages. But that increase would be > unlikely raise total prices by even a couple of percent. We don't > pay them that much. A 10% or 20% increase in their salaries won't > matter much to the rest of the population. > * That there are no substitutes for cheap labor. Again, wrong-o > sleigh bell lovers. Necessity is the mother of invention. In all > likelihood, faced with higher labor costs industry would be more > eager to develop and buy more capital equipment and to arrange the > methods of purveying goods and services to decrease the amount of > labor needed. In fact, we have an example available for what the > lack of cheap immigrant labor will do to an industry. [12]The > Australian wine industry is more automated than the American wine > industry due to lack of cheap immigrant labor in Australia. Ben > Franklin was right. We'd advance more rapidly without simple minds > available to do simple tasks cheaply. > * That there are no external costs to cheap unskilled immigrant > labor. And once again, wrong-o sleigh bell lovers. Low skilled > laborers can not afford to pay for their own medical care. They > don't pay enough in taxes to pay for the educations of their > children. They do not make enough to pay for their retirements in > the United States. The list goes on. Oh, and they commit crime at > higher rates. So they cost crime victims and also the criminal > justice system. A year for an inmate at Rikers Island in New York > costs $47,000. Criminals are expensive for the rest of us in many > ways. > > The Open Borders advocates are deeply dishonest. America's elites are > corrupt. They lie. They can not be trusted. America is going down a > very wrong path. Our leaders in business and politics are to blame. > But so are apathetic members of the public. It is time to wake up and > demand a stop to massive immigration. The costs have become far too > high and will be with us for decades to come. > By Randall Parker at 2005 August 14 06:44 PM [13]Immigration > Economics | [14]TrackBack > Comments > > in vermont too. many more latinos work in oregon than 10 years ago > though, and i hear that similar things are going on in the south. i > suspect that for a variety of reasons the upper midwest and new > england (distance, climate, cost of living) will resist latino labor > the longest. > Posted by: [15]razib on August 14, 2005 08:55 PM > > Resistance is futile. Viva La Rasa. > Posted by: [16]Mark on August 14, 2005 10:59 PM > > There would be a net savings from reversing the antimerit immigrant > flow, some of which would be passed on to the consumers. If the bottom > 20% gets paid so little that their wages could double without the rich > even noticing it, shifting 4% of the total income away from the top > 80% over several years, that is a worthwhile price to pay. There is no > economic need to increase the size of the bottom end; it isn't about > money, it's about power. How to get power, when there are no ideas; > won't they use immigration to increase racial conflict, and say that > officials must have more power? > Posted by: [17]John S Bolton on August 14, 2005 11:26 PM > > For some reason my trackbacks to this post don't take, so ping! > Posted by: [18]Dave Schuler on August 15, 2005 07:47 AM > > Eastern Washington, North Idaho, and Montana are alot like Wisconsin > in that low end labor jobs are done primarly by whites. We have very > few illegal aliens in this part of the country. This is good because > we have much less of the "servant" culture that you see in California > and other places. People clean their own homes and often do their own > yard work. If you have someone else do these things, they are done by > outside services operating more like independent business people > rather than as "domestics". Not having the illegal immigrants means > that we have a much more "do it yourself" mentality than, say, in > Southern California. > > I do not like that "class" mentality that illegal immigration has > produced in places like California and Texas. I think having distinct > social classes, especially if they are of different races, is very > destructive to the future of the U.S. The "open-borders" people need > to be grilled over this issue. > Posted by: [19]Kurt on August 15, 2005 10:01 AM > > razib - don't underestimate the number of mexicans in the upper > midwest - chicago has the 2nd highest mexican population in the u.s. > after l.a. granted this isn't wisconsin, but.... > > randall - in a similar, practical manner that you approach alternative > energy solutions, i.e. can't tell people to drive less or other > inconveniences that would be a political non-starter in america today; > what would be your political platform for immigration that would be > politically feasible? i would love to know what you'd recommend, > having put considerable thought to this issue, assuming something like > you were an advisor to your senator. thanks. > Posted by: [20]Jim on August 15, 2005 01:22 PM > > I spent a few days in Sierra Vista, AZ, a booming town about 15 miles > north of the Mexican border. Strikingly, the maids in my motel were > white, as were a lot of the other service workers. The answer to this > paradox is that Sierra Vista is within the narrow band heavily policed > by the Border Patrol. If illegal aliens are found there, they are > deported. But if they make it far enough north to Tucson or Phoenix, > well, they're Ollie Ollie Home Free. > Posted by: [21]Steve Sailer on August 15, 2005 02:03 PM > > Jim, > > Perhaps I don't understand your question. Politically feasible? I > think a candidate for the Presidency could run on a platform to deport > all the illegals and win. The dollar cost to the government of > deporting all the illegals would be pretty low. > > The anger about the immigrant deluge is building. But politicians are > chasing the votes of Hispanics, the Democrats see them as a solid > Democrat voting bloc (and they are), and some business interests want > cheap labor. > > I'd tell a US Senator to submit a bill to fund a barrier along the > entire length of the border. I'd also propose upping the number of > Border Patrol by 20,000 and setting them loose in the interior with > orders to round up all illegals. Congress should give instructions to > DHS to resume interior enforcement. > Posted by: [22]Randall Parker on August 15, 2005 03:33 PM > > References > > 9. http://nospeedbumps.com/ > 10. http://nospeedbumps.com/?p=334 > 11. http://www.heritage.org/Research/Taxes/bg1791.cfm > 12. http://www.parapundit.com/archives/002778.html > 13. http://www.parapundit.com/archives/cat_immigration_economics.html > 14. http://www.futurepundit.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi?__mode=view&entry_id=2938 > 15. http://www.gnxp.com/ > 16. mailto:dfsf at hotmail.com > 17. http://www.johnsbolton.net/ > 18. http://www.theglitteringeye.com/ > 19. mailto:kurt2100kimo at yahoo.com.tw > 20. mailto:knuckleballnews at yahoo.com > 21. http://www.iSteve.com/ > 22. http://futurepundit.com/ > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Aug 16 04:02:24 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 21:02:24 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] 250 miles per gallon? They're doing it Message-ID: <01C5A1DC.A374B920.shovland@mindspring.com> These ideas can be applied on a wider scale. Here's a car we saw in Europe: This is the future in America :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Gerry Reinhart-Waller [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] Sent: Monday, August 15, 2005 6:14 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] 250 miles per gallon? They're doing it Well and good, Steve. But one robin does not a springtime make. Even if it is parked in your garage. Regards, Gerry Reinhart-Waller Steve Hovland wrote: >Tinkerers fiddle with hybrids to increase efficiency > >Bottom of Form 1 >CORTE MADERA, California (AP) -- Politicians and automakers say a car that >can both reduce greenhouse gases and free America from its reliance on >foreign oil is years or even decades away. >Ron Gremban says such a car is parked in his garage. >It looks like a typical Toyota Prius hybrid, but in the trunk sits an >80-miles-per-gallon secret -- a stack of 18 brick-sized batteries that >boosts the car's high mileage with an extra electrical charge so it can >burn even less fuel. >Gremban, an electrical engineer and committed environmentalist, spent >several months and $3,000 tinkering with his car. >Like all hybrids, his Prius increases fuel efficiency by harnessing small >amounts of electricity generated during braking and coasting. The extra >batteries let him store extra power by plugging the car into a wall outlet >at his home in this San Francisco suburb -- all for about a quarter. >He's part of a small but growing movement. "Plug-in" hybrids aren't yet >cost-efficient, but some of the dozen known experimental models have gotten >up to 250 mpg. >They have support not only from environmentalists but also from >conservative foreign policy hawks who insist Americans fuel terrorism >through their gas guzzling. >And while the technology has existed for three decades, automakers are >beginning to take notice, too. >So far, DaimlerChrysler AG is the only company that has committed to >building its own plug-in hybrids, quietly pledging to make up to 40 vans >for U.S. companies. But Toyota Motor Corp. officials who initially frowned >on people altering their cars now say they may be able to learn from them. >"They're like the hot rodders of yesterday who did everything to soup up >their cars. It was all about horsepower and bling-bling, lots of chrome and >accessories," said Cindy Knight, a Toyota spokeswoman. "Maybe the hot >rodders of tomorrow are the people who want to get in there and see what >they can do about increasing fuel economy." > >Plugged or unplugged? >The extra batteries let Gremban drive for 20 miles with a 50-50 mix of gas >and electricity. Even after the car runs out of power from the batteries >and switches to the standard hybrid mode, it gets the typical Prius fuel >efficiency of around 45 mpg. As long as Gremban doesn't drive too far in a >day, he says, he gets 80 mpg. >"The value of plug-in hybrids is they can dramatically reduce gasoline >usage for the first few miles every day," Gremban said. "The average for >people's usage of a car is somewhere around 30 to 40 miles per day. During >that kind of driving, the plug-in hybrid can make a dramatic difference." > >Gremban promotes the CalCars Initiative, a volunteer effort encouraging >automakers to make plug-in hybrids. >Backers of plug-in hybrids acknowledge that the electricity to boost their >cars generally comes from fossil fuels that create greenhouse gases, but >they say that process still produces far less pollution than oil. They also >note that electricity could be generated cleanly from solar power. >Gremban rigged his car to promote the nonprofit CalCars Initiative, a San >Francisco Bay area-based volunteer effort that argues automakers could mass >produce plug-in hybrids at a reasonable price. >But Toyota and other car companies say they are worried about the cost, >convenience and safety of plug-in hybrids -- and note that consumers >haven't embraced all-electric cars because of the inconvenience of >recharging them like giant cell phones. >Automakers have spent millions of dollars telling motorists that hybrids >don't need to be plugged in, and don't want to confuse the message. >Nonetheless, plug-in hybrids are starting to get the backing of prominent >hawks like former CIA director James Woolsey and Frank Gaffney, President >Reagan's undersecretary of defense. They have joined Set America Free, a >group that wants the government to spend $12 billion over four years on >plug-in hybrids, alternative fuels and other measures to reduce foreign oil >dependence. >Gaffney, who heads the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Security Policy, >said Americans would embrace plug-ins if they understood arguments from him >and others who say gasoline contributes to oil-rich Middle Eastern >governments that support terrorism. >"The more we are consuming oil that either comes from places that are bent >on our destruction or helping those who are ... the more we are enabling >those who are trying to kill us," Gaffney said. > >Now vs. later >DaimlerChrysler spokesman Nick Cappa said plug-in hybrids are ideal for >companies with fleets of vehicles that can be recharged at a central >location at night. He declined to name the companies buying the vehicles >and said he did not know the vehicles' mileage or cost, or when they would >be available. >Others are modifying hybrids, too. >Monrovia-based Energy CS has converted two Priuses to get up to 230 mpg by >using powerful lithium ion batteries. It is forming a new company, EDrive >Systems, that will convert hybrids to plug-ins for about $12,000 starting >next year, company vice president Greg Hanssen said. >University of California, Davis, engineering professor Andy Frank built a >plug-in hybrid from the ground up in 1972 and has since built seven others, >one of which gets up to 250 mpg. They were converted from non-hybrids, >including a Ford Taurus and Chevrolet Suburban. >Frank has spent $150,000 to $250,000 in research costs on each car, but >believes automakers could mass-produce them by adding just $6,000 to each >vehicle's price tag. >Instead, Frank said, automakers promise hydrogen-powered vehicles hailed by >President Bush and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, even though hydrogen's >backers acknowledge the cars won't be widely available for years and would >require a vast infrastructure of new fueling stations. >"They'd rather work on something that won't be in their lifetime, and >that's this hydrogen economy stuff," Frank said. "They pick this kind of >target to get the public off their back, essentially." > > > > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 915972 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Aug 16 04:03:29 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 21:03:29 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] ParaPundit: Whites Still Do Manual Labor In Wisconsin Message-ID: <01C5A1DC.C9BAB260.shovland@mindspring.com> It's eroding our society. I personally believe in the melting pot, not "diversity." Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Monday, August 15, 2005 8:45 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] ParaPundit: Whites Still Do Manual Labor In Wisconsin More thanks for Frank's efforts. This is exactly right. The fast-food restaurant where I get my lunch salad used to be staffed by ordinary causasians, often with obvious mild retardation. They were good workers, and I enjoyed them. Now I can barely understand the girl at the register and sometimes I have to ask her to say it in Spanish because her English is so poor. I am deeply discouraged and disillusioned by President Bush's attitude about illegal emmigration. Lynn Premise Checker wrote: > Whites Still Do Manual Labor In Wisconsin > http://www.parapundit.com/archives/002938.html#002938 > > 2005 August 14 Sunday > Whites Still Do Manual Labor In Wisconsin > > Over at [9]No Speed Bumps Dan reports on how [10]during a vacation > trip in Wisconsin he found white people doing all the manual labor > jobs that are done by Hispanics in Texas. > > Two weeks ago I vacationed near Oshkosh, Wisconsin. One thing > strikingly different than living in Texas was that there were few > Hispanics. In Texas, Hispanics are found in all walks of life, from > doctors to janitors. > > With so many impoverished Hispanics illegally moving to Texas over > the southern border each year, they have taken over most of the > lower-skill jobs because they will work for less than American > citizens. Go to any restaurant, hotel, or construction site and all > of the basic manual labor tasks are being done by low-income > Hispanics. > > Anyway, while on vacation, in the hotels we stayed in all of the > maid staff and other help were white. The same was true of all of > the restaurants we ate in, from the cooks, to the bus boys, to the > grounds keepers. I felt like we were in a time machine and in a > strange land. > > An interesting note about the maid staff at the hotels was the good > cheer that they were in. They were constantly chatting among > themselves and seemed very content as they went about their work. > This reminded me that, yes, there is dignity to manual labor, and > yes, white people can still do manual labor. > > This runs counter to the fashionable argument today justifying the > open border policy with Mexico. The argument goes that America > could just not function without all of the low-skill workers coming > in to do all of the manual labor. Well, that is ridiculous. It may > drive prices up some, if American citizens (whether white, black, > or any other race) must do the work but the work will still get > done, one way or another. > > One of the big whopper lies told by open borders advocates such as > George W. Bush is that there are "jobs that Americans won't do". This > is nonsense. One only need travel to those places where the bulk of > the population is still white to see that this claim is false > propaganda. > > As for the argument that a lack of cheap immigrant labor will drive up > prices, it rests on three fallacies: > * That low skilled labor makes up much of total costs. Wrong-o > sleigh bell lovers. The bottom quintile of the United States > population earns [11]only 3.5% of national income. 20% get 3.5%. > If we deported all the illegal aliens and stopped all low skiilled > and moderate skilled immigration the bottom 20% would see some > significant increase in their wages. But that increase would be > unlikely raise total prices by even a couple of percent. We don't > pay them that much. A 10% or 20% increase in their salaries won't > matter much to the rest of the population. > * That there are no substitutes for cheap labor. Again, wrong-o > sleigh bell lovers. Necessity is the mother of invention. In all > likelihood, faced with higher labor costs industry would be more > eager to develop and buy more capital equipment and to arrange the > methods of purveying goods and services to decrease the amount of > labor needed. In fact, we have an example available for what the > lack of cheap immigrant labor will do to an industry. [12]The > Australian wine industry is more automated than the American wine > industry due to lack of cheap immigrant labor in Australia. Ben > Franklin was right. We'd advance more rapidly without simple minds > available to do simple tasks cheaply. > * That there are no external costs to cheap unskilled immigrant > labor. And once again, wrong-o sleigh bell lovers. Low skilled > laborers can not afford to pay for their own medical care. They > don't pay enough in taxes to pay for the educations of their > children. They do not make enough to pay for their retirements in > the United States. The list goes on. Oh, and they commit crime at > higher rates. So they cost crime victims and also the criminal > justice system. A year for an inmate at Rikers Island in New York > costs $47,000. Criminals are expensive for the rest of us in many > ways. > > The Open Borders advocates are deeply dishonest. America's elites are > corrupt. They lie. They can not be trusted. America is going down a > very wrong path. Our leaders in business and politics are to blame. > But so are apathetic members of the public. It is time to wake up and > demand a stop to massive immigration. The costs have become far too > high and will be with us for decades to come. > By Randall Parker at 2005 August 14 06:44 PM [13]Immigration > Economics | [14]TrackBack > Comments > > in vermont too. many more latinos work in oregon than 10 years ago > though, and i hear that similar things are going on in the south. i > suspect that for a variety of reasons the upper midwest and new > england (distance, climate, cost of living) will resist latino labor > the longest. > Posted by: [15]razib on August 14, 2005 08:55 PM > > Resistance is futile. Viva La Rasa. > Posted by: [16]Mark on August 14, 2005 10:59 PM > > There would be a net savings from reversing the antimerit immigrant > flow, some of which would be passed on to the consumers. If the bottom > 20% gets paid so little that their wages could double without the rich > even noticing it, shifting 4% of the total income away from the top > 80% over several years, that is a worthwhile price to pay. There is no > economic need to increase the size of the bottom end; it isn't about > money, it's about power. How to get power, when there are no ideas; > won't they use immigration to increase racial conflict, and say that > officials must have more power? > Posted by: [17]John S Bolton on August 14, 2005 11:26 PM > > For some reason my trackbacks to this post don't take, so ping! > Posted by: [18]Dave Schuler on August 15, 2005 07:47 AM > > Eastern Washington, North Idaho, and Montana are alot like Wisconsin > in that low end labor jobs are done primarly by whites. We have very > few illegal aliens in this part of the country. This is good because > we have much less of the "servant" culture that you see in California > and other places. People clean their own homes and often do their own > yard work. If you have someone else do these things, they are done by > outside services operating more like independent business people > rather than as "domestics". Not having the illegal immigrants means > that we have a much more "do it yourself" mentality than, say, in > Southern California. > > I do not like that "class" mentality that illegal immigration has > produced in places like California and Texas. I think having distinct > social classes, especially if they are of different races, is very > destructive to the future of the U.S. The "open-borders" people need > to be grilled over this issue. > Posted by: [19]Kurt on August 15, 2005 10:01 AM > > razib - don't underestimate the number of mexicans in the upper > midwest - chicago has the 2nd highest mexican population in the u.s. > after l.a. granted this isn't wisconsin, but.... > > randall - in a similar, practical manner that you approach alternative > energy solutions, i.e. can't tell people to drive less or other > inconveniences that would be a political non-starter in america today; > what would be your political platform for immigration that would be > politically feasible? i would love to know what you'd recommend, > having put considerable thought to this issue, assuming something like > you were an advisor to your senator. thanks. > Posted by: [20]Jim on August 15, 2005 01:22 PM > > I spent a few days in Sierra Vista, AZ, a booming town about 15 miles > north of the Mexican border. Strikingly, the maids in my motel were > white, as were a lot of the other service workers. The answer to this > paradox is that Sierra Vista is within the narrow band heavily policed > by the Border Patrol. If illegal aliens are found there, they are > deported. But if they make it far enough north to Tucson or Phoenix, > well, they're Ollie Ollie Home Free. > Posted by: [21]Steve Sailer on August 15, 2005 02:03 PM > > Jim, > > Perhaps I don't understand your question. Politically feasible? I > think a candidate for the Presidency could run on a platform to deport > all the illegals and win. The dollar cost to the government of > deporting all the illegals would be pretty low. > > The anger about the immigrant deluge is building. But politicians are > chasing the votes of Hispanics, the Democrats see them as a solid > Democrat voting bloc (and they are), and some business interests want > cheap labor. > > I'd tell a US Senator to submit a bill to fund a barrier along the > entire length of the border. I'd also propose upping the number of > Border Patrol by 20,000 and setting them loose in the interior with > orders to round up all illegals. Congress should give instructions to > DHS to resume interior enforcement. > Posted by: [22]Randall Parker on August 15, 2005 03:33 PM > > References > > 9. http://nospeedbumps.com/ > 10. http://nospeedbumps.com/?p=334 > 11. http://www.heritage.org/Research/Taxes/bg1791.cfm > 12. http://www.parapundit.com/archives/002778.html > 13. http://www.parapundit.com/archives/cat_immigration_economics.html > 14. http://www.futurepundit.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi?__mode=view&entry_id=2938 > 15. http://www.gnxp.com/ > 16. mailto:dfsf at hotmail.com > 17. http://www.johnsbolton.net/ > 18. http://www.theglitteringeye.com/ > 19. mailto:kurt2100kimo at yahoo.com.tw > 20. mailto:knuckleballnews at yahoo.com > 21. http://www.iSteve.com/ > 22. http://futurepundit.com/ > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From Thrst4knw at aol.com Tue Aug 16 16:49:41 2005 From: Thrst4knw at aol.com (Thrst4knw at aol.com) Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2005 12:49:41 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Religious Belief Is Found to Be Less Lacking Among Soci... Message-ID: <20d.7293c1e.30337325@aol.com> I think the prevailing scientific view of religion is that it is primarily a social psychological phenomenon, an adaptation of sorts to group life, so it certainly makes sense that social scientists would tend to be interested in it in general, gender notwithstanding. It sounds like the researchers are looking for something more exotic, but I wonder if they are making the right distinctions to tease it out. It would be interesting to have this type of study distinguish between different kinds of faith underlying the profession of being "religious." Two people who claim a affiliation with a religious community or an affinity for religion and can do so with very different attitudes toward it, and research often ignores this important fact. My suspicion is that it is not a homogeneous phenomenon, but our research tradition often appears to treat it essentially as such. Two people with "religious belief" can sometimes believe in very different things and I suspect also in in very different *ways* cognitively. You can easily find Bible thumping evangelicals with clear religious beliefs and equally easily find "liberal" philosopher-theologians with distinct religious beliefs but they certainly seem to approach the same topics in entirely different ways, and their beliefs take on different roles in their behavior. kind regards, Todd -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From waluk at earthlink.net Tue Aug 16 18:34:22 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Gerry Reinhart-Waller) Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2005 11:34:22 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] ParaPundit: Whites Still Do Manual Labor In Wisconsin In-Reply-To: <01C5A1DC.C9BAB260.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C5A1DC.C9BAB260.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <430231AE.7040801@earthlink.net> I think all of us grew up with grandparents or such who arrived in the U.S. expecting to be part of the great melting pot that America offered. Today, thoughts of merging have been replaced by ethnic diversity. What ethnic divisions create is group hatred, one for another. That's what is responsible for the crumbling of our society. Gerry Reinhart-Waller Steve Hovland wrote: >It's eroding our society. > >I personally believe in the melting pot, not "diversity." > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >Sent: Monday, August 15, 2005 8:45 PM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] ParaPundit: Whites Still Do Manual Labor In Wisconsin > >More thanks for Frank's efforts. This is exactly right. The fast-food >restaurant where I get my lunch salad used to be staffed by ordinary >causasians, often with obvious mild retardation. They were good workers, >and I enjoyed them. Now I can barely understand the girl at the register >and sometimes I have to ask her to say it in Spanish because her English >is so poor. I am deeply discouraged and disillusioned by President >Bush's attitude about illegal emmigration. >Lynn > >Premise Checker wrote: > > > >>Whites Still Do Manual Labor In Wisconsin >>http://www.parapundit.com/archives/002938.html#002938 >> >> 2005 August 14 Sunday >> Whites Still Do Manual Labor In Wisconsin >> >> Over at [9]No Speed Bumps Dan reports on how [10]during a vacation >> trip in Wisconsin he found white people doing all the manual labor >> jobs that are done by Hispanics in Texas. >> >> Two weeks ago I vacationed near Oshkosh, Wisconsin. One thing >> strikingly different than living in Texas was that there were few >> Hispanics. In Texas, Hispanics are found in all walks of life, from >> doctors to janitors. >> >> With so many impoverished Hispanics illegally moving to Texas over >> the southern border each year, they have taken over most of the >> lower-skill jobs because they will work for less than American >> citizens. Go to any restaurant, hotel, or construction site and all >> of the basic manual labor tasks are being done by low-income >> Hispanics. >> >> Anyway, while on vacation, in the hotels we stayed in all of the >> maid staff and other help were white. The same was true of all of >> the restaurants we ate in, from the cooks, to the bus boys, to the >> grounds keepers. I felt like we were in a time machine and in a >> strange land. >> >> An interesting note about the maid staff at the hotels was the good >> cheer that they were in. They were constantly chatting among >> themselves and seemed very content as they went about their work. >> This reminded me that, yes, there is dignity to manual labor, and >> yes, white people can still do manual labor. >> >> This runs counter to the fashionable argument today justifying the >> open border policy with Mexico. The argument goes that America >> could just not function without all of the low-skill workers coming >> in to do all of the manual labor. Well, that is ridiculous. It may >> drive prices up some, if American citizens (whether white, black, >> or any other race) must do the work but the work will still get >> done, one way or another. >> >> One of the big whopper lies told by open borders advocates such as >> George W. Bush is that there are "jobs that Americans won't do". This >> is nonsense. One only need travel to those places where the bulk of >> the population is still white to see that this claim is false >> propaganda. >> >> As for the argument that a lack of cheap immigrant labor will drive up >> prices, it rests on three fallacies: >> * That low skilled labor makes up much of total costs. Wrong-o >> sleigh bell lovers. The bottom quintile of the United States >> population earns [11]only 3.5% of national income. 20% get 3.5%. >> If we deported all the illegal aliens and stopped all low skiilled >> and moderate skilled immigration the bottom 20% would see some >> significant increase in their wages. But that increase would be >> unlikely raise total prices by even a couple of percent. We don't >> pay them that much. A 10% or 20% increase in their salaries won't >> matter much to the rest of the population. >> * That there are no substitutes for cheap labor. Again, wrong-o >> sleigh bell lovers. Necessity is the mother of invention. In all >> likelihood, faced with higher labor costs industry would be more >> eager to develop and buy more capital equipment and to arrange the >> methods of purveying goods and services to decrease the amount of >> labor needed. In fact, we have an example available for what the >> lack of cheap immigrant labor will do to an industry. [12]The >> Australian wine industry is more automated than the American wine >> industry due to lack of cheap immigrant labor in Australia. Ben >> Franklin was right. We'd advance more rapidly without simple minds >> available to do simple tasks cheaply. >> * That there are no external costs to cheap unskilled immigrant >> labor. And once again, wrong-o sleigh bell lovers. Low skilled >> laborers can not afford to pay for their own medical care. They >> don't pay enough in taxes to pay for the educations of their >> children. They do not make enough to pay for their retirements in >> the United States. The list goes on. Oh, and they commit crime at >> higher rates. So they cost crime victims and also the criminal >> justice system. A year for an inmate at Rikers Island in New York >> costs $47,000. Criminals are expensive for the rest of us in many >> ways. >> >> The Open Borders advocates are deeply dishonest. America's elites are >> corrupt. They lie. They can not be trusted. America is going down a >> very wrong path. Our leaders in business and politics are to blame. >> But so are apathetic members of the public. It is time to wake up and >> demand a stop to massive immigration. The costs have become far too >> high and will be with us for decades to come. >> By Randall Parker at 2005 August 14 06:44 PM [13]Immigration >> Economics | [14]TrackBack >> Comments >> >> in vermont too. many more latinos work in oregon than 10 years ago >> though, and i hear that similar things are going on in the south. i >> suspect that for a variety of reasons the upper midwest and new >> england (distance, climate, cost of living) will resist latino labor >> the longest. >> Posted by: [15]razib on August 14, 2005 08:55 PM >> >> Resistance is futile. Viva La Rasa. >> Posted by: [16]Mark on August 14, 2005 10:59 PM >> >> There would be a net savings from reversing the antimerit immigrant >> flow, some of which would be passed on to the consumers. If the bottom >> 20% gets paid so little that their wages could double without the rich >> even noticing it, shifting 4% of the total income away from the top >> 80% over several years, that is a worthwhile price to pay. There is no >> economic need to increase the size of the bottom end; it isn't about >> money, it's about power. How to get power, when there are no ideas; >> won't they use immigration to increase racial conflict, and say that >> officials must have more power? >> Posted by: [17]John S Bolton on August 14, 2005 11:26 PM >> >> For some reason my trackbacks to this post don't take, so ping! >> Posted by: [18]Dave Schuler on August 15, 2005 07:47 AM >> >> Eastern Washington, North Idaho, and Montana are alot like Wisconsin >> in that low end labor jobs are done primarly by whites. We have very >> few illegal aliens in this part of the country. This is good because >> we have much less of the "servant" culture that you see in California >> and other places. People clean their own homes and often do their own >> yard work. If you have someone else do these things, they are done by >> outside services operating more like independent business people >> rather than as "domestics". Not having the illegal immigrants means >> that we have a much more "do it yourself" mentality than, say, in >> Southern California. >> >> I do not like that "class" mentality that illegal immigration has >> produced in places like California and Texas. I think having distinct >> social classes, especially if they are of different races, is very >> destructive to the future of the U.S. The "open-borders" people need >> to be grilled over this issue. >> Posted by: [19]Kurt on August 15, 2005 10:01 AM >> >> razib - don't underestimate the number of mexicans in the upper >> midwest - chicago has the 2nd highest mexican population in the u.s. >> after l.a. granted this isn't wisconsin, but.... >> >> randall - in a similar, practical manner that you approach alternative >> energy solutions, i.e. can't tell people to drive less or other >> inconveniences that would be a political non-starter in america today; >> what would be your political platform for immigration that would be >> politically feasible? i would love to know what you'd recommend, >> having put considerable thought to this issue, assuming something like >> you were an advisor to your senator. thanks. >> Posted by: [20]Jim on August 15, 2005 01:22 PM >> >> I spent a few days in Sierra Vista, AZ, a booming town about 15 miles >> north of the Mexican border. Strikingly, the maids in my motel were >> white, as were a lot of the other service workers. The answer to this >> paradox is that Sierra Vista is within the narrow band heavily policed >> by the Border Patrol. If illegal aliens are found there, they are >> deported. But if they make it far enough north to Tucson or Phoenix, >> well, they're Ollie Ollie Home Free. >> Posted by: [21]Steve Sailer on August 15, 2005 02:03 PM >> >> Jim, >> >> Perhaps I don't understand your question. Politically feasible? I >> think a candidate for the Presidency could run on a platform to deport >> all the illegals and win. The dollar cost to the government of >> deporting all the illegals would be pretty low. >> >> The anger about the immigrant deluge is building. But politicians are >> chasing the votes of Hispanics, the Democrats see them as a solid >> Democrat voting bloc (and they are), and some business interests want >> cheap labor. >> >> I'd tell a US Senator to submit a bill to fund a barrier along the >> entire length of the border. I'd also propose upping the number of >> Border Patrol by 20,000 and setting them loose in the interior with >> orders to round up all illegals. Congress should give instructions to >> DHS to resume interior enforcement. >> Posted by: [22]Randall Parker on August 15, 2005 03:33 PM >> >>References >> >> 9. http://nospeedbumps.com/ >> 10. http://nospeedbumps.com/?p=334 >> 11. http://www.heritage.org/Research/Taxes/bg1791.cfm >> 12. http://www.parapundit.com/archives/002778.html >> 13. http://www.parapundit.com/archives/cat_immigration_economics.html >> 14. http://www.futurepundit.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi?__mode=view&entry_id=2938 >> 15. http://www.gnxp.com/ >> 16. mailto:dfsf at hotmail.com >> 17. http://www.johnsbolton.net/ >> 18. http://www.theglitteringeye.com/ >> 19. mailto:kurt2100kimo at yahoo.com.tw >> 20. mailto:knuckleballnews at yahoo.com >> 21. http://www.iSteve.com/ >> 22. http://futurepundit.com/ >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> >> > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > > From waluk at earthlink.net Tue Aug 16 18:38:14 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Gerry Reinhart-Waller) Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2005 11:38:14 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] 250 miles per gallon? They're doing it In-Reply-To: <01C5A1DC.A374B920.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C5A1DC.A374B920.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <43023296.3030400@earthlink.net> It is a good first step. That I agree with. Hybids are a wave of the future. But there are many other waves that need to follow. Gerry Reinhart-Waller Steve Hovland wrote: >These ideas can be applied on a wider scale. > >Here's a car we saw in Europe: > > > >This is the future in America :-) > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Gerry Reinhart-Waller [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] >Sent: Monday, August 15, 2005 6:14 PM >To: The new improved paleopsych list >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] 250 miles per gallon? They're doing it > >Well and good, Steve. But one robin does not a springtime make. Even >if it is parked in your garage. > >Regards, >Gerry Reinhart-Waller > > >Steve Hovland wrote: > > > >>Tinkerers fiddle with hybrids to increase efficiency >> >>Bottom of Form 1 >>CORTE MADERA, California (AP) -- Politicians and automakers say a car that >>can both reduce greenhouse gases and free America from its reliance on >>foreign oil is years or even decades away. >>Ron Gremban says such a car is parked in his garage. >>It looks like a typical Toyota Prius hybrid, but in the trunk sits an >>80-miles-per-gallon secret -- a stack of 18 brick-sized batteries that >>boosts the car's high mileage with an extra electrical charge so it can >>burn even less fuel. >>Gremban, an electrical engineer and committed environmentalist, spent >>several months and $3,000 tinkering with his car. >>Like all hybrids, his Prius increases fuel efficiency by harnessing small >>amounts of electricity generated during braking and coasting. The extra >>batteries let him store extra power by plugging the car into a wall outlet >>at his home in this San Francisco suburb -- all for about a quarter. >>He's part of a small but growing movement. "Plug-in" hybrids aren't yet >>cost-efficient, but some of the dozen known experimental models have gotten >>up to 250 mpg. >>They have support not only from environmentalists but also from >>conservative foreign policy hawks who insist Americans fuel terrorism >>through their gas guzzling. >>And while the technology has existed for three decades, automakers are >>beginning to take notice, too. >>So far, DaimlerChrysler AG is the only company that has committed to >>building its own plug-in hybrids, quietly pledging to make up to 40 vans >>for U.S. companies. But Toyota Motor Corp. officials who initially frowned >>on people altering their cars now say they may be able to learn from them. >>"They're like the hot rodders of yesterday who did everything to soup up >>their cars. It was all about horsepower and bling-bling, lots of chrome and >>accessories," said Cindy Knight, a Toyota spokeswoman. "Maybe the hot >>rodders of tomorrow are the people who want to get in there and see what >>they can do about increasing fuel economy." >> >>Plugged or unplugged? >>The extra batteries let Gremban drive for 20 miles with a 50-50 mix of gas >>and electricity. Even after the car runs out of power from the batteries >>and switches to the standard hybrid mode, it gets the typical Prius fuel >>efficiency of around 45 mpg. As long as Gremban doesn't drive too far in a >>day, he says, he gets 80 mpg. >>"The value of plug-in hybrids is they can dramatically reduce gasoline >>usage for the first few miles every day," Gremban said. "The average for >>people's usage of a car is somewhere around 30 to 40 miles per day. During >>that kind of driving, the plug-in hybrid can make a dramatic difference." >> >>Gremban promotes the CalCars Initiative, a volunteer effort encouraging >>automakers to make plug-in hybrids. >>Backers of plug-in hybrids acknowledge that the electricity to boost their >>cars generally comes from fossil fuels that create greenhouse gases, but >>they say that process still produces far less pollution than oil. They also >>note that electricity could be generated cleanly from solar power. >>Gremban rigged his car to promote the nonprofit CalCars Initiative, a San >>Francisco Bay area-based volunteer effort that argues automakers could mass >>produce plug-in hybrids at a reasonable price. >>But Toyota and other car companies say they are worried about the cost, >>convenience and safety of plug-in hybrids -- and note that consumers >>haven't embraced all-electric cars because of the inconvenience of >>recharging them like giant cell phones. >>Automakers have spent millions of dollars telling motorists that hybrids >>don't need to be plugged in, and don't want to confuse the message. >>Nonetheless, plug-in hybrids are starting to get the backing of prominent >>hawks like former CIA director James Woolsey and Frank Gaffney, President >>Reagan's undersecretary of defense. They have joined Set America Free, a >>group that wants the government to spend $12 billion over four years on >>plug-in hybrids, alternative fuels and other measures to reduce foreign oil >>dependence. >>Gaffney, who heads the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Security Policy, >>said Americans would embrace plug-ins if they understood arguments from him >>and others who say gasoline contributes to oil-rich Middle Eastern >>governments that support terrorism. >>"The more we are consuming oil that either comes from places that are bent >>on our destruction or helping those who are ... the more we are enabling >>those who are trying to kill us," Gaffney said. >> >>Now vs. later >>DaimlerChrysler spokesman Nick Cappa said plug-in hybrids are ideal for >>companies with fleets of vehicles that can be recharged at a central >>location at night. He declined to name the companies buying the vehicles >>and said he did not know the vehicles' mileage or cost, or when they would >>be available. >>Others are modifying hybrids, too. >>Monrovia-based Energy CS has converted two Priuses to get up to 230 mpg by >>using powerful lithium ion batteries. It is forming a new company, EDrive >>Systems, that will convert hybrids to plug-ins for about $12,000 starting >>next year, company vice president Greg Hanssen said. >>University of California, Davis, engineering professor Andy Frank built a >>plug-in hybrid from the ground up in 1972 and has since built seven others, >>one of which gets up to 250 mpg. They were converted from non-hybrids, >>including a Ford Taurus and Chevrolet Suburban. >>Frank has spent $150,000 to $250,000 in research costs on each car, but >>believes automakers could mass-produce them by adding just $6,000 to each >>vehicle's price tag. >>Instead, Frank said, automakers promise hydrogen-powered vehicles hailed by >>President Bush and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, even though hydrogen's >>backers acknowledge the cars won't be widely available for years and would >>require a vast infrastructure of new fueling stations. >>"They'd rather work on something that won't be in their lifetime, and >>that's this hydrogen economy stuff," Frank said. "They pick this kind of >>target to get the public off their back, essentially." >> >> >> >> >>------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> >>_______________________________________________ >>paleopsych mailing list >>paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> >> > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Tue Aug 16 19:31:12 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2005 12:31:12 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] multiculturalism and freedom In-Reply-To: <200508161801.j7GI14R01175@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050816193112.66306.qmail@web30804.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Steve says: >>I personally believe in the melting pot, not "diversity."<< --Everyone envisions something different when they hear those terms... I think the basic problem in our society is not that people have differences. There will always be differences and variations in culture and language. What's missing is civility between people who have different views that are not likely to change. Language barriers can be overcome when people want to overcome them. But not WANTING to overcome barriers is a whole other problem. We can't eliminate cultural or religious differences or force everyone to adopt enough corporate culture to be "typical fast-food Americans". A common national mythology is always nice to have. A belief in the wisdom of the Founding Fathers (even if they owned slaves and had some blind spots about women and children) and a basic understanding of the constitution and how the government works is good. But none of those things require the erasure of cultural differences. People can speak Spanish and live a very Mexican lifestyle in America, and still believe in the Constitution and freedom and the need to be a good citizen by voting and being honest on your taxes. But if people lack civility and empathy, they'll find any difference to pick on and make it a subject of hostility. We need a cultural immune system that tolerates, accepts or embraces difference, while retaining the core values of freedom, equal treatment under law, and human religious and rhetorical rights that have fueled the American vision. Rather than focusing on making people more similar, we should focus on giving people a shared appreciation of how precious it is to have a place to live where you can say what you want and worship your own deity or non-deity in peace. Protecting that is what the long term war on terrorism is really about. Michael ____________________________________________________ Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs From waluk at earthlink.net Tue Aug 16 19:42:26 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Gerry Reinhart-Waller) Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2005 12:42:26 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] multiculturalism and freedom In-Reply-To: <20050816193112.66306.qmail@web30804.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <20050816193112.66306.qmail@web30804.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <430241A2.2070201@earthlink.net> It is my opinion that we in America can no longer say what we want or even worship in peace. I'm afraid 911 changed everything and Homeland Security now has a very active role in snuffing out dissenters and other miscreants. I hope I'm wrong and we can return to principles our founding fathers felt were important to preserve....but I rather doubt it. Gerry Reinhart-Waller Michael Christopher wrote: >Rather than focusing on making people more similar, we >should focus on giving people a shared appreciation of >how precious it is to have a place to live where you >can say what you want and worship your own deity or >non-deity in peace. Protecting that is what the long >term war on terrorism is really about. > > From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Aug 16 22:36:46 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2005 15:36:46 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] multiculturalism and freedom Message-ID: <01C5A278.5051A3B0.shovland@mindspring.com> A lot of us are still practicing free speech. I'm pretty active but I wasn't on any terrorist list when I flew to Europe :-) Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Gerry Reinhart-Waller [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] Sent: Tuesday, August 16, 2005 12:42 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] multiculturalism and freedom It is my opinion that we in America can no longer say what we want or even worship in peace. I'm afraid 911 changed everything and Homeland Security now has a very active role in snuffing out dissenters and other miscreants. I hope I'm wrong and we can return to principles our founding fathers felt were important to preserve....but I rather doubt it. Gerry Reinhart-Waller Michael Christopher wrote: >Rather than focusing on making people more similar, we >should focus on giving people a shared appreciation of >how precious it is to have a place to live where you >can say what you want and worship your own deity or >non-deity in peace. Protecting that is what the long >term war on terrorism is really about. > > _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Aug 19 14:34:05 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2005 07:34:05 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Flywheels for energy storage Message-ID: <01C5A490.61DE6D60.shovland@mindspring.com> This is how to make an intermittent source like sun and wind into a continuous source. http://www.beaconpower.com/ A flywheel energy storage system draws electrical energy from a primary source, such as the utility grid, and stores it in a high-density rotating flywheel. The flywheel system is actually a kinetic, or mechanical battery, spinning at very high speeds (>20,000 rpm) to store energy that is instantly available when needed. Upon power loss, the motor driving the flywheel acts as a generator. As the flywheel continues to rotate, this generator supplies power to the customer load. Performance is measured in energy units indicating the amount of power available over a given period of time. Typical single-flywheel systems, such as the Smart Energy 6 and Smart Energy 25 , are intended for standby power applications. A more recent Beacon Power flywheel design proposes an integrated system of 10 higher-power (25 kWh) flywheels, interconnected in a matrix to provide energy storage for utility-grade applications. The Smart Energy Matrix is designed to deliver megawatts of power for minutes, providing highly robust and responsive frequency and voltage regulation capabilities for increased grid reliability. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From shovland at mindspring.com Fri Aug 19 14:50:48 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2005 07:50:48 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] More on wind power Message-ID: <01C5A492.DDD436A0.shovland@mindspring.com> WIND POWER Harnessing the power of the wind using modern wind generators is one of the most popular sources for green power. Wind is created when the sun's rays cause temperature and air density differences between two or more air masses on the earth's surface. To equalize these pressure differences, air is drawn to a new location, creating wind. Other geographic factors affect the speed of the wind and its consistency. Wind power is becoming an economically attractive energy source because of rising fuel costs, such as gas, coal and nuclear energy. It is also an environmentally attractive source of power because wind generators don't pollute the air or water. Extracting electric power from the wind requires the right site, a reliable machine and the flexibility of the power system to adapt to a capricious air stream. Evolution of wind technology: Wind power technology has advanced in recent years from smaller, single home generators, to larger, high-powered machines of several hundred kilowatts suitable for mass deployment in megawatt-scale machines. Sitting on towers as tall as a 20-story building, these wind plants often have blades 300 feet long from tip to tip. Several wind generators are often clustered together to create wind farms. California has been a leader in using wind power, due to their available wind resources in mountain regions, and their expanding need for electricity. Wind energy supplies one percent of the state's electricity. California's wind plants extend over more than 27,000 acres, yet only 10-15 percent of the area is actually occupied by the turbines. The blustery region just east of the San Francisco Bay area boosts more wind turbines than anywhere else in the world, nearly half of the state's total. The basic principles of wind turbines is fairly straightforward. A typical wind power system consists of a generator, blades, steel tower, meteorological equipment and on-site controls. Most wind generators require utility power to start and are subject to local rules/regulations. Drawbacks/dangers of wind machines: Windmills can be noisy because blade tips can approach the speed of sound; many turbine blades must be regularly scrubbed to avoid impairment of aerodynamic efficiency; large wind farms need expansive tracts of land; wind is intermittent and as wind speeds drop below eight mph, electricity generation stops; rotor blades could possibly kill or injure migratory birds. Several electric utilities and communities have recently launched wind power programs. EXAMPLES: Traverse City Mich. supplies power to 170 homes and businesses, which pay an additional 1.58 cents per kilowatt-hour, or about $7.58 per month. Their wind generator features 144-foot long blades perched on a 160-foot tower. With winds in that area averaging about 14.5 mph, it generates about 1.2 million kilowatt hours of electricity a year, enough for about 200 homes. In 1993, Iowa's Waverly Light & Power installed and began operating an 80-kilowatt wind generator for a population of 9,000. The $129,000 system demonstrates how a small utility can own and operate wind generation. Alta, Iowa also broke ground in 1998 for a $200 million wind farm with 259,750 kilowatt turbines, the largest in the U.S. to date. Great River Energy in Minnesota (formerly United Power & Cooperative Power). This power supplier began by pre-selling 3,750 "blocks" of wind generated power to interested consumers (1 block = 100 kilowatt-hours). Businesses and home owners have contracted to pay $2 extra per month for each 100-kWh block of green power that they use. Now that all the needed energy has been sold, Great River is building the $1.7 million wind farm in southwestern Minnesota Altamont Pass and two smaller wind farms, all located in California, produced enough energy to power a city the size of San Francisco. That's 2.8 billion kWh of electricity, or the equivalent of about 5 million barrels of oil. One California-based turbine manufacturer, U.S. Windpower, joined forces with Iowa-Illinois Gas & Electric to set up wind farms on agricultural land. This will generate about 250 megawatts for area utilities and benefit 100,000 homes. Marshall (MN) Municipal Utilities and Minnesota Windpower worked and installed five 12-kilowatt (kW) wind turbines on city property, to serve 12,000 homes. Wind resources throughout the U.S. in relation to physical characteristic land surfaces: Highest wind energy (class 7): Alaska (the Aleutian Islands and coastal areas of western Alaska. Also producing high winds are isolated areas in Hawaii and the Pacific Islands and isolated, high mountain summits and ridge crests in portions of the eastern and western U.S. High averages of wind energy resources include (class 4 or higher): Great Plains, from the Texas panhandle and western Oklahoma to North Dakota and western Minnesota; southern Wyoming; Northwestern Montana plains; the Atlantic coast from North Carolina to Maine; the Pacific coast from Point Conception, California to Washington; the Gulf Coast along southern Texas; much of the Great Lakes shorelines; portions of Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, and Pacific Island; exposed ridge crests and mountain summits throughout the Appalachians and western U.S.; and isolated wind corridors such as the Columbia River gorge in Oregon and Washington and San Gorgonio Pass in California. The future of wind power: Wind power will not provide a reliable contribution to the energy mix until we can store excess electricity generated on windy days for use when the wind doesn't blow. However, Wind energy's environmental benefits, coupled with dramatic cost reductions in turbines and an increase in their reliability, are causing increases in wind projects being proposed to decision-makers and communities throughout the United States. For more information, available publications on wind power include: http://www.igc.apc.org/awea/faq/smsyslst.html htttp://www.wfec.org Click HERE to return to Green Power Opportunities From shovland at mindspring.com Sat Aug 20 16:42:28 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 20 Aug 2005 09:42:28 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Painting from passion (letter to a godson who paints) Message-ID: <01C5A56B.7B120770.shovland@mindspring.com> Modern physics says our energetic state is encoded in our paintings. It says we stay connected to them wherever they go. It says that our customers connect to that energy and to us. So we want to project high energy into our pictures- passion. On way to enable ourselves to project passion is to clear our psychological undergrowth, whatever it is, so we can fully experience our feelings. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 20 20:21:36 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 20 Aug 2005 16:21:36 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Meme 045: High- and Low-Cost Realities Message-ID: Meme 045: High- and Low-Cost Realities sent 5.8.18 This is the difference "between constructs of the world that require heavy investment of resources, such as time, money, efforts, and skills, and those which engage fewer resources on the part of those who consume these realities. Scientific knowledge constructs high-cost reality, usually based on a densely organized system of concepts, facts, rules, interpretation, methodological skills, equipment, and evidence. As such, the knowledge is not directly accessible to laypersons and remains esoteric. Low-cost realities may be expensive to produce, but are "cheap" to consume. They depend on the immediate experience of the flow of images and sounds. They become the shared means by which the public conceives, imagines, remembers, thinks, and relates or acts in politics. They allow the public to simulate the witnessing of real events without the trouble of being actually there. Low-cost reality is a spectacularly successful commercial product in our culture." That's from the article below, but Mr. Mencken said it better, in his first dispatch covering the Scopes Trial: The inferior man's reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex--because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meager capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. All superstitions are such short cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious. So on what seem to be higher levels. No man who has not had a long and arduous education can understand even the most elementary concepts of modern pathology. But even a hind at the plow can grasp the theory of chiropractic in two lessons. Hence the vast popularity of chiropractic among the submerged- -and of osteopathy, Christian Science and other such quackeries with it. They are idiotic, but they are simple--and every man prefers what he can understand to what puzzles and dismays him. The popularity of Fundamentalism among the inferior orders of men is explicable in exactly the same way. The cosmogonies that educated men toy with are all inordinately complex. To comprehend their veriest outlines requires an immense stock of knowledge, and a habit of thought. It would be as vain to try to teach to peasants or to the city proletariat as it would be to try to teach them to streptococci. But the cosmogony of Genesis is so simple that even a yokel can grasp it. It is set forth in a few phrases. It offers, to the ignorant man, the irresistible reasonableness of the nonsensical. So he accepts it with loud hosannas, and has one more excuse for hating his betters. "Homo Neanderthalensis," _The Baltimore Evening Sun_, 1925.6.29 ----------- Helga Nowotny: High- and Low-Cost Realities for Science and Society Science 308 (2005.5.20): 1117-8 The author is chair of EURAB, the European Research Advisory Board of the European Commission, and Fellow at the Wissenschaftszentrum Wien, A-1080 Vienna, Austria. E-mail: helga.nowotny at wzw.at Through the ongoing proliferation of images and symbols, information overload and hi-tech-driven media, science increasingly communicates with the public in ways that are deliberately designed and intended to meet the public (and political) imagination. At the same time, the public is led to imagine what the sciences and scientists mean and say. The appeal to the imagination can be pursued through different avenues. One is that of fiction, a recent example of which is Michael Crichton's blockbuster The State of Fear (1 ). In his plot, scientists are colluding with the environmental movement, making up facts when necessary, in order to support a common cause. In a shrewd move of having environmental lawyers rehearse possible arguments that the defense might use against them, he lectures extensively in the guise of the scientific graphs and footnotes and by presenting whatever else looks like scientific evidence, about all that is wrong with global warming. It is a mix of science, advocacy, and a vision of scientists whose idealism leads them astray. It has been on 37 best-seller lists with another book that looks at the impact of environmental change in a very different way: Jared Diamond's Collapse (2 ), which is based on a scholarly analysis of a series of case studies of ancient civilizations. If Crichton's book is taken not as a work of fiction, but becomes equated with one of fact, like Diamond's, do we not run the risk that trust in science will be decided by market forces and continuing sales figures? The public has become accustomed in a media-saturated world to switching between fact and fiction--but how far does this extend? The question I want to pose is whether in the desire to communicate with "society," "science" has contributed to a confusion between facts and fiction, or as the political analyst Yaron Ezrahi described it, between high-cost and low-cost realities (3 ). Ezrahi distinguishes between constructs of the world that require heavy investment of resources, such as time, money, efforts, and skills, and those which engage fewer resources on the part of those who consume these realities. Scientific knowledge constructs high-cost reality, usually based on a densely organized system of concepts, facts, rules, interpretation, methodological skills, equipment, and evidence. As such, the knowledge is not directly accessible to laypersons and remains esoteric. Low-cost realities may be expensive to produce, but are "cheap" to consume. They depend on the immediate experience of the flow of images and sounds. They become the shared means by which the public conceives, imagines, remembers, thinks, and relates or acts in politics. They allow the public to simulate the witnessing of real events without the trouble of being actually there. Low-cost reality is a spectacularly successful commercial product in our culture. Richard Feynman once used the analogy (4 ) of a Mayan priest who had mastered the numerical concept of subtraction and other elaborate mathematical rules. He used them to predict the rising and setting of Venus. However, to explain his approach to an audience who did not know what subtraction is, the priest resorted to counting beans. The important thing, said Feynman, is that it makes no difference as far as the result is concerned: We can predict the rise of Venus by counting beans (slow, but easy to understand) or by using the tricky rules (which are much faster, but it takes years of training to learn them). However, we have not taken the public through the tedium of bean counting, nor--apart from some notable exemptions--focused on teaching the tricks. Instead, we have been proud to re-enact on the public stage the spectacle of the Maya priest stepping forward before the attentive crowd and announcing the rise of Venus--while Venus rises indeed under the applause and to the relief of the viewers. We have learned how to stage such events ourselves and have come to believe that we thereby render a public service. We have largely engaged in the construction of low-cost realities that appeal to emotions and the imagination. There have certainly been charges that selling science as sexy has gone too far (5), amusing as it may be to explain the magic in Harry Potter in scientific terms (6 ). Some have said that by turning the Year of Physics de facto into the Year of Einstein, the point is missed that physics, while central to our understanding of the Universe, is also central to making useful and practical things through engineering (7 ). Although it is exhilarating to think of science's role in extending the frontiers of our knowledge, it is critical that the public remembers how important science is to their day-to-day reality. There are critical issues that need to be discussed, although they are not especially glamorous, such as the ongoing shift between the public nature of science and the tendency toward its propertization (8 ) or the upcoming debate about security-oriented research and the potential clash between the public interest in scientific openness and its security interests. Sexy communication is not going to be enough to inform good decision-making. Declining trust in science and scientific experts has been clear in public controversies like genetically modified organisms (GMOs) or the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) crisis, as well as in the rejection of scientific evidence regarding vaccination safety in the UK. The Euro-barometer, conducted as an EU-wide survey, probes the state of mind of EU citizens and how they view science and technology. The most recent data are expected to be published in mid-May and, for the first time, will be commented on by a panel of experts. The 2001 survey (9 ) revealed that two-thirds of the public do not feel well-informed about science and technology, and the number of people who believe in the capacity of science and technology to solve societal problems is declining. Trust in science in general seems to be on the decline in many national surveys, although scientists still come out way ahead of politicians or other public institutions. There are currently clear examples of research on the frontiers of science clashing with human beliefs and values. From the United States, voices can be heard deploring the tendency of politicians to interfere with scientific agendas in teaching and in research (10 ) and faith-based opposition to the teaching of evolution and some forms of frontier research, like stem cells continue to raise serious concern. Luckily, creationism/evolution is not an issue in Europe, largely due to the centralized education systems in most countries. However, an analogous situation exists for stem cell research, with some countries, like Germany and Italy, completely opposed. There will be a referendum in Italy shortly on stem cell research. The Catholic church urges the public not to vote, in the hope that the necessary 50% quota will not be reached, and the referendum will be defeated. Although we may welcome greater public interest in science, if only to avoid another backlash in fields like nanotechnology as occurred with GMOs, we must also confront the thorny issue of how contemporary democracies will deal with minorities who, on faith-based or other, value-related grounds, refuse any compromise. There is no reason to believe that Europe will be immune to an ascendancy of groups who oppose otherwise promising lines of research on the basis of their value system. If the values dimension is here to stay, it is far from certain that the usual response of setting up ethical guidelines and committees will suffice, let alone that any of the efforts to "better communicate science" will have any effect. If the goal is a more research-friendly society, one in which research and innovation become embedded in society and an expression of "the capacity to aspire" (11 ), we have to explain what research is and how the process of research is actually carried out. We need to focus more on the processes of research; on the inherent uncertainty that is part and parcel of it; on how bottom-up and top-down approaches intersect; on the actual, and not only idealized, role that users play; and on how research funding agencies work, both on national and supranational levels. We should explain how research priorities are set, because it is not nature whispering into the ears of researchers, but an intricate mixture of opportunities and incentives, of prior investments and of strategic planning mixed with subversive contingencies. We would also be better poised to explain to the wider public the difference between claims or promises made on the part of researchers, depending on whether these claims have been peer-reviewed or not. How should the public know about these rules that play such an important part for the scientific community, see their significance as well as their limitations, unless we explain how they actually work? Or how should they know about the differences in scientific cultures, what counts as evidence, or how consensus is reached with criticism being an essential precondition for moving toward it, if nobody tells them? To observe and explain what scientists are really doing requires that we make the multiple links of interaction between science and society transparent, as well as the institutions that mediate and shape science policies. The dialogue needs to be extended into the world of politics, economics, and culture, including how scientists are influenced by globalization. There is a need for additional capacity building so that civil society can become a partner in this encounter with science. Apart from patient groups or organizations that have sponsored research into orphan diseases, there has been little organized effort in Europe so far. It is only fair to say that much has been accomplished. The initial notion of public understanding of science as a didactically conceived one-way street through which scientific literacy is diffused did not miraculously lead to increased public support for science. It is increasingly being replaced by concepts of public awareness of science and public engagement with science. Activities that have been undertaken in this more interactive and outreaching mode range from the "Physics for taxi drivers" in London (12 ) to the regular public science festivals occupying their place alongside other, cultural, festivals. The 16th International Science Festival which has recently occurred in Edinburgh (13), and the Swiss "Science et Cit?" initiatives stand out (14 ) as good examples of forums that encourage discussion and debate. Almost all member states of the European Union now celebrate European Science Week (15 ). The European Science Open Forum (ESOF) was a highly successful European event in Stockholm in 2004 and will be held again in Munich in 2006. The larger (and richer) research institutions, such as the Max Planck Society in Germany or the CNRS in France, have set up their own outreach and public relations units. The current Framework Programme of the EU foresees outreach activities as an integral part of the contract obligations, although it is regrettable that outreach is not considered a factor in evaluating research proposals. The European Commission's proposed 7th Framework Programme, published on 6 April 2005, foresees an expanded "Science in Society" action line with an increased provisional budget of [euro] 554 million (US$712 million) for 7 years. Successful communication can begin to be measured through short-term indicators, such as improvements in public opinion polls on trust in science or increases in enrollment figures for undergraduate physics or chemistry programs. In the longer term, we will need to measure evolution in the direction of scientific citizenship, which presupposes rights and duties on the part of citizens as much as on the part of political and scientific institutions. Innovation is the collective bet on a common fragile future, and neither science nor society knows the secret of how to cope with its inherent uncertainties. It can only be accomplished through an alliance among the participants and a shared sense of direction. References and Notes 1. M. Crichton, The State of Fear (HarperCollins, New York, 2004). 2. J. Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking, New York, 2004). 3. Y. Ezrahi, in States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order, S. Jasanoff, Ed. (Routledge, London, 2004), pp. 254-273. 4. R. P. Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, NJ, 1986), pp. 10-12. 5. P. Weinberger, Falter, 16 February 2005, p. 14. 6. R. Highfield, Harry Potter: How Magic Really Works (Penguin, London, 2003). 7. "Einstein is dead," Nature 433, 179 (2005). 8. H. Nowotny, in The Public Nature of Science Under Assault: Politics, Markets, Science, and the Law, Helga Nowotny et al. (Springer Verlag, New York, 2005), pp. 1-28. 9. http://europa.eu.int/comm/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_154_en.pdf 10. A. I. Leshner, Science 307, 815 (2005). 11. A. Appadurai, in Culture and Public Action, V. Rao and M. Walton, Eds. (Stanford Univ. Press, Stanford, CA, 2004), pp. 59-84. 12. www.iop.org/news/860 13. www.edinburghfestivals.co.uk/science/ 14. www.science-et-cite.ch/de.aspx 15. www.cordis.lu/scienceweek/home.htm DOI: 10.1126/science.1113825 From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 20 20:22:06 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 20 Aug 2005 16:22:06 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Music and Emotion Message-ID: Music and Emotion http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/16/science/16qna.html By [3]C. CLAIBORNE RAY Music and Emotion Q. Why is it that when I listen to particularly beautiful or moving music I get goose bumps and even cry? A. It is well known that areas of the brain that recognize and process music are linked with areas that handle emotions, and scientists are gradually mapping these areas in greater detail with brain-imaging technology. Last year, a study by English researchers at the University of Newcastle, published in The Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, drew important insights from a single case, a 52-year-old radio announcer who lost his emotional response to music after a stroke. He was still able to recognize music that had given him particular pleasure, by Rachmaninoff, but he no longer experienced the intense emotional states that used to come from listening to it. Ordinarily, the researchers said, a stroke that causes loss of emotional response is accompanied by a loss of musical perception, called amusia. In this patient's case, however, they were able to separate musical perception from the emotional response and thus to identify a particular area of damage, called the left insula, as being involved in the emotional processing of music. It is part of a widely distributed brain network recruited by other powerful emotional stimuli, producing arousal of the autonomic nervous system and leading to various physiological reactions. C. CLAIBORNE RAY Readers are invited to submit questions by mail to Question, Science Times, The New York Times, 229 West 43rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10036-3959, or by e-mail to question at nytimes.com. From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 20 20:22:26 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 20 Aug 2005 16:22:26 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Ideas Bank: 60 Key Works: A Beginner's Guide to the Futures Literature Message-ID: 60 Key Works: A Beginner's Guide to the Futures Literature http://ide.idebanken.no/English/Framtidsbilder.html [Links omitted, for they would have cluttered the text. Click on the URL to get them.] Kjell Dahle, Ideas Bank Foundation, Oslo, Norway: This is a presentation of 60 selected works within the realm of futures studies. Earlier versions of the beginners guide have been published in Slaughter 1995 and Slaughter 1996. (1) The books and articles presented deal with possible, probable, desirable and undesirable futures. My intention is to give the reader a picture of what futures studies is about through a broad range of practical examples. For this purpose, brief information is provided on the background of each author. Some of them may not use labels like "futures studies" or "futures research" (not to mention "futurology"), about what they have written. But they have all developed or converted knowledge in order to contribute to long-term planning, the formulation of visions, or social change. This is what futures studies is about.(2) To make it easier for newcomers to browse amongst the rich offerings presented here, the literature has been categorised into the following seven groups: Classic Introductions Looking back - and ahead Trends Scenarios Utopias The world problematique Change As mutually exclusive categories are hard to find in the field of futures studies, the categorisation will to some extent be arbitrary. CLASSIC INTRODUCTIONS The notorious 1960s also meant the start of a golden age for futures studies. Having been dominated by a few big North American "think tanks", serving military and related industrial goals, the scope now broadened tremendously. Futurists developed their own tools in the shape of serious techniques and methodologies, and all kinds of futurist organisations popped up around the world. I will now present some sources to the state of the art in this "new" field of futures studies around 1970. The dynamic spirit of new academic fields often result in good introductury textbooks. This is also the case with futures studies. Some books from the 1960s and 1970s are still among the best introductions to the field. As early as in the middle of the 1960s, a major study was carried out for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. OECD felt the need for an account of the state of the art of technological forecasting as well as practical applications. The work was done by an Austrian, Dr Erich JANTSCH, and resulted in the classic "Technological Forecasting in Perspective. A Framework for Technological Forecasting, its Techniques and Organisation". One of the main findings was that, in spite of its increasingly wide adoption in industry, research institutes and military environments, technological forecasting was not yet a science but an art. It was characterised more by attitudes than by intellectual tools. The development of special techniques had, however, gained momenteum in the last few years. The book thus includes a thorough discussion of more than 100 distinct versions of forecasting, grouped under some 20 approaches in four broad areas. Those are intuitive thinking, and exploratory, normative and feedback techniques. Like other basic terms, Jantsch defines them in ways that are still highly relevant. The same year, in 1967, a quite different classic, "The Art of Conjecture", was published in English. The author, Bertrand de JOUVENEL, was the founder of "Futuribles International" in Paris. Educated in law, biology, and economics, he worked as a journalist and author. Later, he became the first president of the World Futures Studies Federation. Baron de Jouvenel mistrusted pretentious terms such as "forecast", "foresight", "prediction" and "futurology", especially since prognosis-makers are often credited with aspirations they do not (or should not!) have. He wanted futures studies to be taken seriously, and thus preferred the unpretentious term "conjecture", stressing the uncertainty of the field. Like Jantsch, he regarded the intellectual formulation of possible futures (futuribles) as a piece of art, in the widest possible sense. By linking historical examples to current problems, the book underlines the complexity and unpredictability of society, and how difficult it is to make models of the future. 1967 was also the year of the first big international conference of futures studies. It was held in Oslo with 70 participants from more than a dozen countries in three continents. The conference was designed to meet what was seen as a new trend within futures research. After the departure from the military domination, the desire emerged to use futurist tools on civilian problems. Could information technology, systems analysis, operational research, forecasting, anticipating, scenario-writing and "futures creation" be used against such enemies as urban sprawl, hunger, lack of education and growing alienation? These were the major challenges for the participants of the Oslo conference, which was used as a source for the book "Mankind 2000". It was edited by the main initiators, Robert JUNGK from the Institute for Future Research in Vienna and Johan GALTUNG from the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo. Jungk and Galtung both had most diverse backgrounds, even for futurists. They were to become leading international figures within the field in the years to come. Robert Jungk was a German journalist, researcher and political activist. He inspired the creation of a whole lot of futures institutions around the world, academic as well as non-academic.(3) Galtung holds university degrees in both mathematics and sociology; has worked in five continents; and has been an advisor for ten UN organisations and a guest professor at more than 30 universities. He succeeded Bertrand de Jouvenel as the president of the World Futures Studies Federation. In his contribution to "Mankind 2000", Galtung discusses the traditional division of labour between ideologists who establish values, scientists who establish trends, and politicians who try to adjust means to ends. He claims that futures research rejects this artificial compartmentalisation, and tries to develop a more unified approach to the three fields. In a postscript, Jungk and Galtung advocate an internationalisation and a "democratisation" of the field, which should not be allowed to become 'the monopoly of power groups served by experts in the new branch of "futurism". Some national governments also came to see the potential of futures studies. In the early 1970s, a very thorough report entitled To Choose a Future" was presented by a Swedish Government committee, led by cabinet member Alva MYRDAL. Its task was to give advice on the development of futures studies in Sweden. It turned out to be most influential. The relationship between futures studies and public decision-making and planning is a central issue in the report. According to the committee, futures studies should help people shape their own future. Like Jungk and Galtung, the committee saw a risk of futures studies being the private preserve of influential specialists, thereby eroding the democratic and political element in the shaping of the future. Advise is given on how to avoid this, for instance always to present several possible futures. According to the commission's recommendations, the Secretariat for Futures Studies was established the following year, attached to the Cabinet office. "Handbook of Futures Research" is a US classic of the 1970s, containing no less than forty-one articles about various aspects of the new field. It was edited by Jib FOWLES, then chairman of the graduate program in Studies of the Future which still exists at the University of Houston. He defines the field as "the effort to anticipate and prepare for the future before it unfolds". The first part of the book deals with the emergence and international growth of futures research, providing a broad survey of institutions, literature, and people associated with the new field. The handbook further presents the most common methods and procedures of futures research, including scenarios, trend extrapolation, the Delphi technique, technological forecasting and assessment, simulation, and social forecasting. The dominant themes within the field and substantive disagreements among futurists are also discussed. Most articles in the book are written by heavyweighters within their subject. It is also a strength that the difficulties of futures research have been given so much consideration. Methodological shortcomings, tendencies of elitism, self-altering predictions and the problem of values are among the subjects tackled. Finally, the challenges to be faced by the new field of futures research are addressed. "The Study of the Future. An Introduction to the Art and Science of Understanding and Shaping Tomorrow's World." is a shorter classic from 1977. It is edited by Edward CORNISH, who is still the president of one of the most important futures institutions, the US-based World Future Society. The book was designed to meet the need for a brief, readable, general-purpose introductory book. Basic principles of futurism are discussed, as well as the US and international development of the field. Futurists are seen as persons interested in the longer-term future of human civilisation, using non-mystical means to identify and study possible future occurrences. The book presents methods and case studies, as well as future-oriented organisations and the ideas of a dozen leading futurists (except Bertrand de Jouvenel and Robert Jungk all are North Americans). It was written with the broad assistance from members and staff of the WFS, and evolved from the extensive project "Resources directory for America's third century". Serving as a contribution to the U.S. Bicentennial celebration in 1976, this project was a result of grants from the National Science Foundation and the Congressional Research Service. Andr? COURNAND and Maurice LEVY's book "Shaping the Future. Gaston Berger and the Concept of Prospective" presents "La prospective" as a French orientation to the future, radically different from trends dominating in the United States and Great Britain. A fundamental idea of La prospective is that the future as conceived by man, is a factor in bringing about events that are to come. Gaston Berger and his successors within this approach thus emphasise the importance of human values and education in preparation for, and as elements in, planning. This approach is contrasted to many future-oriented activities in the Anglo-Saxon world; conceiving the future as the inevitable extension of the present and favouring short-term partial programs. This book from 1973 presents to English-speaking readers the chief idea of La prospective and its application to industrial and governmental planning in France, especially in relation to the fourth and fifth National Plans. Gaston Berger was Director of Higher Education in the French Ministry of Education before founding "Centre International de Prospective". The dynamic spirit of new academic fields often results in good introductury text-books. This is also the case with futures studies. Some books from the 1960s and 1970s are still among the best introductions to the field. This embarrassing truth was one of the reasons why Richard A. SLAUGHTER, now president of the World Futures Studies Federation, initiated "The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies". Three volumes were published in 1996 and a fourth in 2000. Volume 1 considers the origin of futures studies and discusses some of the social, cultural and historical reasons for their emergence. Volume 2 presents case studies of different futures organisation and explores a range of futures methodologies. Images, imaging processes and social innovations are also discussed. Volume 3 presents new directions in futures thinking and discusses the outlook for a new millennium. In volume 4, futurists from all over the world present themselves and their ideas. One of the grand old men of international futures studies, professor emeritus Wendell BELL of Yale University, supplied the field with another presentation of the state of the art when he published his Foundations of Futures Studies in 1997. For more than 30 years, the author has tried to convince sociologists to give priority to futures studies. These two volumes demonstrate that there is no lack of arguments for such a choice. Volume 1, History, Purposes, and Knowledge, delivers what the title promises. Among other things, the author discusses - pro et contra - whether futures studies is an art or an science, and he describes some of the different methods used by futurists. Volume 2, Values, Objectivity, and the Good Society, mainly deals with preferable futures. After examining the values of a few key utopian writers throughout history, he explains the ethical foundations of futures studies and how they relate to all action. Rolf HOMANN's book "Zuk?nfte - heute denken morgen sein" from 1998 is an excellent introduction to the realm of futures studies in German language. It is written in a way that makes it easily accessible for individuals and companies without previous knowledge of the field. Homann presents the toolbox of futures studies, including trend research, morphology, Delfi, scenarios, futures workshops and chaos research. Each method is being examined rather critically (and not without humour). The book also discusses possible, desirable and undesirable futures within fields like work, education, media and sex. An important part of the books is the "Glossen"; short satirical comments to concepts and themes from the book (often illustrated by the artist Regine Scmidt-Morsbach). The author strongly believes in a further quick development of information technology, making virtual reality an important part of our futures whether we like it or not. After presenting main futures institutions of the world, the book ends with a draft to a manifest of futures rights. The manifest includes the right to have alternative visions of the future, the right to choose between them and the right to act in accordance with one's choices. LOOKING BACK - AND AHEAD Time has passed since many of today's futurists became active, and looking back can be most valuable. Even for futurists. Michael MARIEN and Lane JENNINGS asked a number of prominent people from the US "futures vogue" of the 1960s and 1970s to reflect upon how the reality of the 1980s differed from what they had anticipated, and what had been learned about social and technological change since then. The answers resulted in the book "What I Have Learned". Some of the 17 contributors update and revise their previous thinking. Others summarise lessons learned rather than updating published thinking of long time ago. Several contributors acknowledge that predicting and prescribing the future is harder than once believed. But they all agree that thinking about the future can be useful, not only in anticipating certain developments, but also in asking better questions and learning more about one's self. The German futurist Ossip K. FLECHTHEIM took his look back a little earlier. From his US exile, he introduced the word "futurology" as early as 1943, searching for a logic of the future in the same way as history is a search for the logic of the past. "History and Futurology" from 1966 is an adapted collection of this frontrunner's most important articles since the 1940s. He tries to assess the fate of mankind in the coming centuries as objectively as possible, and has been criticized for his belief in this kind of approach. Flechtheim, a professor of political science at the Free University of Berlin, was an active figure in the public debate almost until his death in 1998. Richard A. SLAUGHTER, professor of foresight at the Swinton University of Technology, Australia, and since 2001 the president of World Futures Studies Federation, represents the next generation of futurists. According to his book from 1995, "The Foresight Principle", foresight is the process of attempting to broaden the boundaries of perception by careful futures scanning and the clarification of emerging situations. Foresight is not the ability to predict the future, but a way of facilitating desirable individual and social change. The author takes a brief look at the origins and development of the Western industrial worldview, considering some of its costs. In our time, he sees foresight as consciously working to complete the transition to a more sustainable world while there is still time to achieve it. Analysis and imagination are key words for foresight. In addition, institutions of foresight are needed to secure better implementation at the social and organisational level. Examples of such institutions are the US Millennium Institute, the International Futures Library created by Robert Jungk in Salzburg, and the no longer existing US Congressional Clearing House on the Future. Strategies for creating positive views of futures with young people are also discussed by the author, who holds a PhD in the role of futures studies in education. In their book "Zukunftsforschung und Politik" from 1991, Rolf KREIBICH et al analyse the development of German futures research, which reached its peak in the late 1970s. A historical discussion leads up to a presentation of the state of the art. After a decade of low activity, they find the situation more promising. Like so many others, these German futurists have moved their focus from quantitatively oriented prognostics to more normative studies of desirable futures. Comparative analyses of futures studies in France, Sweden and Switzerland are included in the book, which is a result of a project financed by the regional authorities of North Rhine-Westphalia. Far more critical voices than those mentioned above have also taken their look back. There has been a Western hegemony in futures studies, as in most other fields. The diversity and "unpredictability" of the actors did not correspond very well with e.g. State Marxism. Georgi SHAKHANAZOV's book "Futurology Fiasco. A Critical Study of Non-Marxist Concepts of How Society Develops." is a translation of a Soviet work, published in Moscow in 1982. He saw the field of futures studies as a 'bizarre mixture of valuable observations, quasi-scientific nonsense, and anti-communist fabrications of the foulest'. Different approaches are discussed, and the field is acknowledged for contributing to the gathering of knowledge about various features on the road in front of us. But according to the author all futurist approaches had in common that they 'in no way refute the Marxist-Leninist postulate that socialism is inevitable'. From his Third World point of view, Ziauddin SARDAR has a somewhat more elaborate critique of the development of futures studies. In his essay "Colonizing the Future" from 1993, he analyses the evolution of futures studies and claims that it is increasingly becoming an instrument for the marginalisation of non-Western cultures from the future. According to Sardar, even those futurists who are inspired by non-Western cultures, tend to produce 'a grotesque parody' of non-Western thought. His article was published in the international journal "Futures" (a must for anyone who wants to get an idea what serious futures studies are about). Rick Slaughter and Sohail Inayatullah respond to Sardar's essay in the same issue. Having later become the editor of "Futures", Sardar is himself an example of the fact that futures studies also has room for critical people born in the Third World. A special issue of Futures edited by Colin BLACKMAN and Olugbenga ADESIDA, published in 1994, was devoted to African futures studies. Adesida, an economist/information systems analyst working with the United Nations Development Programme's project "African Futures" based in Abidjan, claims there is no place where a change from ancestral worship to worship of future generations is more necessary than Africa. This special issue takes stock of progress in the use of futures studies concepts and methodologies in Africa, and discusses how such studies could be better integrated into decision-making and planning. A long-term view and a participatory approach are seen as essential in this respect. Within the old Eastern block there were also futurists who, to some extent, could operate within the main international networks of futures studies. A prominent example is Igor BESTUZHEV-LADA, a professor of sociology who has experienced all the changes of post-war USSR. His article "A Short History of Forecasting in the USSR" in the US journal "Technological Forecasting and Social Change", gives a most thrilling description of the fields problems and achievements in the region during different phases up to 1991. For the further development of forecasting in his area, Bestuzhev-Lada recommends a normative approach focusing on global imbalances. The task is to outline an alternative civilisation able to overcome them, and the transition thereto. The fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 had immense consequences for futures studies in Eastern and Central Europe. These are analysed in Erzsebet NOVAKY et al's book "Futures Studies in the European Ex-Socialist Countries" from 2001. Although some contributions look more like early drafts, it gives a comprehesive picture of the development of futures studies in the different countries involved. Even "official" futurists experienced a rather limited freedom during the "communist" era. The dismantling of state planning and the transition process to a market economy has, however, led to new problems. Futures researchers that were once financed by the state, have experienced dissolution and even incrimination. In the early 1990s, the interest for futures studies was rather limited in most "Ex-Socialist" countries. People felt that they had had enough of detailed planning and dubious forecasts. New politicians were caught in "presentism" traps, focusing on short-term tasks only. Comprehensive strategic studies for development of these countries rarely appeared until the late 1990s, and then most often connected with the question of how to meet the EU criteria for becoming future members of the union. There is, however, a beginning optimism about a new generation of futures studies becoming increasingly demanded in the area. Hungarian futurists seem to be in the luckiest situation, now as before 1989. TRENDS Some of the most famous futurists in the public eye deal mainly with trends; they try to predict which futures are the most probable. Post-Industrial Society, Future Shock, and Megatrends are only a few of the widely diffused "trend" concepts originating from futures studies. In his popular book "The Coming of Post-Industrial Society" from 1973, Daniel BELL presented the thesis that in the next 30 to 50 years a post-industrial society would emerge, representing a dramatic change in the social framework of the Western world. The creation of a service economy, the primacy of theoretical knowledge and the planning of technology are supposed to be among the central dimensions of this new society. The United States is used as unit of illustration. Bell (a Harvard professor of sociology) launched the concept of "post-industrial society" as early as 1962. When it comes to the growth debate, Bell finds that both Kahn's post-scarcity ideas and the doomsday predictions of "The Limits to Growth" are wrong. Alvin TOFFLER launched his famous concept, "Future shock" in 1965. His goal was to describe what happens to people who are overwhelmed by change; how they manage - or fail - to adapt to the future. His international bestseller "Future Shock" from 1970 was a result of subsequent conversations between the author (a former journalist) and researchers from a wide range of disciplines, as well as industrialists, psychiatrists, doctors and hippies. Unlike many other futurists, especially those dealing with trend studies, Toffler emphasises soft, everyday aspects of the future. A main conclusion is that the speed of change can often be more important than the direction of change. The time frame of planning must therefore be extended if we are to forestall technocracy. The growth of futures research is seen as one of the healthiest phenomena of recent years. Yoneji MASUDA, a Japanese professor of information science, published his bestseller, "The Information Society as Post-Industrial Society", in 1980. He saw humankind as standing on the threshold of a period when information values would become more important than material values. This was a result of a new societal technology based on the combination of computers and communications technology. The first part of the book deals with the question of when and through what stages the "information society" will be created. The second part presents the author's theoretical and conceptual studies on the information society. The discussion ends with "Computopia", the author's vision of a preferred global society in the 21st century. This society will encourage self-realisation and freedom of decision, in contrast to his alternative vision, "Automated State", a horrible controlled society. Taichi SAKAIYA's "The Knowledge-Value Revolution" became another Japanese bestseller within the field. Sakaiya is an economist, essayist and novelist, and the author of more than 30 books. His starting point is that the industrial society has reached its zenith, and that the world is undergoing a gigantic transformation. In the coming age, people will no longer be driven to consume more, but will turn towards values created through access to time and wisdom. Rather than buying a lot of goods and replacing them in rapid succession, they will purchase high-priced items possessing preferred designs, high-class brand images, high-level technologies, or specific functional capabilities, and keep them for much longer. "Knowledge-value" is the worth or price a society gives to that which the society acknowledges to be creative wisdom". People of the coming epoch can be expected to pay a high price for items that correspond to the demands set by the social subjectivity of the group to which they believe they belong. This will have enormous consequences for the industrial world. Developing technology, design, rhytms and images that match the social subjectivities of the times will thus be more important for their success or failure than the literal products they create. John NAISBITT sold as many as 9 000 000 copies of his book "Megatrends", published in 1982. Here, the USA was described as a society in-between two eras. Those who are willing to anticipate the new era will be a quantum leap ahead of those who hold on to the past. Ten empirical, mainly quantitative "megatrends" are presented, including the transition from Industrial Society to Information Society, from National Economy to World Economy, from Short Term to Long Term Considerations, from Centralisation to Decentralisation, from Institutional Help to Self-Help, from Representative Democracy to Participatory Democracy and from Hierarchies to Informal Networking. Naisbitt base his findings on content analysis of local newspapers, because he finds trends to be generated from the bottom up. The new economic order will not, as forecast by Daniel Bell and others, be a service-based post-industrial society, but rather a "hyper-industrial" society in which services are transformed into mass-produced consumer goods. The microchip and advances in biotechnology will lead to a new age that will profoundly transform human culture. The new consumer society will be bitterly divided between rich and poor. If the North remains passive and indifferent to this, Attali feels sure that the peoples of the South will enter into revolt, and one day, war. This will be unlike modern wars: it will rather resemble the barbarian raids on Europe of the seventh and eight centuries. An English-American professor of history, Paul KENNEDY, shifted his main interest from the past to the future in the late 1980s. As a result, an international bestseller on trends was published in 1993, called "Preparing for the Twenty-First Century". It gives a generalist view of some important global trends of our time. These include demographic explosion, the communications revolution, biotechnology and threats to the environment. Kennedy then discusses how prepared the world's regions and nations are for the challenges that seem to be looming. However, in spite of the book's title and size, there is no real analysis of practical solutions or of general worldviews. This shows how a well-written book about the next century can have appeal, even without the futurist tools that could have enabled the author to deal more meaningfully with preparations for the 21st century. Willis HARMAN's "Global Mind Change" from 1988 is a completely different kind of "trend book". The author predicts a societal transformation in the form of a paradigm change towards the end of the 20th century. This could be just as radical as the earth-shaking shifts in view of reality that took place when the "modern" worldview began to take shape in the 17th century. According to Harman, the origins of present global problems are to be found in the belief system supporting our whole economic structure. The Establishment's solutions only deal with symptoms, instead of accepting the need for fundamental change. Within the coming worldview, we will accept reality both through physical sense data (like today) and through a deep intuitive "inner knowing", being part of a oneness. Harman's point is not to accelerate or resist changes that take place, but rather to help society understand the forces of historical change. Dialogue and caring can help us through the process with as little misery as possible. The author is a veteran of US futures studies, with background in electrical engineering and systems analysis as well as psychology. Lester BROWN et al's "Vital Signs. The Trends That Are Shaping Our Future represents still another kind of trend studies. This is an annual series from the Worldwatch Institute in Washington DC, having been published in at least17 languages over the last ten years. In text and easy-to-read graphs, the 2002 version analyses more than 50 key indicators of long-term trends that track change in our planets environmental, economic, and social health. Topics covered in Vital Signs include food, agriculture, energy, the atmosphere, economy, transportation, the environment and the military. In addition, the series contains special features on less celebrated, but still important trends, not normally covered by national and international statistical agencies. These include subjects as different as pecticide bans, bicycle production, increase in solar cells and violence against women. "States of Disarray" is a report from the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), presented in Copenhagen during the 1995 UN Social Summit. It gives a comprehensive analysis of the social effects of globalisation using a holistic and multi-disciplinary approach. The report draws upon a big number of global research programs, as well as special material form UNRISD's worldwide network of scholars, activists and development practitioners. The quickening pace of change is found to have caught much of the international community unaware. Capital, goods and people are now moving with an enormous speed and complexity, thus creating enormous social tensions. The belief in dynamic, well-functioning markets resolving problems of human welfare is called a fallacy leading to catastrophic consequences. At the international level, social organisations have been overtaken by transnational corporations and international finance institutions. At a national level, many state institutions have been eroded or eliminated. And at a local level, the imperatives of market forces and globalisation have been undermining communities and families. The report explores not only issues like poverty, unemployment, inequality, crime and drugs, but also themes such as identity crisis, weakening social solidarity and declining responsibility within certain institutions. Future implications of globalisation are also discussed. Current success criteria towards the end of last century were very often economic growth, high consumption, and international competition. Robert THEOBALD's book "Reworking Success. New Communities at the Millennium" from 1997 presents "the required success criteria for the twenty-first century". These are ecological integrity, effective participatory decision-making, and social cohesion. According to the author, such a change in success criteria will necessarily occur at the personal, group, and community level rather than through top-down policy shifts. Here is no belief in "mapping" reality. Theobald prefers to see reality as an impressionist painting, which is partial and incomplete and where patterns shift as one looks at it. Such an approach makes it easier to find common ground between different positions, which is a must if we are to move out of current dead-ends. Other key words for a coming change are, according to Theobald, "servant leaders" seeking to empower others rather than control them), a new political landscape (those who want to keep the Industrial era vs those who are committed to creating a changed culture), and decentralised governance with less coercion. Local and international Internet fora will also be important. "Exciting and creative things are happening everywhere, but at the same time there is a failure to appreciate positive local steps. SCENARIOS The most unpredicted rise of OPEC in the 1970s (in some parts of the world better known as the oil crisis), had consequences for the futures literature. The risk with delivering short-term prognoses is that you may lose your reputation quickly. It was not so easy anymore to convince people that they could find the truth about development trends in books written by gurus. There was a gradual shift in interest from the realm of trends and predictions to the choice between alternative futures, in the form of scenarios or utopias. Scenario writing had, however, also been used by many trend researchers, such as the highly controversial Herman KAHN. Aside from what one may think of his political analysis, it has to be admitted that he was a key figure behind the development of today's scenario building. His 1967 book "The Year 2000" remains an important classic. It includes scenarios both for the world society and for the USA, and is inspired by methods from military studies. Here they were used to explore possible consequences of nuclear war. Kahn, a scholar of mathematics and physics, strongly believed in future economic growth and prosperity, and that the ecological problems will be solved by technological innovation. This book (produced at the Hudson Institute) was the first volume from the "Commission on the Year 2000" project, sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Basic concepts like "surprise-free scenarios" and "standard world" were here introduced to the public. Scenarios are not necessarily about the most likely future or the authors preferred future; they can be more or less probable and more or less desirable. Michel GODET has defined a scenario as 'the description of a possible future and the corresponding path to it' (4). Godet is a professor of strategic prospective at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers (CNAM), and represents the French la prospective-tradition, believing in action and non-predetermination. He is the author of 14 books on scenario building, of which many have been translated to other languages including English. His latest one, Creating Futures. Scenario Planning as a Strategic Management Tool has a preface by the US futurist Joseph F. Coates. Godet here presents five basic attitudes to the future that people can choose from: the passive ostrich, the reactive firefighter, the preactive insurer, the proactive innovative conspirator and the anticipative actor. Anticipative actors blend the reactive, the preactive and the proactive attitudes. In football language, they blend the star players ambition with caution and urgency! Ostriches go with the flow when things happen. Firefighters adapt to reduce damage. Insurers try to prevent accidents and look for trend-based scenarios. Conspirators try to be innovative. Their scenarios are normative; they describe desirable alternatives. Godet warns against drafting strategic plans based on proactive innovating scenarios alone. Ambitions are not enough. There is a need to be preactive, too, in order to prepare for expected changes in the future environment. On the other hand, trend-based scenarios are no longer the most probable ones, according to Godet. That was yesteryear! Today, the most probable scenario in many instances corresponds to deep breaks or even breakdown in current trends. There are lots of different scenario methods around. Important elements are, however, system analysis, retrospective analysis, asking the right questions and identifying key variables, analysing the main actors strategies, scanning possible futures and evaluating strategic choices and options. Through case studies, Godet demonstrates how scenario building can be used to prepare action plans for companies, organisations and governments. A growing number of studies on the year 2000 were initiated during the 1980s, using scenario methods. Their aim was to analyse long-term alternative futures of nations or regions. The Institute of 21st Century Studies (now called the Millennium Institute) was established to promote and support such efforts. Martha GARRETT of that institute edited "Studies for the 21st Century". This large book, published by UNESCO's Futuresco project in 1991, provides an overview of about 50 projects from all continents. Both normative and exploratory studies are included. Besides reports from the various projects involved, the book presents the methodologies used and discusses lessons learned. The professional and national backgrounds of the participants strongly influence the approach that the project teams chose in their studies. Still, there is a high degree of agreement on certain points, such as sustainability being the key to a continuing future for humankind, and the foundation of new public attitudes as a prerequisite for changes in action. An example of a 21st century study is Jim NORTHCOTT's "Britain in 2010". The main forecasts are on a "most probable" basis, although the authors know that 'the one thing that can be predicted with certainty is that some of the forecasts will turn out to be wrong'. Three other scenarios are therefore added, identifying potential areas of choice. The first one is market-oriented, the second is left-wing interventionist, and the third illustrates an environmental-oriented approach. The report was produced by a multidisciplinary group at the Policy Studies Institute (PSI) in London, in cooperation with Cambridge Econometrics. It was funded by a consortium of private sector companies and government departments. James ROBERTSON is a central figure within the New Economics Foundation. His book entitled "The Sane Alternative. A Choice of Futures." has a far more qualitative approach than most other scenario works. The author, having a background from the British Cabinet Office and from banking, sees the period up to about 2010 as a critical period in the history of humankind. He briefly presents five very different futures, all assumed to be realistic. The scenarios are "Business as Usual", "Disaster" (giving up in advance), "Authoritarian Control", "Hyper-Expansionist (HE) Future (even bigger toys and more important jobs for the boys), and "The Sane, Human, Ecological (SHE) Future" (a decentralized alternative where the limits to growth are not technical and economic, but social and psychological). Most of the book deals with the SHE-scenario; what it is like and what we can do to develop it further. Kimon VALASKAKIS et al's "The Conserver Society" was written to meet 14 Canadian government agencies' wish to study the implications of different policy options (how to turn a potentially good idea into a policy option). Five separate scenarios are presented, including three "conserver societies". These are "Scotch gambit" (do more with less), the "Greek" ideal (do the same with less), and The Buddhist scenario (doing less with less and doing something else). Two mass-consumption scenarios are added, the "Squander society" (do less with more), reminiscent of a Roman orgy, and "Big Rock Candy Mountain" (do more with more). The project was carried out by the futures research institute Gamma. 15 experts from as many different disciplines took part. The ideas developed are thought to have had significant influence upon the development of environmentally based arguments in a number of areas such as health and agriculture, as well as providing a general context within which the Canadians may cast environmental arguments in general. R?diger LUTZ' book "Die sanfte Wende. Aufbruch ins ?kologische Zeitalter" gives a most comprehensive view of cultural trends, accentuating the counter-culture-scene with its critique of the industrial society and its practical experiments. Theories of development are discussed, as well as classical and modern utopias. The author ends up with discussing seven prototypes of possible scenarios, all having supporters among futurists. These are COMPUTOPIA (the information society), SPACE COLONIES, ECOTOPIA, CHINATOWN (a melting pot of multi-million, multi-racial and multi-cultural metropols), FINDHORN (spiritually oriented new age-communes), DALLAS (a further market-oriented society based on social darwinism), and GAIA (earth as a self-organised ecosystem based on reciprocity and interdependence). Combinations of the different options are also discussed through a multiple scenario approach. Ove SVIDEN and Britt ANIANSSON's "Surprising futures" presents notes from a workshop in Stockholm, where about 20 leading researchers from different continents and disciplines (including Michel Godet) drew up five global and regional scenarios up to the year 2075. Four of the scenarios were deliberately given a "surprising" content, although they need not be more unlikely than the fifth, "surprise-free" scenario called "Conventional Wisdom". The workshop was run in 1986 by the Swedish research council FRN and the International Institute for Applied System Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria. We now move from the comparing of probable (more or less desirable) futures, and to works that focus on the "ideal society". UTOPIAS 'Those who rule decide what is reality and what is utopia.' These words from the feminist German journalist and author Carna Zacharias (5), make it clear that the futures discussed under this heading are not necessarily unrealistic or unattainable. In fact, instead of "Utopias", it might just as well have been called "Visions" or "Images of the future". The Germans also use the term "Zukunftsgestaltung" (futures design). But, as the pragmatic Chinese Deng Xiao Ping once said, the important thing is not whether a cat is black or white, but whether it catches mice. "Utopia" here means more or less fictional literature that describes a particular community, desired by the author. The main theme is the structure of those communities. So, does this kind of literature catch mice? Has it had any influence on societal development through the ages? According to the late Dutch professor Fred POLAK, the answer is yes. In his classic study "The Image of the Future", he demonstrates that idealistic and inspiring visions of the past have greatly influenced later developments. Utopias (and dystopias) are first considered from the history of Western civilisation. Then the author describes what he sees as a unique lack of convincing images in our own times. His hope for our cultural survival was in a new development of both utopias and dystopias. The book demonstrates the advantages of a most interdisciplinary background. During his academic career Polak was active within law, economy, philosophy and sociology. In addition, he was a central figure in Dutch culture, business and politics. Probably the most thorough survey of utopian literature is Frank E. and Fritzie P. MANUEL's "Utopian Thought in the Western World." He, a Harvard professor of history, and she, an art historian, produced the book after more than 25 years work on utopian thinking. In chronological order they identify historical constellations of utopias, bringing us from the ancient Greeks via Christian utopians and Thomas More to more modern utopians like Saint-Simon, Karl Marx, Edward Bellamy, William Morris and Herbert Marcuse. The authors believe in the revival of utopias, as Western civilisation may not be able to survive without utopian phantasies any more than individuals can exist without dreaming. They predict that "Man the innovator" will come up with the unthought-of, leaving model-builders and futurological predictors 'holding their bag of forecasts and facile analogies in embarrassed irrelevance'. Krishan KUMAR's book "Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times", focuses particularly on the ability of utopias to capture the popular imagination or become the centre of public debate. The bulk of the material is about English and American literature of the period from the 1880s to the 1950s. Works of five authors (Edward Bellamy, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and B. F. Skinner) were selected for thorough analysis of their roles within the intellectual and literary tradition of utopias. The last part considers the decline of utopia and dystopia in the second half of the 20th century. Special emphasis is put on critical discussions of socialist ideology, ecology and the relations between utopia and research. Kumar, a Trinidad-born professor of sociology, claims that "Futurologists" of the 1960s and 1970s were convinced of the imminent realisation of their expectations, and thus saw their task as one of scientific analysis and policy prescription rather than of utopian picturing. The success of Niels MEYER et al's "Revolt from the Center" in the late 1970s showed that new visions could still capture the public imagination. This book triggered a broad public debate in Scandinavia, and sold more than 100,000 copies in Denmark alone (a country with five million inhabitants). It was written by a professor of physics, a former liberal cabinet member and a famous essayist. They analyse weaknesses of the existing social system, describe their utopia of a humane society in ecological balance, and discuss ways and means of achieving it. An important reform is the introduction of a guaranteed basic income. Those who want a material standard above that level have the right to do a certain amount of paid work. "Visions of Desirable Societies" edited by Eleonora MASINI is a book where most of the contributors come from the Third World. It is a collection of different images of the future from different ideological, philosophical and cultural perspectives. The book presents the process of thinking within a United Nations University project of the same name. The aim was to understand contradictions within and between different visions, and to find ways in which they may become more compatible in a diverse world. The book is based on papers presented at two conferences in Mexico City in 1978/79, arranged by the World Futures Studies Federation and CEEM (Centro Estudios Economicos y Sociales de Terces Mundo). Whereas some authors have asked for more visions in our times, Michael MARIEN divided the existing ones into two categories. In his classic article "The Two Visions of Post-Industrial Society" from 1977, he distinguishes between those who go for a technological, affluent, service society, and the believers of a decentralised and ecologically conscious agrarian economy following in the wake of a failed industrialism. Marien is the editor of World Future Society's eminent (although most US-dominated) newsletter on literature, "Future Survey". It is thought-provoking that he, probably the best expert we have on futures literature, found 'no evidence that any writer holding either of the two visions of post-industrial society has any appreciable understanding of the opposing vision'. A collection of essays published 15 years after Marien's article, leaves a quite different impression. Sheila MOORCROFT's "Visions for the 21st Century" consists of essays from 21 invited international contributors. The authors deal with where we are and where we might want to go. Their topics are as varied as the cultures and academic disciplines they themselves represent. The type of analysis differs as much as the proposed solutions, but the text is still coherent. Most approaches are, despite all their diversity, parts of the same problematique. It is up to each reader, though, to synthesise and assess which ideas could be parts of the same solution. Interconnectedness, interdependence and diversity are key words for this anthology. THE WORLD PROBLEMATIQUE Poverty in the midst of plenty, degradation of the environment, loss of faith in institutions, uncontrolled urban spread, and insecurity of employment. These are some elements of what The Club Of Rome has called the "world problematique". Donella MEADOWS et al's bestseller "The Limits to Growth" from 1972 (9 000 000 copies in 29 languages) was the first report commissioned by the Club of Rome. Financed by Volkswagen Foundation, an international research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) investigated five basic factors which limit growth on this planet: population, agriculture, resource use, industry and pollution. Data on these factors were fed into a global model. A conclusion was that if present growth trends continue, the limits to growth will be reached sometime within the next hundred years. To alter these dramatic trends, the report advocated strive to reach a state of global equilibrium. Although "The Limits to Growth" signalled the start of a new era for the discussion on global environmental issues, this problematique was in no way new on the scene. Rachel CARSON's "Silent Spring" from 1962 was the first book to make a big global audience question the whole attitude of industrial society towards nature. The book starts with a "fable for tomorrow", describing a town in the heart of America where the voices of spring have disappeared. The few birds tremble and cannot fly, no bees pollinate the blooming apple trees, and all the fish has died. No witchcraft, no enemy action silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves. "Silent Spring" was much more than a warning from a concerned biologist about the problems posed by DDT and other "modern" pesticides. Rachel Carson concluded that mankind was standing at the crossroads. Her advice was to leave the smooth superhighway of progress. This, as well as crude attacks by the chemical industry, made her a symbol of the early environmental movement that culminated with "The Limits to Growth". In the wake of the discussion around this controversial first report from the Club of Rome, a number of alternative world models were drawn up. HERRERA et al's "Catastrophe or New Society? A Latin American World Model." was the first one to take an explicit viewpoint of the Third World, but gave less attention to the environment. The report proposed measures to satisfy basic needs for food, housing, health care and education by the year 2000 (except in large parts of Africa and Southern Asia, where it was not seen as possible before 2050). The study was made by "Fundacion Barriloche", an Argentine research foundation supported by the UN. The Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex, England, became a centre of the critical debate on "The Limits to Growth". SPRU found little or no basis for the pessimism in the report. In FREEMAN and JAHODA's "World Futures" from 1978, methods and assumptions from the debate are used to sketch other possible profiles of world development in the next 50 years. Combinations of high or low economic growth and strong or weak international equality result in four different profiles. Future supplies of food, energy and non-fuel minerals are discussed in relation to these profiles. An assessment of possible technical changes is also made. The main problems found were not physical limits, but political priorities. The confrontation between the "Limits" and "Sussex" groups was intense, and at some conferences it is said to have come closer to physical confrontation than intellectual debate. In the "boom" of world models of the late 1970s, president Carter ordered a report that was later carefully filed by president Reagan. "The Global 2000 Report to the President", edited by the physician Gerald BARNEY, deals with probable changes in the world's population, natural resources and environment. The relationships between the three issues are emphasised, since there is no lack of separate studies of them. The Global 2000 Report indicates the potential for global problems of alarming proportions by the year 2000, unless things are changed. It points out that the then current efforts underway around the world fell far short of what was needed. The conclusions of the staff's own studies are reinforced by similar findings from other recent global studies examined and referred to in the report. Even more important than Global 2000 was the work in the 1980s of the UN "World Commission on Environment and Development", headed by Norway's then prime minister Gro Harlem BRUNDTLAND. Its task was no less than to re-examine the critical environment and development problems of the planet and to formulate realistic proposals to solve them. The Commission's report "Our Common Future" was published in 1987, after four years' work. "Sustainable development" is the core concept of the report. As with "Global 2000", the main importance of the report is not in its innovativeness, but in the official status of its analysis and proposals. The work of the Brundtland Commission was generally well received, but the report become highly controversial among environmentalists for its positive attitude to growth. The commission envisions "a new era of economic growth", growth that is "forceful and at the same time socially and environmentally sustainable". The discussion of the Brundtland report led up to the huge World Conference on Environment and Development (WCED) in Rio in 1992. Ten years after, very few environmentalists considered the outcomes of the Rio process a success. The follow-up of the "Agenda 21" programme of action and the other decisions taken by the state leaders has been disappointing to most observers. Many of the critical voices on the whole Rio process came together in the volume "Global Ecology", edited by Wolfgang SACHS. Environmentalists from different parts of the world here examine the new landscape of conflicts on the international level that emerged during the Rio conference. Wolfgang Sachs finds that, although environmental and poverty problems were brought into focus, the action was handed over to those social forces (governments, agencies and corporations) that have largely been responsible for the present state of affairs. Formerly the knowledge of opposition groups, ecology has after Rio been wedded to the dominating world-view, where the cure for environmental ills is called "efficiency revolution" or "global management". What is to be managed are those things that are valuable to the global economy - from germplasm for biotechnology to pollution sinks and other commodities that can be traded. This can be at odds with how people traditionally care for their own environment locally. Although many of the contributors are rather dogmatic in their approach, the book raises important objections to the process and outcomes of the Rio meeting. As well as to the ritually repeated messages from politicians, industrialists and scientists, denying the existence of alternatives to the direction the world's economies are taking. The Rio conference (also known as the Earth Summit) was held 20 years after the first UN conference on environment (in Stockholm). But 1992 was also the 20th anniversary of "The Limits to Growth". Donella MEADOWS et al thus wrote a sequel using the same computer model as in their first book. 13 scenarios for the period between 1990 and 2100 are sketched. In the authors preferred scenario the population levels out at just under eight billion people, family size is limited to two children and the material standard of living is roughly that of present-day Europe. "Beyond the Limits" has been far less controversial than "The Limits to Growth". Although the sequel was much better received, it has not attracted the same large readership as the first book. CHANGE The perspective of change has been more or less involved in the categories already presented. But, although one should expect especially authors dealing with desirable futures to accentuate processes of change, this is not very often the case. Some exceptions will be presented here, but first we should again stress that not all futurists focus on the need for major change. Rajni KOTHARI's "Footsteps Into the Future" from 1974 deals with how to make a "minimal utopia" feasible. The basic issue is how to move from a world in which there is a growing "divorce" between scientific, technological progress and the freedom and wellbeing of human beings, to one in which the two are harmonised. Justice, self-realisation, creativity and non-violence are important elements. The author does not believe in fully worked-out models, and therefore warns against 'catastrophic reversals of existing arrangements that may or may not produce the desired results'. Kothari's strategy is that of "ever widening circles"; stepwise attempts at a number of levels. The intellectual task is simultaneously to stimulate new attitudes and major institutional changes. The book belongs to a series of volumes entitled "Preferred Worlds for the 1990s", initiated by the transnational World Order Models Project. Kothari is Director of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi and founder of the international journal Alternatives. In "Envisioning a Sustainable Society. Learning Our Way Out", Lester MILBRATH claims that modern society cannot lead to sustainable development. After elaborating a vision of a sustainable society, he discusses the transition from modern society to a sustainable society. Milbrath, a US professor of political science and sociology, does not believe that elite change can be very thorough, because true social change must affect the everyday behaviour of the people. He sees social learning as the most viable route to social change. Milbrath is, however, not a believer in change here and now. Things must get worse before they can get better. His prescription is to prepare for the moment when things get 'bad enough to force us to cast about'. Then we can make changes that would be beyond the realm of possibility in "normal times". Is today's realm of possibilities as narrow as Milbrath and other patient revolutionaries (6) think? Less than a year before becoming the US Vice-President, Al GORE published his book "Earth in the Balance". A conclusion of his analysis is that we must make rescuing our global environment the central organising principle of our civilisation. He proposes a new global Marshall Plan, consisting of five strategic goals. These are stabilising world population, developing and sharing appropriate technology, a new global "eco-nomics", a new generation of treaties and agreements, and education for a new global environmental consensus. Gore is an example of important elements within the Establishment, who want to bridge the gaps between the dominating worldview and policy, and current ecological knowledge. From his point of view, the key will be a new public awareness of how serious is the threat to the global environment. There will be no meaningful change until enough citizens are willing to speak out and urge their leaders to bring the earth back to balance. The book was re-issued in 2000, including a new foreward from a much more experienced Gore who still believes in the same ideas. The GROUP OF LISBON's "Limits to Competition" from 1993 shows that Gore is not a loner within the establishment. The group consists of 19 prominent professors, bureaucrats, cultural workers and industrialists from Western Europe, North America and Japan. They are concerned about the role competition plays in the process of economic and social globalisation. Instead of praising competitiveness, they call for co-decisions in the form of "global social contracts". All the contributors conclude that the benefits of "going together" are greater than the inconveniences. If we are to move towards this kind of contracts, the initiative has to come from the three dominant global powers; Western Europe, North America and Japan. The target is a global society that will satisfy the basic needs of the eight billion people inhabiting the planet by the year 2020. Common endeavours will be the key, and this makes global civil society a powerful force. The report stresses the importance of systematically recognising and supporting local actions, behaviour and experiments at the global level. The demand for a "new economics" or a "green economics" is common to both oppositional green movements and some more established thinkers. Paul EKINS' "Wealth Beyond Measure" from 1992 is a highly illustrated guide that presents the state of the art in laypersons' terms. Contrary to the view of mainstream economists and politicians, the new economics movement puts forward the idea that recovery from recession must accord with the imperatives of sustainable development. Participatory democracy and economic justice are other important objectives for this movement. Ekins analyses the effects of ongoing changes and discusses political consequences when it comes to the use of ecological, human, organisational and manufactured resources. He is a co-founder of the New Economics Foundation in London, and of TOES (The Other Economic Summit), which has accompanied the G-7 summits since 1984. The British-American futurist Hazel HENDERSON believes that a great transition of industrial societies in the direction of a sustainable, renewable resources based productivity is inevitable. Her book "Paradigms in Progress" deals with the nature of this transition. According to Henderson, a paradigm is a pair of different spectacles that can reveal a new view of reality allowing us to reconceive our situation, reframe old problems and find new pathways for evolutionary change. The book summarises her own paradigms in progress, offering new directions, expanded contexts, connections and possibilities for creating "win-win" solutions. She sees the ongoing transition towards sustainability as multidimensional and nonlinear, and it cannot be mapped in simple economic terms. New interdisciplinary models from biology and chaos theory (rather than mechanistic models) are needed to capture these kinds of accelerating, interactive changes. Hazel Henderson is a lecturer, consultant, writer and activist working within a broad, international sphere. Erik DAMMANN created the popular Norwegian "Future in Our Hands" movement, focusing on social equity and a simpler way of life. His book "Revolution in the Affluent Society" discusses the need for a change of system in the rich world. He argues why it should be nonviolent, nondogmatic and come from below the antithesis of what one is struggling to overcome. He also addresses the role of futures studies, wanting them to be linked more directly to people's wishes and expectations. Surveys could be used to arouse an interest in crucial choices about values and social problems amongst people who otherwise feel that political debate goes over their heads. Reports should be handed over to writers with the literacy skill to convey their basic ideas in popular books and the mass media. They should stress the main initial consequences that alternative courses of development will have for various groups. His main point is the idea of research not as a means of control, but as a means by which the public can consider and actively participate in the formation and development of their own futures. Dammann later became a co-founder of the Alternative Future Project in Norway. Robert JUNGK and Norbert M?LLERT's "Futures workshops" presents another method by which ordinary people can be involved in creating possible and desirable futures. Criticism, phantasy and realisation are the main elements in a process where concrete utopias and social inventions are drawn up. Examples illustrate how participants have changed during the process. Futures workshops can thus be an effective instrument against what Jungk used to call the "ghost" haunting today's world; the ghost of resignation. The book also demonstrates what kinds of ideas and practical results that can be achieved through this method, which has been especially popular in Germany and Denmark. The idea of participatory futures studies involving both academic and less academic circles is not just a theory. It can be put into practise. Robert Jungk, who died in 1994, has probably demonstrated this better than anyone else, not at least through his futures workshops. Such approaches are essential for futures studies if they are to democratise, not colonise, the future. In conclusion, it is worth quoting the words of the late Nobel Prize winner in physics, Dennis Gabor: He wrote that 'the future cannot be predicted, but it can be invented'(7). Since the future belongs to all of us, we all have the right to participate in shaping it. The literature surveyed here clearly provides numerous starting points for doing just that. _________________________________________________________________ Kjell Dahle is a political scientist and a World Futures Studies Federation fellow, based in Oslo, Norway. He is co-founder of the Ideas Bank Foundation and former head of planning of the Alternative Future Project. He has also been secretary general of the Centre Party of Norway and chief editor of Senterpressens Osloredaksjon. This survey is under revision; some important works from the last few years are still missing. Updated and expanded versions with new literature surveys will be available at www.idebanken.no. A revised text will later be part of the next edition of the Knowledge Base of Futures Studies (see footnote 1). Comments, proposals and material can be sent to Kjell Dahle, Stiftelsen Idebanken, Boks 2126 Gr?nerl?kka, N-0505 Oslo, Norway. Or E-mail Kjell Dahle. _________________________________________________________________ (1) -Richard A. Slaughter (ed.): New Thinking for a New Millennium. London/New York, Routledge 1995, pp 84-102. -Richard A. Slaughter (ed.): The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies. Victoria (Australia), DDM Media Group 1996, Volume 1, pp 126-47. A Millennium Edition of the four volumes Knowledge Base is available on CD-Rom from http://livingpresence.org/books/index.shtml. (2) Kjell Dahle: On Alternative Ways of Studying the Future. International institutions, an annotated bibliography and a Norwegian case. Oslo, Alternative Future Project, 1991, p. 16. (3) Robert Jungk was also the founder of the International Futures Library, Imbergstrasse 2, 5020 Salzburg, Austria. I have made several visits to this fabulous library, which has been a main resource for my studies of the futures literature. (4) Michel Godet: Introduction to La Prospective. Seven Key Ideas and One Scenario Method. Futures No 2 1986, pp. 134-57. (5) Carna Zacharias: Wo liegt Utopia? Nur wer tr?umt, ist Realist. Munich, Sch?nberger, 1985. (6) In Fors?k for forandring? Alternative veier til et b?rekraftig samfunn, Oslo, Spartacus 1997 (English short version Toward Governance for Future Generations. How do we change course? Futures No. 4 1998, pp 277-92), I have discussed five alternative strategies for a transition to a sustainable society. These are the Reformists (such as Gore), the Impatient Revolutionaries (such as Robert Heilbroner), the Patient Revolutionaries (such as Milbrath), the Grassroot Fighters (such as Murray Bookchin) and the Multifaceted Radicals (such as Meyer). (7) Dennis Gabor: Inventing the Future. London, Secker and Warburg, 1963/New York, Knopf, 1964. THE 60 KEY WORKS * Barney, Gerald O. (ed.): The Global 2000 Report to the President. Entering the 21st Century. A Report Prepared by the Council on Environmental Quality and the Department of State. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1982. 766 p. (First published 1980.) * Bell, Daniel: The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. A Venture in Social Forecasting. New York, Basic Books, 1973. 507 p. * Bell, Wendell: The Foundation of Futures Studies: Human Science for the 21st Century. ?, Mc Graw-Hill 1997. * Bestuzhev-Lada, Igor: A Short History of Forecasting in the USSR. Article in "Technological Forecasting and Social Change", 41:3, May 1992, pp. 341-8. * Blackman, Colin and Olugbenga Adesida (eds.): African Futures. Special issue of "Futures" (9/1994). * Brown, Lester et al.: Vital Signs 2002. The Trends That are Shaping Our Future. New York, Norton/London, Earthscan 2002. 192 p. * Brundtland, Gro Harlem (chairman): Our Common Future. Oxford/New York, Oxford University Press, 1987. 383 p. * Carson, Rachel: Silent Spring. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1962/London, Hamish Hamilton 1963. 304 p. * Cornish, Edward (ed.): The Study of the Future. An Introduction to the Art and Science of Understanding and Shaping Tomorrow's World. Bethesda, World Future Society, 1977. 308 p. * Cournand, Andr? and Maurice Levy (eds.): Shaping the Future. Gaston Berger and the Concept of Prospective. New York/London/Paris, Gordon and Breach 1973. 300 p. * Dammann, Erik: Revolution in the Affluent Society. London, Heretic, 1984. 173 p. (Norwegian original: Revolusjon i velferdssamfunnet - 1979.) * Ekins, Paul (ed.): Wealth Beyond Measure. An Atlas of New Economics. London, Gaia, 1992. * Flechtheim, Ossip K.: History and Futurology. Meisenheim am Glan, Anton Hain, 1966. 126 p. * Fowles, Jib (ed.): Handbook of Futures Research. Westport(Connecticut)/London, Greenwood, 1978. 822 p. * Freeman, Christopher and Jahoda, Marie (eds.): World Futures. The Great Debate. London, Martin Robertson, 1978. 416 p. * Garrett, Martha J. et al.: Studies for the 21st Century. Paris, UNESCO, 1991. 642 p. * Godet, Michel: Creating Futures. Scenario Planning as a Strategic Management Tool. London, Economica, 2001. 269p. * Gore, Al: Earth in the Balance. Forging a New Common Purpose. London, Earthscan, 2000. 408 p. * The Group of Lisbon: Limits to Competition. Lisbon, Gulbenkian Foundation, 1993. 182 p. * Harman, Willis W.: Global Mind Change. The Promise of the last Years of the Twentieth Century. Sausalito, Institute for Noetic Sciences, 1988. 185 p. * Henderson, Hazel: Paradigms in Progress: Life Beyond Economics. Indianapolis, Knowledge Systems, 1991. 293 p. * Herrera, Amilcar (ed.): Catastrophe or New Society? A Latin American World Model. Ottawa, International Development Centre, 1976. * Homann, Rolf: Zuk?nfte - heute denken morgen sein. Z?rich, Orell F?sli 1998. 191p. * Jantsch, Erich: Technological Forecasting in Perspective. Paris, OECD, 1967. 401 p. * Jouvenel, Bertrand de: The Art of Conjecture. New York, Basic Books, 1967. 307 p. (French original: L'Art de la conjecture - 1964.) * Jungk, Robert and Johan Galtung (eds.): Mankind 2000. Oslo, Universitetsforlaget/London, Allen & Unwin, 1969. 368 p. * Jungk, Robert and Norbert R. M?llert: Futures workshops. How to Create Desirable Futures. London, Institute for Social Inventions, 1989. 123 p. (German original: Zukunftswerkst?tten - 1981.) * Kahn, Herman and Anthony Wiener: The Year 2000. A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years. New York, Mac Millan, 1967. 431 p. * Kennedy, Paul: Preparing for the Twenty-First Century. New York, Random House/London, HarperCollins, 1993. 429 p. * Kothari, Rajni: Footsteps Into the Future. Diagnosis of the Present world and a Design for an Alternative. New Delhi, Orient Longman/New York, The Free Press/Amsterdam, North-Holland, 1974. 173 p. * Kreibich, Rolf et al.: Zukunftsforschung und Politik [Futures Research and Politics]. Weinheim/Basel, Beltz, 1991. 410 p. * Kumar, Krishan: Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times. Oxford/Cambridge (Mass.), Blackwell, 1991. 506 p. (First published 1987.) * Lutz, R?diger: Die sanfte Wende. Aufbruch ins ?kologische Zeitalter. [The Soft Turning Point.] Frankfurt/M; Berlin, Ullstein 1987. (First edition 1984.) * Manuel, Frank E. and Fritzie P.: Utopian Thought in the Western World. Cambridge (Mass.)/Oxford, Belknap, 1979. 896 p. * Marien, Michael: The Two Visions of Post-industrial Society. Article in Futures 5/1977, pp. 415-31. * Marien, Michael and Lane Jennings (eds.): What I Have Learned. Thinking About the Future Then and Now. New York, Greenwood Press, 1987. 204 p. * Masini, Eleonora Barbieri (ed.): Visions of Desirable Societies. Oxford, Pergamon, 1983. 272 p. * Masuda, Yonedi: The Information Society as Post-Industrial Society. Bethesda, World Future Society, 1983. 171 p. (First published Tokyo 1980.) * Meadows, Donella H. et al.: The Limits to Growth. A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York, Universe/London, Earth Island, 1972. 205 p. * Meadows, Donella H. et al.: Beyond the Limits. Confronting Global Collapse. Envisioning a Sustainable Future. Vermont, Chelsea Green/London, Earthscan, 1992. 320 p. * Meyer, Niels I. et al.: Revolt from the Center. London, Maryon Boyars, 1982. (Danish original: Opr?r fra midten 1978. 194 p). * Milbrath, Lester W.: Envisioning a Sustainable Society. Learning Our Way Out. New York, State University Press, 1989. 403 p. * Moorcroft, Sheila (ed.): Visions for the 21st Century. London, Adamantine, 1992/New York, Praeger, 1993. 178 p. * Myrdal, Alva (chairman): To Choose a Future. A Basis for Discussion and Deliberations on Futures Studies in Sweden. Stockholm, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1974. 162 p. (Swedish original: Att v?lja framtid - 1972.) * Naisbitt, John: Megatrends. The Ten New Directions Directing Our Lives. New York, Warner, 1982. 290 p. * Northcott, Jim (ed.): Britain in 2010. The PSI Report. London, Policy Studies Institute, 1991. 364 p. * Novaky, Erzsebet et al (eds.): Futures Studies in the European Ex-Socialist Countries. Budapest, Futures Studies Centre, Budapest University of Economic Sciences and Public Administration 2001. 213 p. * Polak, Fred: The Image of the Future. Amsterdam/London/New York, Elsevier 1973. 319 p. (Dutch original: De toekomst is verleden tijd - 1968.) * Robertson, James: The Sane Alternative. A Choice of Futures. Oxon 1983. (Revised edition.) 156 p. * Sachs, Wolfgang (ed.): Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict. London, Zed 1993. 262 p. * Sakaiya, Taichi: The Knowledge-Value Revolution: Or a History of the Future. Tokyo/New York, Kodansha International, 1991. 379 p. (Updating of the Japanese original: Chika kakumei -1985.) * Sardar, Ziauddin: Colonizing the Future: The Other Dimensions of Futures Studies. Article in Futures 2/1993, pp. 179-88. * Shakhanazov, Georgi: Futurology Fiasco. A Critical Study of Non-Marxist Concepts of How Society Develops. Moscow, Progress, 1982. 230 p. * Slaughter, Richard A.: The Foresight Principle. Cultural Recovery in the 21st Century. London, Adamantine, 1995. 232 p. * Slaughter, Richard A. (ed.): The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies. Victoria (Australia), DDM Media Group 1996/2000. Volume 1: 372 p. Volume 2: 419 p. Volume 3: 396 p. Volume 4: On CD-Rom. * Sviden, Ove and Britt Aniansson (eds.): Surprising Futures. Notes from an International Workshop on Long-term World Development. Stockholm, FRN, 1987. 128 p. * Theobald, Robert: Reworking Success. New Communities at the Millennium. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island (Canada)/Stony Creek CT 1997. 119 p. * Toffler, Alvin: Future Shock. New York, Random House, 1970. 505 p. * United Nations Research Institute for Social Development: States of Disarray. The Social Effects of Globalization. Geneva, UNRISD 1995. 173 p. * Valaskakis, Kimon et al.: The Conserver Society. A Workable Alternative for the Future. Toronto, Fitzhenry and Whiteside/New York, Harper and Row 1979. 286 p. From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 20 20:24:31 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 20 Aug 2005 16:24:31 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Sigma Xi: Statistics of Deadly Quarrels Message-ID: Statistics of Deadly Quarrels http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/14426?&print=yes [Click the URL to get the PDF to see the graphics. [I have a copy of Richardson's book by that title. It's so scarce that it's never been reprinted.] January-February 2002, Volume: 90 Number: 1 Page: 10, DOI: [28]10.1511/2002.1.10 [33]Brian Hayes Look upon the phenomenon of war with dispassion and detachment, as if observing the follies of another species on a distant planet: From such an elevated view, war seems a puny enough pastime. Demographically, it hardly matters. War deaths amount to something like 1 percent of all deaths; in many places, more die by suicide, and still more in accidents. If saving human lives is the great desideratum, then there is more to be gained by prevention of drowning and auto wrecks than by the abolition of war. But no one on this planet sees war from such a height of austere equanimity. Even the gods on Olympus could not keep from meddling in earthly conflicts. Something about the clash of arms has a special power to rouse the stronger emotions--pity and love as well as fear and hatred--and so our response to battlefield killing and dying is out of all proportion to its rank in tables of vital statistics. When war comes, it muscles aside the calmer aspects of life; no one is unmoved. Most of us choose one side or the other, but even among those who merely want to stop the fighting, feelings run high. ("Antiwar militant" is no oxymoron.) [34]click for full image and caption [35]Figure 1. The Great War in La Plata (1865-1870) . . . The same inflamed passions that give war its urgent human interest also stand in the way of scholarly or scientific understanding. Reaching impartial judgment about rights and wrongs seems all but impossible. Stepping outside the bounds of one's own culture and ideology is also a challenge--not to mention the bounds of one's time and place. We tend to see all wars through the lens of the current conflict, and we mine history for lessons convenient to the present purpose. One defense against such distortions is the statistical method of gathering data about many wars from many sources, in the hope that at least some of the biases will balance out and true patterns will emerge. It's a dumb, brute-force approach and not foolproof, but nothing else looks more promising. A pioneer of this quantitative study of war was Lewis Fry Richardson, the British meteorologist whose ambitious but premature foray into numerical weather forecasting I described in this space a year ago. Now seems a good time to consider the other half of Richardson's lifework, on the mathematics of armed conflict. Wars and Peaces Richardson was born in 1881 to a prosperous Quaker family in the north of England. He studied physics with J. J. Thomson at Cambridge, where he developed expertise in the numerical solution of differential equations. Such approximate methods are a major mathematical industry today, but at that time they were not a popular subject or a shrewd career choice. After a series of short-term appointments--well off the tenure track--Richardson found a professional home in weather research, making notable contributions to the theory of atmospheric turbulence. Then, in 1916, he resigned his post to serve in France as a driver with the Friends' Ambulance Unit. Between tours of duty at the front, he did most of the calculations for his trial weather forecast. (The forecast was not a success, but the basic idea was sound, and all modern weather prediction relies on similar methods.) After the war, Richardson gradually shifted his attention from meteorology to questions of war and international relations. He found some of the same mathematical tools still useful. In particular, he modeled arms races with differential equations. The death spiral of escalation--where one country's arsenal provokes another to increase its own armament, whereupon the first nation responds by adding still more weapons--has a ready representation in a pair of linked differential equations. Richardson showed that an arms race can be stabilized only if the "fatigue and expense" of preparing for war are greater than the perceived threats from enemies. This result is hardly profound or surprising, and yet Richardson's analysis nonetheless attracted much comment (mainly skeptical), because the equations offered the prospect of a quantitative measure of war risks. If Richardson's equations could be trusted, then observers would merely need to track expenditures on armaments to produce a war forecast analogous to a weather forecast. Mathematical models of arms races have been further refined since Richardson's era, and they had a place in policy deliberations during the "mutually assured destruction" phase of the Cold War. But Richardson's own investigations turned in a somewhat different direction. A focus on armaments presupposes that the accumulation of weaponry is a major cause of war, or at least has a strong correlation with it. Other theories of the origin of war would emphasize different factors--the economic status of nations, say, or differences of culture and language, or the effectiveness of diplomacy and mediation. There is no shortage of such theories; the problem is choosing among them. Richardson argued that theories of war could and should be evaluated on a scientific basis, by testing them against data on actual wars. So he set out to collect such data. Others had the same idea at roughly the same time. The Russian-born sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin published a long list of wars in 1937, and Quincy Wright of the University of Chicago issued another compilation in 1942. Richardson began his own collection in about 1940 and continued work on it until his death in 1953. Of the three contemporaneous lists, Richardson's covers the narrowest interval of time but seems to be best adapted to the needs of statistical analysis. Richardson published some of his writings on war in journal articles and pamphlets, but his ideas became widely known only after two posthumous volumes appeared in 1960. The work on arms races is collected in Arms and Insecurity; the statistical studies are in Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. In addition, a two-volume Collected Papers was published in 1993. Most of what follows in this article comes from Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. I have also leaned heavily on a 1980 study by David Wilkinson of the University of California, Los Angeles, which presents Richardson's data in a rationalized and more readable format. "Thinginess Fails" The catalogue of conflicts in Statistics of Deadly Quarrels covers the period from about 1820 until 1950. Richardson's aim was to count all deaths during this interval caused by a deliberate act of another person. Thus he includes individual murders and other lesser episodes of violence in addition to warfare, but he excludes accidents and negligence and natural disasters. He also decided not to count deaths from famine and disease associated with war, on the grounds that multiple causes are too hard to disentangle. (Did World War I "cause" the influenza epidemic of 1918-1919?) [36]click for full image and caption [37]Figure 2. Magnitude of a war . . . The decision to lump together murder and war was meant to be provocative. To those who hold that "murder is an abominable selfish crime, but war is a heroic and patriotic adventure," Richardson replies: "One can find cases of homicide which one large group of people condemned as murder, while another large group condoned or praised them as legitimate war. Such things went on in Ireland in 1921 and are going on now in Palestine." (It's depressing that his examples, 50 years later, remain so apt.) But if Richardson dismissed moral distinctions between various kinds of killing, he acknowledged methodological difficulties. Wars are the province of historians, whereas murders belong to criminologists; statistics from the two groups are hard to reconcile. And the range of deadly quarrels lying between murder and war is even more problematic. Riots, raids and insurrections have been too small and too frequent to attract the notice of historians, but they are too political for criminologists. For larger wars, Richardson compiled his list by reading histories, starting with the Encyclopaedia Britannica and going on to more diverse and specialized sources. Murder data came from national crime reports. To fill in the gap between wars and murders he tried interpolating and extrapolating and other means of estimating, but he acknowledged that his results in this area were weak and incomplete. He mixed together civil and international wars in a single list, arguing that the distinction is often unclear. [38]click for full image and caption [39]Figure 3. Frequency of outbreaks of war . . . An interesting lesson of Richardson's exercise is just how difficult it can be to extract consistent and reliable quantitative information from the historical record. It seems easier to count inaccessible galaxies or invisible neutrinos than to count wars that swept through whole nations just a century ago. Of course some aspects of military history are always contentious; you can't expect all historians to agree on who started a war, or who won it. But it turns out that even more basic facts--Who were the combatants? When did the fighting begin and end? How many died?--can be remarkably hard to pin down. Lots of wars merge and split, or have no clear beginning or end. As Richardson remarks, "Thinginess fails." In organizing his data, Richardson borrowed a crucial idea from astronomy: He classified wars and other quarrels according to their magnitude, the base-10 logarithm of the total number of deaths. Thus a terror campaign that kills 100 has a magnitude of 2, and a war with a million casualties is a magnitude-6 conflict. A murder with a single victim is magnitude 0 (since 10^0=1). The logarithmic scale was chosen in large part to cope with shortcomings of available data; although casualty totals are seldom known precisely, it is usually possible to estimate the logarithm within ?0.5. (A war of magnitude 6?0.5 could have anywhere from 316,228 to 3,162,278 deaths.) But the use of logarithmic magnitudes has a psychological benefit as well: One can survey the entire spectrum of human violence on a single scale. Random Violence Richardson's war list (as refined by Wilkinson) includes 315 conflicts of magnitude 2.5 or greater (or in other words with at least about 300 deaths). It's no surprise that the two World Wars of the 20th century are at the top of this list; they are the only magnitude-7 conflicts in human history. What is surprising is the extent to which the World Wars dominate the overall death toll. Together they account for some 36 million deaths, which is about 60 percent of all the quarrel deaths in the 130-year period. The next largest category is at the other end of the spectrum: The magnitude-0 events (quarrels in which one to three people died) were responsible for 9.7 million deaths. Thus the remainder of the 315 recorded wars, along with all the thousands of quarrels of intermediate size, produced less than a fourth of all the deaths. The list of magnitude-6 wars also yields surprises, although of a different kind. Richardson identified seven of these conflicts, the smallest causing half a million deaths and the largest about 2 million. Clearly these are major upheavals in world history; you might think that every educated person could name most of them. Try it before you read on. The seven megadeath conflicts listed by Richardson are, in chronological order, and using the names he adopted: the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864), the North American Civil War (1861-1865), the Great War in La Plata (1865-1870), the sequel to the Bolshevik Revolution (1918-1920), the first Chinese-Communist War (1927-1936), the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the communal riots in the Indian Peninsula (1946-1948). Looking at the list of 315 wars as a time series, Richardson asked what patterns or regularities could be discerned. Is war becoming more frequent, or less? Is the typical magnitude increasing? Are there any periodicities in the record, or other tendencies for the events to form clusters? A null hypothesis useful in addressing these questions suggests that wars are independent, random events, and on any given day there is always the same probability that war will break out. This hypothesis implies that the average number of new wars per year ought to obey a Poisson distribution, which describes how events tend to arrange themselves when each occurrence of an event is unlikely but there are many opportunities for an event to occur. The Poisson distribution is the law suitable for tabulating radioactive decays, cancer clusters, tornado touchdowns, Web-server hits and, in a famous early example, deaths of cavalrymen by horse kicks. As applied to the statistics of deadly quarrels, the Poisson law says that if p is the probability of a war starting in the course of a year, then the probability of seeing n wars begin in any one year is e ^-p p ^n/n!. Plugging some numbers into the formula shows that when p is small, years with no onsets of war are the most likely, followed by years in which a single war begins; as n grows, the likelihood of seeing a year with n wars declines steeply. Figure 3 compares the Poisson distribution with Richardson's data for a group of magnitude- 4 wars. The match is very close. Richardson performed a similar analysis of the dates on which wars ended--the "outbreaks of peace"--with the same result. He checked the wars on Quincy Wright's list in the same way and again found good agreement. Thus the data offer no reason to believe that wars are anything other than randomly distributed accidents. Richardson also examined his data set for evidence of long-term trends in the incidence of war. Although certain patterns catch the eye when the data are plotted chronologically, Richardson concluded that the trends are not clear enough to rule out random fluctuations. "The collection as a whole does not indicate any trend towards more, nor towards fewer, fatal quarrels." He did find some slight hint of "contagion": The presence of an ongoing war may to some extent increase the probability of a new war starting. [40]click for full image and caption [41]Figure 4. Distribution of wars in time . . . Love Thy Neighbor If the temporal dimension fails to explain much about war, what about spatial relations? Are neighboring countries less likely than average to wind up fighting one another, or more likely? Either hypothesis seems defensible. Close neighbors often have interests in common and so might be expected to become allies rather than enemies. On the other hand, neighbors could also be rivals contending for a share of the same resources--or maybe the people next door are just plain annoying. The existence of civil wars argues that living together is no guarantee of amity. (And at the low end of the magnitude scale, people often murder their own kin.) Richardson's approach to these questions had a topological flavor. Instead of measuring the distance between countries, he merely asked whether or not they share a boundary. Then, in later studies, he refined this notion by trying to measure the length of the common boundary--which led to a fascinating digression. Working with maps at various scales, Richardson paced off the lengths of boundaries and coastlines with dividers, and realized that the result depends on the setting of the dividers, or in other words on the unit of measurement. A coastline that measures 100 steps of 10 millimeters each will not necessarily measure 1,000 steps of 1 millimeter each; it is likely to be more, because the smaller units more closely follow the zigzag path of the coast. This result appeared in a somewhat out-of-the-way publication; when Benoit Mandelbrot came across it by chance, Richardson's observation became one of the ideas that inspired Mandelbrot's theory of fractals. During the period covered by Richardson's study there were about 60 stable nations and empires (the empires being counted for this purpose as single entities). The mean number of neighbors for these states was about six (and Richardson offered an elegant geometric argument, based on Euler's relation among the vertices, edges and faces of a polyhedron, that the number must be approximately six, for any plausible arrangement of nations). Hence if warring nations were to choose their foes entirely at random, there would be about a 10 percent chance that any pair of belligerents would turn out to be neighbors. The actual proportion of warring neighbors is far higher. Of 94 international wars with just two participants, Richardson found only 12 cases in which the two combatants had no shared boundary, suggesting that war is mostly a neighborhood affair. But extending this conclusion to larger and wider wars proved difficult, mainly because the "great powers" are effectively everyone's neighbor. Richardson was best able to fit the data with a rather complex model assigning different probabilities to conflicts between two great powers, between a great power and a smaller state, and between two lesser nations. But rigging up a model with three parameters for such a small data set is not very satisfying. Furthermore, Richardson concluded that "chaos" was still the predominant factor in explaining the world's larger wars: The same element of randomness seen in the time-series analysis is at work here, though "restricted by geography and modified by infectiousness." [42]click for full image and caption [43]Figure 5. Web of wars is constructed from Richardson's data . . . What about other causative factors--social, economic, cultural? While compiling his war list, Richardson noted the various items that historians mentioned as possible irritants or pacifying influences, and then he looked for correlations between these factors and belligerence. The results were almost uniformly disappointing. Richardson's own suppositions about the importance of arms races were not confirmed; he found evidence of a preparatory arms race in only 13 out of 315 cases. Richardson was also a proponent of Esperanto, but his hope that a common language would reduce the chance of conflict failed to find support in the data. Economic indicators were equally unhelpful: The statistics ratify neither the idea that war is mainly a struggle between the rich and the poor nor the view that commerce between nations creates bonds that prevent war. The one social factor that does have some detectable correlation with war is religion. In the Richardson data set, nations that differ in religion are more likely to fight than those that share the same religion. Moreover, some sects seem generally to be more bellicose (Christian nations participated in a disproportionate number of conflicts). But these effects are not large. Mere Anarchy Loosed upon the World The residuum of all these noncauses of war is mere randomness--the notion that warring nations bang against one another with no more plan or principle than molecules in an overheated gas. In this respect, Richardson's data suggest that wars are like hurricanes or earthquakes: We can't know in advance when or where a specific event will strike, but we do know how many to expect in the long run. We can compute the number of victims; we just can't say who they'll be. This view of wars as random catastrophes is not a comforting thought. It seems to leave us no control over our own destiny, nor any room for individual virtue or villainy. If wars just happen, who's to blame? But this is a misreading of Richardson's findings. Statistical "laws" are not rules that govern the behavior either of nations or of individuals; they merely describe that behavior in the aggregate. A murderer might offer the defense that the crime rate is a known quantity, and so someone has to keep it up, but that plea is not likely to earn the sympathy of a jury. Conscience and personal responsibility are in no way diminished by taking a statistical view of war. [44]click for full image and caption [45]Figure 6. Long-term catalogue of global conflicts . . . What is depressing is that the data suggest no clear plan of action for those who want to reduce the prevalence of violence. Richardson himself was disappointed that his studies pointed to no obvious remedy. Perhaps he was expecting too much. A retired physicist reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica can do just so much toward securing world peace. But with larger and more detailed data sets, and more powerful statistical machinery, some useful lessons might emerge. There is now a whole community of people working to gather war data, many of whom trace their intellectual heritage back to Richardson and Quincy Wright. The largest such undertaking is the Correlates of War project, begun in the 1960s by J. David Singer of the University of Michigan. The COW catalogues, like Richardson's, begin in the post-Napoleonic period, but they have been brought up close to the present day and now list thousands of militarized disputes. Offshoots and continuations of the project are being maintained by Russell J. Leng of Middlebury College and by Stuart A. Bremer of Pennsylvania State University. Peter Brecke of the Georgia Institute of Technology has begun another data collection. His catalogue extends down to magnitude 1.5 (about 30 deaths) and covers a much longer span of time, back as far as a.d. 1400. The catalogue is approaching completion for 5 of 12 global regions and includes more than 3,000 conflicts. The most intriguing finding so far is a dramatic, century-long lull in the 1700s. Even if Richardson's limited data were all we had to go on, one clear policy imperative emerges: At all costs avoid the clash of the titans. However painful a series of brushfire wars may seem to the participants, it is the great global conflagrations that threaten us most. As noted above, the two magnitude-7 wars of the 20th century were responsible for three-fifths of all the deaths that Richardson recorded. We now have it in our power to have a magnitude-8 or -9 war. In the aftermath of such an event, no one would say that war is demographically irrelevant. After a war of magnitude 9.8, no one would say anything at all. ? Brian Hayes Bibliography * Ashford, Oliver M. 1985. Prophetor Professor?: The Life and Work of Lewis Fry Richardson. Bristol, Boston: Adam Hilger. * Cioffi-Revilla, Claudio A. 1990. The Scientific Measurement of International Conflict: Handbook of Datasets on Crises and Wars 1945?1988. Boulder and London: Lynne Reinner Publishers. * Richardson, Lewis F. 1960. Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. Edited by Quincy Wright and C. C. Lienau. Pittsburgh: Boxwood Press. * Richardson, Lewis F. 1960. Arms and Insecurity: A Mathematical Study of the Causes and Origins of War. Edited by Nicolas Rashevsky and Ernesto Trucco. Pittsburgh: Boxwood Press. * Richardson, Lewis F. 1961. The problem of contiguity: An appendix to Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. Yearbook of the Society for General Systems Research, Ann Arbor, Mich., Vol. VI, pp. 140?187. * Richardson, Lewis Fry. 1993. Collected Papers of Lewis Fry Richardson. Edited by Oliver M. Ashford, et al. New York: Cambridge University Press. * Richardson, Stephen A. 1957. Lewis Fry Richardson (1881-1953): A personal biography. Journal of Conflict Resolution 1:300-304. * Singer, J. David, and Melvin Small. 1972. The Wages of War, 1816-1965: A Statistical Handbook. New York: John Wiley. * Sorokin, Pitirim A. 1937. Social and Cultural Dynamics Vol. 3: Fluctuations of Social Relationships, War, and Revolution. New York: American Book Company. * Wilkinson, David. 1980. Deadly Quarrels: Lewis F. Richardson and the Statistical Study of War. Berkeley: University of California Press. * Wright, Quincy. 1965. A Study of War, with a Commentary on War Since 1942. Second edition. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press. References 28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1511/2002.1.10 From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 20 20:29:25 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 20 Aug 2005 16:29:25 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Jerry Coyne: The Case against Intelligent Design Message-ID: Jerry Coyne: The Case against Intelligent Design The Faith That Dare Not Speak Its Name http://www.tnr.com/user/nregi.mhtml?i=20050822&s=coyne082205 Post date: 08.11.05 Issue date: 08.22.05 [Responses to this from the intelligent designers are most welcome!] Of Pandas and People By Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon (Haughton Publishing Company, 170 pp., $24.95) I. Exactly eighty years after the Scopes "monkey trial" in Dayton, Tennessee, history is about to repeat itself. In a courtroom in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in late September, scientists and creationists will square off about whether and how high school students in Dover, Pennsylvania will learn about biological evolution. One would have assumed that these battles were over, but that is to underestimate the fury (and the ingenuity) of creationists scorned. The Scopes trial of our day--Kitzmiller, et al v. Dover Area School District et al--began innocuously. In the spring of 2004, the district's textbook review committee recommended that a new commercial text replace the outdated biology book. At a school board meeting in June, William Buckingham, the chair of the board's curriculum committee, complained that the proposed replacement book was "laced with Darwinism." After challenging the audience to trace its roots back to a monkey, he suggested that a more suitable textbook would include biblical theories of creation. When asked whether this might offend those of other faiths, Buckingham replied, "This country wasn't founded on Muslim beliefs or evolution. This country was founded on Christianity and our students should be taught as such." Defending his views a week later, Buckingham reportedly pleaded: "Two thousand years ago, someone died on a cross. Can't someone take a stand for him?" And he added: "Nowhere in the Constitution does it call for a separation of church and state." After a summer of heated but inconclusive wrangling, on October 18, 2004 the Dover school board passed, by a vote of six to three, a resolution that read: "Students will be made aware of gaps/problems in Darwin's theory and of other theories of evolution including, but not limited to, intelligent design. Note: Origins of Life is not taught." A month later, the Dover school district issued a press release revealing how the alternative of "intelligent design" was to be presented. Before starting to teach evolution, biology teachers were to read their ninth-grade students a statement, which included the following language: The Pennsylvania Academic Standards require students to learn about Darwin's Theory of Evolution and eventually to take a standardized test of which evolution is a part. Because Darwin's Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence.... Intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view. The reference book, Of Pandas and People, is available for students to see if they would like to explore this view in an effort to gain an understanding of what intelligent design actually involves. As is true with any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind. The results were dramatic but predictable. Two school board members resigned. All eight science teachers at Dover High School sent a letter to the school superintendent pointing out that "intelligent design is not science. It is not biology. It is not an accepted scientific theory." The biology teachers asked to be excused from reading the statement, claiming that to do so would "knowingly and intentionally misrepresent subject matter or curriculum," a violation of their code of professional standards. And so, in January of this year, all ninth-grade biology classes were visited by the assistant superintendent himself, who read the mandated disclaimer while the teachers and a few students left the room. Inevitably, the controversy went to the courts. Eleven Dover parents filed suit against the school district and its board of directors, asking that the "intelligent design" policy be rescinded for fostering "excessive entanglement of government and religion, coerced religious instruction, and an endorsement by the state of religion over non-religion and of one religious viewpoint over others." The plaintiffs are represented by the Philadelphia law firm of Pepper Hamilton, the Pennsylvania American Civil Liberties Union, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State; the defendants, by the Thomas More Law Center, a conservative Christian organization in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Why all the fuss about a seemingly inoffensive statement? Who could possibly object to students "keep[ing] an open mind" and examining a respectable-sounding alternative to evolution? Isn't science about testing theories against each other? The furor makes sense only in light of the tortuous history of creationism in America. Since it arose after World War I, Christianfundamentalist creationism has undergone its own evolution, taking on newer forms after absorbing repeated blows from the courts. "Intelligent design," as I will show, is merely the latest incarnation of the biblical creationism espoused by William Jennings Bryan in Dayton. Far from a respectable scientific alternative to evolution, it is a clever attempt to sneak religion, cloaked in the guise of science, into the public schools. The journey from Dayton to Dover was marked by a series of legal verdicts, only one of which, the Scopes trial, favored creationism. In 1925, John Scopes, a high school teacher, was convicted of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of "any theory that denies the Story of Divine Creation of Man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animal." The verdict was reversed on a technicality (the judge, instead of the jury, levied the $100 fine), so the case was never appealed. In the wake of Scopes, anti-evolution laws were passed in Mississippi and Arkansas, adding to those passed by Florida and Oklahoma in 1923. Although these laws were rarely enforced, evolution nonetheless quickly disappeared from most high school biology textbooks because publishers feared losing sales in the South, where anti-evolution sentiment ran high. In 1957, the situation changed. With the launch of Sputnik, Americans awoke to find that a scientifically advanced Soviet Union had beaten the United States into space. This spurred rapid revisions of science textbooks, some emphasizing biological evolution. But the anti- evolution statutes were still in force, and so some teachers using newer books were violating the law. One of these teachers, Susan Epperson, brought suit against the state of Arkansas for violating the Establishment Clause. She won the right to teach evolution, and Epperson v. Arkansas was upheld by the United States Supreme Court in 1968, only a year after Tennessee finally rescinded the Butler Act. Finally it was legal to teach evolution everywhere in America. The opponents of evolution proceeded to re-think their strategy, deciding that if they could not beat scientists, they would join them. They thus recast themselves as "scientific creationists," proposing an ostensibly non-religious alternative to the theory of evolution that might be acceptable in the classroom. But the empirical claims of scientific creationism--that the Earth is young (6,000 to 10,000 years old), that all species were created suddenly and simultaneously, that mass extinctions were caused by a great worldwide flood--bore a suspicious resemblance to creation stories in the Bible. This strategy was devised largely by Henry Morris, an engineering professor who headed the influential Institute for Creation Research in San Diego and helped to write the textbook Scientific Creationism. The book came in two versions: one purged of religious references for the public schools, the other containing a scriptural appendix explaining that the science came from interpreting the Bible literally. Scientific creationism proved a bust for two reasons. First, the "science" was ludicrously wrong. We have known for a long time that the Earth is 4.6 billion years old (the 6,000- to 10,000-year claim comes from biblical statements, including toting up the number of "begats") and that species were not created suddenly or simultaneously (not only do most species go extinct, but various groups appear at different times in the fossil record), and we have ample evidence for species' changing over time, as well as for fossils that illustrate large morphological transformations. Most risible was Scientific Creationism's struggle to explain the geological record as a result of a great flood: according to its account, "primitive" organisms such as fish would be found in the lowest layers, while mammals and more "advanced" species appeared in higher layers because they climbed hills and mountains to escape the rising waters. Why dolphins are found in the upper strata with other mammals is one of many facts that this ludicrous fantasy fails to explain. Scientific creationism also came to grief because its advocates did not adequately hide its religious underpinnings. In 1981, the Arkansas legislature passed an "equal time" bill mandating balanced treatment for "evolution science" and "creation science" in the classroom. The bill was quickly challenged in federal court by a group of religious and scientific plaintiffs led by a Methodist minister named William McLean. The defense was easily outgunned, with Judge William Overton quickly spotting biblical literalism underlying the scientific-creationist arguments. In a landmark opinion (and a masterpiece of legal argument), Overton ruled in McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education that the balanced-treatment act was unconstitutional, asserting that it violated the Establishment Clause in three ways: it lacked a secular legislative purpose, its primary effect was to advance religion, and it fostered excessive government entanglement with religion. McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education began a string of legal setbacks for scientific creationists. Five years later, in Edwards v. Aguillard, the Supreme Court held that Louisiana's "Creationism Act"-- an act that required the teaching of evolution in public schools to be balanced by instruction in "creation science"--was unconstitutional. In the last two decades, federal courts have also used the First Amendment to allow schools to prohibit teaching creationism and to ban school districts from requiring teachers to read evolution disclaimers similar to the one used in Dover, Pennsylvania. To get around these rulings, schools in Alabama, Arkansas, and Georgia began pasting warning stickers in biology textbooks, as if learning about evolution could endanger one's mental health. A recent specimen from Cobb County, Georgia reads: "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered." To laypeople--particularly those unfamiliar with the scientific status of evolution, which is actually a theory and a fact--the phrasing may seem harmless. But in 2005 a federal judge ordered the stickers removed. By singling out evolution as uniquely controversial among scientific theories, the stickers catered to religious biases and thus violated the First Amendment. But the creationists did not despair. They are animated, after all, by faith. And they are very resourceful. They came up with intelligent design. II. Intelligent design, or ID, is the latest pseudoscientific incarnation of religious creationism, cleverly crafted by a new group of enthusiasts to circumvent recent legal restrictions. ID comes in two parts. The first is a simple critique of evolutionary theory, to the effect that Darwinism, as an explanation of the origin, the development, and the diversity of life, is fatally flawed. The second is the assertion that the major features of life are best understood as the result of creation by a supernatural intelligent designer. To understand ID, then, we must first understand modern evolutionary theory (often called "neo-Darwinism" to take into account post- Darwinian modifications). It is important to realize at the outset that evolution is not "just a theory." It is, again, a theory and a fact. Although non-scientists often equate "theory" with "hunch" or "wild guess," the Oxford English Dictionary defines a scientific theory as "a scheme or system of ideas or statements held as an explanation or account of a group of facts or phenomena; a hypothesis that has been confirmed or established by observation or experiment, and is propounded or accepted as accounting for the known facts." In science, a theory is a convincing explanation for a diversity of data from nature. Thus scientists speak of "atomic theory" and "gravitational theory" as explanations for the properties of matter and the mutual attraction of physical bodies. It makes as little sense to doubt the factuality of evolution as to doubt the factuality of gravity. Neo-Darwinian theory is not one proposition but several. The first proposition is that populations of organisms have evolved. (Darwin, who used the word "evolved" only once in On the Origin of Species, called this principle "descent with modification.") That is, the species on earth today are the descendants of other species that lived earlier, and the change in these lineages has been gradual, taking thousands to millions of years. Humans, for example, evolved from distinctly different organisms that had smaller brains and probably lived in trees. The second proposition is that new forms of life are continually generated by the splitting of a single lineage into two or more lineages. This is known as "speciation." About five million years ago, a species of primates split into two distinct lineages: one leading to modern chimpanzees and the other to modern humans. And this ancestral primate itself shared a common ancestor with earlier primates, which in turn shared a common ancestor with other mammals. The earlier ancestor of all mammals shared an even earlier ancestor with reptiles, and so on back to the origin of life. Such successive splitting yields the common metaphor of an evolutionary "tree of life," whose root was the first species to arise and whose twigs are the millions of living species. Any two extant species share a common ancestor, which can in principle be found by tracing that pair of twigs back through the branches to the node where they meet. (Extinction, of course, has pruned some branches--pterodactyls, for example--which represent groups that died off without descendants.) We are more closely related to chimpanzees than to orangutans because our common ancestor with these primates lived five million versus ten million years ago, respectively. (It is important to note that although we share a common ancestor with apes, we did not evolve from living apes, but from apelike species that no longer exist. Similarly, I am related to my cousin, but the ancestors we share are two extinct grandparents.) The third proposition is that most (though not all) of evolutionary change is probably driven by natural selection: individuals carrying genes that better suit them to the current environment leave more offspring than individuals carrying genes that make them less adapted. Over time, the genetic composition of a population changes, improving its "fit" to the environment. This increasing fit is what gives organisms the appearance of design, although, as we shall see, the "design" can be flawed. These three propositions were first articulated in 1859 by Darwin in On the Origin of Species, and they have not changed substantially, although they have been refined and supplemented by modern work. But Darwin did not propose these ideas as pure "theory"; he also provided voluminous and convincing evidence for them. The weight of this evidence was so overwhelming that it crushed creationism. Within fifteen years, nearly all biologists, previously adherents of "natural theology," abandoned that view and accepted Darwin's first two propositions. Broad acceptance of natural selection came much later, around 1930. The overwhelming evidence for evolution can be found in many books (and on many websites). Here I wish to present just a few observations that not only support the neo-Darwinist account, but in so doing refute the alternative theory of creationism--that God specially created organisms and their attributes. Given the similarity between the claims of intelligent design and creationism, it is not surprising that these observations also refute the major tenets of ID. The fossil record is the most obvious place to search for evidence of evolution. Although the record was sparse in Darwin's time, there were already findings that suggested evolution. The living armadillos of South America bore a striking resemblance to fossil glyptodonts, extinct armored mammals whose fossils occurred in the same area. This suggested that glyptodonts and armadillos shared a common South American ancestry. And the record clearly displayed changes in the forms of life existing over large spans of time, with the deepest and oldest sediments showing marine invertebrates, with fishes appearing much later, and still later amphibians, reptiles, and mammals (along with the persistence of some groups found in earlier stages). This sequence of change was in fact established by creationist geologists long before Darwin, and was often thought to reflect hundreds of acts of divine creation. (This does not exactly comport with the account given in Genesis.) Yet evolution predicts not just successions of forms, but also genetic lineages from ancestors to descendants. The absence of such transitional series in the fossil record bothered Darwin, who called this "the most obvious and serious objection that can be urged against the theory." (He attributed the missing links, quite reasonably, to the imperfection of the fossil record and the dearth of paleontological collections.) But this objection is no longer valid. Since 1859, paleontologists have turned up Darwin's missing evidence: fossils in profusion, with many sequences showing evolutionary change. In large and small organisms, we can trace, through successive layers of the fossil record, evolutionary changes occurring in lineages. Diatoms get bigger, clamshells get ribbier, horses get larger and toothier, and the human lineage evolves bigger brains, smaller teeth, and increased efficiency at bipedal walking. Moreover, we now have transitional forms connecting major groups of organisms, including fish with tetrapods, dinosaurs with birds, reptiles with mammals, and land mammals with whales. Darwin predicted that such forms would be found, and their discovery vindicated him fully. It also destroys the creationist notion that species were created in their present form and thereafter remained unchanged. Darwin's second line of evidence comprised the developmental and structural remnants of past ancestry that we find in living species-- those features that Stephen Jay Gould called "the senseless signs of history." Examples are numerous. Both birds and toothless anteaters develop tooth buds as embryos, but the teeth are aborted and never erupt; the buds are the remnants of the teeth of the reptilian ancestor of birds and the toothed ancestor of anteaters. The flightless kiwi bird of New Zealand, familiar from shoe-polish cans, has tiny vestigial wings hidden under its feathers; they are completely useless, but they attest to the fact that kiwis, like all flightless birds, evolved from flying ancestors. Some cave animals, descended from sighted ancestors that invaded caves, have rudimentary eyes that cannot see; the eyes degenerated after they were no longer needed. A creator, especially an intelligent one, would not bestow useless tooth buds, wings, or eyes on large numbers of species. The human body is also a palimpsest of our ancestry. Our appendix is the vestigial remnant of an intestinal pouch used to ferment the hard- to-digest plant diets of our ancestors. (Orangutans and grazing animals have a large hollow appendix instead of the tiny, wormlike one that we possess.) An appendix is simply a bad thing to have. It is certainly not the product of intelligent design: how many humans died of appendicitis before surgery was invented? And consider also lanugo. Five months after conception, human fetuses grow a thin coat of hair, called lanugo, all over their bodies. It does not seem useful--after all, it is a comfortable 98.6 degrees in utero--and the hair is usually shed shortly before birth. The feature makes sense only as an evolutionary remnant of our primate ancestry; fetal apes also grow such a coat, but they do not shed it. Recent studies of the human genome provide more evidence that we were not created ex nihilo. Our genome is a veritable Gemisch of non- functional DNA, including many inactive "pseudogenes" that were functional in our ancestors. Why do humans, unlike most mammals, require vitamin C in our diet? Because primates cannot synthesize this essential nutrient from simpler chemicals. Yet we still carry all the genes for synthesizing vitamin C. The gene used for the last step in this pathway was inactivated by mutations forty million years ago, probably because it was unnecessary in fruit-eating primates. But it still sits in our DNA, one of many useless remnants testifying to our evolutionary ancestry. Darwin's third line of evidence came from biogeography, the study of the geographic distribution of plants and animals. I have already mentioned what Darwin called his "Law of Succession": living organisms in an area most closely resemble fossils found in the same location. This implies that the former evolved from the latter. But Darwin found his strongest evidence on "oceanic islands"--those islands, such as Hawaii and the Gal?pagos, that were never connected to continents but arose, bereft of life, from beneath the sea. What struck Darwin about oceanic islands--as opposed to continents or "continental islands" such as Great Britain, which were once connected to continents--was the bizarre nature of their flora and fauna. Oceanic islands are simply missing or impoverished in many types of animals. Hawaii has no native mammals, reptiles, or amphibians. These animals, as well as freshwater fish, are also missing on St. Helena, a remote oceanic island in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean. It seems that the intelligent designer forgot to stock oceanic (but not continental!) islands with a sufficient variety of animals. One might respond that this was a strategy of the creator, as those organisms might not survive on islands. But this objection fails, because such animals often do spectacularly well when introduced by humans. Hawaii has been overrun by the introduced cane toad and mongoose, to the detriment of its native fauna. Strikingly, the native groups that are present on these islands-- mainly plants, insects, and birds--are present in profusion, consisting of clusters of numerous similar species. The Gal?pagos archipelago harbors twenty-three species of land birds, of which fourteen species are finches. Nowhere else in the world will you find an area in which two-thirds of the birds are finches. Hawaii has similar "radiations" of fruit flies and silversword plants, while St. Helena is overloaded with ferns and weevils. Compared with continents or continental islands, then, oceanic islands have unbalanced flora and fauna, lacking many familiar groups but having an over- representation of some species. Moreover, the animals and the plants inhabiting oceanic islands bear the greatest similarity to species found on the nearest mainland. As Darwin noted when describing the species of the Gal?pagos, this similarity occurs despite a great difference in habitat, a fact militating against creationism: Why should the species which are supposed to have been created in the Gal?pagos Archipelago, and nowhere else, bear so plainly the stamp of affinity to those created in America? There is nothing in the conditions of life, in the geological nature of the islands, in their height or climate, or in the proportions in which the several classes are associated together, which resembles closely the conditions of the South American coast: in fact there is a considerable dissimilarity in all these respects. As the final peg in Darwin's biogeographic argument, he noted that the kinds of organisms commonly found on oceanic islands--birds, plants, and insects--are those that can easily get there. Insects and birds can fly to islands (or be blown there by winds), and the seeds of plants can be transported by winds or ocean currents, or in the stomachs of birds. Hawaii may have no native terrestrial mammals, but the islands do harbor one native aquatic mammal, the monk seal, and one native flying mammal, the hoary bat. In a direct challenge to creationists (and now also to advocates of ID), Darwin posed this rhetorical question: Though terrestrial mammals do not occur on oceanic islands, aerial mammals do occur on almost every island. New Zealand possesses two bats found nowhere else in the world: Norfolk Island, the Viti Archipelago, the Bonin Islands, the Caroline and Marianne Archipelagoes, and Mauritius, all possess their peculiar bats. Why, it may be asked, has the supposed creative force produced bats and no other mammals on remote islands? The answer is that the creative force did not produce bats, or any other creatures, on oceanic islands. All of Darwin's observations about island biogeography point to one explanation: species on islands descend from individuals who successfully colonized from the mainland and subsequently evolved into new species. Only the theory of evolution explains the paucity of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and freshwater fish on oceanic islands (they cannot get there), the radiation of some groups into many species (the few species that make it to islands find empty niches and speciate profusely), and the resemblance of island species to those from the nearest mainland (an island colonist is most likely to have come from the closest source). On the last 150 years, immense amounts of new evidence have been collected about biogeography, embryology, and, especially, the fossil record. All of it supports evolution. But support for the idea of natural selection was not so strong, and Darwin had no direct evidence for it. He relied instead on two arguments. The first was logical. If individuals in a population varied genetically (which they do), and some of this variation affected the individual's chance of leaving descendants (which seems likely), then natural selection would work automatically, enriching the population in genes that better adapted individuals to their environment. The second argument was analogical. Artificial selection used by breeders had wrought immense changes in plants and animals, a fact familiar to everyone. From the ancestral wolf, humans selected forms as diverse as Chihuahuas, St. Bernards, poodles, and bulldogs. Starting with wild cabbage, breeders produced domestic cabbage, broccoli, kohlrabi, kale, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts. Artificial selection is nearly identical to natural selection, except that humans rather than the environment determine which variants leave offspring. And if artificial selection can produce such a diversity of domesticated plants and animals in a thousand-odd years, natural selection could obviously do much more over millions of years. But we no longer need to buttress natural selection solely with analogy and logic. Biologists have now observed hundreds of cases of natural selection, beginning with the well-known examples of bacterial resistance to antibiotics, insect resistance to DDT, and HIV resistance to antiviral drugs. Natural selection accounts for the resistance of fish and mice to predators by making them more camouflaged, and for the adaptation of plants to toxic minerals in the soil. (A long list of examples may be found in Natural Selection in the Wild, by John Endler.) Moreover, the strength of selection observed in the wild, when extrapolated over long periods, is more than adequate to explain the diversification of life on Earth. Since 1859, Darwin's theories have been expanded, and we now know that some evolutionary change can be caused by forces other than natural selection. For example, random and non-adaptive changes in the frequencies of different genetic variants--the genetic equivalent of coin-tossing--have produced evolutionary changes in DNA sequences. Yet selection is still the only known evolutionary force that can produce the fit between organism and environment (or between organism and organism) that makes nature seem "designed." As the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky remarked, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." And so evolution has graduated from theory to fact. We know that species on earth today descended from earlier, different species, and that every pair of species had a common ancestor that existed in the past. Most evolutionary change in the features of organisms, moreover, is almost certainly the result of natural selection. But we must also remember that, like all scientific truths, the truth of evolution is provisional: it could conceivably be overturned by future investigations. It is possible (but unlikely!) that we could find human fossils co-existing with dinosaurs, or fossils of birds living alongside those of the earliest invertebrates 600 million years ago. Either observation would sink neo-Darwinism for good. When applied to evolution, the erroneous distinction between theory and fact shows why tactics such as the Dover disclaimer and the Cobb County textbook sticker are doubly pernicious. To teach that a scientific theory is equivalent to a "guess" or a "hunch" is deeply misleading, and to assert that "evolution is a theory, not a fact" is simply false. And why should evolution, alone among scientific theories, be singled out with the caveat "This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered"? Why haven't school boards put similar warnings in physics textbooks, noting that gravity and electrons are only theories, not facts, and should be critically considered? After all, nobody has ever seen gravity or an electron. The reason that evolution stands alone is clear: other scientific theories do not offend religious sensibilities. III. Given the copious evidence for evolution, it seems unlikely that it will be replaced by an alternative theory. But that is exactly what intelligent-design creationists are demanding. Is there some dramatic new evidence, then, or some insufficiency of neo-Darwinism, that warrants overturning the theory of evolution? The question is worth asking, but the answer is no. Intelligent design is simply the third attempt of creationists to proselytize our children at the expense of good science and clear thinking. Having failed to ban evolution from schools, and later to get equal classroom time for scientific creationism, they have made a few adjustments designed to sneak Christian cosmogony past the First Amendment. And these adjustments have given ID a popularity never enjoyed by earlier forms of creationism. Even the president of the United States has lent a sympathetic ear: George W. Bush recently told reporters in Texas that intelligent design should be taught in public schools alongside evolution because "part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought." Articles by IDers, or about their "theory," regularly appear in mainstream publications such as The New York Times. Why have the new image and the new approach been more successful? For a start, IDers have duped many people by further removing God from the picture, or at least hiding him behind the frame. No longer do creationists mention a deity, or even a creator, but simply a neutral- sounding "intelligent designer," as if it were not the same thing. This designer could in principle be Brahma, or the Taoist P'an Ku, or even a space alien; but ID creationists, as will be evident to anybody who attends to all that they say, mean only one entity: the biblical God. Their problem is that invoking this deity in science classes in public schools is unconstitutional. So IDers never refer openly to God, and people unfamiliar with the history of their creationist doctrine might believe that there is a real scientific theory afoot. They use imposing new terms such as "irreducible complexity," which make their arguments seem more sophisticated than those of earlier creationists. In addition, many IDers have more impressive academic credentials than did earlier scientific creationists, whose talks and antics always bore a whiff of the revival meeting. Unlike scientific creationists, many IDers work at secular institutions rather than at Bible schools. IDers work, speak, and write like trained academics; they do not come off as barely repressed evangelists. Their ranks include Phillip Johnson, the most prominent spokesperson for ID, and a retired professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley; Michael Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University; William Dembski, a mathematician-philosopher and the director of the Center for Theology and Science at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; and Jonathan Wells, who has a doctorate in biology from Berkeley. All of these proponents, save Johnson, are senior fellows at the Center for Science and Culture (CSC), a division of the Discovery Institute, which is a conservative think tank in Seattle. (Johnson is the "program advisor" to the CSC.) The CSC is the nerve center of the intelligentdesign movement. Its origins are demonstrably religious: as described by the Discovery Institute, the CSC was designed explicitly "to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies" and "to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God." Between them, these IDers have published more than a dozen books about intelligent design (Johnson alone has produced eight), which in turn have provoked numerous responses by scientists. Let us examine one of their most influential volumes, the textbook called Of Pandas and People. This is the book recommended by the Dover school district as a "reference book" for students interested in learning about intelligent design. If Pandas and People is a textbook designed as an antidote to the evolution segment of high school biology classes. It was first published in 1989. By repackaging and updating a subset of traditional young-earth creationist arguments while avoiding taking a stand on any issues that might divide creationists (such as the age of the Earth), it marked the beginning of the modern intelligentdesign movement. By presenting the case for ID, it is supposedly designed to give students a "balanced perspective" on evolution. Although the second edition of Pandas is now twelve years old (a third edition, called Design of Life, is in the works), it accurately presents to students the major arguments for ID. Pandas carefully avoids mentioning God (except under aliases such as "intelligent designer," "master intellect," and so on); but a little digging reveals the book's deep religious roots. One of its authors, Percival Davis, wrote explicitly about his religious beliefs in his book A Case for Creation, co-authored with Wayne Frair: "Truth as God sees it is revealed in the pages of Scripture, and that revelation is therefore more certainly true than any human rationalism. For the creationist, revealed truth controls his view of the universe to at least as great a degree as anything that has been advanced using the scientific method." Its other author, Dean Kenyon, has written approvingly of scientific creationism. Pandas is published by the Haughton Publishing Company of Dallas, a publisher of agricultural books, but the copyright is held by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE) in Richardson, Texas. Although the FTE website scrupulously avoids mentioning religion, its articles of incorporation note with stark clarity that its "primary purpose is both religious and educational, which includes, but is not limited to, proclaiming, preaching, teaching, promoting, broadcasting, disseminating, and otherwise making known the Christian gospel and understanding of the Bible and the light it sheds on the academic and social issues of our day." In a fund-raising letter for the proposed third edition of Pandas, Jon Buell, president of the FTE, is equally frank about his goals: We will energetically continue to publish and propel these strategic tools in the battle for the minds and hearts of the young.... Yes, most young Americans are exposed to numerous gospel presentations. But the fog of the alien world view deadens their responses. This is why we have to inundate them with a rational, defensible, wellargued Judeo-Christian world view. FTE's carefully-researched books do just that. Charles Thaxton, the "academic editor" of Pandas, is the director of curriculum research for FTE and a fellow of the CSC. In a proto-ID book on the origin of life, Thaxton argued that "Special Creation by a Creator beyond the cosmos is a plausible view of origin science." Given Pandas' pedigree and the affiliations of its authors, it is not surprising that the book is nothing more than disguised creationism. What is surprising is the transparency of this disguise. Despite the efforts of IDers to come up with new anti-Darwinian arguments, Pandas turns out to be nothing more than recycled scientific creationism, with most of the old arguments buffed up and proffered as new. (Unlike scientific creationism, however, Pandas adopts a studied neutrality toward the facts of astronomy and geology, instead of denying them outright.) Pandas' discussion of the Earth's age is a prime example of the book's creationist roots, and of its anti-scientific attitude. If the Earth were young--say, the 6,000 to 10,000 years old posited by "young earth" biblical creationists--then evolution would be false. Life simply could not have originated, evolved, and diversified in such a short time. But we now know from several independent and mutually corroborating lines of evidence that the Earth is 4.6 billion years old. All geologists agree on this. So what is Pandas' stance on this critical issue? The book merely notes that design proponents "are divided on the issue of the earth's age. Some take the view that the earth's history can be compressed into a framework of thousands of years, while others adhere to the standard old earth chronology." Well, what's the truth? This equivocation is an attempt to paper over a strong disagreement between young-earth creationists and old-earth creationists, both of whom have marched under the banner of ID. It is typical of creationists to exploit disagreements between evolutionists as proof that neo-Darwinism is dead while at the same time hiding their own disagreements from the public. This equivocation about the fundamental fact of Earth's age does not bode well for the textbook's treatment of the fossil record. Indeed, in this area the authors continue their misrepresentations. Their basic premise is the old creationist argument that organisms appeared simultaneously and have remained largely unchanged ever since. Pandas says of the fossil record that "fully formed organisms appear all at once, separated by distinct gaps." That's not exactly true. Different types of organisms appear in a distinct sequence supporting evolution. The first fossils of living organisms, bacteria, appear 3.5 billion years ago, followed two billion years later by algae, the first organisms having true cells with a nucleus containing distinct chromosomes. Then, 600 million years ago, we see the appearance of rudimentary animals with shells, and many soft-bodied marine organisms. Later, in the Cambrian period, about 543 million years ago, a number of groups arose in a relatively short period of time, the so-called "Cambrian explosion." ("Short period" here means geologically short, in this case 10 million to 30 million years). The Cambrian groups include mollusks, starfish, arthropods, worms, and chordates (including vertebrates). And in some cases, such as worms, modern groups do not just spring into being, but increase in complexity over millions of years. Creationists have always made much of the "Cambrian explosion," and IDers are no exception. The relatively sudden appearance of many groups seems to support the Genesis view of creation. But IDers--and Pandas--fail to emphasize several facts. First, the Cambrian explosion was not "sudden"; it took many millions of years. (We still do not understand why many groups originated in even this relatively short time, although it may reflect an artifact: the evolution of easily fossilized hard parts suddenly made organisms capable of being fossilized.) Moreover, the species of the Cambrian are no longer with us, though their descendants are. But over time, nearly every species that ever lived (more than 99 percent of them) has gone extinct without leaving descendants. Finally, many animals and plants do not show up as fossils until well after the Cambrian explosion: bony fishes and land plants first appeared around 440 million years ago, reptiles around 350 million years ago, mammals around 250 million years ago, flowering plants around 210 million years ago, and human ancestors around 5 million years ago. The staggered appearance of groups that become very different over the next 500 million years gives no support to the notion of instantaneously created species that thereafter remain largely unchanged. If this record does reflect the exertions of an intelligent designer, he was apparently dissatisfied with nearly all of his creations, repeatedly destroying them and creating a new set of species that just happened to resemble descendants of those that he had destroyed. Pandas also makes much of the supposed absence of transitional forms: the "missing" links between major forms of life that, according to evolutionary theory, must have existed as common ancestors. Their absence, claim creationists, is a major embarrassment for evolutionary biology. Phillip Johnson's influential book Darwin on Trial, which appeared in 1993, particularly emphasizes these gaps, which, IDers believe, reflect the designer's creation of major forms ex nihilo. And there are indeed some animals, such as bats, that appear in the fossil record suddenly, without obvious ancestors. Yet in most cases these gaps are certainly due to the imperfection of the fossil record. (Most organisms do not get buried in aquatic sediments, which is a prerequisite for fossilization.) And species that are soft-bodied or have fragile bones, such as bats, degrade before they can fossilize. Paleontologists estimate that we have fossils representing only about one in a thousand of all the species that ever lived. In its treatment of evolutionary transitions, Pandas is again guilty of distortion. Paleontologists have uncovered many transitional forms between major groups, almost more than we have a right to expect. Pandas simply ignores--or waves away--these "non-missing links," stating that "we cannot form a smooth, unambiguous transitional series linking, let's say, the first small horse to today's horse, fishes to amphibians, or reptiles to mammals." This is flatly wrong. All three cited transitions (and others) are well documented with fossils. Moreover, the transitional forms appear at exactly the right time in the fossil record: after the ancestral forms already existed, but before the "linked" later group had evolved. Take one example: the link between early reptiles and later mammals, the so-called mammal-like reptiles. Three hundred fifty million years ago, the world was full of reptiles, but there were no mammals. By 250 million years ago, mammals had appeared on the scene. (Fossil reptiles are easily distinguished from fossil mammals by a complex of skeletal traits including features of the teeth and skull.) Around 275 million years ago, forms appear that are intermediate in skeletal traits between reptiles and mammals, in some cases so intermediate that the animals cannot be unambiguously classified as either reptiles or mammals. These mammal-like reptiles, which become less reptilian and more mammalian with time, are the no-longer-missing links between the two forms, important not only because they have the traits of both forms, but also because they occur at exactly the right time. One of these traits is worth examining in detail because it is among the finest examples of an evolutionary transition. This trait is the "chewing" hinge where the jaw meets the skull. In early reptiles (and their modern reptilian descendants), the lower jaw comprises several bones, and the hinge is formed by the quadrate bone of the skull and the articular bone of the jaw. As mammal-like reptiles become more mammalian, these hinge bones become smaller, and ultimately the jaw hinge shifts to a different pair of bones: the dentary (our "jawbone") and the squamosal, another bone of the skull. (The quadrate and articular, much reduced, moved into the middle ear of mammals, forming two of the bones that transmit sounds from the eardrum to the middle ear.) The dentary-squamosal articulation occurs in all modern mammals, the quadrate-articular in modern reptiles; and this difference is often used as the defining feature of these groups. Like earlier creationist tracts, Pandas simply denies that this evolution of the jaw hinge occurred. It asserts that "there is no fossil record of such an amazing process," and further notes that such a migration would be "extraordinary." This echoes the old creationist argument that an adaptive transition from one type of hinge to another by means of natural selection would be impossible: members of a species could not eat during the evolutionary period when their jaws were being unhinged and then rehinged. (The implication is that the intelligent designer must have done this job instantaneously and miraculously.) But we have long known how this transition happened. It was easily accomplished by natural selection. In 1958, fossil: the mammal-like reptile Diarthrognathus broomi. D. broomi has, in fact, a double jaw joint with two hinges--the reptilian one and the mammalian one! Obviously, this animal could chew. What better "missing link" could we find? It should embarrass IDers that so many of the missing links cited by Pandas as evidence for supernatural intervention are no longer missing. Creationists make a serious mistake when using the absence of transitional forms as evidence for an intelligent designer. In the last decade, paleontologists have uncovered a fairly complete evolutionary series of whales, beginning with fully terrestrial animals that became more and more aquatic over time, with their front limbs evolving into flippers and their hind limbs and pelvis gradually reduced to tiny vestiges. When such fossils are found, as they often are, creationists must then punt and change their emphasis to other missing links, continually retreating before the advance of science. As for other transitional forms, IDers simply dismiss them as aberrant fossils. Pandas characterizes Homo erectus and other probable human ancestors as "little more than apes." But this is false. While H. erectus has a skull with large brow ridges and a braincase much smaller than ours, the rest of its skeleton is nearly identical to that of modern humans.The famous fossil Archaeopteryx, a small dinosaur-like creature with teeth and a basically reptilian skeleton but also with wings and feathers, is probably on or closely related to the line of dinosaurs that evolved into birds. But Pandas dismisses this fossil as just an "odd-ball" type, and laments instead the lack of the unfossilizable: "If only we could find a fossil showing scales developing the properties of feathers, or lungs that were intermediate between the very different reptilian and avian lungs, then we would have more to go on." It is again a typical creationist strategy that when skeletons of missing links turn up, creationists ignore them and insist that evidence of intermediacy be sought instead in the soft parts that rarely fossilize. In sum, the treatment of the fossil evidence for evolution in Pandas is shoddy and deceptive, and offers no advance over the discredited arguments of scientific creationism. In contrast to its long treatment and dismissal of the fossil record, Pandas barely deals with evidence for evolution from development and vestigial traits. The best it can do is note that vestigial features can have a function, and therefore are not really vestigial. The vestigial pelvic bones and legs of the transitional whale Basilosaurus, which were not connected to the skeleton, may have functioned as a guide for the penis during mating. Such a use, according to the authors of Pandas, means that the legs and pelvis "were not vestigial as originally thought." But this argument is wrong: no evolutionist denies that the remnants of ancestral traits can retain some functionality or be co-opted for other uses. The "penis guide" has every bone in the mammalian pelvis and rear leg in reduced form--femur, tibia, fibula, and digits. In Basilosaurus, nearly all of these structures lay within the body wall, and most parts were immobile. Apparently the intelligent designer had a whimsical streak, choosing to construct a sex aid that looked exactly like a degenerate pelvis and set of hind limbs. And what about the strong evidence for evolution from biogeography? About this Pandas, like all creationist books, says nothing. The omission is strategic. It would be very hard for IDers to give plausible reasons why an "intelligent" designer stocked oceanic islands with only a few types of animals and plants--and just those types with the ability to disperse from the nearest mainland. Biogeography has always been the Achilles' heel of creationists, so they just ignore it. IV. Although intelligent design rejects much of the evidence for evolution, it still admits that some evolutionary change occurs through natural selection. This change is what Pandas calls "microevolution," or "small scale genetic changes, observable in organisms." Such microevolutionary changes include the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, changes in the proportion of different-colored moths due to predation by birds, and all changes wrought by artificial selection. But Pandas hastens to add that microevolution gives no evidence for the origin of diverse types of organisms, because "these limited changes do not accumulate the way Darwinian evolutionary theory requires in order to produce macro changes. The process that produces macroevolutionary changes [defined here as "large scale changes, leading to new levels of complexity"] must be different from any that geneticists have studied so far." So, though one can use selection to transform a wolf into either a Chihuahua or a St. Bernard, that is merely microevolution: they are all still dogs. And a DDT-resistant fly is still a fly. Pandas thus echoes the ID assertion that natural selection cannot do more than create microevolutionary changes: "It cannot produce new characteristics. It only acts on traits that already exist." But this is specious reasoning. As we have noted, fossils already show that "macro change," as defined by Pandas, has occurred in the fossil record (the evolution of fish into amphibians, and so on). And if breeders have not turned a dog into another kind of animal, it is because dog breeding has been going on for only a few thousand years, while the differences between dogs and cats, for example, have evolved over more than ten million years. No principle of evolution dictates that evolutionary changes observed during a human lifetime cannot be extrapolated to much longer periods. In fact, Pandas admits that the fruit flies of Hawaii--a diverse group of more than 300 species--have all evolved from a common ancestor. We now know that this common ancestor lived about 20 million years ago. The species of Hawaiian flies differ in many traits, including size, shape, ecology, color pattern, mating behavior, and so on. One can in fact make a good case that some of the fly species differ more from each other than humans differ from chimps. Why, then, do IDers assert that chimps and humans (whose ancestor lived only 5 million years ago) must have resulted from separate acts of creation by the intelligent designer, while admitting that fruit flies evolved from a common ancestor that lived 20 million years ago? The answer is that humans must at all costs not be lumped in with other species, so as to protect the biblical status of humans as uniquely created in God's image. According to Pandas, the theory of "limits to evolution" is a scientific one: "The idea of intelligent design does not preclude the possibility that variation within species occurs, or that new species are formed from existing populations . . . the theory of intelligent design does suggest that there are limits to the amount of variation that natural selection and random change mechanisms can produce." But there is nothing in the theory of intelligent design that tells us how far evolution can go. This "thus far and no further" view of evolution comes not from any scientific findings of ID; it comes from ID's ancestor, scientific creationism. Scientific Creationism notes that "the creation model . . . recognizes only the kind as the basic created unit, in this case, mankind," and a chart contrasting evolution with the "creation model" says that the former predicts "new kinds appearing," while the latter says "no new kinds appearing." But what is a "kind"? No creationist has ever defined it, though they are all very sure that humans and apes are different "kinds." In fact, the notion that evolution and creation have operated together, with the latter creating distinct "kinds," was nicely rebutted by Darwin in On the Origin of Species: Several eminent naturalists . . . admit that they [evolved species] have been produced by variation, but they refuse to extend the same view to other and very slightly different forms. Nevertheless they do not pretend that they can define, or even conjecture, which are the created forms of life, and which are those produced by secondary laws. They admit variation as a vera causa in one case, they arbitrarily reject it in another, without assigning any distinction in the two cases. The day will come when this will be given as a curious illustration of the blindness of preconceived opinion. These authors seem no more startled at a miraculous act of creation than at an ordinary birth. But do they really believe that at innumerable periods in the earth's history certain elemental atoms have been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues? Do they believe that at each supposed act of creation one individual or many were produced? Were all the infinitely numerous kinds of animals and plants created as egg or seed, or as full grown? and in the case of mammals, were they created bearing the false marks of nourishment from the mother's womb? Although naturalists very properly demand a full explanation of every difficulty from those who believe in the mutability of species, on their own side they ignore the whole subject of the first appearance of species in what they consider reverent silence. In fact, the biblical appendix of Scientific Creationism shows that the term "kind" derives from the biblical notion of created kinds: The Scriptures are very clear in their teaching that God created all things as He wanted them to be, each with its own particular structure, according to His own sovereign purposes. The account of Genesis 1, for example, indicates that at least ten major categories of organic life were specially created "after his kind." . . . Finally, man "kind" was created as another completely separate category. The phrase "after his kind" occurs ten times in this first chapter of Genesis. There is thus a clear line of descent from the story of Genesis to the ID notion of evolutionary limits, a line charted by what Darwin called "the blindness of preconceived opinion." Until IDers tell us what the limits to evolution are, how they can be ascertained, and what evidence supports these limits, this notion cannot be regarded as a genuinely scientific claim. V. IDers make one claim that they tout as truly novel, a claim that has become quite popular. It is the idea that organisms show some adaptations that could not be built by natural selection, thus implying the need for a supernatural creative force such as an intelligent designer. These adaptations share a property called "irreducible complexity," a characteristic discussed in Pandas but defined more explicitly by Michael Behe in 1996 in his book Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution: "By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning." Many man-made objects show this property: Behe cites the mousetrap, which would not work if even one part were removed, such as the catch, the spring, the base, and so on. Pandas mentions a car engine, which will not work if one removes the fan belt, spark plugs, distributor cap, or any of numerous individual parts. A famous example of an irreducibly complex system in the biological realm is the "camera" eye of humans and other vertebrates. The eye has many parts whose individual removal would render the organ useless, including the lens, retina, and optic nerve. The reason IDers love "irreducibly complex" features of organisms is that natural selection is powerless (or so they claim) to create such features. As Behe notes: An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly ... by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional.... Since natural selection can only choose systems that are already working, then if a biological system cannot be produced gradually it would have to arise as an integrated unit, in one fell swoop, for natural selection to have anything to act on. "One fell swoop," of course, implies that the feature must have been produced by the miraculous intervention of the intelligent designer. But this argument for intelligent design has a fatal flaw. We have realized for decades that natural selection can indeed produce systems that, over time, become integrated to the point where they appear to be irreducibly complex. But these features do not evolve by the sequential addition of parts to a feature that becomes functional only at the end. They evolve by adding, via natural selection, more and more parts into an originally rudimentary but functional system, with these parts sometimes co-opted from other structures. Every step of this process improves the organism's survival, and so is evolutionarily possible via natural selection. Consider the eye. Creationists have long maintained that it could not have resulted from natural selection, citing a sentence from On the Origin of Species: "To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree." But in the next passage, invariably omitted by creationists, Darwin ingeniously answers his own objection: Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. Thus our eyes did not suddenly appear as full-fledged camera eyes, but evolved from simpler eyes, having fewer components, in ancestral species. Darwin brilliantly addressed this argument by surveying existing species to see if one could find functional but less complex eyes that not only were useful, but also could be strung together into a hypothetical sequence showing how a camera eye might evolve. If this could be done--and it can--then the argument for irreducible complexity vanishes, for the eyes of existing species are obviously useful, and each step in the hypothetical sequence could thus evolve by natural selection. A possible sequence of such changes begins with pigmented eye spots (as seen in flatworms), followed by an invagination of the skin to form a cup protecting the eyespot and allowing it to better localize the image (as in limpets), followed by a further narrowing of the cup's opening to produce an improved image (the nautilus), followed by the evolution of a protective transparent cover to protect the opening (ragworms), followed by coagulation of part of the fluid in the eyeball into a lens to help focus the light (abalones), followed by the co-opting of nearby muscles to move the lens and vary the focus (mammals). The evolution of a retina, an optic nerve, and so on would follow by natural selection. Each step of this transitional "series" confers increased adaptation on its possessor, because it enables the animal to gather more light or to form better images, both of which aid survival. And each step of this process is exemplified by the eye of a different living species. At the end of the sequence we have the camera eye, which seems irreducibly complex. But the complexity is reducible to a series of small, adaptive steps. Now, we do not know the precise order in which the components of the camera eye evolved--but the point is that the appearance of "irreducible complexity" cannot be an argument against neo-Darwinism if we can document a plausible sequence in which the complexity can arise from a series of adaptive steps. The "irreducible complexity" argument is not, in fact, completely novel. It descends, with modification, from the British theologian William Paley, who in 1802 raised the famous "argument from design" in his book Natural Theology. Paley argued that just as finding a watch on the ground implies a conscious designer (the watchmaker), so finding an equally complex organism implies a cosmic designer (God). But the eye is not a watch. The human eye, though eminently functional, is imperfect--certainly not the sort of eye an engineer would create from scratch. Its imperfection arises precisely because our eye evolved using whatever components were at hand, or produced by mutation. Since our retina evolved from an everted part of the brain, for example, the nerves and blood vessels that attach to our photoreceptor cells are on the inside rather than the outside of the eye, running over the surface of the retina. Leakage of these blood vessels can occlude vision, a problem that would not occur if the vessels fed the retina from behind. Likewise, to get the nerve impulses from the photocells to the brain, the different nerves must join together and dive back through the eye, forming the optic nerve. This hole in the retina creates a blind spot in the eye, a flaw that again would be avoidable with a priori design. The whole system is like a car in which all the wires to the dashboard hang inside the driver's compartment instead of being tucked safely out of sight. Evolution differs from a priori design because it is constrained to operate by modifying whatever features have evolved previously. Thus evolution yields fitter types that often have flaws. These flaws violate reasonable principles of intelligent design. IDers tend to concentrate more on biochemistry than on organs such as the eye, citing "irreducibly complex" molecular systems such as the mechanism for blood-clotting and the immune system. Like the eye, these systems supposedly could not have evolved, since removal of any step in these pathways would render the entire pathway non- functional. (This biochemical complexity is the subject of Behe's book Darwin's Black Box.) Discussing the blood-clotting system in its sixth chapter (partially written by Behe), Pandas asserts that "like a car engine, biological systems can only work after they have been assembled by someone who knows what the final result will be." This is nonsense. As we have seen in the case of the eye, biological systems are not useful only at the end of a long evolutionary process, but during every step of that process. And biochemical systems--like all adaptations created by natural selection--are not assembled with foresight. Whatever useful mutations happen to arise get folded into the system. There is no doubt that many biochemical systems are dauntingly complex. A diagram of the blood-clotting pathway looks like a complicated circuit board, with dozens of proteins interacting with one another to one end: healing a wound. And the system seems irreducibly complex, because without any of several key proteins, the blood would not clot. Yet such biochemical systems evolved in the same way that the eye evolved, by adding parts successively and adaptively to simpler, functioning systems. It is more difficult to trace the evolution of biochemical pathways than of anatomical structures because the ancestral metabolic pathways are no longer present. But biologists are beginning to provide plausible scenarios for how "irreducibly complex" biochemical pathways might have evolved. As expected, these systems involve using bits co-opted from other pathways originally having different functions. (Thus, one of the enzymes in the blood-clotting system also plays a role in digestion and cell division.) In view of our progress in understanding biochemical evolution, it is simply irrational to say that because we do not completely understand how biochemical pathways evolved, we should give up trying and invoke the intelligent designer. If the history of science shows us anything, it is that we get nowhere by labeling our ignorance "God." VI. Insofar as intelligent-design theory can be tested scientifically, it has been falsified. Organisms simply do not look as if they had been intelligently designed. Would an intelligent designer create millions of species and then make them go extinct, only to replace them with other species, repeating this process over and over again? Would an intelligent designer produce animals having a mixture of mammalian and reptilian traits, at exactly the time when reptiles are thought to have been evolving into mammals? Why did the designer give tiny, non-functional wings to kiwi birds? Or useless eyes to cave animals? Or a transitory coat of hair to a human fetus? Or an appendix, an injurious organ that just happens to resemble a vestigial version of a digestive pouch in related organisms? Why would the designer give us a pathway for making vitamin C, but then destroy it by disabling one of its enzymes? Why didn't the intelligent designer stock oceanic islands with reptiles, mammals, amphibians, and freshwater fish, despite the suitability of such islands for these species? And why would he make the flora and fauna on those islands resemble that of the nearest mainland, even when the environments are very different? Why, about a million years ago, would the designer produce creatures that have an apelike cranium perched atop a humanlike skeleton? And why would he then successively replace these creatures with others having an ever-closer resemblance to modern humans? There are only two answers to these questions: either life resulted not from intelligent design, but from evolution; or the intelligent designer is a cosmic prankster who designed everything to make it look as though it had evolved. Few people, religious or otherwise, will find the second alternative palatable. It is the modern version of the old argument that God put fossils in the rocks to test our faith. The final blow to the claim that intelligent design is scientific is its proponents' admission that we cannot understand the designer's goals or methods. Behe owns up to this in Darwin's Black Box: "Features that strike us as odd in a design might have been placed there by the designer for a reason--for artistic reasons, to show off, for some as-yetundetectable practical purpose, or for some unguessable reason--or they might not." And, discussing skeletal differences between placental and marsupial mammals, Pandas notes: Why were not the North American placentals given the same bones? Would an intelligent designer withhold these structures from placentals if they were superior to the placental system? At present we do not know; however, we all recognize that an engineer can choose any of several different engineering solutions to overcome a single design problem. An intelligent designer might reasonably be expected to use a variety (if a limited variety) of design approaches to produce a single engineering solution, also. Even if it is assumed that an intelligent designer did indeed have a good reason for every decision that was made, and for including every trait in each organism, it does not follow that such reasons will be obvious to us. Well, if we admit that the designer had a number of means and motives, which can be self-contradictory, arbitrary, improvisatory, and "unguessable," then we are left with a theory that cannot be rejected. Every conceivable observation of nature, including those that support evolution, becomes compatible with ID, for the ways of the designer are unfathomable. And a theory that cannot be rejected is not a scientific theory. If IDers want to have a genuinely scientific theory, let them propose a model that can be rigorously tested. Given its lack of rigor, one might expect that ID theory would not inspire much scientific research. And there is virtually none. Despite the claims of ID to be a program of research, its adherents have published only one refereed paper supporting ID in a scientific journal: a review of ID by Stephen C. Meyer, the director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, which appeared in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. This paper merely rehashes ID arguments for why natural selection and evolution cannot explain the diversity of life and then asserts that intelligent design is the only alternative. It distorts the evolutionary literature it purports to review, and it neither advances new scientific arguments nor suggests any way that ID better explains patterns in nature. Not surprisingly, the Council of the Biological Society of Washington later disowned the paper because it did "not meet the scientific standards of the Proceedings." The gold standard for modern scientific achievement is the publication of new results in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. By that standard, IDers have failed miserably. As William Dembski himself noted, "There are good and bad reasons to be skeptical of intelligent design. Perhaps the best reason is that intelligent design has yet to establish itself as a thriving scientific research program." IDers desperately crave scientific respectability, but it is their own theory that prevents them from attaining it. Thus, while IDers demand that evolutionists produce thousands of transitional fossils and hundreds of detailed scenarios about the evolution of biochemical pathways, they put forth no observations supporting the plausibility of a supernatural designer, nor do they show how appeal to such a designer could explain the fossil record, embryology, and biogeography better than neo-Darwinism. Herbert Spencer could have been describing ID when he declared that "those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution as not being adequately supported by facts, seem to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all. Like the majority of men who are born to a given belief, they demand the most rigorous proof of any adverse belief, but assume that their own needs none." Finally, the reliance of ID on supernatural intervention means that the enterprise cannot be seen, strictly speaking, as scientific. In his rejection of scientific creationism in McLean v. Arkansas, Judge Overton described the characteristics of good science: (1) It is guided by natural law; (2) It has to be explanatory by reference to natural law; (3) It is testable against the empirical world; (4) Its conclusions are tentative, i.e., are not necessarily the final word; and (5) It is falsifiable. By invoking the repeated occurrence of supernatural intervention by an intelligent designer to create new species and new traits, ID violates criteria 1 and 2; and in its ultimate reliance on Christian dogma and God, it violates criteria 3, 4, and 5. In candid moments, usually when writing for or speaking to a religious audience, IDers admit the existence not only of supernatural acts as a part of their theory, but also of Christian supernatural acts. In a foreword to a book on creationism, Johnson wrote: "The intelligent design movement starts with the recognition that 'In the beginning was the Word,' and 'In the beginning God created.' Establishing that point isn't enough, but it is absolutely essential to the rest of the gospel message." And here is Dembski writing in Touchstone, a Christian magazine: "The world is a mirror representing the divine life.... Intelligent design readily embraces the sacramental nature of physical reality. Indeed intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory." Indeed, in the manuscript draft of the first edition of Pandas, the terms "creationism," "creationist," and "creation" are used repeatedly instead of the equivalent ID terms, and "creationism" is defined identically to "intelligent design" in the published version. Nothing gives a clearer indication that one ancestor of this textbook was the Bible. It is clear, then, that intelligent design did not arise because of some long-standing problems with evolutionary theory, or because new facts have called neoDarwinism into question. ID is here for only one reason--to act as a Trojan horse poised before the public schools: a seemingly secular vessel ready to inject its religious message into the science curriculum. The contents of Pandas, and of the other writings of IDers, are simply a cunning pedagogical ploy to circumvent legal restrictions against religious creationism. (With any luck, though, the publicity will backfire. Last month The York Dispatch in Pennsylvania reported that the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, the group that publishes this textbook and others designed to present "a Christian perspective," wanted to intervene in the Dover lawsuit. According to John Buell, the foundation's president, the association of ID with creationism "would make the book radioactive," and his outfit could lose as much as $525,000 in sales.) ID is part of what Johnson candidly calls the "wedge strategy," a carefully crafted scheme that begins with the adoption of intelligent design as an alternative theory to evolution, after which ID will edge out evolution until it is the only view left, after which it will become full-blown biblical creationism. The ultimate goal is to replace naturalist science with spiritualist thinking, and the method is to hammer the wedge of ID into science at its most vulnerable point: public education. In Johnson's own words: So the question is: "How to win?" That's when I began to develop what you now see full-fledged in the "wedge" strategy: "stick with the most important thing," the mechanism and the building up of information. Get the Bible and the Book of Genesis out of the debate because you do not want to raise the so-called Bible-science dichotomy. Phrase the argument in such a way that you can get it heard in the secular academy and in a way that tends to unify the religious dissenters. That means concentrating on, "Do you need a Creator to do the creating, or can nature do it on its own?" and refusing to get sidetracked onto other issues, which people are always trying to do. Johnson was even more explicit in 1999 in remarks to a conference on "Reclaiming America for Christ." Rob Boston reported Johnson's remarks in Church & State magazine: Johnson calls his movement "The Wedge." The objective, he said, is to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic, thus shifting the debate from creationism v. evolution to the existence of God v. the nonexistence of God. From there people are introduced to "the truth" of the Bible and then "the question of sin" and finally "introduced to Jesus." Other major figures in the ID movement have been equally clear about their religious motivations. Here is Dembski: But there are deeper motivations. I think at a fundamental level, in terms of what drives me in this is that I think God's glory is being robbed by these naturalistic approaches to biological evolution, creation, the origin of the world, the origin of biological complexity and diversity. When you are attributing the wonders of nature to these mindless material mechanisms, God's glory is getting robbed. And here is Jonathan Wells, a member of Reverend Moon's Unification Church: Father's [Reverend Moon's] words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle. To these people really believe in intelligent design? There is no reason to think otherwise. They are not lying for their cause, but sincerely hold that life on earth reflects a succession of miracles worked by a supernatural agent. In fact, they view evolutionists as the duplicitous ones. In an interview in The Sacramento Bee in 1991, Johnson proclaimed that "scientists have long known that Darwinism is false. They have adhered to the myth out of self-interest and a zealous desire to put down God." Never mind that many scientists, including evolutionists, are religious. Given the overwhelming evidence for evolution and the lack of evidence for ID, how can intelligent people hold such views? Is their faith so strong that it blinds them to all evidence? It is a bit more complicated than that. After all, many theologians and religious people accept evolution. The real issues behind intelligent design-- and much of creationism--are purpose and morality: specifically, the fear that if evolution is true, then we are no different from other animals, not the special objects of God's creation but a contingent product of natural selection, and so we lack real purpose, and our morality is just the law of the jungle. Tom DeLay furnished a colorful example of this view on the floor of the House of Representatives on June 16, 1999. Explaining the causes of the massacre at Columbine High School, he read a sarcastic letter in a Texas newspaper that suggested that "it couldn't have been because our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud." The notion that naturalism and materialism are the enemies of morality and a sense of human purpose, and that religion is their only ally, is pervasive in the writings of IDers. As Johnson noted, "Once God is culturally determined to be imaginary, then God's morality loses its foundation and withers away." Nancy Pearcey, a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, summarizes why evolution disturbs so many Americans: Why does the public care so passionately about a theory of biology? Because people sense intuitively that there's much more at stake than a scientific theory. They know that when naturalistic evolution is taught in the science classroom, then a naturalistic view of ethics will be taught down the hallway in the history classroom, the sociology classroom, the family life classroom, and in all areas of the curriculum. Even some parents in Dover, though opposed to teaching ID in school, worry that learning evolution will erode the Christian values that they are trying to instill in their children. But the acceptance of evolution need not efface morality or purpose. Evolution is simply a theory about the process and patterns of life's diversification, not a grand philosophical scheme about the meaning of life. Philosophers have argued for years about whether ethics should have a basis in nature. There is certainly no logical connection between evolution and immorality. Nor is there a causal connection: in Europe, religion is far less pervasive than in America, and belief in evolution is more widespread, but somehow the continent remains civilized. Most religious scientists, laymen, and theologians have not found the acceptance of evolution to impede living an upright, meaningful life. And the idea that religion provides the sole foundation for meaning and morality also cannot be right: the world is full of skeptics, agnostics, and atheists who live good and meaningful lives. Barring a miracle, the Dover Area School District will lose its case. Anyone who bothers to study ID and its evolution from earlier and more overtly religious forms of creationism will find it an unscientific, faith-based theory ultimately resting on the doctrines of fundamentalist Christianity. Its presentation in schools thus violates both the Constitution and the principles of good education. There is no secular reason why evolutionary biology, among all the sciences, should be singled out for a school-mandated disclaimer. But the real losers will be the people of Dover, who will likely be saddled with huge legal bills and either a substantial cut in the school budget or a substantial hike in property taxes. We can also expect that, if they lose, the IDers will re-group and return in a new disguise even less obviously religious. I await the formation of the Right to Teach Problems with Evolution Movement. IDers have been helped by Americans' continuing doubts about the truth of evolution. According to a Gallup poll taken last year, 45 percent of Americans agree with the statement, "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years." Asked if evolution is well supported by evidence, 35 percent of Americans said yes, 35 percent said no, and 29 percent said they lack the knowledge to reply. As a rationalist, I cannot help but believe that the first group would swell were Americans to be thoroughly taught the evidence for evolution, which is rarely done in public high schools. I have seen creationist students become evolutionists when they learn about biogeography or examine the skulls of mammal-like reptiles. What we need in the schools is not less teaching of evolution but more. In the end, many Americans may still reject evolution, finding the creationist alternative psychologically more comfortable. But emotion should be distinguished from thought, and a "comfort level" should not affect what is taught in the science classroom. As Judge Overton wrote in his magisterial decision striking down Arkansas Act 590, which mandated equal classroom time for "scientific creationism": The application and content of First Amendment principles are not determined by public opinion polls or by a majority vote. Whether the proponents of Act 590 constitute the majority or the minority is quite irrelevant under a constitutional system of government. No group, no matter how large or small, may use the organs of government, of which the public schools are the most conspicuous and influential, to foist its religious beliefs on others. JERRY COYNE is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. RELATED LINKS Creations Intelligent design is an expression of sentiment, not an exercise of reason. Majority Rules What the religious right and radical multiculturalists have in common. ? web only Evolutionary War Do leading conservative pundits and thinkers believe in evolution? We asked them. web only From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 20 20:29:52 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 20 Aug 2005 16:29:52 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Hedgehog Review: Amy Henderson: From Barnum to Bling Bling Message-ID: Amy Henderson: From Barnum to Bling Bling: The Changing Face of Celebrity Culture THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/hh/henderson.html [I am wildly enthusiastic about this publication and am reading all back issues at the rate of an essay a day. Back up the tree to find out more about the journal. One issue is neither online nor in print, and I'll go xerox it next month when we make our annual trip to Charlottesville. [Each issue of Hedghog Review deals with a topic about deep cultural change. The writers, perceptive as they are, are almost uniformly 20th century leftists, and sometimes their articles are merely silly. No room at all for those who think genetic differences matter! I'll urge affirmative action for conservatives and sociobiologists for future issues. The problem with them is that they mostly want to infuse their "message" in everything they write. This is slowly changing. [I do not know who or what a bling bling is and did not find out from the article.] Summary from the "Magazine and Journal Reader" feature of the daily bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.8.12 http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/08/2005081201j.htm A glance at the current issue of The Hedgehog Review: Changing perceptions of heroes Americans used to embrace heroes, such as George Washington, on the basis of achievement and gentility, but they now choose celebrities, like the American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson, on account of personality, writes Amy Henderson, a historian at the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery. The growth of the media, immigration, and urbanization at the beginning of the 20th century fueled the change, she writes. In the republic's early days, Americans mythologized national heroes as men of virtue, self-reliance, and achievement to compensate for the country's short history. Washington was one of those "Great Men on a Pedestal," Ms. Henderson writes. By the 1850s, authors and essayists such as James Fenimore Cooper and Ralph Waldo Emerson furthered that view by inventing the "American Adam," a hero admired for his innocence, individuality, and idealism, Ms. Henderson writes. But the communications revolution, combined with the growth of immigration and cities, replaced that character-driven definition of heroes with the personality-driven one of today. "The 'genteel tradition' that had been the core of America's mainstream culture dissolved in this new urban stew, replaced by a vernacular culture that rose from the streets," Ms. Henderson writes. Vaudeville, movies, magazines, newspapers, radio, and, now, cable television all helped form today's celebrity culture, where entertainers dominate. Today's stars appeal to niche audiences, not the public at large. There is also less of a barrier between "heroes" and everyday people, in part because of the rise of reality television. Instead of casting "reverential and upward-looking" gazes upon celebrities, Americans now view them from an "eye-to-eye" level -- a shift Ms. Henderson calls "an immense psychological sea change." The article, "From Barnum to 'Bling Bling': The Changing Face of Celebrity Culture," is available online at http://www.virginia.edu/iasc/hh/henderson.html --Jamie Schuman --------------------- Amy Henderson, a historian at the Smithsonians National Portrait Gallery, specializes in film, music, media history, and biography. Her books include Exhibiting Dilemmas: Issues of Representation at the Smithsonian; Red, Hot & Blue: A Smithsonian Salute to the American Musical; and On the Air: Pioneers of American Broadcasting. She has curated numerous exhibitions including: The TIME of Our Lives; Champions of American Sport; Opera: The Grand Interpreters; Hollywood Glamour Photographs; and Red, Hot & Blue. Showman P. T. Barnum set the stage for modern celebrity culture by opening the curtain on mass entertainment in the mid-nineteenth century. He dazzled in an era before technology could broadcast performancebefore the advent of the recording, radio, and motion picture industries; before the heyday of advertising; before the mass distribution of photography in rotogravure sections of the Sunday newspapers. Yet somehow he ignored these constraints and created such popular culture events as the establishment of the American Museum in New York in 1841, the introduction of General Tom Thumb shortly thereafter, the orchestration of Swedish songbird Jenny Linds celebrated 18511852 American tour, the organization of The Greatest Show on Earth (a traveling circus/menagerie/museum) in 1871, and the creation ten years later, with James Bailey, of the Barnum & Bailey Circus. His American Museum on Broadway in particular showcased Barnums love of humbug in such wildly diverse entertainments as industrious fleas, automatons, jugglers, ventriloquists, living statuary, tableaux, gypsies, albinos, giants, dwarfs, models of Niagara, American Indians. It was my monomania, he said in his autobiography, to make the Museum the town wonder and town talk. And this he did with astonishing ingenuity: my puffing was more persistent, my posters more glaring, my pictures more exaggerated, my flags more patriotic. It worked brilliantly.^1 The bravado Barnum used to create his wondrous celebrities, illusions, and spectacles injected ballyhoo into the rarified air of Americas earlier devotion to Great Men on a Pedestal. Lacking millennia of history as a nation, Americans of the Revolutionary republic fashioned a mythic national character out of military heroes and eminent statesmen who embodied the ideals of virtue, self-reliance, and achievement. By mid-twentieth century, this heroic pedestal was claimed not by politicians and generals but by sports stars and movie legendsby personality rather than character.^2 This shift, reflecting the cultural changes wrought by the communications revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and by the rise of immigration and urbanization between the 1890s and 1920s, says a great deal about the nations continuing need for self-definition, and about the culture that contributed to the search for it. In his groundbreaking book The Image, Daniel Boorstin described this metamorphosis as one from traditional larger-than-life heroes known for their achievement to celebrity-personalities recognized for their well-knownness in a society enamored of pseudo-events.^3 By the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, the changing face of fame existed squarely at eye level, lacking any pretense of pedestal altogether: postmodern pseudo-celebrity blips flooded the airwaves with reality television and Americans eagerly clawed their way to fame as Apprentices and American Idols. Yet flash and spectacle remain crucial components of celebrity, as exemplified today by bling blingthe diamond-studded, showy rapper style that has recently won approval by the Oxford English Dictionary.^4 From Revolutionary Hero to American Adam Heroes of the Revolutionary era were invoked to give the nation a sense of historical legitimacy. If, as Milton wrote, Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise,^5 then it was a spur to industry and virtue. Above all others, George Washington stood as the great embodiment of national virtue, the symbol of the nations essential worthiness. Heroes of this era were gentlemen, scholars, and patriotstraditional representatives of such basic social institutions as the state, the military, and the churchand their lives served as examples. Literary historian R. W. B. Lewis has written that the heroic image contrived between 1820 and 1860 was that of an American Adam,^6 a figure of innocence and promise who was, as Emerson defined him, the simple genuine self against the whole world.^7 In an age optimistic about an indigenous culture-in-the-making, the nations novelists, poets, essayists, critics, historians, and preachers all entered into the discourse with gusto, seeking to construct not only a national narrative, but to create that epics protagonist. The Adamic hero, freed from the past and boasting such intrinsic characteristics as self-reliance, virtue, and achievement, would become the central figure in the quest for national legitimacy. James Fennimore Cooper notably invented Natty Bumppo, the selfless, stoic, and enduring hero who has been described as timeless and sturdily innocent, and the essential American soul.^8 The conceptual distance separating Revolutionary heroes from their mid-nineteenth century counterparts was indiscernible. Core values remained, as Emerson demonstrated in extolling the democratic central man who was the source of all national vitality.^9 Elsewhere he depicted history in terms of representative men^10 --a sensibility that would not have been alien to earlier generations. It was only in the later nineteenth century, with the revolution in communications technology, the rise of a substantial monied class, and the emergence of a mass urban landscape, that the nations heroic vision evolved into a new stage. The Communications Revolution The look of fame itself changed with what Daniel Boorstin has termed the Graphic Revolution, the advent both of mechanical means of image reproduction and of the facility for mass diffusion of information. The emergence of photography and chromolithography in post-Civil War America led to an explosive growth in such mass publications as newspapers and magazines. The first truly mass urban newspapers appeared in the 1880s and were made possible by high-speed presses, the linotype, halftone photo reproduction, and the emergence of news-gathering organizations like the Associated Pressall of which made the daily newspaper the central supplier of national and world news. The circulation of daily papers increased 400% between 1870 and 1900, partly as a result of technology and partly because of rising literacy rates and the growth of leisure time.^11 The new magazines like McClures that appeared in the 1890s also played a role in enlarging the popular imagination, thereby redefining ideals of fame, success, and national heroism. At centurys end Americas most-admired figures were hero-inventors like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Italian &eactute;migr? Guglialmo Marconi. Financial wizards such as J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller (either captains of industry or robber barons, depending on your perspective) were idolized for fighting their way to Darwinian peaks of capitalist success/excess. Immigration, the Melting Pot, and the New Urban Landscape But then the look of fame shifted again, turning full face in the twentieth century. The new eras heroes were activists who muckraked the old: figures such as Theodore Roosevelt rode the crest of change and attempted to change the cultural context, busting trusts and monopolies to leaven the social landscape while elevating the United States to a heightened role in the international order. Journalist William Allen White wrote in his autobiography that that decade which climaxed in 1912 was a time of tremendous change in our national life. The American people were melting down old heroes and recasting the mold in which heroes were made.^12 This sentiment was echoed in Israel Zangwills hit 1908 play, The Melting Pot, which depicted America as Gods Crucible, the great Melting-Pot, where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming.^13 Between 1890 and the 1920s, twenty-three million new immigrants arrived on Americas shores. The genteel tradition that had been the core of Americas mainstream culture dissolved in this new urban stew, replaced by a vernacular culture that rose from the streets. The sounds and rhythms of this new culture were captured best by the rising entertainment industry: indeed, the most successful performing art of the time was vaudevilleliterally, the voice of the city. Magazines and newspapers trumpeted the phenomenon: one article in the late 1880s proclaimed: It is remarkable how much attention the stage and things pertaining to it are receiving nowadays from the magazines. Twenty years ago, it was argued, such a thing would have been thought indecorous, but drama now makes such a large part of the life of society that it has become a topic of conversation among all classes.^14 No longer indecorous, entertainment had become decidedly mainstream. Advertising the entertainment at his Opera House, vaudeville impresario Tony Pastor assured his patrons that his Temple of Amusement was in fact The Great Family Resort of the City where heads of families can bring their Ladies and children. Good order was observed at all times, and there were strict rules against peanut feasts and boisterous applause.^15 In the 1920s, cultural critic Gilbert Seldes rhapsodized about the lively artsincluding jazz, musicals, radio, and motion picturesthat were creating an American culture to match the countrys new immigrant, urban personality. Broadway flourished, and one of its leading lights, George Gershwin, composed staccato-paced, syncopated rhythms that helped define the Jazz Age. It was a highly visual culture as well. In 1915, poet Vachel Lindsay wrote of the increasingly hieroglyphic civilization that characterized the rise of American modernism.^16 Times Square and Broadways Great White Way were blanketed by extravagant displays of signs and blinking lights that bespoke what one chronicler called a staggering machine of desire.^17 And who would emerge as the dominant symbol of modernism? Media-generated celebrities whose popularity was achieved via the mass media of radio, recordings, and motion pictures. The Emergence of Celebrity Celebrity became a measure of success in a culture preoccupied with personality. In biographical articles that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers from 1901 to 1914, 74% of the subjects came from traditional fields such as politics, business, and the professions. But from 1922 until 1941, over half came from the world of entertainment: sports figures like Babe Ruth and Joe Louis, movie stars like Gloria Swanson and Charlie Chaplin.^18 The machinery providing mass information in the broadcasting, recording, and film industries created a ravenous market for celebrity culture: media-generated fame became a ragingand lastingpopular vogue. Celebrities were able to broach all cultural levels. Between 1906 and 1920, Metropolitan Opera stars Enrico Caruso and Geraldine Farrar were the companys most successful box office draws. But their popularity transcended Golden Horseshoe audiences, as newspapers and periodicals fanned their fame and enormously lucrative sales placed their recordings in millions of households. Farrar even went to Hollywood in 1915 to star in such Cecil B. DeMille spectaculars as a silent version of Carmen, and Joan the Woman. Motion pictures helped make celebrity culture a national pastime. Though early flickers and back-alley lantern shows were considered slightly sleazy, by the teens movies had achieved a middle-class respectability. Whereas early film actors remained anonymous, the public began to lobby for its box office favorites, and by 1915 there were such authentic stars as Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks. In the twenties and increasingly with the advent of talkies, movie celebrities came to represent the visual quintessence of glamour. Stars such as Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, and Greta Garbo glowed with glamourdraped in diamonds and wrapped in silk, feathers, and fur, they were silvered beings worshipped by what Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard would call all those little people out there in the dark. By the late 1920s, each of the major studios had its own portrait gallery where studio photographers created a style of portraiture that crystallized stardom. Armed with banks of lights, large format cameras, retouching pencils, but above all an aesthetic of glamour, they coaxed celluloid icons from mere flesh and blood. In the Depression, the American public responded exuberantly to this larger-than-life celebrity. Fan magazines like Photoplay documented star activities (or at least the studios version) with gushing stories about stars at homewhat they ate, what their beauty secrets were, what pets they pampered, what cars they drove, what they wore. Fabric stores sold patterns of favorite star dresses for at-home seamstresses to copy, as in the phenomenally successful dress Adrian designed for Joan Crawford in the 1932 movie Letty Lynton: in addition to countless Butterick patterns of this puffed-sleeve, cinched waist dress, over 500,000 copies of the dress were sold at Macys alone!^19 And how many women peroxided their hair ? la Harlow, or later adopted Veronica Lakes peekaboo look? The Advent of the Broadcast Industry The advent of the broadcast industry in the 1920s marked another quantum leap in the cultivation of celebrity culture. While the film industry expanded in response to popular demand and the recording industry enjoyed a 600% sales increase between 1933 and 1938, radio became an everyday medium for mass culture. A household presence, an average radio in 1934 cost about $35, and 60% of all American households had at least one set.^20 And unlike records, radio was live: entertainment and information were available at the touch of the dial. Radio stars like Rudy Vallee, Jack Benny, Molly Goldberg, and Burns and Allen became virtual members of the family. While entertainers dominated the airwaves, broadcasting created political celebrities as well. Franklin D. Roosevelts election in 1932 coincided with radios own coming of age, and he proved himself a master of this ubiquitous medium. Of FDRs fireside chats, a New York newspaper reporter noted that, while painting a verbal picture expansive enough for a museum mural, Roosevelt reduced it to the proportions of a miniature hanging cozily on the wall of a living room.^21 Others thought that radio would purify politics. In 1928 Mississippi Senator Pat Harrison waxed that the venomous darts (of the demagogue) cannot pass through the airan optimism soon dispelled by the likes of Father Charles E. Coughlin, who won an enormous following in the 1930s by using radio to spread an increasingly proto-fascist brand of politics. ^22 In its early decades, television vastly expanded broadcastings impact: the Army-McCarthy hearings, political conventions, and the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates established televisions center stage significance. Radio and televisioneven before the advent of cable and 24/7 coveragehad become the essential means for communicating political messages. Contemporary Celebrity Culture Those two factorscable and 24/7 coveragehave transformed contemporary celebrity culture. Whereas earlier celebrity was broadly encompassing, encouraging general agreement at least in mainstream culture, contemporary celebrity is carefully niched, appealing not to wide swaths of society but to minute slivers. The consequences of this narrow-casting range from a fundamentally decentralized and trivialized culture of special interests to a society that is polarized on such national issues as red/blue politics and gay rights. Another consequence of contemporary celebrity harkens back to the ballyhoo of Barnum and his gleeful use of illusion and spectacle to make humbug out of reality. Boorstin found contemporary media-generated celebrity dependent on pseudo-events, and French sociologist Jean Baudrillard has argued that a culture dominated by simulacra is not capable of discriminating between reality and the illusion or simulation of reality. The popularity of reality television where participantsregardless of talentare convinced of their own celebrity clearly continues the tradition of humbug. Instead of Major Bowes gong, Simon tells them they are pitiful, or the Donald declaims, Youre fired! Do they believe in their fame fallibility? Of course not. Contemporary celebrity is eons from an age when heroes were placed on pedestals: today, rather than reverential and upward-looking, the perspective is eye-to-eyean immense psychological sea change. The disposable culture spawned by todays 24/7 media seems relentless, devouring anything in its path while leaving its audience permanently unsated. But the show will always go on: bling bling! [blackHR.gif] ^1 Quoted in Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973) 40, 5354. ^2 See Warren Susman, Personality and the Making of Twentieth Century Culture, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984) 271?85. ^3 Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Atheneum, 1971) 57. ^4 See www.mtv.com/news/articles/1471629/20030430/bg.jhtml?headlines=true. ^5 John Milton, Lycidas, The New Oxford Book of English Verse, 12501950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972) 294. ^6 R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1955) 110. ^7 Lewis vi. ^8 Lewis 34. ^9 F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941) ^10 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men (London: Dent, 1901). ^11 Boorstin 57 and passim. ^12 William Allen White, The Autobiography of William Allen White (New York: Macmillan, 1946) 428. ^13 Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot: A Drama in Four Parts (New York: Macmillan, 1908) 33. ^14 See Theatre Scrapbooks, 18771903 , vol. 3: article Concerning the Stage, c. 1890, University of Virginia Manuscript Room. ^15 Amy Henderson and Dwight Bowers, Red, Hot & Blue: A Smithsonian Salute to American Musicals (Washington: Smithsonian Press, 1996) 10. ^16 Vachel Lindsay, quoted in Susman xxvi. ^17 Quoted in William Leach, Brokers and the New Corporate Industrial Order, Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World, ed. William R. Taylor (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1991) 99. ^18 Leo Lowenthal, Literature, Popular Culture, and Society (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1961) 11014. ^19 Howard Gutner, Gowns by Adrian: The MGM Years 19281941 (New York: Abrams, 2001) 120. ^20 Cited in Amy Henderson, On the Air: Pioneers of American Broadcasting (Washington: Smithsonian Press, 1988) 22. ^21 Henderson, On the Air, 186. ^22 Henderson, On the Air, 188. From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 20 20:30:17 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 20 Aug 2005 16:30:17 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] J. Sports Sciences: A natural history of athleticism, health and longevity Message-ID: A natural history of athleticism, health and longevity Journal of Sports Sciences, 1998, 16, S31? S45 [This is the crucial part, lifted from the article: "Estimates of added life gained (to age 80) from a physically active way of living, as compared with a sedentary life, was from 1 to > 2 years. For each hour that men were physically active, they got to live that hour over again plus one or two additional hours (Paffenbarger et al., 1986)." [Adobe 7 now converts PDF to txt, but, as you can see, it sometimes does a horrible job of it, like running across columns. E-mail me for the PDF to get the graphs and tables.] RALPH S.PAFFENBARGER,JR1,2* and I.-MIN LEE2 Division of Epidemiology, Department ofHealth Research and Policy, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford,CA, and Department of Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health,Boston,MA,USA Longitudinal observations on the sports play,social habits and health status of 52,000 men who entered Harvard College or the University of Pennsylvania between 1916 and 1950 have afforded means of identifying causes of disease and death. These observations were then translated into the effect of sports and physical exercise on health and longevity. Student sports play in college predicted a decreased risk of developing cardiovascular disease (CVD) at least up to age 50 years. Questionnaire surveys showed physical exercise (sports play, walking and stair climbing) in middle age to be inversely related to the later development of CVD and early death. In a 10-year follow-up between 1962 and 1972, alumni aged 35? 74 years who expended > 2000 kcal week -1 (8.4 MJ week -1) in such activities had a 25% reduced risk of CVD and death compared with less active men. But, the 'protective effect' of early athleticism waned unless a physically active life was maintained. In contrast, sedentary students who took up an active life were at a lower risk of CVD and death than former student athletes who gave up or reduced their physical activities in middle age. A total of 17,815 Harvard alumni aged 45? 84 years were followed from a 1977 questionnaire survey through 1992, with 4399 deaths occurring. Death rates declined with increased levels of total activity (estimated in kilocalories), and declined also with increased intensity of effort measured as from none, to light,to moderately vigorous or vigorous sports play.Death rates at any given quantity of physical exercise were lower for men playing moderately intense sports than for less vigorous men. Over the age range, in the 16-year follow-up, Harvard alumni playing moderately vigorous or more intense sports gained 1.5 years by age 90 compared with less active men. Keywords: athleticism, health, lifeway habits, longevity, physical activity. [snip for bad conversion from PDF to txt. Acrobat 7 is doing a poor job!] Despite these histories, scientific evidence suYcient to meet twentieth-century standards has been hard to come by. The health issues of adequate physical activity are still being explored and debated by clinicians, physiologists, dietitians, epidemiologists and others. If anything, the issues have become more complex and inconsistent. More machines have been devised to do our work and carry us about, and many of our jobs have become so 'soft' that we can use computers and robots to do them for us while we play bowls or watch television! Most heavy labour in particular has been eliminated. Never before has there been so little physical activity among so many people as in the Western World today. The adverse effects of these developments on public health became increasingly obvious as infectious diseases were brought under control, and cardiovascular disease rapidly gained ascendancy. An American physician from St. Louis, writing in German (Hammer, 1878; Nuland, 1994) in 1878, had described the relation of clinical symptoms to resulting pathological findings of myocardial infarction at necropsy of one of his patients. While Rudolf Virchow, Edward Jenner and others had previously described ischaemia in connection with arteriosclerosis, there seemed to be a rising tide of myocardial infarction that was first clearly defined clinically by J.B. Herrick in 1912 (Herrick, 1912). In 1922, I. Sivertsen and A.W. Dahlstrom classified men in Minnesota according to occupational physical activity and observed that death rates declined with increasing physical activity in the job (Silversten and Dahlstrom, 1922). Yet in 1939, when O.F. Hedley reported that cardiovascular disease mortality in Philadelphia was higher for white-collar workers than for labourers, the mortality gap was not attributed to their differences in physical activity (Hedley, 1939). The antecedents of modern-day exercise science and sports medicine may have begun in the mid-1800s at Oxford and Cambridge with concern for the health and longevity of rugby players and oarsmen, true 'gentleman-amateurs' (Park, 1997). The prevailing belief regarding vigorous exercise had not changed from the time of the ancients, namely that it was harmful (Morgan, 1873). However, studies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century oarsmen from English universities and those of the Eastern United States of America suggested the opposite; that is, the life expectancy of these men tended to exceed that of insured or general populations (Hartley and Llewellyn, 1939; Yamaji and Shephard, 1977). Studies of other sportsmen (e.g. track-and-field athletes; rugby, football and baseball players; cricketers; cross-country skiers, etc.) failed to show that they died earlier than non-athletes (Rook, 1954). Indeed, other studies even showed sportsmen to live longer (Pomeroy and White, 1958). Famed demographer-statistician Louis I. Dublin conducted an extensive review of 4976 university athletes ? participants in baseball, football, crew, track and 'minor sports' ? from 10 American colleges. In 1928, he concluded that, because of selection bias and an inability to adjust for confounding elements, it was 'not easy to draw final conclusions, [but] the group of college athletes studied presented a favourable [longevity] picture' (Dublin, 1928, 1932). The disease experience and length of life of men who were athletes in their youth had attracted interest over the decades despite the fact that, whatever the findings, interpretation was often uncertain, even confusing. The fact that men commonly adopted or avoided athletics suited to their size, strength, coordination, health and desires, whether self-selected or encouraged by others, made it diYcult to draw conclusions from epidemiological studies on the role of exercise, or its lack of a role, in the development of, say, cardiovascular disease or survival. Some examples of these uncertainties follow: Michigan State University athletes born between 1855 and 1919 experienced no appreciable difference in longevity as compared with classmates (Montoye et al., 1956). Apart from violent deaths (especially military action and accidents), there were no differences in the causes of death. Extension of studies of these same Michigan State athletes versus classmates suggested that moderate levels of aerobic activity might reduce the risk of hypertension and cardiovascular disease, thus leading to longer life (Quinn et al., 1990). Tokyo University athletes were reported to live longer than their classmates, including medical graduates (Ishiko, 1967a,b). Danish athletic champions born between 1880 and 1910 had a 39% lower risk of death than the general male population when aged 25? 50 years, but similar risks when aged 50? 64 and 65? 80 years; the rates of causes of death were also similar (Schnohr, 1971). Harvard and Yale University oarsmen matriculating between 1882 and 1902 lived 61? 4 years longer than randomly selected classmates (Prout, 1972). Finnish champion skiers born between 1845 and 1910 lived 3? 4 years longer than the general male population (Karvonen et al., 1974). Studies of athletes who attended Harvard College between 1880 and 1916 were followed for longevity and causes of death (Polednak, 1972). 'Major' university athletes were the shortest lived, by 1? 3 years, in relation to 'minor' athletes and recreational athletes in each of three birth decades. Major athletes died from coronary heart disease (CHD) significantly earlier than others. In most comparisons of university athletes with non- athletes, or of sportsmen versus less physically active individuals, the subjects self-selected themselves into differing levels of physical activity, yet almost no attention has been paid to the reason why they made the choice. Also, investigators have often been unable to account for potential confounding elements, both personal characteristics and other ways of living. A comparison of subsequent disease and death rates of athletes with non-athletic students or with insured lives, or with general populations, is insuYcient or often misleading. A further weakness of these early studies is that they concerned host and environmental conditions that existed as much as a century ago. Nevertheless, these shortcomings do not lessen the importance of examining critically the available data, the methods used, and their interpretation so as to uncover limitations that must be placed on the conclusions. More recent observations of the effect of sports play on length of life were conducted on New Zealand international rugby payers as compared with New Zealand life tables for males. The life expectancy of All Black players was the same as for the general population, but non-Maori All Blacks lived almost 10 years longer than Maori All Blacks (Beaglehole and Stewart, 1983). Survival curves and standardized mortality ratios for US professional baseball players were very similar to those of the male general population (Waterbor et al., 1988). Dutch male long-distance skaters experienced a lower mortality rate than the age-comparable general population, but the data suggested that competitive racers experienced higher death rates than noncompetitive skaters (van Saase et al., 1990). Finnish male world-class athletes were compared with a sample of age-and area-matched Finnish Defence forces conscripts. As contrasted with the reference population, endurance sportsmen lived an extra 5.7 years; team sports players, jumpers and short-distance runners, 4.0 years; and power sportsmen, an extra 1.6 years. But no differences were observed among the groups for maximum life span. A 1985 questionnaire survey did indicate that former athletes had a physically more active lifestyle and were healthier than the reference population (Sarna et al., 1993). Recently, a national cross-sectional postal survey of male recreational runners in the USA assessed the weekly distance run as related to the prevalence of numerous personal characteristics and other lifestyle characteristics. Compared with runners who ran less than 16 km week -1, men who ran exceptionally long distances (> 80 km week -1) showed nearly a 50% reduction in clinically recognized hypertension, an 85% reduction in clinically low levels of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and a 2.5-fold increased prevalence of clinically defined high levels of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol. Estimated age-adjusted 10-year CHD risk was 30% lower in runners who averaged > 64 km week -1 than in those who averaged < 16 km week -1 (Williams, 1997). Gradient responses to distance run were evident for each end-point measured. The implication drawn by the author of this study, and a second done on women runners with similar results, is that substantial health benefits occur at exercise levels that exceed current minimal guidelines and do not exceed a point of diminishing return to the health benefits of running any distance less than 80 km week -1 (Williams, 1996). Data from these studies of recreational runners indicate a clear benefit of vigorous physical activity, and add to data showing a continuum of health benefits with increasing amounts and intensity of activity. Thus, while the message of moderate physical activity may be more palatable for those recalcitrant to exercise, vigorous-intensity activity should not receive less emphasis among those for whom such activity is not contraindicated. In today' s time-oriented world, a half- hour of vigorous exercise can expend as much energy as light to moderate exercise carried out for twice or three times as long. Modern-day exercise The modern story of exercise and CHD began in 1949 when Jeremy N. Morris and his colleagues in London first began to understand how both vocational and leisure-time physical activity relate to cardiovascular fitness and risk of CHD (Morris et al., 1953). Initially, they found that highly active conductors on London' s double-decker omnibuses were at lower risk for CHD than bus drivers who worked sitting at the wheel; what disease the conductors did develop was less severe, and they were less likely to die following a heart attack. Morris et al. (1953) also found that postmen delivering mail on foot had lower rates of CHD than sedentary supervisors and telephonists, and a gradient appeared for positions of intermediate physical activity. Since the early research by Morris and co-workers, further studies of occupational or leisure physical activity and CHD rates have concerned farmers and non-farmers in North Dakota, Iowa and Puerto Rico; American letter carriers and mail clerks; American and Italian railroad trackmen and clerks; Israeli kibbutzim workers in various occupations; San Francisco long- shoring cargo handlers and warehousemen; those insured by the Health Insurance Plan of New York; college students and alumni in various activities; residents of Iowa, California and Framingham, Massachusetts; American Cancer Society volunteers; Japanese-American men in Hawaii; Seventh Day Adventists in California; Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial men; and those from various regions of Denmark, Finland, Holland, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and Germany. While these studies showed lower CHD risk with higher levels of exercise, some did not address potential confounding by cigarette smoking, diet, heredity, stress or other characteristics. Many of these studies have been summarized by Powell et al. (1987), Berlin and Colditz (1990), Blair and Connelly (1996), Paffenbarger and Lee (1996), Lee and Paffenbarger (1996) and, in particular, The Surgeon General' s Report on Physical Activity and Health (1996). The College Alumni Health Study In an early study of physical activity, athleticism and other personal characteristics related to the occurrence of specific chronic diseases in later life, pre-documented data provided material from records made years in advance of the clinical recognition of disease (Paffenbarger et al., 1966). The study was based on 52,500 men who were born between 1896 and 1934, entered Harvard College or the University of Pennsylvania between 1916 and 1950, and were followed continuously for cause-specific mortality from time of college entrance to present time. Multiple host and environmental characteristics of college students in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s were considered to predict future coronary mortality. Individuals who died from coronary disease were less likely to have played sports in college than their surviving classmates. Habitual cigarette smoking and higher blood pressure levels were the most detrimental characteristics, while participation in college athletics was the most protective against early coronary mortality. In compressing investigative time by using data recorded years earlier, later observations reaYrmed that student athleticism led to a substantial sparing effect from CHD mortality through about age 55 years, but not beyond. A graded dose? response existed; namely, the more athletically involved, the lower the risk of coronary mortality. In combination with cigarette abstention, lean body composition, lower blood pressure level and a favourable family history of longevity, a physically active lifestyle, especially vigorous exercise, predicted a low risk of early coronary mortality. Since habits of exercise, smoking and weight control are matters of personal choice, and their independent and combined in? uences are substantial, it becomes apparent that intervention strategies are likely to promote the public' s heath (Paffenbarger and Wing, 1969). Further observations contributed to our current -understanding of the influences of physical energy expenditure on other lifestyle habits, on personal characteristics and on cardiovascular health, largely by excluding selection bias and eliminating confounding elements in showing that physical activity protected against heart attack. This phase of the study concerned nearly 17,000 Harvard College men assessed in the 1960s for walking, stair climbing, recreational activities and other characteristics, in addition to self-reported physician-diagnosed disease. Classified by these and previously documented characteristics from college days, men aged 35? 74 years were followed through 1972 for the occurrence of non-fatal and fatal CHD. Substantively, college athletes retained their low risk of both non-fatal and fatal CHD only if they remained physically active as adults (62% lower risk than for athletes who became sedentary). Also, sedentary students reduced their risk of coronary disease (by 61%) only if they adopted an active life since their college days. Both vigorous leisure-time physical activities and other less demanding activities in the 1960s, as measured on a linear scale of increasing energy expenditure, were independently associated with a subsequent lower risk of heart attack. At any given level of energy expenditure, the risk of heart -attack was significantly lower with vigorous activities than with more casual activities. Finally, the study -showed that alumni who expended less than 2000 kcal week -1 (8.4 MJ week -1) in leisure-time activities, who smoked cigarettes and were hypertensive were nearly eight times more likely to have a heart attack in mid- life than alumni with none of these characteristics (Paffenbarger et al., 1978). The next phase of the study extended observations on men who entered college in the years 1916? 50 and were resurveyed in the 1960s for their personal athleticism in relation to both morbidity from CHD and to specific causes of death. Follow-up through 1978 reaYrmed that only contemporary exercise, not college sports play, protected against cardiovascular disease. Walking, climbing and recreational activities totalling 2000 or more kcal week -1 (8.4 MJ week -1) reduced the risk of both fatal CHD and stroke in a gradient fashion. The benefits of exercise from a physically active lifestyle were independent of normotension, but not smoking, stable body weight or an absence of family history of cardiovascular disease. The community benefit from habitual physical exercise, measured as population attributable risk, was substantially stronger than corresponding figures for each of these other characteristics. Although inversely related to both cardiovascular and respiratory mortality, exercise level was less related to cancer or other causes of death (Paffenbarger et al., 1984). Next, we made quantitative estimates of influences on length of life related to physical activity (again expressed in kilocalories of weekly energy expenditure) and other lifeway characteristics. In the follow-up of men from 1962 to 1978, the data showed that exercise benefited all types: old and young; large and small; hypertensive and normotensive; men who have never smoked, ex- smokers, and light, heavy or very heavy smokers. Death rates declined steadily with increased levels of energy expenditure, at least up to 3500 kcal week -1 (14.6 MJ week -1). Rates were one-quarter to one-third lower among men who expended 2000 or more kilocalories (8.4 MJ) than among less active individuals. Estimates of added life gained (to age 80) from a physically active way of living, as compared with a sedentary life, was from 1 to > 2 years. For each hour that men were physically active, they got to live that hour over again plus one or two additional hours (Paffenbarger et al., 1986). Favourable changes in personal characteristics and habits, including the adoption of a physically active way of living between college years and middle age, had been shown to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease. Now, men aged 35-84 years from the same large cohort of former college students were studied for the adoption or maintenance of physical activity and other optional lifeway habits between 1962 and 1977 for the influence of such changes on cardiovascular and total mortality over the subsequent 8-9 years. Men who increased their activity levels to 1500 kcal week -1 (6.3 MJ week -1) or who adopted moderately vigorous sports play habits between the 1960s and 1970s, lowered their risk of premature death by 25% in the ensuing 12 years. Quitting cigarette smoking, maintaining normal blood pressure and avoiding obesity were separately associated with lower mortality rates from CHD and all-cause mortality. These volitional changes represent a kind of intervention, one of the epidemiological canons generally assumed to be necessary to establish cause- and-effect relations between host or environmental characteristics and disease outcome. The estimates of years of life gained to age 85 years by men who had reported favourable changes in levels of energy expenditure and these other lifeway habits were substantial when contrasted to survival rates for men whose style of living or personal characteristics remained detrimental. Estimates from later observations predicted that men who took up moderately vigorous sports play, quit cigarette smoking and remained normotensive enjoyed 4-10 more years of active living (an average of 7 years) than those who did not. Of special significance, these findings add further support to the hypothesis that sedentary living, cigarette smoking, hypertension and obesity independently cause specific chronic diseases and reduce longevity substantially (Paffenbarger et al., 1993, 1994). Contemporary studies Most recent observations have examined the experiences of 17,815 Harvard College alumni aged 45-84 years who, in 1977, had responded to questionnaires on their health habits and health status. Again classified by walking, stair climbing, recreational activities, cigarette smoking habit, blood pressure status, body mass index, alcohol consumption, history of parental mortality and chronic disease occurrence, the alumni were then followed for 16 years, through 1992 or to age 90 years, for mortality. The experiences represent 254,636 man years of observation, during which 4399 men died. Mortality rates were computed for each lifeway pattern, standardized for age and all other pertinent patterns to account for potential confounding influences. To examine the influence of ageing, some analyses are presented in age-specific groups in 1977, with follow-up for the 16-year period through 1992. It is important to recognize that comparisons were made among separate age groups, each followed for 16 years, and not as trackings of one group as it passed through successive ages. Age trends of lifeways To examine the influence of lifeway patterns on mortality at various stages of the ageing process, we categorized the Harvard population into four 10-year age groups: 45-54, 55-64, 65-74 and 75-84 years in 1977. Baseline characteristics are given in Table 1, together with measures of median attained ages during follow-up. The age of survivors through 1992 ranged 61 years to censure at 90 years. The frequencies of lifeway patterns in these separate age groups are also given in Table 1. The proportions of men who played moderately vigorous sports declined steadily and substantially with advancing age, as did the proportions who climbed stairs equalling > 55 floors, and who expended > 2000 kcal week -1 (8.4 MJ week -1). Although the proportions of men playing light sports increased with age, total sports play declined from 80.2% in the youngest men to 73.0%, 59.2% and 44.0% in successively older age groups. No consistent age trend was noted for patterns of walking, blood pressure status, or reported quantities of alcohol consumption. With increasing age, lower proportions of men reported smoking cigarettes, fewer were overweight (body mass index > 26 units) or re- ported a history of early parental mortality, and more were free of self-reported physician-diagnosed chronic disease. These last four cited patterns presumably related in part to previous (before 1977) mortality rates; that is, some men who had exhibited one or more of these lifeways may have died and not been available to report when these observations began. Nevertheless, interaction of all of these lifeway patterns could have influenced morbidity and mortality rates in all age groups during the follow-up interval of 16 years. Table 1 Baseline characteristics of Harvard alumni and frequencies (percent of man-years) of lifeway patterns in 1977 [omitted] Lifeways and mortality The physical activity index is distributed into arbitrary levels at < 1000, 1000? 1999 and > 2000 kcal week -1, dividing the population into roughly equal man-years of follow-up (Table 2). Using < 1000 kcal week -1 (4.2 M J week -1) as the comparison group, men in the middle group had a 19% lower risk of death during the interval 1977? 92, and men in the most active group a 25% lower risk. The gradients of lower risk for both walking and stair climbing were less steep but both activities implied reduced mortality rates with greater quantities of these activities. With absence of sports play representing the standard of reference, men playing only light sports (activities requiring < 4.5 METs intensity; 10% of men) were at a 16% lower risk of death, while men participating in moderately vigorous sports play (> 4.5 METs; 62% of men) were at a 27% lower risk. We distributed the population into arbitrary or customary levels of lifeways for other comparisons. The dangers of cigarette smoking are evident, with light smokers having a one-third lower risk and non-smokers a nearly 50% lower risk of death than heavy smokers. Normotensive men experienced only 75% the mortality during follow-up as hypertensive men. Both body mass index and alcohol consumption patterns displayed U-shaped distributions of mortality when examined in approximately thirds, with mid-range levels experiencing the lowest rates, suggesting that both lower and higher levels of each pattern carried higher risk. Early parental mortality was only a minimal indicator of increased alumni mortality in this interval; but the presence of a potentially lethal chronic disease (representing CHD, stroke, diabetes mellitus, chronic obstructive lung disease or cancer; 18% of men) was a strong predictor of death in these men, doubling the mortality over that for men not reporting any of these ailments. Not shown is the proportion of deaths (i.e. 13.2%) that might have been avoided between 1977 and 1992 if all alumni had expended > 2000 kcal week -1 (8.4 M J week -1). Corresponding figures for playing moderately vigorous sports would have been 13.9%; for not smoking, 9.3%; for remaining normotensive, 7.9%; and for being free of chronic disease, 19.7%. Such attributable risk estimates comprise a public health perspective to the Harvard alumni population. Age trends of mortality Table 3 shows the age-specific relative risks of death according to the distributions of lifeway patterns presented in Table 2. In general, these gradients for the separate age groups ran parallel to those for age- standardized relative risks, there being some exceptions that may have useful implications for preventive inter-were unrelated to delayed mortality; only moderately vention as men get older. Perhaps most notable with vigorous sports play was inversely (and significantly) respect to physical activity, walking, stair climbing and related to death in the 16-year follow-up period for total energy expenditure in men aged 45? 54 years those youngest men. In addition, an inverse relation with death for body mass index was evident only for the At the oldest end of the age range, cigarette smoking youngest men. Other age groups did not show this was not significantly related to death, again perhaps relation of a higher death risk for the more overweight because smoking had taken a considerable toll before men. this population reached age 75 years. Also, among men aged 75? 84 years in 1977, whose median attained age would have reached 88 years by 1992, and in whom the frequencies of favourable lifeways would have declined substantially relative to those in younger men, signifi cant relations with mortality during follow-up were not evident from stair climbing, body mass index, alcohol consumption or early parental mortality. Table 2 Rates and relative risks of deatha among Harvard alumnib from 1977 to 1992, according to lifeway patterns in 1977 [omitted] Table 3 Age-specific relative risks of deatha among Harvard alumni from 1977 to 1992, according to lifeway patterns in 1977 [omitted] Youth versus adult sports It might be asked if student athleticism per se is related to premature mortality in a population that had been classified by contemporary sports play status when aged 45? 84 years of age. For this purpose, 11,286 Harvard alumni (a sample of the larger population) were followed over 163,935 man-years, during which 2377 deaths occurred. Mortality rates were computed for the next 16 years. Figure 1 shows standardized rates and relative risks of death by student and alumni physical activity patterns. Considering college activity as university (intercollegiate), recreational (intramural) and non-athletic (minimal or none), a cross-tabulation is shown with alumni (contemporary) sports play at three levels: none, light only (< 4.5 METs) and moderately vigorous or vigorous (> 4.5 METs). Thus risks are given for men who were less physically active as students but more active as alumni, or vice versa, or who showed little or no change in activity level. While contemporary athleticism coded as none, light sports only, or moderately vigorous to vigorous sports play, carried a significant decline in death rates that favoured increased activity, student sports play did not. There was no significant trend in death rates among men classified by college sports play, except for former university athletes who had given up sports play since 1977. They experienced a significantly higher death rate through 1992 than former recreational athletes or non-athletes who played no sports as alumni. Combined lifeways To assess any confounding influences among major precursors of mortality, and with a special interest in the protective effect afforded by moderately vigorous and vigorous sports play, Fig. 2 presents rates and relative risks of paired combinations of such sports play with four other precursors, among the 17,815 Harvard alumni, 4399 of whom died during follow-up. As shown in the stereograms, each of the lifeway characteristics is associated with mortality in the 16-year follow-up period. Moderately vigorous sports players who do not smoke are at a 54% lower risk of death than their opposites. Normotensive sports players are at a 42% lower risk, lean players a 26% lower risk, and alumni without chronic disease a 60% lower risk than men who were more active and healthy. Changes in physical activity Next, we tested the hypothesis that favourable changes in physical activity might reduce the risk of premature mortality by computing death rates and plotting survival curves (1977? 92) for the 14,782 alumni who had reported on their physical activities in 1962 or 1966 and again in 1977 (Fig. 3). A total of 3528 men died in 212,410 man-years in the 16-year follow-up. Men who increased or decreased their energy expenditure between the 1960s and 1977 by less than 250 kcal week -1 (1.05 MJ week -1) were placed in an 'unchanged' category and used as a reference. Compared with this standard, gradient reductions in mortality became evident with increasing levels of physical activity, and gradient increases in mortality with decreasing levels of activity. The patterns were consistent within each of the four age groups studied, the three oldest groups being presented. Note in particular that even elderly men would seem to benefit from becoming more physically active. Figure 1 Rates and relative risks of death per 10,000 man-years among Harvard alumni aged 45? 84 years, between 1977 and 1992, according to combinations of athleticism in college and sports play in 1977. Rates and relative risks were standardized for age, cigarette smoking habit, blood pressure status, body mass index, alcohol consumption, early parental mortality and chronic disease (except for given characteristic) (11,286 men; 2377 deaths; 163,935 man-years). Figure 2 Rates and relative risks of death per 10,000 man-years among Harvard alumni aged 45? 84 years, between 1977 and 1992, according to paired combinations of moderately vigorous sports play and (A) cigarette smoking habit, (B) hypertension, (C) body mass index and (D) chronic disease status in 1977. Rates and relative risks were standardized for age, cigarette smoking habit,blood pressure status,body massindex,alcoholconsumption, early parentalmortality and chronic disease (except for given characteristic) (17,815 men; 4399 deaths; 254,636 man-years). Quantity versus intensity of physical activity To explore the relative importance of the quantity as opposed to the intensity of physical activity in deferring mortality, the college alumni were first separated into two groups: those whose activities might require> 4.5 METs of sustained effort (76% of the total) and those whose activities might be expected to require less. In these analyses, standardized mortality rates for 1977? 88 were computed for 14,787 alumni aged 45? 84 years in 1977. A total of 2206 men had died in 123,285 man- years of observation. The quantity of activity amassed from walking and climbing stairs was arbitrarily assigned to the less vigorous group. Death rates were then plotted against the quantity of energy expended in kcal week -1 (Fig. 4). The data indicate that, with increasing quantities of energy expenditure, both light and moderately vigorous effort were related to lower rates of mortality. But at any given quantity of energy expenditure, rates were lower for moderately vigorous activities than for activities requiring less intensity of effort. Figure 3 Survivorship curves and relative risks of death, among Harvard alumni aged 45? 84 years, between 1977 and 1992, according to change or lack of change in physical activity index (kcal week -1) between 1962 or 1966 and 1977. Curves and relative risks were standardized for age, cigarette smoking habit, blood pressure status, body mass index, alcohol consumption, early parental mortality and chronic disease (14,787 men; 3528 deaths; 212,410 man-years). The two vertical marks on each curve of Fig. 4 (tertile ticks) separate men into thirds according to man-years of experience. From these graphic displays, the mean death rate was about 170 per 10,000 for the less vigorous, compared with about 120 per 10,000 for the more vigorous, or 20% lower. Of further importance in this time-oriented era, at some given quantity of moderately vigorous activity, say 1500 kcal of energy expended per week (6.3 MJ week -1), where the death rate was about 120 per 10,000, the same low death rate was achieved among the less vigorously active men only at about 3000 kcal week -1 (12.6 MJ week -1). This difference might be equated to 3? 4 h of jogging versus 6? 8 h of regular walking. Figure 4 Death rates among Harvard alumni aged 45? 84 years, between 1977 and 1988, according to quantity and intensity of physical activity. Rates were standardized for age, cigarette smoking habit, blood pressure status, body mass index, alcohol consumption, early parental mortality and chronic disease (14,787 men; 2206 deaths; 123,285 man-years). Added life The mortality and survival experiences of the Harvard alumni during the 16-year follow-up period were used to develop estimates of years of added life gained (up to age 90) from favourable as opposed to detrimental lifeway patterns (Table 4). The results are tabulated for 10-year age groups and for selected habits or characteristics at the start of the follow-up. Estimates for individual lifeway patterns are standardized for age (5year groups) and each of the other patterns listed. The physical activity index shows the estimated years of survival gained by men expending > 2000 kcal week -1 (8.4 MJ week -1) in the combination of self-reported walking, stair climbing and playing sports, as compared with those expending less energy in those activities. The estimated added years of life from a more active life was 1.19 years. Walking > 15 km, climbing > 55 floors and playing moderately vigorous sports each week versus walking and climbing less and not playing such sports each week were estimated to yield 0.43, 0.70 and 1.44 added years of life, respectively. Even the oldest men, all of whom were followed until death or age 90, experienced at least an extra 6 months of life by being active as compared with being sedentary. Important, too, was the finding that these physically active alumni, as contrasted with their less active counterparts, reported that they 'felt younger than their years' , and were more likely to be 'feeling fine and enjoying life' (Paffenbarger et al., 1993). The additional life gained as a result of not smoking cigarettes versus smoking was 2.95 years, and 1.56 years for remaining normotensive as opposed to having become hypertensive. Men who had avoided chronic disease as of the 1977 questionnaire assessment gained 3.96 years more than men who manifested at least one of these ailments by that time. Considering the range of starting ages (i.e. 45? 84 years) and ageing through 90 years, these are truncated analyses and the difference in survival between groups being compared might be expected to become somewhat narrower as the life experience of this population approaches its completion. Table 4 Added years of life gained (to age 90) from favourable lifeway patterns among Harvard alumni as estimated from standardized death rates, 1977? 92a [omitted] These actuarial estimates predict what the logical extension or outcome might be sometime in the future. The mortality and survival experience of these alumni during a 16-year follow-up (i.e. 1962? 78) provided estimates of added years to age 80 from an active life- way (Paffenbarger et al., 1986). The observed mortality differentials for the follow-up period (i.e. 1977? 92) have shown that these earlier predictions were remarkably accurate to date. Discussion Extended longevity is the result of a number of interacting favourable influences, some susceptible to optional adjustment and others not. The findings reported here on college alumni represent only a part of the overall picture, but they suggest a protective effect of moderately vigorous exercise, abstention from cigarette smoking and maintenance of normotension against all- cause mortality in all age groups studied, and therefore an indication of additional years of life expectancy. To the extent that these alumni increased their exercise, reduced their smoking and received treatment for hypertension since 1977, when these lifeway patterns were assessed, such changes would minimize the importance of the patterns reported here. Thus, the true strength of the protective effect of these lifeways would be even larger than observed. Nevertheless, the estimates of years gained reflect the self-reported experience of college men, already recognized as long- lived, whose level of aZuence and social behaviour might differ from other populations, and this might invite caution against unwarranted extrapolation to other populations. The opportunity to examine long-range parallels between findings based on experience of student days and the alumni follow-up gave a different dimension to this investigation. If it is postulated that university sports play reflects, at least in part, a selective attribute of personal health (e.g. cardiovascular fitness), the present findings show that such selection alone is insuYcient to explain delayed death in later adult (alumni) years. Alumni who had not been especially athletic as students, but rated high physical activity status at middle and advanced age, were at lower risk of mortality than former athletes whose later exercise level did not include moderately vigorous sports play. The medical treatment of such chronic diseases as cardiovascular ailments and diabetes mellitus, and the management of such intermediate variables as abnormal lipoprotein profiles and impaired glucose tolerance, may defer mortality and extend longevity. Yet, the effect of adequate physical activity is partly independent of these influences and it counteracts many detrimental variables through metabolic and other processes. Even when other means of health promotion and disease prevention are used to increase longevity, the relevance of adequate physical activity is likely to remain. Physical activity is a positive and pervasive element of health maintenance and disease prevention, and lifetime extension for everyone, including the elderly and aged persons. Habitual physical activity can influence fitness, which in turn may modify the level of physical activity of the individual. Other lifeways and personal characteristics, physical and social environments, and genetic endowment also affect these complex relations. In the late James A. Michener' s 1976 book entitled Sports in America, he wrote: 'I defend sports as a means of obtaining exercise pleasurably. I am more impressed with sports as a developer of health than as a developer of character, and I want to see them prosper for health reasons, because I know of no other human activity which so well serves that purpose' . Perhaps Michener' s ideas have not changed much from those of Hippocrates and Galen many centuries earlier. 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Yamaji, K. and Shephard, R.J. (1977) Longevity and causes of death of athletes. Journal of Human Ergology, 6, 15? 27. From christian.rauh at uconn.edu Sun Aug 21 15:26:05 2005 From: christian.rauh at uconn.edu (Christian Rauh) Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2005 11:26:05 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] 250 miles per gallon? They're doing it In-Reply-To: <43023296.3030400@earthlink.net> References: <01C5A1DC.A374B920.shovland@mindspring.com> <43023296.3030400@earthlink.net> Message-ID: <43089D0D.4050807@uconn.edu> Note that burning coal to make electricity to move a car engine is less energy efficient and more polluting than burning gas in that engine. Christian Gerry Reinhart-Waller wrote: > It is a good first step. That I agree with. > Hybids are a wave of the future. But there are many other waves that > need to follow. > > > Gerry Reinhart-Waller > > > > Steve Hovland wrote: > >> These ideas can be applied on a wider scale. >> >> Here's a car we saw in Europe: >> >> >> >> This is the future in America :-) >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Gerry Reinhart-Waller [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] >> Sent: Monday, August 15, 2005 6:14 PM >> To: The new improved paleopsych list >> Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] 250 miles per gallon? They're doing it >> >> Well and good, Steve. But one robin does not a springtime make. Even >> if it is parked in your garage. >> >> Regards, >> Gerry Reinhart-Waller >> >> >> Steve Hovland wrote: >> >> >> >>> Tinkerers fiddle with hybrids to increase efficiency >>> >>> Bottom of Form 1 >>> CORTE MADERA, California (AP) -- Politicians and automakers say a car >>> that can both reduce greenhouse gases and free America from its >>> reliance on foreign oil is years or even decades away. >>> Ron Gremban says such a car is parked in his garage. >>> It looks like a typical Toyota Prius hybrid, but in the trunk sits an >>> 80-miles-per-gallon secret -- a stack of 18 brick-sized batteries >>> that boosts the car's high mileage with an extra electrical charge so >>> it can burn even less fuel. >>> Gremban, an electrical engineer and committed environmentalist, spent >>> several months and $3,000 tinkering with his car. >>> Like all hybrids, his Prius increases fuel efficiency by harnessing >>> small amounts of electricity generated during braking and coasting. >>> The extra batteries let him store extra power by plugging the car >>> into a wall outlet at his home in this San Francisco suburb -- all >>> for about a quarter. >>> He's part of a small but growing movement. "Plug-in" hybrids aren't >>> yet cost-efficient, but some of the dozen known experimental models >>> have gotten up to 250 mpg. >>> They have support not only from environmentalists but also from >>> conservative foreign policy hawks who insist Americans fuel terrorism >>> through their gas guzzling. >>> And while the technology has existed for three decades, automakers >>> are beginning to take notice, too. >>> So far, DaimlerChrysler AG is the only company that has committed to >>> building its own plug-in hybrids, quietly pledging to make up to 40 >>> vans for U.S. companies. But Toyota Motor Corp. officials who >>> initially frowned on people altering their cars now say they may be >>> able to learn from them. >>> "They're like the hot rodders of yesterday who did everything to soup >>> up their cars. It was all about horsepower and bling-bling, lots of >>> chrome and accessories," said Cindy Knight, a Toyota spokeswoman. >>> "Maybe the hot rodders of tomorrow are the people who want to get in >>> there and see what they can do about increasing fuel economy." >>> >>> Plugged or unplugged? >>> The extra batteries let Gremban drive for 20 miles with a 50-50 mix >>> of gas and electricity. Even after the car runs out of power from the >>> batteries and switches to the standard hybrid mode, it gets the >>> typical Prius fuel efficiency of around 45 mpg. As long as Gremban >>> doesn't drive too far in a day, he says, he gets 80 mpg. >>> "The value of plug-in hybrids is they can dramatically reduce >>> gasoline usage for the first few miles every day," Gremban said. "The >>> average for people's usage of a car is somewhere around 30 to 40 >>> miles per day. During that kind of driving, the plug-in hybrid can >>> make a dramatic difference." >>> >>> Gremban promotes the CalCars Initiative, a volunteer effort >>> encouraging automakers to make plug-in hybrids. >>> Backers of plug-in hybrids acknowledge that the electricity to boost >>> their cars generally comes from fossil fuels that create greenhouse >>> gases, but they say that process still produces far less pollution >>> than oil. They also note that electricity could be generated cleanly >>> from solar power. >>> Gremban rigged his car to promote the nonprofit CalCars Initiative, a >>> San Francisco Bay area-based volunteer effort that argues automakers >>> could mass produce plug-in hybrids at a reasonable price. >>> But Toyota and other car companies say they are worried about the >>> cost, convenience and safety of plug-in hybrids -- and note that >>> consumers haven't embraced all-electric cars because of the >>> inconvenience of recharging them like giant cell phones. >>> Automakers have spent millions of dollars telling motorists that >>> hybrids don't need to be plugged in, and don't want to confuse the >>> message. >>> Nonetheless, plug-in hybrids are starting to get the backing of >>> prominent hawks like former CIA director James Woolsey and Frank >>> Gaffney, President Reagan's undersecretary of defense. They have >>> joined Set America Free, a group that wants the government to spend >>> $12 billion over four years on plug-in hybrids, alternative fuels and >>> other measures to reduce foreign oil dependence. >>> Gaffney, who heads the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Security >>> Policy, said Americans would embrace plug-ins if they understood >>> arguments from him and others who say gasoline contributes to >>> oil-rich Middle Eastern governments that support terrorism. >>> "The more we are consuming oil that either comes from places that are >>> bent on our destruction or helping those who are ... the more we are >>> enabling those who are trying to kill us," Gaffney said. >>> >>> Now vs. later >>> DaimlerChrysler spokesman Nick Cappa said plug-in hybrids are ideal >>> for companies with fleets of vehicles that can be recharged at a >>> central location at night. He declined to name the companies buying >>> the vehicles and said he did not know the vehicles' mileage or cost, >>> or when they would be available. >>> Others are modifying hybrids, too. >>> Monrovia-based Energy CS has converted two Priuses to get up to 230 >>> mpg by using powerful lithium ion batteries. It is forming a new >>> company, EDrive Systems, that will convert hybrids to plug-ins for >>> about $12,000 starting next year, company vice president Greg Hanssen >>> said. >>> University of California, Davis, engineering professor Andy Frank >>> built a plug-in hybrid from the ground up in 1972 and has since built >>> seven others, one of which gets up to 250 mpg. They were converted >>> from non-hybrids, including a Ford Taurus and Chevrolet Suburban. >>> Frank has spent $150,000 to $250,000 in research costs on each car, >>> but believes automakers could mass-produce them by adding just $6,000 >>> to each vehicle's price tag. >>> Instead, Frank said, automakers promise hydrogen-powered vehicles >>> hailed by President Bush and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, even though >>> hydrogen's backers acknowledge the cars won't be widely available for >>> years and would require a vast infrastructure of new fueling stations. >>> "They'd rather work on something that won't be in their lifetime, and >>> that's this hydrogen economy stuff," Frank said. "They pick this kind >>> of target to get the public off their back, essentially." >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> paleopsych mailing list >>> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>> >>> >>> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> paleopsych mailing list >> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> >> _______________________________________________ >> paleopsych mailing list >> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych -- ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ~ YOUR WINDOW RIGHT ~ "A person in a rented apartment must be able to lean out of his window and scrape off the masonry within arm's reach. And he must be allowed to take a long brush and paint everything outside within arm's reach. So that it will be visible from afar to everyone in the street that someone lives there who is different from the imprisoned, enslaved, standardised man who lives next door" Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1972) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedensreich_Hundertwasser _____________________________________________________________________ ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? From christian.rauh at uconn.edu Sun Aug 21 15:31:28 2005 From: christian.rauh at uconn.edu (Christian Rauh) Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2005 11:31:28 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] ParaPundit: Whites Still Do Manual Labor In Wisconsin In-Reply-To: <430231AE.7040801@earthlink.net> References: <01C5A1DC.C9BAB260.shovland@mindspring.com> <430231AE.7040801@earthlink.net> Message-ID: <43089E50.2010007@uconn.edu> Free flow of people should be tied to free flow of capital, let the market equalize things. Christian Gerry Reinhart-Waller wrote: > I think all of us grew up with grandparents or such who arrived in the > U.S. expecting to be part of the great melting pot that America > offered. Today, thoughts of merging have been replaced by ethnic > diversity. What ethnic divisions create is group hatred, one for > another. That's what is responsible for the crumbling of our society. > > Gerry Reinhart-Waller > > Steve Hovland wrote: > >> It's eroding our society. >> >> I personally believe in the melting pot, not "diversity." >> >> Steve Hovland >> www.stevehovland.net >> >> >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >> Sent: Monday, August 15, 2005 8:45 PM >> To: The new improved paleopsych list >> Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] ParaPundit: Whites Still Do Manual Labor >> In Wisconsin >> >> More thanks for Frank's efforts. This is exactly right. The fast-food >> restaurant where I get my lunch salad used to be staffed by ordinary >> causasians, often with obvious mild retardation. They were good >> workers, and I enjoyed them. Now I can barely understand the girl at >> the register and sometimes I have to ask her to say it in Spanish >> because her English is so poor. I am deeply discouraged and >> disillusioned by President Bush's attitude about illegal emmigration. >> Lynn >> >> Premise Checker wrote: >> >> >> >>> Whites Still Do Manual Labor In Wisconsin >>> http://www.parapundit.com/archives/002938.html#002938 >>> >>> 2005 August 14 Sunday >>> Whites Still Do Manual Labor In Wisconsin >>> >>> Over at [9]No Speed Bumps Dan reports on how [10]during a vacation >>> trip in Wisconsin he found white people doing all the manual labor >>> jobs that are done by Hispanics in Texas. >>> >>> Two weeks ago I vacationed near Oshkosh, Wisconsin. One thing >>> strikingly different than living in Texas was that there were few >>> Hispanics. In Texas, Hispanics are found in all walks of life, from >>> doctors to janitors. >>> >>> With so many impoverished Hispanics illegally moving to Texas over >>> the southern border each year, they have taken over most of the >>> lower-skill jobs because they will work for less than American >>> citizens. Go to any restaurant, hotel, or construction site and all >>> of the basic manual labor tasks are being done by low-income >>> Hispanics. >>> >>> Anyway, while on vacation, in the hotels we stayed in all of the >>> maid staff and other help were white. The same was true of all of >>> the restaurants we ate in, from the cooks, to the bus boys, to the >>> grounds keepers. I felt like we were in a time machine and in a >>> strange land. >>> >>> An interesting note about the maid staff at the hotels was the good >>> cheer that they were in. They were constantly chatting among >>> themselves and seemed very content as they went about their work. >>> This reminded me that, yes, there is dignity to manual labor, and >>> yes, white people can still do manual labor. >>> >>> This runs counter to the fashionable argument today justifying the >>> open border policy with Mexico. The argument goes that America >>> could just not function without all of the low-skill workers coming >>> in to do all of the manual labor. Well, that is ridiculous. It may >>> drive prices up some, if American citizens (whether white, black, >>> or any other race) must do the work but the work will still get >>> done, one way or another. >>> >>> One of the big whopper lies told by open borders advocates such as >>> George W. Bush is that there are "jobs that Americans won't do". This >>> is nonsense. One only need travel to those places where the bulk of >>> the population is still white to see that this claim is false >>> propaganda. >>> >>> As for the argument that a lack of cheap immigrant labor will drive up >>> prices, it rests on three fallacies: >>> * That low skilled labor makes up much of total costs. Wrong-o >>> sleigh bell lovers. The bottom quintile of the United States >>> population earns [11]only 3.5% of national income. 20% get 3.5%. >>> If we deported all the illegal aliens and stopped all low skiilled >>> and moderate skilled immigration the bottom 20% would see some >>> significant increase in their wages. But that increase would be >>> unlikely raise total prices by even a couple of percent. We don't >>> pay them that much. A 10% or 20% increase in their salaries won't >>> matter much to the rest of the population. >>> * That there are no substitutes for cheap labor. Again, wrong-o >>> sleigh bell lovers. Necessity is the mother of invention. In all >>> likelihood, faced with higher labor costs industry would be more >>> eager to develop and buy more capital equipment and to arrange the >>> methods of purveying goods and services to decrease the amount of >>> labor needed. In fact, we have an example available for what the >>> lack of cheap immigrant labor will do to an industry. [12]The >>> Australian wine industry is more automated than the American wine >>> industry due to lack of cheap immigrant labor in Australia. Ben >>> Franklin was right. We'd advance more rapidly without simple minds >>> available to do simple tasks cheaply. >>> * That there are no external costs to cheap unskilled immigrant >>> labor. And once again, wrong-o sleigh bell lovers. Low skilled >>> laborers can not afford to pay for their own medical care. They >>> don't pay enough in taxes to pay for the educations of their >>> children. They do not make enough to pay for their retirements in >>> the United States. The list goes on. Oh, and they commit crime at >>> higher rates. So they cost crime victims and also the criminal >>> justice system. A year for an inmate at Rikers Island in New York >>> costs $47,000. Criminals are expensive for the rest of us in many >>> ways. >>> >>> The Open Borders advocates are deeply dishonest. America's elites are >>> corrupt. They lie. They can not be trusted. America is going down a >>> very wrong path. Our leaders in business and politics are to blame. >>> But so are apathetic members of the public. It is time to wake up and >>> demand a stop to massive immigration. The costs have become far too >>> high and will be with us for decades to come. >>> By Randall Parker at 2005 August 14 06:44 PM [13]Immigration >>> Economics | [14]TrackBack >>> Comments >>> >>> in vermont too. many more latinos work in oregon than 10 years ago >>> though, and i hear that similar things are going on in the south. i >>> suspect that for a variety of reasons the upper midwest and new >>> england (distance, climate, cost of living) will resist latino labor >>> the longest. >>> Posted by: [15]razib on August 14, 2005 08:55 PM >>> >>> Resistance is futile. Viva La Rasa. >>> Posted by: [16]Mark on August 14, 2005 10:59 PM >>> >>> There would be a net savings from reversing the antimerit immigrant >>> flow, some of which would be passed on to the consumers. If the bottom >>> 20% gets paid so little that their wages could double without the rich >>> even noticing it, shifting 4% of the total income away from the top >>> 80% over several years, that is a worthwhile price to pay. There is no >>> economic need to increase the size of the bottom end; it isn't about >>> money, it's about power. How to get power, when there are no ideas; >>> won't they use immigration to increase racial conflict, and say that >>> officials must have more power? >>> Posted by: [17]John S Bolton on August 14, 2005 11:26 PM >>> >>> For some reason my trackbacks to this post don't take, so ping! >>> Posted by: [18]Dave Schuler on August 15, 2005 07:47 AM >>> >>> Eastern Washington, North Idaho, and Montana are alot like Wisconsin >>> in that low end labor jobs are done primarly by whites. We have very >>> few illegal aliens in this part of the country. This is good because >>> we have much less of the "servant" culture that you see in California >>> and other places. People clean their own homes and often do their own >>> yard work. If you have someone else do these things, they are done by >>> outside services operating more like independent business people >>> rather than as "domestics". Not having the illegal immigrants means >>> that we have a much more "do it yourself" mentality than, say, in >>> Southern California. >>> >>> I do not like that "class" mentality that illegal immigration has >>> produced in places like California and Texas. I think having distinct >>> social classes, especially if they are of different races, is very >>> destructive to the future of the U.S. The "open-borders" people need >>> to be grilled over this issue. >>> Posted by: [19]Kurt on August 15, 2005 10:01 AM >>> >>> razib - don't underestimate the number of mexicans in the upper >>> midwest - chicago has the 2nd highest mexican population in the u.s. >>> after l.a. granted this isn't wisconsin, but.... >>> >>> randall - in a similar, practical manner that you approach alternative >>> energy solutions, i.e. can't tell people to drive less or other >>> inconveniences that would be a political non-starter in america today; >>> what would be your political platform for immigration that would be >>> politically feasible? i would love to know what you'd recommend, >>> having put considerable thought to this issue, assuming something like >>> you were an advisor to your senator. thanks. >>> Posted by: [20]Jim on August 15, 2005 01:22 PM >>> >>> I spent a few days in Sierra Vista, AZ, a booming town about 15 miles >>> north of the Mexican border. Strikingly, the maids in my motel were >>> white, as were a lot of the other service workers. The answer to this >>> paradox is that Sierra Vista is within the narrow band heavily policed >>> by the Border Patrol. If illegal aliens are found there, they are >>> deported. But if they make it far enough north to Tucson or Phoenix, >>> well, they're Ollie Ollie Home Free. >>> Posted by: [21]Steve Sailer on August 15, 2005 02:03 PM >>> >>> Jim, >>> >>> Perhaps I don't understand your question. Politically feasible? I >>> think a candidate for the Presidency could run on a platform to deport >>> all the illegals and win. The dollar cost to the government of >>> deporting all the illegals would be pretty low. >>> >>> The anger about the immigrant deluge is building. But politicians are >>> chasing the votes of Hispanics, the Democrats see them as a solid >>> Democrat voting bloc (and they are), and some business interests want >>> cheap labor. >>> >>> I'd tell a US Senator to submit a bill to fund a barrier along the >>> entire length of the border. I'd also propose upping the number of >>> Border Patrol by 20,000 and setting them loose in the interior with >>> orders to round up all illegals. Congress should give instructions to >>> DHS to resume interior enforcement. >>> Posted by: [22]Randall Parker on August 15, 2005 03:33 PM >>> >>> References >>> >>> 9. http://nospeedbumps.com/ >>> 10. http://nospeedbumps.com/?p=334 >>> 11. http://www.heritage.org/Research/Taxes/bg1791.cfm >>> 12. http://www.parapundit.com/archives/002778.html >>> 13. http://www.parapundit.com/archives/cat_immigration_economics.html >>> 14. http://www.futurepundit.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi?__mode=view&entry_id=2938 >>> 15. http://www.gnxp.com/ >>> 16. mailto:dfsf at hotmail.com >>> 17. http://www.johnsbolton.net/ >>> 18. http://www.theglitteringeye.com/ >>> 19. mailto:kurt2100kimo at yahoo.com.tw >>> 20. mailto:knuckleballnews at yahoo.com >>> 21. http://www.iSteve.com/ >>> 22. http://futurepundit.com/ >>> _______________________________________________ >>> paleopsych mailing list >>> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>> >>> >>> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> paleopsych mailing list >> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> _______________________________________________ >> paleopsych mailing list >> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >> >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych -- ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ~ YOUR WINDOW RIGHT ~ "A person in a rented apartment must be able to lean out of his window and scrape off the masonry within arm's reach. And he must be allowed to take a long brush and paint everything outside within arm's reach. So that it will be visible from afar to everyone in the street that someone lives there who is different from the imprisoned, enslaved, standardised man who lives next door" Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1972) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedensreich_Hundertwasser _____________________________________________________________________ ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? From waluk at earthlink.net Sun Aug 21 16:04:17 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Gerry Reinhart-Waller) Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2005 09:04:17 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] gasoline prices In-Reply-To: <43089D0D.4050807@uconn.edu> References: <01C5A1DC.A374B920.shovland@mindspring.com> <43023296.3030400@earthlink.net> <43089D0D.4050807@uconn.edu> Message-ID: <4308A601.8080006@earthlink.net> So true. Yet the cost for making electricity is still a good deal less than the current price for a gallon of gasoline. Gerry Reinhart-Waller Christian Rauh wrote: > Note that burning coal to make electricity to move a car engine is > less energy efficient and more polluting than burning gas in that engine. > > Christian > > Gerry Reinhart-Waller wrote: > >> It is a good first step. That I agree with. >> Hybids are a wave of the future. But there are many other waves that >> need to follow. >> >> >> Gerry Reinhart-Waller >> >> >> >> Steve Hovland wrote: >> >>> These ideas can be applied on a wider scale. >>> >>> Here's a car we saw in Europe: >>> >>> >>> >>> This is the future in America :-) >>> >>> Steve Hovland >>> www.stevehovland.net >>> >>> >>> -----Original Message----- >>> From: Gerry Reinhart-Waller [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] >>> Sent: Monday, August 15, 2005 6:14 PM >>> To: The new improved paleopsych list >>> Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] 250 miles per gallon? They're doing it >>> >>> Well and good, Steve. But one robin does not a springtime make. >>> Even if it is parked in your garage. >>> >>> Regards, >>> Gerry Reinhart-Waller >>> >>> >>> Steve Hovland wrote: >>> >>> >>> >>>> Tinkerers fiddle with hybrids to increase efficiency >>>> >>>> Bottom of Form 1 >>>> CORTE MADERA, California (AP) -- Politicians and automakers say a >>>> car that can both reduce greenhouse gases and free America from its >>>> reliance on foreign oil is years or even decades away. >>>> Ron Gremban says such a car is parked in his garage. >>>> It looks like a typical Toyota Prius hybrid, but in the trunk sits >>>> an 80-miles-per-gallon secret -- a stack of 18 brick-sized >>>> batteries that boosts the car's high mileage with an extra >>>> electrical charge so it can burn even less fuel. >>>> Gremban, an electrical engineer and committed environmentalist, >>>> spent several months and $3,000 tinkering with his car. >>>> Like all hybrids, his Prius increases fuel efficiency by harnessing >>>> small amounts of electricity generated during braking and coasting. >>>> The extra batteries let him store extra power by plugging the car >>>> into a wall outlet at his home in this San Francisco suburb -- all >>>> for about a quarter. >>>> He's part of a small but growing movement. "Plug-in" hybrids aren't >>>> yet cost-efficient, but some of the dozen known experimental models >>>> have gotten up to 250 mpg. >>>> They have support not only from environmentalists but also from >>>> conservative foreign policy hawks who insist Americans fuel >>>> terrorism through their gas guzzling. >>>> And while the technology has existed for three decades, automakers >>>> are beginning to take notice, too. >>>> So far, DaimlerChrysler AG is the only company that has committed >>>> to building its own plug-in hybrids, quietly pledging to make up to >>>> 40 vans for U.S. companies. But Toyota Motor Corp. officials who >>>> initially frowned on people altering their cars now say they may be >>>> able to learn from them. >>>> "They're like the hot rodders of yesterday who did everything to >>>> soup up their cars. It was all about horsepower and bling-bling, >>>> lots of chrome and accessories," said Cindy Knight, a Toyota >>>> spokeswoman. "Maybe the hot rodders of tomorrow are the people who >>>> want to get in there and see what they can do about increasing fuel >>>> economy." >>>> >>>> Plugged or unplugged? >>>> The extra batteries let Gremban drive for 20 miles with a 50-50 mix >>>> of gas and electricity. Even after the car runs out of power from >>>> the batteries and switches to the standard hybrid mode, it gets the >>>> typical Prius fuel efficiency of around 45 mpg. As long as Gremban >>>> doesn't drive too far in a day, he says, he gets 80 mpg. >>>> "The value of plug-in hybrids is they can dramatically reduce >>>> gasoline usage for the first few miles every day," Gremban said. >>>> "The average for people's usage of a car is somewhere around 30 to >>>> 40 miles per day. During that kind of driving, the plug-in hybrid >>>> can make a dramatic difference." >>>> >>>> Gremban promotes the CalCars Initiative, a volunteer effort >>>> encouraging automakers to make plug-in hybrids. >>>> Backers of plug-in hybrids acknowledge that the electricity to >>>> boost their cars generally comes from fossil fuels that create >>>> greenhouse gases, but they say that process still produces far less >>>> pollution than oil. They also note that electricity could be >>>> generated cleanly from solar power. >>>> Gremban rigged his car to promote the nonprofit CalCars Initiative, >>>> a San Francisco Bay area-based volunteer effort that argues >>>> automakers could mass produce plug-in hybrids at a reasonable price. >>>> But Toyota and other car companies say they are worried about the >>>> cost, convenience and safety of plug-in hybrids -- and note that >>>> consumers haven't embraced all-electric cars because of the >>>> inconvenience of recharging them like giant cell phones. >>>> Automakers have spent millions of dollars telling motorists that >>>> hybrids don't need to be plugged in, and don't want to confuse the >>>> message. >>>> Nonetheless, plug-in hybrids are starting to get the backing of >>>> prominent hawks like former CIA director James Woolsey and Frank >>>> Gaffney, President Reagan's undersecretary of defense. They have >>>> joined Set America Free, a group that wants the government to spend >>>> $12 billion over four years on plug-in hybrids, alternative fuels >>>> and other measures to reduce foreign oil dependence. >>>> Gaffney, who heads the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Security >>>> Policy, said Americans would embrace plug-ins if they understood >>>> arguments from him and others who say gasoline contributes to >>>> oil-rich Middle Eastern governments that support terrorism. >>>> "The more we are consuming oil that either comes from places that >>>> are bent on our destruction or helping those who are ... the more >>>> we are enabling those who are trying to kill us," Gaffney said. >>>> >>>> Now vs. later >>>> DaimlerChrysler spokesman Nick Cappa said plug-in hybrids are ideal >>>> for companies with fleets of vehicles that can be recharged at a >>>> central location at night. He declined to name the companies buying >>>> the vehicles and said he did not know the vehicles' mileage or >>>> cost, or when they would be available. >>>> Others are modifying hybrids, too. >>>> Monrovia-based Energy CS has converted two Priuses to get up to 230 >>>> mpg by using powerful lithium ion batteries. It is forming a new >>>> company, EDrive Systems, that will convert hybrids to plug-ins for >>>> about $12,000 starting next year, company vice president Greg >>>> Hanssen said. >>>> University of California, Davis, engineering professor Andy Frank >>>> built a plug-in hybrid from the ground up in 1972 and has since >>>> built seven others, one of which gets up to 250 mpg. They were >>>> converted from non-hybrids, including a Ford Taurus and Chevrolet >>>> Suburban. >>>> Frank has spent $150,000 to $250,000 in research costs on each car, >>>> but believes automakers could mass-produce them by adding just >>>> $6,000 to each vehicle's price tag. >>>> Instead, Frank said, automakers promise hydrogen-powered vehicles >>>> hailed by President Bush and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, even >>>> though hydrogen's backers acknowledge the cars won't be widely >>>> available for years and would require a vast infrastructure of new >>>> fueling stations. >>>> "They'd rather work on something that won't be in their lifetime, >>>> and that's this hydrogen economy stuff," Frank said. "They pick >>>> this kind of target to get the public off their back, essentially." >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ >>>> >>>> >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> paleopsych mailing list >>>> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>>> >>>> >>>> >>> >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> paleopsych mailing list >>> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>> >>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> paleopsych mailing list >>> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>> >>> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> paleopsych mailing list >> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From waluk at earthlink.net Sun Aug 21 16:09:10 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Gerry Reinhart-Waller) Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2005 09:09:10 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] ParaPundit: Whites Still Do Manual Labor In Wisconsin In-Reply-To: <43089E50.2010007@uconn.edu> References: <01C5A1DC.C9BAB260.shovland@mindspring.com> <430231AE.7040801@earthlink.net> <43089E50.2010007@uconn.edu> Message-ID: <4308A726.5060303@earthlink.net> Not such a bad idea. Yet immigrants are flowing into America while U.S. manufacturing has gone to cheaper foreign locales. Gerry Reinhart-Waller Christian Rauh wrote: > Free flow of people should be tied to free flow of capital, let the > market equalize things. > > Christian > > Gerry Reinhart-Waller wrote: > >> I think all of us grew up with grandparents or such who arrived in >> the U.S. expecting to be part of the great melting pot that America >> offered. Today, thoughts of merging have been replaced by ethnic >> diversity. What ethnic divisions create is group hatred, one for >> another. That's what is responsible for the crumbling of our society. >> >> Gerry Reinhart-Waller >> >> Steve Hovland wrote: >> >>> It's eroding our society. >>> >>> I personally believe in the melting pot, not "diversity." >>> >>> Steve Hovland >>> www.stevehovland.net >>> >>> >>> -----Original Message----- >>> From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] >>> Sent: Monday, August 15, 2005 8:45 PM >>> To: The new improved paleopsych list >>> Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] ParaPundit: Whites Still Do Manual >>> Labor In Wisconsin >>> >>> More thanks for Frank's efforts. This is exactly right. The >>> fast-food restaurant where I get my lunch salad used to be staffed >>> by ordinary causasians, often with obvious mild retardation. They >>> were good workers, and I enjoyed them. Now I can barely understand >>> the girl at the register and sometimes I have to ask her to say it >>> in Spanish because her English is so poor. I am deeply discouraged >>> and disillusioned by President Bush's attitude about illegal >>> emmigration. >>> Lynn >>> >>> Premise Checker wrote: >>> >>> >>> >>>> Whites Still Do Manual Labor In Wisconsin >>>> http://www.parapundit.com/archives/002938.html#002938 >>>> >>>> 2005 August 14 Sunday >>>> Whites Still Do Manual Labor In Wisconsin >>>> >>>> Over at [9]No Speed Bumps Dan reports on how [10]during a vacation >>>> trip in Wisconsin he found white people doing all the manual labor >>>> jobs that are done by Hispanics in Texas. >>>> >>>> Two weeks ago I vacationed near Oshkosh, Wisconsin. One thing >>>> strikingly different than living in Texas was that there were few >>>> Hispanics. In Texas, Hispanics are found in all walks of life, >>>> from >>>> doctors to janitors. >>>> >>>> With so many impoverished Hispanics illegally moving to Texas over >>>> the southern border each year, they have taken over most of the >>>> lower-skill jobs because they will work for less than American >>>> citizens. Go to any restaurant, hotel, or construction site and >>>> all >>>> of the basic manual labor tasks are being done by low-income >>>> Hispanics. >>>> >>>> Anyway, while on vacation, in the hotels we stayed in all of the >>>> maid staff and other help were white. The same was true of all of >>>> the restaurants we ate in, from the cooks, to the bus boys, to the >>>> grounds keepers. I felt like we were in a time machine and in a >>>> strange land. >>>> >>>> An interesting note about the maid staff at the hotels was the >>>> good >>>> cheer that they were in. They were constantly chatting among >>>> themselves and seemed very content as they went about their work. >>>> This reminded me that, yes, there is dignity to manual labor, and >>>> yes, white people can still do manual labor. >>>> >>>> This runs counter to the fashionable argument today justifying the >>>> open border policy with Mexico. The argument goes that America >>>> could just not function without all of the low-skill workers >>>> coming >>>> in to do all of the manual labor. Well, that is ridiculous. It may >>>> drive prices up some, if American citizens (whether white, black, >>>> or any other race) must do the work but the work will still get >>>> done, one way or another. >>>> >>>> One of the big whopper lies told by open borders advocates such as >>>> George W. Bush is that there are "jobs that Americans won't do". >>>> This >>>> is nonsense. One only need travel to those places where the bulk of >>>> the population is still white to see that this claim is false >>>> propaganda. >>>> >>>> As for the argument that a lack of cheap immigrant labor will >>>> drive up >>>> prices, it rests on three fallacies: >>>> * That low skilled labor makes up much of total costs. Wrong-o >>>> sleigh bell lovers. The bottom quintile of the United States >>>> population earns [11]only 3.5% of national income. 20% get 3.5%. >>>> If we deported all the illegal aliens and stopped all low >>>> skiilled >>>> and moderate skilled immigration the bottom 20% would see some >>>> significant increase in their wages. But that increase would be >>>> unlikely raise total prices by even a couple of percent. We >>>> don't >>>> pay them that much. A 10% or 20% increase in their salaries >>>> won't >>>> matter much to the rest of the population. >>>> * That there are no substitutes for cheap labor. Again, wrong-o >>>> sleigh bell lovers. Necessity is the mother of invention. In all >>>> likelihood, faced with higher labor costs industry would be more >>>> eager to develop and buy more capital equipment and to >>>> arrange the >>>> methods of purveying goods and services to decrease the >>>> amount of >>>> labor needed. In fact, we have an example available for what the >>>> lack of cheap immigrant labor will do to an industry. [12]The >>>> Australian wine industry is more automated than the American >>>> wine >>>> industry due to lack of cheap immigrant labor in Australia. Ben >>>> Franklin was right. We'd advance more rapidly without simple >>>> minds >>>> available to do simple tasks cheaply. >>>> * That there are no external costs to cheap unskilled immigrant >>>> labor. And once again, wrong-o sleigh bell lovers. Low skilled >>>> laborers can not afford to pay for their own medical care. They >>>> don't pay enough in taxes to pay for the educations of their >>>> children. They do not make enough to pay for their >>>> retirements in >>>> the United States. The list goes on. Oh, and they commit >>>> crime at >>>> higher rates. So they cost crime victims and also the criminal >>>> justice system. A year for an inmate at Rikers Island in New >>>> York >>>> costs $47,000. Criminals are expensive for the rest of us in >>>> many >>>> ways. >>>> >>>> The Open Borders advocates are deeply dishonest. America's elites >>>> are >>>> corrupt. They lie. They can not be trusted. America is going down a >>>> very wrong path. Our leaders in business and politics are to blame. >>>> But so are apathetic members of the public. It is time to wake up >>>> and >>>> demand a stop to massive immigration. The costs have become far too >>>> high and will be with us for decades to come. >>>> By Randall Parker at 2005 August 14 06:44 PM [13]Immigration >>>> Economics | [14]TrackBack >>>> Comments >>>> >>>> in vermont too. many more latinos work in oregon than 10 years ago >>>> though, and i hear that similar things are going on in the south. i >>>> suspect that for a variety of reasons the upper midwest and new >>>> england (distance, climate, cost of living) will resist latino labor >>>> the longest. >>>> Posted by: [15]razib on August 14, 2005 08:55 PM >>>> >>>> Resistance is futile. Viva La Rasa. >>>> Posted by: [16]Mark on August 14, 2005 10:59 PM >>>> >>>> There would be a net savings from reversing the antimerit immigrant >>>> flow, some of which would be passed on to the consumers. If the >>>> bottom >>>> 20% gets paid so little that their wages could double without the >>>> rich >>>> even noticing it, shifting 4% of the total income away from the top >>>> 80% over several years, that is a worthwhile price to pay. There >>>> is no >>>> economic need to increase the size of the bottom end; it isn't about >>>> money, it's about power. How to get power, when there are no ideas; >>>> won't they use immigration to increase racial conflict, and say that >>>> officials must have more power? >>>> Posted by: [17]John S Bolton on August 14, 2005 11:26 PM >>>> >>>> For some reason my trackbacks to this post don't take, so ping! >>>> Posted by: [18]Dave Schuler on August 15, 2005 07:47 AM >>>> >>>> Eastern Washington, North Idaho, and Montana are alot like Wisconsin >>>> in that low end labor jobs are done primarly by whites. We have very >>>> few illegal aliens in this part of the country. This is good because >>>> we have much less of the "servant" culture that you see in >>>> California >>>> and other places. People clean their own homes and often do their >>>> own >>>> yard work. If you have someone else do these things, they are >>>> done by >>>> outside services operating more like independent business people >>>> rather than as "domestics". Not having the illegal immigrants means >>>> that we have a much more "do it yourself" mentality than, say, in >>>> Southern California. >>>> >>>> I do not like that "class" mentality that illegal immigration has >>>> produced in places like California and Texas. I think having >>>> distinct >>>> social classes, especially if they are of different races, is very >>>> destructive to the future of the U.S. The "open-borders" people need >>>> to be grilled over this issue. >>>> Posted by: [19]Kurt on August 15, 2005 10:01 AM >>>> >>>> razib - don't underestimate the number of mexicans in the upper >>>> midwest - chicago has the 2nd highest mexican population in the u.s. >>>> after l.a. granted this isn't wisconsin, but.... >>>> >>>> randall - in a similar, practical manner that you approach >>>> alternative >>>> energy solutions, i.e. can't tell people to drive less or other >>>> inconveniences that would be a political non-starter in america >>>> today; >>>> what would be your political platform for immigration that would be >>>> politically feasible? i would love to know what you'd recommend, >>>> having put considerable thought to this issue, assuming something >>>> like >>>> you were an advisor to your senator. thanks. >>>> Posted by: [20]Jim on August 15, 2005 01:22 PM >>>> >>>> I spent a few days in Sierra Vista, AZ, a booming town about 15 >>>> miles >>>> north of the Mexican border. Strikingly, the maids in my motel were >>>> white, as were a lot of the other service workers. The answer to >>>> this >>>> paradox is that Sierra Vista is within the narrow band heavily >>>> policed >>>> by the Border Patrol. If illegal aliens are found there, they are >>>> deported. But if they make it far enough north to Tucson or Phoenix, >>>> well, they're Ollie Ollie Home Free. >>>> Posted by: [21]Steve Sailer on August 15, 2005 02:03 PM >>>> >>>> Jim, >>>> >>>> Perhaps I don't understand your question. Politically feasible? I >>>> think a candidate for the Presidency could run on a platform to >>>> deport >>>> all the illegals and win. The dollar cost to the government of >>>> deporting all the illegals would be pretty low. >>>> >>>> The anger about the immigrant deluge is building. But politicians >>>> are >>>> chasing the votes of Hispanics, the Democrats see them as a solid >>>> Democrat voting bloc (and they are), and some business interests >>>> want >>>> cheap labor. >>>> >>>> I'd tell a US Senator to submit a bill to fund a barrier along the >>>> entire length of the border. I'd also propose upping the number of >>>> Border Patrol by 20,000 and setting them loose in the interior with >>>> orders to round up all illegals. Congress should give >>>> instructions to >>>> DHS to resume interior enforcement. >>>> Posted by: [22]Randall Parker on August 15, 2005 03:33 PM >>>> >>>> References >>>> >>>> 9. http://nospeedbumps.com/ >>>> 10. http://nospeedbumps.com/?p=334 >>>> 11. http://www.heritage.org/Research/Taxes/bg1791.cfm >>>> 12. http://www.parapundit.com/archives/002778.html >>>> 13. http://www.parapundit.com/archives/cat_immigration_economics.html >>>> 14. >>>> http://www.futurepundit.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi?__mode=view&entry_id=2938 >>>> 15. http://www.gnxp.com/ >>>> 16. mailto:dfsf at hotmail.com >>>> 17. http://www.johnsbolton.net/ >>>> 18. http://www.theglitteringeye.com/ >>>> 19. mailto:kurt2100kimo at yahoo.com.tw >>>> 20. mailto:knuckleballnews at yahoo.com >>>> 21. http://www.iSteve.com/ >>>> 22. http://futurepundit.com/ >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> paleopsych mailing list >>>> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>>> >>>> >>>> >>> >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> paleopsych mailing list >>> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>> _______________________________________________ >>> paleopsych mailing list >>> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>> >>> >>> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> paleopsych mailing list >> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From waluk at earthlink.net Mon Aug 22 02:29:21 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (Gerry Reinhart-Waller) Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2005 19:29:21 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: gasoline prices Message-ID: <43093881.8020901@earthlink.net> I recently spoke with someone with knowlege about hybrid cars. He claims that for a hybrid, car starts in the gasoline mode which activates the battery so that car can then convert to the electrical mode. This negates the steps necessary for making electricity including burning coal. Gerry Reinhart-Waller Christian Rauh wrote: > Note that burning coal to make electricity to move a car engine is > less energy efficient and more polluting than burning gas in that engine. > > Christian > > Gerry Reinhart-Waller wrote: > >> It is a good first step. That I agree with. >> Hybids are a wave of the future. But there are many other waves that >> need to follow. >> >> >> Gerry Reinhart-Waller >> >> >> >> Steve Hovland wrote: >> >>> These ideas can be applied on a wider scale. >>> >>> Here's a car we saw in Europe: >>> >>> >>> >>> This is the future in America :-) >>> >>> Steve Hovland >>> www.stevehovland.net >>> >>> >>> -----Original Message----- >>> From: Gerry Reinhart-Waller [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] >>> Sent: Monday, August 15, 2005 6:14 PM >>> To: The new improved paleopsych list >>> Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] 250 miles per gallon? They're doing it >>> >>> Well and good, Steve. But one robin does not a springtime make. >>> Even if it is parked in your garage. >>> >>> Regards, >>> Gerry Reinhart-Waller >>> >>> >>> Steve Hovland wrote: >>> >>> >>> >>>> Tinkerers fiddle with hybrids to increase efficiency >>>> >>>> Bottom of Form 1 >>>> CORTE MADERA, California (AP) -- Politicians and automakers say a >>>> car that can both reduce greenhouse gases and free America from its >>>> reliance on foreign oil is years or even decades away. >>>> Ron Gremban says such a car is parked in his garage. >>>> It looks like a typical Toyota Prius hybrid, but in the trunk sits >>>> an 80-miles-per-gallon secret -- a stack of 18 brick-sized >>>> batteries that boosts the car's high mileage with an extra >>>> electrical charge so it can burn even less fuel. >>>> Gremban, an electrical engineer and committed environmentalist, >>>> spent several months and $3,000 tinkering with his car. >>>> Like all hybrids, his Prius increases fuel efficiency by harnessing >>>> small amounts of electricity generated during braking and coasting. >>>> The extra batteries let him store extra power by plugging the car >>>> into a wall outlet at his home in this San Francisco suburb -- all >>>> for about a quarter. >>>> He's part of a small but growing movement. "Plug-in" hybrids aren't >>>> yet cost-efficient, but some of the dozen known experimental models >>>> have gotten up to 250 mpg. >>>> They have support not only from environmentalists but also from >>>> conservative foreign policy hawks who insist Americans fuel >>>> terrorism through their gas guzzling. >>>> And while the technology has existed for three decades, automakers >>>> are beginning to take notice, too. >>>> So far, DaimlerChrysler AG is the only company that has committed >>>> to building its own plug-in hybrids, quietly pledging to make up to >>>> 40 vans for U.S. companies. But Toyota Motor Corp. officials who >>>> initially frowned on people altering their cars now say they may be >>>> able to learn from them. >>>> "They're like the hot rodders of yesterday who did everything to >>>> soup up their cars. It was all about horsepower and bling-bling, >>>> lots of chrome and accessories," said Cindy Knight, a Toyota >>>> spokeswoman. "Maybe the hot rodders of tomorrow are the people who >>>> want to get in there and see what they can do about increasing fuel >>>> economy." >>>> >>>> Plugged or unplugged? >>>> The extra batteries let Gremban drive for 20 miles with a 50-50 mix >>>> of gas and electricity. Even after the car runs out of power from >>>> the batteries and switches to the standard hybrid mode, it gets the >>>> typical Prius fuel efficiency of around 45 mpg. As long as Gremban >>>> doesn't drive too far in a day, he says, he gets 80 mpg. >>>> "The value of plug-in hybrids is they can dramatically reduce >>>> gasoline usage for the first few miles every day," Gremban said. >>>> "The average for people's usage of a car is somewhere around 30 to >>>> 40 miles per day. During that kind of driving, the plug-in hybrid >>>> can make a dramatic difference." >>>> >>>> Gremban promotes the CalCars Initiative, a volunteer effort >>>> encouraging automakers to make plug-in hybrids. >>>> Backers of plug-in hybrids acknowledge that the electricity to >>>> boost their cars generally comes from fossil fuels that create >>>> greenhouse gases, but they say that process still produces far less >>>> pollution than oil. They also note that electricity could be >>>> generated cleanly from solar power. >>>> Gremban rigged his car to promote the nonprofit CalCars Initiative, >>>> a San Francisco Bay area-based volunteer effort that argues >>>> automakers could mass produce plug-in hybrids at a reasonable price. >>>> But Toyota and other car companies say they are worried about the >>>> cost, convenience and safety of plug-in hybrids -- and note that >>>> consumers haven't embraced all-electric cars because of the >>>> inconvenience of recharging them like giant cell phones. >>>> Automakers have spent millions of dollars telling motorists that >>>> hybrids don't need to be plugged in, and don't want to confuse the >>>> message. >>>> Nonetheless, plug-in hybrids are starting to get the backing of >>>> prominent hawks like former CIA director James Woolsey and Frank >>>> Gaffney, President Reagan's undersecretary of defense. They have >>>> joined Set America Free, a group that wants the government to spend >>>> $12 billion over four years on plug-in hybrids, alternative fuels >>>> and other measures to reduce foreign oil dependence. >>>> Gaffney, who heads the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Security >>>> Policy, said Americans would embrace plug-ins if they understood >>>> arguments from him and others who say gasoline contributes to >>>> oil-rich Middle Eastern governments that support terrorism. >>>> "The more we are consuming oil that either comes from places that >>>> are bent on our destruction or helping those who are ... the more >>>> we are enabling those who are trying to kill us," Gaffney said. >>>> >>>> Now vs. later >>>> DaimlerChrysler spokesman Nick Cappa said plug-in hybrids are ideal >>>> for companies with fleets of vehicles that can be recharged at a >>>> central location at night. He declined to name the companies buying >>>> the vehicles and said he did not know the vehicles' mileage or >>>> cost, or when they would be available. >>>> Others are modifying hybrids, too. >>>> Monrovia-based Energy CS has converted two Priuses to get up to 230 >>>> mpg by using powerful lithium ion batteries. It is forming a new >>>> company, EDrive Systems, that will convert hybrids to plug-ins for >>>> about $12,000 starting next year, company vice president Greg >>>> Hanssen said. >>>> University of California, Davis, engineering professor Andy Frank >>>> built a plug-in hybrid from the ground up in 1972 and has since >>>> built seven others, one of which gets up to 250 mpg. They were >>>> converted from non-hybrids, including a Ford Taurus and Chevrolet >>>> Suburban. >>>> Frank has spent $150,000 to $250,000 in research costs on each car, >>>> but believes automakers could mass-produce them by adding just >>>> $6,000 to each vehicle's price tag. >>>> Instead, Frank said, automakers promise hydrogen-powered vehicles >>>> hailed by President Bush and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, even >>>> though hydrogen's backers acknowledge the cars won't be widely >>>> available for years and would require a vast infrastructure of new >>>> fueling stations. >>>> "They'd rather work on something that won't be in their lifetime, >>>> and that's this hydrogen economy stuff," Frank said. "They pick >>>> this kind of target to get the public off their back, essentially." >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ >>>> >>>> >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> paleopsych mailing list >>>> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>>> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>>> >>>> >>>> >>> >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> paleopsych mailing list >>> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>> >>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> paleopsych mailing list >>> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >>> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych >>> >>> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> paleopsych mailing list >> paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 22 22:47:18 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2005 18:47:18 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Robert Sapolsky: Should Science Make Us Better Than Well? Message-ID: Robert Sapolsky: Should Science Make Us Better Than Well? http://www.popsci.com/popsci/futurebody/article/0,20967,1088740,00.html Popular Science - August 2005 One preeminent scientist tackles the moral and ethical issues that come with the business of genetically enhancing our biology. The point of medicine is to make sick people "well," which is really just another way of saying "afflicted with roughly the same diseases as everyone else." But as we've seen in this special issue, we are belly-flopping our way into a world in which more and more medical interventions hold the promise of making us better than well, to borrow a memorable coinage from Peter Kramer's 1993 book Listening to Prozac. We're working on an entire suite of biological enhancements: smart drugs to improve memory beyond normal, doping methods that promote muscle growth by inhibiting certain proteins, gene therapy to stimulate the birth of neurons in the brain to above-normal levels. If you can imagine it, some scientist is mucking around in it. I know this firsthand. In my lab at Stanford University, we're developing gene-therapy approaches to, among other things, transfer genes into the hippocampus-an area of the brain involved in learning and memory-with the goal of making a rat learn better under stress, a state that typically impairs cognition. What we're really talking about here is becoming above average, and that's where things get tricky. The average person often has trouble with the mathematics of averageness. So even though air travel is safer than traveling by car, most people fear the former more than the latter because people like to be in control and because the average person considers himself to be a better-than-average driver. Or there's the physician who ignores findings in clinical research in favor of her gut feeling, because the average physician thinks she is a better-than-average physician. And then there are the mathematically challenged social critics who sincerely believe that our schools should be producing nothing but above-average children. The ideal of fostering an above-average society is, by definition, doomed. Still, with an imagination steeped in science-fiction literature-and a deep-rooted trust in our ability to solve humanity's problems-it's not hard to dream up fanciful ways in which science will make us better than well. But I think it's a good idea to consider whether this sort of tinkering is a good idea. What are some of the worrisome aspects of us White-Labcoat Guys futzing with our bodies and minds? A partial list: What if a wondrous intervention backfires? This is the scenario of "Wait a second . . . this gene-transfer breakthrough was supposed to make humans photosynthetic, and instead now we're just vulnerable to Dutch elm disease." This concern had better top the list, given the rich history of such disasters, stretching from at least as far back as the Medieval Medical Association advocating leeches for when you're feeling under the weather all the way up to the recent discovery that a gene therapy designed to cure a life-threatening immunological disorder happens to cause leukemia. And the earnest assurance of "But we're being extra, extra cautious this time" doesn't cut it-we scientists have always been careful people intent on not screwing up, but nonetheless, unpredictable things happen when cruising the unknown. The unpredictable isn't the only peril we face, though. There are all sorts of things that should worry us even when the intervention works exactly as planned. What fun is it now? So we figure out how to get a bunch of bumblebee mito- chondria into the fingers of some pianist, who can now play the fastest trills in the history of music. Great, but it's unlikely to make the playing actually sound better. Or suppose the big question this season is whether the Pistons, with the new titanium fibril implants in their quads, will beat the Spurs, with their prosthetic forearm extenders. Who cares? It's as exciting as watching to see if the PC team defeats the Macs at virtual synchronized swimming. Where does the line go? There is nothing intrinsically wrong with making us better than well, but there are certain lines that should not be crossed. One boundary I hear often is that we should not alter the normal chemistry of the brain. In this scenario, it would be fine to perform gene therapy in, say, the bladders of aging men, to banish the inevitable increase in what a polite doctor might call urinary urgency, so that middle-aged men would need to go to the bathroom only once a day, at exactly noon. The problem with this "keep the brain sacrosanct" strategy is that we already alter the brain's neurochemistry all the time. The average person who has gotten no sleep the previous night is pretty useless-unless she makes herself neurochemically better than well with the timely ingestion of a cup of caffeine. Another popular do-not-cross line involves inheritance: We should not manipulate the germline, which would allow hardwired genetic changes to carry on to the next generation. In this view, if you want to splurge for cosmetic surgery to get some fancy neon antler implants, that's your puzzling prerogative. Just don't manipulate your germline so that you pass on the antler trait to your kids. But couldn't controversial science also determine what traits are not passed between generations? Consider Tay- Sachs, a congenital disease in which massive deposits of lipids build up in the brain, destroying it-and the child-within a few years. Most people would agree that this constitutes a less-than-well disease state, and they would be comfortable with prenatal screening to eliminate the disease from the gene pool. But what about other ideas for manipulating the germline by elimination? It is generally considered an example of "well" to be able to have healthy children. But in parts of China and India, being guaranteed to have a healthy boy would count as better than well. Is it OK to determine the gender of a child through in-vitro techniques, allowing only a certain type of sperm to cozy up to an egg? Who here wants superpowers? Once we have the means to make someone better than well, what should we do with that ability? Suppose Big Pharma develops a smart drug to manipulate cognition so that an individual thinks better and learns better under stress instead of having those abilities impaired. What's wrong with that? As I mentioned, my lab is working on this; to me it seems like a good idea to give such a drug to safety workers whose actions could determine whether the next Chernobyl occurs. But should it be something a student can take in preparation for an SAT exam? How about the stressed-out death-squad commander making a snap decision as to how best to ethnically cleanse a village of civilians? The rich get richer. Do the well get better than weller? The great promise of technology in Western civilization is that it will make all our lives better. It's a nice sentiment, but it rarely works this way. In their book The Axemaker's Gift, James Burke and Robert Ornstein document how most technological innovations have done precisely the opposite of leveling the playing field, concentrating more power into the hands of the few, starting with the first dawn-of-man guy to invent a really good cudgel. The same applies in medicine. It is those high on the socioeconomic ladder who are most likely to hear about a medical innovation, to understand its implications, to have a cousin whose friend's sister can get them at the top of the list to receive it, and to be able to afford it (whether thanks to health insurance or deep pockets). During the past few decades, the U.S. has had an unprecedented economic boom, has been at the core of the biotech revolution, and has spent the highest percentage of its GDP on health care of any country on Earth. Despite that, we rank something like 29th in life expectancy, in large part because we're moving in the direction of a dichotomized nation-where our urban poor are elderly by age 60, crippled with heart disease, obesity and diabetes, while our wealthy septuagenarians are wrestling with the decision of whether to go for the knee replacement this close to ski season. The best of our biomedical science doesn't always trickle down very far. Who's well, anyway? Before you opt for prosthetic x-ray eyes or genetically engineered opposable big toes-or whatevers -to make you better than well, you have to have de-cided what constitutes well. And this is where we, as individuals and societies, have a pretty bad track record of making sensible judgments about what counts as normal. For example: In the early 1990s a hormone called leptin, which suppresses appetite, was discovered. People went hog-wild at the news, assuming that we'd found the magic fat pill for society at large. As it turns out, though, most overweight people don't suffer from a shortage of leptin. There are certain people, however, who have a mutation resulting in extremely low leptin levels. An article in the journal Science reported on three Pakistani families whose members were described, in an unexpected departure from scientific argot, as "chubby." You know what happens next-in swoops the Leptin SWAT Team to give these people synthetic leptin, suppress their appetites, melt away their chub, propel them toward a successful life of winning elections, having strings of highly publicized affairs with glitterati, appearing on the cover of People, et cetera. But here's where the leptin Albert Schweitzers ran aground: The family refused the treatment. "These people are from a culture that considers it a status symbol to be chubby," reported Science. And thus you are left with the boggling specter of having to convince people that according to the dominant culture, there's something wrong with them, in order to then cure them of their wrongness. This is a disturbing domain. We are already in a world that promises ways to make people better than well with a nose job, breast implants, cosmetic products to straighten out their kinky hair, or tanning salons to keep them bronze year-round. Such modifications sometimes do wonders for the quality of someone's life. But we don't need fancier science to be even better at egging on and then accommodating people's insecurities or their shame at who they and their people are. Ironic ending department Finally, one of the best reasons to stop and question some of these better-than-well advances is that when they work, they may ultimately accomplish nothing. We are a terribly invidious species. Psychology studies have shown that, for example, people are not happy receiving x more dollars in salary if it means that their neighbor gets 2x more. In reality, none of us wants to be rich; what we want is to be richer than other folks. Similarly, there are few reasons to be tall, in absolute terms; in fact, there are some health risks associated with being extremely tall. There are, however, ample societal benefits to being taller than other people. Which brings us back to the mathematical difficulties so many people have with averageness: No matter how marvelous the state-of-the-art science, no matter what miracles are accomplished by my kindred Bio-Elves of the Laboratory, the majority of society will still not be able to be taller than average, smarter than average, more beautiful than average, and so on. You can imagine plenty of better-than-well interventions that would be appealing for their own sake. Personally, I would find it very pleasurable to have genetically engineered cochleas that would allow me to hear gorgeous birdsong from many miles away, or gills that would make exploring coral reefs simpler or, as long as we're at it, a nifty prehensile tail. But if science is being recruited to make someone better than well to gain the advantages it would bring in society, it's a dead end. All you'll be doing is buying into an ever-spiraling arms race of needing to be better than well, and then needing to be better than the new and improved well, and then . . . well, you get the picture. I think it's scarier than average. Robert Sapolsky is a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University, a MacArthur "genius" Fellow, and author of five books, including Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 22 22:47:30 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2005 18:47:30 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Edge 165: (Goedel) Janna Levin: A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines Message-ID: Janna Levin: A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge165.html Edge 165-- August 15, 2005 [Her biography is attached.] A MADMAN DREAMS OF TURING MACHINES by Janna Levin G?del didn't believe that truth would elude us. He proved it would. He didn't invent a myth to conform to his prejudice of the world at least not when it came to mathematics. He discovered his theorem as surely as if it was a rock he had dug up from the ground. He could pass it around the table and it would be as real as that rock. If anyone cared to, they could dig it up where he buried it and find it just the same. Look for it and you'll find it where he said it is, just off center from where you're staring. There are faint stars in the night sky that you can see but only if you look to the side of where they shine. They burn too weakly or are too far to be seen directly, even if you stare. But you can see them out of the corner of your eye because the cells on the periphery of your retina are more sensitive to light. Maybe truth is just like that. You can see it, but only out of the corner of your eye. Introduction The following message arrived from Janna Levin, Barnard physicist and writer: "There have been a few recent articles in the press on the theme that "the novel is dead". Comments on Edge, on the other hand, have gone in the opposite direction, noting the widening umbrella of the third culture in terms of the work of accomplished novelists and playwrights who noodle around with scientific ideas like Ian McEwan in Saturday, Richard Powers in Galatea 2.2, Michael Frayne in Copenhagen, David Auburn in Proof - not to mention Mary Shelley in Frankenstein. Maybe these works hit some things more effectively than can be done in a straightforward popular science book. Conversely scientists have played with new forms of expression like Primo Levy in The Periodic Table and Alan Lightman in Einstein's Dreams. "So let me throw this out there in the hopes that Edge readers will find the attached piece of interest -- an early draft from a book I've been writing called A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines. This is a story. Does that make it fiction? It's based on truth like all of our stories. It's a story of coded secrets and psychotic delusions, mathematics and war. It's a chronicle of the strange lives of Alan Turing and Kurt G?del. These stories are so strange, so incredible, that they are totally unbelievable. Except they're true. And fact is more extraordinary than fiction. "This excerpt may be particularly relevant now given the recent Edge features on G?del with Rebecca Goldstein and Verena Huber-Dyson." JANNA LEVIN is a professor of physics at Barnard College of Columbia University and recently held a fellowship from NESTA (National Endowment for Science Technology and Arts) at the University of Oxford. She has worked on theories of the Early Universe, Chaos, and Black Holes. Her work tends to encompass the overlap of mathematics, general relativity, and astrophysics. She is the author of How The Universe Got Its Spots: Diary Of A Finite Time In A Finite Space. _________________________________________________________________ A MADMAN DREAMS OF TURING MACHINES Vienna, Austria. 1931. The scene is a coffeehouse. The Caf? Josephinum is a smell first, a stinging smell of roasted Turkish beans too heavy to waft on air and so waiting instead for the more powerful current of steam blown off the surface of boiling saucers fomenting to coffee. By merely snorting the vapors out of the air, patrons become over-stimulated. The caf? appears in the brain as this delicious, muddy scent first, awaking a memory of the shifting room of mirrors second the memory nearly as energetic as the actual sight of the room which appears in the mind only third. The coffee is a fuel to power ideas. A fuel for the anxious hope that the harvest of art and words and logic will be the richest ever because only the most fecund season will see them through the siege of this terrible winter and the siege of that terrible war. Names are made and forgotten. Famous lines are penned, along with not so famous lines. Artists pay their debt with work that colors some walls while other walls fall into an appealing decrepitude. Outside, Vienna deteriorates and rejuvenates in swatches, a motley, poorly tended garden. From out here, the windows of the coffeehouse seem to protect the crowd inside from the elements and the tedium of any given day. Inside, they laugh and smoke and shout and argue and stare and whistle as the milky brew hardens to lace along the lip of their cups. A group of scientists from the University begin to meet and throw their ideas into the mix with those of artists and novelists and visionaries who rebounded with mania from the depression that follows a nation's defeat. The few grow in number through invitation only. Slowly their members accumulate and concepts clump from the soup of ideas and take shape until the soup deserves a name, so they are called around Europe and even as far as the United States, The Vienna Circle. At the center of the Circle is a circle: a clean, round, white-marble tabletop. They select the caf? Josephinum precisely for this table. A pen is passed counterclockwise. The first mark is made, an equation applied directly to the tabletop, a slash of black ink across the marble, a mathematical sentence amid the splatters. They all read the equation honing in on the meaning amid the disordered drops. Mathematics is visual not auditory. They argue with their voices but more pointedly with their pens. They stain the marble with rays of symbolic logic in juicy black pigment that very nearly washes away. They collect here every Thursday evening to distill their ideas to distinguish science from superstition. At stake is Everything. Reality. Meaning. Their lives. They have lost any tolerance for ineffectual and embroidered attitudes, for mysticism or metaphysics. That is putting it too dispassionately. They hate mysticism and metaphysics, religion and faith. They loathe them. They want to separate out truth. They feel, I imagine, the near hysteria of sensing it just there, just beyond the nub of their fingers at the end of arms stretched to their limits. I'm standing there, looking three hundred and sixty degrees around the table. Some of them stand out brighter than the others. They press forward and announce themselves. The mathematician Olga Hahn-Neurath is here. She has a small but valuable part to play in this script as does her husband Otto Neurath, the oversized socialist. Most importantly, Moritz Schlick is here to form the acme and source of the Circle. Olga, whose blindness descended with the conclusion of an infection, smokes her cigar while Otto drinks lethal doses of caffeine and Moritz settles himself with a brush of his lapels. The participation of the others present today is less imperative. A circle can be approximated by a discrete handful of points and the others will not be counted. There are perhaps more significant members of the Circle over the years, but these are the people that glow in color against my grainy black and white image of history. A grainy, worn, poorly resolved, monochromatic picture of a still scene. I can make out details if I look the shot over carefully. Outside, a wind frozen in time burns the blurred faces of incidental pedestrians. Men pin their hats to their heads with hands gloved by wind-worn skin. Inside a grand mirror traps the window's images, a chunk of animated glass. In a plain, dark wooden chair near the wall, almost hidden behind the floral arm of an upholstered booth, caught in the energy and enthusiasm of that hopeful time as though caught in a sandstorm, is Kurt G?del. In 1931 he is a young man of twenty-five years, his sharpest edges still hidden beneath the soft pulp of youth. He has just discovered his theorems. With pride and anxiety he brings with him this discovery. His almost, not-quite paradox, his twisted loop of reason, will be his assurance of immortality. An immortality of his soul or just his name? This question will be the subject of his madness. Can I assert that suprahuman longevity will apply only to his name? And barely even that. Even now that we live under the shadow of his discovery, his name is hardly known. His appellation denotes a theorem, he's an initial, not a man. Only here he is, a man in defense of his soul, in defense of truth, ready to alter the view of reality his friends have formulated on this marble table. He has come to tell the circle that they are wrong, and he can prove it. G?del is taciturn, alone even in a crowd, back against the wall, looking out as though in the dark at the cinema. He is reticent but not un-likeable. The attention with which his smooth hair, brushed back over his head away from his face, is creamed and tended hints at his strongest interest next to mathematics, namely women. His efforts often come to fruition only adding to his mystery for a great many of the mathematicians around him. And while he has been known to show off a girlfriend or two, he keeps his real love a secret. His bruised apple, his sweet Adele. There is something sweet about his face too, hidden as it is behind thick-rimmed goggle glasses, inverted binoculars, so that those who are drawn into a discussion of mathematics with him feel as though they are peering into a blurry distant horizon. The completely round black frames with thick nosepiece have the effect of accentuating his eyes or replacing them with cartoon orbs a physical manifestation of great metaphorical vision. They leave the suggestion with anyone looking in that all emphasis should be placed there on those sad windows or, more importantly, on the vast intellectual world that lays just beyond the focus of the binocular lenses. He speaks only when spoken to and then only about mathematics. But his responses are stark and beautiful and the very few able to connect with him feel they have discovered an invaluable treasure. His sparse council is sought after and esteemed. This is a youth of impressive talent and intimidating strength. This is also a youth of impressive strangeness and intimidating weakness. Maybe he has no more than the rest of us harbor, but his weaknesses all seem so extreme hypochondria, paranoia, schizophrenia. They are even more pronounced when laid alongside his incredible mental strengths huge black voids, chunks taken out of an intensely shining star. He is still all potential. The potential to be great, the potential to be mad. He will achieve both magnificently. Everyone gathered on this Thursday, the rotating numbers accounting for some three dozen, believe in their very hearts that mathematics is unassailable. G?del has come tonight to shatter their belief until all that's left are convincing pieces that when assembled erect a powerful monument to mathematics, but not an unassailable one or at least not a complete one. G?del will prove that some truths live outside of logic and that we can't get there from here. Some people people who probably distrust mathematics are quick to claim that they knew all along that some truths are beyond mathematics. But they just didn't. They didn't know it. They didn't prove it. G?del didn't believe that truth would elude us. He proved it would. He didn't invent a myth to conform to his prejudice of the world at least not when it came to mathematics. He discovered his theorem as surely as if it was a rock he had dug up from the ground. He could pass it around the table and it would be as real as that rock. If anyone cared to, they could dig it up where he buried it and find it just the same. Look for it and you'll find it where he said it is, just off center from where you're staring. There are faint stars in the night sky that you can see but only if you look to the side of where they shine. They burn too weakly or are too far to be seen directly, even if you stare. But you can see them out of the corner of your eye because the cells on the periphery of your retina are more sensitive to light. Maybe truth is just like that. You can see it, but only out of the corner of your eye. ~~ The iron frame of Kurt's bed was a brutal conductor of the chill singeing his hand so sharply as he hoisted himself awake this morning that it might as well have left a burn and the cloud of condensation that escaped from his damp mouth could have been smoke. He prepared for his discussion with The Circle most the day and took care to present himself well. He applied layers of clothes like a dressing over a wound, carefully wrapping his limbs in strong woolen weaves. The third pair of pants buttoned easily over the inner two layers with just the right amount of resistance. He made sure the two pairs of trousers he wore closest were slightly short and stayed well hidden behind the cuff of the outer suit. A similar procedure was followed for his upper half a series of shirts and vests created a padding five garments thick. Even then he looked lean although less alarmingly so. Despite his detachment, his family's sophistication was not entirely lost on him and surfaced in the subtle choices he made, if not in the few kitsch objects he clashed against his mother's design in the interior of his large flat, then at least it showed in the many garments that he now used to flatter himself, a reference to the rich textiles manufactured in his father's factories. He applied the finely woven jacket that still hung loosely from the line connecting the points of his two shoulders and finally a handsome overcoat was draped over that. G?del loves these Thursday nights. The rest of the week is spent in near complete isolation, sometimes losing the sense of days. Comforted by the darkest hours when his loneliness is assured, he manipulates logical symbols into a flawless sequence, generating theorem after theorem in his notebooks. He fills the plain paper books with mathematical proofs that lead to new ideas that spawn new results. He can't always find a context for the proliferation of logical conclusions other than the pages themselves which are covered one-sided from left to right until the book is finished and he moves back through the volume covering the back of the pages from right to left. In these ordinary brown notebooks he builds a logical cosmos of his own in which the private ideas are nested, his secret gems. His most precious insights he transcribes in Garbelsberger, an obsolete form of German shorthand he was taught as a schoolboy and is sure no one else remembers. While he often loses Monday easily and tries to find root in Tuesday, though Wednesday is a mere link between nights, he always knows Thursday. He likes to arrive early and choose the same place each time, a dark wooden chair near the wall, almost hidden behind the floral arm of an upholstered booth, not too close to the center but not too far out where it might become crowded, people pressing in to warm themselves against the heat of argument emanating from the core. Comfortably still, with an undisturbed tepid coffee he never intends to drink, he listens to the debates, the ideas, and the laughter, like a man marooned on an island tuning into a distant radio broadcast. Proof that there are others out there. Proof that he is not alone. Proof. He usually disagrees with them. Still, The Circle gives him a clear form to relate to, an external setting for his private cosmos solid rocks of reality appearing in a fog of ghosts. This evening he is later than usual. Knocked unsteady as he has been by the recent turns. He has his latest notebook with him, pressed against his jacket. His knuckles protrude from the spine of the book like barbed wire lacings. The pages are nearly full, front and back covered, they must be read as a loop from the first page front to the last page back, then towards the first page again, a closed path, a broken triangle, and at the pointed tip a discovery. An incredible discovery. He is so impressed by the stream of symbols that accumulate particularly at the endpoint, where they began, that he feels lightheaded while his blood collects in pools about his boney knees. He's in front of the glass doors of the Caf? Josephinum. Through the filter of the windowpanes the activity becomes an unreal smear of lights and colors. His hand on the door, it opens, that aroma, and he moves into the room. Through the filter of his eyes the activity persists, an unreal smear of lights and colors. Who here is real? Pushing against a breeze of phantoms he moves towards the table, pressing into a chair. Amazing that he looks composed. His physical condition is fragile. His emotional condition is fragile. He hides the former behind thick textile weaves and a well-manicured fa?ade. He hides the latter behind the pattern of reflected lights off his glasses. On this stage provided by the Caf? Josephinum, he looks at ease, as though he belongs. But the past few days have been irregular at best. For one thing, Adele almost poisoned him. He woke into the hardest cold this morning like breaking through the surface of a frozen lake and gasped for breath the air shocking his nose and throat with brittle spikes of ice as his mind sucked in the progression of the past days. A terrible relief flooded his system and the relieved thoughts themselves confirmed to him that he was indeed alive. I think therefore I am, he thought. Both the thought and the condition of being alive amused him. While he has run the events over and over in his mind, they permute with each replay: An old woman, his death, then Adele who is kind until she dusts something into his stew. Then again: An old woman, his death, the rain, Adele manipulates his confession and blatantly builds a toxic pyre. An old woman. His death. The rain. Adele. Pretty, stained Adele. His heart aches with suspicion and the thick mucous of betrayal. His heart also aches with disease. He is fatigued. His chest is sore. He has no breath. This very evening he coughed up blood. His heart has become stiff and scarred after a bout of rheumatic fever at the age of eight. A valve in his atrium fused and constricted over years. It took the disease a full decade to declare the specific threat intended. He is plagued by attacks. A backwash of his blood stretches the chambers, depriving his arteries. He lives in constant fear for his life. Every minute framed by panic. The flutter in his chest a warning of a potential blood clot, suffocation, or heart failure. He shouldn't be here with the smoky air, warm and virulent. But the relief that filled his limbs this morning gave him a feeling of urgency and ambition. And he needs to see Moritz. The Circle doesn't take shape until Moritz Schlick arrives. He enters like a gale, his entrance embellished by a curl of eddies in his wake that flow around the door and into the room. He is the chair of natural philosophy at the University, a title that carries great prestige and authority. Moritz is always a gentleman, always gracious and earnest and admirable. As he rocks into a chair, hands are waved, more coffees are ordered and in the darkening room, darker than the ebbing day, they all begin to settle amid clanking dishes, knocking elbows, their collective weight leveraged inward. The table wobbles as cups rise and fall and a circle forms. It's Moritz Schlick's Circle. Drawn together by his invitation and kept together by his soothing tones. They come here to orbit around truth, to throw off centuries of misguided faith, the shackles of religion, the hypnotism of metaphysics. They celebrate the heft of their own weight in a solid chair, the heat off the coffee, the sound their voices manufacture within the walls of the caf?. Some are delirious with the immediacy of this day because it is all that matters. There is nothing else. Everything true is summed up in the chair, the cup, the building. There is only gravity, heat and force. The world is all that is the case. Moritz knows the greatness that can emerge from the members he has chosen by hand, so he smoothes the caustic edges between egos and makes out of them a collective, an eclectic orchestra out of dissonance. Moritz is the glue that holds together the communist, the mathematician, the empiricist. He selects each person here with care, patiently turning them over in his mind, studying them with his kind eyes. They are comforted by his self-assurance and are sincerely flattered by the invitation to Thursday's discussions, if they are ever fortunate enough to receive the summons. There are many for whom the hoped for invitation never comes. G?del blushed with either vanity or shyness, who can know for sure, when Moritz approached him in the room in the basement of the mathematics Institute and extended the invitation almost four years ago. Kurt was at the chalkboard organizing another student's thoughts in spare symbols, lovely dusty marks on a landscape of poorly erased predecessors. He always transcribes the skeleton in the pure notation of symbolic logic first and with such care before he begins to speak. Even though he was only a twenty-one year old student, the others watched with admiration for his ability to see through to the logical bones in their debates, like a chef skillfully removing the endoskeleton of a filleted fish without a morsel of clinging flesh. Moritz watched him too and moved by the lucidity of G?del's resolution to a problem he himself had found distractingly difficult, he came to his final decision to extend to Kurt an invitation to his Circle on Thursday nights. Moritz joined him at the board, quietly adding a fine comment on the infinite list of integers that might participate in the reasoning off the middle rib of the fish's spine. And in this smooth manner he eased G?del into conversation. Everyone either knows by instinct or learns by plain experiment to meet G?del with mathematics first. And so Moritz approached with the right words about infinity and integers and earned that look of gratitude and trust. As he shook Kurt's hand and his own head in grateful amazement, they talked: "Herr Professor, I have been thinking about the Liar's Paradox where the liar says, this sentence is false." "Ah, the antinomy of the liar. Yes, that liar who says, this sentence is false." "The sentence cannot be false." "Because if it is false as claimed, then it must be true. A contradiction." Studying his young student for a time Moritz stroked his lip dry and concluded his motion with the reply, "And it cannot be true. Because if it is true, then it is false which is again a contradiction. It is a paradox and an artifact of our careless use of language. Mathematics will never allow such a paradox. Mathematical propositions will either be true or false with no contradictions." "What if mathematics is not free of such propositions?" "It must be. Mathematics must be complete. There are no unsolvable problems." Ever since that morning of the invitation and the antinomy of the liar, G?del has found Moritz's very presence reassuring. If Kurt was different in character, more affectionate, less rigid, and if Moritz too were just a little different, more spontaneous, less reserved, G?del could have come to love Moritz like a father. Instead he feels something more formal, more distant, more appropriate probably. He feels grateful. He keeps this feeling to himself and the sentiment has almost no outward manifestation beyond his attendance here at Moritz's discussions. He believes that Moritz is real, that he exists and it happened in the moment that Moritz shared the comment on the infinite list of numbers. With that insight, it was as though he uttered a code word. I am one of the real ones, his comment certified, and with that he crystallized from the cloud and took shape. [Excerpted from A Madman Dreams Of Turing Machines by Janna Levin. Knopf, 2006.] References 22. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/levin.html ---------------- Edge: JANNA LEVIN http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/levin.html Janna Levin JANNA LEVIN is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. She received a BA in physics and astronomy with a concentration in philosophy from Barnard, a PhD from MIT in the Center for Theoretical Physics, and subsequently worked at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) and the Center for Particle Astrophysics (CfPA) at the University of California, Berkeley before moving to England. There she held an Advanced Fellowship at the University of Cambridge in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP). Just prior to returning to the states she was awarded a Fellowship from the National Endowment for Science Technology and Arts to be a scientist-in-residence at the Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing in Oxford. She has worked on theories of the Early Universe, Chaos, and Black Holes. She is the author of How The Universe Got Its Spots: Diary Of A Finite Time In A Finite Space. _________________________________________________________________ Beyond Edge: [10]Janna Levin's Website References 10. http://www.phys.barnard.edu/%7Ejanna/index.htm From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 22 22:48:46 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2005 18:48:46 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NS: Erotic images can turn you blind Message-ID: Erotic images can turn you blind http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id==dn7845 18:09 12 August 2005 Gaia Vince Researchers have finally found evidence for what good Catholic boys have known all along ? erotic images make you go blind. The effect is temporary and lasts just a moment, but the research has added to road-safety campaigners' calls to ban sexy billboard-advertising near busy roads, in the hope of preventing accidents. The new study by US psychologists found that people shown erotic or gory images frequently fail to process images they see immediately afterwards. And the researchers say some personality types appear to be affected more than others by the phenomenon, known as "emotion- induced blindness". David Zald, from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and Marvin Chun and colleagues from Yale University in Connecticut, showed hundreds of images to volunteers and asked them to pick a specific image from the rapid sequence. Most of the images were landscape or architectural scenes, but the psychologists included a few emotionally charged images, portraying violent or sexually provocative scenes. The closer these emotionally charged images occurred prior to the target image, the more frequently people failed to spot the target image, the researchers found. "We observed that people failed to detect visual images that appeared one-fifth of a second after emotional images, whereas they can detect those images with little problem after neutral images," Zald says. Primitive brain "We think there is essentially a bottleneck for information processing and if a certain type of stimulus captures attention, it can jam up the bottleneck so subsequent information can't get through," Zald explains. "It appears to happen involuntarily. The stimulus captures attention and once allocated to that particular stimulus, no other stimuli can get through" for several tenths of a second. He believes that a primitive part of the brain, known as the amygdala, may play a part. That region is involved in evaluating sensory input according to its emotional relevance and has an autonomic role, influencing heart rate and sweating. "It is possible that emotionally-charged stimuli produce preferential rapid routing of the impulse that bypasses the slower cortical route via the amygdala," Zald told New Scientist. "Patients with amygdala lesions pick out the target image without reacting to violent images, although they show normal blindness reactions when sexual images are introduced, which suggests another mechanism may also be involved." Harm avoiders The researchers think emotion-induced blindness could lead to drivers simply not seeing another car or pedestrian if they have just witnessed an emotionally charged scene, such as an accident or sexually explicit billboard. The effect could exacerbate the more obvious problem of drivers simply being distracted by large, arresting images. "It's the responsibility of drivers to ensure that when they are behind the wheel they keep their eyes on the job in hand," says a spokeswoman from Brake, a UK road safety organisation. And some people are more vulnerable than others. The study assessed participants using a personality questionnaire, rating them according to their level of "harm avoidance". Those scoring highly were more fearful, careful and cautious; those scoring low were more carefree and more comfortable in difficult or dangerous situations. The researchers found that those with low harm avoidance scores were better able to stay focused on a target image than those with high harm avoidance scores. "People who are more harm avoidant may not be detecting negative stimuli more than other people, but they have a greater difficulty suppressing that information," Zald suggests. The Brake spokeswoman says companies should think about the consequences of placing emotionally charged billboards at dangerous road junctions: "We should be concerned if drivers are experiencing split-second breaks in concentration, which could result in an accident or death on the roads." Journal reference: Psychonomic Bulletin and Review (August 2005 issue) From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 22 22:49:39 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2005 18:49:39 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Freakonomics: "Peak Oil:" Welcome to the media's new version of shark attacks Message-ID: "Peak Oil:" Welcome to the media's new version of shark attacks http://www.freakonomics.com/2005/08/peak-oil-welcome-to-medias-new-version.html Sunday, August 21, 2005 [Links omitted on purpose. Too much irrelevance. I posted the NYT Magazine article yesterday.] The cover story of the New York Times Sunday Magazine written by Peter Maass is about "Peak Oil." The idea behind "peak oil" is that the world has been on a path of increasing oil production for many years, and now we are about to peak and go into a situation where there are dwindling reserves, leading to triple-digit prices for a barrel of oil, an unparalleled worldwide depression, and as one web page puts it, "Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon." One might think that doomsday proponents would be chastened by the long history of people of their ilk being wrong: Nostradamus, Malthus, Paul Ehrlich, etc. Clearly they are not. What most of these doomsday scenarios have gotten wrong is the fundamental idea of economics: people respond to incentives. If the price of a good goes up, people demand less of it, the companies that make it figure out how to make more of it, and everyone tries to figure out how to produce substitutes for it. Add to that the march of technological innovation (like the green revolution, birth control, etc.). The end result: markets figure out how to deal with problems of supply and demand. Which is exactly the situation with oil right now. I don't know much about world oil reserves. I'm not even necessarily arguing with their facts about how much the output from existing oil fields is going to decline, or that world demand for oil is increasing. But these changes in supply and demand are slow and gradual -- a few percent each year. Markets have a way with dealing with situations like this: prices rise a little bit. That is not a catastrophe, it is a message that some things that used to be worth doing at low oil prices are no longer worth doing. Some people will switch from SUVs to hybrids, for instance. Maybe we'll be willing to build some nuclear power plants, or it will become worth it to put solar panels on more houses. The NY Times article totally flubs the economics time and again. Here is one example from the article: The author writes: The consequences of an actual shortfall of supply would be immense. If consumption begins to exceed production by even a small amount, the price of a barrel of oil could soar to triple-digit levels. This, in turn, could bring on a global recession, a result of exorbitant prices for transport fuels and for products that rely on petrochemicals -- which is to say, almost every product on the market. The impact on the American way of life would be profound: cars cannot be propelled by roof-borne windmills. The suburban and exurban lifestyles, hinged to two-car families and constant trips to work, school and Wal-Mart, might become unaffordable or, if gas rationing is imposed, impossible. Carpools would be the least imposing of many inconveniences; the cost of home heating would soar -- assuming, of course, that climate-controlled habitats do not become just a fond memory. If oil prices rise, consumers of oil will be (a little) worse off. But, we are talking about needing to cut demand by a few percent a year. That doesn't mean putting windmills on cars, it means cutting out a few low value trips. It doesn't mean abandoning North Dakota, it means keeping the thermostat a degree or two cooler in the winter. A little later, the author writes The onset of triple-digit prices might seem a blessing for the Saudis -- they would receive greater amounts of money for their increasingly scarce oil. But one popular misunderstanding about the Saudis -- and about OPEC in general -- is that high prices, no matter how high, are to their benefit. Although oil costing more than $60 a barrel hasn't caused a global recession, that could still happen: it can take a while for high prices to have their ruinous impact. And the higher above $60 that prices rise, the more likely a recession will become. High oil prices are inflationary; they raise the cost of virtually everything -- from gasoline to jet fuel to plastics and fertilizers -- and that means people buy less and travel less, which means a drop-off in economic activity. So after a brief windfall for producers, oil prices would slide as recession sets in and once-voracious economies slow down, using less oil. Prices have collapsed before, and not so long ago: in 1998, oil fell to $10 a barrel after an untimely increase in OPEC production and a reduction in demand from Asia, which was suffering through a financial crash. Oops, there goes the whole peak oil argument. When the price rises, demand falls, and oil prices slide. What happened to the "end of the world as we know it?" Now we are back to $10 a barrel oil. Without realizing it, the author just invoked basic economics to invalidate the entire premise of the article! Just for good measure, he goes on to write: High prices can have another unfortunate effect for producers. When crude costs $10 a barrel or even $30 a barrel, alternative fuels are prohibitively expensive. For example, Canada has vast amounts of tar sands that can be rendered into heavy oil, but the cost of doing so is quite high. Yet those tar sands and other alternatives, like bioethanol, hydrogen fuel cells and liquid fuel from natural gas or coal, become economically viable as the going rate for a barrel rises past, say, $40 or more, especially if consuming governments choose to offer their own incentives or subsidies. So even if high prices don't cause a recession, the Saudis risk losing market share to rivals into whose nonfundamentalist hands Americans would much prefer to channel their energy dollars. As he notes, high prices lead people to develop substitutes. Which is exactly why we don't need to panic over peak oil in the first place. So why do I compare peak oil to shark attacks? It is because shark attacks mostly stay about constant, but fear of them goes up sharply when the media decides to report on them. The same thing, I bet, will now happen with peak oil. I expect tons of copycat journalism stoking the fears of consumers about oil induced catastrophe, even though nothing fundamental has changed in the oil outlook in the last decade. (For those of you interested in more economic perspectives on peak oil, check out these three posts by Jim Hamilton of econbrowser: here, here, and here. And thanks to Alex from marginalrevolution for pointing me to Hamilton's posts.) posted by Steven D. Levitt at 11:31 AM 107 Comments: head lem said... OK I'll be your Huckleberry. In 1971, President Nixon declared a "War on Cancer". http://training.seer.cancer.gov/module_cancer_disease/unit5_war _on_cancer.html "The Market" has had 35 years to respond. In fact, very rich people who are dying of cancer are willing to pay whatever price they can afford for "the cure". The Shah of Iran came to NYC with his cancer and his untold wealth. It did not help him. Peter Jennings of ABC news (lung cancer 2005) was probably wealthy. The "market" did not help him. And amazingly, Nixon declared his war on cancer AFTER we had been to the Moon in 1969. Why heck, if WE can go to the Moon, we can do anything. The Market always provides. Right? Right? Technology always finds a way. Technology will save us. Right? The market will save us. "They" who tinker in science will save us even though they fret that they might be able to this time. It's always happened before and therefore by unquestionably "sound" logic it must happen again. Right? Peak Oil is one of a number of Global-Scope Catastrophes that are rolling up onto Humanity's beach. The Tsunami of Sumatra was nothing compared to what is heading our way. We know about it, and yet the ever-insightful "market" does nothing. Just as it did when the dot.com bust was rolling in and people knew (Barrons). Just as it did when the first oil shock hit (Hubbert's 1973 USA peak). When are you religious fanatics of "economics" and Adam Smith's invisible waving hand going to wake up and admit you worship a false deity? There is only a finite amount of easily-extractable oil underground. We are at the point where our high-tech straws are sucking it out as fast as they can. The faster they suck, the quicker we reach peak and go over. 8/21/2005 2:01 PM Preston said... The economics principles I don't disagree with, its the degree of the reponse. You say: "If oil prices rise, consumers of oil will be (a little) worse off. But, we are talking about needing to cut demand by a few percent a year. That doesn't mean putting windmills on cars, it means cutting out a few low value trips. It doesn't mean abandoning North Dakota, it means keeping the thermostat a degree or two cooler in the winter." But our use of energy is far more fundamental to both our population growth as a planet, and our standard of living as a country. What the economics can't compensate for are the physics and fundamentals of the laws of thermodynamics. Our standard of living requires a certain energy input. Renewables can't provide energy at the rate we are accustom to, so we use the "battery" of oil that we are draining. When that battery runs out, the economics will adapt, but along with it is a more painful adaption we will have to make in the way we live. As just one example of how fossil fuels go beyond just gas trips for errands, read this article: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html -Ptone 8/21/2005 2:22 PM Davis said... Using cancer as an example doesn't help your argument here -- it's a shining example of common misunderstanding. There is no such disease as cancer -- "Cancer is actually the end result of what are probably hundreds (thousands?) of different diseases. We have confused ourselves by giving them the same category name - it's like the old-style classification of infections as various 'fevers.'" I would argue that "peak oil" is an issue which suffers from common understanding in a similar way -- the complex details of the real situation become obscured by attention-grabbing, headline-friendly rhetoric. The Economist had an excellent survey discussing peak oil in the April 28th issue; I won't reproduce their arguments against this kind of alarmist talk here, simply because there are too many of them. 8/21/2005 2:31 PM Eric Galloway said... The sad thing is that the New York Times is so 'old media' that most readers of the paper will never know about these critiques. Here an idea: Make this the subject of your next column in the New York Times. Of course, the Timesies are feeling a little sensitive to criticism these days (Judy Miller, Jayson Blair, etc.) so any explicit references to the Peter Maass piece might be ill-advised. 8/21/2005 2:37 PM mtraven said... Yes the market will respond. As Hamilton points out, the framing of this question in terms of peaks or sudden cliffs where prices shoot up instaneously is naive. However, nothing in the market-economics arguments addresses: - the size of the dislocation (small increases in oil prices can multiply their effects as it raises costs throughout the economy) - the time to respond. This is the big one. A rational response to a rise in oil prices involves consuming less transportation. Everyone who lives spread out in the suburbs will be hurting and, perhaps, be economically motivated to live in a denser development pattern where they can rely on human-power or public transit. However, getting to that state requires an enormous shift in investment, public and private. It's not going to happen quickly and it's going to cause pain. - Speaking of pain, downturns, recessions, and depressions can all be part of a market response. While a long-view economist can interpret it all as a welcome and necessary correction, that doesn't lessen the pain for individuals involved. I'd like to see you and James Kunstler, who has a new doomsaying book out, have a good optimist/pessimist debate. Us ordinary citizens don't know who to believe, but a good battle is always entertaining. 8/21/2005 2:52 PM Jamie Brockington said... Dr. Levitt: You make an excellent that is often overlooked in the mainstream media and among the general populace. Taking into account another basic economic principle, that people make rational decisions, it is illogical to assume that people will pay say, $5 per gallon of gas if an alternative can offer half of that. It is also reasonable to assume that people would drive less if driving costs more. The idea that rising gas prices could be the "end of life as we know it" is just completely absurd. Toyota and Honda obviously understand it. They're beginning to create more hybrid vehicles. to head lem: Contrary to your assertion, the market is responding to cancer. While there is no efficative cure for the disease, there is a copious amount of money and research towards developing one. That IS the invisible hand at work. Were there no economic response to such a devastating illness, there would be Cancer Societies, no funds devoted towards curing cancer, and less attention paid towards it. Just because a few wealthy, cancer-afflicted aristocrats could not use their money to cure themselves, doesn't negate the economic, incentive-based reaction towards cancer. -JB 8/21/2005 2:59 PM Anonymous said... The flaw in your logic is the speed with which society will adapt. I don't feel it will be a slow shift away from oil, but rather a sudden drop in supply will come first - unrest in Nigeria or Venezuela and suddenly supply drastically exceeds demand. Look at the panic buying which ensued during the UK petrol protest in 2000 - it literally brought the country to a halt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_fuel_protest The US is particularly dependent on petrol for transport. Look at Walmart's worry over oil prices. Look at Surprise, AZ - a community with no public transport, a group of suburbs which are virtually unsustainable without cheap fuel: http://maps.google.com/maps?oi=map&q=Surprise,+AZ We all agree that hybrids and changes of habits must happen. Unfortunately, I bet that a sudden drop in supply will cause total chaos before any real lasting change in habits begins to occur. I am also highly sceptical of any replacement technology for oil - how long will it take to build the nuclear plants required? Any idea how many plants would be needed? You can't build a nuclear plant overnight. Oil is to society as alcohol is to an alcoholic ... sadly, I feel we're going to have to wake up in our own vomit before we start any process of a real substantial move away from oil. 8/21/2005 3:50 PM JW said... "The consequences of an actual shortfall of supply would be immense. If consumption begins to exceed production by even a small amount, the price of a barrel of oil could soar to triple-digit levels." The price of oil has gone up precipitously in the last few years, mainly because excess capacity has disappeared. We are still consuming more every year. If and when we get to the point where supply actually decreases, the price of a good with an inelastic demand curve will go through the roof, at least temporarily. I agree that as long as cooler heads prevail, this does not mean the end of civilization, but modern civilization is built on the idea of growth. Our current system where the rich get richer will only work when there is growth in the system. This will become extremely difficult once energy becomes constrained. Is it hard to believe that when the economy goes into an extended funk and the people at the bottom are getting squeezed the most, that people will want a scapegoat, esp one thats supposedly sitting on all the oil? 8/21/2005 3:58 PM Mike said... The real problem with your analysis of the situation as one which can be resolved by simple economics is that you're right. You're right - prices will go up until enough demand is destroyed for them to stabilize. There'll be a lot of up/down in the meantime. But what does this mean? In our country, this means you won't be able to live in the suburbs anymore in most cities (no public transportation; and no feasible way to deliver it to most suburban neighborhoods). So what does that do to our country? Concrete laid down now to build the latest exurbs has a long life. And conversely, rebuilding today's suburbs to be dense urban neighborhoods in which mass transit can actually work is expensive even with CHEAP oil. One thing economists forget is that demand destruction in the abstract is a perfect solution to a supply/demand imbalance. But when the suburbanites are trying to get to work or school at $6/gallon gasoline, and there still isn't a bus in their neighborhood, and they still can't carpool since their town has offices spread all throughout the suburbs rather than in one central location, what are you gonna do? 8/21/2005 4:01 PM Prof. Goose said... This post has been removed by the author. 8/21/2005 4:15 PM odograph said... Economists seem weird to me. Yes, I've seen and commented in some of those other blogs. Valid points are made, but an undercurrent of economic weirdness returns. They seem to think they have "the answer" because no matter what happens, supply and demand will meet. It doesn't matter if they meet in a return to $10 gas (SUVs for everyone!) or at $100 (goodbye Fedex) ... it's still a market success. A comment above says: Taking into account another basic economic principle, that people make rational decisions, it is illogical to assume that people will pay say, $5 per gallon of gas if an alternative can offer half of that. It is also reasonable to assume that people would drive less if driving costs more. The idea that rising gas prices could be the "end of life as we know it" is just completely absurd. I submit to you that driving less, even having to think about how far you drive, is a change in life as we know it. Be careful that your prediction of optimism doesn't come to match someone else's prediction of pessimism! 8/21/2005 4:21 PM odograph said... sorry, $10 oil not "$10 gas." 8/21/2005 4:22 PM Prof. Goose said... Cheap oil is necessary and sufficient for economic growth. Period. Cheap oil is what could have facilitated the development of alternative sources of energy, had it been used wisely. You see, without economic growth, lives change. Period. Economics is a discipline that is very normatively pleasing when economic growth exists. Growth facilitates rational choices and we all feel warm and fuzzly about the market. However, at its core, economics, when there is not economic growth, turns into a rationalist, Hobbesian State of Nature that decays rapidly. Why? Actors have to make tougher choices, that while still rational, do not stem from a growing pie, but a shrinking one. Then throw in the psychology of people with no hope of growth or betterment...and what do you have? NB, I do not subscribe to the real doomers like Kunstler, because I think humans can innovate and change if we understand the situation and are driven to do so...and we can do so in time to come in for a soft landing. We just have to get our heads out of our asses and start. Now. So, I hope you all learn as much as you can about peak oil. Simmons, Deffeyes, etc., etc. And if you're so inclined, come on over to The Oil Drum, where it is our mission to talk about this and many other related subjects. 8/21/2005 4:35 PM Anonymous said... As knowledge of the impending energy crisis begins to spread, hording will take precedent over conservation-- pushing the price higher and higher, even in the face of falling demand. 8/21/2005 4:37 PM Eric Galloway said... I see Peter Maass (the author of the NY Times Mag piece) is writing a book about oil. I'd advise him to write quickly--just in case the price of oil collapses down to $10 a barrel again (as in 1998)--if he wants to produce a freako'-style bestseller. Next year we might be back to worrying about the threat from Japan (or perhaps killer bees, or possibly even kudzu). 8/21/2005 4:40 PM Aaron said... A few thoughts from up here in "Oilberta", Canada. - I have a friend who burns raw vegetable oil in his mercedes diesel at 77 cents (CDN) per litre. - People in my town are responding by snapping up Smart Cars. They are everywhere in the Great White North. - It might not be the price of oil in terms of dollars, but the price of dollars in terms of oil. The US dollar has taken a substantial hit as of late. - Price of oil is based on expectations. Investment houses who buy futures contracts do so on expectations. They almost have an incentive to propagate a theory of limited future supply. 8/21/2005 4:47 PM J-Deal said... ?We know about it, and yet the ever-insightful "market" does nothing.? How can you make such a claim? It now costs $1,000 dollars to change any car into a Natural Gas or propane car. Oil can now be cheaply extracted from Sand Tar and Coal. -did you know America could supplement it?s oil supply with it?s coal supply? Electric cars are now completely viable, still not as good as oil driven cars, but 300 miles on an overnight charge ain?t bad. Combustion Hydrogen cars can be made for 50k, fuel cell for about 100k. Should we go on? There are hundreds of examples, and hundreds of alternatives that could go into effect, and be improved upon within months, if your catastrophe ever comes about. ?There is only a finite amount of easily-extractable oil underground? You need to research this a bit more, you do realize that the definition of easily extractable oil has changed every single year of your life? Tar sand which a few years ago was considered costly, can now be done for relatively cheap. Deep oil which was once impossible to drill, can now be done for $12 a barrel. American Oil companies have not once accurately predicted oil prices beyond 5 years. Always stating a higher cost than they expected, always underestimating the increase in technology. Tappable Oil reserves have increased every year I have been alive. If that ever changes, you will soon see oil substitutes increase every year. ?Renewables can't provide energy at the rate we are accustom to, so we use the "battery" of oil that we are draining.? France gets 80% of it?s energy from Nukes, we get 20%. Even if your statement is true, we have a long way to go. The article you link is basically bunk. About 90% of oil use in America goes to transportation. That other 10% can be made up easily just through use of alternatives. It doesn?t even explain the green revolution properly. Look it up at Wiki if you care. I don?t know if you know anyone in the car business, but bring this all up with them. Every car company has a plan to switch from Gas to other alternatives. The price of which would only be about 16 billion dollars. The cars would not be as good as gas cars at first -miles per tank of about 200-300 miles- but that would improve very quickly. ?Look at Surprise, AZ - a community with no public transport, a group of suburbs which are virtually unsustainable without cheap fuel:? A really bad example, seeing that just last year Phoenix?s oil supply was cut off by a pipeline rupture. Gas went to 20 dollars a gallon. And though their was much complaining, people just car pooled for the week while the pipeline was being fixed. Heck at the very worst, it takes about a day to switch your car over to natural gas or propane. Phoenix having one of the best natural gas infrastructures in the world would be able to remedy this quickly. That?s not to say it would be havoc for a good month or two, but people who think it would be a catastrophic way to life as we know it, just don?t seem to understand the history. The prices of commodities have always gone down, new technology has always arise, better means of extraction have always been invented. This has and will always be the case. Why should oil be any different? I?m 27 years old now. I have been hearing this same debate for my entire life now. At every step of my life my teachers have told me we will run out of oil in 10 years. I used to think, that if they kept saying it, someday it would be true. Now I realize it will never be true. Man learns to adapt. For there are only two great truth in the world. The world is always getting better, and everyone always believes it?s getting worse. 8/21/2005 5:03 PM peakguy said... Dr. Levitt I urge you not to make hasty comments about this subject without more deep analysis. Oil is not just a commodity, it is THE commodity that makes everything in our modern world possible, in particular food production and most forms of transportation. Barring some major innovation, there is no technology or energy source that can replace oil and it's many uses. It's like water and air. 6 Billion people need oil. 100 million maybe... If you read the Maass article closer you will find that really the oil market right now suffers from gross price distortion (probably way too low) because of a dearth of basic data on reserves and a well by well analysis of production rates. This is why people like Matt Simmons have been crying out for more data. Until we have more data I don't think anyone should be complacent about oil prices moving slowly in any direction. The problem is that we have invested Trillions of Dollars into an economic structure predicated on consistently low oil prices. We have trusted politically motivated leaders and economic interests that oil is plentiful and can meet an ever rising level of demand. If we had better data then the market could have continuously bid up the price as it became increasingly apparent that oil supplies were becoming scarce. Instead we are left with a situation in which all of this will become apparent when there are real shortages which will cause a huge spike in prices and the Saudis simply cannot increase production to alleviate the shortage. Then the market will react with brutal efficiency throwing the economy into an economic depression. Will oil restabilize at a lower price? Perhaps. It depends on whether you think inflation will be the main effect or an economic collapse causing rapid deflation of asset and massive unemployment. Remember that everything is relative. If there is rapid deflation and massive unemployment, then $10/barrel may be unaffordable. Please research this subject more closely and come back to us with a more thorough analysis of the subject. It's only the fate of our economy and civilization that hang in the balance. 8/21/2005 5:29 PM Anonymous said... One very quick point. Why is it do you think that in Canada our oil and natural gas reserves are managed by the Ministry of Natural Resources, Environment Canada, run mostly by enviornment science grads but in the US oil and how to obtain it is a matter of National Defence? I find Americans to be very reactionary. If oil and the procurement of it become to expensive and difficult I feel that it actually may be a very good thing for LOCAL economy.....why buy a tomato from Chile when you can buy one from the farmer down the road, and that sort of thinking. 8/21/2005 5:47 PM Jim said... All this discussion with no mention of Julian Simon's bet with Paul Ehrlich? Simon's proposition is that comodities get cheaper over time due to human creativity. Real gas prices are not much more than they were in the '50's, while real income is much higher. 8/21/2005 5:53 PM Ripley said... The hosts of this blog make several huge assumptions. First, "people respond to incentives." That's true, but the incentives to oil suppliers are not necessarily monetary. Countries like Iran or Sudan may sell to China because it can protect them with a UN Security Council veto. Hugo Chavez may lead Venezuela to stop selling to Americans because he doesn't care about maximizing profit. The second assumption is that any "changes in [oil] supply and demand are slow and gradual... [so] prices will rise a little bit" at most. Without knowing exactly how supply or demand will change, how can that be automatically true? The third assumption is market forces will solve the problem rationally. But doesn't that assume some sort of perfect market, with many buyers and sellers? Many responses to high oil prices would require huge initial investments, and it doesn't make sense to the individual entity to make those investments unless it's clear that they will be profitable on a long-term basis. Also, certainty of supply is important in the real world because oil is such a critical resource. This is a long-term issue which an economic analysis should address. The economic issue I'm the most interested in is the elasticity of demand for gasoline, which accounts for about half of U.S. oil use. 8/21/2005 5:57 PM coffee17 said... j-deal: could you post some links about tar sands being cheap? I remember that local producers were having to double the initial overhead to increase production a mere 0.1 mbpd (from $4.3 billion CDN to $7.8 billion CDN). Additionally, combined oil sand production by 2015 is supposed to be 2.7 mbpd ( http://cassandrasyndrome.blogspot.com/2005/07/canadian-tar-sand s-fools-black-gold.html ), so even if it was cheap, that's about 2.7% of the projected oil demand at 2015. Where's the rest of the increased oil production supposed to come from. As for people who drive their cars for 77 cents a gallon with vegetable oil, it's a question of scale. I saw a news story about one such person, and he depended on waste oil from a local restaurant. They won't be able to supply an entire city. There's a waiting time in many places to get a hybrid vehicle, and it there are multiple month long waiting lists to buy enough solar panels to power a house. Not to mention that with the increased price of oil this will be attached onto the cost to manufacture said solar panels. Nuclear power stations take 5+ years to build, and are very energy and capital intensive. And there are no new ones coming on line in the US (yet). Switch one's car over to natural gas? That's a great idea, considering North American natural gas production has already peaked, and the worry about oil prices is regarding the impending peak. Oh, wait, perhaps on the scale of all cars (or even 20% of all cars) that might not be the wisest long term decision. Where are you going to get the hydrogen to fill up your hydrogen (or fuel cell) car? Remember, this isn't just your car, but everyone's car (or again, how about 20%), so the question of scale applies again. Transitioning to all these new technologies will take a lot of oil when oil is getting scare. Additionally our economy currently depends upon cheap oil. Which means that transitioning away from oil takes a lot of capital when there will be (at least) a recession going on, multiplying the apparent cost to transition. This doesn't even take into the fact that about 15% of the USA's oil use is for making inorganic fertilizers, without which agribuisness won't work. And don't count on cheap apples from argentia as well, shipping costs will be up. So the people in the cities will have less direct need of oil, but won't be able to grow their own food. The people in the suburbs will be densely packed enough that crime could be a real problem with a less mobile police force, but at least they have the possibility of growing some of their food. However, for those who've put the work into a successful garden realize that it cuts into the leisure time, and how many people have worm bins to make their compost faster than a compost pile? How many people are ready to grow a garden which will give them some approximately balanced nutrition? And if America has less leisure time, then the terrorists have won. Or something like that. Yes, there are lots of small scale alternatives, but none of them currently answer the question of, "What if everyone did this?", and then there's the issue that even if we find something that ramps up well, will it ramp up fast enough. Yes, there will be demand destruction, but consider what demand destruction is for people in the suburbs, when there's no housing left within walking/biking distance to work, it's the middle of winter, and they pantry is empty. Now consider demand destruction for natural gas which has already peaked (at least it currently has lower decline rates) in Canadian cities. Touching back on oil sands again, current processing uses a lot of natural gas, and as we use more natural gas (cars and busses), what do you think will happen with the price of natural gas and how will this affect oil sands? Lastly, decline in rate of oil recovery for individual wells varries greatly on the techniques used. Horrizontal wells run well until they peak, and then they decline sharply. New wells are energy intensive, and new fields don't contain as much oil, or as fine of a quality of oil. Which means it takes more energy to refine the oil into something useable. As EROEI goes down, effectively the amount of oil produced goes down still further. 8/21/2005 5:58 PM Dimitar Vesselinov said... "Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." Yoda Is there any hope? Yes, there is. Help is on the way. http://alt-e.blogspot.com/ http://alteng.blogspot.com/ http://curtrosengren.typepad.com/alternative_energy/ 8/21/2005 6:00 PM wkwillis said... Why do you assume that oil can't collapse in price and increase in price, say, going from 65 dollars/45 euros per barrel to 650 dollars/15 euros a barrel? That's without US hyperinflation, either. Just a balance of payments renormalisation. We get loaned money by the rest of the world. We buy oil. If the rest of the world doesn't loan us money the dollar collapses and it costs us more money in real terms to buy oil. So we buy lead for battery powered cars, instead. 8/21/2005 6:01 PM peak oil said... The inaugural meeting of the US branch of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) will be held in Denver, Nov 10-11 http://www.postcarbon.org/node/434 8/21/2005 6:17 PM SW said... People have predicted that I would die. I haven't died. Therefore, I will never die. 8/21/2005 6:21 PM Anonymous said... As a Coloradan, let me assure you that the long term problem is about 500 years. There are mountains on the middle slope that are basically horrible piles of black gunk filled with oil--no green trees, no lovely golden aspen, no pretty fuzzy cuddly deer or chipmunks--just ugly black piles of oil poisoned shale. Take the trip along I-70 from Denver to Grand Junction before you argue with me. Our dear former President Jimmy Carter paid me 18.73 an hour to buld an oil cracking plant at Parachute, Colo.--the site of the former city of Grand Mesa. I worked on that sucker for the entire summers of 76 and 77. It would have brought in gasoline for under a dollar a gallon. Our lovely friends in Araby decided to lower their prices before it came online, so now weeds are growing through the cracks in the concrete. The smart boys (oaky, my chemist father) said then that there is enough oil there to supply the entire planet for 500 years. That was in 1976, so maybe there's only enough oil to supply us until, say, 2375 A.D. at today's demands. So it costs us $60.00 a barrel. That's less than we seem to be paying now. To paraphrase Frank Zappa, those mountains are ugly and they want to die. --Bruce Dearborn Walker 8/21/2005 6:29 PM Ralph said... We'll survive peak oil, but the transition will not be pain-free. Oil is transportation. There are limited substitutes. I can buy an electric car to take me to the grocery store, but the trucks and trains that get the food to the store have no alternatives. Batteries large enough to power these vehicles long distances would make them extremenly inefficient. Planes also have no fuel alternative. Biodiesel or liquid fuel from coal is a possibility, but significant infrastructure is not in place. Natural gas production in North America has peaked, and the LNG infrastructure to import oversea NG is hardly started, so conversions to this fuel has minimal upside for the time being. This is not a matter of minor fluctuations in supply and demand. China had a 20% year over year increase in oil demand. This has accelerated the process. In this country, SUV purchases have fallen off the map, but efficient hybrids have long waiting lists, and many upcoming hybrid models are only slightly more efficient than the normal models. What is really disappointing about this glib rebuttal is the ipse dixit manner in which Levitt dismisses the concept. His book and research have been focused on ignoring surface appearance and looking at what the data actually says, and this piece makes pronouncements without bothering to look at the data. 8/21/2005 6:29 PM Steven D. Levitt said... To SW- The right analogy is: People have predicted you will die. You haven't died yet. You probably won't die in the next 5 minutes. The point isn't that we will never run out of oil, it is that by the time we do we probably won't care very much. Steve Levitt 8/21/2005 6:46 PM J-Deal said... Coffee17 Rereading my statement, I may of overstepped. I probably should of stated "cheaper" instead of "cheap". Generally speaking Oil reserves are considered any oil that can be drilled for $15 a barrel, much of the Alberta oil hovers right at this price, most is closer to $18 -but with $60 a barrel for oil, I would consider that pretty cheap, though not as cheap as the $2-$4 Persian Gulf oil. As for some links -I got this info from hard print, so just googled for info. http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006228 http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/company/cnn40245.htm http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.07/oil.html However, if you think I was trying to imply that Alberta sands were the end all be all, you are mistaken. it's just one piece of the puzzle. You act as if it is all zero sum. Let me ask you something, what if we learn how to shale drill cheaply? Well then all our problems go away overnight. As for your questions on Hydrogen, Natural Gas and and propane. First of all, each one of these would lesson our demand for oil, even with a 10% decrease, this would be huge. However, hydrogen could easily become our soul source almost overnight. -We have plans just to do this, in case of catastrophe. Hydrogen is more expensive than oil in output per unit -think mpg-, and the vehicles are more expensive. however with mass production, that could change quickly. You ask where the hydrogen will come from. Well Hydrogen can come from any electrical source. It's one of the easiest things to make on the planet. Actually it's transportation costs that are a pain right now. Hydrogen should not be looked at as a fuel, but an intermidiatary. Much like elecrticity. If an overnight catastphee should happen, which I think is extremely unlikely. You could make the hydrogen in home units with equipment bought at Home Depot. large scale facilities would be put in place within about a 3 month period. It can be made from any electrical source. So unless you think Oil will dry up within a 3 month period, this could be eased into to avert a mass spike in oil demand. You act as if one day we will have oil, and the next day it will be all gone. It just doesn't work that way. If you believe it does, then there is nothing I can say that will change your mind. You also speak of the peak in NG demand, but don't mention LNG at all, LNG is still in it's infancy. Soon we will be able to import LNG much like we import Oil. And guess what, when LNG peaks, we'll find something else, and after that, something else. And so on. 8/21/2005 6:47 PM Anonymous said... We should just trust the Saudis, they love us over there. They would never let anything bad happen to us. 8/21/2005 6:55 PM Anonymous said... Steven: I would agree with you completely if it was guaranteed that oil depletion would be only "a few percent a year". Unfortunately, that's not a solid assumption. Various provinces either are or are about to deplete at over 10% per year. Eg the UK: http://www.irna.ir/en/news/view/menu-237/0505140999165001.htm and Mexico: http://www.greencarcongress.com/2005/03/mexicorsquos_la.html Saudi depletion on existing oil production is estimated at 11% a year (but they may be able to make up the difference with new production for some unknown period). It appears that a lot of provinces have been adopting technology like 4D seismic imaging of the changing oil in place and horizontal wells at the top of the oil layer which lead to maintaining production flat for a while, and then very rapid depletion on the backside of the peak. So, the worst case scenario is global depletion at O(10%) per year in a few years. Not saying that's certain by any means, but it's not off the wall either. That's very very hard to overcome when you consider that the average lifetime for a car on the road is 9 years, a truck is twice that, and new nuclear power plants need a lead time of 5-7 years. Stuart Staniford 8/21/2005 7:06 PM Anonymous said... Sorry, that should have been average *age* of a car on the road is nine years. Stuart Staniford 8/21/2005 7:14 PM Anonymous said... > new nuclear power plants need a lead time of 5-7 years. No, they don't. The political and regulatory environment imposes that kind of delay, but the planning and construction can be done in far less time. I predict that we'll first see the relevant cracks in US gasoline formulation regulation. There will be a production glitch that starves one area and not another and the obvious questions will get asked and the standard answers won't be accepted. 8/21/2005 7:16 PM J-Deal said... Peakguy, you stated "I urge you not to make hasty comments about this subject without more deep analysis. Oil is not just a commodity, it is THE commodity that makes everything in our modern world possible, in particular food production and most forms of transportation. Barring some major innovation, there is no technology or energy source that can replace oil and it's many uses. It's like water and air. 6 Billion people need oil. 100 million maybe..." Hmm, whatever did we do before Oil? Let me ask you, what would affect your life more, the loss of Oil? or the loss of Copper? Or maybe, lets be more fair, $600 dollar a barrel oil or $15 dollar a pound copper? I urge you not to be hasty, think about it. What is more important to you, having cheap electricity or having cheap gas? being able to cool your food in a fridge? or having cheap plastics? heck, using wood instead of plastics? A lot of people assume Oil is more important to us than it really is, just because we buy it at the pump everyday. We never think of the importance of copper. How copper is the commodity that makes our modern homes possible. As for the whole food production comment, I really don't even know what to say to this. Start buy learning how fertilizer is made. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process Oil is the #1 most important substance we have for transportation, you will get no argument from me on that one at all. However, ever since the 70's, we have shifted our oil use in other applications, over to alternatives. Open up an Almanac, look at our Oil use over the past 25 years, you might be surprised. hint, it's increased about 12% from 34.20 qbtu to 39.07 qbtu while total energy use has increased 19%. 8/21/2005 7:19 PM Loren Coleman said... The Copycat Effect Blog Sharks, Gators, Oil http://copycateffect.blogspot.com/2005/08/sharks-gators-oil.html 8/21/2005 7:24 PM odograph said... Just curious ... is "everyone drives a little electric car" optimistic or pessimistic? Is it the success of the invisible hand, or the end of life as we know it? I've got a sense that a lot of SUV families would see it as the sky falling. I get the idea it might be contrary to the "lifestyle" our government thinks it must defend. If it was me, I'd take freedom, honor, peace, and electric cars. YMMV. 8/21/2005 7:25 PM J-Deal said... Anon, you stated. "I would agree with you completely if it was guaranteed that oil depletion would be only "a few percent a year". Unfortunately, that's not a solid assumption. Various provinces either are or are about to deplete at over 10% per year. Eg the UK:" I don't disagree with this in theory at all. But the problem is, world production is still increasing. Even last year, which was a horrible year, we increased at about 2%. -And it wasn't until last year that Oil companies really started to ramp up, many still remeber the losses they took at 10 dollar oil. Now say next year, we are flat, or go down a a few %. Then we need to get our @sses in order, and fast. If it came in as you state, and dropped 10%. Then I think we'd have a few months of Havoc, as we went into a huge burst of energy production from other sources. Also I know it's generic to say, but kinda needs to be saying. France gets 80% of it's power from a source that was unknown 100 years ago. Whose to say that in 100 years, we won't be saying the same about the US. 8/21/2005 7:27 PM SW said... "The point isn't that we will never run out of oil, it is that by the time we do we probably won't care very much". It has bugger all to do with running out. It's all about RATES of production. You need to address that in a substantive way rather than invoking motivation. We agree that there will be plenty of motivation to inspire people to "unlock their creative genius". The question is, are you allowing yourself a realistic assessment of the physical realities that this genius is up against. I suggest not. If you want to make the argument that mining for sand and shale and the resulting processing is going to take the place of what we are losing to depletion and increased consumption and these new sources are going to come on line quickly enough to prevent near term supply shortages, I'd like to see the numbers. Where specifically are the projects where the anticipated production in the next five years can possibly compensate for the 4 million barrels per day we are losing to depletion plus the increased demand represented by growth both here and in India and China? I just don't see the numbers working out without significant 'demand destruction'. You can't just click your heels and make it happen. You can't rely on pixie dust. In the real world, most good leaders prepare for the worst and hope for the best. It is true that there is a real lack of solid data, particularly from the Middle East. And it is also true that a guy like Mat Simmons may be giving us what amounts to the worst case scenario. But given the implications, you would be a complete idiot not to have a plan to deal with the worst case scenario. To blithely assume that there is no chance that it could be an accurate prediction of what is to come amounts to public policy malpractice. The consequences of being wrong on this are simply too severe. Besides, the simple obvious things to do, are undeniably good anyway. Efficiency, doing the same amount of work, with less energy, is a growth industry. It is the next wave of high tech. Disengaging ourselves from the Middle East makes sense. Limiting our carbon emissions makes sense. So getting our public policy going in the right direction is going to help even if this turns out to be a pessimistic projection and we really have more time to prepare for something that is, I'm sure you will admit, inevitable. 8/21/2005 7:35 PM odograph said... "Whose to say that in 100 years, we won't be saying the same about the US." Oh, as an engineer I have seen the "invisible hand" fuel R&D ... they've just never let me deliver an "invisible product." Or put another way, the invisible hand is not a wishing well. 8/21/2005 7:43 PM cerqueira said... Steven, I was really disappointed by this post. By focusing on Maass' article, you've managed to avoid the real question of oil depletion and its implications on economy. If the "peak oilers" are right and oil production reaches a maximum then, surely, people will adapt. The cost of it, though, might be high. The last time oil prices raised, in the seventies and early eighties, it was followed by inflation and recession. Demand was destroyed by recession. In peripheral countries (I live in Brazil) the consequences (of high oil prices and high interest rates) were felt for a long time. As an engineer, I have almost the obligation to believe that energy conservation and alternative sources can cope with the needs. In my own country, ethanol from sugarcane constitutes some 50% of the fuel used by cars. But in the last three years world daily demand for oil has risen some two million barrels a year. Finding alternative sources for that much would be tough - and if you consider anthropogenic climate change, coal derived fuels are not an option. 8/21/2005 8:09 PM Sandy said... There was also no way the oil fires in Kuwait could be out in less than 10 years. There was also no way the Y2K problem could be solved in time to avoid TEOTWAWKI(tm). There was no way prices for commodities would be less in the 1980s than the 1970s. There was no way to feed the world in the 1980's, either. Remember when all of that happened? Me neither. Lots of bright people have said "there is no way that..." and produced lots of learned graphs and data as to why it can't be done, yet to date it has been done. Now, that's not a guarantee that this one time out of all the others, they'll be right, but the trend doesn't go their way. 8/21/2005 8:32 PM head lem said... Yes people have always predicted you will die, some promising it will happen very soon. They were all wrong so far. But now you are in ICU. The Chevron doctor has said "Will You Join Us?" http://www.willyoujoinus.com/ Still willing to bet on that next 5 minutes? 8/21/2005 8:38 PM Aaron said... The Saudis are repatriating billions in investments from abroad, which is just a nicer way of saying "we don't want to fund your consumption habits". No wonder Dick Cheney is coming to Canada in search of oil. There's plenty of it up here. It was profitable at 13 canadian dollars a barrel, or about 9 US. 8/21/2005 8:50 PM head lem said... Sandy, Thanks to "globalization", the markets provide their perfect solutions everywhere, even in Africa, today: http://www.sundayherald.com/51376 What exactly is the "market price" for a pauper's burial site in Africa? ... you know, speaking in cold terms of supply and demand? 8/21/2005 9:00 PM Anonymous said... Mike, and others - we have a serious arithmetic problem standing between us and doom. After all, at $6/gallon they're still building suburbs in Europe, although package tourists never see them. And Europeans still buy enough SUVs that their Socialist Parties keep dreaming up schemes to ban them from cities. A little back-of-the-envelope calculation clears up the mystery. Returning to the U S of A, housing in and near cities is unaffordable. So, in order to buy, people move 20, 30, or more miles out, even in out-of-the-way smaller cities like Madison, Wisconsin. Buying gets them an instant $20k or more a year in capital appreciation. It gets them another $10k or more from income tax they can shift to somebody else by taking the mortgage deduction. Double or triple these numbers around big coastal cities. Now, to swim in this $30k to $60k a year of government-subsidized free money, a couple might drive an extra 30k miles a year between them. That would take 1000 gallons of gas at 30mpg. Seems to me the minimum breakeven is $30k divided by 1000 gallons, or $30 a gallon, or $1260 a barrel - or $2520 a barrel along the coasts. Now, of course, that's a naive analysis holding all other things equal, and they never are. Still, as long as government policy is to keep real estate so hugely profitable, it might even be economically feasible to pay Norwegian trolls with soda straws to suck oil out of shale by the teaspoon. That sort of policy certainly makes gas (or diesel) at $3/gallon one of the all-time bargains in human history. It would remain so at $10 and beyond, which is much higher than any of the (serious) spike forecasts being bandied about. 8/21/2005 9:02 PM Anonymous said... It is not that oil will disappear, rather that to meet demand the price will rise high and quickly. Adapting to that price will be painful for us as the US has predicated its economy on cheap oil. Energy production is completely different from every other technology we know. In most industries, the more modifications or alterations you make to something the more value it has. A Porsche has more value than a VW due to the work and thought going into it. Energy production is the opposite. The more you have to do to produce a fuel the less valuable it is. Oil shales did not work because they required vast amounts of energy and water to convert them to fuel. Tar sands in Canada are marginally productive requiring a barrel or more of oil for every four barrels produced. This is what makes oil so fantastic. It has the highest energy density of any fuel except nuclear fuel and to obtain it we just stick a pipe in the ground and let it flow out (best case). No other fuel we know of provides so much benefit for so little work. This is what will make the transition to the age after cheap oil so painful. We'll have to make extensive changes to our lives and we won't have cheap oil to do it with. 8/21/2005 9:29 PM odograph said... To the Anonymous above this, talking about "doom" ... remember that doom is just one of the two extremes of opinion (or religion). The people who (in my opinion) don't think this through tend to immediately jump to one of two extremes. Either it is doom, or no problem at all. In the middle ground there are lots of scenarios ... clouds with or without various silver linings. Just to pick minor historical dislocations, think "farm crisis" or "rust belt" ... I think there is enought meat in the oil depletion argument to make that kind of "adjustment" possible. 8/21/2005 9:29 PM WHT said... I am very disappointed with Steve Levitt in his analysis. I thought Freakonomics was all about looking at the statistics and basic math underlying a premise and trying to debunk or support that premise. Many times you (Levit) have been able to do this in your book by demonstrating how that almost certain correlations between cause and effect were simply anomolies that could not overcome the null hypothesis. But now with this quickie study, you say " I don't know much about world oil reserves." So, with that, how can you say anything, one way or another, on how things will turn out. Cripes, in the whole post, you didn't even mention that the USA has gone through its own peak oil in the 70's and you could have started one of your classic Freakonomics statistical studies from that well-understood set of data. Actually I am not sure where you are going with this. I realize that you tend to take a balanced view of things, hitting progressive and conservative mistakes with eqivalent gusto. With this, it seems you clearly do not want to upset the conservative circle. 8/21/2005 10:04 PM Pixy Misa said... Energy production is completely different from every other technology we know. In most industries, the more modifications or alterations you make to something the more value it has. A Porsche has more value than a VW due to the work and thought going into it. Energy production is the opposite. The more you have to do to produce a fuel the less valuable it is. Baloney. Energy production works just the same as everything else. You're just confusing cost with value. 8/21/2005 10:13 PM Anonymous said... Hi Stephen, I had no idea you would take on peak oil so soon. I mentioned once about some of the undecidables in economic theory, but I found an interesting argument that points out the difference between humans and free markets. Suppose I have a pond full of trout and for some insane reason I introduce a breeding pair of Sea Lamprey. Of course from the lamprey's perpsective the market is flooded with trout so there is no real reason to plan family size or worry about supply. The lamprey population booms. Is it always true that the two species reach equilibrium? It is not always true, there exist systems in which the rapid rise of the lamprey and there life expectancy forces them to consume all of the trout in the pond. This example is like the interaction of renewables of supply and demand. But what if the trout were sterile so there was only a finite number? Then of course both the trout and lamprey would go extinct. Obviously evolution works too slow to make the lamprey suddenly eat pond scum. The question is when the fundamental need for oil is built into our way of life how quickly will we be able to change in the face of demand outstripping supply? Can we change easily at a rate of 3% of the auto fleet per year, that's only five million cars. Can we start to produce 3% more of our food locally or regionally to offset rising costs of imported food. If we can than great. But the secret underbelly of peak oil is the risk that we need to deal with. If OPEC artificially inflated its reserves back in 1980 then we are in for one hell of a decline. Why, because water infusion makes the wells produce in a skewed distribution, the decline is much steeper and therefore quicker. A good short term policy would be to get OPEC to allow auditing since the future of their resource is the future of the oil economy. The other thing I wanted to say is that just because the trout and lamprey system has a natural way of operating it does not mean that it is an acceptable way of operating or that it is the best way in light of other concerns. Thus the invisible hand, and glove and foot may be the way unfettered markets would act but underneath that chaotic dance with equilibrium is real human suffering. I can't imagine that you have contented yourself with that. 8/21/2005 10:39 PM Aaron Donovan said... The price of oil goes up, and demand for oil goes down. It's that simple. But because oil fuels economic activity, when the demand for oil goes down, economic activity has a way of slowing down too (remember '73, '79, and '90). So Dr. Levitt is right that the market always reaches an equilibrium, and the peak oilers are right in that the end of cheap oil would mean a global economic recession, followed by depression, unless some alternatives were found to stave that off. 8/21/2005 10:40 PM Tom Kelly said... It is now time to short oil. The guy who mows my grass almost quit mowing about five years ago to day trade internet stocks and then of course he got wiped out. Just today he stopped me to talk about how gas would soon be $5 a gallon. Since the New York Times has not shown itself recently to be half as smart as the guy who mows my grass- the end of high gas prices is certainly near. 8/21/2005 11:13 PM coffee17 said... j-deal: thanks for the links. Altho there's conflicting information in each article, from some other articles I'd read, it seemed like they were still taking a bath on oil sands. Then again, it is heavy oil, which is less useful, and while it's not particularly sour, it's definitely not sweet. But as you've said, there's more in the game than just oil sands. The only thing that really bothered me is one article says that they use oil and gas from within the tar sands for the extraction, and another article mentions the costs of the natural gas that they burned to extract the oil. As one who lives in Canada, where natural gas is the primary heating fuel, and knowing that natural gas has peaked in north america, and that liquid natural gas shipments aren't going to be ramping up quickly, it seems criminal to use it to make oil. What if we learned how to drill shale oil cheaply? Google for "Leon Smith" and shale, and apparently someone has found a way that's comparable to oil sands. Of course, there's not much else out there about him other than his announcement. But shale oil would be another issue like oil sands. There's a lot of oil, but it's low capacity. With depletion of existing wells, and most new wells coming on line are from the same fields (meaning they'll never produce as much capacity as the earlier wells did, and they'll go into depeltion sooner) capacity is the problem, not total reserves. Cheap is not enough, it has to be cheap and fast. If there was cheap and fast shale, that would be great for all but the environment. Yes, I admit that a quick 10% depletion of demand (not destruction) would be great. But I think you're overstating the "overnight" case. I don't think that society as we know it is going to end. But I do think there's going to be great difficulties because of the transition time, and current infrastructure. However million many cars there are in the US won't be replaced over night. Heck, there's a shortage of hybrid cars, and they've experienced more effort into producing a consumer product that hydrogen cars have been. Yes, hydrogen is simple to make, you don't even need to go to home depot, just cut an existing extension cord short and stick the ends in water. Or did you mean that there are products one can buy at home depot which will create and trap hydrogen which one could feed to an air compressor? Well, regardless, one could fashion things together at home depot, and eventually someone would put out a finished product. But how long until there's been enough hydrogen cars to take 10% of the gas guzzlers off the road? I suppose it would be more important to ask how long until there are enough hydrogen powered busses? They seem to just be hitting the market (as in first bus delivered, and pilot projects). We won't just run out of oil. But when we're short on capacity by 500,000 a day, how much will price have to rice until demand for those half million is destroyed? And how high will prices have to go before the next years shortfall of 1.5 mbpd or 2.5 mbpd? And when people are paying those prices what will happen to the economy with them not buying other stuff with that money (and if they're americans, they certainly wouldn't be saving it!)? Anonymous posts some equations showing that it's cost effective for people in the suburbs to pay $30 per gallon of gas. However, while some of that $30 they save via gas goes towards consummables, I think at least an equal portion went towards owning a more expensive house (essentially living beyond their means). And if there's $30 gas and the true costs of living in the suburbs are apparent, I'd be willing to wager home prices would go down, but that won't help the people with the APR mortgages. They'll still be paying the original amount, but at new interest rates, and I don't think they'll be as good as they were. For those who can't afford it and can't sell, they lose their initial investment, get to try and find a place to rent in the cities, or ... well, demand destruction? Again, I really don't think that this is the end of the world. But given the large unknowns from the oil companies, the knowledge that a corporation is quite willing to take advantage of the consumers, and even willing to take advantage of it's long term viability for short term profit (depending on individual corporations), I think that the problem is something that more people should be concerned about, and I don't think it's going to be without problems. Coal towns didn't have good prospects on the switch to oil, and that was under the best of terms. Unless we have a viable (read: as good or better) alternative to oil by the time desired demand outstrips supply, I think it could be worse. 8/21/2005 11:15 PM Anonymous said... Please note: lifting cost in Saudi is lower than other places, say 5 dollars a barrel. Canadian oil is perhaps 15 dollars a barrel. Money spent on increasing production at higher rates is wasted if the price of oil drops below 20 dollars a barrel. That is the problem with high cost energy sources, not so much the cost, but the risk of bankruptcy from a flucutating oil price. The US and other governments can act to stabilize oil prices by a policy of purchase for a petroleum reserve when the price drops below 25 dollars, and sales from the petroleum reserve when the price goes above 50 dollars a barrel. Another policy that would help would reduce 'designer gas' requirements so refineries could fill each others requirements when they have to shut down for maintenance. 8/21/2005 11:33 PM M. Simon said... For a lot of uses modems are a very good substitute for autos. The USA is ready if the need arises. The change could be done in days. 8/21/2005 11:41 PM Mr. Snitch said... Pretty healthy discussion as internet boards go, haven't seen the word 'wingnut' once. (This one won't count.) 1) Re predictions about 'dying': What actually happens is either some one predicts you'll die soon, and then when you die at 95 they say, 'See?', or when your continued living becomes embarassing to them, rather than changing their worldview they look for ways to make you die. Understanding that concept means understadning 95% of national politics. 2) I love these discussions about life-and-death commodities. When the power goes out, it's electricity that's indispensible. When it's oil we're concerned about, it's oil. One comment mentioned copper. There's only one vital commodity that we have to manage, and that's water. No one worries about that because it looks like there's plenty, but it's the one commodity we should be more concerned about - because there IS no alternative. 3) I like the potential energy alternatives we have now and am very encouraged about the prospect for electric (hydrogen) cars in ten years or so (they won't be around in large numbers much before that I think). That still means the hydrogen has to be produced somehow. I speculated on that here. 8/21/2005 11:44 PM M. Simon said... Basic economics: demand does not outstrip supply as long as prices can vary. The price of oil has hisen by a factor of 6X in 8 years without destroying the American economy. It is screwing the Chinese economy. Why? 8/21/2005 11:47 PM M. Simon said... Hydrogen cars are probably not the wave of the future. Methanol cars probably are. The problem with hydrogen is low densitty of energy when used as a transportation fuel. Why methanol? Because, computer companies want it to power laptops. Methanol is starting from behind but will catch up fast as the methanol fuel cells actually go to market in the next year or three. 8/21/2005 11:52 PM Gene Hoffman said... There are two separate issues and problems here. One set is macro and one set is micro. On the macro side, people are confusing cheap oil with cheap energy. The US economy is dependent on cheap energy. The US economy is so large and diversified that it can easily absorb a slight increase in what is the definition of cheap energy as the mix shifts away from oil simply on price. To show an anecdotal story to explain this, look at domestic transport. People point to trucks and trains as causing a huge impact on the price of consumer goods if oil prices increase substantially. However what is much more likely is that subsidized long haul trucking shifts in favor of rail lines that are more effecient and can further convert to electrical energy sources. We do face a technological challenge around batteries. Lots of alternative energy sources would be viable if we had serious improvements in our ability to store energy. The sad thing is that the best energy storage mechanism we've come up with is pumping water uphill. That should give you a sense of where we can make dramatic technological changes that would have a very real impact on the cost of useable energy. On the micro front, two items are pushing current prices higher. One is simply the lower value of the dollar relative to other currencies. As the dollar recovers strength the price of oil in dollars will decrease. The second is that the Chinese economy is distorting the price of oil by placing caps on the price paid at the pump. This is an attempt to stimulate growth but is not long term sustainable. As the political-economic reality sinks in, their demand will decrease and potentially decrease at a surprising rate. Artificial price mechanisms are as brittle as folks would like to say relatively free markets are. -Gene 8/22/2005 12:07 AM Anonymous said... Just to widen the discussion a little, they say a picture is worth a thousand words. Check out this guy's analysis. http://davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr71.html It's America we can have more than one take on things right guys? http://davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr70.html 8/22/2005 12:17 AM Anonymous said... http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112466148445219046,00.html How Oil Dependence Fuels U.S. Policies From Iraq to China, from the Gaza Strip to Iran, the biggest foreign-policy problems of the summer all are setting off the same alarm: It is imperative for the U.S. to become more energy independent. But that, of course, is precisely what Washington's policymakers have been unable, or unwilling, to accomplish. Instead, America's exposure to trouble in the world's volatile oil-producing regions actually is on the rise, even as the summer driving season heads toward its climax with oil near a once-unthinkable $65 a barrel. In brief, while the 20th century was the century of oil, the 21st already is unfolding as the century of whatever follows oil, or the century of fighting over what's left of oil -- or both. 8/22/2005 12:24 AM Anonymous said... "Which is exactly the situation with oil right now. I don't know much about world oil reserves." Opinion on a subject you base on economics without any industry experience. Nice one. 8/22/2005 12:28 AM Anonymous said... so when you take a whole bunch of speed, just fill your system with it over and over and over until at one point you cant get as much into the system as you need to keep the system running at such a high speed, and presumably inefficient way (compared to the way it was designed to run)... at that point is it really right to complain about the loss of speed or is it more right to realize that we shouldnt have been taking so much? 8/22/2005 12:32 AM M. Simon said... China uses 6X as much energy per unit of output as the USA does. Perhaps the problem is that the Chinese government controlled economy is not investing enough in energy efficiency because the government is screwing with price signals. 8/22/2005 12:49 AM William said... "As for people who drive their cars for 77 cents a gallon with vegetable oil" It was per-liter, which equates to roughly 2.50$ a gallon. And you need fertilizers (petro-based), and insecticides (petro-based), to grow those vegetables. I also suppose global warming's just a big liberal lie and we shouldn't worry at all about the fact that tar oil creates about 3 or 4 times more emmissions than "cheap oil" just through extraction. And the way societies & markets adapt is by panicking, and if you lay back and say things are going to fix themselves, they won't. 8/22/2005 1:12 AM Marty said... The rogue ecomomist says: "I don't know much about world oil reserves". Oh, how rascally of you. I originally got a degree in geology but now I study the brain. If somebody said, 'I don't know much about neuroscience, but here is how I think the brain works', I'd probably take them less seriously. Why not take a look at actual oil and energy numbers? I've summarized the basic ones here. After all, that's what the scientists you are depending on to save your butt do. 8/22/2005 1:42 AM Anonymous said... Anon -- "Energy production is completely different from every other technology we know. In most industries, the more modifications or alterations you make to something the more value it has. A Porsche has more value than a VW due to the work and thought going into it." This is Marxist stuff and Karl's biggest error. A product or service is worth EXACTLY what the market price is and not your inputs including cost of labor. An army of Garden Gnomes could sculpt and spray paint a pile of dog doo. You'd have a hard time selling it. In contrast people will pay for the most ridiculous junk simply because it has a designer name slapped on it. Point being that technology and substitution provide work-arounds and the market responds to buyer preferences expresses as willingness to buy at price points. The world was running out of Whale oil for lamps until some obscure Colonel found oil in Pennsylvania. Much of the discussion is being fueled by "why won't people live a morally pure life like we tell them to?" People abandoned the cities as soon as possible, when I lived in New Orleans it was clear that the streetcars in the 1840's onwards drove suburban life, starting out from the St. Charles line (the line is still in existence btw). Other lines along Magazine stimulated development upriver as well, with obvious fill-in housing as lines were added in between. This helps explain the curious set of mansions on the main streets and row houses off them a few blocks over. A few more high-profile terrorist attacks, coupled with continuing urban crime, and oil prices will have to be high indeed for suburban dwellers to trade safety and privacy for "moral living." That's the real incentive that drove people out to suburbs even back before WWII; the same pattern developed around rail lines in Victorian England. So sad isn't it that people live their own lives instead of what people lecture them to do? 8/22/2005 3:02 AM Red A said... "why buy a tomato from Chile when you can buy one from the farmer down the road, and that sort of thinking." Please let me know when the farmer down the road has tomatoes in winter. The reason many countries export fruit to the USA so well is their growing seasons are different - in Chile's case their summer is our winter. You know, electricty prices rocketed in California a few years ago...my mother tried to save energy and got her summer bill down to US$ 32.00 / month or some insanely low level. It was not too hard. I can imagine high oil prices will make people drive less, combine trips, and wear sweaters indoors and probably could save 30% on their bills. 8/22/2005 3:24 AM head lem said... Overheard in the cockpit of the Venezeulean airline that ran out of fuel (assuming news rumor is true): "Relax, market forces will soon equalize the gap between our fuel supply and gravity's demands (the latter having been recently renamed by the President of the USA as "intelligent falling" or "Rapture at 3,000 feet") http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/americas/08/21/venezuela.plane.cr ash.ap/index.html 8/22/2005 3:29 AM Anonymous said... Everything that has been said in the comments to this post was said in discussions I have had about this very same topic in the early 1970's, 1980's and 1990's with people who were convinced that oil would be prohibitively expensive and commercially unavailable sometime in the 1970's, 1980's or 1990's. If I were older, I suppose I might be able to refer to discussions on this same topic I had in the early 1960's, but alas I was only in elementary school in the early 1960's This doesn't mean that the pessimists will forever be wrong. I just think that they will have to develop better arguments to convince me that doomsday is looming than the same old tired arguments that have been wrong for as long as the topic has been discussed. As to how long will it take to adjust to lower suplies and higher prices I would make the following observation. Everyday I ride a bus to work on a half-empty bus and observe that almost every car that passes me has only one passenger. I would venture that the amount of gas used for commuting could be cut by 60% to 75% in the United States without enourmous effort simply by prividing sufficient price incentives to fill every existing bus and encourage people to drive into work with one or two other person in each car. Although people would gripe, the actual inconvenience of adopting these consevation measures is relatively small. The reason this hasn't already happened is that despite everyone's whining, gas is still relatively inexpensive compared to incomes so that people are not willing to foregoe the relatively inexpensive luxury of driving to work everyday in their own car. 8/22/2005 6:09 AM Anonymous said... I'm with you on the idea that reporting Shark Attacks ad-nausium is ridiculous. But, the reason is not because they do not occur - every story is true. The reason being informed about shark attacks is silly is that it affects a miniscule percentage of the miniscule number of people that swim in the ocean. Oil is a requirment for the lives of the vast majority of people on this earth. Comparing issues like this to shark attack stories is ignorant. 8/22/2005 7:40 AM Paul Dietz said... An earlier message mentioned methanol... Interestingly, a few years ago many methanol plants around the world were converted to use the Fischer-Tropsch method to produce hydrocarbons. This technique can produce an exceptional diesel fuel (very low sulfur, very high cetane number; low soot and other emissions; CARB was considering mandating its use in California) for the equivalent of $20 to $25/barrel oil, and it can be made to work with natural gas, coal, biomass, or any other material that can be converted to synthesis gas (a mixture of CO and hydrogen). The only reason very large scale construction of FT gas-to-oil plants isn't occuring more is the expectation that oil prices will decline in the near future. 8/22/2005 8:32 AM Anonymous said... Oil men in the White House have discouraged alt energy, and the industry bought up and buried the patents to most of the alternative energy sources developed since our last gas lines in '73. Wages have been stagnant while prices have risen sharply for everything that must be delivered (due to fuel costs). There is no room in the household budget for any of this. 8/22/2005 8:45 AM M. Simon said... There is a very simple reason oil consumption in China is rising 20% a year. It is priced below market. The purpose of below market pricing is to insure growth to keep domestic peace. How long can the Chinese keep the party going? My guess. The party is over. 8/22/2005 9:40 AM M. Simon said... Fuel cells (of any kind) have one significant problem. Platinum. There is not enough of it to support a 100% fuel cell transportation system. In time we will find a way around this problem. So far all we have is glimers (nickel maybe?) The fuel cell transportation system is not ready for prime time. 8/22/2005 9:45 AM TallDave said... The real problem is timing: it takes a few years to bring new production online. In a few years oil prices will probably dive again. 8/22/2005 9:49 AM Anonymous said... Interesting discussion. Professor Levitt, I commend your effort in taking up such an interesting matter. What is truly fascinating is the natural inclination toward catastrophic prospects that human beings keep on exhibiting. All these catastrophic scenarios, bei it overpopulation,oil depletion or whatever are nothing but the secular humanistic versions of the classical biblical Apocalyptical scenarios. It always amaze me how on earth could those "enlightended", atheistic, socialistic multiculturalists deride the "superstitious" beliefs of religious people. 8/22/2005 9:54 AM M. Simon said... Patents are public records. Could anon. cite a few that would solve our energy problems economically? I'm not interested in ownership. Just patent numbers. 8/22/2005 10:05 AM Anonymous said... "What is truly fascinating is the natural inclination toward catastrophic prospects that human beings keep on exhibiting." No, what is fascinating is how it drives home the old criticism that Americans have two modes: complacency and panic. What you typically see in a new "peak oil" discussion is an argument between the complacent and the paniced. Shades of gray, resonable questions in the middle ground, are slow to emerge. 8/22/2005 10:11 AM Anonymous said... Anon, It's 2005. 2005-1973=32 yrs. You suppose those patents are still in effect? All, Hydrogen is not an alternative fuel, merely a conversion/storage method. It has to be produced somehow...perhaps from electricity, derived from (usually) coal. 8/22/2005 10:15 AM M. Simon said... We have been running out of oil for my whole life time. (I was in high school in the 50s). It is one of the things that got me interested in a career in engineering. (I do aircraft electrical systems among other things. I have also worked on oil field monitoring systems - which surprisingly enough are solar powered.) Every time oil prices peaked the refrain was the same. BTW high rises and cities may be more efficient energy wise, but they have one huge drawback. Disease can run through them like wild fire. Dispersed housing is more disease resistant. 8/22/2005 10:21 AM odograph said... If we are going to digress on hydrogen, we should point out that most is now being made from natural gas. The "hydrogen highway" filling stations usually reform natural gas at the station. Nuclear, coal, electric sources for hydrogen auto fuel are all "promises." In the meantime we depelete our natural gas (which could easily drive cars directly and efficiently) to "prove" hydrogen ... what a scam. 8/22/2005 10:24 AM Anonymous said... Okay -- Now I understand what they mean by thinking inside the box. The specific box you doomsayer commenters -- not to mention the original NYT article -- are all trapped in is clearly of seventies manufacture. Less oil equals no suburbs, equals denser construction, equals life having to change to such an extent that a prolongued depression arises. Come into the twenty first century my friends and look at the object into which you're typing. It's a computer -- yep. Virtually miraculous in its capacities to allow people to conduct business at a distance. And all that's needed to use it for this purpose is... fewer regulations, incentives to businesses using telecommuting and other stroke-of-pen issues. Will people still need to show up to work. Oh, heck, yes. Manual and service workers. BUT if office workers can work from home, then oil demand will fall. A lot. And think of all those office buildings not getting heated. Will this happen? -- supposing a halfway rational, not inately anti-oil and for fuzzy wuzzy warm-and-cozy alternative fuels administration in the next ten years or so -- probably yes. So -- people will be at home more and there might be a fall in daycare business and a rise in divorces till situation stabilizes. I'd say not "end of the world as we know it" material. 8/22/2005 10:26 AM odograph said... Anonymous at 8/22/2005 10:26 AM, did you notice my comment way up above, saying: "Be careful that your prediction of optimism doesn't come to match someone else's prediction of pessimism!" I actually agree with you that this level of adjustment is possible. I also think you are looking at whole job categories, and perhaps industries, left behind. It is the difference between "end of the world" and "end of the world as we know it" 8/22/2005 10:32 AM Podchef said... Okay, so you've taken the moderate position on this "problem". Others want to be extreem on either side of the issue. Nevertheless, the real issue is being ignored: 1st World Countries are using too much of a non-renewable resource. The shortages, and problems this will lead to, maybe not today or tomorrow--or this decade--will be real and globally painful. Beyond wind generators and solar power we need to begin to solve this shortage issue--to send a message, like you said, to the oil producers--perhaps they will drop prices; but that only works for a while--even oil producers are up against fixed costs. How can we send this message and what will it be? Should we all switch to hybird cars? Quite possibly. But there are other solutions--using used vegetable oil from restaurants to power desiel vehicles is a start (frybird.com). Perhaps, today, don't drive so much. Stop waiting for the outcome to cry foul. Reduce your number of trips to WalBobs or the MiniMart now, not when things get worse--they already are worse. If you want to make more of an impact, start looking for local sources for your foods and other household items. Why pay, both in increased product cost and global costs, to have a sofa from the other side of the country? Or beets? Or carrots from China? Someone in your neck of the woods is growing carrots, beets and a whole lot more. Start going to Farmer's Markets and supporting the locals. If enough people do this then the money stays in the community and your neighbor begins to travel less, and their neighbor and so on. I'm not suggesting that everything we use can be found within 100 mile of us, but that by shopping as locally as we can. By reducing transportation times and costs, every individual can have a global impact by reducing fuel consumption. This winter, find a local craftsperson and spend a few extra dollars to buy a nice thick sweater from locally grown wool. Then keep the thermostat at 68 degrees during the day. At night drop it to 65 or 60. If Chicken Little had had any sense he would have pause for a moment, surveyed what his position was and cornered the market on falling acorns. The Sky-is-falling position is fearmongering and never leads to a solution in time. 8/22/2005 10:42 AM JLP said... Excellent post! Sadly, the people writing these articles don't know what they are talking about. I also remember seeing an article in the Wall Street Journal about how there is a theory that oil is replenishing itself. It was an interesting article and I could kick myself for not saving it. JLP at AllThingsFinancial 8/22/2005 10:42 AM JLP said... Hey, I found that article (it cost me a whopping $2.95) I was talking about. The article titled "Odd Reservoir Off Louisiana Prods Oil Experts to Seek a Deeper Meaning" was in the Wall Street Journal on April 16, 1999. It talks about how this oil field in the Gulf is supposedly replenishing itself. I haven't done any research to see if those claims still hold true. Anyway, it makes for an interesting read. JLP at AllThingsFinancial 8/22/2005 11:03 AM Mike said... "After all, at $6/gallon they're still building suburbs in Europe" Technically true, but you know damn well their suburbs aren't the same as ours - they're built on a scale that still allows for transit use and carpooling, while ours aren't. (I was in Yeovil UK a couple years back and even worked for a week at an office park out in the 'burbs; worked 3 weeks in Hursley for IBM a few years before that, driving back and forth from my hotel in central Winchester). 8/22/2005 11:43 AM Anonymous said... Lets check the oil market today, oh it is up again. Funny thing about the law of supply and demand, it cares not for National Boundaries or Political Demagoguery! All hail the infinite wisdom of the free market! Live or die!! Your kids Ivy League Education will come in very handy as mid-21st century horse and buggy farmer. 8/22/2005 12:14 PM Anonymous said... Oops, there goes the whole peak oil argument. When the price rises, demand falls, and oil prices slide. What happened to the "end of the world as we know it?" Now we are back to $10 a barrel oil. Without realizing it, the author just invoked basic economics to invalidate the entire premise of the article! It seems to me that the premise of the article is: "High demand and low supply for oil is likely to have serious and broad economic consequences, maybe a global recession." It seems to me that your counterargument is: "But if there's a global recession, the price of oil will come down! Neener neener neener!" It would be downright laughable in its cluelessness if so many people weren't taking you seriously. You've misrepresented the NYT article and the Peak Oil theory in order to debate them more effectively. Sure, there are exaggerated predictions of doom out there, but this kind of dishonesty isn't helping anyone. 8/22/2005 12:17 PM M. Simon said... The best way to get alternate fuels are: 1. Lower their cost 2. Raise the cost of current fuels If #1 is not possible in the short term then, driving a Hummer will help #2. Burn it up. As to the problems of the third world. Their #1 problem is bad government. The price of oil will have aproximately zero effect on that problem. There are too many thug regimes in the world. If the source of oil near the surface is deeper underground resivoirs then we do not have a resource problem. We have a technology problem. How to tap the deep resivoirs economically. We know there are huge planets whose atmospheres consist of a lot of methane. Did that methane come from biological activity? Very doubtful. Might not some of that glactic methane have been incorporated in the earth during its formation? Likely. Thomas Gold estimated that petrolium reserves may be 100X those already discovered based on interplanetary formation of hydrocarbons. Well you know how it is: fear will keep the star systems in line. I have been listening to the fear for 50 years. I'm bored with it. In the mean time for those of you who are fearful: I have some designs to reduce energy consumption and others to deal with electrical energy storage. Every time I get into one of these discussions I ask any one interested in investing in change to contact me. So far zero responses. That gives me one important data point. Lack of real interest. It is all talk. 8/22/2005 12:32 PM Anonymous said... "Technically true, but you know damn well their suburbs aren't the same as ours - they're built on a scale that still allows for transit use and carpooling" - Mike Ummm...yes and no, but a bit more of the no. Yes, they're more compact, but no, you can't walk much of anyplace useful because they tend to be single-use pods just like here. (And yes, just maybe you can walk to a small row of shops charging ghastly, exorbitant prices, but maybe not, and that's about it, and so what?) The denser scale doesn't help carpooling, because the issue is not how far you're going, but whether you're going to the same place at the same time and whether you want to have a life. And bus service to these pods tends to be only half-hourly even at rush hour, which I guess is OK if you have lots and lots of valueless time on your hands. BTW I was in Chiba, Japan recently, and it's amazing how over the last 15 years, bicycles have gone way, way down (but are still used much more than in the U S of A) and cars have gone up. That's at about $4.50/gallon - and with public transit to places where people actually live - as opposed to districts tourists see - more frequent and reliable than to such places in Europe. Some homeowners even purchase elevators to stow two cars (that pesky "we aren't actually going to the same place at the same time" issue) in the driveway, one over the other. The cars do, however, tend to be small. 8/22/2005 12:36 PM M. Simon said... We have had recessions when supply and demand get out of whack. We are richer than ever. How is that possible? 8/22/2005 12:39 PM odograph said... We are richer than ever. How is that possible? We? I might be. You might be. But I feel a little bit for the guys sleeping on the side of the road! 8/22/2005 1:15 PM Anonymous said... Here is something I posted on usenet a few days ago: If Americans drove cars that were a little more than twice as efficient, there would almost not be any need for oil imports -- which would mean there would be no need to attempt to control the Middle East's oil reserves with the Iraq invasion and our multiple bases all around Iran. It would also mean there would be an extra 12m barrels of oil on the market, which is something like 12% of world supply. I'm sure that would lower prices and make the oil supply last a bit longer. But, it's all kind of pointless now. With peak oil, the price will inexorably climb. Companies and governments will scramble with coal gassification, mining bitumen, heavy oils, biodiesel, ethanol, thermal depolymerization, etc., which will blunt the impact but not scale to meet current demand. Only by radically redesigning our way of life and economy can this be dealt with and even the mere mention of this is political death in America. Not to mention the fact that world populations are still growing, the population will have to be reduced, most likely by some very unpleasant means. Poorer nations are already feeling the pain. Their governments have been heavily subsidizing oil prices for years and now the chasm between what the people pay and what the government pays for oil is so large it threatens their solvency. Raise the price just a bit and you get riots, so shortages are the most likely scenario there. I expect a major global financial recession before 2010 followed by a brief collapse in oil prices followed by shortages and then oil prices that make $70/barrel seem ultra cheap. The whole American way of life is built on cheap energy. Sprawling cities, Wal-Mart, 10 MPG hummers, etc. -- Something is going to have to give somewhere, unless actually outright seizing oil fields and stealing oil is going to be palatable to the American public and the other nuclear powers of the world. Of course none of this will register with the US public. They'll blame the government, OPEC, oil companies, aliens, etc. -- Anything to avoid looking at the reality: Oil is a finite resource, no new oil is being made, and we've been gorging on it for over a century and the end of the party is in sight. The sad part is that this has been known since the 1950s, and pretty much proven in the 1970s. We've had 30 years to prepare, and we've done more or less the opposite, becoming more dependent on oil, especially foreign oil, not less. 8/22/2005 1:34 PM Mike said... "The denser scale doesn't help carpooling, because the issue is not how far you're going, but whether you're going to the same place at the same time and whether you want to have a life. And bus service to these pods tends to be only half-hourly even at rush hour, which I guess is OK if you have lots and lots of valueless time on your hands." Yes, it DOES help carpooling, in two ways: 1. Offices are more likely in the same area 2. Shorter distance to your next cow orker. To imply, as you do, that European work commuters suffer roughly the same issues as do American commuters is misleading AT BEST. The objective statistics for commute split SHOW you're not being accurate here - they STILL use transit, carpool, ride bikes, and walk at a far higher percentage than we do even in our more enlightened cities (i.e. London >> New York; Winchester >> Portland; etc.) 8/22/2005 1:36 PM M. Simon said... odo, I have slept beside the road. I'd rather do it in America than any other country I can think of. I've seen people throw away perfectly good 27" color TVs when they get their home theaters. You want to have a good life on the cheap? Scour the upscale neighborhoods on garbage day. If you have never been really poor and desperate you have no idea how good the poor and desperate have it in this country. 50% of the bottom 20% own their own homes. 8/22/2005 1:38 PM odograph said... All I'm getting at is that a smooth transition, from cheap oil to (ultimately) beyond oil, means less human tragedy. We are already dealing with this as a society. We have hybrid car hackers, and french fry biodiesel recyclers. We have hybrids from Japan and (pie in the sky) hybrids in Detroit. We fund ethanol on a truly massive scale. The only adjustment we need, in my opinion, is to be a little more "real" about our solutions. If ethanol is really a farm subsidy, then it isn't real as a fuel. If hydrogen is a way to deflect emissions and efficiency standards, then it isn't real as a fuel either. Today I feel pessimistic. I don't think the US can be real, in time. That means we'll have those painful little adjustments. We'll see those little human tragedies on nightly TV. And ultimately we'll buy our transportation solutions from Japan ... were (with no native fuel supply) they don't have the luxury of believing their own BS. 8/22/2005 1:49 PM odograph said... Sorry, meant to say "(pie in the sky) hydrogen from Detroit." If the blog owners want to mine a rich vein of funky economics, the hyrogen highway is probably it. Where else do we assume a one million dollar product (a hydrogen fuel cell car) can be made afordable for everyman ... just because we wish (or incentivise) it? Why don't we just go for flying cars while we're at it ... they're probably cheaper. 8/22/2005 2:01 PM M. Simon said... Odo, There is no direct line from here to where you want to go. Small adjustments if effective will expand to their limits. An economic system that does not constrain ideas grows organically. A trial here, a test there, more of the same if it is profitable. It looks messy but has an advantage: lots of ideas get tried. Those that are good enough get replicated. Organic growth and change are best. Even in industrial systems. 8/22/2005 2:08 PM odograph said... Oh I'm a big believer in the market ... but don't like the whipsaw corrections when people suddenly discover an error in their economic logic. All those little things I mentioned above (electric cars, hybrids, boidiesel, ethanol, hydrogen) are at the fringes. The bulk of America is out there driving along at 20 mpg (latest fleet average). I've heard recently that Ford's current product line averages poorer mpg than a ford model A. Indirect, organic, market adjustment might have worked (past tense) if we had been real about our oil supplies. Instead, we get to see a little of that old time Creative Destruction. Some in this thread might even find themselves on the wrong end of it ... and I've always said that creative destruction is more fun to watch than to live. 8/22/2005 2:19 PM Marty said... Boy, reading some of the delusional posts here makes me think we should call it "Intelligent Energy" -- that's the kind that senses when you're running out it, and then it replenishes itself. Several mentioned various alternative energy resources but without considering the fact that they are all made using non-renewable fossil and fission fuels. Not-yet-working alternatives like fusion also require limited resources like helium (for superconducting magnets). Helium cannot made and is instead extracted from a small number of oil and gas wells, and is on similar depletion curves to oil. Because of this, the price of renewables is likely to go up, not down as fossil fuels and other limited resources deplete. For example, the price of silicon photoelectric cells has been going up the past year (25%). This was explained as simple supply/demand by the NYT. The real situation is a little more complicated. Current generation photoelectric cells (the kind already on satellites decades ago) are made from silicon crystal rejects from the semiconductor industry. These have started to get scarce as forward-thinking well-to-do Californians have been installing them like no tomorrow. This is simple supply/demand. But as the throwaways are depleted, the price will likely go up even more because the throwaways were being sold for less than they cost to make. Third, if fossil fuel prices continue their rise (oil back up to $66/barrel today), the price of silicon photoelectric cells will go up yet further. Now, of course, there are other solar techs on the way, invented by number-loving people who did their homework problems, such as CIGS (copper/indium/gallium/selenium) photoelectric cells sputtered onto thin metal (the way harddisk surfaces are made), and solar-concentrator-driven Stirling engines. And hopefully, there will be enough indium and gallium (elements, which as the alchemists long ago discovered are very hard to make), and hopefully, the price of renewable energy will eventually stabilize when renewable energy devices (and mining, and steel production, etc, etc) all begin to be done using renewable energy. It's important to keep a positive attitude. From a recent cartoon: And so, while the end-of-the-world scenario will be rife with unimaginable horrors, we believe that the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit :-} 8/22/2005 2:36 PM drewhinton said... I want to believe in Markets. I really really do. But I'm not sure I trust human nature. I think markets are imperfect just like we are. They manage to pull out of crisis, perhaps more often than not, but many times people can't adapt because of their own assumptions or cultural baggage. I think the tale of the Viking settlers in Greenland is a poignant example. http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/greenland/ They ignored better methods for survival because of cultural hubris, and they perished. Markets are made of humans. And sometimes humans are just plain stupid. 8/22/2005 3:19 PM dag said... Freakonomics said: "I don't know much about world oil reserves." Obviously.....you dont maxrates 8/22/2005 3:51 PM M. Simon said... Hybrids are not on the fringes. Several million will get built this year with production ramping up. A guy in Cali. is retrofitting hybrids with more batteries creating the gasoline/electric hybrid. Toyota is taking note. Given Japanese design cycles expect to see them on the road in 2 1/2 years. Detriot will do it 4 years after they see a Japanese example on the road. If you are paying attention things are not so bad. The real boost will come when autos go to 36V (nominal) electrical systems with Integral Starter Generators (ISG). They will be defacto hybrids. There is time to work out the bugs. Wind is coming down the cost curve. Once turbine size reaches 8 - 12 MW (peak) the cost of wind will equal the best coal plants. About 5 to 10 years. In the mean time 3,000 MW (peak) of wind will get installed this year. About one nuke equivalent (1,000 MW). We are ramping up. BTW nice to see solar ramping up even if it is straining supples. If the buyers are there the industry will get stronger. 8/22/2005 4:45 PM Anonymous said... Let's clear up a couple of misunderstandings: First, for those criticising the OP for writing about oil when he doesn't know much about oil specifically: Economists can do this because the information they need revolves around prices, incentives, and the response of people to them. Economists can predict the movement of prices on pork bellies without knowing anything about pig farming. They can predict demand for real estate at a given price point without having to know how houses are built. And they can predict how consumers of oil will react when the price increases, without having to understand the oil industry. Now, assuming the market will 'solve' the problem supposes a couple of things: one is that alternatives to a commmodity exist, and the other is that prices reflect the true cost of a commodity and people are free actors to choose to buy or not. In the case of oil, this is not necessarily the case. For one thing, the price is not free to move with demand, due to the OPEC cartel, local price caps and subsidies, and other market-distorting interventions. For another, the availability of substitutes for oil is still debatable. Certainly it's possible to replace oil with alternatives, but there are legitimate questions about the rate at which this can be done and the eventual cost. However, we can make some good inferences from currently available information. The biggest is the price of oil futures. I believe 10 year oil contracts are currently set at about 65 dollars. This almost certainly represents our best understanding of what we're going to be paying for oil ten years from now. If some oil expert really knew that oil was about to peak, he would be buying up futures like mad and driving up the price. If he knew oil was much more abundant and that we're in a price bubble, he'd short like mad and drive the futures price down. So the futures price in a free market is a pretty good distillation of current understanding. If you don't believe this is the case, I suggest you put your money where your belief is and start buying oil contracts like mad. One thing you might consider first, however, is that the drop-off in supply will not be linear. As the price of oil reaches certain price points, alternative supplies will enter the market. Alberta's tar sands have recently been re-estimated to have 175 billion barrels of recoverable oil at today's prices, giving Alberta the second-largest oil reserves of any country on the planet after Saudi Arabia. If oil doubles in price, the recoverable barrels goes over 300 billion, and shale oil all over North America becomes cost-competitive. Also, oil wells are closed not when they are empty, but when the cost of recovering the remaining oil is so high as to make them uneconomic. At very high oil prices, many of those fields will be re-opened. Plus, alternative energy sources like wind and solar will become a bigger part of the picture as they become more profitable. Next: American energy independence. Here's the thing: oil is a fungible resource. That means that once it comes out of the ground, it's worth the same no matter where it came from. Saudi oil is no more or less valuable than Alberta oil (assuming the same grade). So if the U.S. suddenly stopped buying Saudi oil and instead bought Alberta oil or started using an energy source that was home grown but more expensive, all that would do is cause the U.S. to waste money. And the drop in demand from the U.S. leaving the world oil market would cause the price of oil to drop, benefiting everyone else and driving up demand for oil elsewhere. Net result: higher energy costs in the U.S., lower energy costs for everyone else, and an increase in demand for oil by others to offset the U.S. drop in demand. This is simply not an intelligent strategy from a purely economic standpoint. It might make better sense in terms of national defense, but that's a different argument. So the last question is whether or not we can move to an alternative fuel regime in a timely manner. And I believe the answer to that is yes, especially if the real problem takes a few years to appear. The current move to hybrids is important because it gives us a way to disconnect the drivetrain of a car from its fuel source. The power source for the car is electricity. How that electricity is generated doesn't really matter. For example, it would not take much of a change at all to turn a hybrid into a 'plug-in hybrid'. Add a little bigger battery and a charging plug, and now for short commutes (say less than 50 miles) the gas engine doesn't even come on. You've just completely removed the dependency on gasoline from the car, or reduced the consumption to just a fraction of the amount you need now. Perhaps we'll all be driving electric cars that still have gas engines, but the gas engine is really just an emergency charging device. Plug-in hybrids can get 100 mpg on average across the fleet. You still need to generate the electricity, but we know we can do that. Nuclear power. France gets 70% of its electrical energy from nuclear. The U.S., only 20%. Roughly 175 new reactors could produce enough hydrogen to completely replace gasoline for the U.S. vehicle fleet, assuming no changes in efficiency. So it can be done, and will be if we need to. 8/22/2005 5:04 PM From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 22 22:51:28 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2005 18:51:28 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Economist: (Laffer) The budget deficit: Cocktail-bar calculations Message-ID: The budget deficit: Cocktail-bar calculations http://www.economist.com/World/na/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=4299097 5.8.18 Are George Bush's tax cuts paying for themselves? [4]Get article background NOT many economists find fame in a cocktail lounge. But it was in just such a venue that Arthur Laffer in 1974 drew the "Laffer curve" on the back of a convenient napkin. The sketch, still more popular with politicians than economists, illustrated how lower tax rates, by spurring growth, might leave tax revenues undiminished. Tax cuts might pay for themselves. None of the weighty studies produced by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) would fit on the back of a napkin. But the latest projections from the legislature's non-partisan budget-watcher have excited a few of Mr Laffer's fans. The federal budget deficit, the CBO reckons, will narrow to $331 billion this fiscal year (which ends on September 30th), from $412 billion the year before. Tom DeLay, the Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives, was quick to offer a Laffer-like explanation: "Lower taxes and spending discipline spur economic growth, which in turn cuts the deficit," he opined. In fact, spending discipline is still rather lacking. Government outlays will increase by $181 billion (or 8%) this year, a figure that does not include the cost of the pork-stuffed highway bill, signed by the president on August 10th. The fall in the deficit owes rather more to the other side of the ledger: tax revenues are set to grow by $262 billion, or 14% this year. They will increase as a share of GDP for the first time under this tax-cutting president. Income taxes withheld from pay cheques account for some of the new revenues, but many of the gains are in more exotic areas. The government's take from such things as capital gains, payouts from pension funds, and "sole proprietorships" (one-man companies) should increase by 28% this year, the CBO reckons. Corporations are also making a strikingly handsome contribution to the state's coffers, paying $80 billion (or fully 42%) more than the year before. A third of this bounty seems to be due to the demise of a corporate tax break, which allowed firms to deduct up to half their investment costs from their taxable profits last year. But some $53 billion of it caught the CBO unawares, and remains unexplained. Is Mr DeLay right to attribute any of these gains to the seductive curves of supply-side economics? In December, Gregory Mankiw, who used to be chairman of Mr Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, and Matthew Weinzierl, a colleague at Harvard University, published a "back-of-the-envelope guide" to tax rates and revenues. Given the relatively low tax rates prevailing in America, they thought that tax cuts could not be entirely self-financing. But by their reckoning cutting taxes on labour would generate enough growth to recoup about 17 cents on the dollar, and a tax cut on capital could pay for more than half of itself. The government would take a thinner slice of a bigger pie. Left out of these calculations is any guide to what happens when taxes are cut but spending is not. The budget deficits that ensue will tend to "crowd out" investment, slowing growth. The CBO calculates that every extra dollar of federal borrowing reduces investment in the economy by 36 cents. The White House, according to its latest forecast in July, now expects to leave a deficit of $162 billion by the time the president leaves office in 2009. But it assumes (absurdly) that Congress will not add a single dollar to its discretionary spending on anything except defence and homeland security from 2006 to 2010. It also leaves out of its projections any extra money for Iraq, Afghanistan or the war on terror. The CBO makes the opposite assumption. It assumes that by 2009, all of these missions will remain far from accomplished, costing the American taxpayer the same amount, in real terms, as they do today. Partly as a result, the CBO shows Mr Bush bequeathing a deficit of $321 billion to his successor. Though the CBO's outlook is substantially worse than the White House's over a five-year horizon, it improves dramatically over ten years. This is not because of some long-run Laffer curve; but because the CBO assumes that Mr Bush's tax cuts will expire, as scheduled (the bulk of them in December 2010). That looks extremely unlikely: no politician would allow it and Mr Bush is already trying to make them permanent. If that happens, it would add $349 billion to the deficit in 2015, plus an extra $83 billion in debt service costs. The CBO's job, says Douglas Holtz-Eakin, its director, is to forecast the economy and the budget, not Congress. It is required by law to assume that Congress will carry on doing what it currently does, adjusted only for inflation. "Everything we have presented today is going to be wrong," he confidently predicted as he unveiled his report. The same, of course, could be said of Mr Bush's projections. References 4. http://www.economist.com/background/displayBackground.cfm?story_id=4299097 E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles. From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 22 22:51:53 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2005 18:51:53 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Wired: Whew! Your DNA Isn't Your Destiny Message-ID: Whew! Your DNA Isn't Your Destiny By Brandon Keim http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,68468,00.html 02:00 AM Aug. 16, 2005 PT The more we learn about the human genome, the less DNA looks like destiny. As scientists discover more about the "epigenome," a layer of biochemical reactions that turns genes on and off, they're finding that it plays a big part in health and heredity. By mapping the epigenome and linking it with genomic and health information, scientists believe they can develop better ways to predict, diagnose and treat disease. "A new world is opening up, one that is so much more complex than the genomic world," said Moshe Szyf, an epigeneticist at Canada's McGill University. The epigenome can change according to an individual's environment, and is passed from generation to generation. It's part of the reason why "identical" twins can be so different, and it's also why not only the children but the grandchildren of women who suffered malnutrition during pregnancy are likely to weigh less at birth. "Now we're even talking about how to see if socioeconomic status has an impact on the epigenome," Szyf said. Researchers have already linked some human cancers with epigenetic changes. In a few years, scientists hope that doctors, by looking at an individual's epigenome, will be able to detect cancer early and determine what treatments to use. The same might be done for other diseases -- and as the effect of the environment on epigenetic change is better understood, people will be able to address the environmental aspects of health. The field, though still embryonic, won't be that way for long. "Epigenetics is one of the fastest-moving areas of science, period," said Melanie Ehrlich, a Tulane University epigeneticist whose lab linked human cancer to epigenomic changes in 1983. Back then, Ehrlich's discipline was largely ignored. Walter Gilbert, a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, famously said that since fruit flies had no epigenomes, people could hardly need them. But in the past two decades -- and especially the last couple of years -- studies have linked the epigenome to disease and development, showing that it changes in response to the environment and can be passed from parents to children. While predicted treatments run from diabetes and heart disease to substance abuse and schizophrenia, the most promising applications are in cancer. Research shows that some cancers follow from the deactivation of tumor-suppression genes. Last year, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first epigenetic drug, azacitidine, which treats a form of leukemia by reactivating those genes. However, using drugs to target specific parts of the epigenome, which runs in tandem with our 6 billion base pairs of DNA, is extremely complicated. Ehrlich believes epigenetic researchers are better off trying to predict and diagnose cancer and other diseases. To do that, scientists need a large-scale map that shows how epigenetic patterns relate to disease, said Steve Baylin, an epigeneticist at Johns Hopkins. "If we knew those patterns," Baylin said, "you could predict which individuals are more at risk -- change their diets, change their exposures, use prevention. We could detect disease early and predict how people respond to drugs." Making that map won't be easy. Not only does the epigenome change over time, it also differs in every major cell type, of which there are a couple hundred. Epigeneticists say this will be time-consuming but possible. In Europe, a consortium of public and private institutions is collaborating on the Human Epigenome Project, while mapping in the United States is scattered among a handful of companies and government-funded scientists. "We don't have the funding to do a comprehensive, large-scale epigenetics project," said Elise Feingold, a director of the National Human Genome Research Institute's ENCODE Project. The lack of investment is somewhat reminiscent of the Human Genome Project's early struggles, when James Watson fought for government money. But at least the epigenomic mapping effort seems to have learned something from the gene-patenting frenzy that loomed over the Human Genome Project. "That was a lesson in how intellectual property should not be handled," said John Stamatoyannopoulos, founder of biopharmaceutical company Regulome. "Everybody patented everything left and right, the lawyers got rich, the patent office was flooded, and at the end of the day the patents just weren't valuable." The absence of patent sniping might diminish some of the urgency, but the upside is that the epigenomic map is free and available to anyone -- although only a tiny fraction has thus far been made. "We are well under 1 percent finished; 1 percent would be a massive overstatement," Stamatoyannopoulos said. "But, ultimately, this type of knowledge will revolutionize the way we diagnose and treat disease." From checker at panix.com Mon Aug 22 22:52:16 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2005 18:52:16 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] FrontPage: Symposium: Through the Eyes of a Suicide Bomber by Jamie Glazov Message-ID: Symposium: Through the Eyes of a Suicide Bomber by Jamie Glazov http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19110 et seq. August 12, 2005 The July suicide bombings in London were yet another horrifying reminder of the dreadful tactic perpetrated by Islamic jihadists in their holy war. To be sure, Israeli citizens have long known the nightmare of suicide bombing and Iraqis, unfortunately, have become acquainted with it daily. What exactly is inside the mind of the Islamic suicide bomber? What impulse motivates a human being, who supposedly believes in God, to blow himself up alongside innocent people? To discuss these and other questions with us today, Frontpage Symposium has assembled a distinguished panel. Our guests today are: Jessica Stern, an expert on terrorism, a lecturer on the subject at Harvard, and the author of [25]Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill; Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, a prison psychiatrist who has had much experience with treating Muslim patients in Britain and who has witnessed the "collision of cultures." He is the author of his new collection of essays, [26]Our Culture, What's Left of It. The Mandarins and the Masses; Dr. Nancy Kobrin, an affiliated professor to the University of Haifa, Arabist, psychoanalyst and author of the upcoming book, The Sheikh's New Clothes: Islamic Suicide Terror and What It's Really All About; and Dr. Hans-Peter Raddatz, a scholar of Islamic Studies and author of Von Allah zum Terror? Der Djihad und die Deformierung des Westens (From Allah to Terror? Jihad and the Western Deformation). FP: Jessica Stern, Dr. Tilman Nagel, Dr. Nancy Kobrin and Dr. Hans-Peter Raddatz, welcome to Frontpage Symposium. Suicide bombings are a perpetual reality in Iraq and Israel today. In Israel, we see Palestinians, often kids, blowing themselves up alongside Jewish inoccents while their parents cheer on in euphoria. In Iraq, we see foreign fighters coming from all over the Arab and Muslim world to detonate themselves amongst innocent civilians. Now they have struck in London. Lets start from square one to crystallize things. What instils the yearning to blow oneself up? Dr. Raddatz? Raddatz: If you were a molecule type of "personality" who has only one alternative of existence, namely being stripped of any individual ego and merged with the mass of the "umma", the community of Allah, you might also be tempted to look for some dynamite - or rather C4 - in order to focus your unimportant life into one single, supposedly grandiose moment. When you in addition to that are not able to distinguish spiritual from material aspects, you are in really serious trouble. In one previous symposium, Dr. Kobrin rightly mentioned the regrettable inabililty of not so too few Muslims to tell brain from mind. While they cut heads off, they think to destroy the thoughts of their victims. Similar to that they expect to meet innumerable beautiful girls in paradise since all their lives they have been told to proceed directly there as reward for the martyr death. Needless to mention that there will be unlimited erections as well as hymens renewed constantly. Some of the Palestinian suicide bombers wrap their penises into fire-proof aluminum foil to save them for the pleasures to come. Their parents get even doubly rewarded, by cash and "honor." Allah provides for an unusually profitable deal, indeed. What we are facing here is not only pre-modern but pre-cultural "thinking". The Koran and Islamic tradition set guidelines conserving a manichaean type of prevalence claim that ultimately rejects any other society alternative. While strengthening its orthodox structures worldwide, Islam keeps on lacking one very important feature which most cultures have developed and which is indispensable for diverting violence inside a group: the subliminal function of the sacrifice concept. The impossibility for the average Muslim individual to develop a thinking outside the community and for the Muslim collective to deal with power and with women without violence has prevailed until today and is even picking up again due to modernization conflicts. In this context, one has to keep in mind the Western "scientists" in sociolgy, anthropology, neuro-physiology etc. who deny the singularity of the human mind. Therefore, they have no problems with cognition Islamic style and thus explain "martyr" bombers as "emergency defence". Ultimately we are talking about politics, of course, renewing sympathies with a radical ideology quite close to the biology of Fascism. FP: Ms. Stern? Stern: There has been exponential growth in suicide attack worldwide, the most virulent form of terrorism, which accounts for less than 5 percent of all terrorist events but about 50 percent of all casualties. Many suicide attacks since1980 originated in organized campaigns to drive perceived occupiers from the attackers` homeland, and US military interventions have only exacerbated the problem. That said, most military occupations in history have not led to suicide bombing campaigns. The answer to your question - what instils the yearning to blow oneself up is dependent on many factors. I believe the reasons are likely to be a combination of political, religious, psychological, organizational, and material factors. But not all suicide-murder operations are committed by religious zealots. It used to be the case that a secular group Sri Lankas Tamil Tigers were responsible for most suicide-murder attacks. Now Islamist groups are more important. You mention two areas: Palestine and Iraq in particular. In Palestine, Hamas and the other terrorist groups use religion to justify their aspirations for political power and to recover Palestinian territory from Israeli occupation. Part of this land is sacred to Muslims but also to Jews and Christians. To achieve their ends, some of which are accepted as legitimate by much of the world, Hamas and the other terrorist groups in the region are committing atrocities against Israeli citizens and against the Palestinian people. The terrorist leaders deliberately inculcate the idea that martyrdom operations are sacred acts, worthy of both earthly and heavenly rewards. Mainstream Islamic scholars are increasingly voicing their view that suicide-bombing attacks against civilians are not acts of martyrdom but suicide and murder, both of which are forbidden by Islamic law. I believe the best way to understand the situation in Palestine is to see suicide-murder as a kind of epidemic disease. Ordinary suicide has been shown to spread through social contagion, especially among youth. Studies have shown that a teenager whose friend or relative attempts or commits suicide is more likely to attempt or commit suicide himself. Not surprisingly, ordinary suicide is more common among youths who are depressed or exposed to intense social stress. Suicide bombing is different from ordinary suicide: It entails a willingness not only to die, but also to kill others. Often, an organization takes charge of planning the suicide operation, and the terrorist may be on call for weeks or, in the case of the leaders of the September 11^th attacks, years. But there are some commonalties. The situation in Gaza suggests that suicide-murder can also be spread through social contagion, that there is some tipping point beyond which a cult of suicide-murder takes hold among youth. Once this happens, the role of the organization appears to be less critical: the bombing takes on a momentum of its own. Martyrdom operations have become part of the popular culture in Gaza and the West Bank. For example, on the streets of Gaza, children play a game called shuhada, which includes a mock funeral for a suicide bomber. Teenage rock groups praise martyrs in their songs. Asked to name their heroes, young Palestinians are likely to include suicide bombers on the list. There were more suicide attacks in Iraq in 2004 (104) than for the entire globe in any previous year of contemporary history, involving fighters from at least 15 Arab countries. And the rate of suicide attacks in Iraq in 2005 is likely to surpass that. From talking to terrorists and those who monitor them, I and others have learned that terrorism thrives in an atmosphere of humiliation, marginalization, and dashed expectations. Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, describes globalization as deeply humiliating to Muslims. That's why, he says, he encourages the youth of Islam to carry arms and defend their religion with pride and dignity rather than ignobly submit to the new world order. Perceived humiliation and religious fervor are both tools that terrorist leaders can cynically exploit to promote martyrdom. FP: Thanks Ms. Stern. To make the statement that US military interventions have only exacerbated the problem might be true on some levels, in the sense that if you confront your enemy he is going to engage in violence. But to mention U.S. intervention in the context of our discussion is to imply that it is Americas fault somewhere that a Muslim in the world gives up his college education and comfortable material existence and flocks to Iraq to blow himself up. Daniel Pipes article[27] The California Suicide Bomber is a perfect example of where a suicide bomber does not come from among the poor, the oppressed and the downtrodden. His cravings to kill himself alongside innocents stemmed from many factors other than having supposedly suffered from American imperialism. There can be all kinds of military occupations, invasions, etc. Not all people blow themselves up. Ms. Stern, you mention that mainstream Islamic scholars are increasingly voicing their view that suicide-bombing attacks against civilians are not acts of martyrdom but suicide and murder, both of which are forbidden by Islamic law. These are truly encouraging developments and we all hope they continue. But unfortunately, these Islamic scholars are pretty effective in their invisibility and in getting absolutely no respect from suicide bombers and from a large section of the Muslim world. Why is that? Why is it that the parents of Palestinian suicide bombers do not shiver in dread worrying that their dead kids are in hell -- because their clerics teach that suicide bombing is against Islamic law and will not lead you to paradise, but to ever-lasting hell-fire? How come the 9/11 hijackers werent depressed knowing they would be in hell after they would commit their crime, because their clerics and their religious texts told them this would be the case? Could it be that maybe suicide and murder might just not be all that directly in conflict with certain components of Islam law? Scholar Robert Spencers [28]Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West clearly demonstrates that Islamic jihad finds much of its basis in Islamic religious texts. Yes, there are many portions of Islamic texts that teach tolerance and peace, and we must all fight for this part of Islam to prevail and to defeat the side that Islamic extremists and terrorists refer to and manipulate. But can we, and is it wise for us, to deny that the negative and dark side exists? Terry McDermotts new book [29]Perfect Soldiers is a clear example of how the 9/11 hijackers were the last thing from impoverished and oppressed victims. For some reason, I highly doubt that if you gave a New Testament to each of those individuals and that if they experienced a religious conversion to Christianity, or if they became atheists, that they would still have longed with such fervor to leave this world though smashing planes into populated American buildings filled with thousands of innocent people. Humiliation, marginalization, and dashed expectations? Yes, those words can fit the plight of many Jews under Nazi occupation, but you didnt see them strapping bombs unto themselves and walking into caf?s and blowing themselves up. These terms also fit my Russian peoples and many of the Russian dissidents who suffered under the horror of Soviet tyranny. These dissidents included my parents and many of our friends. They were humiliated, marginalized and suffered dashed expectations. I cant name you one who walked into a caf? in Russia and blew himself up alongside innocents. It is clear that Islamist terrorists hate globalization. But they do so because it makes life on this earth even more materially comfortable. They reject earthly pleasure and happiness. The enjoyment of life represents humiliation to them. The sight of a happy free and spontaneous woman laughing, dressed as she wants to be dressed, represents humiliation to them. That is the problem. Can we really blame America for the unhappiness of those who venerate a death-cult that rejects individualism and the pursuit of happiness in earthly existence? Ms. Stern, I am by no means saying that you have argued some of these notions that I am questioning and criticizing. I am just provoking a dialogue here that I hope will help all of us crystallize some important themes relevant to this discussion. Dr. Dalrymple, tell us about your own personal experience with your patients and what it revealed about the Muslim mindset. As you answer this, please also include what we really want to narrow in on: what is inside the mind of the suicide bomber? Dalrymple: I agree that poverty and humiliation are not sufficient explanations of the phenomenon. These are things which are almost part of universal human experience. I think the problem is a combustible mixture of elements. The first is the belief that Muslims are in possession of the final revealed truth, and that they have a testament and a tradition of sayings of the Prophet that in essence answer all human questions, and by the light of which all such questions ought not only to be answered but are answerable. While no doubt there are Christians who feel more or less the same about their favoured scriptures, they now have to live in a world of competing ideas. Muslims have created societies in which it is possible, perhaps, to dispute what the Koran and hadith mean, but not their underlying authority to answer all questions. It is still not safe in a Muslim country to say 'There is no God and Mohammed was therefore not his prophet, but a man suffering from a delusion.' While in possession of transcendental religious and philosophical truth, however, it has not escaped notice that the Muslim world has fallen behind the rest of the world. Japan, China, India are fast catching up or overtaking the West: they have been able to meet the Western challenge. No Muslim country has managed more than a kind of parasitic prosperity, dependent on oil - the industry which no Muslim did anything to discover or develop. Even their wealth, then, is a reminder of the dependence. The whole of the Arab world, minus the oil, is economically less significant to the rest of the world than one Finnish telephone company. The fact that Islamic civilisation was once exquisite, and in advance of most others, is in this context a disadvantage. It means that Muslims tend to think in terms of recovery of glory, rather than anything new. In Muslim bookshops, you can find books about the scholars and scientists who led the world 600 years ago or more - who are a perfectly legitimate subject of enquiry of course - but after that there is a hiatus. If there had been no Muslims for the last 300 or 400 years, the world would have lost no technical or scientific advance. So there is both a sense of superiority and a gnawing sense of inferiority. Repeated attempts to 'catch up' within an Islamic context have failed. Moreover, there is an element of personal self-hatred as well. For all the hatred of the West, it is absolutely essential to the satisfaction of the tastes of the modern Muslims. They are all partly Westernised. Even Osama dresses half-Muslim, half-Western. His reliance of Western inventions is total. As for the attractions of the flesh-pots of the west, they need not be stressed. Then, of course, there is the day to day humiliation of individuals, who do not see a purely pragmatic way out of their impasse. I think this completes the mindset. In summary, we have: * Metaphysical superiority. * Technical and intellectual retardation. * Self-hatred caused by the impurity of their own desires. * No practical means of escape from genuine quotidian humiliations. * The promise of rewards, for their families on earth and for themselves in the other world. FP: Thank you Dr. Dalrymple. So, lets get deeper into this now. With this background and context, lets get inside the mind of a hypothetical suicide bomber. Paint a picture for us of a Muslim, let us say, that you once had in your psychiatrist office in Britain. Let us suppose that he decides to go to Iraq to blow himself up. Illustrate for us the step-by-step process that is going on in his mind, as he quits his life and heads off to Iraq. Sketch for us the thoughts patterns that lead to this decision-making. Pretend you are writing a script for a movie and we are listening to what is going on in his head as he quits school or his job, starts packing his suitcase or whatever, and is visualizing with great glee how he will detonate himself in a crowd of civilians in Baghdad. Dalrymple: Clearly, although the fundamental socio-psychological conditions I have described apply to millions - hundreds of millions - of people, only a vanishingly small proportion of them actually want to be suicide bombers, even if rather more admire and approve of suicide bombers. So what pushes someone over the edge, as it were? In my experience, which admittedly is limited, and of a selected sample, I would say the following: The suicide bomber is of above average intelligence. He, or she, is therefore searching for an explanation of his or her existential plight. (You need a certain level of intellection for this to be so.) This involves the identification of an enemy. The person who becomes a bomber often has a special, personal sense of grievance. This can derive from an intrinsic sensitivity to perceived insult, consequent upon the normal variation of human personality, or can come from outside, eg a person is humiliatingly accused of something of which he is guilty, but regards the accusation itself as lese majeste. For example, a Muslim rapist I know wanted to become a suicide bomber, having become convinced that the West was rotten to the core, deficient in moral worth, because it took the word of a mere woman against his. So to refine it further, we need all the general cultural and economic conditions, plus the personal particularities I have suggested. The act of killing oneself for a cause, in the process taking a few 'enemies' with one, is an apologia pro vita sua. Let us not forget that we in the West have a long and inglorious, irrational tradition of supposing that the lengths to which people are prepared to go in the furtherance of a cause is itself evidence of the moral worth of that cause. The kind of would-be suicide bomber I have known thinks to himself: They have accused me of what I have done. What I have done is no crime. Therefore those who accuse me are the corrupt of the earth. Those who accuse me are truly representative of the society from which they come. The destruction of the corrupt of the earth will be rewarded appropriately. Therefore it matters not which individuals I destroy. The belief is therefore not in representative government, but in representative guilt. FP: Thank you Dr. Dalrymple. This is fascinating and frightening stuff. Dr. Kobrin? Kobrin: Yes Jamie, it is perversely fascinating and downright terrifying. It is also part of the Eros of the terrorism. Dr. Dalrymple has succinctly described the crux of the problem that the other is always already guilty and hence expendable. Similarly Dr. Raddatz is correct in fore grounding the Ummah. Just as the child in Arab Muslim culture is not permitted to separate from the Umm [Ar. mother], this enmeshment gets repeated and reinforced by the Ummah as a singularly fused group. There are working groups which strive for the betterment of life and then, there are regressed destructive groups. The Islamic terrorist organizations are among the most destructive because they send their own to be killed off using women and children under the guise of martyrdom while attacking and murdering the innocent. Just because this is done consciously as a tactical tool does not mean there doesnt exist a vicious psychological undercurrent. When there is no sense of self, this leads to many problems. If you are denied a life and live in a community where power [meaning absolute control of the other] is the rule of thumb and it is enforced brutally through honor killings, child beating, sexual abuse, beheadings etc., fear and terror are pervasive. The need to hate and the need to have an enemy are in place by age 3 and the Jew is among the most hated of all. I will return to this in a moment. It is precisely because of the terror that few factor in the ramifications of shame-based child rearing practices because the implications are enormous and the ability to do effective interventions are highly compromised. What winds up happening, in a nutshell, is that the mother who has been so pervasively and insidiously traumatized struggles to give the child what s/he needs. Its not that the mother doesnt want to and I dont mean to minimize the role of the father either but it is here that the problem of splitting the world irrationally into loving vs. hating begins without being able to develop the cognitive piece to bridge between the two extremes. There are many adults who may appear to be high functioning but the splitting is there below the surface in their minds and they still struggle to be free from their terrors of abandonment and rejection, feeling humiliated and shamed by this impotent inability. So that when the terrorists and the Ummah scream in a deafening voice we have been shamed and humiliated! it might be worth the while to ask how did they themselves participate in creating a collective self which is so easily shamed by others? If a person has a realistic sense of self, it is hard to buy into being shamed as an adult. There is the Arabic saying: He hits me and cries, and races me to complain. Dr. Stern raises the subject of the Tamil Tigers. Yes, counter terrorism studies have repeatedly defined them as a secular nationalist ethno-separatist organization. However, the experts forget that it is the first three years of life when the cultural-religio ideologies are absorbed like a sponge ingrained into the personality. In Hindu culture as in Arab Muslim culture, the child is not supposed to separate from the mother. Prabhakaran, the charismatic leader of the LTTE, claims that religion is a non-issue and ironically vowed never to marry, yet did so in a Hindu ceremony. What is the importance of this? It shows that the process of identify formation is much more nuanced and complicated than we like to admit. It is a reminder that there is no purity of identity. Indeed the LTTE on the one hand threw out their Muslim Tamil-speaking members in the early 1990s and yet on the other, there are reports that they are recruiting people of mixed parentage Tamil-Muslim and Hindu-Catholic from the south (personal communication, A. Gunawardena) When I was in Sri Lanka in March, I wondered about this history and the growing local Arab Muslim community. This added dimension of religious identity is thrown into this mix. For example, Muslims refer to Hindus as najus meaning filthy because they are polytheists. This is its socially sanctioned prejudiced attitude. Then there are the Jews and Christians as Dr. Stern points out with the land of Israel being sacred to all three. But in the minds eye of the Muslim, Judaism and Christianity and their believers are subjugated to Islam as Dhimma. The root of the word means to blame so that the Prophet Muhammad built into the religion an institutionalized ideology where you can always blame the other and never have to assume responsibility for your own communitys predicament. This is to say nothing of the ideology of submission only to Allah and never to a non-Muslim so that any occupation stings deeply. You know, Musa (Moses) is the most frequently mentioned prophet in the Quran. Why? Because of the giving of the law at Sinai Moses makes divine will manifest in human discourse in the Torah. However, to be a believer requires a leap of faith. The Christians had to appropriate the giving of the law and then added to it with the New Testament. The Prophet Muhammad was faced with a much more difficult task since he had to juggle two preceding religious identities. Muhammad initially borrowed extensively from the Jews who at that time lived in what is now Judenrein Saudi Arabia. He borrowed with the hopes that the Jews would convert. When that didnt happen, he became enraged and more deeply engaged in Jihad and Dawa [the call to convert]. However, this still left him and his followers with the problem of their mixed heritage, that is their Judaic and Christian roots. The Ummah struggles to admit to this borrowing. It is very difficult to do so when the Jew and Israel are always at the eye of the storm. Muslims seek to cancel out their Judaic roots and the Islamic terrorists seek to kill them off rather than accepting the fact that Judaism and Islam are so similar up to a point. The unacknowledged terror is the fear of losing their identity in the other. Think: enmeshment. Jihad is unique to Islam Judaism and Christianity have nothing remotely similar. People routinely fail to remember that the Muslims invaded Spain fi sabil Allah [fighting] in the path of Allah in 711 AD. They came on Jihad. The Crusades were a response to massacre, forced conversions to Islam, Muslim invasion, conquest and the animosity for the Prophet co-opting the New Testament by the Quran. So the Islamic terrorists attempt to resolve their religious identity confusion by brute force, using suicide bombers as a tactical tool with this psychological undercurrent. By the way, the Sira (the biography of Muhammad) records that the prophet attempted suicide twice; though this has rarely been pointed out as a modeling moment for Muslim identity. (personal communication, R. Paz) Thus, it is not merely that the ideologies per se are exacerbating the violence but it is the way in which they function and are deployed by their practitioners. I agree with Dr. Dalrymple that poverty and humiliation are not sufficient explanations rather that there is a fear of recognizing that their identity is mixed not pure. They are uncomfortable with the impurity of their own desires which are accompanied by violent fantasies that get acted out in real time on innocent victims. Just like BTK, the serial killer, their external life is a mask of sanity but their internal life is a mess of psychosexual violent fantasies. But surely it cant be that hard to comprehend what kind of mind the suicide bomber must have, given the fact that s/he is part and parcel of the Umma, born and raised by the Umm. The vast majority of whom venerate Ayman al-Zawahiri who ordered the execution by firing squad of the 15 year old son of one of his closest confidants in the presence of the father and other colleagues. (Montasser al-Zayyat, The Road to Al-Qaeda, p.105) This mind is merely a reflection of the crisis within Islam. [E. Sivan, Hitnagshut btokh ha-Islam [The Crash Within Islam in Hebrew]. The crisis has been projected on to the West. Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Soviet Studies. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitzs new book [31]Left Illusions. He is also the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of the new book [32]The Hate America Left and the author of [33]Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchevs Soviet Union (McGill-Queens University Press, 2002) and [34]15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist. To see his previous symposiums, interviews and articles [35]Click Here. Email him at [36]jglazov at rogers.com. References 25. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/006050532X/qid=1123832248/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-7311062-5729652?v=glance&s=books 26. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1566636434/qid=1123832389/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-7311062-5729652?v=glance&s=books 27. http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17602 28. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0895261006/ref=ase_robertspencer-20/103-1603172-8127010?v=glance&s=books 29. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060584696/qid=1123833997/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/002-7311062-5729652 30. http://www.frontpagemag.com/articles/readarticle.asp?ID=19111&p=1 31. https://www.donationreport.com/init/controller/ProcessEntryCmd?key=D8Q0U3W0R8 32. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=6317 33. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=6158 34. https://www.donationreport.com/init/controller/ProcessEntryCmd?key=C1P3Y2N7P9 35. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/authors.asp?ID=3 36. mailto:jglazov at rogers.com -------------------- Through the Eyes of a Suicide Bomber: Continued by Jamie Glazov http://www.frontpagemag.com/articles/readarticle.asp?ID=19111&p=1 FP: Thank you Dr. Kobrin. One very powerful and clear dynamic here is the guilt these extremists feel for their own sexual desires, which have been demonized in their religion and culture, and now they seek the cleanse themselves of this guilt through hating the object of their lust (freedom in the West) and then ridding themselves of their dirty flesh (suicide) in an attempt to redeem themselves. Dr. Raddatz, could you kindly expand a bit and succinctly crystallize for us the meaning of: [1] having no sense of self. [2] shame-based child rearing practices. [3] splitting the world irrationally into loving vs. hating. And kindly comment how and why this pathology leads to scapegoating the Jew and hating him most of all. Also, why and how does suicide bombing become a rational and legitimate course of action within this pathological dynamic? And kindly comment on Dr. Kobrins point that the Sira records that the prophet attempted suicide twice. This is not a very well known fact. Could you integrate these phenomena for us? Raddatz: Quite an ambitious request as it goes right at the core of the whole question. The way we look at the problem of Islamic violence has a lot to do with our kind of fancy differentiating. I am far away from criticizing Ms. Stern, but when we stress that there are imams condemning suicide bombings we simply tranquilize ourselves with time-consuming platitudes. Firstly, as FP has pointed out, those imams do not play any mentionable role in Muslim politics. Secondly, they are part of what is referred to as "taqiya", the Islamic duty to systematically lie to non-Muslims, and thirdly the real heavyweights in the imam business, like Muhammad Tantawi and Yusuf Quaradhawi, make no bones about suicide terrorists belonging to the most valuable form of existence Allah has ever had the grace to create. As Tantawi pointed out, inside this privileged species there is even another inbuilt peak version: If you kill as many Jewish women and children your paradise guarantee is even more guaranteed, so to speak. What we have here is the usual - admittedly gruesome - ideology constructed by elites to manipulate people. By the same time we arrive at the first point FP wants me to elaborate on - the so-called self. Although many profit takers in the current science scene want to discuss it away, it is still there. It is still a generally accepted interpretation that the "self" is the somewhat paradoxical faculty to observe oneself observing oneself. In other words, the interaction between ego and self constitutes the personality that is able to separate - at least hypothetically - from its own role and judge it in a greater context. If it is, however, only thinkable as part of a mass, the "ummah" or any other politico-religious "movement", there will be little individual distance from any controversial question. Correspondingly, these "individuals" will be convinced more by material than by theoretical arguments. Thus, they will be rather "pre-destined" i.e. commanded by "holy books" and/or leaders who decide for the people and represent a collective self. What we have to keep in mind is this: Due to the still intact survival instinct only a small Muslim minority wants to blow itself and others up, but a large majority agrees to the Islamic justification of destroying non-Islamic situations. As a direct consequence we are faced with the "shame/honor" mechanism. Typical for totalitarian systems altogether. As being "oneself" is an aberration, it is a shame to insist on it and a corresponding honor to renounce it and denounce others if they do not follow this rule. "Ego-extinction" (Arabic: tadjarrud) is an official, high-ranking mental exercise to get rid of individual temptations. Among the "normal" Muslims you will find very few who allow themselves an independent, outspoken opinion outside the official Islam mainstream. Whoever has lived for a longer period of time in Islamic countries - like myself - very probably has experienced that there is a lot of distrust and tactical behaviour within the closest family relations. He or she who violates the rules or just makes simply a wrong decision, does bring shame over the family, over the tribe and - ultimately - Islam. Here we have the very reason why inventions are simply unknown, everyday things always delayed and almost only able to be accelerated by corruption. In this context I think Ms. Kobrin's concept of "umm" and "ummah" - mother and community - is very worthwhile pursuing. It will probably explain why we will eternalize our problems with Islam if we do not realize that the groundwork is being laid during earliest childhood. The forgoing absence of an intellectual distance to questions concerning Islam calls for Manichaean behaviour and language as well as readiness to exert violence. Therefore, the Western "dialogue" with Muslims has shied away from compromises let alone contradiction so far. Every major Muslim demand, especially the conservation of pressurizing women and the death threat to dissidents and converts, has been accepted and thereby added to the love/hate split thinking also in the Western migration scenario. This is what I meant by "fancy differentiating". It is our own political or rather "Islamic correctness" that has developed very hard codes of thinking and behaviour itself. Meanwhile we have a mandatory line of argumentation in Europe that depicts Islam as a problem-free phenomenon which has to be imported unchanged and kept as unintegrated as possible. The second highest constitution judge in Germany spreads the semi-official rule that Islam must not be forced to answer questions critical to the "religion". Thus, we should not be too astonished at the Western process - at least in some major European countries like England, Germany and France - of a distinct approach and assimilation to Islamic rules and regulations. It is accompanied by long-term aspects which are clearly meta-historical and out of direct political reach, namely a growing hostility against women, combined with an equally growing "understanding" for homosexual and paedophiliac interests, as well as renewed anti-Semitism. The latter is not restricted to Muslims but being emancipated again in Europe nowadays. It is an old phenomenon as the repeated attempt to "overcome" traditional society patterns, particularly connected to the Jews as "inventors" of the first law as such in the development of mankind. We have heard that Moses is mentioned frequently in the Koran, and I may add the well known fact that anti-Semitism goes historically along with periods of distinct power concentrations. So it is probably the decline of Western individuality, along with with the media info explosion, curtailing the collective memory, which promotes radical ideologies like Islam with all strings attached - growing sympathy for organized crime, violence and women's repression, anti-hetero sexual "theories" and other post-modern achievements. To blame the US is a favourite game in Europe, but does not grasp the overall picture at all. As for Muhammads biography (sira), the scholars are not very certain about the double suicide thing, as they are very shy about him altogether. We are faced with another psychological question here waiting for discussion and clarification. It has a lot to do with Muhammeds wildly changing mental states and obviously deeply rooted, rather psychotic situations, reported by his companions. As the Koran waits for a historical analysis, Muhammad waits to be laid on the couch. I call him the "burning glass" of Islam, meaning the representation of a world moving power in the nutshell of a personal but highly abstract lifetime. It is the combination of radical exclusiveness with the "leader's will" that justifies any violence and gives suicide bombers the illusion of individuality - a sense of life by dying. FP: Thank you Dr. Raddatz. While it is crucial that you bring up the reality of "taqiya" and that we must not be na?ve when confronting it, I think at the same time we must stress that there are many Muslims and Muslim clerics who are sincere in their belief in a peaceful Islam and are honest in their denunciation of terror. I think it would be fair to say that Sheikh Prof. Abdul Hadi Palazzi, Director of the Cultural Institute of the Italian Islamic Community, is one of them. In any case, Ms. Stern? Stern: Well, I agree with both you and Dr. Raddatz -- there are Muslim clerics who condemn suicide murder- as we have seen in the week following the London attacks. And yet we should not assume naively that the clerics who support suicide murder are unimportant in this war. We are all struggling with the question of why terrorists do what they do, and how their situations differ from those who are not terrorists. One problem we face is that we don't have enough interviews of radicals who said no to terrorist recruiters -- so it's hard for us to assess what qualities distinguishes those who say "yes" from those who say "no." The notion that poverty causes terrorism has been disproven again and again, as the other participants have pointed out. But terrorists I have interviewed tend to emphasize humiliation and confused identity in their answer to the question -- why do you do what you do? Sometimes it also seems to be a kind of vicarious humiliation - the notion that my people are humiliated so therefore I must act to avenge their pain. Still, as our other contributors have made clear, most people feel confused about their identities at some point in their lives, and most people feel humiliated. I think of my university, Harvard, as a humiliation factory - everyone feels humiliated, except, perhaps, the president. And yet we don't see a lot of terrorists emerging from Cambridge. Not yet, anyway. So if humiliation is important, it is certainly not sufficient. Could it be that the shame-based child-rearing practices and splitting the world into good and evil are important additional ingredients, as you suggest? I think that Dr. Raddatz is absolutely correct in emphasizing Manichean world views. I have the feeling that honor and shame are also critical here, but at this point it's just a feeling - I haven't been able to do the interviews that would allow me to assess your hypothesis. I brought up the question of military occupation only because it is described as the most important factor in a recent book, Robert Pape's Dying to Win. But I see terrorism as much more complex than this - it is not just a response to military occupation. Most military occupations have not resulted in terrorism, and much of the terrorism we worry about most today is not a response to military occupation. FP: Dr. Dalrymple? Dalrymple: I think the question of 'military occupation,' in light of the London bombings, must be viewed as at best an ostensible justification rather than a real reason for Islamic terrorism, at least outside Israel and Palestine. I was very interested to see that one of the people involved in the bombings was not only a believer, but a devotee of Elvis Presley. Now these things seem to me to be highly contradictory. I think it is difficult to find any interpretation of Islam that is reconcilable with an admiration for Elvis Presley, who is surely symbolic of all the decadence of the west that Muslims (not entirely mistakenly, I must confess) see. Elvis Presley represents the triumph of sexual desire over all restraints; nothing could be further from the spirit of Islam, at least in its sublunary phase. For these two things to exist in the same human breast creates a terrible and guilty conflict. (Another bomber loved cricket - the quintessentially English game.) Let us not forget that it is possible to be a terrorist - to kill people at random - without any wish or vocation to die oneself. It is true that a terrorist who kills himself while killing others is even more terrifying, since it is difficult to conceive of anything that might deter him, but overall the terrorist who lives to kill another day may be more effective in the pursuit of any definite end. The point is: i) that the Islamic terrorists, at least of the London bomber kind, have no specific demands to make ii) they are clearly trying to resolve some conflict within themselves. I think they are trying to prove to themselves that the west offers them no temptations, that they are actually more Islamic than the Prophet, though at the same time a still small voice tells them that this is not so. Death is a solution, it squares a circle. FP: Dr. Kobrin? Kobrin: First I want to extend my heartfelt condolences to Dr. Dalrymple on account of seven/seven. As someone who has been so involved in trying to understand the mind of the Islamic terrorist, I can only imagine how difficult these days have been. Now, there is no question that the entire Islamic terrorist organization and its members who are manufacturing suicide bombers like Al Qaeda lack a balanced, nuanced sense of self. The tragedy is that they and their Ummah have come up with a feeble justification of military occupation to excuse their aberrant behavior. Then there are the scholars of Academe who should know better and who should be more insightful but aren't. They willingly take the bait hook, line and sinker which only further compounds the matter, thereby putting more innocent people at risk of being murdered. They vicariously murder and are therefore, accomplices. This is not so passive aggressive behavior. All the ideologies of Islam especially tadjarrud and taqiyah which Dr. Raddatz explains, must be explored from not just a psychological point of view as to the meaning that they express but also how their practice impacts children in light of early childhood development. Here in lies the crux of the problem. The neighbors, friends and family who say that they never dreamt that so-and-so suicide bomber could do something like that or that he/she was a radical Islamist terrorist, remind me of the shocked family members and neighbors of serial killers. It is routinely understood in the field of mental health that a person can appear normal but mask violent fantasies and act them out in real time, murdering innocent victims. This is not rocket science. Dr. Raddatzs image of the Prophet Muhammad as the burning glass of Islam resonates with the intense charisma that he continues to hold for his followers. The sense of deprivation in the narratives of the Quran (cf. J. Lachkar.1983 The Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Psychoanalytic Perspective. Unpublished PhD thesis. Los Angeles: International University.), Sunna, Ahadith and Sira is huge and very attractive to many of the followers who carry within themselves their own deprivation. Deprivation should not be confused with poverty. Those hijackers of 9/11 and the suicide bombers who were well educated and came from middle to upper middle class families had their own sense of emotional deprivation, rejection and abandonment which went undetected and which was accompanied by profound rage leading to violence and cold blooded murder. Dr. Dalrymple points to the severe conflict within and an inability to reconcile and tolerate difference. He raises the important issue that you can be a terrorist and murder without committing suicide. However, the combination together is extremely terrifying because the dirty little secret is they do not want to die alone. No one probably does . . . but we dont go around taking out innocent people by murder in order to square the circle. It should not be forgotten too, that the Prophet Muhammad died with his head in the lap of his favorite wife Aisha whose name happens to mean life. Furthermore, he was buried in her room where she continued to live, earning her keep from the alms she received from pilgrims who visited the site. Think: Womb to Tomb. The image venerates a permanent fusion signaling that the ideal is never to separate. And by the way, whats with this favorite wife business? Polygamy is nothing more than a clever way to pit one wife against the other and never have to deal with male rage. Plus if you dont like what your wife says, you can merely blow her off and go on to the next so that you never have to learn how to resolve conflict. That would make learning how to negotiate a peace quite difficult dont you think? Thats why, if we are going to discuss the military occupation, it needs to be understood in light of Islamic history and its ideologies rather than taking it at face value. The ideology of submission, i.e. Islam, would make it very difficult for male Muslims to tolerate any other position than conqueror but certainly not that of the conquered. FP: Dr. Raddatz? Feel to comment on what has been said in the previous round, but let's also move on to the recent suicide bombers of 7/7 in London. In terms of what we have learned, up till now, of who they were, what do their pathologies and crimes bring to this discussion? Raddatz: As Ms. Stern rightly pointed out, our subject gets more complicated the more insight we gain, be it psychological, political, social and what have you. Islam appears as a comprehensive spectrum that contains and encourages all sorts of behaviour but clearly favours deceit and violence as far as the achievement of goals is concerned, especially in "competition" with non-Islam. I also agree that "humiliation" is one of the key words in the affair since the Western superiority in productivity and education is clearly staggering. Aside from this: Whatever negative happens it is somebody else's guilt anyhow. We have to consider again that the Islamic self is usually understood as part of a greater mass or "movement". Thus, the destruction of something un-Islamic may imply also self-destruction in order to get noticed at all. Insofar as Dr. Dalrymple's remark of the London terrorist being a Presley fan confirms the compatibility of both in the mass aspect. In other words, watching the behaviour of rock festival participants can be quite revealing if you search for signs for mass movements in the Western civilization. Moreover, it is amazing how parallel things seem to develop as far as "humiliation" at Harvard and European universities goes. It is a favourite term over here as well and exemplifies a fast spreading educational elitarianism that in turn fraternizes with the Islamic elites and purifies Islam from any violence reproach: The Islam is not the problem" and "violence is not the Islam". There should be consent not only on the spectral character of the Islamic culture but also the corresponding special kind of freedom it creates. As the Koran and tradition offer a wide variety of measures between peace and war, Muslim power has always preferred the violent side and, therefore, has brought about a historically grown phenomenon which I call "counter-ethics". This means to say that the special Muslim freedom created a similarly special inclination to violence wherever an opportunity arises to gain an advantage - inside and outside of Islam. We should note here some very important examples I have mentioned partially in a previous round. They confirm the power of man and a rather free interpretation of what is referred to as "religion" but is merely naked and mostly quite primitive power politics. Firstly, Jews and Christians have been historically extinguished although there are Koranic regulations to the opposite. Secondly, women have been historically humiliated, beaten, raped and killed although there are Koranic rules and many traditions to the opposite. Thirdly, dissenters and apostates are badly beaten and often killed although there are clear rules saying that their punisment should be postponed into the beyond. So we should not be very astonished if we are repeatedly confronted with "honor" murderers, suicide bombers and other Islamic geared perpetrators as long as our "elites" tell us that "Islam is not the problem". In my new book coming out next month ("Allahs Women - Djihad between Sharia and Denocracy") I describe - among other subjects - exactly this self-legitimizing violence which does not need a "self" but simply asks for and lives on "individuals" serving indoctrination purposes. In London, terrorists were at work who grew up in the Western environment, obviously without assuming any individualizing element of this civilization. They confirm the complete failure of "integration" and, moreover, Dr. Kobrin's impressive formula of "womb to tomb". The "divinely" granted freedom to kill secures Allahs community and simultaneously the only form of "individuality" possible in Islam. We know that "not all" followers of Islam are violent but its spectral structure and growing populations will provide for vast supply in the future. However our politicians may twist the matter, as long as they are unable and/or unprepared to face these Islamic realities they will not only violate their responsibility towards the non-Muslim majority - they will encourage further bombings and "honor" killings as well as the risks of greater conflicts. In this context we should not forget either the growing pressure coming from the Islamic investor side which plays a fast rising role in the global portfolio management and state financing game, thereby adding to corruption and political paralyzation. The major players in Jeddah, Riadh and elsewhere are often identical with those who finance Al-Qa'ida, PLO, Hamas and so on. FP: Ms. Stern, your comment on the Pakistani suicide bombers in London? And, by the way, this conversation is getting me very depressed. Is there any hope is combating this enemy? From this discussion, it seems hopeless. Can you please offer some optimism how we might prevail over this death-cult and threat to our freedom, safety and overall way of life? Stern: Well there are reasons to feel hopeful. First, the Muslim community in London reacted very swiftly to condemn the attacks on the public transportation system there, something we did not see enough of after 9 11. Second, I think law enforcement and intelligence officials have a better understanding of the "enemy" than they did immediately after 9/11. There is growing recognition that obliterating the threat is not possible, that penetration of terrorist organizations is often a better approach than capturing or killing operatives, and the level of cooperation among and between law enforcement and intelligence agencies continues to expand. It is also important to remember that terrorism tends to run in fads -- Islamist terrorism will not be with us forever, although, admittedly, it is likely to replaced by other "brands..". Alas, risk is part of life -- and terrorism is unlikely to go away. All this suggests that the most important thing we can do as individuals is to make sure we are loving our family as friends as well as we can: every day is precious. FP: Dr. Dalrymple, do you have some words of optimism and hope? Dalrymple: The London bombings may have caused at long last people to examine their fatuous multiculturalist pieties, which I believe are fundamentally derived from the restaurant model: today we eat Hungarian, tomorrow Mexican, the day after Lebanese, and so forth. Clearly, this is possible and very enjoyable, but there are more important and deeper things in life than a variety of cuisines. Perhaps people will begin to see that some values are simply not compatible with others, and will now be prepared to stand up for those that we believe in. Certainly I hope people will start to examine the abominable abuse of women that, if not universal, is very widespread in the Moslem population, and that is a large part - I believe - of the attraction of Islam to increasingly and essentially secularised men. (Interestingly, a recent article in Le Monde about French converts to Islam gave the statistic that 83 per cent were men -and I suspect that the 17 per cent of women were in response to love affairs, though I don't know this to be the case. This is eloquent testimony.) In Britain, if we had the courage to defend Moslem women, I think Islam would lose a lot of it residual attraction. Unfortunately, the Prime Minister's wife went into court shortly before the last election to defend a Moslem schoolgirl's right to wear 'traditional' costume - not traditional in Luton, by the way - I suspect to obtain the Moslem vote for her husband, and probably knowing, and certainly with the duty to know, the often abominable social meaning of this costume. Let us hope the recent events have taught the Prime Minister the folly - no, the sheer wickedness - of this. FP: Dr. Kobrin, last word goes to you. Kobrin: It might be helpful to consider that when we find ourselves feeling hopeless and helpless about terrorism that these feelings are really not ours but rather those of the terrorists denied, split-off and quite literally inflicted on us. I agree with Dr. Stern that the counter terrorist experts, law enforcement and the military are broadening and deepening their thinking which will help facilitate more effective strategies. Its interesting too that Dr. Stern characterizes terrorism as a fad. Psychologically fads express imitative behavior. This links back to a point which Dr. Raddatz made of singular importance the lack of a self. The terrorist persona is as if it had one when it doesnt. I find it ironic that identity theft is a frequently occurring crime which sponsors terrorism because the term itself exposes not only the terrorists problem of identity but more importantly that the terrorist actually must steal from another in order to bolster this tragically fragile sense of self. In the expression identity theft we have a good example of the transparency of the terrorists and their concrete, imitative behavior about which they themselves remain clueless. Unfortunately, it comes with a significant price tag for us and I agree with Dr. Raddatz we should be very concerned about the push to expand investment and banking. Dr. Dalrymples restaurant model is valuable in understanding the disastrous effect of such superficiality nor could I agree more about why there are so many European secularized male converts to Islam. Coming on the heels of the initial London bombings, we now have Egypts Sharm El-Sheikhs tragedy. Unfortunately, things will probably have to hit rock bottom in a series of Muslim countries before the Ummah really takes on the problem of Islamic suicide terrorism which is of its own making. For us, several things might be important to keep in mind as we learn to counter terrorism in our daily life that perseverance and endurance are needed over the long haul, being prudent rather than hyper vigilant, remaining skeptical rather than cynical when possibly encountering the Islamic demeanor of deception. We should also enjoy life not because the terrorists are envious that we can and they cant but because it is part and parcel of loving our family and friends and caring about others. Countering terrorism entails knowing not only ourselves well including our deepest fears but now more than ever we must know the terrorists terrors their deepest and darkest -- in order to be effective in containing the violence. FP: Jessica Stern, Dr. Tilman Nagel, Dr. Nancy Kobrin and Dr. Hans-Peter Raddatz, thank you for joining Frontpage Symposium. Well see you again soon. Previous Symposiums: [25]Iraq: A Report Card, Jeffrey White, Turi Munthe, Karl Zinsmeister, Steven Vincent, Cliff May and Jacob Helibrunn. [26]Russia's Darkness at Noon, Richard Pipes, Fredo Arias-King, Yuri Yarim-Agaev, Dick Morris and Ramsey Flynn. [27]Muslims in France: A Ticking Time Bomb? Mohamed Ibn Guadi, Soner Cagaptay, Laurent Murawiec and Reza Bayegan. [28]Murdering Women For Honor, Dr. Gudrun Eussner, Dr. Nancy Kobrin, Dr. Hans-Peter Raddatz and Seyran Ates. ______________________________________________________________________ Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Soviet Studies. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitzs new book [29]Left Illusions. He is also the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of the new book [30]The Hate America Left and the author of [31]Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchevs Soviet Union (McGill-Queens University Press, 2002) and [32]15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist. To see his previous symposiums, interviews and articles [33]Click Here. Email him at [34]jglazov at rogers.com. References 25. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19031 26. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=18782 27. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=18631 28. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=18370 29. https://www.donationreport.com/init/controller/ProcessEntryCmd?key=D8Q0U3W0R8 30. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=6317 31. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=6158 32. https://www.donationreport.com/init/controller/ProcessEntryCmd?key=C1P3Y2N7P9 33. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/authors.asp?ID=3 34. mailto:jglazov at rogers.com From checker at panix.com Tue Aug 23 22:40:10 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2005 18:40:10 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] PNAS: Cultural variation in eye movements during scene perception Message-ID: Cultural variation in eye movements during scene perception Hannah Faye Chua, Julie E. Boland, and Richard E. Nisbett* Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, 530 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1043 Contributed by Richard E. Nisbett, July 20, 2005 *To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: nisbett at umich.edu. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0506162102 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences August 30, 2005 vol. 102 no. 35 12629-12633 [This is a Big Mac psychology article, but an important one. Nisbett is a big AntiRacist and wrote the best response to the Rushton-Jensen article "Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability," which appeared in the same issue of _Psychology, Public Policy, and Law_, the whole issue being unreported in both the mainstream and alternative press. [In fact, "racial differences" could have replaced "cultural differences" throughout the paper! The study found that East Asians look at the background in pictures more than Americans and claimed their "findings provide clear evidence that cultural differences in eye-movement patterns mirror and probably underlie the cultural differences in judgment and memory tasks." Toward the end the authors added ["In the past decade, cultural differences in perceptual judgment and memory have been observed: Westerners attend more to focal objects, whereas East Asians attend more to contextual information. However, the underlying mechanisms for the apparent differences in cognitive processing styles have not been known. In the present study, we examined the possibility that the cultural differences arise from culturally different viewing patterns when confronted with a naturalistic scene. We measured the eye movements of American and Chinese participants while they viewed photographs with focal object on complex background. In fact, the Americans fixated more on focal objects than did the Chinese, and the Americans tended to look at the focal object more quickly. In addition, the Chinese made more saccades to the background than did the Americans. Thus, it appears that differences in judgment and memory may have their origins in differences in what is actually attended as people view scene." [I see here a mixing of psychological and social layers. Once the idea of gene-culture co-evolution becomes acceptable (that is, after the battle between Big Med and Big Ed resolves in Big Ed's favor and Big Ed discovers that as big a cash cow can come with "race-based education" as with "race-based medicine), we'll get something like this: [For some reason or another, the *physical* environment in East Asia selected those whose visual systems focused upon the background more than the physical environment in Europe did. Weather patterns, reflectivity i snow or in the atmosphere, something like that. A byproduct of this difference in perceptual *psychology* was a psychology of greater attentiveness to holistic phenomenon in other aspects of the environment, including the social environment (other people). This byproduct had an impact on social organization as well, since those being attuned to other people are more likely to think in collectivist terms. [The authors, to the contrary, assert that more collectivist societies somehow affect visual processing, a nice AntiRacist claim but an ad hoc one. [I'm not sure the authors were really thinking about the co-evolution question, though. And they might have presented data about Chinese-Americans instead of just Chinese Chinese and White Americans. Nisbett did give data on Japanese Americans iirc in his excellent (but also AntiRacist) book, _The Geography of Thought_, cited at the end. If Chinese Americans performed exactly the same as Chinese Chinese in these experiments, we'd have something that is likely to be mostly the result of racial differences. But social organization can effect individual psychology (cultural anthropologists cite instances of this all the time), and it would have been fascinating to have had this extra information. [But it would be safer not have included Chinese Americans, as the SSSM collapses, which collapse I reported on earlier. AntiRacists are getting more and more alike Creationists every day. They needn't, for the race issue is no longer that of superiority and inferiority. It is that of pluralism and whether differences among the world's cultures are deep enough to put a brake on the American democratic capitalism juggernaut. [Invoking "culture" as an all-purpose explanation of everything is spiritualism, really, for such invocations brush aside any material substrate upon which culture can act! This is worse than Creationism. [Thanks to Peter for passing on the reference to this article. I can supply the PDF if you want to see the graphics. ------------ Summary: In the past decade, cultural differences in perceptual judgment and memory have been observed: Westerners attend more to focal objects, whereas East Asians attend more to contextual information. However, the underlying mechanisms for the apparent differences in cognitive processing styles have not been known. In the present study, we examined the possibility that the cultural differences arise from culturally different viewing patterns when confronted with a naturalistic scene. We measured the eye movements of American and Chinese participants while they viewed photographs with focal object on complex background. In fact, the Americans fixated more on focal objects than did the Chinese, and the Americans tended to look at the focal object more quickly. In addition, the Chinese made more saccades to the background than did the Americans. Thus, it appears that differences in judgment and memory may have their origins in differences in what is actually attended as people view scene. A growing literature suggests that people from different cultures have differing cognitive processing styles (1, 2) Westerners, in particular North Americans, tend to be more analytic than East Asians. That is, North Americans attend to focal objects more than do East Asians, analyzing their attributes and assigning them to categories. In contrast, East Asians have been held to be more holistic than Westerners and are more likely to attend to contextual information and make judgments based on relationships and similarities. --------------------------- Causal attributions for events reflect these differences in analytic vs. holistic thought. For example, Westerners tend to explain events in terms that refer primarily or entirely to salient objects (including people) whereas East Asians are more inclined to explain events in terms of contextual factors (3-5) There also are differences in performance on perceptual judgment and memory tasks (6-8) For example, Masuda and Nisbett (6) asked participants to report what they saw in underwater scenes. Americans emphasized focal objects, that is, large, brightly colored, rapidly moving objects. Japanese reported 60% more information about the background (e.g. rocks, color of water, small nonmoving objects) than did Americans. After viewing scenes containing single animal against realistic background, Japanese and American participants were asked to make old/new recognition judgments for animals in a new series of pictures. Sometimes the focal animal was shown against the original background; other times the focal animal was shown against a new background. Japanese and Americans were equally accurate in detecting the focal animal when it was presented in its original background. However, Americans were more accurate than East Asians when the animal was displayed against new background. plausible interpretation is that, compared with Americans, the Japanese encoded the scenes more holistically, binding information about the objects with the backgrounds, so that the unfamiliar new background adversely affected the retrieval of the familiar animal. The difference in attending to objects vs. context also was shown in perceptual judgment task, the Rod and Frame test (7) American and Chinese participants looked down long box. At the end of the box was rod whose orientation could be changed and frame around the rod that could be moved independently of the rod. The participants? task was to judge when the rod was vertical. Chinese participants? judgments of verticality were more dependent on the context, in that their judgments were more influenced by the position of the frame than were those of American participants. In change blindness study, Masuda and Nisbett asked American and Japanese participants to view sequence of still photos and also to view animated vignettes of complex visual scenes (unpublished data) Changes in focal object information (e.g. color and shape of foregrounded objects) and contextual information (e.g. location of background details) were introduced during the sequence of presentations. Overall, the Japanese reported more changes in the contextual details than did the Americans, whereas the Americans reported more changes in the focal objects than did the Japanese. This finding has at least two possible explanations (see ref. 9) On one account, the Asian participants had more detailed mental representations of the backgrounds, whereas the Westerners had more detailed representations of the focal objects. On the other account, the mental representations did not differ with culture, but the two groups differed in their accuracy for detecting deviation between their mental representation of the background/focal object and the current stimulus. Clearly, there were systematic differences between the Americans? and the East Asians? performance in the causal perception, memory, and judgment studies. However, it is unclear whether the effects occur at the level of encoding, retrieval, mental comparison, or differences in reporting bias. To identify the stages in perceptual-cognitive processing at which the cultural differences might arise, consider what is known about scene perception:(i) Within 100ms of first viewing a scene, people can often encode the gist of the scene, e.g. "picnic" or "building" (10) (ii) People then construct mental model of the scene in working memory (11). The mental representation is not an exact rendering of the original scene and is usually incomplete in detail (12-13).(iii) Although the initial eye fixation may not be related to the configuration of the scene, the following fixations are to the most informative regions of the scene for the task at hand (14) The fixation positions are important because foveated regions are likely to been coded in greater detail than peripheral regions (15) (iv) The mental representation of the scene is then transferred to and consolidated in long-term memory. (v) Successful retrieval from long-term memory relies on appropriate retrievalcues.(vi)Duringretrieval,therecalledinformationmay be filtered by experimental demands and cultural expectations. Past studies (3-8) have failed to establish whether the effects are due to differences in perception, encoding, consolidation, recall, comparison judgments, or reporting bias. To address this issue, we monitored eye movements of the American and the Chinese participants while they viewed scenes containing objects on relatively complex backgrounds. We chose this measure because eye fixations reflect the allocation of attention in fairly direct manner. Moreover, we have relatively little awareness of how our eyes move under normal viewing conditions. If differences in culture influence how participants actually view and encode the scenes, there will be differences in the pattern of saccades and fixations in the eye movements of the members of the two cultures. [Saccades are rapid, ballistic eye movements that shift gaze from one fixation to another (15). In particular, we would expect Americans to spend more time looking at the focal objects and less time looking at the context than the Chinese participants. Furthermore, if the Chinese participants perceive the picture more holistically and bind contextual features with features of the focal object, they might make more total saccades when surveying the scene than the Americans. On the other hand, if no eye movement differences emerge between the two cultures, then previous findings of memory and judgment differences are likely due to what happens at later stages, e.g. during memory retrieval or during reporting. Fig. 1. (omitted) Sample pictures presented in the study. Thirty-six pictures with a single foregrounded object (animals or nonliving entities) on realistic backgrounds were presented to participants. Methods Participants. Twenty-five European American graduate students (10 males, 15 females) and 27 international Chinese graduate students (14 males, 12 females, data missing) at the University of Michigan participated in the study. The mean ages of Americans and Chinese were 24.3 and 25.4 years, respectively. All of the Chinese participants were born in China and had completed their undergraduate degrees there. Participants from the two cultures were matched on age and graduate fields of study. Participants were graduate students from engineering, life sciences, business programs, and, in few cases, from the social sciences. Recruitment e-mails were sent to Chinese student organization as well as to different graduate academic departments. Volunteers were each paid $14.00 for their participation in the study. Materials. A collection of animals, nonliving things, and background scenes was obtained from the COREL image collection (Corel, Eden Prairie, MN) and few were obtained from previous study (6) The pictures were manipulated by using PHOTOSHOP software (Adobe Systems, San Jose, CA) to create 36 pictures of single, focal, foregrounded objects (animal or nonliving thing) with realistic complex backgrounds. The final set of pictures contained 20 foregrounded animals and 16 foregrounded nonliving entities, e.g., cars, planes, and boats (see Fig.1 for examples of the pictures shown). The set was composed mostly of culturally neutral photos, plus some Western and Asian objects and backgrounds. This set of 36 pictures was used in the study phase, during which the eye movement data were collected. For the recognition-memory task, the original 36 objects and backgrounds together with 36 new objects and backgrounds were manipulated to create set of 72 pictures. Half of the original objects were presented with old backgrounds and the other half with new backgrounds. Similarly, half of the new objects were presented with old backgrounds and the other half with new backgrounds. This procedure resulted in four picture combinations: (i) 18 previously seen objects with original backgrounds, (ii) 18 previously seen objects with new backgrounds, (iii) 18 new objects with original backgrounds, and (iv) 18 new objects with new backgrounds. This set of 72 pictures was used in the object-recognition phase. All participants saw the same set and sequence of trials to make comparisons of performance comparable. Procedure. Study phase. The participants sat on chair and placed their chin on chin rest to standardize the distance of the head from the computer monitor. The distance of the chin rest from the monitor was 52.8 cm. The size of the monitor was 37.4 cm. At the start of the session, participants wore 120-Hz head- mounted eye-movement tracker (ISCAN, Burlington, MA) and eye-tracking calibration was established before the presentation of stimuli. After this calibration, participants were given instructions on the screen. They were informed that they would be viewing several pictures, one at time. Before each picture was presented, blank screen with cross sign (+) was to appear. Participants were told to make sure that they looked at that cross sign. Once the picture appeared, they could freely move their eyes to look at the picture. For each of the pictures, participants verbally said number between and 7, indicating the degree to which they liked the picture (1, don't like at all; 4, neutral; 7, like verymuch).^ These instructions were followed by several screens showing sample of how the task would proceed. Once ready, participants started the actual task of viewing the 36 pictures. Each picture was presented for 3 s. Afterward, participants engaged in several distracter tasks for about 10 min. Participants were moved to different room and, for example, asked to do backward-counting task, subtracting starting from 100 until they reached zero. [^The Chinese participants gave higher liking ratings than did the Americans (Ms, 4.64 vs. 4.16; 0.005).] Object-recognition phase. Participants were brought back to the computer room to complete recognition-memory task. Participants were told that they would be viewing pictures. Their task was to judge as fast as they could whether they had seen an object before, that is, whether they had seen the particular animal, car, train, boat, etc. in the pictures during the study phase. Participants pressed key if they believed that they had seen the object before, and they pressed another key if they believed that it was new. If participants were unsure, they were told to make guess. Participants then were shown sample picture informing them which item in the picture was the object and that the rest of the visual scene was the background. Participants were informed that each picture would be shown only for specified period. In the event that the picture had already left the screen, they could still input their response. Seventy-two pictures, including 36 original objects and 36 lure objects, were presented. The objects were presented with either an old or new background. Each picture was again presented for s, and fixation screen was presented between the picture presentations. Fig.2. (not shown) Mean accuracy rates from the object-recognition phase (22 Ameri- cans and 24 Chinese). Data shown refer to correct recognition of old objects, when the old objects were presented in old backgrounds, compared with when old objects were presented in new backgrounds. Object refers to the single foregrounded animal or nonliving entity on the picture; background refers to the rest of the realistic, complex spatial area on the visual scene. Demographic questionnaire and debriefing. At the end of the study, participants engaged in an object-familiarity task. All 72 objects were presented against white screen on computer. Participantscircled"yes" if they thought they had seen the object in real life or in pictorial information before coming to the study and "no" if they had not. This procedure was similar to that in previous study (6) We repeated the analyses reported in this paper with familiarity as covariate, and there were no changes in the statistical patterns. Participants also completed demographic questionnaire asking information about their age, education, family history, and English language ability. Participants were debriefed and paid. Data analysis. Six participants had hit rate of /0.5 on the object-recognition task, averaged across conditions. These participants' data were excluded in all statistical analyses. One additional European American had poor eye-tracking data. These exclusions resulted in data for 21 European American and 24 international Chinese participants being included in the eye-tracking analyses. Results The results for the object-recognition task were consistent with previous findings (6) indicating that East Asians are less likely to correctly recognize old foregrounded objects when presented in new backgrounds [F(1,44)=5.72, P=0.02] (Fig. 2) Thus, we have additional evidence for relatively holistic perception by East Asians: they appear to "bind" object with background in perception. The eye-movement patterns of American and Chinese participants differed in several ways. As summarized in Fig. 3, the American participants looked at the foregrounded object sooner and longer than the Chinese, whereas the Chinese looked more at the background than did the Americans, confirming our predictions. Overall, both groups fixated the background more than the objects (Fig. 3A) probably because the background occupied a greater area of the visual scene [F(1,43)=72.46, P=0.001] The Chinese made more fixations during each picture presentation than the Americans [F(1,43)=4.43, P=0.05] but this was entirely due to the fact that Chinese made more fixations on the background [F(1,43)=9.50, P=0.005] The Americans looked at foregrounded objects 118 ms sooner than did the Chinese[t(43)=2.41, P=0.02] (Fig.3B). Participants from both cultures had longer fixations on the objects than on the backgrounds (Fig. 3C) [F(1,43)=17.27, P=0.001] but this was far more true for the Americans than for the Chinese [F(1,43)=5.97, P=0.02] In short, the cultural difference in the memory study was reflected in the eye movements as well.^ [^Across both groups and for each participant group, we examined the correlation between six eye-movement variables and the object-memory index, i.e., the difference score between old object-old background memory and old object-new background memory. Of the 18 correlations, only 2 were marginally significant, and neither of these was readily interpretable.] The cultural difference in eye-movement patterns emerged very early. At the onset of the picture slide, 32-35% of the time both the Americans and the Chinese happened to be looking at the object, but the first saccade increased that percentage by 42.8% for the Americans and only by 26.7% for the Chinese [t(43)=2.46, P=0.02] To better understand the time course of cultural differences, we examined the fixation patterns across the 3- duration of picture presentations. Fig. shows that whereas the Americans were most likely to be looking at the object for about 600 ms of the first second, the Chinese exhibited very different eye- movement pattern. For the first 300-400 ms, no cultural differences were observed; at picture onset, both Americans and Chinese fixated the backgrounds more than the focal objects [F(1,43)=235.91, P=0.001] By about 420 ms after picture onset, the Americans were equally likely to be looking at the background and the focal object. At this point, there was an interaction of culture and fixation region, with only the Chinese fixating the backgrounds more than the objects [F(1,43)=6.43, P=0.02] Based on Fig. 4, the region during which the Americans attended preferentially to the object spanned 420-1,100 ms. Averaging the data across this interval, the Americans fixated the objects proportionately more than the backgrounds, whereas this was not at all true for the Chinese [F(1,43)=7.31, P=0.01] There was no time point at which the Chinese were fixating the objects significantly more than the backgrounds during the 3- presentation. Averaging the data from 1,100 to 3,000 ms, the Chinese looked more at the backgrounds than at the objects, whereas this was much less true for the Americans [F(1,43)=6.64, P=0.02] Taken together with the summary data from Fig. 3, these findings provide clear evidence that cultural differences in eye-movement patterns mirror and probably underlie the cultural differences in judgment and memory tasks. Discussion The present findings demonstrate that eye movements can differ as function of culture. Easterners and Westerners allocated attentional resources differently as they viewed the scenes. Apparently, Easterners and Westerners differ in attributing informativeness to foregrounded objects vs. backgrounds in the context of generic "How much do you like this picture?" task. The Americans' propensity to fixate sooner and longer on the foregrounded objects suggests that they encoded more visual even against new background. The Chinese pattern of more details for the objects than did the Chinese. If so, this could balanced fixations to the foreground object and background is explain the Americans' more accurate recognition of the objects, consistent with previous reports of holistic processing of visual scenes (6-8) Thus, previous findings of cultural differences in visual memory are likely due to how people from Eastern and Western cultures view scenes and are not solely due to cultural norms or expectations for reporting knowledge about scenes. Fig. 3. Eye movement data. (A) Number of fixations to object or background by culture (21 Americans and 24 Chinese). Each picture was presented for 3 s. (B) Onset time to object by culture. Time was measured from onset of each picture to first fixation to object, comparing Americans and Chinese.(C) Average fixation times to object and background as a function of culture. All figures represent mean scores over 36 trials and SEM. Fig. 4. Proportion of fixations to object or background, across the 3-s time course of a trial. Data points are sampled every 10 ms for 0-1,500 ms, and every 50 ms for 1,500-3,000 ms, averaging over all 36 trials. The sum of percentages at each time point may not total 100% because, at times, participants were in the process of making a saccade, thus they were in between fixations. The graph illustrates distinct eye tracking patterns of Americans and Chinese during the 3-s period. Cultural differences begin by 420 ms after onset, when an interaction of culture and region was observed, with the Chinese, but not the Americans continuing to fixate the background more than the focal object. Averaging the data from 420 to 1,100 ms, Americans were fixating focal objects at a greater proportion than backgrounds, compared with Chinese. Averaging the data from 1,100 to 3,000 ms, Chinese were fixating more often to the backgrounds and less to the objects, compared with Americans. Cultural differences in eye movements, memory for scenes, and perceptual and causal judgments could stem from several sources, including differences in experience, expertise, or socialization. It is common to consider such factors in high-level cognition, but because such factors can influence the allocation of attention, they influence lower level cognition as well. Our hypothesis is that differential attention to context and object are stressed through socialization practices, as demonstrated in studies on childrearing practices by East Asians and Americans (16, 17) The childrearing practices are, in turn, influenced by societal differences. East Asians live in relatively complex social networks with prescribed role relations (18, 19) Attention to context is, therefore, important for effective functioning. In contrast, Westerners live in less constraining social worlds that stress independence and allow them to pay less attention to context. The present results provide useful warning in world where opportunities to meet people from other cultural backgrounds continue to increase: people from different cultures may allocate attention differently, even within shared environment. The result is that we see different aspects of the world, in different ways. We thank Chi-yue Chiu and Daniel Simons for their reviews of this paper and Meghan Carr Ahern, Chirag Patel, Jason Taylor, Holly Templeton, and Jeremy Phillips for their assistance in the study. This work was supported by the Culture and Cognition Program at the University of Michigan and National Science Foundation Grant 0132074. 1. Nisbett, R. E. Peng, K. Choi, I. Norenzayan, A. (2001) Psychol. Rev. 2, 291-310. 2. Nisbett, R. E. Masuda, T. (2003) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 100, 11163-11170. 3. Choi, I. Nisbett, R. E. (1998) Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 24, 949-960. 4. Morris, M.W. Peng, K. (1994) J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 67, 949-971. 5. Chua, H. F. Leu, J. Nisbett, R. E. (2005) Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 31, 10925-10934. 6. Masuda, T. Nisbett, R. E. (2001) J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 81, 922-934. 7. Ji, L. Peng, K. Nisbett, R. E. (2000) J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 78, 943-955. 8. Kitayama, S. Duffy, S. Kawamura, T. Larsen, J. T. (2003) Psychol. Sci. 14, 201-206. 9. Simons, D. J. Rensink, R. A. (2005) Trends Cognit. Sci. 9, 16-20. 10. Potter, M. C. (1976) J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Learn. Mem. 2, 509-522. 11. Enns, J. T. (2004) The Thinking Eye, the Seeing Brain: Explorations in Visual Cognition (Norton, New York) 12. Intraub, H. (1997) Trends Cognit. Sci. 1, 217-212. 13. Potter, M. C. O'Connor, D. H. Olivia, A. (2002) J. Vision 2, 516. 14. Henderson, J. H. Hollingworth, A. (1999) Annu. Rev. Psychol. 50, 243-271. 15. Smith, E. E. Fredrickson, B. Loftus, G. Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (2002) Atkinson and Hilgard's Introduction to Psychology (Wadsworth, Belmont, CA) 14th Ed. 16. Fernald, A. Morikawa, H. (1993) Child Dev. 64, 637-656. 17. Tardif, T. Gelman, S. A. Xu, F. (1999) Child Dev. 70, 620-635. 18. Markus, H. R. Kitayama, S. (1991) Psychol. Rev. 98, 224-253. 19. Nisbett, R. E. (2003) The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently.. And Why (Free Press, New York) From checker at panix.com Tue Aug 23 22:40:16 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2005 18:40:16 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: The Other Brain Also Deals With Many Woes Message-ID: Howard, this should be particularly of interest to you. Have you touched on it in your writings? The Other Brain Also Deals With Many Woes http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/health/23gut.html By [3]HARRIET BROWN Two brains are better than one. At least that is the rationale for the close - sometimes too close - relationship between the human body's two brains, the one at the top of the spinal cord and the hidden but powerful brain in the gut known as the enteric nervous system. For Dr. Michael D. Gershon, the author of "The Second Brain" and the chairman of the department of anatomy and cell biology at Columbia, the connection between the two can be unpleasantly clear. "Every time I call the National Institutes of Health to check on a grant proposal," Dr. Gershon said, "I become painfully aware of the influence the brain has on the gut." In fact, anyone who has ever felt butterflies in the stomach before giving a speech, a gut feeling that flies in the face of fact or a bout of intestinal urgency the night before an examination has experienced the actions of the dual nervous systems. The connection between the brains lies at the heart of many woes, physical and psychiatric. Ailments like anxiety, [4]depression, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcers and Parkinson's disease manifest symptoms at the brain and the gut level. "The majority of patients with anxiety and depression will also have alterations of their GI function," said Dr. Emeran Mayer, professor of medicine, physiology and psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles. A study in 1902 showed changes in the movement of food through the gastrointestinal tract in cats confronted by growling dogs. One system's symptoms - and cures - may affect the other. Antidepressants, for example, cause gastric distress in up to a quarter of the people who take them. Butterflies in the stomach are caused by a surge of stress [5]hormones released by the body in a "fight or flight" situation. Stress can also overstimulate nerves in the esophagus, causing a feeling of choking. Dr. Gershon, who coined the term "second brain" in 1996, is one of a number of researchers who are studying brain-gut connections in the relatively new field of neurogastroenterology. New understandings of the way the second brain works, and the interactions between the two, are helping to treat disorders like constipation, ulcers and Hirschprung's disease. The role of the enteric nervous system is to manage every aspect of digestion, from the esophagus to the stomach, small intestine and colon. The second brain, or little brain, accomplishes all that with the same tools as the big brain, a sophisticated nearly self-contained network of neural circuitry, neurotransmitters and proteins. The independence is a function of the enteric nervous system's complexity. "Rather than Mother Nature's trying to pack 100 million neurons someplace in the brain or spinal cord and then sending long connections to the GI tract, the circuitry is right next to the systems that require control," said Jackie D. Wood, professor of physiology, cell biology and internal medicine at Ohio State. Two brains may seem like the stuff of science fiction, but they make literal and evolutionary sense. "What brains do is control behavior," Dr. Wood said. "The brain in your gut has stored within its neural networks a variety of behavioral programs, like a library. The digestive state determines which program your gut calls up from its library and runs." When someone skips lunch, the gut is more or less silent. Eat a pastrami sandwich, and contractions all along the small intestines mix the food with enzymes and move it toward the lining for absorption to begin. If the pastrami is rotten, reverse contractions will force it - and everything else in the gut - into the stomach and back out through the esophagus at high speed. In each situation, the gut must assess conditions, decide on a course of action and initiate a reflex. "The gut monitors pressure," Dr. Gershon said. "It monitors the progress of digestion. It detects nutrients, and it measures acid and salts. It's a little chemical lab." The enteric system does all this on its own, with little help from the central nervous system. The enteric nervous system was first described in 1921 by Dr. J. N. Langley, a British physician who believed that it was one of three parts - along with the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems - of the autonomic nervous system, which controls involuntary behaviors like breathing and circulation. In this triad, the enteric nervous system was seen as something of a tag-along to the other two. After Langley died, scientists more or less forgot about the enteric nervous system. Years later, when Dr. Gershon reintroduced the concept and suggested that the gut might use some of the same neurotransmitters as the brain, his theory was widely ridiculed. "It was like saying that New York taxi drivers never miss a showing of 'Tosca' at the Met," he recalled. By the early 80's, scientists had accepted the idea of the enteric nervous system and the role of neurotransmitters like serotonin in the gut. It is no surprise that there is a direct relationship between emotional stress and physical distress. "Clinicians are finally acknowledging that a lot of dysfunction in GI disorders involves changes in the central nervous system," said Gary M. Mawe, a professor of anatomy and neurobiology at the University of Vermont. The big question is which comes first, physiology or psychology? The enteric and central nervous systems use the same hardware, as it were, to run two very different programs. Serotonin, for instance, is crucial to feelings of well-being. Hence the success of the antidepressants known as S.S.R.I.'s that raise the level of serotonin available to the brain. But 95 percent of the body's serotonin is housed in the gut, where it acts as a neurotransmitter and a signaling mechanism. The digestive process begins when a specialized cell, an enterochromaffin, squirts serotonin into the wall of the gut, which has at least seven types of serotonin receptors. The receptors, in turn, communicate with nerve cells to start digestive enzymes flowing or to start things moving through the intestines. Serotonin also acts as a go-between, keeping the brain in the skull up to date with what is happening in the brain below. Such communication is mostly one way, with 90 percent traveling from the gut to the head. Many of those messages are unpleasant, and serotonin is involved in sending them. Chemotherapy drugs like doxorubicin, which is used to treat breast [6]cancer, cause serotonin to be released in the gut, leading to nausea and vomiting. "The gut is not an organ from which you wish to receive frequent progress reports," Dr. Gershon said. Serotonin is also implicated in one of the most debilitating gut disorders, irritable bowel syndrome, or I.B.S., which causes abdominal pain and cramping, bloating and, in some patients, alternating diarrhea and constipation. "You can run any test you want on people with I.B.S., and their GI tracts look essentially normal," Dr. Mawe said. The default assumption has been that the syndrome is a psychosomatic disease. But it turns out that irritable bowel syndrome, like depression, is at least in part a function of changes in the serotonin system. In this case, it is too much serotonin rather than too little. In a healthy person, after serotonin is released into the gut and initiates an intestinal reflex, it is whisked out of the bowel by a molecule known as the serotonin transporter, or SERT, found in the cells that line the gut wall. People with irritable bowel syndrome do not have enough SERT, so they wind up with too much serotonin floating around, causing diarrhea. The excess serotonin then overwhelms the receptors in the gut, shutting them down and causing constipation. When Dr. Gershon, whose work has been supported by Novartis, studied mice without SERT, he found that they developed a condition very much like I.B.S. in humans. Several new serotonin-based drugs - intestinal antidepressants, in a way - have brought hope for those with chronic gut disorders. Another mechanism that lends credence to physiology as the source of intestinal dysfunctions is the system of mast cells in the gut that have an important role in immune response. "During stress, trauma or 'fight or flight' reactions, the barrier between the lumen, the interior of the gut where food is digested, and the rest of the bowel could be broken, and bad stuff could get across," Dr. Wood said. "So the big brain calls in more immune surveillance at the gut wall by activating mast cells." These mast cells release histamines and other inflammatory agents, mobilizing the enteric nervous system to expel the perceived intruders, and causing diarrhea. Inflammation induced by mast cells may turn out to be crucial in understanding and treating GI disorders. Inflamed tissue becomes tender. A gut under stress, with chronic mast cell production and consequent inflammation, may become tender, as well. In animals, Dr. Mawe said, inflammation makes the sensory neurons in the gut fire more often, causing a kind of sensory hyperactivity. "I have a theory that some chronic disorders may be caused by something like attention deficit disorder in the gut," he said. Dr. Gershon, too, theorizes that physiology is the original culprit in brain-gut dysfunctions. "We have identified molecular defects in the gut of everyone who has irritable bowel syndrome," he said. "If you were chained by bloody diarrhea to a toilet seat, you, too, might be depressed." Still, psychology clearly plays a role. Recent studies suggest that stress, especially early in life, can cause chronic GI diseases, at least in animals. "If you put a rat on top of a little platform surrounded by water, which is very stressful for a rat, it develops the equivalent of diarrhea," Dr. Mayer said. Another experiment showed that when young rats were separated from their mothers, the layer of cells that line the gut, the same barrier that is strengthened by mast cells during stress, weakened and became more permeable, allowing bacteria from the intestine to pass through the bowel walls and stimulate immune cells. "In rats, it's an adaptive response," Dr. Mayer said. "If they're born into a stressful, hostile environment, nature programs them to be more vigilant and stress responsive in their future life." He said up to 70 percent of the patients he treats for chronic gut disorders had experienced early childhood traumas like parents' divorces, chronic illnesses or parents' deaths. "I think that what happens in early life, along with an individual's genetic background, programs how a person will respond to stress for the rest of his or her life," he said. Either way, what is good for one brain is often good for the other, too. A team of researchers from Penn State University recently discovered a possible new direction in treating intestinal disorders, biofeedback for the brain in the gut. In an experiment published in a recent issue of Neurogastroenterology and Motility, Robert M. Stern, a professor of psychology at Penn State, found that biofeedback helped people consciously increase and enhance their gastrointestinal activity. They used the brains in their heads, in other words, to help the brains in their guts, proving that at least some of the time two brains really are better than one. References 3. http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=HARRIET%20BROWN&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=HARRIET%20BROWN&inline=nyt-per 4. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/depression/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier 5. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/hormones/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier 6. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/cancer/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier From checker at panix.com Tue Aug 23 22:40:36 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2005 18:40:36 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Boston Globe: What Makes People Gay? Message-ID: What Makes People Gay? http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2005/08/14/what_makes_people_gay?mode=PF The debate has always been that it was either all in the child's upbringing or all in the genes. But what if it's something else? By Neil Swidey | August 14, 2005 With crystal-blue eyes, wavy hair, and freshly scrubbed faces, the boys look as though they stepped out of a Pottery Barn Kids catalog. They are 7-year-old twins. I'll call them Thomas and Patrick; their parents agreed to let me meet the boys as long as I didn't use their real names. Spend five seconds with them, and there can be no doubt that they are identical twins - so identical even they can't tell each other apart in photographs. Spend five minutes with them, and their profound differences begin to emerge. Patrick is social, thoughtful, attentive. He repeatedly addresses me by name. Thomas is physical, spontaneous, a bit distracted. Just minutes after meeting me outside a coffee shop, he punches me in the upper arm, yells, "Gray punch buggy!" and then points to a Volkswagen Beetle cruising past us. It's a hard punch. They horse around like typical brothers, but Patrick's punches are less forceful and his voice is higher. Thomas charges at his brother, arms flexed in front of him like a mini-bodybuilder. The differences are subtle - they're 7-year-old boys, after all - but they are there. When the twins were 2, Patrick found his mother's shoes. He liked wearing them. Thomas tried on his father's once but didn't see the point. When they were 3, Thomas blurted out that toy guns were his favorite things. Patrick piped up that his were the Barbie dolls he discovered at day care. When the twins were 5, Thomas announced he was going to be a monster for Halloween. Patrick said he was going to be a princess. Thomas said he couldn't do that, because other kids would laugh at him. Patrick seemed puzzled. "Then I'll be Batman," he said. Their mother - intelligent, warm, and open-minded - found herself conflicted. She wanted Patrick - whose playmates have always been girls, never boys - to be himself, but she worried his feminine behavior would expose him to ridicule and pain. She decided to allow him free expression at home while setting some limits in public. That worked until last year, when a school official called to say Patrick was making his classmates uncomfortable. He kept insisting that he was a girl. Patrick exhibits behavior called childhood gender nonconformity, or CGN. This doesn't describe a boy who has a doll somewhere in his toy collection or tried on his sister's Snow White outfit once, but rather one who consistently exhibits a host of strongly feminine traits and interests while avoiding boy-typical behavior like rough-and-tumble play. There's been considerable research into this phenomenon, particularly in males, including a study that followed boys from an early age into early adulthood. The data suggest there is a very good chance Patrick will grow up to be homosexual. Not all homosexual men show this extremely feminine behavior as young boys. But the research indicates that, of the boys who do exhibit CGN, about 75 percent of them - perhaps more - turn out to be gay or bisexual. What makes the case of Patrick and Thomas so fascinating is that it calls into question both of the dominant theories in the long-running debate over what makes people gay: nature or nurture, genes or learned behavior. As identical twins, Patrick and Thomas began as genetic clones. From the moment they came out of their mother's womb, their environment was about as close to identical as possible - being fed, changed, and plopped into their car seats the same way, having similar relationships with the same nurturing father and mother. Yet before either boy could talk, one showed highly feminine traits while the other appeared to be "all boy," as the moms at the playgrounds say with apologetic shrugs. "That my sons were different the second they were born, there is no question about it," says the twins' mother. So what happened between their identical genetic starting point and their births? They spent nine months in utero. In the hunt for what causes people to be gay or straight, that's now the most interesting and potentially enlightening frontier. WHAT DOES IT MATTER WHERE HOMOSEXUALITY COMES FROM? Proving people are born gay would give them wider social acceptance and better protection against discrimination, many gay rights advocates argue. In the last decade, as this "biological" argument has gained momentum, polls find Americans - especially young adults - increasingly tolerant of gays and lesbians. And that's exactly what has groups opposed to homosexuality so concerned. The Family Research Council, a conservative Christian think tank in Washington, D.C., argues in its book Getting It Straight that finding people are born gay "would advance the idea that sexual orientation is an innate characteristic, like race; that homosexuals, like African-Americans, should be legally protected against 'discrimination;' and that disapproval of homosexuality should be as socially stigmatized as racism. However, it is not true." Some advocates of gay marriage argue that proving sexual orientation is inborn would make it easier to frame the debate as simply a matter of civil rights. That could be true, but then again, freedom of religion enjoyed federal protection long before inborn traits like race and sex. For much of the 20th century, the dominant thinking connected homosexuality to upbringing. Freud, for instance, speculated that overprotective mothers and distant fathers helped make boys gay. It took the American Psychiatric Association until 1973 to remove "homosexuality" from its manual of mental disorders. Then, in 1991, a neuroscientist in San Diego named Simon LeVay told the world he had found a key difference between the brains of homosexual and heterosexual men he studied. LeVay showed that a tiny clump of neurons of the anterior hypothalamus - which is believed to control sexual behavior - was, on average, more than twice the size in heterosexual men as in homosexual men. LeVay's findings did not speak directly to the nature-vs.-nurture debate - the clumps could, theoretically, have changed size because of homosexual behavior. But that seemed unlikely, and the study ended up jump-starting the effort to prove a biological basis for homosexuality. Later that same year, Boston University psychiatrist Richard Pillard and Northwestern University psychologist J. Michael Bailey announced the results of their study of male twins. They found that, in identical twins, if one twin was gay, the other had about a 50 percent chance of also being gay. For fraternal twins, the rate was about 20 percent. Because identical twins share their entire genetic makeup while fraternal twins share about half, genes were believed to explain the difference. Most reputable studies find the rate of homosexuality in the general population to be 2 to 4 percent, rather than the popular "1 in 10" estimate. In 1993 came the biggest news: Dean Hamer's discovery of the "gay gene." In fact, Hamer, a Harvard-trained researcher at the National Cancer Institute, hadn't quite put it that boldly or imprecisely. He found that gay brothers shared a specific region of the X chromosome, called Xq28, at a higher rate than gay men shared with their straight brothers. Hamer and others suggested this finding would eventually transform our understanding of sexual orientation. That hasn't happened yet. But the clear focus of sexual-orientation research has shifted to biological causes, and there hasn't been much science produced to support the old theories tying homosexuality to upbringing. Freud may have been seeing the effect rather than the cause, since a father faced with a very feminine son might well become more distant or hostile, leading the boy's mother to become more protective. In recent years, researchers who suspect that homosexuality is inborn - whether because of genetics or events happening in the womb - have looked everywhere for clues: Prenatal hormones. Birth order. Finger length. Fingerprints. Stress. Sweat. Eye blinks. Spatial relations. Hearing. Handedness. Even "gay" sheep. LeVay, who is gay, says that when he published his study 14 years ago, some gays and lesbians criticized him for doing research that might lead to homosexuality once again being lumped in with diseases and disorders. "If anything, the reverse has happened," says LeVay, who is now 61 and no longer active in the lab. He says the hunt for a biological basis for homosexuality, which involves many researchers who are themselves gay or lesbian, "has contributed to the status of gay people in society." These studies have been small and underfunded, and the results have often been modest. Still, because there's been so much of this disparate research, "all sort of pointing in the same direction, makes it pretty clear there are biological processes significantly influencing sexual orientation," says LeVay. "But it's also kind of frustrating that it's still a bunch of hints, that nothing is really as crystal clear as you would like." Just in the last few months, though, the hints have grown stronger. In May, Swedish researchers reported finding important differences in how the brains of straight men and gay men responded to two compounds suspected of being pheromones - those scent-related chemicals that are key to sexual arousal in animals. The first compound came from women's urine, the second from male sweat. Brain scans showed that when straight men smelled the female urine compound, their hypothalamus lit up. That didn't happen with gay men. Instead, their hypothalamus lit up when they smelled the male-sweat compound, which was the same way straight women had responded. This research once again connecting the hypothalamus to sexual orientation comes on the heels of work with sheep. About 8 percent of domestic rams are exclusively interested in sex with other rams. Researchers found that a clump of neurons similar to the one LeVay identified in human brains was also smaller in gay rams than straight ones. (Again, it's conceivable that these differences could be showing effect rather than cause.) In June, scientists in Vienna announced that they had isolated a master genetic switch for sexual orientation in the fruit fly. Once they flicked the switch, the genetically altered female flies rebuffed overtures from males and instead attempted to mate with other females, adopting the elaborate courting dance and mating songs that males use. And now, a large-scale, five-year genetic study of gay brothers is underway in North America. The study received $2.5 million from the National Institutes of Health, which is unusual. Government funders tend to steer clear of sexual orientation research, aware that even small grants are apt to be met with outrage from conservative congressmen looking to make the most of their C-Span face time. Relying on a robust sample of 1,000 gay-brother pairs and the latest advancements in genetic screening, this study promises to bring some clarity to the murky area of what role genes may play in homosexuality. This accumulating biological evidence, combined with the prospect of more on the horizon, is having an effect. Last month, the Rev. Rob Schenck, a prominent Washington, D.C., evangelical leader, told a large gathering of young evangelicals that he believes homosexuality is not a choice but rather a predisposition, something "deeply rooted" in people. Schenck told me that his conversion came about after he'd spoken extensively with genetic researchers and psychologists. He argues that evangelicals should continue to oppose homosexual behavior, but that "many evangelicals are living in a sort of state of denial about the advance of this conversation." His message: "If it's inevitable that this scientific evidence is coming, we have to be prepared with a loving response. If we don't have one, we won't have any credibility." AS THE 21-YEAR-OLD COLLEGE JUNIOR IN A HOSPITAL JOHNNY slides into the MRI, she is handed controls with buttons for "strongly like" and "strongly dislike." Hundreds of pornographic images - in male-male and female-female pairings - flash before her eyes. Eroticism eventually gives way to monotony, and it's hard to avoid looking for details to distinguish one image from the rest of the panting pack. So it goes from "Look at the size of those breasts!" to "That can't be comfortable, given the length of her fingernails!" to "Why is that guy wearing nothing but work boots on the beach?" Regardless of which buttons the student presses, the MRI scans show her arousal level to each image, at its starting point in the brain. Researchers at Northwestern University, outside Chicago, are doing this work as a follow-up to their studies of arousal using genital measurement tools. They found that while straight men were aroused by film clips of two women having sex, and gay men were aroused by clips of two men having sex, most of the men who identified themselves as bisexual showed gay arousal patterns. More surprising was just how different the story with women turned out to be. Most women, whether they identified as straight, lesbian, or bisexual, were significantly aroused by straight, gay, and lesbian sex. "I'm not suggesting that most women are bisexual," says Michael Bailey, the psychology professor whose lab conducted the studies. "I'm suggesting that whatever a woman's sexual arousal pattern is, it has little to do with her sexual orientation." That's fundamentally different from men. "In men, arousal is orientation. It's as simple as that. That's how gay men learn they are gay." These studies mark a return to basics for the 47-year-old Bailey. He says researchers need a far deeper understanding of what sexual orientation is before they can determine where it comes from. Female sexual orientation is particularly foggy, he says, because there's been so little research done. As for male sexual orientation, he argues that there's now enough evidence to suggest it is "entirely in-born," though not nearly enough to establish how that happens. Bailey's 1991 twin study is still cited by other researchers as one of the pillars in the genetic argument for homosexuality. But his follow-up study using a comprehensive registry of twins in Australia found a much lower rate of similarity in sexual orientation between identical twins, about 20 percent, down from 50 percent. Bailey still believes that genes make important contributions to sexual orientation. But, he says, "that's not where I'd bet the real breakthroughs will come." His hunch is that further study of childhood gender nonconformity will pay big. Because it's unclear what percentage of homosexuals and lesbians showed CGN as children, Bailey and his colleagues are now running a study that uses adult participants' home movies from childhood to look for signs of gender-bending behavior. Cornell psychologist Daryl Bem has proposed an intriguing theory for how CGN might lead to homosexuality. According to this pathway, which he calls "the exotic becomes erotic," children are born with traits for temperament, such as aggression and activity level, that predispose them to male-typical or female-typical activities. They seek out playmates with the same interests. So a boy whose traits lead him to hopscotch and away from rough play will feel different from, and ostracized by, other boys. This leads to physiological arousal of fear and anger in their presence, arousal that eventually is transformed from exotic to erotic. Critics of homosexuality have used Bem's theory, which stresses environment over biology, to argue that sexual orientation is not inborn and not fixed. But Bem says this pathway is triggered by biological traits, and he doesn't really see how the outcome of homosexuality can be changed. Bailey says whether or not Bem's theory holds up, the environment most worth focusing in on is the one a child experiences when he's in his mother's womb. LET'S GET BACK TO THOMAS AND PATRICK. BECAUSE IT'S UNCLEAR why twin brothers with identical genetic starting points and similar post-birth environments would take such divergent paths, it's helpful to return to the beginning. Males and females have a fundamental genetic difference - females have two X chromosomes, and males have an X and a Y. Still, right after conception, it's hard to tell male and female zygotes apart, except for that tucked-away chromosomal difference. Normally, the changes take shape at a key point of fetal development, when the male brain is masculinized by sex hormones. The female brain is the default. The brain will stay on the female path as long as it is protected from exposure to hormones. The hormonal theory of homosexuality holds that, just as exposure to circulating sex hormones determines whether a fetus will be male or female, such exposure must also influence sexual orientation. The cases of children born with disorders of "sexual differentiation" offer insight. William Reiner, a psychiatrist and urologist with the University of Oklahoma, has evaluated more than a hundred of these cases. For decades, the standard medical response to boys born with severely inadequate penises (or none at all) was to castrate the boy and have his parents raise him as a girl. But Reiner has found that nurture - even when it involves surgery soon after birth - cannot trump nature. Of the boys with inadequate penises who were raised as girls, he says, "I haven't found one who is sexually attracted to males." The majority of them have transitioned back to being males and report being attracted to females. During fetal development, sexual identity is set before the sexual organs are formed, Reiner says. Perhaps it's the same for sexual orientation. In his research, of all the babies with X and Y chromosomes who were raised as girls, the only ones he has found who report having female identities and being attracted to males are those who did not have "receptors" to let the male sex hormones do their masculinizing in the womb. What does this all mean? "Exposure to male hormones in utero dramatically raises the chances of being sexually attracted to females," Reiner says. "We can infer that the absence of male hormone exposure may have something to do with attraction to males." Michael Bailey says Reiner's findings represent a major breakthrough, showing that "whatever causes sexual orientation is strongly influenced by prenatal biology." Bailey and Reiner say the answer is probably not as simple as just exposure to sex hormones. After all, the exposure levels in some of the people Reiner studies are abnormal enough to produce huge differences in sexual organs. Yet, sexual organs in straight and gay people are, on average, the same. More likely, hormones are interacting with other factors. Canadian researchers have consistently documented a "big-brother effect," finding that the chances of a boy being gay increase with each additional older brother he has. (Birth order does not appear to play a role with lesbians.) So, a male with three older brothers is three times more likely to be gay than one with no older brothers, though there's still a better than 90 percent chance he will be straight. They argue that this results from a complex interaction involving hormones, antigens, and the mother's immune system. By now, there is substantial evidence showing correlation - though not causation - between sexual orientation and traits that are set when a baby is in the womb. Take finger length. In general, men have shorter index fingers in relation to their ring fingers; in women, the lengths are generally about the same. Researchers have found that lesbians generally have ratios closer to males. Other studies have shown masculinized results for lesbians in inner-ear functions and eye-blink reactions to sudden loud noises, and feminized patterns for gay men on certain cognitive tasks like spatial perception and remembering the placement of objects. New York University researcher Lynn S. Hall, who has studied traits determined in the womb, speculates that Patrick was somehow prenatally stressed, probably during the first trimester, when the brain is really developing, particularly the structures like the hypothalamus that influence sexual behavior. This stress might have been based on his position in the womb or the blood flow to him or any of a number of other factors not in his mother's control. Yet more evidence that identical twins have womb experiences far from identical can be found in their often differing birth weights. Patrick was born a pound lighter than Thomas. Taken together, the research suggests that early on in the womb, as the fetus's brain develops in either the male or female direction, something fundamental to sexual orientation is happening. Nobody's sure what's causing it. But here's where genes may be involved, perhaps by regulating hormone exposure or by dictating the size of that key clump of neurons in the hypothalamus. Before researchers can sort that out, they'll need to return to the question of whether, in fact, there is a "gay gene." THE CROWD ON BOSTON COMMON IS THICK ON THIS SCORCHER of a Saturday afternoon in June, as the throngs make their way around the 35th annual Boston Pride festival, past booths peddling everything from "Gayopoly" board games to Braveheartian garments called Utilikilts. Sitting quietly in his booth is Alan Sanders, a soft-spoken 41-year-old with a sandy beard and thinning hair. He's placed a mound of rainbow-colored Starbursts on the table in front of him and hung a banner that reads: "WANTED: Gay Men with Gay Brothers for Molecular Genetic Study of Sexual Orientation." Sanders is a psychiatrist with the Evanston Northwestern Healthcare Research Institute who is leading the NIH-funded search for the genetic basis of male homosexuality ([2]www.gaybros.com). He is spending the summer crisscrossing the country, going to gay pride festivals, hoping to recruit 1,000 pairs of gay brothers to participate. (His wife, who just delivered their third son, wasn't crazy about the timing.) When people in Boston ask him how much genes may contribute to homosexuality, he says the best estimate is about 40 percent. Homosexuality runs in families - studies show that 8 to 12 percent of brothers of gay men are also gay, compared with the 2 to 4 percent of the general population. Sanders spends much of the afternoon handing out Starbursts to people who clearly don't qualify for a gay brothers study - preteen girls, adult lesbians wearing T-shirts that read "I Like Girls Who Like Girls," and elderly women in straw hats who speak only Chinese. But many of the gay men who stop by are interested in more than free candy. Among the people signing up is James Daly, a 31-year-old from Salem. "I think it's important for the public - especially the religious right - to know it's not a choice for some people," Daly says. "I feel I was born this way." (In fairness, there aren't many leaders of groups representing social and religious conservatives who still argue that homosexual orientation - as opposed to behavior - is a matter of choice. Even as he insists that no one is born gay, Peter Sprigg, the point person on homosexuality for the Family Research Council, says, "I don't think that people choose their sexual attraction.") In the decade since Dean Hamer made headlines, the gay gene theory has taken some hits. A Canadian team was unable to replicate his findings. Earlier this year, a team from Hamer's own lab reported only mixed results after having done the first scan of the entire human genome in the search for genes influencing sexual orientation. But all of the gene studies so far have been based on small samples and lacked the funding to do things right. Sanders's study should be big enough to provide some real answers on linkage as well as shed light on gender nonconformity and the big-brother effect. There is, however, a towering question that Sanders's study will probably not be able to answer. That has to do with evolution. If a prime motivation of all species is to pass genes on to future generations, and gay men are estimated to produce 80 percent fewer offspring than straight men, why would a gay gene not have been wiped out by the forces of natural selection? This evolutionary disadvantage is what led former Amherst College biologist Paul Ewald to argue that homosexuality might be caused by a virus - a pathogen most likely working in utero. That argument caused a stir when he and a colleague proposed it six years ago, but with no research done to test it, it remains just another theory. Other scientists have offered fascinating but unpersuasive explanations, most of them focusing on some kind of compensatory benefit, in the same way that the gene responsible for sickle cell anemia also protects against malaria. A study last year by researchers in Italy showed that female relatives of gay men tended to be more fertile, though, as critics point out, not nearly fertile enough to make up for the gay man's lack of offspring. But there will be plenty of time for sorting out the evolutionary paradox once - and if - researchers are able to identify actual genes involved in sexual orientation. Getting to that point will likely require integrating multiple lines of promising research. That is exactly what's happening in Eric Vilain's lab at the University of California, Los Angeles. Vilain, an associate professor of human genetics, and his colleague, Sven Bocklandt, are using gay sheep, transgenic mice, identical twin humans, and novel approaches to human genetics to try to unlock the mystery of sexual orientation. Instead of looking for a gay gene, they stress that they are looking for several genes that cause either attraction to men or attraction to women. Those same genes would work one way in heterosexual women and another way in homosexual men. The UCLA lab is examining how these genes might be turned "up" or "down." It's not a question of what genes you have, but rather which ones you use, says Bocklandt. "I have the genes in my body to make a vagina and carry a baby, but I don't use them, because I am a man." In studying the genes of gay sheep, for example, he's found some that are turned "way up" compared with the straight rams. The lab is also testing an intriguing theory involving imprinted genes. Normally, we have two copies of every gene, one from each parent, and both copies work. They're identical, so it doesn't matter which copy comes from which parent. But with imprinted genes, that does matter. Although both copies are physically there, one copy - either from the mom or the dad - is blocked from working. Think of an airplane with an engine on each wing, except one of the engines is shut down. A recent Duke University study suggests humans have hundreds of imprinted genes, including one on the X chromosome that previous research has tied to sexual orientation. With imprinted genes, there is no backup engine. So if there's something atypical in the copy from mom, the copy from dad cannot be turned on. The UCLA lab is now collecting DNA from identical twins in which one twin is straight and the other is gay. Because the twins begin as genetic clones, if a gene is imprinted in one twin, it will be in the other twin as well. Normally, as the fetuses are developing, each time a cell divides, the DNA separates and makes a copy of itself, replicating all kinds of genetic information. It's a complicated but incredibly accurate process. But the coding to keep the backup engine shut down on an imprinted gene is less accurate. So how might imprinted genes help explain why one identical twin would be straight and the other gay? Say there's an imprinted gene for attraction to females, and there's something atypical in the copy the twin brothers get from mom. As all that replicating is going on, the imprinting (to keep the copy from dad shut down) proceeds as expected in one twin, and he ends up gay. But somehow with his brother, the coding for the imprinting is lost, and rather than remain shut down, the fuel flows to fire up the backup engine from dad. And that twin turns out to be straight. IN THE COURSE OF REPORTING THIS STORY, I EXPERIENCED A good deal of whiplash. Just when I would become swayed by the evidence supporting one discreet theory, I would stumble onto new evidence casting some doubt on it. Ultimately, I accepted this as unavoidable terrain in the hunt for the basis of sexual orientation. This is, after all, a research field built on underfunded, idiosyncratic studies that are met with full-barreled responses from opposing and well-funded advocacy groups determined to make the results from the lab hew to the scripts they've honed for the talk-show circuit. You can't really blame the advocacy groups. The stakes are high. In the end, homosexuality remains such a divisive issue that only thoroughly tested research will get society to accept what science has to say about its origin. Critics of funding for sexual orientation research say that it isn't curing cancer, and they're right. But we devote a lot more dollars to studying other issues that aren't curing cancer and have less resonance in society. Still, no matter how imperfect these studies are, when you put them all together and examine them closely, the message is clear: While post-birth development may well play a supporting role, the roots of homosexuality, at least in men, appear to be in place by the time a child is born. After spending years sifting through all the available data, British researchers Glenn Wilson and Qazi Rahman come to an even bolder conclusion in their forthcoming book Born Gay: The Psychobiology of Sex Orientation, in which they write: "Sexual orientation is something we are born with and not `acquired' from our social environment." Meanwhile, the mother of twins Patrick and Thomas has done her own sifting and come to her own conclusions. She says her son's feminine behavior suggests he will grow up to be gay, and she has no problem with that. She just worries about what happens to him between now and then. After that fateful call from Patrick's school, she says, "I knew I had to talk to my son, and I had no clue what to say." Ultimately, she told him that although he could play however he wanted at home, he couldn't tell his classmates he was a girl, because they'd think he was lying. And she told him that some older boys might be mean to him and even hit him if he continued to claim he was a girl. Then she asked him, "Do you think that you can convince yourself that you are a boy?" "Yes, Mom," he said. "It's going to be like when I was trying to learn to read, and then one day I opened the book and I could read." His mother's heart sank. She could tell that he wanted more than anything to please her. "Basically, he was saying there must be a miracle - that one day I wake up and I'm a boy. That's the only way he could imagine it could happen." In the year since that conversation, Patrick's behavior has become somewhat less feminine. His mother hopes it's just because his interests are evolving and not because he's suppressing them. "I can now imagine him being completely straight, which I couldn't a year ago," she says. "I can imagine him being gay, which seems to be statistically most likely." She says she's fine with either outcome, just as long as he's happy and free from harm. She takes heart in how much more accepting today's society is. "By the time my boys are 20, the world will have changed even more." By then, there might even be enough consensus for researchers to forget about finger lengths and fruit flies and gay sheep, and move on to a new mystery. Neil Swidey is a member of the Globe Magazine staff. He can be reached at [3]swidey at globe.com. From checker at panix.com Tue Aug 23 22:41:03 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2005 18:41:03 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Scientific American: Mindful of Symbols (fwd) Message-ID: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2005 17:24:51 -0400 (EDT) From: Premise Checker To: Premise Checker: ; Subject: Scientific American: Mindful of Symbols Mindful of Symbols http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=000ACE3F-007E-12DC-807E83414B7F0000 July 25, 2005 On the way to learning that one thing can represent another, young children often conflate the real item and its symbol. These errors show how difficult it is to start thinking symbolically By Judy S. DeLoache About 20 years ago I had one of those wonderful moments when research takes an unexpected but fruitful turn. I had been studying toddler memory and was beginning a new experiment with two-and-a-half- and three-year-olds. For the project, I had built a model of a room that was part of my lab. The real space was furnished like a standard living room, albeit a rather shabby one, with an upholstered couch, an armchair, a cabinet and so on. The miniature items were as similar as possible to their larger counterparts: they were the same shape and material, covered with the same fabric and arranged in the same positions. For the study, a child watched as we hid a miniature toy--a plastic dog we dubbed "Little Snoopy"--in the model, which we referred to as "Little Snoopy's room." We then encouraged the child to find "Big Snoopy," a large version of the toy "hiding in the same place in his big room." We wondered whether children could use their memory of the small room to figure out where to find the toy in the large one. The three-year-olds were, as we had expected, very successful. After they observed the small toy being placed behind the miniature couch, they ran into the room and found the large toy behind the real couch. But the two-and-a-half-year-olds, much to my and their parents' surprise, failed abysmally. They cheerfully ran into the room to retrieve the large toy, but most of them had no idea where to look, even though they remembered where the tiny toy was hidden in the miniature room and could readily find it there. Their failure to use what they knew about the model to draw an inference about the room indicated that they did not appreciate the relation between the model and room. I soon realized that my memory study was instead a study of symbolic understanding and that the younger children's failure might be telling us something interesting about how and when youngsters acquire the ability to understand that one object can stand for another. What most distinguishes humans from other creatures is our ability to create and manipulate a wide variety of symbolic representations. This capacity enables us to transmit information from one generation to another, making culture possible, and to learn vast amounts without having direct experience--we all know about dinosaurs despite never having met one. Because of the fundamental role of symbolization in almost everything we do, perhaps no aspect of human development is more important than becoming symbol-minded. What could be more fascinating, I concluded, than finding out how young children begin to use and understand symbolic objects and how they come to master some of the symbolic items ubiquitous in modern life. As a result of that fortuitous model-room experiment, I shifted my focus from memory to symbolic thinking. Pictures Come to Life The first type of symbolic object infants and young children master is pictures. No symbols seem simpler to adults, but my colleagues and I have discovered that infants initially find pictures perplexing. The problem stems from the duality inherent in all symbolic objects: they are real in and of themselves and, at the same time, representations of something else. To understand them, the viewer must achieve dual representation: he or she must mentally represent the object as well as the relation between it and what it stands for. A few years ago I became intrigued by anecdotes suggesting that infants do not appreciate the dual nature of pictures. Every now and then, I would hear of a baby who tried to pick up a depicted apple or to fit a foot into a photograph of a shoe. My colleagues--David H. Uttal of Northwestern University, Sophia L. Pierroutsakos of St. Louis Community College and Karl S. Rosengren of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign--and I decided to investigate even though we assumed such behaviors would be rare and therefore difficult to study. Fortunately, we were wrong. We began testing infants' understanding of pictures in a very simple way. We put a book containing highly realistic color photographs of individual objects in front of nine-month-olds. To our surprise, every child in the initial study, and most in our subsequent studies, reached out to feel, rub, pat or scratch the pictures. Sometimes the infants even grasped at the depicted objects as if trying to pick them up off the page. We had a unique opportunity to see how universal this response was when anthropologist Alma Gottlieb of the University of Illinois took some of our books and a video camera to a remote Beng village in Ivory Coast. The testing situation there was different: Beng babies sat on the ground or in their mother's lap as chickens and goats wandered around and other children and villagers played, worked, talked and laughed nearby. Yet the Beng babies, who had almost certainly never seen a picture before, manually explored the depicted objects just as the American babies had. The confusion seems to be conceptual, not perceptual. Infants can perfectly well perceive the difference between objects and pictures. Given a choice between the two, infants choose the real thing. But they do not yet fully understand what pictures are and how they differ from the things depicted (the "referents") and so they explore: some actually lean over and put their lips on the nipple in a photograph of a bottle, for instance. They only do so, however, when the depicted object is highly similar to the object it represents, as in color photographs. The same confusion occurs for video images. Pierroutsakos and her colleague Georgene L. Troseth of Vanderbilt University found that nine-month-olds seated near a television monitor will reach out and grab at objects moving across the screen. But when depicted objects bear relatively little resemblance to the real thing--as in a line drawing--infants rarely explore them. By 18 months, babies have come to appreciate that a picture merely represents a real thing. Instead of manipulating the paper, they point to pictures and name objects or ask someone else for the name. Melissa A. Preissler of Yale University and Susan Carey of Harvard University recently provided a good example of this development. The two researchers used a simple line drawing of a whisk to teach 18- and 24-month-olds the word for this object that they had not seen before. Most of the children assumed the word referred to the object itself, not just to the picture of it. In other words, they interpreted the picture symbolically--as standing for, not just being similar to, its referent. One factor we think contributes to the decline of manual exploration of pictures is the development of inhibitory control. Throughout the first years of life, children become increasingly capable of curbing impulses. This general developmental change is supported by changes in the frontal cortex. Increased inhibitory control presumably helps infants restrain their impulse to interact directly with pictures, setting the stage for them to simply look, as adults do. Experience with pictures must play a role in this development as well. In an image-rich society, most children encounter family photographs and picture books on a daily basis. Such interactions teach children how pictures differ from objects and how they are supposed to be targets of contemplation and conversation, not action. Nevertheless, it takes several years for the nature of pictures to be completely understood. John H. Flavell of Stanford University and his colleagues have found, for example, that until the age of four, many children think that turning a picture of a bowl of popcorn upside down will result in the depicted popcorn falling out of the bowl. Pictures are not the only source of symbol confusion for very young children. For many years, my colleagues and students and I watched toddlers come into the lab and try to sit down on the tiny chair from the scale model--much to the astonishment of all present. At home, Uttal and Rosengren had also observed their own daughters trying to lie down in a doll's bed or get into a miniature toy car. Intrigued by these remarkable behaviors that were not mentioned in any of the scientific literature we examined, we decided to study them. Gulliver's Errors We brought 18- to 30-month-old children into a room that contained, among other things, three large play objects: an indoor slide, a child-size chair and a car toddlers could get inside and propel around the room with their feet. After a child had played with each of the objects at least twice, he or she was escorted from the room. We then replaced the large items with identical miniature versions. When the child returned, we did not comment on the switch and let him or her play spontaneously. If the toddler ignored the miniature toys for more than three or four minutes, however, we would draw attention to them. We then examined films of the children's behavior for what we came to call scale errors: earnest attempts to perform actions that are clearly impossible because of extreme differences in the relative size of the child's body and the target object. We were very conservative in what we counted as a scale error. Almost half the children committed one or more of these mistakes. They attempted with apparent seriousness to perform the same actions with the miniature items that they had with the large ones. Some sat down on the little chair: they walked up to it, turned around, bent their knees and lowered themselves onto it. Some simply perched on top, others sat down so hard that the chair skittered out from under them. Some children sat on the miniature slide and tried to ride down it, usually falling off in the process; others attempted to climb the steps, causing the slide to tip over. (With the chair and slide made of sturdy plastic and only about five inches tall, the toddlers faced no danger of hurting themselves.) A few kids tried to get into the tiny car. Just as they had done with the large version, they opened the door and attempted--often with remarkable persistence--to force a foot inside. One little girl went so far as to take off her shoe in the apparent hope that her foot would then fit! Interestingly, most of the children showed little or no reaction to their failed attempts with the miniatures. A couple seemed a bit angry, a few looked sheepish, but most simply went on to do something else. We think the lack of reaction probably reflects the fact that toddlers' daily lives are full of unsuccessful attempts to do one thing or another. Our interpretation is that scale errors originate in a dissociation between the use of visual information for planning an action and for controlling its execution. When a child sees a miniature of a familiar object, visual information--the object's shape, color, texture and so on--activates the child's mental representation of its referent. Associated with that memory is the motor program for interacting with the large object and other similar objects. In half the children we studied, this motor program was presumably activated but then inhibited, and the children did not attempt to interact with the miniature in the same way as they did with the large version. But in the other half the motor routine was not inhibited. Once the child began to carry out the typical motor sequence, visual information about the actual size of the object was used to accurately perform the actions. Some children, for instance, bent over the tiny chair and looked between their legs to precisely locate it; those trying to get into the miniature car first opened its door and then tried to shove their foot right in. In deciding to interact with the replica, the children relied on visual information linking it to the normal-size object, but in executing their plan, they used visual information about the miniature's actual size to guide their actions. This dissociation in the use of visual information is consistent with influential theories of visual processing--ones positing that different regions of the brain handle object recognition and planning versus the execution and control of actions. Scale errors involve a failure of dual representation: children cannot maintain the distinction between a symbol and its referent. We know this because the confusion between referent and symbolic object does not happen when the demand for dual representation is eliminated--a discovery I made in 1997 when Rosengren and Kevin F. Miller of the University of Illinois and I convinced two-and-a-half-year-olds--with the full consent of their parents, of course--that we had a device that could miniaturize everyday objects. The Magical Machine Using our amazing shrinking machine, we hoped to see if the need to think of an object in two ways at once was at the heart of young children's inability to appreciate symbols. If a child believes that a machine has shrunk an object or a room, then in the child's mind the miniature is the thing itself. There is no symbolic relation between room and model, so children should be able to apply what they know about the big version to the little one. We used the powers of our device to turn toys into miniature versions of themselves and to shrink a large tent. In front of the child, we placed a toy--a troll doll with vivid purple hair--in a tent and aimed the shrinking machine at the tent. The child and experimenter then decamped to another room to wait while the machine did its work. When they returned to the lab, a small tent sat where the big one had been. (One of the remarkable things about this study is the fact that the children did not find it at all surprising that a machine could miniaturize objects. Or that it might need privacy to do so.) When we asked the children to search for the toy, they immediately looked in the small tent. Believing the miniature to actually be the original tent after shrinking, they successfully retrieved the hidden toy. Unlike in our scale model experiment, they had no dual representation to master: the small tent was the same as the large tent, and thus the toy was where it should be, according to the toddlers' view of the world. Understanding the role of dual representation in how young children use symbols has important practical applications. One has to do with the practice of using dolls to interview young children in cases of suspected sexual abuse. The victims of abuse are often very young children, who are quite difficult to interview. Consequently, many professionals--including police officers, social workers and mental health professionals--employ anatomically detailed dolls, assuming that a young child will have an easier time describing what happened using a doll. Notice that this assumption entails the further assumption that a young child will be able to think of this object as both a doll and a representation of himself or herself. These assumptions have been called into question by Maggie Bruck of Johns Hopkins University, Stephen J. Ceci of Cornell University, Peter A. Ornstein of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and their many colleagues. In several independent studies, these investigators have asked preschool children to report what they remember about a checkup with their pediatrician, which either had or had not included a genital check. Anatomically detailed dolls were sometimes used to question the children, sometimes not. In general, the children's reports were more accurate when they were questioned without a doll, and they were more likely to falsely report genital touching when a doll was used. Based on my research documenting young children's difficulty interpreting symbolic objects, I suspected that very young children might not be able to relate their own body to a doll. In a series of studies in my lab using an extremely simple mapping task, Catherine Smith placed a sticker somewhere on a child--on a shoulder or foot, for example--and asked the child to place a smaller version of the sticker in the same place on a doll. Children between three and three-and-a-half usually placed the sticker correctly, but children younger than three were correct less than half the time. The fact that these very young children cannot relate their own body to the doll's in this extremely simple situation with no memory demands and no emotional involvement supports the general case against the use of anatomically detailed dolls in forensic situations with young children. (Because of many demonstrations akin to this one, the use of dolls with children younger than five is viewed less favorably than in the past and has been outlawed in at least one state.) Educational Ramifications The concept of dual representation has implications for educational practices as well. Teachers in preschool and elementary school classrooms around the world use "manipulatives"--blocks, rods and other objects designed to represent numerical quantity. The idea is that these concrete objects help children appreciate abstract mathematical principles. But if children do not understand the relation between the objects and what they represent, the use of manipulatives could be counterproductive. And some research does suggest that children often have problems understanding and using manipulatives. Meredith Amaya of Northwestern University, Uttal and I are now testing the effect of experience with symbolic objects on young children's learning about letters and numbers. Using blocks designed to help teach math to young children, we taught six- and seven-year-olds to do subtraction problems that require borrowing (a form of problem that often gives young children difficulty). We taught a comparison group to do the same but using pencil and paper. Both groups learned to solve the problems equally well--but the group using the blocks took three times as long to do so. A girl who used the blocks offered us some advice after the study: "Have you ever thought of teaching kids to do these with paper and pencil? It's a lot easier." Dual representation also comes into play in many books for young children. A very popular style of book contains a variety of manipulative features designed to encourage children to interact directly with the book itself--flaps that can be lifted to reveal pictures, levers that can be pulled to animate images, and so forth. Graduate student Cynthia Chiong and I reasoned that these manipulative features might distract children from information presented in the book. Accordingly, we recently used different types of books to teach letters to 30-month-old children. One was a simple, old-fashioned alphabet book, with each letter clearly printed in simple black type accompanied by an appropriate picture--the traditional "A is for apple, B is for boy" type of book. Another book had a variety of manipulative features. The children who had been taught with the plain book subsequently recognized more letters than did those taught with the more complicated book. Presumably, the children could more readily focus their attention with the plain 2-D book, whereas with the other one their attention was drawn to the 3-D activities. Less may be more when it comes to educational books for young children. As these various studies show, infants and young children are confused by many aspects of symbols that seem intuitively obvious to adults. They have to overcome hurdles on the way to achieving a mature conception of what symbols represent, and today many must master an ever expanding variety of symbols. Perhaps a deeper understanding of the various stages of becoming symbol-minded will enable researchers to identify and address learning problems that might stem from difficulty grasping the meanings of symbols. From checker at panix.com Tue Aug 23 22:41:19 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2005 18:41:19 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: Gender and Brain Dysfunction Message-ID: Neuroscience: Gender and Brain Dysfunction http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050819-1.htm The following points are made by Constance Holden (Science 2005 308:5728): 1) Researchers are seeking biological reasons for the widespread gender differences in the prevalence and symptomatology of mental disorders. There is little debate that patterns of mental illness and disorders vary between the sexes. Women, for example, are more likely to get depressed. Men are more severely afflicted by schizophrenia. Females have more anxiety. Males exhibit more antisocial behavior. Most alcoholics and drug addicts are male; females have more eating disorders. Even suicide has a gender bias. Females make more attempts; males are more successful. Although culture helps shape how the two sexes express mental problems, some differences persist across cultures and across time. It's difficult to find any single factor more predictive for some of these disorders than gender. 2) Talking about sex differences has long been taboo in some quarters -- people hear "sex differences" and think you're talking about individuals, not populations. There is a huge amount of variation within a population and overlap between populations. But neuroscience research, especially the explosion in brain imaging, has produced data that are hard to ignore. "Every time you do a functional MRI on any test, different parts of the brain light up in men and women," says Florence Haseltine, a reproductive endocrinologist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) in Bethesda, Maryland. "It's clear there are big differences." Understanding these differences will have implications for treatments of brain diseases and brain injuries. 3) Most mental disorders are complex and resist the hunt for specific genes, yet family and twin studies have demonstrated significant heritability for them. These disorders interact with brain differences between the sexes that arise from genes on the X and Y chromosomes and from the bath of gonadal hormones that soak fetal brains early in gestation. Sex hormones are far-reaching in their powers. They are master transcription regulators; they affect hundreds of downstream genes. There is no question these are big players in mental disorders. These sex-related changes are sort of early filters, influencing the expression of underlying disorders in different ways. 4) No one has managed to draw an unbroken line from prenatal development to adult behavior. But some researchers are now trying to tease apart just what aspects of brain anatomy and chemistry can help account for the gender skewing in mental disorders. Some studies are contradictory, and there is still more known about animals than about humans. Science http://www.sciencemag.org -------------------------------- Related Material: MEDICAL BIOLOGY: SEX DIFFERENCES READING DISABILITY The following points are made by M. Rutter et al (J. Am. Med. Assoc. 2004 291:2007): 1) Are boys more likely than girls to have reading disability? The answer to this question has both theoretical implications (with respect to possible causal mechanisms) and practical implications (with respect to service provision). If boys are truly more likely to have reading disability, this would direct research attention to uncovering the possible source of the sex difference. Also, the sex difference would offer a window into the understanding of the causal processes involved in the origins of developmental reading disability.(1) In addition, if boys are more prone to have reading disability, this should motivate educational programs to address boys' early emerging disability. Given that reading disability in childhood is associated with adjustment problems and long-term adverse outcomes in multiple life domains,(2) the elucidation of this disability should constitute a high priority. 2) Thirty years ago, epidemiological studies drew attention to the preponderance of male children with reading disability. Surveys both on the Isle of Wight and in an inner London borough(3) were consistent in showing that reading disability, whether assessed through group or individual tests, was substantially more frequent in boys than in girls. Moreover, the sex difference was evident whether reading disability was considered in terms of IQ-referenced (adjusted) specific reading retardation (in which reading was markedly lower than that predicted on the basis of age and IQ) or non-IQ-referenced general low achievement in reading. Thus, in the inner London sample of 10-year-olds, the rates of specific reading retardation on group tests were 16.9% in boys compared with 7.2% in girls. Using individual testing in those with positive screens on the group reading test, the rates were 4.6% vs 2.0%. The comparable data for Isle of Wight 10-year-old boys and girls were 8.6% vs 3.7% on group tests and 5.6% vs 2.9% on individual tests.3 3) When non-IQ-referenced reading disability was defined as performance at least 28 months behind population norms on either reading accuracy or reading comprehension, the male-female difference on group tests was 15.9% vs 7.2% in inner London, with 22.2% vs 15.6% on the basis of individual testing of those who had positive screens. The comparable Isle of Wight data were 8.6% vs 3.7% on group testing and 10.5% vs 6.1% on individual testing. The sample sizes in both cases were large: 1689 for the inner London 10-year-olds and 1142 for the Isle of Wight 10-year-olds. 4) Some 15 years later, in 1990, Shaywitz et al,(4) reporting on a sample of 414 children aged 7 to 8 years, drew attention to their finding that the sex ratio in their epidemiological study was very much less than that in their sample of children identified on the basis of school records. Among the children in second grade, the rates were 8.7% in boys vs 6.9% in girls, and 1 year later (at a mean age of 8.7 years), the comparison was 9.0% vs 6.0%. 5) The authors summarize the history of research on sex differences in reading disability and provide new evidence from four independent epidemiological studies about the nature, extent, and significance of sex differences in reading disability. In all 4 studies, the rates of reading disability were significantly higher in boys. The authors conclude: "Reading disabilities are clearly more frequent in boys than in girls."(5) References (abridged): 1. Rutter M, Caspi A, Moffitt TE. Using sex differences in psychopathology to study causal mechanisms: unifying issues and research strategies. J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2003;44:1092-1115 2. Snowling MJ. Reading and other learning difficulties. In: Rutter M, Taylor E, eds. Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 4th Edition. Oxford, England: Blackwell Science; 2002:682-696 3. Berger M, Yule W, Rutter M. Attainment and adjustment in two geographical areas, II: the prevalence of specific reading retardation. Br J Psychiatry. 1975;126:510-519 4. Shaywitz SE, Shaywitz BA, Fletcher JM, Escobar MD. Prevalence of reading disability in boys and girls: results of the Connecticut Longitudinal Study. JAMA. 1990;264:998-1002 5. Flannery KA, Liederman J, Daly L, Schultz J. Male prevalence for reading disability is found in a large sample of black and white children free from ascertainment bias. J Int Neuropsychol Soc. 2000;6:433-442 J. Am. Med. Assoc. http://www.jama.com -------------------------------- Related Material: SEX DIFFERENCES IN THE NEURAL BASIS OF EMOTIONAL MEMORIES. The following points are made by T. Canli et al (Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 2002 99:11802): 1) Emotionally arousing experiences are more memorable than neutral experiences. There is superior memory for traumatic relative to mundane events (1) and for emotionally provocative relative to neutral words (2) and pictures (3). Memory for emotional stimuli and experiences differs between the sexes (4,5). Women recall more emotional autobiographical events than men in timed tests, produce memories more quickly or with greater emotional intensity in response to cues, and report more vivid memories than their spouses for events related to their first date, last vacation, and a recent argument (4). 2) Two explanations for the difference in memory performance have been proposed. The "affect-intensity" hypothesis posits that women have better memory because they experience life events more intensely than men and thus may better encode such events into memory (4). Controlling for affect intensity at encoding should therefore eliminate women's superior memory performance. The "cognitive-style" hypothesis posits that women may differ from men in how they encode, rehearse, or think about their affective experiences or in how they generate responses in a memory test (5). According to this view, controlling for affect intensity at encoding should not remove sex-based differences in memory performance. 3) In summary: Psychological studies have found better memory in women than men for emotional events, but the neural basis for this difference is unknown. The authors report they used event-related functional MRI to assess whether sex differences in memory for emotional stimuli is associated with activation of different neural systems in men and women. Brain activation in 12 men and 12 women was recorded while they rated their experience of emotional arousal in response to neutral and emotionally negative pictures. In a recognition memory test 3 weeks after scanning, highly emotional pictures were remembered best, and remembered better by women than by men. Men and women activated different neural circuits to encode stimuli effectively into memory even when the analysis was restricted to pictures rated equally arousing by both groups. Men activated significantly more structures than women in a network that included the right amygdala, whereas women activated significantly fewer structures in a network that included the left amygdala. Women had significantly more brain regions where activation correlated with both ongoing evaluation of emotional experience and with subsequent memory for the most emotionally arousing pictures. Greater overlap in brain regions sensitive to current emotion and contributing to subsequent memory may be a neural mechanism for emotions to enhance memory more powerfully in women than in men. References (abridged): 1. Christianson, S.-A. & Loftus, E. F. (1987) Appl. Cogn. Psychol. 1, 225-239. 2. LaBar, K. S. & Phelps, E. A. (1998) Psychol. Sci. 9, 490-493. 3. Bradley, M. M. , Greenwald, M. K. , Petry, M. C. & Lang, P. J. (1992) J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cognit. 18, 379-390. 4. Fujita, F. , Diener, E. & Sandvik, E. (1991) J. Pers. Soc. Pychol. 61, 427-434. 5. Seidlitz, L. & Diener, E. (1998) J. Pers. Soc. Pychol. 74, 262-271. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. http://www.pnas.org -------------------------------- Related Material: COGNITIVE SCIENCE: SEX DIFFERENCES IN CHIMPANZEE LEARNING The following points are made by E.V. Lonsdorf et al (Nature 2004 428:715): 1) The wild chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, fish for termites with flexible tools that they make out of vegetation, inserting them into the termite mound and then extracting and eating the termites that cling to the tool(1). Tools may be used in different ways by different chimpanzee communities according to the local chimpanzee culture(2). 2) Chimpanzees use tools for more purposes than any other non-human species(3). The cultural variation in tool-use repertoires among chimpanzee communities may be attributable to individuals socially learning from other members of their community(2). The authors investigated this process in wild chimpanzees in Gombe National Park by videotaping 14 animals (who were all under 11 years old) and their mothers during termite-fishing sessions. 3) There were no significant differences between the sexes in the frequency of social interaction with the mothers, and mothers did not show any difference in tolerance towards male or female offspring. Because active demonstration of nut-cracking by a chimpanzee mother in the Tai forest has been described(5), the authors looked for evidence of such behavior in mothers at Gombe. They saw no cases of active teaching, by mothers or any other individuals, which would have been indicated, for example, by the offering of tools or modification of offspring behavior. 4) The authors conclude: "Our findings indicate that female chimpanzees start to fish for termites at a younger age than males; they are more proficient than males once they have acquired the skill; and they each use a technique similar to their mother's, although males do not. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic evidence of a difference between the sexes in the learning or imitation of a tool-use technique in wild chimpanzees. A similar disparity in the ability of young males and females to learn skills has been demonstrated in human children and may be indicative of different learning processes. A sex-based learning difference may therefore date back at least to the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans.(3,4) References (abridged): 1. Goodall, J. Symp. Zool. Soc. Lond. 10, 39-48 (1963) 2. Whiten, A. et al. Nature 399, 682-685 (1999) 3. McGrew, W. C. Chimpanzee Material Culture: Implications for Human Evolution (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1992) 4. McCulloch, C. E. & Searle, S. R. Generalized, Linear, and Mixed Models (Wiley, New York, 2000) 5. Boesch, C. Anim. Behav. 41, 530-532 (1991) Nature http://www.nature.com/nature From checker at panix.com Tue Aug 23 22:48:01 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2005 18:48:01 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] World Science: One in 25 dads could unknowingly be raising another man's child, researchers find Message-ID: One in 25 dads could unknowingly be raising another man's child, researchers find http://www.world-science.net/othernews/050812_dadsfrm.htm Aug. 12, 2005 Courtesy BMJ Specialty Journals and World Science staff Around one in 25 dads could unknowingly be raising another man???s child, new research suggests. The study is published in the September issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. The implications are huge, said the researchers, because of the growing reliance of judicial and health systems on DNA profiling and genetic testing, such as organ donation and criminal identification. More frequent testing means more parents are likely to learn about their children???s true status, with devastating consequences for some families, they warned. More instances of the phenomenon, which scientists politely term ???paternal discrepancy,??? may come to light through the ever-more common paternity tests being conducted in Western countries, the researchers said. In the United States, rates of such tests more than doubled to 310,490 between 1991 and 2001. The authors based their conclusions on an array of international, published scientific research and conference findings, covering the period between 1950 and 2004. In the U.K., around a third of pregnancies are unplanned, the researchers said, around one in five women in long term relationships has had an affair. Other developed countries have reported similar figures. There are few support services to help those affected, added the researchers, Mark Bellis of Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, U.K., and colleagues. And there is little guidance on what roles healthcare or criminal justice system workers should play in disclosing paternal discrepancy. ???In a society where services and life decisions are increasingly influenced by genetics, our approach to [paternal discrepancy] cannot be simply to ignore this difficult issue,??? wrote the researchers. From checker at panix.com Tue Aug 23 22:48:13 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2005 18:48:13 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: (Colin Wilson) Philosopher of Optimism Endures Negative Deluge Message-ID: Philosopher of Optimism Endures Negative Deluge http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/17/books/17wils.html [Sarah had his Outsider. We never read it and got rid of it. Later, I bought a used copy, intending this time to read it. Never did. Got rid of it again. Bought it again a third time. Got rid of it, too. I have read a couple of books by him, one on the occult, which did not convince me. Maybe I'll turn back to him. Unlikely. Don't know why. I respect him more than I read him. Have read a few essays also and enjoyed them. Don't remember what they said, though. Quite a fascinating character, though, as this article will show.] By BRAD SPURGEON GORRAN HAVEN, Britain - Any intellectual who divides opinion as much as Colin Wilson has for almost 50 years must be onto something, even if it is only whether humans should be pessimistic or optimistic. Mr. Wilson, who turned 74 in June and whose autobiography, "Dreaming to Some Purpose," recently appeared in paperback from Arrow, describes in the first chapter how he made his own choice. The son of working-class parents from Leicester - his father was in the boot and shoe trade - he was forced to quit school and go to work at 16, even though his ambition was to become "Einstein's successor." After a stint in a wool factory, he found a job as a laboratory assistant, but he was still in despair and decided to kill himself. On the verge of swallowing hydrocyanic acid, he had an insight: there were two Colin Wilsons, one an idiotic, self-pitying teenager and the other a thinking man, his real self. The idiot, he realized, would kill them both. "In that moment," he wrote, "I glimpsed the marvelous, immense richness of reality, extending to distant horizons." Achieving such moments of optimistic insight has been his goal and subject matter ever since, through more than 100 books, from his first success, "The Outsider," published in 1956, when he was declared a major existentialist thinker at 24, to the autobiography. In an interview last month at his home of nearly 50 years on the Cornish coast, Mr. Wilson was as optimistic as ever, even though his autobiography and his life's work have come under strong attack in some quarters. "What I wanted to do was to try to create a philosophy upon a completely new foundation," he said, sitting in his living room along with a parrot, two dogs and part of his collection of 30,000 books and as many records. "Whereas in the past optimism had been regarded as rather shallow - because 'oh well, it's just your temperament, you happen to be just a cheerful sort of person' - what I wanted to do was to establish that in fact it is the pessimists who are allowing all kinds of errors to creep into their work." He includes in that category writers like Hemingway and philosophers like Sartre. In books on sex, crime, psychology and the occult, and in more than a dozen novels, Mr. Wilson has explored how pessimism can rob ordinary people of their powers. "If you asked me what is the basis of all my work," he said, "it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings. Human beings are like grandfather clocks driven by watch springs. Our powers appear to be taken away from us by something." The critics, particularly in Britain, have alternately called him a genius and a fool. His autobiography, published in hardcover last year, has received mixed reviews. Though lauded by some, the attacks on it and Mr. Wilson have been as virulent as those he provoked in the 1950's after he became a popular culture name with the publication of "The Outsider." That book dealt with alienation in thinkers, artists and men of action like T. E. Lawrence, van Gogh, Camus and Nietzsche, and caught the mood of the age. Critics, including Cyril Connolly and Philip Toynbee, hailed Mr. Wilson as a British version of the French existentialists. His fans ranged from Muammar el-Qaddafi to Groucho Marx, who asked his British publisher to send a copy of his own autobiography to three people in Britain: Winston Churchill, Somerset Maugham and Colin Wilson. "The Outsider" was translated into dozens of languages and sold millions of copies. It has never been out of print. The Times of London called Mr. Wilson and John Osborne - another young working-class man, whose play "Look Back in Anger" opened about the same time "The Outsider" was published - "angry young men." That name was passed on to others of their generation, including Kingsley Amis, Alan Sillitoe and even Doris Lessing. But fame brought its own problems for Wilson. His sometimes tumultuous early personal life became fodder for gossip columnists. He was still married to his first wife while living with his future second wife, Joy. His publisher, Victor Gollancz, urged him to leave the spotlight, and he and Joy moved to Cornwall. But the publicity had done its damage. His second book, "Religion and the Rebel," was panned and his career looked dead. Mr. Wilson said the episode had actually saved him as a writer, however. "Too much success gets you resting on your laurels and creates a kind of quicksand that you can't get out of," he said. "So I was relieved to get out of London." He said his books were probably heading for condemnation in Britain anyway. "I'm basically a writer of ideas, and the English aren't interested in ideas," he said. "The English, I'm afraid, are totally brainless. If you're a writer of ideas like Sartre or Foucault or Derrida, then the general French public know your name, whereas here in England, their equivalent in the world of philosophy wouldn't be known." He never lost belief in the importance of his work in trying to find out how to harness human beings' full powers and wipe out gloom. "Sartre's 'man is a useless passion,' and Camus's feeling that life is absurd, and so on, basically meant that philosophy itself had turned really pretty dark," he said. "I could see that there was a basic fallacy in Sartre and Camus and all of these existentialists, Heidegger and so on. The basic fallacy lay in their failure to understand the actual foundation of the problem." That foundation, he said, is that human perception is intentional; the pessimists themselves paint their world black. Mr. Wilson has spent much of his life researching how to achieve those moments of well-being that bring insight, what the American psychologist Abraham Maslow called "peak experiences." Those moments can come only through effort, concentration or focus, and refusing to lose one's vital energies through pessimism. "What it means basically is that you're able to focus until you suddenly experience that sense that everything is good," Mr. Wilson said. "We go around leaking energy in the same way that someone who has slashed their wrists would go around leaking blood. "Once you can actually get over that and recognize that this is not necessary, suddenly you begin to see the possibility of achieving a state of mind, a kind of steady focus, which means that you see things as extremely good." If harnessed by everyone, this could lead to the next step in human evolution, a kind of Superman. "The problem with human beings so far is that they are met with so many setbacks that they are quite easily defeatable, particularly in the modern age when they've got too separated from their roots," he said. Over the last year, he has been forced to test his own powers in this area. "When I was pretty sure that the autobiography was going to be a great success, and when it, on the contrary, got viciously attacked," Mr. Wilson said, "well, I know I'm not wrong. Obviously the times are out of joint." Though "Dreaming to Some Purpose" was warmly received in The Independent on Sunday and The Spectator and was praised by the novelist Philip Pullman, the autobiography - and Mr. Wilson - received a barrage of negative profiles and reviews in The Sunday Times and The Observer. These made fun of the book's more eccentric parts, like his avowed fetish for women's panties. As a measure of the passions that Mr. Wilson provokes, Robert Meadley, an essayist, wrote "The Odyssey of a Dogged Optimist" (Savoy, 2004), a 188-page book defending him. "If you think a man's a fool and his books are a waste of time, how long does it take to say so?" Mr. Meadley wrote, questioning the space the newspapers gave to the attacks. Part of Mr. Meadley's conclusion is that the British intellectual establishment still felt threatened by Mr. Wilson, a self-educated outsider from the working class. "One of my main problems as far as the public is concerned is that I've always been interested in too many things," Mr. Wilson said, "and if they can't typecast you as a writer on this or that, then I'm afraid you tend not to be understood at all." From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Wed Aug 24 04:21:15 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2005 22:21:15 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: (Colin Wilson) Philosopher of Optimism Endures Negative Deluge In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <430BF5BB.6030801@solution-consulting.com> The work of Ed Diener, David Myers, Marty Seligman and others suggest that Wilson is right. We are more intelligent and creative and cooperative when we are happy. Lynn Premise Checker wrote: > Philosopher of Optimism Endures Negative Deluge > http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/17/books/17wils.html > > [Sarah had his Outsider. We never read it and got rid of it. Later, I > bought a used copy, intending this time to read it. Never did. Got rid > of it again. Bought it again a third time. Got rid of it, too. I have > read a couple of books by him, one on the occult, which did not > convince me. Maybe I'll turn back to him. Unlikely. Don't know why. I > respect him more than I read him. Have read a few essays also and > enjoyed them. Don't remember what they said, though. Quite a > fascinating character, though, as this article will show.] > > By BRAD SPURGEON > > GORRAN HAVEN, Britain - Any intellectual who divides opinion as much > as Colin Wilson has for almost 50 years must be onto something, even > if it is only whether humans should be pessimistic or optimistic. > > Mr. Wilson, who turned 74 in June and whose autobiography, "Dreaming > to Some Purpose," recently appeared in paperback from Arrow, describes > in the first chapter how he made his own choice. The son of > working-class parents from Leicester - his father was in the boot and > shoe trade - he was forced to quit school and go to work at 16, even > though his ambition was to become "Einstein's successor." After a > stint in a wool factory, he found a job as a laboratory assistant, but > he was still in despair and decided to kill himself. > > On the verge of swallowing hydrocyanic acid, he had an insight: there > were two Colin Wilsons, one an idiotic, self-pitying teenager and the > other a thinking man, his real self. > > The idiot, he realized, would kill them both. > > "In that moment," he wrote, "I glimpsed the marvelous, immense > richness of reality, extending to distant horizons." > > Achieving such moments of optimistic insight has been his goal and > subject matter ever since, through more than 100 books, from his first > success, "The Outsider," published in 1956, when he was declared a > major existentialist thinker at 24, to the autobiography. > > In an interview last month at his home of nearly 50 years on the > Cornish coast, Mr. Wilson was as optimistic as ever, even though his > autobiography and his life's work have come under strong attack in > some quarters. > > "What I wanted to do was to try to create a philosophy upon a > completely new foundation," he said, sitting in his living room along > with a parrot, two dogs and part of his collection of 30,000 books and > as many records. "Whereas in the past optimism had been regarded as > rather shallow - because 'oh well, it's just your temperament, you > happen to be just a cheerful sort of person' - what I wanted to do was > to establish that in fact it is the pessimists who are allowing all > kinds of errors to creep into their work." > > He includes in that category writers like Hemingway and philosophers > like Sartre. In books on sex, crime, psychology and the occult, and in > more than a dozen novels, Mr. Wilson has explored how pessimism can > rob ordinary people of their powers. > > "If you asked me what is the basis of all my work," he said, "it's the > feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings. Human > beings are like grandfather clocks driven by watch springs. Our powers > appear to be taken away from us by something." > > The critics, particularly in Britain, have alternately called him a > genius and a fool. His autobiography, published in hardcover last > year, has received mixed reviews. Though lauded by some, the attacks > on it and Mr. Wilson have been as virulent as those he provoked in the > 1950's after he became a popular culture name with the publication of > "The Outsider." > > That book dealt with alienation in thinkers, artists and men of action > like T. E. Lawrence, van Gogh, Camus and Nietzsche, and caught the > mood of the age. Critics, including Cyril Connolly and Philip Toynbee, > hailed Mr. Wilson as a British version of the French existentialists. > > His fans ranged from Muammar el-Qaddafi to Groucho Marx, who asked his > British publisher to send a copy of his own autobiography to three > people in Britain: Winston Churchill, Somerset Maugham and Colin > Wilson. > > "The Outsider" was translated into dozens of languages and sold > millions of copies. It has never been out of print. > > The Times of London called Mr. Wilson and John Osborne - another young > working-class man, whose play "Look Back in Anger" opened about the > same time "The Outsider" was published - "angry young men." That name > was passed on to others of their generation, including Kingsley Amis, > Alan Sillitoe and even Doris Lessing. > > But fame brought its own problems for Wilson. His sometimes tumultuous > early personal life became fodder for gossip columnists. He was still > married to his first wife while living with his future second wife, > Joy. His publisher, Victor Gollancz, urged him to leave the spotlight, > and he and Joy moved to Cornwall. > > But the publicity had done its damage. His second book, "Religion and > the Rebel," was panned and his career looked dead. > > Mr. Wilson said the episode had actually saved him as a writer, > however. "Too much success gets you resting on your laurels and > creates a kind of quicksand that you can't get out of," he said. "So I > was relieved to get out of London." > > He said his books were probably heading for condemnation in Britain > anyway. "I'm basically a writer of ideas, and the English aren't > interested in ideas," he said. "The English, I'm afraid, are totally > brainless. If you're a writer of ideas like Sartre or Foucault or > Derrida, then the general French public know your name, whereas here > in England, their equivalent in the world of philosophy wouldn't be > known." > > He never lost belief in the importance of his work in trying to find > out how to harness human beings' full powers and wipe out gloom. > > "Sartre's 'man is a useless passion,' and Camus's feeling that life is > absurd, and so on, basically meant that philosophy itself had turned > really pretty dark," he said. "I could see that there was a basic > fallacy in Sartre and Camus and all of these existentialists, > Heidegger and so on. The basic fallacy lay in their failure to > understand the actual foundation of the problem." > > That foundation, he said, is that human perception is intentional; the > pessimists themselves paint their world black. > > Mr. Wilson has spent much of his life researching how to achieve those > moments of well-being that bring insight, what the American > psychologist Abraham Maslow called "peak experiences." > > Those moments can come only through effort, concentration or focus, > and refusing to lose one's vital energies through pessimism. > > "What it means basically is that you're able to focus until you > suddenly experience that sense that everything is good," Mr. Wilson > said. "We go around leaking energy in the same way that someone who > has slashed their wrists would go around leaking blood. > > "Once you can actually get over that and recognize that this is not > necessary, suddenly you begin to see the possibility of achieving a > state of mind, a kind of steady focus, which means that you see things > as extremely good." If harnessed by everyone, this could lead to the > next step in human evolution, a kind of Superman. > > "The problem with human beings so far is that they are met with so > many setbacks that they are quite easily defeatable, particularly in > the modern age when they've got too separated from their roots," he > said. > > Over the last year, he has been forced to test his own powers in this > area. "When I was pretty sure that the autobiography was going to be a > great success, and when it, on the contrary, got viciously attacked," > Mr. Wilson said, "well, I know I'm not wrong. Obviously the times are > out of joint." > > Though "Dreaming to Some Purpose" was warmly received in The > Independent on Sunday and The Spectator and was praised by the > novelist Philip Pullman, the autobiography - and Mr. Wilson - received > a barrage of negative profiles and reviews in The Sunday Times and The > Observer. These made fun of the book's more eccentric parts, like his > avowed fetish for women's panties. > > As a measure of the passions that Mr. Wilson provokes, Robert Meadley, > an essayist, wrote "The Odyssey of a Dogged Optimist" (Savoy, 2004), a > 188-page book defending him. > > "If you think a man's a fool and his books are a waste of time, how > long does it take to say so?" Mr. Meadley wrote, questioning the space > the newspapers gave to the attacks. > > Part of Mr. Meadley's conclusion is that the British intellectual > establishment still felt threatened by Mr. Wilson, a self-educated > outsider from the working class. > > "One of my main problems as far as the public is concerned is that > I've always been interested in too many things," Mr. Wilson said, "and > if they can't typecast you as a writer on this or that, then I'm > afraid you tend not to be understood at all." > _______________________________________________ > paleopsych mailing list > paleopsych at paleopsych.org > http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From checker at panix.com Wed Aug 24 22:59:43 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2005 18:59:43 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: On the Large Scale Structure of the Universe (fwd) Message-ID: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 17 Aug 2005 16:54:05 -0400 (EDT) From: Premise Checker To: Premise Checker: ; Subject: SW: On the Large Scale Structure of the Universe On the Large Scale Structure of the Universe http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050819-5.htm The following points are made by David H. Weinberg (Science 2005 309:564): 1) In a large-scale view of the Universe, galaxies are the basic unit of structure. A typical bright galaxy may contain 100 billion stars and span tens of thousands of light-years, but the empty expanses between the galaxies are much larger still. Galaxies are not randomly distributed in space, but instead reside in groups and clusters, which are themselves arranged in an intricate lattice of filaments and walls, threaded by tunnels and pocked with bubbles. Two ambitious new surveys, the Two-Degree Field Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS) and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), have mapped the three-dimensional distribution of galaxies over an unprecedented range of scales [1,2]. Astronomers are using these maps to learn about conditions in the early Universe, the matter and energy contents of the cosmos, and the physics of galaxy formation. 2) Galaxies and large-scale structure form as a result of the gravitational amplification of tiny primordial fluctuations in the density of matter. The inflation hypothesis ascribes the origin of these fluctuations to quantum processes during a period of exponential expansion that occupied the first millionth-of-a-billionth-of-a-trillionth of a second of cosmic history. Experiments over the last decade have revealed the imprint of these fluctuations as part-in-100,000 intensity modulations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which records the small inhomogeneities present in the Universe half a million years after the big bang. Although the visible components of galaxies are made of "normal" baryonic matter (mostly hydrogen and helium), the gravitational forces that drive the growth of structure come mainly from dark matter, which is immune to electromagnetic interactions. 3) By combining precise, quantitative measurements of present-day galaxy clustering with CMB data and other cosmological observations, astronomers hope to test the inflation hypothesis, to pin down the physical mechanisms of inflation, to measure the amounts of baryonic and dark matter in the cosmos, and to probe the nature of the mysterious "dark energy" that has caused the expansion of the Universe to accelerate over the last 5 billion years. The 2dFGRS, completed in 2003, measured distances to 220,000 galaxies, and the SDSS is now 80% of the way to its goal of 800,000 galaxies. 4) The key challenge in interpreting the observed clustering is the uncertain relation between the distribution of galaxies and the underlying distribution of dark matter. If the galaxy maps are smoothed over tens of millions of lightyears, this relation is expected to be fairly simple: Variations in galaxy density are constant multiples of the variations in dark matter density. Quantitative analysis in this regime has focused on the spatial power spectrum, which characterizes the strength of clustering on different size scales [3,4]. The power spectrum describes the way that large, intermediate, and small structures -- like the mountain ranges, isolated peaks, and rolling hills of a landscape -- combine to produce the observed galaxy distribution. The shape of the dark matter power spectrum is a diagnostic of the inflation model, which predicts the input spectrum from the early Universe, and of the average dark matter density, which controls the subsequent gravitational growth. Recent analyses have also detected subtle modulations of the power spectrum caused by baryonic matter, which undergoes acoustic oscillations in the early universe because of its interaction with photons [4,5]. References (abridged): 1. M. Colless et al., Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 328, 1039 (2001) 2. D. G. York et al., Astron. J.120, 1579 (2000) 3. M. Tegmark et al., Astrophys. J. 606, 702 (2004) 4. S. Cole et al., http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0501174 5. D.J. Eisenstein et al.http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0501171. Science http://www.sciencemag.org -------------------------------- Related Material: COSMOLOGY: ON THE FIRST GALAXIES The following points are made by Zoltan Haiman (Nature 2004 430:979): 1) Galaxies are thought to be surrounded by massive haloes of dark matter, each outweighing its galaxy by a factor of about eight. The visible part of a galaxy, occupying the inner 10% of the halo, consists of a mixture of stars and gas. Galaxies harbor a giant black hole at their centers, which in some cases is actively fuelled as it sucks in surrounding gas. In especially active galaxies, called quasars, the fuelling rate is so high that the radiation generated close to the black hole outshines the cumulative star-light from the entire galaxy. The sequence of cosmic events that leads to this configuration is still largely mysterious.(1) How does gas condense into the central regions of the dark-matter halo? At what stage of the gas condensation process do the stars and the giant black hole light up? 2) The formation of massive dark-matter haloes is dictated by gravity, and can be described by using ab initio calculations(2). As the Universe expanded from its dense beginning, tiny inhomogeneities in the distribution of dark matter were amplified through the effects of gravity. Regions of space that were slightly denser than average had a higher gravitational pull on their surroundings; eventually, these regions stopped following the expansion of the rest of the Universe, turned around and re-collapsed on themselves. The resulting dense knots of dark matter -- forming the intersections of a cosmic web of less-dense dark-matter filaments -- are believed to be the sites at which galaxies lit up. 3) Dark matter thus dominates the formation of a galaxy, at least initially, and determines the gross properties of the galaxy population, such as their abundance, size and spatial distribution. But it is the trace amount of gas (mostly hydrogen and helium), pulled with the dark matter into the collapsed haloes, that forms the visible parts of galaxies and determines their observable properties. In particular, to condense to the core of the dark halo, the gas must cool continuously so as to deflate the pressure acquired by its compression. A fraction of the gas (typically 10% by mass) eventually turns into stars, and a much smaller fraction (typically 0.1%) into the central massive black hole(3). 4) The composition of the gas inside the galaxy can be studied through the spectrum of radiation that it absorbs and emits. Primordial gas is essentially a pure mix of hydrogen and helium, but the spectra of all of the quasars discovered so far have shown the presence of various heavier elements (such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and iron). This indicates that the gas has been enriched by the nucleosynthetic yields from previous generations of stars. Even the most distant quasars, including those that existed about a billion years after the Big Bang (a mere 5% of the current age of the Universe), show a significant heavy-element content(4). This suggests that vigorous star-formation is a necessary condition for any quasar activity. On the other hand, star formation seems to be occurring on relatively small scales, close to the galactic center. A natural inference would then be the following sequence of events: the cosmic gas first contracts to the inner regions of the halo, and only then forms stars --but this is still before the formation (or at least activation) of any central quasar black hole. 5) Not necessarily so, according to Weidinger et al(1). They have detected the faint glow of hydrogen emission enveloping a distant quasar at a radius equivalent to about 100,000 light years --several times the size of the visible part of a typical galaxy. Such emission has a simple physical origin. The hydrogen atoms falling through the halo are ionized by the quasar's light, then recombine with electrons to become atoms again. Each recombination results in the emission of a so-called Lyman-photon (a photon with energy equal to the difference between the ground and first excited states of a hydrogen atom). As a result, when viewed through a filter tuned to the Lyman-alpha frequency, a faint "fuzz" can be seen to surround quasars(5). This fuzz can serve as a diagnostic of whether or not a spatially extended distribution of infalling gas is present around the quasar. If most of the gas has already cooled and settled at the center of the halo, the extended fuzz would be absent. References (abridged): 1. Weidinger, M., Mueller, P. & Fynbo, J. P. U. Nature 430, 999-1001 (2004) 2. Navarro, J. F., Frenk, C. S. & White, S. D. M. Astrophys. J. 462, 563-575 (1996) 3. Magorrian, J. et al. Astron. J. 115, 2285-2305 (1998) 4. Fan, X. et al. Astron J. (in the press); preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0405138 (2004) 5. Rees, M. J. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 231, 91-95 (1988) Nature http://www.nature.com/nature -------------------------------- Related Material: COSMOLOGY: ON THE FORMATION OF GALAXIES The following points are made by Gregory D. Wirth (Nature 2004 430:149): 1) Over the past two decades, astrophysicists have been spectacularly successful in explaining the early evolution of the Universe. Existing theories can account well for the time span from the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago until the Universe began to cool and form the first large structures less than a million years later. But detailed explanations of how the original stew of elementary particles subsequently coalesced over time to form the stars and galaxies seen in the present-day Universe are still being refined. Glazebrook et al(1) and Cimatti et al(2) have recently discovered the most distant "old" galaxies yet. and the existence of these objects at such an early epoch in the history of the Universe seems inconsistent with the favored theory of how galaxies formed. 2) That favored theory is the so-called hierarchical model, in which smaller structures gradually accumulate into ever larger structures, ultimately forming galaxies of the sort we see today(3). The most massive galaxies are expected to have formed relatively late in the process, with few existing before the Universe was half its present age. Such predictions can be tested in principle through the observations made of distant galaxies. 3) We have a powerful means of observing the history of the Universe: because the speed of light is finite, as we look out into space we actually peer back in time, seeing distant objects not as they are now, but as they were when their light was emitted millions or billions of years ago. Unfortunately, galaxies more than 6 billion light years away are not only exceedingly faint, but are also particularly difficult to identify. The visible galaxy spectra are "redshifted" to longer, near-infrared wavelengths as a consequence of the expansion of the Universe; at these wavelengths, the Earth's atmospheric emission obscures the key spectral "fingerprints" that are commonly used to identify galaxies. 4) For these reasons, virtually all of the galaxies known from the early days of the Universe are those that are still forming new stars, and hence emitting copious amounts of light(4). Although easier to find, such galaxies are not particularly useful for testing theories of galaxy formation because it is impossible to set strong lower limits on how old they are. However, finding significant numbers of massive, evolved galaxies (which finished forming stars long ago) at distances that correspond to half the present age of the Universe would indicate that such galaxies formed much earlier than the leading theory predicts.(5) References (abridged): 1. Glazebrook, K. et al. Nature 430, 181-184 (2004) 2. Cimatti, A. et al. Nature 430, 184-187 (2004) 3. Blumenthal, G. R. et al. Nature 311, 517-525 (1984) 4. Steidel, C. C., Adelberger, K. L., Giavalisco, M., Dickinson, M. & Pettini, M. Astrophys. J. 519, 1-17 (1999) 5. Dickinson, M., Papovich, C., Ferguson, H. C. & Bud?vari, T. Astrophys. J. 587, 25-40 (2003) Nature http://www.nature.com/nature From checker at panix.com Wed Aug 24 22:59:56 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2005 18:59:56 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: Complexity and Causality Message-ID: Theoretical Physics: Complexity and Causality http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050819-6.htm The following points are made by George F. Ellis (Nature 2005 435:743): 1) The atomic theory of matter and the periodic table of elements allow us to understand the physical nature of material objects, including living beings. Quantum theory illuminates the physical basis of the periodic table and the nature of chemical bonding. Molecular biology shows how complex molecules underlie the development and functioning of living organisms. And neurophysics reveals the functioning of the brain. 2) In the hierarchy of complexity, each level links to the one above: chemistry links to biochemistry, to cell biology, physiology, psychology, to sociology, economics, and politics. Particle physics is the foundational subject underlying -- and so in some sense explaining -- all the others. In a reductionist world view, physics is all there is. The cartesian picture of man as a machine seems to be vindicated. 3) But this view omits important aspects of the world that physics has yet to come to terms with. Our environment is dominated by objects that embody the outcomes of intentional design (buildings, books, computers, teaspoons). Today's physics has nothing to say about the intentionality that has resulted in the existence of such objects, even though this intentionality is clearly causally effective. 4) A simple statement of fact: there is no physics theory that explains the nature of, or even the existence of, football matches, teapots, or jumbo-jet aircraft. The human mind is physically based, but there is no hope whatever of predicting the behavior it controls from the underlying physical laws. Even if we had a satisfactory fundamental physics "theory of everything", this situation would remain unchanged: physics would still fail to explain the outcomes of human purpose, and so would provide an incomplete description of the real world around us. 5) Can we nevertheless claim that the underlying physics uniquely causally determines what happens, even if we cannot predict the outcome? To examine whether we can, contemplate what is required for this claim to be true within its proper cosmic context. The implication is that the particles existing when the cosmic background radiation was decoupling from matter, in the early Universe, were placed precisely so as to make it inevitable that 14 billion years later, human beings would exist, Charles Townes would conceive of the laser, and Edward Witten would develop string theory. Is it plausible that quantum fluctuations in the inflationary era in the very early Universe -- the source of the perturbations at the time of decoupling -- implied the future inevitability of the Mona Lisa and Einstein's theory of relativity? Those fluctuations are supposed to have been random, which by definition means without purpose or meaning.[1,2] References: 1. Ellis, G. F. R. Phys. Today (in the press). 2. Bishop, R. C. Phil. Sci. (in the press). Nature http://www.nature.com/nature -------------------------------- Related Material: THEORETICAL BIOLOGY: ON SCALE AND COMPLEXITY The following points are made by Neil D. Theise (Nature 2005 435:1165): 1) Complexity theory, which describes emergent self-organization of complex adaptive systems, has gained a prominent position in many sciences. One powerful aspect of emergent self-organization is that scale matters. What appears to be a dynamic, ever changing organizational panoply at the scale of the interacting agents that comprise it, looks to be a single, functional entity from a higher scale. Ant colonies are a good example: from afar, the colony appears to be a solid, shifting, dark mass against the earth. But up close, one can discern individual ants and describe the colony as the emergent self-organization of these scurrying individuals. Moving in still closer, the individual ants dissolve into myriad cells. 2) Cells fulfill all the criteria necessary to be considered agents within a complex system: they exist in great numbers; their interactions involve homeostatic, negative feedback loops; and they respond to local environmental cues with limited stochasticity ("quenched disorder"). Like any group of interacting individuals fulfilling these criteria, they self-organize without external planning. What emerges is the structure and function of our tissues, organs and bodies. 3) This view is in keeping with cell doctrine -- the fundamental paradigm of modern biology and medicine whereby cells are the fundamental building blocks of all living organisms. Before cell doctrine emerged, other possibilities were explored. The ancient Greeks debated whether the body's substance was an endlessly divisible fluid or a sum of ultimately indivisible subunits. But when the microscopes of Theodor Schwann (1810-1882) and Matthias Schleiden (1804-1881) revealed cell membranes, the debate was settled. The body's substance is not a fluid, but an indivisible box-like cell: the magnificently successful cell doctrine was born. 4) But a complexity analysis presses for consideration of a level of observation at a lower scale. At the nanoscale, one might suggest that cells are not discreet objects; rather, they are dynamically shifting, adaptive systems of uncountable biomolecules. Do biomolecules fulfill the necessary criteria for agents forming complex systems? They obviously exist in sufficient quantities to generate emergent phenomena; they interact only on the local level, without monitoring the whole system; and many homeostatic feedback loops govern these local interactions. But do their interactions display quenched disorder; that is, are they somewhere between being completely random and rigidly determined? Analyses of individual interacting molecules and the recognition that at the nanoscale, quantum effects may have a measurable impact, suggest that the answer is yes.[1-3] References: 1. Theise N. D. & d'Inverno, M. Blood Cells Mol. Dis. 32, 17-20 (2004) 2. Theise N. D. & Krause D. S. Leukemia 16, 542-548 (2002) 3. Kurakin A. Dev. Genes Evol. 215, 46-52 (2005) Nature http://www.nature.com/nature -------------------------------- Related Material: PHYSICS AND COMPLEXITY The following points are made by Gregoire Nicolis (citation below): 1) For the vast majority of scientists physics is a marvelous algorithm explaining natural phenomena in terms of the building blocks of the universe and their interactions. Planetary motion; the structure of genetic material, of molecules, atoms or nuclei; the diffraction pattern of a crystalline body; superconductivity; the explanation of the compressibility, elasticity, surface tension or thermal conductivity of a material, are only a few among the innumerable examples illustrating the immense success of this view, which presided over the most impressive breakthroughs that have so far marked the development of modern science since Newton. 2) Implicit in the classical view, according to which physical phenomena are reducible to a few fundamental interactions, is the idea that under well-defined conditions a system governed by a given set of laws will follow a unique course, and that a slight change in the causes will likewise produce a slight change in the effects. But, since the 1960s, an increasing amount of experimental data challenging this idea has become available, and this imposes a new attitude concerning the description of nature. Such ordinary systems as a layer of fluid or a mixture of chemical products can generate, under appropriate conditions, a multitude of self-organization phenomena on a macroscopic scale -- a scale orders of magnitude larger than the range of fundamental interactions -- in the form of spatial patterns or temporal rhythms. 3) States of matter capable of evolving (states for which order, complexity, regulation, information and other concepts usually absent from the vocabulary of the physicist become the natural mode of description) are, all of a sudden, emerging in the laboratory. These states suggest that the gap between "simple" and "complex", and between "disorder" and "order", is much narrower than previously thought. They also provide the natural archetypes for understanding a large body of phenomena in branches which traditionally were outside the realm of physics, such as turbulence, the circulation of the atmosphere and the oceans, plate tectonics, glaciations, and other forces that shape our natural environment: or, even, the emergence of replicating systems capable of storing and generating information, embryonic development, the electrical activity of brain, or the behavior of populations in an ecosystem or in an economic environment. Adapted from: Gregoire Nicolis: in: Paul Davies (ed.): The New Physics. Cambridge University Press 1989, p.316 From checker at panix.com Wed Aug 24 23:00:12 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2005 19:00:12 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Cape Times: Scientists show way to non-addictive drugs Message-ID: Scientists show way to non-addictive drugs http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=79&art_id=vn20050816070856987C214316&newslett=1&em=17706a1a20050816ah 5.8.16 [Recall Mr. Mencken's definition of a puritan as you read this.] It is the news that clubbers have been waiting for. Scientists are working on a range of recreational drugs that can produce similar effects to alcohol but with fewer of the side-effects. Experts looked 20 years into the future to discover what kind of drugs we would be taking, and came up with a surprising range of findings, that open up the prospect of Sunday mornings without a thumping hangover or the "parrot's cage" mouth. They have also been able to separate the effect of one psychoactive substance from its addictive properties, leading an expert panel to advise British government ministers that "this could pave the way to non-addictive recreational drugs". One of the new substances has even been found to reduce the side effects of recreational drugs. "Such compounds might allow users to shape their drug experience," said the panel headed by Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser. His report to the Trade and Industry secretary, Alan Johnson, raises the possibility that, in a generation, Britain's dinner parties could become more like Woody Allen's "orb" scene in the futuristic film Sleeper, where guests get high by rubbing the orb instead of inhaling a joint. The report said: "There are a number of new and developing technologies that could be used to deliver drugs in new ways. Examples include patches, vaporisers, depot injection and direct neural stimulation... this may encourage the development of technology for the slower release of recreational psychoactive substances, which could reduce the risk of addiction." Some drugs developed to tackle health problems are capable of being used for improving the performance of the brain. Madafinil, which was introduced to treat narcolepsy, can keep normal people awake for three days, says the report. Other drugs could be used to stop alcohol triggering a need for a cigarette. "Drinking with friends might no longer create a trigger for an individual to smoke tobacco," the panel said. From checker at panix.com Wed Aug 24 23:00:29 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2005 19:00:29 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Economist: Modern China: Fear of the future Message-ID: Modern China: Fear of the future http://www.economist.com/books/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=4292805 Aug 18th 2005 The Changing Face of China: From Mao to Market. By John Gittings. Oxford University Press; 384 pages; $30 and ?18.99 WHITHER China is arguably the most vital, if the least fathomable, strategic question of the 21st century. John Gittings, a veteran journalist and prolific writer, has produced a new study of China's Communist era and its likely trajectory. Unfortunately, his book will have many readers still scratching their heads. Mr Gittings is sceptical of the view that China's huge internal stresses--from dysfunctional banks to religious unrest--have pushed it to the verge of catastrophe. Yet his argument is hedged with sufficient caveats that the pessimist could still feel vindicated. "The Chinese miracle is a precarious one: the leadership...only has a few years to get it right," he suggests. The leadership needs to initiate "serious reforms" of the political structure within this period. But the leadership Mr Gittings describes is one that has a congenital disinclination to reform itself. The author's biggest concern is about the ravages to China's environment caused by breakneck industrial growth. Environmental degradation and rising pollution, he argues, represent a far more serious threat to the Chinese people than either political or economic instability. He even proposes a nightmare scenario in which China will run out of water. Mr Gittings is altogether too gloomy on this issue. Another, and in this reviewer's opinion, more likely, scenario is that China's huge environmental problems will cause widespread suffering. But they will also become part of the powerful cocktail of emerging challenges to an unreformed party that will force it to change the way it rules. Increasingly frequent protests, triggered by environmental issues and the formation of non-governmental pressure groups, are already making the party rethink the way it handles public concerns. Rather than let itself run out of water, China will bite the bullet and use pricing mechanisms and penalties on polluters (both sadly inadequate now) to improve and ensure conservation. It will have no choice. Mr Gittings hints that he was among the "sympathetic foreign observers" who admired the achievements of Mao Zedong. He is far more critical now, though he stops short of condemning Mao in the unrelenting manner of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday in their recent biography. China, he says, cannot be understood if Mao is regarded simply as a despot who was interested in nothing but power. Yet Mr Gittings's mostly dry, historical account provides few new insights into what really motivated Mao. And there is nothing on the horrors of that era that matches his vivid, first-hand account of the bloody suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. The book accurately describes China's precipitate abandonment of socialism in all but name by Deng Xiaoping and his successors, and the iniquities of the unfettered capitalism that has replaced it. But it laments too much the abandonment of collectivised agriculture. Mr Gittings believes that China's post-Mao policies have caused the "effective privatisation" of land. If only this were true. It may have caused the demise of collectivised farming, but peasants certainly do not own the tiny plots of land they work. Privatisation would give peasants collateral with which to borrow, encourage investment in high value-added agriculture and promote urbanisation. Unfortunately the idea is still anathema to the Communist Party, which has deprived many peasants of affordable health care and education (as Mr Gittings well describes), but continues to deny them the opportunity to use their land as capital with which to make a new start in the cities. Would that it were not so. From checker at panix.com Wed Aug 24 23:02:50 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2005 19:02:50 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Scientists Speak Up on Mix of God and Science Message-ID: Scientists Speak Up on Mix of God and Science http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/national/23believers.html [Mr. Mencken argued repeatedly for the incompatibility of science and religion. Sometimes he claimed to be a "genial agnostic," but on another occasion he described his belief in something very close to an intelligent designer. He added, though, that beyond this no one should make any claims. I balk at even this, for invoking an intelligent designer replaces one mystery with a much larger one. It is also arrogant for Dr. Michael Behe, for instance, to tell the world that Dr. Michael Behe cannot explain the origin of life, therefore someone greater than Dr. Michael Behe must have brought it about. My more substantial objection, though, is moral: true, humans with three-pound brains, or even humans with Dr. Michael Behe-sized brains, may never explain the origin of life, but to stop at any point and say there must be something greater than Dr. Michael Behe, is immoral for cutting inquiry short. [I suggest that, were Mr. Mencken alive today, he'd be taken in so much with the progress of science since his day in showing how complex structures can evolve out of simpler ones that he'd no longer find it plausible to invoke an intelligent designer.] By [3]CORNELIA DEAN At a recent scientific conference at City College of New York, a student in the audience rose to ask the panelists an unexpected question: "Can you be a good scientist and believe in God?" Reaction from one of the panelists, all Nobel laureates, was quick and sharp. "No!" declared Herbert A. Hauptman, who shared the chemistry prize in 1985 for his work on the structure of crystals. Belief in the supernatural, especially belief in God, is not only incompatible with good science, Dr. Hauptman declared, "this kind of belief is damaging to the well-being of the human race." But disdain for religion is far from universal among scientists. And today, as religious groups challenge scientists in arenas as various as evolution in the classroom, AIDS prevention and stem cell research, scientists who embrace religion are beginning to speak out about their faith. "It should not be a taboo subject, but frankly it often is in scientific circles," said Francis S. Collins, who directs the National Human Genome Research Institute and who speaks freely about his Christian faith. Although they embrace religious faith, these scientists also embrace science as it has been defined for centuries. That is, they look to the natural world for explanations of what happens in the natural world and they recognize that scientific ideas must be provisional - capable of being overturned by evidence from experimentation and observation. This belief in science sets them apart from those who endorse creationism or its doctrinal cousin, intelligent design, both of which depend on the existence of a supernatural force. Their belief in God challenges scientists who regard religious belief as little more than magical thinking, as some do. Their faith also challenges believers who denounce science as a godless enterprise and scientists as secular elitists contemptuous of God-fearing people. Some scientists say simply that science and religion are two separate realms, "nonoverlapping magisteria," as the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould put it in his book "Rocks of Ages" (Ballantine, 1999). In Dr. Gould's view, science speaks with authority in the realm of "what the universe is made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory)" and religion holds sway over "questions of ultimate meaning and moral value." When the American Association for the Advancement of Science devoted a session to this idea of separation at its annual meeting this year, scores of scientists crowded into a room to hear it. Some of them said they were unsatisfied with the idea, because they believe scientists' moral values must inevitably affect their work, others because so much of science has so many ethical implications in the real world. One panelist, Dr. Noah Efron of Bar-Ilan University in Israel, said scientists, like other people, were guided by their own human purposes, meaning and values. The idea that fact can be separated from values and meaning "jibes poorly with what we know of the history of science," Dr. Efron said. Dr. Collins, who is working on a book about his religious faith, also believes that people should not have to keep religious beliefs and scientific theories strictly separate. "I don't find it very satisfactory and I don't find it very necessary," he said in an interview. He noted that until relatively recently, most scientists were believers. "Isaac Newton wrote a lot more about the Bible than the laws of nature," he said. But he acknowledged that as head of the American government's efforts to decipher the human genetic code, he had a leading role in work that many say definitively demonstrates the strength of evolutionary theory to explain the complexity and abundance of life. As scientists compare human genes with those of other mammals, tiny worms, even bacteria, the similarities "are absolutely compelling," Dr. Collins said. "If Darwin had tried to imagine a way to prove his theory, he could not have come up with something better, except maybe a time machine. Asking somebody to reject all of that in order to prove that they really do love God - what a horrible choice." Dr. Collins was a nonbeliever until he was 27 - "more and more into the mode of being not only agnostic but being an atheist," as he put it. All that changed after he completed his doctorate in physics and was at work on his medical degree, when he was among those treating a woman dying of heart disease. "She was very clear about her faith and she looked me square in the eye and she said, 'what do you believe?' " he recalled. "I sort of stammered out, 'I am not sure.' " He said he realized then that he had never considered the matter seriously, the way a scientist should. He began reading about various religious beliefs, which only confused him. Finally, a Methodist minister gave him a book, "Mere Christianity," by C. S. Lewis. In the book Lewis, an atheist until he was a grown man, argues that the idea of right and wrong is universal among people, a moral law they "did not make, and cannot quite forget even when they try." This universal feeling, he said, is evidence for the plausibility of God. When he read the book, Dr. Collins said, "I thought, my gosh, this guy is me." Today, Dr. Collins said, he does not embrace any particular denomination, but he is a Christian. Colleagues sometimes express surprise at his faith, he said. "They'll say, 'how can you believe that? Did you check your brain at the door?" But he said he had discovered in talking to students and colleagues that "there is a great deal of interest in this topic." Polling Scientists on Beliefs According to a much-discussed survey reported in the journal Nature in 1997, 40 percent of biologists, physicists and mathematicians said they believed in God - and not just a nonspecific transcendental presence but, as the survey put it, a God to whom one may pray "in expectation of receiving an answer." The survey, by Edward J. Larson of the University of Georgia, was intended to replicate one conducted in 1914, and the results were virtually unchanged. In both cases, participants were drawn from a directory of American scientists. Others play down those results. They note that when Dr. Larson put part of the same survey to "leading scientists" - in this case, members of the National Academy of Sciences, perhaps the nation's most eminent scientific organization - fewer than 10 percent professed belief in a personal God or human immortality. This response is not surprising to researchers like Steven Weinberg, a physicist at the University of Texas, a member of the academy and a winner of the Nobel Prize in 1979 for his work in particle physics. He said he could understand why religious people would believe that anything that eroded belief was destructive. But he added: "I think one of the great historical contributions of science is to weaken the hold of religion. That's a good thing." No God, No Moral Compass? He rejects the idea that scientists who reject religion are arrogant. "We know how many mistakes we've made," Dr. Weinberg said. And he is angered by assertions that people without religious faith are without a moral compass. In any event, he added, "the experience of being a scientist makes religion seem fairly irrelevant," he said. "Most scientists I know simply don't think about it very much. They don't think about religion enough to qualify as practicing atheists." Most scientists he knows who do believe in God, he added, believe in "a God who is behind the laws of nature but who is not intervening." Kenneth R. Miller, a biology professor at Brown, said his students were often surprised to find that he was religious, especially when they realized that his faith was not some sort of vague theism but observant Roman Catholicism. Dr. Miller, whose book, "Finding Darwin's God," explains his reconciliation of the theory of evolution with his religious faith, said he was usually challenged in his biology classes by one or two students whose religions did not accept evolution, who asked how important the theory would be in the course. "What they are really asking me is "do I have to believe in this stuff to get an A?,' " he said. He says he tells them that "belief is never an issue in science." "I don't care if you believe in the Krebs cycle," he said, referring to the process by which energy is utilized in the cell. "I just want you to know what it is and how it works. My feeling about evolution is the same thing." For Dr. Miller and other scientists, research is not about belief. "Faith is one thing, what you believe from the heart," said Joseph E. Murray, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1990 for his work in organ transplantation. But in scientific research, he said, "it's the results that count." Dr. Murray, who describes himself as "a cradle Catholic" who has rarely missed weekly Mass and who prays every morning, said that when he was preparing for the first ever human organ transplant, a kidney that a young man had donated to his identical twin, he and his colleagues consulted a number of religious leaders about whether they were doing the right thing. "It seemed natural," he said. Using Every Tool "When you are searching for truth you should use every possible avenue, including revelation," said Dr. Murray, who is a member of the Pontifical Academy, which advises the Vatican on scientific issues, and who described the influence of his faith on his work in his memoir, "Surgery of the Soul" (Science History Publications, 2002). Since his appearance at the City College panel, when he was dismayed by the tepid reception received by his remarks on the incompatibility of good science and religious belief, Dr. Hauptman said he had been discussing the issue with colleagues in Buffalo, where he is president of the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute. "I think almost without exception the people I have spoken to are scientists and they do believe in the existence of a supreme being," he said. "If you ask me to explain it - I cannot explain it at all." But Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary theorist at Oxford, said that even scientists who were believers did not claim evidence for that belief. "The most they will claim is that there is no evidence against," Dr. Dawkins said, "which is pathetically weak. There is no evidence against all sorts of things, but we don't waste our time believing in them." Dr. Collins said he believed that some scientists were unwilling to profess faith in public "because the assumption is if you are a scientist you don't have any need of action of the supernatural sort," or because of pride in the idea that science is the ultimate source of intellectual meaning. But he said he believed that some scientists were simply unwilling to confront the big questions religion tried to answer. "You will never understand what it means to be a human being through naturalistic observation," he said. "You won't understand why you are here and what the meaning is. Science has no power to address these questions - and are they not the most important questions we ask ourselves?" From checker at panix.com Wed Aug 24 23:02:56 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2005 19:02:56 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Yorker: Jim Holt: Say Anything: Three books find truth under cultural and conceptual assault. Message-ID: Jim Holt: Say Anything: Three books find truth under cultural and conceptual assault. http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/050822crat_atlarge Issue of 2005-08-22 Posted 2005-08-15 People have been talking bull, denying that they were talking bull, and accusing others of talking bull for ages. "Dumbe Speaker! that's a Bull," a character in a seventeenth-century English play says. "It is no Bull, to speak of a common Peace, in the place of War," a statesman from the same era declares. The word "bull," used to characterize discourse, is of uncertain origin. One venerable conjecture was that it began as a contemptuous reference to papal edicts known as bulls (from the bulla, or seal, appended to the document). Another linked it to the famously nonsensical Obadiah Bull, an Irish lawyer in London during the reign of Henry VII. It was only in the twentieth century that the use of "bull" to mean pretentious, deceitful, jejune language became semantically attached to the male of the bovine species--or, more particularly, to the excrement therefrom. Today, it is generally, albeit erroneously, thought to have arisen as a euphemistic shortening of "bullshit," a term that came into currency, dictionaries tell us, around 1915. If "bullshit," as opposed to "bull," is a distinctively modern linguistic innovation, that could have something to do with other distinctively modern things, like advertising, public relations, political propaganda, and schools of education. "One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit," Harry G. Frankfurt, a distinguished moral philosopher who is professor emeritus at Princeton, says. The ubiquity of bullshit, he notes, is something that we have come to take for granted. Most of us are pretty confident of our ability to detect it, so we may not regard it as being all that harmful. We tend to take a more benign view of someone caught bullshitting than of someone caught lying. ("Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through," a father counsels his son in an Eric Ambler novel.) All of this worries Frankfurt. We cannot really know the effect that bullshit has on us, he thinks, until we have a clearer understanding of what it is. That is why we need a theory of bullshit. Frankfurt's own effort along these lines was contained in a paper that he presented two decades ago at a faculty seminar at Yale. Later, that paper appeared in a journal, and then in a collection of Frankfurt's writings; all the while, photocopies of it passed from fan to fan. Earlier this year, it was published as "On Bullshit" (Princeton; $9.95), a tiny book of sixty-seven spaciously printed pages that has gone on to become an improbable best-seller. Philosophers have a vocational bent for trying to divine the essences of things that most people never suspected had an essence, and bullshit is a case in point. Could there really be some property that all instances of bullshit possess and all non-instances lack? The question might sound ludicrous, but it is, at least in form, no different from one that philosophers ask about truth. Among the most divisive issues in philosophy today is whether there is anything important to be said about the essential nature of truth. Bullshit, by contrast, might seem to be a mere bagatelle. Yet there are parallels between the two which lead to the same perplexities. Where do you start if you are an academic philosopher in search of the quiddity of bullshit? "So far as I am aware," Frankfurt dryly observes, "very little work has been done on this subject." He did find an earlier philosopher's attempt to analyze a similar concept under a more genteel name: humbug. Humbug, that philosopher decided, was a pretentious bit of misrepresentation that fell short of lying. (A politician talking about the importance of his religious faith comes to mind.) Frankfurt was not entirely happy with this definition. The difference between lies and bullshit, it seemed to him, was more than a matter of degree. To push the analysis in a new direction, he considers a rather peculiar anecdote about the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. It was the nineteen-thirties, and Wittgenstein had gone to the hospital to visit a friend whose tonsils had just been taken out. She croaked to Wittgenstein, "I feel just like a dog that has been run over." Wittgenstein (the friend recalled) was disgusted to hear her say this. "You don't know what a dog that has been run over feels like," he snapped. Of course, Wittgenstein might simply have been joking. But Frankfurt suspects that his severity was real, not feigned. This was, after all, a man who devoted his life to combatting what he considered to be pernicious forms of nonsense. What Wittgenstein found offensive in his friend's simile, Frankfurt guesses, was its mindlessness: "Her fault is not that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even trying." The essence of bullshit, Frankfurt decides, is that it is produced without any concern for the truth. Bullshit needn't be false: "The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong." The bullshitter's fakery consists not in misrepresenting a state of affairs but in concealing his own indifference to the truth of what he says. The liar, by contrast, is concerned with the truth, in a perverse sort of fashion: he wants to lead us away from it. As Frankfurt sees it, the liar and the truthteller are playing on opposite sides of the same game, a game defined by the authority of truth. The bullshitter opts out of this game altogether. Unlike the liar and the truthteller, he is not guided in what he says by his beliefs about the way things are. And that, Frankfurt says, is what makes bullshit so dangerous: it unfits a person for telling the truth. Frankfurt's account of bullshit is doubly remarkable. Not only does he define it in a novel way that distinguishes it from lying; he also uses this definition to establish a powerful claim: "Bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are." If this is true, we ought to be tougher on someone caught bullshitting than we are on someone caught lying. Unlike the bullshitter, the liar at least cares about the truth. But isn't this account a little too flattering to the liar? In theory, of course, there could be liars who are motivated by sheer love of deception. This type was identified by St. Augustine in his treatise "On Lying." Someone who tells a lie as a means to some other goal tells it "unwillingly," Augustine says. The pure liar, by contrast, "takes delight in lying, rejoicing in the falsehood itself." But such liars are exceedingly rare, as Frankfurt concedes. Not even Iago had that purity of heart. Ordinary tellers of lies simply aren't principled adversaries of the truth. Suppose an unscrupulous used-car salesman is showing you a car. He tells you that it was owned by a little old lady who drove it only on Sundays. The engine's in great shape, he says, and it runs beautifully. Now, if he knows all this to be false, he's a liar. But is his goal to get you to believe the opposite of the truth? No, it's to get you to buy the car. If the things he was saying happened to be true, he'd still say them. He'd say them even if he had no idea who the car's previous owner was or what condition the engine was in. Frankfurt would say that this used-car salesman is a liar only by accident. Even if he happens to know the truth, he decides what he's going to say without caring what it is. But then surely almost every liar is, at heart, a bullshitter. Both the liar and the bullshitter typically have a goal. It may be to sell a product, to get votes, to keep a spouse from walking out of a marriage in the wake of embarrassing revelations, to make someone feel good about himself, to mislead Nazis who are looking for Jews. The alliance the liar strikes with untruth is one of convenience, to be abandoned the moment it ceases to serve this goal. The porousness of Frankfurt's theoretical boundary between lies and bullshit is apparent in Laura Penny's "Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit" (Crown; $21.95). The author, a young Canadian college teacher and former union organizer, begins by saluting Frankfurt's "subtle and useful" distinction: "The liar still cares about the truth. The bullshitter is unburdened by such concerns." She then proceeds to apply the term "bullshit" to every kind of trickery by which powerful, moneyed interests attempt to gull the public. "Most of what passes for news," Penny submits, "is bullshit"; so is the language employed by lawyers and insurance men; so is the use of rock songs in ads. She even stretches the rubric to apply to things as well as to words: "The new product that will change your life is probably just more cheap, plastic bullshit," she writes. At times, despite her nod to Frankfurt, Penny appears to equate bullshit with deliberate deceit: "Never in the history of mankind have so many people uttered statements they know to be untrue." But then she says that George W. Bush ("a world-historical bullshitter") and his circle "distinguish themselves by believing their own bullshit," which suggests that they themselves are deluded. Frankfurt concedes that in popular usage "bullshit" is employed as a "generic term of abuse, with no very specific literal meaning." What he wanted to do, he says, was to get to the essence of the thing in question. But does bullshit have a single essence? In a paper published a few years ago, "Deeper Into Bullshit," G. A. Cohen, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, protested that Frankfurt excludes an entire category of bullshit: the kind that appears in academic works. If the bullshit of ordinary life arises from indifference to truth, Cohen says, the bullshit of the academy arises from indifference to meaning. It may be perfectly sincere, but it is nevertheless nonsensical. Cohen, a specialist in Marxism, complains of having been grossly victimized by this kind of bullshit as a young man back in the nineteen-sixties, when he did a lot of reading in the French school of Marxism inspired by Louis Althusser. So traumatized was he by his struggle to make some sense of these defiantly obscure texts that he went on to found, at the end of the nineteen-seventies, a Marxist discussion group that took as its motto Marxismus sine stercore tauri--"Marxism without the shit of the bull." Anyone familiar with the varieties of "theory" that have made their way from the Left Bank of Paris into American English departments will be able to multiply examples of the higher bullshit ad libitum. A few years ago, the physicist Alan Sokal concocted a deliberately meaningless parody under the title "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," and then got it accepted as a serious contribution to the journal Social Text. It would, of course, be hasty to dismiss all unclear discourse as bullshit. Cohen adduces a more precise criterion: the discourse must be not only unclear but unclarifiable. That is, bullshit is the obscure that cannot be rendered unobscure. How would one defend philosophers like Hegel or Heidegger from the charge that their writings are bullshit? Not, Cohen says, by showing that they cared about the truth (which would be enough to get them off the hook if they were charged with being bullshitters under Frankfurt's definition). Rather, one would try to show that their writings actually made some sense. And how could one prove the opposite: that a given statement is hopelessly unclear, and hence bullshit? One proposed test is to add a "not" to the statement and see if that makes any difference to its plausibility. If it doesn't, that statement is bullshit. As it happens, Heidegger once came very close to doing this himself. In the fourth edition of his treatise "What Is Metaphysics?" (1943), he asserted, "Being can indeed be without beings." In the fifth edition (1949), this sentence became "Being never is without beings." Frankfurt acknowledges the higher bullshit as a distinctive variety, but he doesn't think it's very dangerous compared with the sort of bullshit that he is concerned about. While genuinely meaningless discourse may be "infuriating," he says, it is unlikely to be taken seriously for long, even in the academic world. The sort of bullshit that involves indifference to veracity is far more insidious, Frankfurt claims, since the "conduct of civilized life, and the vitality of the institutions that are indispensable to it, depend very fundamentally on respect for the distinction between the true and the false." How evil is the bullshitter? That depends on how valuable truthfulness is. When Frankfurt observes that truthfulness is crucial in maintaining the sense of trust on which social co?peration depends, he's appealing to truth's instrumental value. Whether it has any value in itself, however, is a separate question. To take an analogy, suppose a well-functioning society depends on the belief in God, whether or not God actually exists. Someone of subversive inclinations might question the existence of God without worrying too much about the effect that might have on public morals. And the same attitude is possible toward truth. As the philosopher Bernard Williams observed in a book published in 2002, not long before his death, a suspicion of truth has been a prominent current in modern thought. It was something that Williams found lamentable. "If you do not really believe in the existence of truth," he asked, "what is the passion for truthfulness a passion for?" The idea of questioning the existence of truth might seem bizarre. No sane person doubts that the distinction between true and false is sharp enough when it comes to statements like "Saddam had W.M.D.s" or "The cat is on the mat." But when it comes to more interesting propositions-assertions of right and wrong, judgments of beauty, grand historical narratives, talk about possibilities, scientific statements about unobservable entities--the objectivity of truth becomes harder to defend. "Deniers" of truth (as Williams called them) insist that each of us is trapped in his own point of view; we make up stories about the world and, in an exercise of power, try to impose them on others. The battle lines between deniers and defenders of absolute truth are strangely drawn. On the pro-truth side, one finds Pope Benedict XVI, who knows that moral truths correspond to divine commands and rails against what he calls the "dictatorship of relativism." On the "anything goes" side, one finds the member of the Bush Administration who mocked the idea of objective evidence by declaring, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." Among philosophers, Continental poststructuralists like Bruno Latour, Jean Baudrillard, and the late Jacques Derrida tend to be arrayed on the anti-truth side. One might expect their hardheaded counterparts in Britain and the United States--practitioners of what is called analytical philosophy--to be firmly in the pro-truth camp. And yet, as Simon Blackburn observes in "Truth: A Guide" (Oxford; $25), the "brand-name" Anglophone philosophers of the past fifty years--Wittgenstein, W. V. Quine, Thomas Kuhn, Donald Davidson, Richard Rorty--have developed powerful arguments that seem to undermine the commonsense notion of truth as agreement with reality. Indeed, Blackburn says, "almost all the trends in the last generation of serious philosophy lent aid and comfort to the 'anything goes' climate"--the very climate that, Harry Frankfurt argued, has encouraged the proliferation of bullshit. Blackburn, who is himself a professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, wants to rally the pro-truth forces. But he is also concerned to give the other side its due. In "Truth," he scrupulously considers the many forms that the case against truth has taken, going back as far as the ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras, whose famous saying "Man is the measure of all things" was seized upon by Socrates as an expression of dangerous relativism. In its simplest form, relativism is easy to refute. Take the version of it that Richard Rorty, a philosopher who teaches at Stanford, once lightheartedly offered: "Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with." The problem is that contemporary Americans and Europeans won't let you get away with that characterization of truth; so, by its own standard, it cannot be true. (The late Sidney Morgenbesser's gripe about pragmatism--which, broadly speaking, equates truth with usefulness--was in the same spirit: "The trouble with pragmatism is that it's completely useless.") Then, there is the often heard complaint that the whole truth will always elude us. Fair enough, Blackburn says, but partial truths can still be perfectly objective. He quotes Clemenceau's riposte to skeptics who asked what future historians would say about the First World War: "They will not say that Belgium invaded Germany." If relativism needed a bumper-sticker slogan, it would be Nietzsche's dictum "There are no facts, only interpretations." Nietzsche was inclined to write as if truth were manufactured rather than discovered, a matter of manipulating others into sharing our beliefs rather than getting those beliefs to "agree with reality." In another of his formulations, "Truths are illusions that we have forgotten are illusions." If that's the case, then it is hard to regard the bullshitter, who does not care about truth, as all that villainous. Perhaps, to paraphrase Nietzsche, truth is merely bullshit that has lost its stench. Blackburn has ambivalent feelings about Nietzsche, who, were it not for his "extraordinary acuteness," would qualify as "the pub bore of philosophy." Yet, he observes, at the moment Nietzsche is the most influential of the great philosophers, not to mention the "patron saint of postmodernism," so he must be grappled with. One of Nietzsche's more notorious doctrines is perspectivism-the idea that we are condemned to see the world from a partial and distorted perspective, one defined by our interests and values. Whether this doctrine led Nietzsche to a denial of truth is debatable: in his mature writings, at least, his scorn is directed at the idea of metaphysical truth, not at the scientific and historical varieties. Nevertheless, Blackburn accuses Nietzsche of sloppy thinking. There is no reason, he says, to assume that we are forever trapped in a single perspective, or that different perspectives cannot be ranked according to accuracy. And, if we can move from one perspective to another, what is to prevent us from conjoining our partial views into a reasonably objective picture of the world? Today, Richard Rorty is probably the most prominent "truth-denier" in the academy. What makes him so formidable is the clarity and eloquence of his case against truth and, by implication, against the Western philosophical tradition. Our minds do not "mirror" the world, he says. The idea that we could somehow stand outside our own skins and survey the relationship between our thoughts and reality is a delusion. Language is an adaptation, and the words we use are tools. There are many competing vocabularies for talking about the world, some more useful than others, given human needs and interests. None of them, however, correspond to the Way Things Really Are. Inquiry is a process of reaching a consensus on the best way of coping with the world, and "truth" is just a compliment we pay to the result. Rorty is fond of quoting the American pragmatist John Dewey to the effect that the search for truth is merely part of the search for happiness. He also likes to cite Nietzsche's observation that truth is a surrogate for God. Asking of someone, "Does he love the truth?," Rorty thinks, is like asking, "Is he saved?" In our moral reasoning, he says, we no longer worry about whether our conclusions correspond to the divine will; so in the rest of our inquiry we ought to stop worrying about whether our conclusions correspond to a mind-independent reality. Do Rorty's arguments offer aid and comfort to bullshitters? Blackburn thinks so. Creating a consensus among their peers is something that hardworking laboratory scientists try to do. But it is also what creationists and Holocaust deniers do. Rorty insists that, even though the distinction between truth and consensus is untenable, we can distinguish between "frivolous" and "serious." Some people are "serious, decent, and trustworthy"; others are "unconversable, incurious, and self-absorbed." Blackburn thinks that the only way to make this distinction is by reference to the truth: serious people care about it, whereas frivolous people do not. Yet there is another possibility that can be extrapolated from Rorty's writings: serious people care not only about producing agreement but also about justifying their methods for producing agreement. (This is, for example, something that astronomists do but astrologers don't.) That, and not an allegiance to some transcendental notion of truth, is the Rortian criterion that distinguishes serious inquirers from bullshitters. Pragmatists and perspectivists are not the only enemies Blackburn considers, though, and much of his book is taken up with contemporary arguments turning on subversive-sounding expressions like "holism," "incommensurability," and the "Myth of the Given." Take the last of these. Our knowledge of the world, it seems reasonable to suppose, is founded on causal interactions between us and the things in it. The molecules and photons impinging on our bodies produce sensations; these sensations give rise to basic beliefs--like "I am seeing red now"--which serve as evidence for higher-level propositions about the world. The tricky part of this scheme is the connection between sensation and belief. As William James wrote, "A sensation is rather like a client who has given his case to a lawyer and then has passively to listen in the courtroom to whatever account of his affairs, pleasant or unpleasant, the lawyer finds it most expedient to give." The idea that a sensation can enter directly into the process of reasoning has become known as the Myth of the Given. The late philosopher Donald Davidson, whose influence in the Anglophone philosophical world was unsurpassed, put the point succinctly: "Nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief." This line of thought, as Blackburn observes, threatens to cut off all contact between knowledge and the world. If beliefs can be checked only against other beliefs, then the sole criterion for a set of beliefs' being true is that they form a coherent web: a picture of knowledge known as holism. And different people interacting with the causal flux that is the world might well find themselves with distinct but equally coherent webs of belief--a possibility known as incommensurability. In such circumstances, who is to say what is truth and what is bullshit? But Blackburn will have none of this. The slogan "Nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief" can't be right, he claims. After all, if "John comes in and gets a good doggy whiff, he acquires a reason for believing that Rover is in the house. If Mary looks in the fridge and sees the butter, she acquires a reason for believing that there is butter in the fridge." Not so fast, a Davidsonian might reply. Sensations do not come labelled as "doggy whiffs" or "butter sighting"; such descriptions imply a good deal of prior concept formation. What gives John a reason to believe that Rover is in the house is indeed another belief: that what he is smelling falls under the category of "doggy whiff." Blackburn is obviously right in maintaining that such beliefs arise from causal interaction with the world, and not just from voices in our heads. But justifying those beliefs--determining whether we are doing well or badly in forming them--can be a matter only of squaring them with other beliefs. Derrida was not entirely bullshitting when he said, "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte" ("There is nothing outside the text"). Although Blackburn concludes that objective truth can and must survive the assaults of its critics, he himself has been forced to diminish that which he would defend. He and his allies, one might think, should be willing to give some sort of answer to the question that "jesting Pilate" put to Jesus: What is truth? The most obvious answer, that truth is correspondence to the facts, founders on the difficulty of saying just what form this "correspondence" is supposed to take, and what "facts" could possibly be other than truths themselves. Indeed, about the only thing that everyone can agree on is that each statement supplies its own conditions for being true. The statement "Snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white; the statement "The death penalty is wrong" is true if and only if the death penalty is wrong; and so forth. As far as Blackburn is concerned, any attempt to go beyond this simple observation by trying to mount a general theory of what makes things true or false is wrongheaded. That makes him, to use his own term, a "minimalist" about truth. By reducing truth to something "small and modest," Blackburn hopes to induce its enemies to call off their siege. The problem with this strategy is that it leaves us with little to care about. If truth necessarily eludes our theoretical grasp, then how do we know that it has any value, let alone that it is an absolute good? Why should we worry about whether our beliefs deserve to be called "true"? Deep down, we might prefer to believe whatever helps us achieve our ends and enables us to flourish, regardless of whether it is true. We may be happier believing in God even if there is no God. We may be happier thinking that we are really good at what we do even if that is a delusion. (The people with the truest understanding of their own abilities, research suggests, tend to be depressives.) However one feels about the authority of truth, there is a separate reason for deploring bullshit; namely, that most bullshit is ugly. When it takes the form of political propaganda, management-speak, or P.R., it is riddled with euphemism, clich?, fake folksiness, and high-sounding abstractions. The aesthetic dimension of bullshit is largely ignored in Frankfurt's essay. Yet much of what we call poetry consists of trite or false ideas in sublime language. (Oscar Wilde, in his dialogue "The Decay of Lying," suggests that the proper aim of art is "the telling of beautiful untrue things.") Bullshitting can involve an element of artistry; it offers, as Frankfurt acknowledges, opportunities for "improvisation, color, and imaginative play." When the bullshitting is done from an ulterior motive, like the selling of a product or the manipulation of an electorate, the outcome is likely to be a ghastly abuse of language. When it is done for its own sake, however, something delightful just might result. The paradigm here is Falstaff, whose refusal to be enslaved by the authority of truth is central to his comic genius. Falstaff's merry mixture of philosophy and bullshit is what makes him such a clubbable man, far better company than the dour Wittgenstein. We should by all means be severe in dealing with bullshitters of the political, the commercial, and the academic varieties. But let's not banish plump Jack. From checker at panix.com Wed Aug 24 23:03:02 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2005 19:03:02 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: In Explaining Life's Complexity, Darwinists and Doubters Clash Message-ID: In Explaining Life's Complexity, Darwinists and Doubters Clash http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/22/national/22design.html By [3]KENNETH CHANG At the heart of the debate over intelligent design is this question: Can a scientific explanation of the history of life include the actions of an unseen higher being? The proponents of intelligent design, a school of thought that some have argued should be taught alongside evolution in the nation's schools, say that the complexity and diversity of life go beyond what evolution can explain. Biological marvels like the optical precision of an eye, the little spinning motors that propel bacteria and the cascade of proteins that cause blood to clot, they say, point to the hand of a higher being at work in the world. In one often-cited argument, Michael J. Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University and a leading design theorist, compares complex biological phenomena like blood clotting to a mousetrap: Take away any one piece - the spring, the baseboard, the metal piece that snags the mouse - and the mousetrap stops being able to catch mice. Similarly, Dr. Behe argues, if any one of the more than 20 proteins involved in blood clotting is missing or deficient, as happens in hemophilia, for instance, clots will not form properly. Such all-or-none systems, Dr. Behe and other design proponents say, could not have arisen through the incremental changes that evolution says allowed life to progress to the big brains and the sophisticated abilities of humans from primitive bacteria. These complex systems are "always associated with design," Dr. Behe, the author of the 1996 book "Darwin's Black Box," said in an interview. "We find such systems in biology, and since we know of no other way that these things can be produced, Darwinian claims notwithstanding, then we are rational to conclude they were indeed designed." It is an argument that appeals to many Americans of faith. But mainstream scientists say that the claims of intelligent design run counter to a century of research supporting the explanatory and predictive power of Darwinian evolution, and that the design approach suffers from fundamental problems that place it outside the realm of science. For one thing, these scientists say, invoking a higher being as an explanation is unscientific. "One of the rules of science is, no miracles allowed," said Douglas H. Erwin, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution. "That's a fundamental presumption of what we do." That does not mean that scientists do not believe in God. Many do. But they see science as an effort to find out how the material world works, with nothing to say about why we are here or how we should live. And in that quest, they say, there is no need to resort to otherworldly explanations. So much evidence has been provided by evolutionary studies that biologists are able to explain even the most complex natural phenomena and to fill in whatever blanks remain with solid theories. This is possible, in large part, because evolution leaves tracks like the fossil remains of early animals or the chemical footprints in DNA that have been revealed by genetic research. For example, while Dr. Behe and other leading design proponents see the blood clotting system as a product of design, mainstream scientists see it as a result of a coherent sequence of evolutionary events. Early vertebrates like jawless fish had a simple clotting system, scientists believe, involving a few proteins that made blood stick together, said Russell F. Doolittle, a professor of molecular biology at the University of California, San Diego. Scientists hypothesize that at some point, a mistake during the copying of DNA resulted in the duplication of a gene, increasing the amount of protein produced by cells. Most often, such a change would be useless. But in this case the extra protein helped blood clot, and animals with the extra protein were more likely to survive and reproduce. Over time, as higher-order species evolved, other proteins joined the clotting system. For instance, several proteins involved in the clotting of blood appear to have started as digestive enzymes. By studying the evolutionary tree and the genetics and biochemistry of living organisms, Dr. Doolittle said, scientists have largely been able to determine the order in which different proteins became involved in helping blood clot, eventually producing the sophisticated clotting mechanisms of humans and other higher animals. The sequencing of animal genomes has provided evidence to support this view. For example, scientists had predicted that more primitive animals such as fish would be missing certain blood-clotting proteins. In fact, the recent sequencing of the fish genome has shown just this. "The evidence is rock solid," Dr. Doolittle said. Intelligent design proponents have advanced their views in books for popular audiences and in a few scientific articles. Some have developed mathematical formulas intended to tell whether something was designed or formed by natural processes. Mainstream scientists say that intelligent design represents a more sophisticated - and thus more seductive - attack on evolution. Unlike creationists, design proponents accept many of the conclusions of modern science. They agree with cosmologists that the age of the universe is 13.6 billion years, not fewer than 10,000 years, as a literal reading of the Bible would suggest. They accept that mutation and natural selection, the central mechanisms of evolution, have acted on the natural world in small ways, for example, leading to the decay of eyes in certain salamanders that live underground. Some intelligent design advocates even accept common descent, the notion that all species came from a common ancestor, a central tenet of evolution. Although a vast majority of scientists accept evolution, the Discovery Institute, a research group in Seattle that has emerged as a clearinghouse for the intelligent design movement, says that 404 scientists, including 70 biologists, have signed a petition saying they are skeptical of Darwinism. Nonetheless, many scientists regard intelligent design as little more than creationism dressed up in pseudoscientific clothing. Despite its use of scientific language and the fact that some design advocates are scientists, they say, the design approach has so far offered only philosophical objections to evolution, not any positive evidence for the intervention of a designer. 'Truncated View of Reality' If Dr. Behe's mousetrap is one of the most familiar arguments for design, another is the idea that intelligence is obvious in what it creates. Read a novel by Hemingway, gaze at the pyramids, and a designer's hand is manifest, design proponents say. But mainstream scientists, design proponents say, are unwilling to look beyond the material world when it comes to explaining things like the construction of an eye or the spinning motors that propel bacteria. What is wrong, they ask, with entertaining the idea that what looks like it was designed was actually designed? "If we've defined science such that it cannot get to the true answer, we've got a pretty lame definition of science," said Douglas D. Axe, a molecular biologist and the director of research at the Biologic Institute, a new research center in Seattle that looks at the organization of biological systems, including intelligent design issues. Dr. Axe said he had received "significant" financing from the Discovery Institute, but he declined to give any other details about the institute or its financing. Stephen C. Meyer, director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, compares the design approach to the work of archaeologists investigating an ancient civilization. "Imagine you're an archaeologist and you're looking at an inscription, and you say, 'Well, sorry, that looks like it's intelligent but we can't invoke an intelligent cause because, as a matter of method, we have to limit ourselves to materialistic processes,' " Dr. Meyer said. "That would be nuts." He added, "Call it miracle, call it some other pejorative term, but the fact remains that the materialistic view is a truncated view of reality." William Paley, an Anglican priest, made a similar argument in the early 19th century. Someone who finds a rock can easily imagine how wind and rain shaped it, he reasoned. But someone who finds a pocket watch lying on the ground instantly knows that it was not formed by natural processes. With living organisms so much more complicated than watches, he wrote, "The marks of design are too strong to be got over." Mainstream scientists say that the scientific method is indeed restricted to the material world, because it is trying to find out how it works. Simply saying, "it must have been designed," they say, is simply a way of not tackling the hardest problems. They say they have no disagreement with studying phenomena for which there are, as yet, no explanations. It is the presumption of a designer that mainstream scientists dispute, because there are no artifacts or biological signs - no scientific evidence, in other words - to suggest a designer's presence. Darwin's theory, in contrast, has over the last century yielded so many solid findings that no mainstream biologist today doubts its basic tenets, though they may argue about particulars. The theory has unlocked many of the mysteries of the natural world. For example, by studying the skeletons of whales, evolutionary scientists have been able to trace the history of their descent from small-hoofed land mammals. They made predictions about what the earliest water-dwelling whales might look like. And, in 1994, paleontologists reported discovering two such species, with many of the anatomical features that scientists had predicted. Darwin's Finches Nowhere has evolution been more powerful than in its prediction that there must be a means to pass on information from one generation to another. Darwin did not know the biological mechanism of inheritance, but the theory of evolution required one. The discovery of DNA, the sequencing of the human genome, the pinpointing of genetic diseases and the discovery that a continuum of life from a single cell to a human brain can be detected in DNA are all a result of evolutionary theory. Darwin may have been the classic scientific observer. He observed that individuals in a given species varied considerably, variations now known to be caused by mutations in their genetic code. He also realized that constraints of food and habitat sharply limited population growth; not every individual could survive and reproduce. This competition, he hypothesized, meant that those individuals with helpful traits multiplied, passing on those traits to their numerous offspring. Negative or useless traits did not help individuals reproduce, and those traits faded away, a process that Darwin called natural selection. The finches that Darwin observed in the Gal?pagos Islands provide the most famous example of this process. The species of finch that originally found its way to the Gal?pagos from South America had a beak shaped in a way that was ideal for eating seeds. But once arrived on the islands, that finch eventually diversified into 13 species. The various Gal?pagos finches have differently shaped beaks, each fine-tuned to take advantage of a particular food, like fruit, grubs, buds or seeds. Such small adaptations can arise within a few generations. Darwin surmised that over millions of years, these small changes would accumulate, giving rise to the myriad of species seen today. The number of organisms that, in those long periods, ended up being preserved as fossils is infinitesimal. As a result, the evolutionary record - the fossils of long-extinct organisms found preserved in rock - is necessarily incomplete, and some species appear to burst out of nowhere. Some supporters of intelligent design have argued that such gaps undermine the evidence for evolution. For instance, during the Cambrian explosion a half a billion years ago, life diversified to shapes with limbs and shells from jellyfish-like blobs, over a geologically brief span of 30 million years. Dr. Meyer sees design at work in these large leaps, which signified the appearance of most modern forms of life. He argues that genetic mutations do not have the power to create new shapes of animals. But molecular biologists have found genes that control the function of other genes, switching them on and off. Small mutations in these controller genes could produce new species. In addition, new fossils are being found and scientists now know that many changes occurred in the era before the Cambrian - a period that may have lasted 100 million years - providing more time for change. The Cambrian explosion, said David J. Bottjer, a professor of earth sciences at the University of Southern California and president of the Paleontological Society, is "a wonderful mystery in that we don't know everything yet." "I think it will be just a matter of time before smart people will be able to figure a lot more of this out," Dr. Bottjer said. "Like any good scientific problem." Purposeful Patterns Intelligent design proponents have been stung by claims that, in contrast to mainstream scientists, they do not form their own theories or conduct original research. They say they are doing the mathematical work and biological experiments needed to put their ideas on firm scientific ground. For example, William A. Dembski, a mathematician who drew attention when he headed a short-lived intelligent design institute at Baylor University, has worked on mathematical algorithms that purport to tell the difference between objects that were designed and those that occurred naturally. Dr. Dembski says designed objects, like Mount Rushmore, show complex, purposeful patterns that evince the existence of intelligence. Mathematical calculations like those he has developed, he argues, could detect those patterns, for example, distinguishing Mount Rushmore from Mount St. Helens. But other mathematicians have said that Dr. Dembski's calculations do not work and cannot be applied in the real world. Other studies that intelligent design theorists cite in support of their views have been done by Dr. Axe of the Biologic Institute. In one such study, Dr. Axe looked at a protein, called penicillinase, that gives bacteria the ability to survive treatment with the antibiotic penicillin. Dr. Meyer, of the Discovery Institute, has referred to Dr. Axe's work in arguing that working proteins are so rare that evolution cannot by chance discover them. What was the probability, Dr. Axe asked in his study, of a protein with this ability existing in the universe of all possible proteins? Penicillinase is made up of a strand of chemicals called amino acids folded into a shape that binds to penicillin and thus disables it. Whether the protein folds up in the right way determines whether it works or not. Dr. Axe calculated that of the plausible amino acid sequences, only one in 100,000 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion - a number written as 1 followed by 77 zeroes - would provide resistance to penicillin. In other words, the probability was essentially zero. Dr. Axe's research appeared last year in The Journal of Molecular Biology, a peer-reviewed scientific publication. Dr. Kenneth R. Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University and a frequent sparring partner of design proponents, said that in his study, Dr. Axe did not look at penicillinase "the way evolution looks at the protein." Natural selection, he said, is not random. A small number of mutations, sometimes just one, can change the function of a protein, allowing it to diverge along new evolutionary paths and eventually form a new shape or fold. One Shot or a Continual Act Intelligent design proponents are careful to say that they cannot identify the designer at work in the world, although most readily concede that God is the most likely possibility. And they offer varied opinions on when and how often a designer intervened. Dr. Behe, for example, said he could imagine that, like an elaborate billiards shot, the design was set up when the Big Bang occurred 13.6 billion years ago. "It could have all been programmed into the universe as far as I'm concerned," he said. But it was also possible, Dr. Behe added, that a designer acted continually throughout the history of life. Mainstream scientists say this fuzziness about when and how design supposedly occurred makes the claims impossible to disprove. It is unreasonable, they say, for design advocates to demand that every detail of evolution be filled in. Dr. Behe, however, said he might find it compelling if scientists were to observe evolutionary leaps in the laboratory. He pointed to an experiment by Richard E. Lenski, a professor of microbial ecology at Michigan State University, who has been observing the evolution of E. coli bacteria for more than 15 years. "If anything cool came out of that," Dr. Behe said, "that would be one way to convince me." Dr. Behe said that if he was correct, then the E. coli in Dr. Lenski's lab would evolve in small ways but never change in such a way that the bacteria would develop entirely new abilities. In fact, such an ability seems to have developed. Dr. Lenski said his experiment was not intended to explore this aspect of evolution, but nonetheless, "We have recently discovered a pretty dramatic exception, one where a new and surprising function has evolved," he said. Dr. Lenski declined to give any details until the research is published. But, he said, "If anyone is resting his or her faith in God on the outcome that our experiment will not produce some major biological innovation, then I humbly suggest they should rethink the distinction between science and religion." Dr. Behe said, "I'll wait and see." From checker at panix.com Fri Aug 26 01:35:04 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 21:35:04 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Beloit College Releases the Mindset List for the Class of 2009 Message-ID: Beloit College Releases the Mindset List for the Class of 2009 http://www.beloit.edu/~pubaff/releases/mindset_2009.htm For an archive of past years' Mindset Lists, click on the Middle College symbol. [2]Ron Nief (608) 363-2625 BELOIT COLLEGE RELEASES THE BELOIT COLLEGE MINDSET LIST FOR THE CLASS OF 2009 Beloit, Wis.--In the coming weeks, millions of students will be entering college for the first time. On average, these members of the Class of 2009 will be 18 years old, which means they were born in 1987. Starbucks, souped-up car stereos, telephone voicemail systems, and Bill Gates have always been a part of their lives. Each August, as students start to arrive, Beloit College releases the Beloit College Mindset List, which offers a world view of today's entering college students. It is the creation of Beloits Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride and Director of Public Affairs Ron Nief. McBride, who directs Beloits First Year Initiatives (FYI) program for entering students, notes that "This years entering students have grown up in a country where the main business has become business, and where terrorism, from obscure beginnings, has built up slowly but surely to become the threat it is today. Cable channels have become as mainstream as the 'Big 3' used to be, formality in dress has become more quaint than ever, and Aretha Franklin, Kermit the Frog and Jimmy Carter have become old-timers." Each year, according to Nief, When Beloit releases the Mindset List, it is the birth year of the entering students that is the most disturbing fact for most readers. This year will come as no exception and, once again, the faculty will remain the same age as the students get younger. The list is distributed to faculty on campus during the New Students Days orientation. According to McBride, It is an important reminder, as faculty start to show signs of hardening of the references, that we think about the touchstones and benchmarks of a generation that has grown up with CNN, home computers, AIDS awareness, digital cameras and the Bush political dynasty. We should also keep in mind that these students missed out on the pleasures of being tossed in the back of a station wagon with a bunch of friends and told to keep the noise down, walking in the woods without fearing Lyme Disease, or setting out to try all of the 28 ice cream flavors at Howard Johnsons. According to Nief, This is not serious in-depth research. It is meant to be thought-provoking and fun, yet accurate. It is as relevant as possible, given the broad social and geographic diversity of our students, who are drawn from every state and 50 countries. It is always open to challenge, which has an additional benefit in that it reminds us of students varied backgrounds. It is still a good reflection of the attitudes and experiences of the young people that we must be aware of from the first day of their college experience. _________________________________________________ BELOIT COLLEGE MINDSET LIST? FOR THE CLASS OF 2009 Most students entering college this fall were born in 1987. 1. Andy Warhol, Liberace, Jackie Gleason, and Lee Marvin have always been dead. 2. They don't remember when "cut and paste" involved scissors. 3. Heart-lung transplants have always been possible. 4. Wayne Gretzky never played for Edmonton. 5. Boston has been working on "The Big Dig" all their lives. 6. With little need to practice, most of them do not know how to tie a tie. 7. Pay-Per-View television has always been an option. 8. They never had the fun of being thrown into the back of a station wagon with six others. 9. Iran and Iraq have never been at war with each other. 10. They are more familiar with Greg Gumbel than with Bryant Gumbel. 11. Philip Morris has always owned Kraft Foods. 12. Al-Qaida has always existed with Osama bin Laden at its head. 13. They learned to count with Lotus 1-2-3. 14. Car stereos have always rivaled home component systems. 15. Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker have never preached on television. 16. Voice mail has always been available. 17. "Whatever" is not part of a question but an expression of sullen rebuke. 18. The federal budget has always been more than a trillion dollars. 19. Condoms have always been advertised on television. 20. They may have fallen asleep playing with their Gameboys in the crib. 21. They have always had the right to burn the flag. 22. For daily caffeine emergencies, Starbucks has always been around the corner. 23. Ferdinand Marcos has never been in charge of the Philippines. 24. Money put in their savings account the year they were born earned almost 7% interest. 25. Bill Gates has always been worth at least a billion dollars. 26. Dirty dancing has always been acceptable. 27. Southern fried chicken, prepared with a blend of 11 herbs and spices, has always been available in China. 28. Michael Jackson has always been bad, and greed has always been good. 29. The Starship Enterprise has always looked dated. 30. Pixar has always existed. 31. There has never been a "fairness doctrine" at the FCC. 32. Judicial appointments routinely have been "Borked." 33. Aretha Franklin has always been in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. 34. There have always been zebra mussels in the Great Lakes. 35. Police have always been able to search garbage without a search warrant. 36. It has always been possible to walk from England to mainland Europe on dry land. 37. They have grown up in a single superpower world. 38. They missed the oat bran diet craze. 39. American Motors has never existed. 40. Scientists have always been able to see supernovas. 41. Les Miserables has always been on stage. 42. Halogen lights have always been available at home, with a warning. 43. "Baby M" may be a classmate, and contracts with surrogate mothers have always been legal. 44. RU486, the "morning after pill," has always been on the market. 45. There has always been a pyramid in front of the Louvre in Paris. 46. British Airways has always been privately owned. 47. Irradiated food has always been available but controversial. 48. Snowboarding has always been a popular winter pastime. 49. Libraries have always been the best centers for computer technology and access to good software. 50. Biosphere 2 has always been trying to create a revolution in the life sciences. 51. The Hubble Telescope has always been focused on new frontiers. 52. Researchers have always been looking for stem cells. 53. They do not remember "a kinder and gentler nation." 54. They never saw the shuttle Challenger fly. 55. The TV networks have always had cable partners. 56. Airports have always had upscale shops and restaurants. 57. Black Americans have always been known as African-Americans. 58. They never saw Pat Sajak or Arsenio Hall host a late night television show. 59. Matt Groening has always had a Life in Hell. 60. Salman Rushdie has always been watching over his shoulder. 61. Digital cameras have always existed. 62. Tom Landry never coached the Cowboys. 63. Time Life and Warner Communications have always been joined. 64. CNBC has always been on the air. 65. The Field of Dreams has always been drawing people to Iowa. 66. They never saw a Howard Johnson's with 28 ice cream flavors. 67. Reindeer at Christmas have always distinguished between secular and religious decorations. 68. Entertainment Weekly has always been on the newsstand. 69. Lyme Disease has always been a ticking concern in the woods. 70. Jimmy Carter has always been an elder statesman. 71. Miss Piggy and Kermit have always dwelt in Disneyland. 72. America's Funniest Home Videos has always been on television. 73. Their nervous new parents heard C. Everett Koop proclaim nicotine as addictive as heroin. 74. Lever has always been looking for 2000 parts to clean. 75. They have always been challenged to distinguish between news and entertainment on cable TV. August 24, 2005 References 1. http://www.beloit.edu/~pubaff/mindset/index.html 2. mailto:niefr at beloit.edu From checker at panix.com Fri Aug 26 01:35:14 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 21:35:14 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Sigma Xi: Genealogy in the era of genomic Message-ID: Genealogy in the era of genomics: models of cultural and family traits reveal human homogeneity and stand conventional beliefs about ancestry on their head. Susanna C. Manrubia; Bernard Derrida; Damian H. Zanette. American Scientist, March-April 2003 v91 i2 p158(8) What plain proceeding is more plain than this?" asks the Earl of Warwick in the Shakespearean play Henry VI, Part II. "Henry doth claim the crown from John of Gaunt, the fourth son; York claims it from the third. Till Lionel's issue fails, his [John of Gaunt's] should not reign." In truth, nothing was plain for another two generations, as the ruling family, the Plantagenets, nearly butchered themselves into extinction during England's 15th-century Wars of the Roses, precipitated by the competing claims of the House of Clarence (descendants of Lionel, third son of Edward III), Lancaster (founded by John of Gaunt, the fourth son) and York (the house of the fifth son, Edmund). The smoke cleared only after Gaunt's descendant Henry VII of Tudor defeated the last Plantagenet king, Richard Ill, in battle. He consolidated his power with an intra-family marriage to Elizabeth of York. Their son, Henry VIII, was descended from King Edward III (1312--1377) in four different ways--each one marking a key alliance and a turning point in English history. The story of the royal houses of England illustrates not only how the fate of nations can turn on questions of genealogy but also how the phenomenon of coalescence--the merging of the branches in a family tree--is staggeringly common in any closed population. In fact the Plantagenets are in some ways utterly typical. In a population of 1,000 people who choose their mates at random, 10 generations are normally enough to guarantee that any two people have some ancestor in common. Perhaps even more startlingly. 18 generations normally guarantee that any two people in such a population have all their ancestors in common. So it is not the least bit surprising, for example, that every hereditary monarch in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century was a descendant of Edward III. In recent years, the field of genomics has revolutionized our perception of how closely all human beings are related to each other. The study of mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA (passed on without change, except for mutations, from mother to daughter), and certain genes on the Y chromosome (passed on from father to son) has enabled geneticists to place the time of the "mitochondrial Eve" or the "Y chromosome Adam" in the surprisingly recent past. The mitochondria carried in all human cells are the global legacy of a single woman. In a pioneering study carried out in 1987, the University of California, Berkeley, team of Rebecca Cann, Mark Stoneking and Allan Wilson estimated that this woman lived between 140,000 and 290,000 years ago. These analyses tell only part of the story, because they are based on mono parental inheritance. The great majority of our genome is inherited from both the mother and the father, and their genes are shuffled by the crossingover, or recombination, of DNA. Our recombinant DNA tells a much richer story of our past, if we could only learn to read it. Each one of us, if we could look far enough back in the past, would find just as tangled a pedigree as Henry VIII's, with many different coalescing branches. Mitochondrial DNA is a powerful tool because it cuts through this thicket and highlights a single vine--but for the very same reason, it misrepresents the complexity of our past. To understand the full story of human ancestry, the way that genes and lineages evolve over tens and hundreds of generations, we have to use mathematical models and computer simulations, because we do not have genealogical records that extend so far back into the past. These biparental models show that mitochondrial DNA actually underestimates how quickly human populations become homogeneous in ancestry. The Extinction of Families The first serious attempt to solve a genealogical problem mathematically resulted from a controversy involving one of the most famous British scientists of the Victorian era, Sir Francis Galton. Appropriately enough, Galton, a first cousin of Charles Darwin, had written a book entitled Hereditary Genius, in which he attempted to explain the oft-noted phenomenon of the decline of great families. "The instances are very numerous in which surnames that were once common have since become scarce or have wholly disappeared," Galton wrote several years later. "The tendency is universal, and, in explanation of it, the conclusion has been hastily drawn that a rise in physical comfort and intellectual capacity is necessarily accompanied by diminution in 'fertility."' Galton himself proposed an alternative explanation that (not surprisingly, for that era) blamed the women. Men who had recently been elevated in status, he wrote, would tend to consolidate their positions by marrying heiresses, who were by definition women from families with no sons. Such women, he believed, would themselves be less likely to produce sons. However, a Swiss botanist named Alphonse de Candolle correctly pointed out that there was another possible explanation for the failure of some family names to perpetuate themselves: It could simply arise by chance. Until scientists knew the likelihood of a surname dying out by random processes, they would not have any way to tell whether the extinction of "famous" surnames was in any way anomalous. In 1874, Galton enlisted a mathematician, the Reverend Henry William Watson, to resolve this question. The approach Watson took was ingenious, and he came within a whisker of discovering a basic result of the 20th-century theory of branching processes. Because he wanted to assess the role of chance, Watson assumed that all males had the same innate fertility, so that the differences in their numbers of offspring were attributable purely to chance. Thus, each male had a certain probability [p.sub.0] of having no sons; a probability [p.sub.1] of having one son; a probability [p.sub.2] of having two sons; and so forth. Of course, if a man had no sons, his lineage would die out immediately So the probability of extinction after one generation--call it [q.sub.1]--would be just the same as [p.sub.0]. But things get more complicated in the succeeding generations, and that is why Galton had asked for help. For example, a man could have one son (probability [p.sub.1]) who himself had no sons (with probability [p.sub.0]); the probability of his line going extinct in this way would then be the product of the probabilities, [p.sub.1][p.sub.0]. Or he could have two sons (with probability [p.sub.2])' who both had no sons (with probability [p.sup.2.sub.0]); the probability of this event would be [p.sub.2] [p.sup.2.sub.0]. Adding up the probability of each of these events gives the probability that the lineage is extinct after two generations, [q.sub.2]: [q.sub.2] = [p.sub.0] + [p.sub.1] [p.sub.0] + [p.sub.2] [p.sup.2.sub.0] + [p.sub.3] [p.sup.3.sub.0] ... Watson's brilliant insight was that the expression on the right side of this equation, called the generating function, contained all the information about the probability of extinction in later generations as well. Computing the probabilities of extinction was simply a matter of applying the generating function over and over again. Mathematically, he defined the generating function f(x) by replacing each [p.sub.0] (except the first) with a variable x: f(x) = [p.sub.0] + [p.sub.1] x + [p.sub.2] [x.sup.2] + [p.sub.3] [x.sup.3] ... Then he showed that the extinction probabilities for each generation are obtained by feeding the previous generation's extinction probability back into this function, a process called iteration: [q.sub.1] =f(0), [q.sub.2] = f([q.sub.1]), [q.sub.3] = f([q.sub.2]), ... And what would be the probability of extinction after an indefinite number of generations, [q.sub.[infinity]]? It would simply be an iterate of itself! That is, f([q.sub.[infinity]]) = [q.sub.[infinity]] This is the equation that gives the probability that any lineage will ultimately--whether after one generation, 10, or any number--become extinct. Now, having come so close to a beautiful solution, Watson made his great blunder. With no demographic data to tell him the probabilities of having zero sons, one son, etc., he simply took a guess: f(x) [(3 + x).sup.5]/[4.sup.5]. The guess was not a bad one, but then he made a mathematical mistake by overlooking a solution to his equation. He thought that the only solution was f(l) = 1; in other words, [q.sub.[infinity]] = 1, meaning a 100 percent probability that any lineage will eventually go extinct. How depressing! "All the surnames, therefore, tend to extinction in an indefinite time," Watson wrote. "This result might have been anticipated generally, for a surname once lost can never be recovered, and there is an additional chance of loss in every successive generation." Watson's analysis was correct for shrinking or constant-size populations. But in a growing population, a second solution for [q.sub.[infinity]] appears. For the generating function Watson used, where the population was growing at a rate of around 8 percent per generation, it turns out that f(0.55) = 0.55 as well, meaning there is a 55 percent probability that any lineage will become extinct and a 45 percent probability that it will survive forever. Very roughly, one may say that a lineage (say, the Smiths or the Joneses) can reach a critical mass where its survival is essentially assured. But because Watson seemed to have resolved the debate, no one caught his mistake for another 50 years. Surnames and Mitochondria In the 1920s, a new generation of biologists and mathematicians laid the foundations of population genetics, and soon discovered Watson's error. In a growing population, any given lineage has a nonzero chance to survive indefinitely. In 1939, Alfred Lotka used data from the 1920 U.S. census to estimate [p.sub.0], [p.sub.1], etc., and then computed that [q.sub.[infinity]] = 0.819. This meant that in the United States of that era, the probability for indefinite survival of a surname, beginning with one progenitor, was about 18 percent. Or, if you prefer to look at it pessimistically, the probability of eventual extinction was about 82 percent. There is always an inherent danger in such pronouncements: They begin to sound like absolute truths. It is important to remember that they are dependent on particular mathematical assumptions, which may or may not conform to the real world. In Watson's model, which has become known to population geneticists as a Galton-Watson process, some of the assumptions are quite debatable. Do all males really have the same innate fertility? Perhaps being a member of a particular family confers some evolutionary advantage; in that case, the process is no longer "neutral." (This becomes more likely when one applies Galton-Watson processes to biological traits rather than surnames.) Is the fertility of each male really independent of each other male, and unvarying over time? And what happens if we allow "mutation" of surnames, either through immigration or through fluidity in spelling? Different cultures, in fact, show great differences in the mutability of surnames. In China, surnames have been strongly conserved over thousands of years. A survey by Emperor Tang Taizong in 627 A.D. found a total of 593 different surnames. In 960 A.D., the book Surnames of a Hundred Families recorded 438 surnames. Today, about 40 percent of the population of China have one of the 10 most common names, and 70 percent have one of the 45 most common names. We believe that this lack of mutability is inherent to the Chinese writing system, which represents each surname by a single character. By contrast, the U.S. and Canada have the highest diversity of surnames in the world, a legacy of their history as countries built by immigration. The extreme mutability of English spellings has also increased the variety of surnames, as the following excerpt from a World Wide Web page devoted to Hemingways (Figure 3 below) attests: My most elusive Hemingway ancestor, Fisher Hemingway, born in 1819 or 1820 in New York... is listed as: Hemensway, Fisher in the 1880 census; Hemingway, Fisher when he married Catharine Chambers in 1858; Hemenway, Fisher in the 1845-46 Cleveland city directory, Henenway, Fisher in the 1840 census; Hemmingway, Fisher when he married Elizabeth Elliott in 1839 ... My current list of Hemingway variations runs to many pages, and I suspect that I have overlooked many others. We have studied the distribution of surnames using a simple model that allows for a small probability of mutations at any time and that also includes a flexible death rate that can be made equal to, greater than or less than the birth rate. In this model, like the Galton-Watson model, we find dramatic differences between growing populations and static ones, where the birth and death rate are equal. In a growing population, the diversity of names always increases over time. Given enough time, the number of names that belong to exactly y people, or n(y), becomes proportional to l/[y.sup.2] for large enough y, that is to say for large family sizes. Thus, for example, there should be 100 times as many names that belong to only 20 people as names that belong to 200 people. In a static population, on the other hand, the mutation rate becomes very important. If the mutation rate is too low, then the diversity is very likely to decrease until there is only one dominant surname. On the other hand, if the mutation rate is high, then the frequency function n(y) will approach a steady state, but one that is much more biased toward small family sizes than is the distribution for a growing population. We emphasize that these steady-state distributions hold true only after many generations. On the flip side of the coin, deviations from the expected steady state can reflect recent historical events. For instance, modern Japanese surnames began to appear only 120 years ago. Thus we would expect the distribution of family sizes--particularly large families--to retain an imprint of the "initial state" of a century ago. A comparison with real data taken from three sources--the whole 1996 Argentine phone book, the "A" entries of the 1996 Berlin phone book, and the whole list of surnames from five Japanese cities circa 2000--seems to bear out these conclusions. (In this study we defined a "family" as all people with the same last name.) The Argentine data fit very nicely to the steady-state line n(y), except for a slight deficit of very large families. This is consistent with Argentina's demography, a generally pan-European population that has been disturbed a bit by immigration in the late 1800s and after World War II. The Berlin data have more scatter, because they come from a smaller data set, but seem to follow the steady-state distribution. The Japanese data, however, deviate from the steady-state distribution dramatically, with a significant excess of large families. If we were to return a century or two from now, we would probably find the distribution to be clustered more closely around the straight line shown in Figur e 4. However, this prediction would not hold up if Japan (or either of the other countries) went through a prolonged period of zero population growth. Modern scientists may not care as much as Victorian scientists did about surnames or the death of "great families." They do, however, care about mitochondrial DNA, which has the same mode of inheritance as a surname. A mother's mtDNA is passed along intact, except for rare mutations, to all of her children; only her daughters, though, can propagate that DNA to the next generation. The simplest counting unit on a double strand of DNA is the base pair, made up of a nucleotide on each strand. There is a special segment in mtDNA, the so-called control region, about 500 base pairs in length, that apparently evolves neutrally. This segment does not seem to have a specific function, and the mutations do not offer any survival benefit. Thus the slow, random genetic drift of mtDNA forms an excellent genetic clock that indicates whether two people, or two groups of people, had a common ancestor, and how long ago. The discovery of this clock has cleared up some important historical debates, both from the recent and the distant past. For example, the mtDNA of a woman whom many people believed to be the princess Anastasia, the daughter of the last tsar of Russia, turned out to be unrelated to other living relatives of the Romanov dynasty. The mitochondria of Pacific Islanders have mutations common among Asiatic people, and thus prove that the Pacific Islanders came from Asia, rather than from the Americas as some historians believed. And the analysis of mtDNA from the upper arm of a 50,000-year-old Neandertal skeleton established that Neandertals apparently split from the lineage leading to modern human beings some 500,000 years ago and therefore do not contribute mtDNA to modern humans. In general, mtDNA, just like surnames, can identify demographic events in a population's past, such as migrations, population bottlenecks or expansions. One Parent or Two? Mitochondrial DNA has provided groundbreaking insights into the history of humans. However, mtDNA tells only part of the story: We know that we have, potentially, as many contributors to our genes as ancestors in our genealogical tree. "Mitochondrial Eve" and "Y-chromosome Adam" need not be contemporaries or live in the same region, and they are not necessarily the most important contributors to our genetic makeup. In fact, if we had one common ancestor at some particular time, we almost certainly had many of them. Mitochondrial Eve merely happens to be the one who is our mother's mother's mother's (repeat this many thousand times) mother. Mitochondrial analysis cannot tell us who is our mother's father's mother's father's (repeat this many thousand times) father. Some of these undetectable ancestors may have lived a good deal more recently than mitochondrial Eve. It is also worth noting that common ancestors do not necessarily make equal contributions to our genome. it is true that our parents each contribute 50 percent of our genetic material, but our grandparents do not necessarily each contribute 25 percent. Going farther back, some ancestors may have their genetic contribution enhanced by genealogical coalescence: More branches leading to them translates to more opportunities to pass their DNA down to us. Two recent studies, one by us and the other by Joseph Chang of Yale University, have emphasized the difference between the genetic and genealogical approaches to coalescence. The mathematical models of genealogy that we studied and that Chang studied are very similar and can be extended, as we did, to populations of varying sizes. The models work from present to past. We assume that each individual randomly chooses two parents from the preceding generation. "Of course [this model] is not meant to be particularly realistic," writes Chang. "Still, one might worry that this simple model ignores considerations of sex and allows impossible genealogies. If this seems bothersome, an alternative interpretation of the same process is that each 'individual' is actually a couple, and that the population consists of n monogamous couples. Then the random choices cause no contradictions: the husband and wife each were born to a couple from the previous generation." As further arguments for the validity of this model, we might add that it gives a good match to census data on family sizes, and that it can (if desired) be reformulated to move forward in time. (The "forward" version is, however, slightly more complicated.) With this model, one can study a variety of questions. For example, there is the one Galton and Watson were interested in: What is the probability that your line (now defined as all descendants, not just sons of sons of sons) will go extinct? If you pick two people at random in the present, how many generations back will you have to go to find a common ancestor? How far back do you have to go until all the ancestors are the same? Figure 5 illustrates these questions. In this constant population of 12 people, the first common ancestor of the two individuals denoted by red and blue boxes is a grandmother, shown in red bounded by blue. Going back to previous generations, we find the red+blue common ancestors becoming more and more common, until after a mere 6 generations there is complete overlap between the two individuals' ancestry. Notice that the mitochondrial lineages (shown in green) have not yet coalesced, so that a geneticist studying mtDNA may or may not realize that the two present-day individuals are so closely related. This example is not unusual. The number of generations to the first common ancestor, in a constant population of n people, is typically the logarithm of n to the base 2. (The logarithm of 12 to the base 2 is 3.6, so we would expect a common ancestor around three or four generations ago.) According to Chang, the number of generations, G, until any two individuals have the same set of ancestors, is 1.77 times the logarithm of n to the base 2. One might call this the "coalescence time" of the population. (For a population of 12, it works out to about 6.3 generations, which agrees with the example in Figure 5.) We happened to choose a different approach from Chang's, comparing instead the number of times that a given ancestor appears in two distinct genealogical trees. We found that it takes on the order of log n generations for the number of repetitions of each ancestor to become identical in any tree, with an abrupt transition of about 14 generations (independent of the population size) where the similarity jum ps from 1 to 99 percent. Finally, both Chang and our group found that there is not only a universal common ancestor but a universal ancestral population. At the coalescence time a complete dichotomy emerges, in which every individual is either an ancestor of all people in the present generation or none of them. (If the population is constant, about 80 percent of the people in the Gth generation are universal ancestors, and the remaining 20 percent have had their lines go extinct. In a growing population, the proportion of universal ancestors is higher and the proportion of extinct lines is lower.) Clearly, these model results stand the conventional wisdom about ancestry and "mitochondrial Eves" on its head. It is therefore very important to scrutinize the assumptions we made, to see what is reasonable and what is not. We heartily concur with Chang when he writes, "What is the significance of these results? An application to the world population of humans would be an obvious misuse. In the real world, the selection of parents (or in the "forward" model, the selection of mates) is, of course, not random. Geography, race, religion and class have always played strong roles in biasing mate selection. Even so, the models are telling us something important: In subpopulations where random mating can take place, a common ancestor pool emerges with startling rapidity, in hundreds rather than hundreds of thousands of years. By contrast, genetic homogeneity in a population takes a great deal longer to emerge. Although a genealogical tree has the property of doubling the ancestry at each generation, this is not the case for individual genes, which necessarily are inherited along single branches and thus conform to a monoparental model. Thus one might define a genetic coalescence time to be the number of generations required to reach a common ancestor for any particular non-recombining allele. (This is essentially the same as the mitochondrial DNA problem, in which each individual is linked to only one parent.) In his pioneering contribution, Sir John Frank Charles Kingman, currently at the University of Cambridge, has shown that this kind of coalescence takes a number of generations equal to the population size itself. Thus, for example, a randomly intermarrying population of 1,000 people will reach genealogical coalescence in 18 generations, but will require a thousand generations to achieve genetic coalescence. And even in this case, different genes may lead to different common ancestors. Thus, once again, it is more appropriate to speak of an entire ancestral population, rather than a single progenitor Eve. Conclusion The analysis of mitochondrial DNA has allowed scientists to obtain many spectacular results regarding human evolution. MtDNA represents a small, though essential, piece of our whole genome. Its relevance to the origin of and relationships among human groups lies in its peculiar mode of transmission through the maternal line, analogous to surnames. However, our genetic ancestry is much broader, because we know that a large fraction of any population many generations ago is included in our genealogical tree. Our surname, like mtDNA, is only one small piece of information about our origins. Mitochondrial genes contain information largely about energy production. But most of the information that characterizes us as human beings resides in our so-called nuclear genes, which constitute more than 99.99 percent of the human genome. These genes mix every time a pair of humans reproduce, through the process of recombination. If we could follow all the branches through which we have inherited our genes, we would probably find that all those people included in our genealogical tree have contributed--maybe in an extremely diluted way--to our genetic inheritance. It is not only mitochondrial Eve, but probably most of her contemporaries, who have left silent footprints in our extant (collective) genome. The next time you hear someone boasting of being descended from royalty, take heart: There is a very good probability that you have noble ancestors too. The rapid mixing of genealogical branches, within only a few tens of generations, almost guarantees it. The real doubt is how much "royal blood" your friend (or you) still carry in your genes. Genealogy does not mean genes. And how similar we are genetically remains an issue of current research. [FIGURE 4 OMITTED] [FIGURE 6 OMITTED] Bibliography Cann, R, M. Stoneking and A. C. Wilson. 1987. Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution. Nature 325:31-36. Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi L., P. Menozzi and A. Piazza. 1994. History and Geography of Huwan Genes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Chang, Joseph T. 1999. Recent common ancestors of all present-day individuals. Advances in Applied Probability 31:1002-1026. Derrida, Bernard, Susanna C. Manrubia and Damian H. Zanette. 1999. Statistical properties of genealogical trees. Physical Review Letters 82:1987-1990. Derrida, Bernard, Susanna C. Manrubia and Damian H. Zanette. 2000a. On the genealogy of a population of biparental individuals. Journal of Theoretical Biology 203:303-315. Derrida, Bernard, Susanna C. Manrubia and Damian H. Zanette. 2000b. Distribution of repetitions of ancestors in genealogical trees. Physica A 281:1-16. Harris, Theodore E. 1963. The Theory of Branching Processes. New York: Springer Verlag. Kingman, J. F. C. 1982. The coalescent. Stochastic Processes and Their Applications 13:235-248. Manrubia, Susanna C., and Damian H. Zanette. 2002. At the boundary between biological and cultural evolution: The origin of surname distributions. Journal of Theoretical Biology 216:461-477. Sykes, Brian. 2001. The Seven Daughters of Eve. New York W. W. Norton & Company. Watson, H. W., and Francis Galton. 1874. On the probability of the extinction of families. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4:138-144. Zanette, Damian H., and Susanna C. Manrubia. 2001. Vertical transmission of culture and the distribution of family names. Physica A 295:1-8. Links to Internet resources for further exploration of "Genealogy in the Era of Genomics" are available on the American Scientist Web site: http://www.americanscientist.org/articles/03articles/manrubia.html Susanna C. Manrubia received her Ph.D. in physics at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya in 1996. She currently holds a tenure-track position (Ramon y Cajal) at the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid. She is interested in biological evolution and has applied statistical-mechanics methods and modeling techniques to a variety of problems where regular collective patterns appear. Bernard Derrida studied at Ecole normale superieure (ENS) in Paris and completed his Ph.D. in 1979. Since 1993 he has been professor of physics at Universite Pierre et Marie Curie and at ENS. He is an expert in statistical mechanics who has adapted statistical-physics ideas to various problems in biology. Damian H. Zanette is a researcher and professor at Centro Atomico Bariloche and Instituto Balseiro in Argentina. He completed his Ph.D. in 1989 with a thesis on kinetic theory. He is interested in applying the methods of statistical physics to revealing patterns of complexity in social and biological systems. Address for Manrubia: Centro de Astrobiologia, INTA-CSIC, Ctra. de Ajalvir Km. 4,28850 Torrejon de Ardoz, Madrid, Spain. Internet: cuevasms at inta.es From checker at panix.com Fri Aug 26 01:35:26 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 21:35:26 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Asia Times: Spengler: Why nations die (fwd) Message-ID: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 20 Aug 2005 15:44:42 -0400 (EDT) From: Premise Checker To: Premise Checker: ; Subject: Asia Times: Spengler: Why nations die Spengler: Why nations die Asia Times Online :: Asian News, Business and Economy. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GH16Aa02.html Why people read a certain book often contains more information than the book itself, and there is rich information content in the brisk sales of Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Diamond picks out of the rubbish bin of history a few cases of nugatory interest in which environmental disaster overwhelmed a society otherwise desirous of continued existence. According to the publisher's notice (I do not read such piffle), Diamond avers that the problem was in breeding too fast and cutting down too many trees. The silly Vikings of Greenland refused to eat fish, disdained the hunting techniques of the Inuit, and consumed too much wood and topsoil. As a result their colony collapsed during the 15th century and they all died. One feels sorry for the Greenlanders, though not for their cousins on the Scandinavian mainland, who just then stood at the cusp of their European power. Something similar happened to the Easter Islanders, who chopped down all their palm trees and the Mayans of Central America, who burned their forests to build temples. Diamond thinks this should serve as a warning to the inveterate consumerists of the United States, who presumably also face extinction should they fail to erect legal barriers to suburban sprawl. Ideological reflex is too mild a word for this sort of thinking; perhaps the term "cramp" would do better. Given that America returns land to the wilderness each year, the danger to American survival from deforestation must be on par with the risks of being hit by a large asteroid. The world is not breeding too fast - birthrates are everywhere falling - and the industrial countries (except for the Anglo-Saxons) fail to reproduce at all. Why should the peculiar circumstances that killed obscure populations in remote places make a geography professor's book into a bestseller? Evidently the topic of mass extinction commands the attention of the reading public, although the reading public wants to look for the causes of mass extinction in all but the most obvious place, which is the mirror. Diamond's books appeal to an educated, secular readership, that is, precisely the sort of people who have one child or none at all. If you have fewer than two children, and most of the people you know have fewer than two children, Holmesian deductive powers are not required to foresee your eventual demise. After rejecting revealed religion, modern people seek an sense of exaltation in nature, which is to say that they revered the old natural religion. If you do not believe in God, quipped G K Chesterton, you will believe in anything. It is too fearful to contemplate one's own mortality, so the Green projects his own presentiment of death onto the natural world. Fear for the destruction of the natural world - trees, whales, polar ice-caps, tigers, whatever - substitutes for the death-anxiety of the individual. I discussed this under the title, "It's not the end of the world - it's just the end of you," and am told that Rush Limbaugh read the whole essay aloud on his radio program. [1] In fact, the main reason societies fail is that they choose not to live. That is a horrifying thought to absorb, and the average reader would much rather delve into the details of obscure ecosystems of the past than reflect upon why half of Eastern Europe will die out by mid-century. Suicide is a rare occurrence at the individual level, but a typical one at the level of nations. Even among the most stressed populations in the world, eg the Neolithic Amazon people of the Guarani, the suicide rate is small compared to the total population. According to Survival International (survival-international.org), 330 of the 30,000 Guaranis killed themselves during the past 17 years, a sad response to the shock of engagement with modern culture. We know little of small peoples who died out in antiquity or even Medieval times, but the case histories that have come down to us are compelling, precisely because they include the most successful civilizations of the West, namely classical Greece, Rome and Byzantium. Countless small tribes disappeared into the hands of the Roman slavers, doubtless quite against their inclinations. As Robert Marcellus wrote in The Human Life Review: The Greek geographer and historian Strabo (63 BCE-21 CE) described Greece as "a land entirely deserted; the depopulation begun since long continues. Roman soldiers camp in abandoned houses; Athens is populated by statues". Plutarch observed that "one would no longer find in Greece 3,000 hoplites [infantrymen]." The historian Polybius (204-122 BCE) wrote: "One remarks nowadays all over Greece such a diminution in natality and in general manner such a depopulation that the towns are deserted and the fields lie fallow. Although this country has not been ravaged by wars or epidemics, the cause of the harm is evident: by avarice or cowardice the people, if they marry, will not bring up the children they ought to have. At most they bring up one or two. It is in this way that the scourge before it is noticed is rapidly developed. The remedy is in ourselves; we have but to change our morals." [2] Sparta, the model of slave-based military oligarchy, had 5,000 land-owning families at the time of the Peloponnesian War, but only 700 by the third century AD after Epiminondas broke the Spartan hold over its helot population. Rome's population fell to perhaps 100,000 during the seventh century from 1 million in the second century. Between 150 AD and 450 AD, the population of Rome's Western empire fell by about four-fifths. Constantinople held 250,000 people in the ninth century and between 600,000 and one million during the 12th century, yet it had fallen to only 100,000 when the Turks took it, at least in 1453. After Constantinople, the world's largest city west of the Indus, well may have been the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan. Estimates of the annual number of humans sacrificed by the Aztecs range from 20,000 to a quarter million per year. Although Aztec civilization was overthrown by the conquering Spaniards, it could not have lasted indefinitely given such practices. There is endless debate about such data. Roman population data are somewhat conjectural, and Strabo's estimates have been disputed by some scholars. Explanations have been forwarded that range from the collapse of the slave-based agricultural system to mass infanticide and venereal disease. Nonetheless, it seems clear that the Romans did not so much conquer Greece as to occupy its shell; that the Germanic tribes did not so much conquer Rome so much as to move into what remained of it; and that the Arabs did not so much conquer the Byzantine hinterland as migrate into it. On this last point, a new book by Yehuda Nevo and Judith Koren argues convincingly that the Byzantines ceded frontier territories to Arab foederati in the mid-seventh century and that the famous battles of the Islamic conquest in fact never took place. [3] In one form or another the antecedents of Western civilization died of existential causes, rather than external ones. No doubt Diamond's Greenlanders wished to keep on living. They ate their dogs when other food ran out (although apparently they continued to refuse fish for reasons that are hard to explain). Perhaps the will to live among 17th century Easter Islanders burned brightly as they chopped down their last palm tree. It is hard for us to fathom, for we have very little in common with the Easter Islanders. But we have a great deal in common with the residents of classical Greek polis and with the Romans as well as their Byzantine offshoot. Notes [i] http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FB03Aa01.html [2] http://www.humanlifereview.com/2001_winter/demarcellus.php [3] Crossroads to Islam, by Yehuda D Nevo and Judith Koren. Prometheus: New York 2003. Head Office: Rm 202, Hau Fook Mansion, No. 8 Hau Fook St., Kowloon, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau: 11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110 References 1. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FF03Aa07.html 4. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page.html 5. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China.html 6. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia.html 7. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia.html 8. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Japan.html 9. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea.html 10. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East.html 11. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia.html 12. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy.html 13. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Asian_Economy.html 14. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/book_reviews.html 15. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Letters.html 16. http://forum.atimes.com/ 17. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/War_and_Terror.html 18. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/others/spengler.html 19. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/others/Henry.html 20. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/others/Escobar.html 21. http://a.tribalfusion.com/f.ad?site=AsiaTimes&adSpace=ROS&size=468x60&requestID=587334943 22. http://a.tribalfusion.com/i.click?site=AsiaTimes&adSpace=ROS&size=468x60&requestID=587334943 From checker at panix.com Fri Aug 26 01:36:36 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 21:36:36 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Economist: (Laffer) The budget deficit: Cocktail-bar calculations Message-ID: The budget deficit: Cocktail-bar calculations http://www.economist.com/World/na/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=4299097 5.8.18 Are George Bush's tax cuts paying for themselves? [4]Get article background NOT many economists find fame in a cocktail lounge. But it was in just such a venue that Arthur Laffer in 1974 drew the "Laffer curve" on the back of a convenient napkin. The sketch, still more popular with politicians than economists, illustrated how lower tax rates, by spurring growth, might leave tax revenues undiminished. Tax cuts might pay for themselves. None of the weighty studies produced by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) would fit on the back of a napkin. But the latest projections from the legislature's non-partisan budget-watcher have excited a few of Mr Laffer's fans. The federal budget deficit, the CBO reckons, will narrow to $331 billion this fiscal year (which ends on September 30th), from $412 billion the year before. Tom DeLay, the Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives, was quick to offer a Laffer-like explanation: "Lower taxes and spending discipline spur economic growth, which in turn cuts the deficit," he opined. In fact, spending discipline is still rather lacking. Government outlays will increase by $181 billion (or 8%) this year, a figure that does not include the cost of the pork-stuffed highway bill, signed by the president on August 10th. The fall in the deficit owes rather more to the other side of the ledger: tax revenues are set to grow by $262 billion, or 14% this year. They will increase as a share of GDP for the first time under this tax-cutting president. Income taxes withheld from pay cheques account for some of the new revenues, but many of the gains are in more exotic areas. The government's take from such things as capital gains, payouts from pension funds, and "sole proprietorships" (one-man companies) should increase by 28% this year, the CBO reckons. Corporations are also making a strikingly handsome contribution to the state's coffers, paying $80 billion (or fully 42%) more than the year before. A third of this bounty seems to be due to the demise of a corporate tax break, which allowed firms to deduct up to half their investment costs from their taxable profits last year. But some $53 billion of it caught the CBO unawares, and remains unexplained. Is Mr DeLay right to attribute any of these gains to the seductive curves of supply-side economics? In December, Gregory Mankiw, who used to be chairman of Mr Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, and Matthew Weinzierl, a colleague at Harvard University, published a "back-of-the-envelope guide" to tax rates and revenues. Given the relatively low tax rates prevailing in America, they thought that tax cuts could not be entirely self-financing. But by their reckoning cutting taxes on labour would generate enough growth to recoup about 17 cents on the dollar, and a tax cut on capital could pay for more than half of itself. The government would take a thinner slice of a bigger pie. Left out of these calculations is any guide to what happens when taxes are cut but spending is not. The budget deficits that ensue will tend to "crowd out" investment, slowing growth. The CBO calculates that every extra dollar of federal borrowing reduces investment in the economy by 36 cents. The White House, according to its latest forecast in July, now expects to leave a deficit of $162 billion by the time the president leaves office in 2009. But it assumes (absurdly) that Congress will not add a single dollar to its discretionary spending on anything except defence and homeland security from 2006 to 2010. It also leaves out of its projections any extra money for Iraq, Afghanistan or the war on terror. The CBO makes the opposite assumption. It assumes that by 2009, all of these missions will remain far from accomplished, costing the American taxpayer the same amount, in real terms, as they do today. Partly as a result, the CBO shows Mr Bush bequeathing a deficit of $321 billion to his successor. Though the CBO's outlook is substantially worse than the White House's over a five-year horizon, it improves dramatically over ten years. This is not because of some long-run Laffer curve; but because the CBO assumes that Mr Bush's tax cuts will expire, as scheduled (the bulk of them in December 2010). That looks extremely unlikely: no politician would allow it and Mr Bush is already trying to make them permanent. If that happens, it would add $349 billion to the deficit in 2015, plus an extra $83 billion in debt service costs. The CBO's job, says Douglas Holtz-Eakin, its director, is to forecast the economy and the budget, not Congress. It is required by law to assume that Congress will carry on doing what it currently does, adjusted only for inflation. "Everything we have presented today is going to be wrong," he confidently predicted as he unveiled his report. The same, of course, could be said of Mr Bush's projections. References 4. http://www.economist.com/background/displayBackground.cfm?story_id=4299097 E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles. From checker at panix.com Fri Aug 26 01:37:14 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 21:37:14 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Ideas Bank: 60 Key Works: A Beginner's Guide to the Futures Literature Message-ID: 60 Key Works: A Beginner's Guide to the Futures Literature http://ide.idebanken.no/English/Framtidsbilder.html [Links omitted, for they would have cluttered the text. Click on the URL to get them.] Kjell Dahle, Ideas Bank Foundation, Oslo, Norway: This is a presentation of 60 selected works within the realm of futures studies. Earlier versions of the beginners guide have been published in Slaughter 1995 and Slaughter 1996. (1) The books and articles presented deal with possible, probable, desirable and undesirable futures. My intention is to give the reader a picture of what futures studies is about through a broad range of practical examples. For this purpose, brief information is provided on the background of each author. Some of them may not use labels like "futures studies" or "futures research" (not to mention "futurology"), about what they have written. But they have all developed or converted knowledge in order to contribute to long-term planning, the formulation of visions, or social change. This is what futures studies is about.(2) To make it easier for newcomers to browse amongst the rich offerings presented here, the literature has been categorised into the following seven groups: Classic Introductions Looking back - and ahead Trends Scenarios Utopias The world problematique Change As mutually exclusive categories are hard to find in the field of futures studies, the categorisation will to some extent be arbitrary. CLASSIC INTRODUCTIONS The notorious 1960s also meant the start of a golden age for futures studies. Having been dominated by a few big North American "think tanks", serving military and related industrial goals, the scope now broadened tremendously. Futurists developed their own tools in the shape of serious techniques and methodologies, and all kinds of futurist organisations popped up around the world. I will now present some sources to the state of the art in this "new" field of futures studies around 1970. The dynamic spirit of new academic fields often result in good introductury textbooks. This is also the case with futures studies. Some books from the 1960s and 1970s are still among the best introductions to the field. As early as in the middle of the 1960s, a major study was carried out for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. OECD felt the need for an account of the state of the art of technological forecasting as well as practical applications. The work was done by an Austrian, Dr Erich JANTSCH, and resulted in the classic "Technological Forecasting in Perspective. A Framework for Technological Forecasting, its Techniques and Organisation". One of the main findings was that, in spite of its increasingly wide adoption in industry, research institutes and military environments, technological forecasting was not yet a science but an art. It was characterised more by attitudes than by intellectual tools. The development of special techniques had, however, gained momenteum in the last few years. The book thus includes a thorough discussion of more than 100 distinct versions of forecasting, grouped under some 20 approaches in four broad areas. Those are intuitive thinking, and exploratory, normative and feedback techniques. Like other basic terms, Jantsch defines them in ways that are still highly relevant. The same year, in 1967, a quite different classic, "The Art of Conjecture", was published in English. The author, Bertrand de JOUVENEL, was the founder of "Futuribles International" in Paris. Educated in law, biology, and economics, he worked as a journalist and author. Later, he became the first president of the World Futures Studies Federation. Baron de Jouvenel mistrusted pretentious terms such as "forecast", "foresight", "prediction" and "futurology", especially since prognosis-makers are often credited with aspirations they do not (or should not!) have. He wanted futures studies to be taken seriously, and thus preferred the unpretentious term "conjecture", stressing the uncertainty of the field. Like Jantsch, he regarded the intellectual formulation of possible futures (futuribles) as a piece of art, in the widest possible sense. By linking historical examples to current problems, the book underlines the complexity and unpredictability of society, and how difficult it is to make models of the future. 1967 was also the year of the first big international conference of futures studies. It was held in Oslo with 70 participants from more than a dozen countries in three continents. The conference was designed to meet what was seen as a new trend within futures research. After the departure from the military domination, the desire emerged to use futurist tools on civilian problems. Could information technology, systems analysis, operational research, forecasting, anticipating, scenario-writing and "futures creation" be used against such enemies as urban sprawl, hunger, lack of education and growing alienation? These were the major challenges for the participants of the Oslo conference, which was used as a source for the book "Mankind 2000". It was edited by the main initiators, Robert JUNGK from the Institute for Future Research in Vienna and Johan GALTUNG from the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo. Jungk and Galtung both had most diverse backgrounds, even for futurists. They were to become leading international figures within the field in the years to come. Robert Jungk was a German journalist, researcher and political activist. He inspired the creation of a whole lot of futures institutions around the world, academic as well as non-academic.(3) Galtung holds university degrees in both mathematics and sociology; has worked in five continents; and has been an advisor for ten UN organisations and a guest professor at more than 30 universities. He succeeded Bertrand de Jouvenel as the president of the World Futures Studies Federation. In his contribution to "Mankind 2000", Galtung discusses the traditional division of labour between ideologists who establish values, scientists who establish trends, and politicians who try to adjust means to ends. He claims that futures research rejects this artificial compartmentalisation, and tries to develop a more unified approach to the three fields. In a postscript, Jungk and Galtung advocate an internationalisation and a "democratisation" of the field, which should not be allowed to become 'the monopoly of power groups served by experts in the new branch of "futurism". Some national governments also came to see the potential of futures studies. In the early 1970s, a very thorough report entitled To Choose a Future" was presented by a Swedish Government committee, led by cabinet member Alva MYRDAL. Its task was to give advice on the development of futures studies in Sweden. It turned out to be most influential. The relationship between futures studies and public decision-making and planning is a central issue in the report. According to the committee, futures studies should help people shape their own future. Like Jungk and Galtung, the committee saw a risk of futures studies being the private preserve of influential specialists, thereby eroding the democratic and political element in the shaping of the future. Advise is given on how to avoid this, for instance always to present several possible futures. According to the commission's recommendations, the Secretariat for Futures Studies was established the following year, attached to the Cabinet office. "Handbook of Futures Research" is a US classic of the 1970s, containing no less than forty-one articles about various aspects of the new field. It was edited by Jib FOWLES, then chairman of the graduate program in Studies of the Future which still exists at the University of Houston. He defines the field as "the effort to anticipate and prepare for the future before it unfolds". The first part of the book deals with the emergence and international growth of futures research, providing a broad survey of institutions, literature, and people associated with the new field. The handbook further presents the most common methods and procedures of futures research, including scenarios, trend extrapolation, the Delphi technique, technological forecasting and assessment, simulation, and social forecasting. The dominant themes within the field and substantive disagreements among futurists are also discussed. Most articles in the book are written by heavyweighters within their subject. It is also a strength that the difficulties of futures research have been given so much consideration. Methodological shortcomings, tendencies of elitism, self-altering predictions and the problem of values are among the subjects tackled. Finally, the challenges to be faced by the new field of futures research are addressed. "The Study of the Future. An Introduction to the Art and Science of Understanding and Shaping Tomorrow's World." is a shorter classic from 1977. It is edited by Edward CORNISH, who is still the president of one of the most important futures institutions, the US-based World Future Society. The book was designed to meet the need for a brief, readable, general-purpose introductory book. Basic principles of futurism are discussed, as well as the US and international development of the field. Futurists are seen as persons interested in the longer-term future of human civilisation, using non-mystical means to identify and study possible future occurrences. The book presents methods and case studies, as well as future-oriented organisations and the ideas of a dozen leading futurists (except Bertrand de Jouvenel and Robert Jungk all are North Americans). It was written with the broad assistance from members and staff of the WFS, and evolved from the extensive project "Resources directory for America's third century". Serving as a contribution to the U.S. Bicentennial celebration in 1976, this project was a result of grants from the National Science Foundation and the Congressional Research Service. Andr? COURNAND and Maurice LEVY's book "Shaping the Future. Gaston Berger and the Concept of Prospective" presents "La prospective" as a French orientation to the future, radically different from trends dominating in the United States and Great Britain. A fundamental idea of La prospective is that the future as conceived by man, is a factor in bringing about events that are to come. Gaston Berger and his successors within this approach thus emphasise the importance of human values and education in preparation for, and as elements in, planning. This approach is contrasted to many future-oriented activities in the Anglo-Saxon world; conceiving the future as the inevitable extension of the present and favouring short-term partial programs. This book from 1973 presents to English-speaking readers the chief idea of La prospective and its application to industrial and governmental planning in France, especially in relation to the fourth and fifth National Plans. Gaston Berger was Director of Higher Education in the French Ministry of Education before founding "Centre International de Prospective". The dynamic spirit of new academic fields often results in good introductury text-books. This is also the case with futures studies. Some books from the 1960s and 1970s are still among the best introductions to the field. This embarrassing truth was one of the reasons why Richard A. SLAUGHTER, now president of the World Futures Studies Federation, initiated "The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies". Three volumes were published in 1996 and a fourth in 2000. Volume 1 considers the origin of futures studies and discusses some of the social, cultural and historical reasons for their emergence. Volume 2 presents case studies of different futures organisation and explores a range of futures methodologies. Images, imaging processes and social innovations are also discussed. Volume 3 presents new directions in futures thinking and discusses the outlook for a new millennium. In volume 4, futurists from all over the world present themselves and their ideas. One of the grand old men of international futures studies, professor emeritus Wendell BELL of Yale University, supplied the field with another presentation of the state of the art when he published his Foundations of Futures Studies in 1997. For more than 30 years, the author has tried to convince sociologists to give priority to futures studies. These two volumes demonstrate that there is no lack of arguments for such a choice. Volume 1, History, Purposes, and Knowledge, delivers what the title promises. Among other things, the author discusses - pro et contra - whether futures studies is an art or an science, and he describes some of the different methods used by futurists. Volume 2, Values, Objectivity, and the Good Society, mainly deals with preferable futures. After examining the values of a few key utopian writers throughout history, he explains the ethical foundations of futures studies and how they relate to all action. Rolf HOMANN's book "Zuk?nfte - heute denken morgen sein" from 1998 is an excellent introduction to the realm of futures studies in German language. It is written in a way that makes it easily accessible for individuals and companies without previous knowledge of the field. Homann presents the toolbox of futures studies, including trend research, morphology, Delfi, scenarios, futures workshops and chaos research. Each method is being examined rather critically (and not without humour). The book also discusses possible, desirable and undesirable futures within fields like work, education, media and sex. An important part of the books is the "Glossen"; short satirical comments to concepts and themes from the book (often illustrated by the artist Regine Scmidt-Morsbach). The author strongly believes in a further quick development of information technology, making virtual reality an important part of our futures whether we like it or not. After presenting main futures institutions of the world, the book ends with a draft to a manifest of futures rights. The manifest includes the right to have alternative visions of the future, the right to choose between them and the right to act in accordance with one's choices. LOOKING BACK - AND AHEAD Time has passed since many of today's futurists became active, and looking back can be most valuable. Even for futurists. Michael MARIEN and Lane JENNINGS asked a number of prominent people from the US "futures vogue" of the 1960s and 1970s to reflect upon how the reality of the 1980s differed from what they had anticipated, and what had been learned about social and technological change since then. The answers resulted in the book "What I Have Learned". Some of the 17 contributors update and revise their previous thinking. Others summarise lessons learned rather than updating published thinking of long time ago. Several contributors acknowledge that predicting and prescribing the future is harder than once believed. But they all agree that thinking about the future can be useful, not only in anticipating certain developments, but also in asking better questions and learning more about one's self. The German futurist Ossip K. FLECHTHEIM took his look back a little earlier. From his US exile, he introduced the word "futurology" as early as 1943, searching for a logic of the future in the same way as history is a search for the logic of the past. "History and Futurology" from 1966 is an adapted collection of this frontrunner's most important articles since the 1940s. He tries to assess the fate of mankind in the coming centuries as objectively as possible, and has been criticized for his belief in this kind of approach. Flechtheim, a professor of political science at the Free University of Berlin, was an active figure in the public debate almost until his death in 1998. Richard A. SLAUGHTER, professor of foresight at the Swinton University of Technology, Australia, and since 2001 the president of World Futures Studies Federation, represents the next generation of futurists. According to his book from 1995, "The Foresight Principle", foresight is the process of attempting to broaden the boundaries of perception by careful futures scanning and the clarification of emerging situations. Foresight is not the ability to predict the future, but a way of facilitating desirable individual and social change. The author takes a brief look at the origins and development of the Western industrial worldview, considering some of its costs. In our time, he sees foresight as consciously working to complete the transition to a more sustainable world while there is still time to achieve it. Analysis and imagination are key words for foresight. In addition, institutions of foresight are needed to secure better implementation at the social and organisational level. Examples of such institutions are the US Millennium Institute, the International Futures Library created by Robert Jungk in Salzburg, and the no longer existing US Congressional Clearing House on the Future. Strategies for creating positive views of futures with young people are also discussed by the author, who holds a PhD in the role of futures studies in education. In their book "Zukunftsforschung und Politik" from 1991, Rolf KREIBICH et al analyse the development of German futures research, which reached its peak in the late 1970s. A historical discussion leads up to a presentation of the state of the art. After a decade of low activity, they find the situation more promising. Like so many others, these German futurists have moved their focus from quantitatively oriented prognostics to more normative studies of desirable futures. Comparative analyses of futures studies in France, Sweden and Switzerland are included in the book, which is a result of a project financed by the regional authorities of North Rhine-Westphalia. Far more critical voices than those mentioned above have also taken their look back. There has been a Western hegemony in futures studies, as in most other fields. The diversity and "unpredictability" of the actors did not correspond very well with e.g. State Marxism. Georgi SHAKHANAZOV's book "Futurology Fiasco. A Critical Study of Non-Marxist Concepts of How Society Develops." is a translation of a Soviet work, published in Moscow in 1982. He saw the field of futures studies as a 'bizarre mixture of valuable observations, quasi-scientific nonsense, and anti-communist fabrications of the foulest'. Different approaches are discussed, and the field is acknowledged for contributing to the gathering of knowledge about various features on the road in front of us. But according to the author all futurist approaches had in common that they 'in no way refute the Marxist-Leninist postulate that socialism is inevitable'. From his Third World point of view, Ziauddin SARDAR has a somewhat more elaborate critique of the development of futures studies. In his essay "Colonizing the Future" from 1993, he analyses the evolution of futures studies and claims that it is increasingly becoming an instrument for the marginalisation of non-Western cultures from the future. According to Sardar, even those futurists who are inspired by non-Western cultures, tend to produce 'a grotesque parody' of non-Western thought. His article was published in the international journal "Futures" (a must for anyone who wants to get an idea what serious futures studies are about). Rick Slaughter and Sohail Inayatullah respond to Sardar's essay in the same issue. Having later become the editor of "Futures", Sardar is himself an example of the fact that futures studies also has room for critical people born in the Third World. A special issue of Futures edited by Colin BLACKMAN and Olugbenga ADESIDA, published in 1994, was devoted to African futures studies. Adesida, an economist/information systems analyst working with the United Nations Development Programme's project "African Futures" based in Abidjan, claims there is no place where a change from ancestral worship to worship of future generations is more necessary than Africa. This special issue takes stock of progress in the use of futures studies concepts and methodologies in Africa, and discusses how such studies could be better integrated into decision-making and planning. A long-term view and a participatory approach are seen as essential in this respect. Within the old Eastern block there were also futurists who, to some extent, could operate within the main international networks of futures studies. A prominent example is Igor BESTUZHEV-LADA, a professor of sociology who has experienced all the changes of post-war USSR. His article "A Short History of Forecasting in the USSR" in the US journal "Technological Forecasting and Social Change", gives a most thrilling description of the fields problems and achievements in the region during different phases up to 1991. For the further development of forecasting in his area, Bestuzhev-Lada recommends a normative approach focusing on global imbalances. The task is to outline an alternative civilisation able to overcome them, and the transition thereto. The fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 had immense consequences for futures studies in Eastern and Central Europe. These are analysed in Erzsebet NOVAKY et al's book "Futures Studies in the European Ex-Socialist Countries" from 2001. Although some contributions look more like early drafts, it gives a comprehesive picture of the development of futures studies in the different countries involved. Even "official" futurists experienced a rather limited freedom during the "communist" era. The dismantling of state planning and the transition process to a market economy has, however, led to new problems. Futures researchers that were once financed by the state, have experienced dissolution and even incrimination. In the early 1990s, the interest for futures studies was rather limited in most "Ex-Socialist" countries. People felt that they had had enough of detailed planning and dubious forecasts. New politicians were caught in "presentism" traps, focusing on short-term tasks only. Comprehensive strategic studies for development of these countries rarely appeared until the late 1990s, and then most often connected with the question of how to meet the EU criteria for becoming future members of the union. There is, however, a beginning optimism about a new generation of futures studies becoming increasingly demanded in the area. Hungarian futurists seem to be in the luckiest situation, now as before 1989. TRENDS Some of the most famous futurists in the public eye deal mainly with trends; they try to predict which futures are the most probable. Post-Industrial Society, Future Shock, and Megatrends are only a few of the widely diffused "trend" concepts originating from futures studies. In his popular book "The Coming of Post-Industrial Society" from 1973, Daniel BELL presented the thesis that in the next 30 to 50 years a post-industrial society would emerge, representing a dramatic change in the social framework of the Western world. The creation of a service economy, the primacy of theoretical knowledge and the planning of technology are supposed to be among the central dimensions of this new society. The United States is used as unit of illustration. Bell (a Harvard professor of sociology) launched the concept of "post-industrial society" as early as 1962. When it comes to the growth debate, Bell finds that both Kahn's post-scarcity ideas and the doomsday predictions of "The Limits to Growth" are wrong. Alvin TOFFLER launched his famous concept, "Future shock" in 1965. His goal was to describe what happens to people who are overwhelmed by change; how they manage - or fail - to adapt to the future. His international bestseller "Future Shock" from 1970 was a result of subsequent conversations between the author (a former journalist) and researchers from a wide range of disciplines, as well as industrialists, psychiatrists, doctors and hippies. Unlike many other futurists, especially those dealing with trend studies, Toffler emphasises soft, everyday aspects of the future. A main conclusion is that the speed of change can often be more important than the direction of change. The time frame of planning must therefore be extended if we are to forestall technocracy. The growth of futures research is seen as one of the healthiest phenomena of recent years. Yoneji MASUDA, a Japanese professor of information science, published his bestseller, "The Information Society as Post-Industrial Society", in 1980. He saw humankind as standing on the threshold of a period when information values would become more important than material values. This was a result of a new societal technology based on the combination of computers and communications technology. The first part of the book deals with the question of when and through what stages the "information society" will be created. The second part presents the author's theoretical and conceptual studies on the information society. The discussion ends with "Computopia", the author's vision of a preferred global society in the 21st century. This society will encourage self-realisation and freedom of decision, in contrast to his alternative vision, "Automated State", a horrible controlled society. Taichi SAKAIYA's "The Knowledge-Value Revolution" became another Japanese bestseller within the field. Sakaiya is an economist, essayist and novelist, and the author of more than 30 books. His starting point is that the industrial society has reached its zenith, and that the world is undergoing a gigantic transformation. In the coming age, people will no longer be driven to consume more, but will turn towards values created through access to time and wisdom. Rather than buying a lot of goods and replacing them in rapid succession, they will purchase high-priced items possessing preferred designs, high-class brand images, high-level technologies, or specific functional capabilities, and keep them for much longer. "Knowledge-value" is the worth or price a society gives to that which the society acknowledges to be creative wisdom". People of the coming epoch can be expected to pay a high price for items that correspond to the demands set by the social subjectivity of the group to which they believe they belong. This will have enormous consequences for the industrial world. Developing technology, design, rhytms and images that match the social subjectivities of the times will thus be more important for their success or failure than the literal products they create. John NAISBITT sold as many as 9 000 000 copies of his book "Megatrends", published in 1982. Here, the USA was described as a society in-between two eras. Those who are willing to anticipate the new era will be a quantum leap ahead of those who hold on to the past. Ten empirical, mainly quantitative "megatrends" are presented, including the transition from Industrial Society to Information Society, from National Economy to World Economy, from Short Term to Long Term Considerations, from Centralisation to Decentralisation, from Institutional Help to Self-Help, from Representative Democracy to Participatory Democracy and from Hierarchies to Informal Networking. Naisbitt base his findings on content analysis of local newspapers, because he finds trends to be generated from the bottom up. The new economic order will not, as forecast by Daniel Bell and others, be a service-based post-industrial society, but rather a "hyper-industrial" society in which services are transformed into mass-produced consumer goods. The microchip and advances in biotechnology will lead to a new age that will profoundly transform human culture. The new consumer society will be bitterly divided between rich and poor. If the North remains passive and indifferent to this, Attali feels sure that the peoples of the South will enter into revolt, and one day, war. This will be unlike modern wars: it will rather resemble the barbarian raids on Europe of the seventh and eight centuries. An English-American professor of history, Paul KENNEDY, shifted his main interest from the past to the future in the late 1980s. As a result, an international bestseller on trends was published in 1993, called "Preparing for the Twenty-First Century". It gives a generalist view of some important global trends of our time. These include demographic explosion, the communications revolution, biotechnology and threats to the environment. Kennedy then discusses how prepared the world's regions and nations are for the challenges that seem to be looming. However, in spite of the book's title and size, there is no real analysis of practical solutions or of general worldviews. This shows how a well-written book about the next century can have appeal, even without the futurist tools that could have enabled the author to deal more meaningfully with preparations for the 21st century. Willis HARMAN's "Global Mind Change" from 1988 is a completely different kind of "trend book". The author predicts a societal transformation in the form of a paradigm change towards the end of the 20th century. This could be just as radical as the earth-shaking shifts in view of reality that took place when the "modern" worldview began to take shape in the 17th century. According to Harman, the origins of present global problems are to be found in the belief system supporting our whole economic structure. The Establishment's solutions only deal with symptoms, instead of accepting the need for fundamental change. Within the coming worldview, we will accept reality both through physical sense data (like today) and through a deep intuitive "inner knowing", being part of a oneness. Harman's point is not to accelerate or resist changes that take place, but rather to help society understand the forces of historical change. Dialogue and caring can help us through the process with as little misery as possible. The author is a veteran of US futures studies, with background in electrical engineering and systems analysis as well as psychology. Lester BROWN et al's "Vital Signs. The Trends That Are Shaping Our Future represents still another kind of trend studies. This is an annual series from the Worldwatch Institute in Washington DC, having been published in at least17 languages over the last ten years. In text and easy-to-read graphs, the 2002 version analyses more than 50 key indicators of long-term trends that track change in our planets environmental, economic, and social health. Topics covered in Vital Signs include food, agriculture, energy, the atmosphere, economy, transportation, the environment and the military. In addition, the series contains special features on less celebrated, but still important trends, not normally covered by national and international statistical agencies. These include subjects as different as pecticide bans, bicycle production, increase in solar cells and violence against women. "States of Disarray" is a report from the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), presented in Copenhagen during the 1995 UN Social Summit. It gives a comprehensive analysis of the social effects of globalisation using a holistic and multi-disciplinary approach. The report draws upon a big number of global research programs, as well as special material form UNRISD's worldwide network of scholars, activists and development practitioners. The quickening pace of change is found to have caught much of the international community unaware. Capital, goods and people are now moving with an enormous speed and complexity, thus creating enormous social tensions. The belief in dynamic, well-functioning markets resolving problems of human welfare is called a fallacy leading to catastrophic consequences. At the international level, social organisations have been overtaken by transnational corporations and international finance institutions. At a national level, many state institutions have been eroded or eliminated. And at a local level, the imperatives of market forces and globalisation have been undermining communities and families. The report explores not only issues like poverty, unemployment, inequality, crime and drugs, but also themes such as identity crisis, weakening social solidarity and declining responsibility within certain institutions. Future implications of globalisation are also discussed. Current success criteria towards the end of last century were very often economic growth, high consumption, and international competition. Robert THEOBALD's book "Reworking Success. New Communities at the Millennium" from 1997 presents "the required success criteria for the twenty-first century". These are ecological integrity, effective participatory decision-making, and social cohesion. According to the author, such a change in success criteria will necessarily occur at the personal, group, and community level rather than through top-down policy shifts. Here is no belief in "mapping" reality. Theobald prefers to see reality as an impressionist painting, which is partial and incomplete and where patterns shift as one looks at it. Such an approach makes it easier to find common ground between different positions, which is a must if we are to move out of current dead-ends. Other key words for a coming change are, according to Theobald, "servant leaders" seeking to empower others rather than control them), a new political landscape (those who want to keep the Industrial era vs those who are committed to creating a changed culture), and decentralised governance with less coercion. Local and international Internet fora will also be important. "Exciting and creative things are happening everywhere, but at the same time there is a failure to appreciate positive local steps. SCENARIOS The most unpredicted rise of OPEC in the 1970s (in some parts of the world better known as the oil crisis), had consequences for the futures literature. The risk with delivering short-term prognoses is that you may lose your reputation quickly. It was not so easy anymore to convince people that they could find the truth about development trends in books written by gurus. There was a gradual shift in interest from the realm of trends and predictions to the choice between alternative futures, in the form of scenarios or utopias. Scenario writing had, however, also been used by many trend researchers, such as the highly controversial Herman KAHN. Aside from what one may think of his political analysis, it has to be admitted that he was a key figure behind the development of today's scenario building. His 1967 book "The Year 2000" remains an important classic. It includes scenarios both for the world society and for the USA, and is inspired by methods from military studies. Here they were used to explore possible consequences of nuclear war. Kahn, a scholar of mathematics and physics, strongly believed in future economic growth and prosperity, and that the ecological problems will be solved by technological innovation. This book (produced at the Hudson Institute) was the first volume from the "Commission on the Year 2000" project, sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Basic concepts like "surprise-free scenarios" and "standard world" were here introduced to the public. Scenarios are not necessarily about the most likely future or the authors preferred future; they can be more or less probable and more or less desirable. Michel GODET has defined a scenario as 'the description of a possible future and the corresponding path to it' (4). Godet is a professor of strategic prospective at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers (CNAM), and represents the French la prospective-tradition, believing in action and non-predetermination. He is the author of 14 books on scenario building, of which many have been translated to other languages including English. His latest one, Creating Futures. Scenario Planning as a Strategic Management Tool has a preface by the US futurist Joseph F. Coates. Godet here presents five basic attitudes to the future that people can choose from: the passive ostrich, the reactive firefighter, the preactive insurer, the proactive innovative conspirator and the anticipative actor. Anticipative actors blend the reactive, the preactive and the proactive attitudes. In football language, they blend the star players ambition with caution and urgency! Ostriches go with the flow when things happen. Firefighters adapt to reduce damage. Insurers try to prevent accidents and look for trend-based scenarios. Conspirators try to be innovative. Their scenarios are normative; they describe desirable alternatives. Godet warns against drafting strategic plans based on proactive innovating scenarios alone. Ambitions are not enough. There is a need to be preactive, too, in order to prepare for expected changes in the future environment. On the other hand, trend-based scenarios are no longer the most probable ones, according to Godet. That was yesteryear! Today, the most probable scenario in many instances corresponds to deep breaks or even breakdown in current trends. There are lots of different scenario methods around. Important elements are, however, system analysis, retrospective analysis, asking the right questions and identifying key variables, analysing the main actors strategies, scanning possible futures and evaluating strategic choices and options. Through case studies, Godet demonstrates how scenario building can be used to prepare action plans for companies, organisations and governments. A growing number of studies on the year 2000 were initiated during the 1980s, using scenario methods. Their aim was to analyse long-term alternative futures of nations or regions. The Institute of 21st Century Studies (now called the Millennium Institute) was established to promote and support such efforts. Martha GARRETT of that institute edited "Studies for the 21st Century". This large book, published by UNESCO's Futuresco project in 1991, provides an overview of about 50 projects from all continents. Both normative and exploratory studies are included. Besides reports from the various projects involved, the book presents the methodologies used and discusses lessons learned. The professional and national backgrounds of the participants strongly influence the approach that the project teams chose in their studies. Still, there is a high degree of agreement on certain points, such as sustainability being the key to a continuing future for humankind, and the foundation of new public attitudes as a prerequisite for changes in action. An example of a 21st century study is Jim NORTHCOTT's "Britain in 2010". The main forecasts are on a "most probable" basis, although the authors know that 'the one thing that can be predicted with certainty is that some of the forecasts will turn out to be wrong'. Three other scenarios are therefore added, identifying potential areas of choice. The first one is market-oriented, the second is left-wing interventionist, and the third illustrates an environmental-oriented approach. The report was produced by a multidisciplinary group at the Policy Studies Institute (PSI) in London, in cooperation with Cambridge Econometrics. It was funded by a consortium of private sector companies and government departments. James ROBERTSON is a central figure within the New Economics Foundation. His book entitled "The Sane Alternative. A Choice of Futures." has a far more qualitative approach than most other scenario works. The author, having a background from the British Cabinet Office and from banking, sees the period up to about 2010 as a critical period in the history of humankind. He briefly presents five very different futures, all assumed to be realistic. The scenarios are "Business as Usual", "Disaster" (giving up in advance), "Authoritarian Control", "Hyper-Expansionist (HE) Future (even bigger toys and more important jobs for the boys), and "The Sane, Human, Ecological (SHE) Future" (a decentralized alternative where the limits to growth are not technical and economic, but social and psychological). Most of the book deals with the SHE-scenario; what it is like and what we can do to develop it further. Kimon VALASKAKIS et al's "The Conserver Society" was written to meet 14 Canadian government agencies' wish to study the implications of different policy options (how to turn a potentially good idea into a policy option). Five separate scenarios are presented, including three "conserver societies". These are "Scotch gambit" (do more with less), the "Greek" ideal (do the same with less), and The Buddhist scenario (doing less with less and doing something else). Two mass-consumption scenarios are added, the "Squander society" (do less with more), reminiscent of a Roman orgy, and "Big Rock Candy Mountain" (do more with more). The project was carried out by the futures research institute Gamma. 15 experts from as many different disciplines took part. The ideas developed are thought to have had significant influence upon the development of environmentally based arguments in a number of areas such as health and agriculture, as well as providing a general context within which the Canadians may cast environmental arguments in general. R?diger LUTZ' book "Die sanfte Wende. Aufbruch ins ?kologische Zeitalter" gives a most comprehensive view of cultural trends, accentuating the counter-culture-scene with its critique of the industrial society and its practical experiments. Theories of development are discussed, as well as classical and modern utopias. The author ends up with discussing seven prototypes of possible scenarios, all having supporters among futurists. These are COMPUTOPIA (the information society), SPACE COLONIES, ECOTOPIA, CHINATOWN (a melting pot of multi-million, multi-racial and multi-cultural metropols), FINDHORN (spiritually oriented new age-communes), DALLAS (a further market-oriented society based on social darwinism), and GAIA (earth as a self-organised ecosystem based on reciprocity and interdependence). Combinations of the different options are also discussed through a multiple scenario approach. Ove SVIDEN and Britt ANIANSSON's "Surprising futures" presents notes from a workshop in Stockholm, where about 20 leading researchers from different continents and disciplines (including Michel Godet) drew up five global and regional scenarios up to the year 2075. Four of the scenarios were deliberately given a "surprising" content, although they need not be more unlikely than the fifth, "surprise-free" scenario called "Conventional Wisdom". The workshop was run in 1986 by the Swedish research council FRN and the International Institute for Applied System Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria. We now move from the comparing of probable (more or less desirable) futures, and to works that focus on the "ideal society". UTOPIAS 'Those who rule decide what is reality and what is utopia.' These words from the feminist German journalist and author Carna Zacharias (5), make it clear that the futures discussed under this heading are not necessarily unrealistic or unattainable. In fact, instead of "Utopias", it might just as well have been called "Visions" or "Images of the future". The Germans also use the term "Zukunftsgestaltung" (futures design). But, as the pragmatic Chinese Deng Xiao Ping once said, the important thing is not whether a cat is black or white, but whether it catches mice. "Utopia" here means more or less fictional literature that describes a particular community, desired by the author. The main theme is the structure of those communities. So, does this kind of literature catch mice? Has it had any influence on societal development through the ages? According to the late Dutch professor Fred POLAK, the answer is yes. In his classic study "The Image of the Future", he demonstrates that idealistic and inspiring visions of the past have greatly influenced later developments. Utopias (and dystopias) are first considered from the history of Western civilisation. Then the author describes what he sees as a unique lack of convincing images in our own times. His hope for our cultural survival was in a new development of both utopias and dystopias. The book demonstrates the advantages of a most interdisciplinary background. During his academic career Polak was active within law, economy, philosophy and sociology. In addition, he was a central figure in Dutch culture, business and politics. Probably the most thorough survey of utopian literature is Frank E. and Fritzie P. MANUEL's "Utopian Thought in the Western World." He, a Harvard professor of history, and she, an art historian, produced the book after more than 25 years work on utopian thinking. In chronological order they identify historical constellations of utopias, bringing us from the ancient Greeks via Christian utopians and Thomas More to more modern utopians like Saint-Simon, Karl Marx, Edward Bellamy, William Morris and Herbert Marcuse. The authors believe in the revival of utopias, as Western civilisation may not be able to survive without utopian phantasies any more than individuals can exist without dreaming. They predict that "Man the innovator" will come up with the unthought-of, leaving model-builders and futurological predictors 'holding their bag of forecasts and facile analogies in embarrassed irrelevance'. Krishan KUMAR's book "Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times", focuses particularly on the ability of utopias to capture the popular imagination or become the centre of public debate. The bulk of the material is about English and American literature of the period from the 1880s to the 1950s. Works of five authors (Edward Bellamy, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and B. F. Skinner) were selected for thorough analysis of their roles within the intellectual and literary tradition of utopias. The last part considers the decline of utopia and dystopia in the second half of the 20th century. Special emphasis is put on critical discussions of socialist ideology, ecology and the relations between utopia and research. Kumar, a Trinidad-born professor of sociology, claims that "Futurologists" of the 1960s and 1970s were convinced of the imminent realisation of their expectations, and thus saw their task as one of scientific analysis and policy prescription rather than of utopian picturing. The success of Niels MEYER et al's "Revolt from the Center" in the late 1970s showed that new visions could still capture the public imagination. This book triggered a broad public debate in Scandinavia, and sold more than 100,000 copies in Denmark alone (a country with five million inhabitants). It was written by a professor of physics, a former liberal cabinet member and a famous essayist. They analyse weaknesses of the existing social system, describe their utopia of a humane society in ecological balance, and discuss ways and means of achieving it. An important reform is the introduction of a guaranteed basic income. Those who want a material standard above that level have the right to do a certain amount of paid work. "Visions of Desirable Societies" edited by Eleonora MASINI is a book where most of the contributors come from the Third World. It is a collection of different images of the future from different ideological, philosophical and cultural perspectives. The book presents the process of thinking within a United Nations University project of the same name. The aim was to understand contradictions within and between different visions, and to find ways in which they may become more compatible in a diverse world. The book is based on papers presented at two conferences in Mexico City in 1978/79, arranged by the World Futures Studies Federation and CEEM (Centro Estudios Economicos y Sociales de Terces Mundo). Whereas some authors have asked for more visions in our times, Michael MARIEN divided the existing ones into two categories. In his classic article "The Two Visions of Post-Industrial Society" from 1977, he distinguishes between those who go for a technological, affluent, service society, and the believers of a decentralised and ecologically conscious agrarian economy following in the wake of a failed industrialism. Marien is the editor of World Future Society's eminent (although most US-dominated) newsletter on literature, "Future Survey". It is thought-provoking that he, probably the best expert we have on futures literature, found 'no evidence that any writer holding either of the two visions of post-industrial society has any appreciable understanding of the opposing vision'. A collection of essays published 15 years after Marien's article, leaves a quite different impression. Sheila MOORCROFT's "Visions for the 21st Century" consists of essays from 21 invited international contributors. The authors deal with where we are and where we might want to go. Their topics are as varied as the cultures and academic disciplines they themselves represent. The type of analysis differs as much as the proposed solutions, but the text is still coherent. Most approaches are, despite all their diversity, parts of the same problematique. It is up to each reader, though, to synthesise and assess which ideas could be parts of the same solution. Interconnectedness, interdependence and diversity are key words for this anthology. THE WORLD PROBLEMATIQUE Poverty in the midst of plenty, degradation of the environment, loss of faith in institutions, uncontrolled urban spread, and insecurity of employment. These are some elements of what The Club Of Rome has called the "world problematique". Donella MEADOWS et al's bestseller "The Limits to Growth" from 1972 (9 000 000 copies in 29 languages) was the first report commissioned by the Club of Rome. Financed by Volkswagen Foundation, an international research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) investigated five basic factors which limit growth on this planet: population, agriculture, resource use, industry and pollution. Data on these factors were fed into a global model. A conclusion was that if present growth trends continue, the limits to growth will be reached sometime within the next hundred years. To alter these dramatic trends, the report advocated strive to reach a state of global equilibrium. Although "The Limits to Growth" signalled the start of a new era for the discussion on global environmental issues, this problematique was in no way new on the scene. Rachel CARSON's "Silent Spring" from 1962 was the first book to make a big global audience question the whole attitude of industrial society towards nature. The book starts with a "fable for tomorrow", describing a town in the heart of America where the voices of spring have disappeared. The few birds tremble and cannot fly, no bees pollinate the blooming apple trees, and all the fish has died. No witchcraft, no enemy action silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves. "Silent Spring" was much more than a warning from a concerned biologist about the problems posed by DDT and other "modern" pesticides. Rachel Carson concluded that mankind was standing at the crossroads. Her advice was to leave the smooth superhighway of progress. This, as well as crude attacks by the chemical industry, made her a symbol of the early environmental movement that culminated with "The Limits to Growth". In the wake of the discussion around this controversial first report from the Club of Rome, a number of alternative world models were drawn up. HERRERA et al's "Catastrophe or New Society? A Latin American World Model." was the first one to take an explicit viewpoint of the Third World, but gave less attention to the environment. The report proposed measures to satisfy basic needs for food, housing, health care and education by the year 2000 (except in large parts of Africa and Southern Asia, where it was not seen as possible before 2050). The study was made by "Fundacion Barriloche", an Argentine research foundation supported by the UN. The Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex, England, became a centre of the critical debate on "The Limits to Growth". SPRU found little or no basis for the pessimism in the report. In FREEMAN and JAHODA's "World Futures" from 1978, methods and assumptions from the debate are used to sketch other possible profiles of world development in the next 50 years. Combinations of high or low economic growth and strong or weak international equality result in four different profiles. Future supplies of food, energy and non-fuel minerals are discussed in relation to these profiles. An assessment of possible technical changes is also made. The main problems found were not physical limits, but political priorities. The confrontation between the "Limits" and "Sussex" groups was intense, and at some conferences it is said to have come closer to physical confrontation than intellectual debate. In the "boom" of world models of the late 1970s, president Carter ordered a report that was later carefully filed by president Reagan. "The Global 2000 Report to the President", edited by the physician Gerald BARNEY, deals with probable changes in the world's population, natural resources and environment. The relationships between the three issues are emphasised, since there is no lack of separate studies of them. The Global 2000 Report indicates the potential for global problems of alarming proportions by the year 2000, unless things are changed. It points out that the then current efforts underway around the world fell far short of what was needed. The conclusions of the staff's own studies are reinforced by similar findings from other recent global studies examined and referred to in the report. Even more important than Global 2000 was the work in the 1980s of the UN "World Commission on Environment and Development", headed by Norway's then prime minister Gro Harlem BRUNDTLAND. Its task was no less than to re-examine the critical environment and development problems of the planet and to formulate realistic proposals to solve them. The Commission's report "Our Common Future" was published in 1987, after four years' work. "Sustainable development" is the core concept of the report. As with "Global 2000", the main importance of the report is not in its innovativeness, but in the official status of its analysis and proposals. The work of the Brundtland Commission was generally well received, but the report become highly controversial among environmentalists for its positive attitude to growth. The commission envisions "a new era of economic growth", growth that is "forceful and at the same time socially and environmentally sustainable". The discussion of the Brundtland report led up to the huge World Conference on Environment and Development (WCED) in Rio in 1992. Ten years after, very few environmentalists considered the outcomes of the Rio process a success. The follow-up of the "Agenda 21" programme of action and the other decisions taken by the state leaders has been disappointing to most observers. Many of the critical voices on the whole Rio process came together in the volume "Global Ecology", edited by Wolfgang SACHS. Environmentalists from different parts of the world here examine the new landscape of conflicts on the international level that emerged during the Rio conference. Wolfgang Sachs finds that, although environmental and poverty problems were brought into focus, the action was handed over to those social forces (governments, agencies and corporations) that have largely been responsible for the present state of affairs. Formerly the knowledge of opposition groups, ecology has after Rio been wedded to the dominating world-view, where the cure for environmental ills is called "efficiency revolution" or "global management". What is to be managed are those things that are valuable to the global economy - from germplasm for biotechnology to pollution sinks and other commodities that can be traded. This can be at odds with how people traditionally care for their own environment locally. Although many of the contributors are rather dogmatic in their approach, the book raises important objections to the process and outcomes of the Rio meeting. As well as to the ritually repeated messages from politicians, industrialists and scientists, denying the existence of alternatives to the direction the world's economies are taking. The Rio conference (also known as the Earth Summit) was held 20 years after the first UN conference on environment (in Stockholm). But 1992 was also the 20th anniversary of "The Limits to Growth". Donella MEADOWS et al thus wrote a sequel using the same computer model as in their first book. 13 scenarios for the period between 1990 and 2100 are sketched. In the authors preferred scenario the population levels out at just under eight billion people, family size is limited to two children and the material standard of living is roughly that of present-day Europe. "Beyond the Limits" has been far less controversial than "The Limits to Growth". Although the sequel was much better received, it has not attracted the same large readership as the first book. CHANGE The perspective of change has been more or less involved in the categories already presented. But, although one should expect especially authors dealing with desirable futures to accentuate processes of change, this is not very often the case. Some exceptions will be presented here, but first we should again stress that not all futurists focus on the need for major change. Rajni KOTHARI's "Footsteps Into the Future" from 1974 deals with how to make a "minimal utopia" feasible. The basic issue is how to move from a world in which there is a growing "divorce" between scientific, technological progress and the freedom and wellbeing of human beings, to one in which the two are harmonised. Justice, self-realisation, creativity and non-violence are important elements. The author does not believe in fully worked-out models, and therefore warns against 'catastrophic reversals of existing arrangements that may or may not produce the desired results'. Kothari's strategy is that of "ever widening circles"; stepwise attempts at a number of levels. The intellectual task is simultaneously to stimulate new attitudes and major institutional changes. The book belongs to a series of volumes entitled "Preferred Worlds for the 1990s", initiated by the transnational World Order Models Project. Kothari is Director of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi and founder of the international journal Alternatives. In "Envisioning a Sustainable Society. Learning Our Way Out", Lester MILBRATH claims that modern society cannot lead to sustainable development. After elaborating a vision of a sustainable society, he discusses the transition from modern society to a sustainable society. Milbrath, a US professor of political science and sociology, does not believe that elite change can be very thorough, because true social change must affect the everyday behaviour of the people. He sees social learning as the most viable route to social change. Milbrath is, however, not a believer in change here and now. Things must get worse before they can get better. His prescription is to prepare for the moment when things get 'bad enough to force us to cast about'. Then we can make changes that would be beyond the realm of possibility in "normal times". Is today's realm of possibilities as narrow as Milbrath and other patient revolutionaries (6) think? Less than a year before becoming the US Vice-President, Al GORE published his book "Earth in the Balance". A conclusion of his analysis is that we must make rescuing our global environment the central organising principle of our civilisation. He proposes a new global Marshall Plan, consisting of five strategic goals. These are stabilising world population, developing and sharing appropriate technology, a new global "eco-nomics", a new generation of treaties and agreements, and education for a new global environmental consensus. Gore is an example of important elements within the Establishment, who want to bridge the gaps between the dominating worldview and policy, and current ecological knowledge. From his point of view, the key will be a new public awareness of how serious is the threat to the global environment. There will be no meaningful change until enough citizens are willing to speak out and urge their leaders to bring the earth back to balance. The book was re-issued in 2000, including a new foreward from a much more experienced Gore who still believes in the same ideas. The GROUP OF LISBON's "Limits to Competition" from 1993 shows that Gore is not a loner within the establishment. The group consists of 19 prominent professors, bureaucrats, cultural workers and industrialists from Western Europe, North America and Japan. They are concerned about the role competition plays in the process of economic and social globalisation. Instead of praising competitiveness, they call for co-decisions in the form of "global social contracts". All the contributors conclude that the benefits of "going together" are greater than the inconveniences. If we are to move towards this kind of contracts, the initiative has to come from the three dominant global powers; Western Europe, North America and Japan. The target is a global society that will satisfy the basic needs of the eight billion people inhabiting the planet by the year 2020. Common endeavours will be the key, and this makes global civil society a powerful force. The report stresses the importance of systematically recognising and supporting local actions, behaviour and experiments at the global level. The demand for a "new economics" or a "green economics" is common to both oppositional green movements and some more established thinkers. Paul EKINS' "Wealth Beyond Measure" from 1992 is a highly illustrated guide that presents the state of the art in laypersons' terms. Contrary to the view of mainstream economists and politicians, the new economics movement puts forward the idea that recovery from recession must accord with the imperatives of sustainable development. Participatory democracy and economic justice are other important objectives for this movement. Ekins analyses the effects of ongoing changes and discusses political consequences when it comes to the use of ecological, human, organisational and manufactured resources. He is a co-founder of the New Economics Foundation in London, and of TOES (The Other Economic Summit), which has accompanied the G-7 summits since 1984. The British-American futurist Hazel HENDERSON believes that a great transition of industrial societies in the direction of a sustainable, renewable resources based productivity is inevitable. Her book "Paradigms in Progress" deals with the nature of this transition. According to Henderson, a paradigm is a pair of different spectacles that can reveal a new view of reality allowing us to reconceive our situation, reframe old problems and find new pathways for evolutionary change. The book summarises her own paradigms in progress, offering new directions, expanded contexts, connections and possibilities for creating "win-win" solutions. She sees the ongoing transition towards sustainability as multidimensional and nonlinear, and it cannot be mapped in simple economic terms. New interdisciplinary models from biology and chaos theory (rather than mechanistic models) are needed to capture these kinds of accelerating, interactive changes. Hazel Henderson is a lecturer, consultant, writer and activist working within a broad, international sphere. Erik DAMMANN created the popular Norwegian "Future in Our Hands" movement, focusing on social equity and a simpler way of life. His book "Revolution in the Affluent Society" discusses the need for a change of system in the rich world. He argues why it should be nonviolent, nondogmatic and come from below the antithesis of what one is struggling to overcome. He also addresses the role of futures studies, wanting them to be linked more directly to people's wishes and expectations. Surveys could be used to arouse an interest in crucial choices about values and social problems amongst people who otherwise feel that political debate goes over their heads. Reports should be handed over to writers with the literacy skill to convey their basic ideas in popular books and the mass media. They should stress the main initial consequences that alternative courses of development will have for various groups. His main point is the idea of research not as a means of control, but as a means by which the public can consider and actively participate in the formation and development of their own futures. Dammann later became a co-founder of the Alternative Future Project in Norway. Robert JUNGK and Norbert M?LLERT's "Futures workshops" presents another method by which ordinary people can be involved in creating possible and desirable futures. Criticism, phantasy and realisation are the main elements in a process where concrete utopias and social inventions are drawn up. Examples illustrate how participants have changed during the process. Futures workshops can thus be an effective instrument against what Jungk used to call the "ghost" haunting today's world; the ghost of resignation. The book also demonstrates what kinds of ideas and practical results that can be achieved through this method, which has been especially popular in Germany and Denmark. The idea of participatory futures studies involving both academic and less academic circles is not just a theory. It can be put into practise. Robert Jungk, who died in 1994, has probably demonstrated this better than anyone else, not at least through his futures workshops. Such approaches are essential for futures studies if they are to democratise, not colonise, the future. In conclusion, it is worth quoting the words of the late Nobel Prize winner in physics, Dennis Gabor: He wrote that 'the future cannot be predicted, but it can be invented'(7). Since the future belongs to all of us, we all have the right to participate in shaping it. The literature surveyed here clearly provides numerous starting points for doing just that. _________________________________________________________________ Kjell Dahle is a political scientist and a World Futures Studies Federation fellow, based in Oslo, Norway. He is co-founder of the Ideas Bank Foundation and former head of planning of the Alternative Future Project. He has also been secretary general of the Centre Party of Norway and chief editor of Senterpressens Osloredaksjon. This survey is under revision; some important works from the last few years are still missing. Updated and expanded versions with new literature surveys will be available at www.idebanken.no. A revised text will later be part of the next edition of the Knowledge Base of Futures Studies (see footnote 1). Comments, proposals and material can be sent to Kjell Dahle, Stiftelsen Idebanken, Boks 2126 Gr?nerl?kka, N-0505 Oslo, Norway. Or E-mail Kjell Dahle. _________________________________________________________________ (1) -Richard A. Slaughter (ed.): New Thinking for a New Millennium. London/New York, Routledge 1995, pp 84-102. -Richard A. Slaughter (ed.): The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies. Victoria (Australia), DDM Media Group 1996, Volume 1, pp 126-47. A Millennium Edition of the four volumes Knowledge Base is available on CD-Rom from http://livingpresence.org/books/index.shtml. (2) Kjell Dahle: On Alternative Ways of Studying the Future. International institutions, an annotated bibliography and a Norwegian case. Oslo, Alternative Future Project, 1991, p. 16. (3) Robert Jungk was also the founder of the International Futures Library, Imbergstrasse 2, 5020 Salzburg, Austria. I have made several visits to this fabulous library, which has been a main resource for my studies of the futures literature. (4) Michel Godet: Introduction to La Prospective. Seven Key Ideas and One Scenario Method. Futures No 2 1986, pp. 134-57. (5) Carna Zacharias: Wo liegt Utopia? Nur wer tr?umt, ist Realist. Munich, Sch?nberger, 1985. (6) In Fors?k for forandring? Alternative veier til et b?rekraftig samfunn, Oslo, Spartacus 1997 (English short version Toward Governance for Future Generations. How do we change course? Futures No. 4 1998, pp 277-92), I have discussed five alternative strategies for a transition to a sustainable society. These are the Reformists (such as Gore), the Impatient Revolutionaries (such as Robert Heilbroner), the Patient Revolutionaries (such as Milbrath), the Grassroot Fighters (such as Murray Bookchin) and the Multifaceted Radicals (such as Meyer). (7) Dennis Gabor: Inventing the Future. London, Secker and Warburg, 1963/New York, Knopf, 1964. THE 60 KEY WORKS * Barney, Gerald O. (ed.): The Global 2000 Report to the President. Entering the 21st Century. A Report Prepared by the Council on Environmental Quality and the Department of State. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1982. 766 p. (First published 1980.) * Bell, Daniel: The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. A Venture in Social Forecasting. New York, Basic Books, 1973. 507 p. * Bell, Wendell: The Foundation of Futures Studies: Human Science for the 21st Century. ?, Mc Graw-Hill 1997. * Bestuzhev-Lada, Igor: A Short History of Forecasting in the USSR. Article in "Technological Forecasting and Social Change", 41:3, May 1992, pp. 341-8. * Blackman, Colin and Olugbenga Adesida (eds.): African Futures. Special issue of "Futures" (9/1994). * Brown, Lester et al.: Vital Signs 2002. The Trends That are Shaping Our Future. New York, Norton/London, Earthscan 2002. 192 p. * Brundtland, Gro Harlem (chairman): Our Common Future. Oxford/New York, Oxford University Press, 1987. 383 p. * Carson, Rachel: Silent Spring. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1962/London, Hamish Hamilton 1963. 304 p. * Cornish, Edward (ed.): The Study of the Future. An Introduction to the Art and Science of Understanding and Shaping Tomorrow's World. Bethesda, World Future Society, 1977. 308 p. * Cournand, Andr? and Maurice Levy (eds.): Shaping the Future. Gaston Berger and the Concept of Prospective. New York/London/Paris, Gordon and Breach 1973. 300 p. * Dammann, Erik: Revolution in the Affluent Society. London, Heretic, 1984. 173 p. (Norwegian original: Revolusjon i velferdssamfunnet - 1979.) * Ekins, Paul (ed.): Wealth Beyond Measure. An Atlas of New Economics. London, Gaia, 1992. * Flechtheim, Ossip K.: History and Futurology. Meisenheim am Glan, Anton Hain, 1966. 126 p. * Fowles, Jib (ed.): Handbook of Futures Research. Westport(Connecticut)/London, Greenwood, 1978. 822 p. * Freeman, Christopher and Jahoda, Marie (eds.): World Futures. The Great Debate. London, Martin Robertson, 1978. 416 p. * Garrett, Martha J. et al.: Studies for the 21st Century. Paris, UNESCO, 1991. 642 p. * Godet, Michel: Creating Futures. Scenario Planning as a Strategic Management Tool. London, Economica, 2001. 269p. * Gore, Al: Earth in the Balance. Forging a New Common Purpose. London, Earthscan, 2000. 408 p. * The Group of Lisbon: Limits to Competition. Lisbon, Gulbenkian Foundation, 1993. 182 p. * Harman, Willis W.: Global Mind Change. The Promise of the last Years of the Twentieth Century. Sausalito, Institute for Noetic Sciences, 1988. 185 p. * Henderson, Hazel: Paradigms in Progress: Life Beyond Economics. Indianapolis, Knowledge Systems, 1991. 293 p. * Herrera, Amilcar (ed.): Catastrophe or New Society? A Latin American World Model. Ottawa, International Development Centre, 1976. * Homann, Rolf: Zuk?nfte - heute denken morgen sein. Z?rich, Orell F?sli 1998. 191p. * Jantsch, Erich: Technological Forecasting in Perspective. Paris, OECD, 1967. 401 p. * Jouvenel, Bertrand de: The Art of Conjecture. New York, Basic Books, 1967. 307 p. (French original: L'Art de la conjecture - 1964.) * Jungk, Robert and Johan Galtung (eds.): Mankind 2000. Oslo, Universitetsforlaget/London, Allen & Unwin, 1969. 368 p. * Jungk, Robert and Norbert R. M?llert: Futures workshops. How to Create Desirable Futures. London, Institute for Social Inventions, 1989. 123 p. (German original: Zukunftswerkst?tten - 1981.) * Kahn, Herman and Anthony Wiener: The Year 2000. A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years. New York, Mac Millan, 1967. 431 p. * Kennedy, Paul: Preparing for the Twenty-First Century. New York, Random House/London, HarperCollins, 1993. 429 p. * Kothari, Rajni: Footsteps Into the Future. Diagnosis of the Present world and a Design for an Alternative. New Delhi, Orient Longman/New York, The Free Press/Amsterdam, North-Holland, 1974. 173 p. * Kreibich, Rolf et al.: Zukunftsforschung und Politik [Futures Research and Politics]. 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Geneva, UNRISD 1995. 173 p. * Valaskakis, Kimon et al.: The Conserver Society. A Workable Alternative for the Future. Toronto, Fitzhenry and Whiteside/New York, Harper and Row 1979. 286 p. From checker at panix.com Fri Aug 26 01:37:56 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 21:37:56 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Freakonomics: "Peak Oil:" Welcome to the media's new version of shark attacks Message-ID: "Peak Oil:" Welcome to the media's new version of shark attacks http://www.freakonomics.com/2005/08/peak-oil-welcome-to-medias-new-version.html Sunday, August 21, 2005 [Links omitted on purpose. Too much irrelevance. I posted the NYT Magazine article recently. Read the first and last item especially.] The cover story of the New York Times Sunday Magazine written by Peter Maass is about "Peak Oil." The idea behind "peak oil" is that the world has been on a path of increasing oil production for many years, and now we are about to peak and go into a situation where there are dwindling reserves, leading to triple-digit prices for a barrel of oil, an unparalleled worldwide depression, and as one web page puts it, "Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon." One might think that doomsday proponents would be chastened by the long history of people of their ilk being wrong: Nostradamus, Malthus, Paul Ehrlich, etc. Clearly they are not. What most of these doomsday scenarios have gotten wrong is the fundamental idea of economics: people respond to incentives. If the price of a good goes up, people demand less of it, the companies that make it figure out how to make more of it, and everyone tries to figure out how to produce substitutes for it. Add to that the march of technological innovation (like the green revolution, birth control, etc.). The end result: markets figure out how to deal with problems of supply and demand. Which is exactly the situation with oil right now. I don't know much about world oil reserves. I'm not even necessarily arguing with their facts about how much the output from existing oil fields is going to decline, or that world demand for oil is increasing. But these changes in supply and demand are slow and gradual -- a few percent each year. Markets have a way with dealing with situations like this: prices rise a little bit. That is not a catastrophe, it is a message that some things that used to be worth doing at low oil prices are no longer worth doing. Some people will switch from SUVs to hybrids, for instance. Maybe we'll be willing to build some nuclear power plants, or it will become worth it to put solar panels on more houses. The NY Times article totally flubs the economics time and again. Here is one example from the article: The author writes: The consequences of an actual shortfall of supply would be immense. If consumption begins to exceed production by even a small amount, the price of a barrel of oil could soar to triple-digit levels. This, in turn, could bring on a global recession, a result of exorbitant prices for transport fuels and for products that rely on petrochemicals -- which is to say, almost every product on the market. The impact on the American way of life would be profound: cars cannot be propelled by roof-borne windmills. The suburban and exurban lifestyles, hinged to two-car families and constant trips to work, school and Wal-Mart, might become unaffordable or, if gas rationing is imposed, impossible. Carpools would be the least imposing of many inconveniences; the cost of home heating would soar -- assuming, of course, that climate-controlled habitats do not become just a fond memory. If oil prices rise, consumers of oil will be (a little) worse off. But, we are talking about needing to cut demand by a few percent a year. That doesn't mean putting windmills on cars, it means cutting out a few low value trips. It doesn't mean abandoning North Dakota, it means keeping the thermostat a degree or two cooler in the winter. A little later, the author writes The onset of triple-digit prices might seem a blessing for the Saudis -- they would receive greater amounts of money for their increasingly scarce oil. But one popular misunderstanding about the Saudis -- and about OPEC in general -- is that high prices, no matter how high, are to their benefit. Although oil costing more than $60 a barrel hasn't caused a global recession, that could still happen: it can take a while for high prices to have their ruinous impact. And the higher above $60 that prices rise, the more likely a recession will become. High oil prices are inflationary; they raise the cost of virtually everything -- from gasoline to jet fuel to plastics and fertilizers -- and that means people buy less and travel less, which means a drop-off in economic activity. So after a brief windfall for producers, oil prices would slide as recession sets in and once-voracious economies slow down, using less oil. Prices have collapsed before, and not so long ago: in 1998, oil fell to $10 a barrel after an untimely increase in OPEC production and a reduction in demand from Asia, which was suffering through a financial crash. Oops, there goes the whole peak oil argument. When the price rises, demand falls, and oil prices slide. What happened to the "end of the world as we know it?" Now we are back to $10 a barrel oil. Without realizing it, the author just invoked basic economics to invalidate the entire premise of the article! Just for good measure, he goes on to write: High prices can have another unfortunate effect for producers. When crude costs $10 a barrel or even $30 a barrel, alternative fuels are prohibitively expensive. For example, Canada has vast amounts of tar sands that can be rendered into heavy oil, but the cost of doing so is quite high. Yet those tar sands and other alternatives, like bioethanol, hydrogen fuel cells and liquid fuel from natural gas or coal, become economically viable as the going rate for a barrel rises past, say, $40 or more, especially if consuming governments choose to offer their own incentives or subsidies. So even if high prices don't cause a recession, the Saudis risk losing market share to rivals into whose nonfundamentalist hands Americans would much prefer to channel their energy dollars. As he notes, high prices lead people to develop substitutes. Which is exactly why we don't need to panic over peak oil in the first place. So why do I compare peak oil to shark attacks? It is because shark attacks mostly stay about constant, but fear of them goes up sharply when the media decides to report on them. The same thing, I bet, will now happen with peak oil. I expect tons of copycat journalism stoking the fears of consumers about oil induced catastrophe, even though nothing fundamental has changed in the oil outlook in the last decade. (For those of you interested in more economic perspectives on peak oil, check out these three posts by Jim Hamilton of econbrowser: here, here, and here. And thanks to Alex from marginalrevolution for pointing me to Hamilton's posts.) posted by Steven D. Levitt at 11:31 AM 107 Comments: head lem said... OK I'll be your Huckleberry. In 1971, President Nixon declared a "War on Cancer". http://training.seer.cancer.gov/module_cancer_disease/unit5_war _on_cancer.html "The Market" has had 35 years to respond. In fact, very rich people who are dying of cancer are willing to pay whatever price they can afford for "the cure". The Shah of Iran came to NYC with his cancer and his untold wealth. It did not help him. Peter Jennings of ABC news (lung cancer 2005) was probably wealthy. The "market" did not help him. And amazingly, Nixon declared his war on cancer AFTER we had been to the Moon in 1969. Why heck, if WE can go to the Moon, we can do anything. The Market always provides. Right? Right? Technology always finds a way. Technology will save us. Right? The market will save us. "They" who tinker in science will save us even though they fret that they might be able to this time. It's always happened before and therefore by unquestionably "sound" logic it must happen again. Right? Peak Oil is one of a number of Global-Scope Catastrophes that are rolling up onto Humanity's beach. The Tsunami of Sumatra was nothing compared to what is heading our way. We know about it, and yet the ever-insightful "market" does nothing. Just as it did when the dot.com bust was rolling in and people knew (Barrons). Just as it did when the first oil shock hit (Hubbert's 1973 USA peak). When are you religious fanatics of "economics" and Adam Smith's invisible waving hand going to wake up and admit you worship a false deity? There is only a finite amount of easily-extractable oil underground. We are at the point where our high-tech straws are sucking it out as fast as they can. The faster they suck, the quicker we reach peak and go over. 8/21/2005 2:01 PM Preston said... The economics principles I don't disagree with, its the degree of the reponse. You say: "If oil prices rise, consumers of oil will be (a little) worse off. But, we are talking about needing to cut demand by a few percent a year. That doesn't mean putting windmills on cars, it means cutting out a few low value trips. It doesn't mean abandoning North Dakota, it means keeping the thermostat a degree or two cooler in the winter." But our use of energy is far more fundamental to both our population growth as a planet, and our standard of living as a country. What the economics can't compensate for are the physics and fundamentals of the laws of thermodynamics. Our standard of living requires a certain energy input. Renewables can't provide energy at the rate we are accustom to, so we use the "battery" of oil that we are draining. When that battery runs out, the economics will adapt, but along with it is a more painful adaption we will have to make in the way we live. As just one example of how fossil fuels go beyond just gas trips for errands, read this article: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html -Ptone 8/21/2005 2:22 PM Davis said... Using cancer as an example doesn't help your argument here -- it's a shining example of common misunderstanding. There is no such disease as cancer -- "Cancer is actually the end result of what are probably hundreds (thousands?) of different diseases. We have confused ourselves by giving them the same category name - it's like the old-style classification of infections as various 'fevers.'" I would argue that "peak oil" is an issue which suffers from common understanding in a similar way -- the complex details of the real situation become obscured by attention-grabbing, headline-friendly rhetoric. The Economist had an excellent survey discussing peak oil in the April 28th issue; I won't reproduce their arguments against this kind of alarmist talk here, simply because there are too many of them. 8/21/2005 2:31 PM Eric Galloway said... The sad thing is that the New York Times is so 'old media' that most readers of the paper will never know about these critiques. Here an idea: Make this the subject of your next column in the New York Times. Of course, the Timesies are feeling a little sensitive to criticism these days (Judy Miller, Jayson Blair, etc.) so any explicit references to the Peter Maass piece might be ill-advised. 8/21/2005 2:37 PM mtraven said... Yes the market will respond. As Hamilton points out, the framing of this question in terms of peaks or sudden cliffs where prices shoot up instaneously is naive. However, nothing in the market-economics arguments addresses: - the size of the dislocation (small increases in oil prices can multiply their effects as it raises costs throughout the economy) - the time to respond. This is the big one. A rational response to a rise in oil prices involves consuming less transportation. Everyone who lives spread out in the suburbs will be hurting and, perhaps, be economically motivated to live in a denser development pattern where they can rely on human-power or public transit. However, getting to that state requires an enormous shift in investment, public and private. It's not going to happen quickly and it's going to cause pain. - Speaking of pain, downturns, recessions, and depressions can all be part of a market response. While a long-view economist can interpret it all as a welcome and necessary correction, that doesn't lessen the pain for individuals involved. I'd like to see you and James Kunstler, who has a new doomsaying book out, have a good optimist/pessimist debate. Us ordinary citizens don't know who to believe, but a good battle is always entertaining. 8/21/2005 2:52 PM Jamie Brockington said... Dr. Levitt: You make an excellent that is often overlooked in the mainstream media and among the general populace. Taking into account another basic economic principle, that people make rational decisions, it is illogical to assume that people will pay say, $5 per gallon of gas if an alternative can offer half of that. It is also reasonable to assume that people would drive less if driving costs more. The idea that rising gas prices could be the "end of life as we know it" is just completely absurd. Toyota and Honda obviously understand it. They're beginning to create more hybrid vehicles. to head lem: Contrary to your assertion, the market is responding to cancer. While there is no efficative cure for the disease, there is a copious amount of money and research towards developing one. That IS the invisible hand at work. Were there no economic response to such a devastating illness, there would be Cancer Societies, no funds devoted towards curing cancer, and less attention paid towards it. Just because a few wealthy, cancer-afflicted aristocrats could not use their money to cure themselves, doesn't negate the economic, incentive-based reaction towards cancer. -JB 8/21/2005 2:59 PM Anonymous said... The flaw in your logic is the speed with which society will adapt. I don't feel it will be a slow shift away from oil, but rather a sudden drop in supply will come first - unrest in Nigeria or Venezuela and suddenly supply drastically exceeds demand. Look at the panic buying which ensued during the UK petrol protest in 2000 - it literally brought the country to a halt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_fuel_protest The US is particularly dependent on petrol for transport. Look at Walmart's worry over oil prices. Look at Surprise, AZ - a community with no public transport, a group of suburbs which are virtually unsustainable without cheap fuel: http://maps.google.com/maps?oi=map&q=Surprise,+AZ We all agree that hybrids and changes of habits must happen. Unfortunately, I bet that a sudden drop in supply will cause total chaos before any real lasting change in habits begins to occur. I am also highly sceptical of any replacement technology for oil - how long will it take to build the nuclear plants required? Any idea how many plants would be needed? You can't build a nuclear plant overnight. Oil is to society as alcohol is to an alcoholic ... sadly, I feel we're going to have to wake up in our own vomit before we start any process of a real substantial move away from oil. 8/21/2005 3:50 PM JW said... "The consequences of an actual shortfall of supply would be immense. If consumption begins to exceed production by even a small amount, the price of a barrel of oil could soar to triple-digit levels." The price of oil has gone up precipitously in the last few years, mainly because excess capacity has disappeared. We are still consuming more every year. If and when we get to the point where supply actually decreases, the price of a good with an inelastic demand curve will go through the roof, at least temporarily. I agree that as long as cooler heads prevail, this does not mean the end of civilization, but modern civilization is built on the idea of growth. Our current system where the rich get richer will only work when there is growth in the system. This will become extremely difficult once energy becomes constrained. Is it hard to believe that when the economy goes into an extended funk and the people at the bottom are getting squeezed the most, that people will want a scapegoat, esp one thats supposedly sitting on all the oil? 8/21/2005 3:58 PM Mike said... The real problem with your analysis of the situation as one which can be resolved by simple economics is that you're right. You're right - prices will go up until enough demand is destroyed for them to stabilize. There'll be a lot of up/down in the meantime. But what does this mean? In our country, this means you won't be able to live in the suburbs anymore in most cities (no public transportation; and no feasible way to deliver it to most suburban neighborhoods). So what does that do to our country? Concrete laid down now to build the latest exurbs has a long life. And conversely, rebuilding today's suburbs to be dense urban neighborhoods in which mass transit can actually work is expensive even with CHEAP oil. One thing economists forget is that demand destruction in the abstract is a perfect solution to a supply/demand imbalance. But when the suburbanites are trying to get to work or school at $6/gallon gasoline, and there still isn't a bus in their neighborhood, and they still can't carpool since their town has offices spread all throughout the suburbs rather than in one central location, what are you gonna do? 8/21/2005 4:01 PM Prof. Goose said... This post has been removed by the author. 8/21/2005 4:15 PM odograph said... Economists seem weird to me. Yes, I've seen and commented in some of those other blogs. Valid points are made, but an undercurrent of economic weirdness returns. They seem to think they have "the answer" because no matter what happens, supply and demand will meet. It doesn't matter if they meet in a return to $10 gas (SUVs for everyone!) or at $100 (goodbye Fedex) ... it's still a market success. A comment above says: Taking into account another basic economic principle, that people make rational decisions, it is illogical to assume that people will pay say, $5 per gallon of gas if an alternative can offer half of that. It is also reasonable to assume that people would drive less if driving costs more. The idea that rising gas prices could be the "end of life as we know it" is just completely absurd. I submit to you that driving less, even having to think about how far you drive, is a change in life as we know it. Be careful that your prediction of optimism doesn't come to match someone else's prediction of pessimism! 8/21/2005 4:21 PM odograph said... sorry, $10 oil not "$10 gas." 8/21/2005 4:22 PM Prof. Goose said... Cheap oil is necessary and sufficient for economic growth. Period. Cheap oil is what could have facilitated the development of alternative sources of energy, had it been used wisely. You see, without economic growth, lives change. Period. Economics is a discipline that is very normatively pleasing when economic growth exists. Growth facilitates rational choices and we all feel warm and fuzzly about the market. However, at its core, economics, when there is not economic growth, turns into a rationalist, Hobbesian State of Nature that decays rapidly. Why? Actors have to make tougher choices, that while still rational, do not stem from a growing pie, but a shrinking one. Then throw in the psychology of people with no hope of growth or betterment...and what do you have? NB, I do not subscribe to the real doomers like Kunstler, because I think humans can innovate and change if we understand the situation and are driven to do so...and we can do so in time to come in for a soft landing. We just have to get our heads out of our asses and start. Now. So, I hope you all learn as much as you can about peak oil. Simmons, Deffeyes, etc., etc. And if you're so inclined, come on over to The Oil Drum, where it is our mission to talk about this and many other related subjects. 8/21/2005 4:35 PM Anonymous said... As knowledge of the impending energy crisis begins to spread, hording will take precedent over conservation-- pushing the price higher and higher, even in the face of falling demand. 8/21/2005 4:37 PM Eric Galloway said... I see Peter Maass (the author of the NY Times Mag piece) is writing a book about oil. I'd advise him to write quickly--just in case the price of oil collapses down to $10 a barrel again (as in 1998)--if he wants to produce a freako'-style bestseller. Next year we might be back to worrying about the threat from Japan (or perhaps killer bees, or possibly even kudzu). 8/21/2005 4:40 PM Aaron said... A few thoughts from up here in "Oilberta", Canada. - I have a friend who burns raw vegetable oil in his mercedes diesel at 77 cents (CDN) per litre. - People in my town are responding by snapping up Smart Cars. They are everywhere in the Great White North. - It might not be the price of oil in terms of dollars, but the price of dollars in terms of oil. The US dollar has taken a substantial hit as of late. - Price of oil is based on expectations. Investment houses who buy futures contracts do so on expectations. They almost have an incentive to propagate a theory of limited future supply. 8/21/2005 4:47 PM J-Deal said... ?We know about it, and yet the ever-insightful "market" does nothing.? How can you make such a claim? It now costs $1,000 dollars to change any car into a Natural Gas or propane car. Oil can now be cheaply extracted from Sand Tar and Coal. -did you know America could supplement it?s oil supply with it?s coal supply? Electric cars are now completely viable, still not as good as oil driven cars, but 300 miles on an overnight charge ain?t bad. Combustion Hydrogen cars can be made for 50k, fuel cell for about 100k. Should we go on? There are hundreds of examples, and hundreds of alternatives that could go into effect, and be improved upon within months, if your catastrophe ever comes about. ?There is only a finite amount of easily-extractable oil underground? You need to research this a bit more, you do realize that the definition of easily extractable oil has changed every single year of your life? Tar sand which a few years ago was considered costly, can now be done for relatively cheap. Deep oil which was once impossible to drill, can now be done for $12 a barrel. American Oil companies have not once accurately predicted oil prices beyond 5 years. Always stating a higher cost than they expected, always underestimating the increase in technology. Tappable Oil reserves have increased every year I have been alive. If that ever changes, you will soon see oil substitutes increase every year. ?Renewables can't provide energy at the rate we are accustom to, so we use the "battery" of oil that we are draining.? France gets 80% of it?s energy from Nukes, we get 20%. Even if your statement is true, we have a long way to go. The article you link is basically bunk. About 90% of oil use in America goes to transportation. That other 10% can be made up easily just through use of alternatives. It doesn?t even explain the green revolution properly. Look it up at Wiki if you care. I don?t know if you know anyone in the car business, but bring this all up with them. Every car company has a plan to switch from Gas to other alternatives. The price of which would only be about 16 billion dollars. The cars would not be as good as gas cars at first -miles per tank of about 200-300 miles- but that would improve very quickly. ?Look at Surprise, AZ - a community with no public transport, a group of suburbs which are virtually unsustainable without cheap fuel:? A really bad example, seeing that just last year Phoenix?s oil supply was cut off by a pipeline rupture. Gas went to 20 dollars a gallon. And though their was much complaining, people just car pooled for the week while the pipeline was being fixed. Heck at the very worst, it takes about a day to switch your car over to natural gas or propane. Phoenix having one of the best natural gas infrastructures in the world would be able to remedy this quickly. That?s not to say it would be havoc for a good month or two, but people who think it would be a catastrophic way to life as we know it, just don?t seem to understand the history. The prices of commodities have always gone down, new technology has always arise, better means of extraction have always been invented. This has and will always be the case. Why should oil be any different? I?m 27 years old now. I have been hearing this same debate for my entire life now. At every step of my life my teachers have told me we will run out of oil in 10 years. I used to think, that if they kept saying it, someday it would be true. Now I realize it will never be true. Man learns to adapt. For there are only two great truth in the world. The world is always getting better, and everyone always believes it?s getting worse. 8/21/2005 5:03 PM peakguy said... Dr. Levitt I urge you not to make hasty comments about this subject without more deep analysis. Oil is not just a commodity, it is THE commodity that makes everything in our modern world possible, in particular food production and most forms of transportation. Barring some major innovation, there is no technology or energy source that can replace oil and it's many uses. It's like water and air. 6 Billion people need oil. 100 million maybe... If you read the Maass article closer you will find that really the oil market right now suffers from gross price distortion (probably way too low) because of a dearth of basic data on reserves and a well by well analysis of production rates. This is why people like Matt Simmons have been crying out for more data. Until we have more data I don't think anyone should be complacent about oil prices moving slowly in any direction. The problem is that we have invested Trillions of Dollars into an economic structure predicated on consistently low oil prices. We have trusted politically motivated leaders and economic interests that oil is plentiful and can meet an ever rising level of demand. If we had better data then the market could have continuously bid up the price as it became increasingly apparent that oil supplies were becoming scarce. Instead we are left with a situation in which all of this will become apparent when there are real shortages which will cause a huge spike in prices and the Saudis simply cannot increase production to alleviate the shortage. Then the market will react with brutal efficiency throwing the economy into an economic depression. Will oil restabilize at a lower price? Perhaps. It depends on whether you think inflation will be the main effect or an economic collapse causing rapid deflation of asset and massive unemployment. Remember that everything is relative. If there is rapid deflation and massive unemployment, then $10/barrel may be unaffordable. Please research this subject more closely and come back to us with a more thorough analysis of the subject. It's only the fate of our economy and civilization that hang in the balance. 8/21/2005 5:29 PM Anonymous said... One very quick point. Why is it do you think that in Canada our oil and natural gas reserves are managed by the Ministry of Natural Resources, Environment Canada, run mostly by enviornment science grads but in the US oil and how to obtain it is a matter of National Defence? I find Americans to be very reactionary. If oil and the procurement of it become to expensive and difficult I feel that it actually may be a very good thing for LOCAL economy.....why buy a tomato from Chile when you can buy one from the farmer down the road, and that sort of thinking. 8/21/2005 5:47 PM Jim said... All this discussion with no mention of Julian Simon's bet with Paul Ehrlich? Simon's proposition is that comodities get cheaper over time due to human creativity. Real gas prices are not much more than they were in the '50's, while real income is much higher. 8/21/2005 5:53 PM Ripley said... The hosts of this blog make several huge assumptions. First, "people respond to incentives." That's true, but the incentives to oil suppliers are not necessarily monetary. Countries like Iran or Sudan may sell to China because it can protect them with a UN Security Council veto. Hugo Chavez may lead Venezuela to stop selling to Americans because he doesn't care about maximizing profit. The second assumption is that any "changes in [oil] supply and demand are slow and gradual... [so] prices will rise a little bit" at most. Without knowing exactly how supply or demand will change, how can that be automatically true? The third assumption is market forces will solve the problem rationally. But doesn't that assume some sort of perfect market, with many buyers and sellers? Many responses to high oil prices would require huge initial investments, and it doesn't make sense to the individual entity to make those investments unless it's clear that they will be profitable on a long-term basis. Also, certainty of supply is important in the real world because oil is such a critical resource. This is a long-term issue which an economic analysis should address. The economic issue I'm the most interested in is the elasticity of demand for gasoline, which accounts for about half of U.S. oil use. 8/21/2005 5:57 PM coffee17 said... j-deal: could you post some links about tar sands being cheap? I remember that local producers were having to double the initial overhead to increase production a mere 0.1 mbpd (from $4.3 billion CDN to $7.8 billion CDN). Additionally, combined oil sand production by 2015 is supposed to be 2.7 mbpd ( http://cassandrasyndrome.blogspot.com/2005/07/canadian-tar-sand s-fools-black-gold.html ), so even if it was cheap, that's about 2.7% of the projected oil demand at 2015. Where's the rest of the increased oil production supposed to come from. As for people who drive their cars for 77 cents a gallon with vegetable oil, it's a question of scale. I saw a news story about one such person, and he depended on waste oil from a local restaurant. They won't be able to supply an entire city. There's a waiting time in many places to get a hybrid vehicle, and it there are multiple month long waiting lists to buy enough solar panels to power a house. Not to mention that with the increased price of oil this will be attached onto the cost to manufacture said solar panels. Nuclear power stations take 5+ years to build, and are very energy and capital intensive. And there are no new ones coming on line in the US (yet). Switch one's car over to natural gas? That's a great idea, considering North American natural gas production has already peaked, and the worry about oil prices is regarding the impending peak. Oh, wait, perhaps on the scale of all cars (or even 20% of all cars) that might not be the wisest long term decision. Where are you going to get the hydrogen to fill up your hydrogen (or fuel cell) car? Remember, this isn't just your car, but everyone's car (or again, how about 20%), so the question of scale applies again. Transitioning to all these new technologies will take a lot of oil when oil is getting scare. Additionally our economy currently depends upon cheap oil. Which means that transitioning away from oil takes a lot of capital when there will be (at least) a recession going on, multiplying the apparent cost to transition. This doesn't even take into the fact that about 15% of the USA's oil use is for making inorganic fertilizers, without which agribuisness won't work. And don't count on cheap apples from argentia as well, shipping costs will be up. So the people in the cities will have less direct need of oil, but won't be able to grow their own food. The people in the suburbs will be densely packed enough that crime could be a real problem with a less mobile police force, but at least they have the possibility of growing some of their food. However, for those who've put the work into a successful garden realize that it cuts into the leisure time, and how many people have worm bins to make their compost faster than a compost pile? How many people are ready to grow a garden which will give them some approximately balanced nutrition? And if America has less leisure time, then the terrorists have won. Or something like that. Yes, there are lots of small scale alternatives, but none of them currently answer the question of, "What if everyone did this?", and then there's the issue that even if we find something that ramps up well, will it ramp up fast enough. Yes, there will be demand destruction, but consider what demand destruction is for people in the suburbs, when there's no housing left within walking/biking distance to work, it's the middle of winter, and they pantry is empty. Now consider demand destruction for natural gas which has already peaked (at least it currently has lower decline rates) in Canadian cities. Touching back on oil sands again, current processing uses a lot of natural gas, and as we use more natural gas (cars and busses), what do you think will happen with the price of natural gas and how will this affect oil sands? Lastly, decline in rate of oil recovery for individual wells varries greatly on the techniques used. Horrizontal wells run well until they peak, and then they decline sharply. New wells are energy intensive, and new fields don't contain as much oil, or as fine of a quality of oil. Which means it takes more energy to refine the oil into something useable. As EROEI goes down, effectively the amount of oil produced goes down still further. 8/21/2005 5:58 PM Dimitar Vesselinov said... "Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." Yoda Is there any hope? Yes, there is. Help is on the way. http://alt-e.blogspot.com/ http://alteng.blogspot.com/ http://curtrosengren.typepad.com/alternative_energy/ 8/21/2005 6:00 PM wkwillis said... Why do you assume that oil can't collapse in price and increase in price, say, going from 65 dollars/45 euros per barrel to 650 dollars/15 euros a barrel? That's without US hyperinflation, either. Just a balance of payments renormalisation. We get loaned money by the rest of the world. We buy oil. If the rest of the world doesn't loan us money the dollar collapses and it costs us more money in real terms to buy oil. So we buy lead for battery powered cars, instead. 8/21/2005 6:01 PM peak oil said... The inaugural meeting of the US branch of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) will be held in Denver, Nov 10-11 http://www.postcarbon.org/node/434 8/21/2005 6:17 PM SW said... People have predicted that I would die. I haven't died. Therefore, I will never die. 8/21/2005 6:21 PM Anonymous said... As a Coloradan, let me assure you that the long term problem is about 500 years. There are mountains on the middle slope that are basically horrible piles of black gunk filled with oil--no green trees, no lovely golden aspen, no pretty fuzzy cuddly deer or chipmunks--just ugly black piles of oil poisoned shale. Take the trip along I-70 from Denver to Grand Junction before you argue with me. Our dear former President Jimmy Carter paid me 18.73 an hour to buld an oil cracking plant at Parachute, Colo.--the site of the former city of Grand Mesa. I worked on that sucker for the entire summers of 76 and 77. It would have brought in gasoline for under a dollar a gallon. Our lovely friends in Araby decided to lower their prices before it came online, so now weeds are growing through the cracks in the concrete. The smart boys (oaky, my chemist father) said then that there is enough oil there to supply the entire planet for 500 years. That was in 1976, so maybe there's only enough oil to supply us until, say, 2375 A.D. at today's demands. So it costs us $60.00 a barrel. That's less than we seem to be paying now. To paraphrase Frank Zappa, those mountains are ugly and they want to die. --Bruce Dearborn Walker 8/21/2005 6:29 PM Ralph said... We'll survive peak oil, but the transition will not be pain-free. Oil is transportation. There are limited substitutes. I can buy an electric car to take me to the grocery store, but the trucks and trains that get the food to the store have no alternatives. Batteries large enough to power these vehicles long distances would make them extremenly inefficient. Planes also have no fuel alternative. Biodiesel or liquid fuel from coal is a possibility, but significant infrastructure is not in place. Natural gas production in North America has peaked, and the LNG infrastructure to import oversea NG is hardly started, so conversions to this fuel has minimal upside for the time being. This is not a matter of minor fluctuations in supply and demand. China had a 20% year over year increase in oil demand. This has accelerated the process. In this country, SUV purchases have fallen off the map, but efficient hybrids have long waiting lists, and many upcoming hybrid models are only slightly more efficient than the normal models. What is really disappointing about this glib rebuttal is the ipse dixit manner in which Levitt dismisses the concept. His book and research have been focused on ignoring surface appearance and looking at what the data actually says, and this piece makes pronouncements without bothering to look at the data. 8/21/2005 6:29 PM Steven D. Levitt said... To SW- The right analogy is: People have predicted you will die. You haven't died yet. You probably won't die in the next 5 minutes. The point isn't that we will never run out of oil, it is that by the time we do we probably won't care very much. Steve Levitt 8/21/2005 6:46 PM J-Deal said... Coffee17 Rereading my statement, I may of overstepped. I probably should of stated "cheaper" instead of "cheap". Generally speaking Oil reserves are considered any oil that can be drilled for $15 a barrel, much of the Alberta oil hovers right at this price, most is closer to $18 -but with $60 a barrel for oil, I would consider that pretty cheap, though not as cheap as the $2-$4 Persian Gulf oil. As for some links -I got this info from hard print, so just googled for info. http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006228 http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/company/cnn40245.htm http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.07/oil.html However, if you think I was trying to imply that Alberta sands were the end all be all, you are mistaken. it's just one piece of the puzzle. You act as if it is all zero sum. Let me ask you something, what if we learn how to shale drill cheaply? Well then all our problems go away overnight. As for your questions on Hydrogen, Natural Gas and and propane. First of all, each one of these would lesson our demand for oil, even with a 10% decrease, this would be huge. However, hydrogen could easily become our soul source almost overnight. -We have plans just to do this, in case of catastrophe. Hydrogen is more expensive than oil in output per unit -think mpg-, and the vehicles are more expensive. however with mass production, that could change quickly. You ask where the hydrogen will come from. Well Hydrogen can come from any electrical source. It's one of the easiest things to make on the planet. Actually it's transportation costs that are a pain right now. Hydrogen should not be looked at as a fuel, but an intermidiatary. Much like elecrticity. If an overnight catastphee should happen, which I think is extremely unlikely. You could make the hydrogen in home units with equipment bought at Home Depot. large scale facilities would be put in place within about a 3 month period. It can be made from any electrical source. So unless you think Oil will dry up within a 3 month period, this could be eased into to avert a mass spike in oil demand. You act as if one day we will have oil, and the next day it will be all gone. It just doesn't work that way. If you believe it does, then there is nothing I can say that will change your mind. You also speak of the peak in NG demand, but don't mention LNG at all, LNG is still in it's infancy. Soon we will be able to import LNG much like we import Oil. And guess what, when LNG peaks, we'll find something else, and after that, something else. And so on. 8/21/2005 6:47 PM Anonymous said... We should just trust the Saudis, they love us over there. They would never let anything bad happen to us. 8/21/2005 6:55 PM Anonymous said... Steven: I would agree with you completely if it was guaranteed that oil depletion would be only "a few percent a year". Unfortunately, that's not a solid assumption. Various provinces either are or are about to deplete at over 10% per year. Eg the UK: http://www.irna.ir/en/news/view/menu-237/0505140999165001.htm and Mexico: http://www.greencarcongress.com/2005/03/mexicorsquos_la.html Saudi depletion on existing oil production is estimated at 11% a year (but they may be able to make up the difference with new production for some unknown period). It appears that a lot of provinces have been adopting technology like 4D seismic imaging of the changing oil in place and horizontal wells at the top of the oil layer which lead to maintaining production flat for a while, and then very rapid depletion on the backside of the peak. So, the worst case scenario is global depletion at O(10%) per year in a few years. Not saying that's certain by any means, but it's not off the wall either. That's very very hard to overcome when you consider that the average lifetime for a car on the road is 9 years, a truck is twice that, and new nuclear power plants need a lead time of 5-7 years. Stuart Staniford 8/21/2005 7:06 PM Anonymous said... Sorry, that should have been average *age* of a car on the road is nine years. Stuart Staniford 8/21/2005 7:14 PM Anonymous said... > new nuclear power plants need a lead time of 5-7 years. No, they don't. The political and regulatory environment imposes that kind of delay, but the planning and construction can be done in far less time. I predict that we'll first see the relevant cracks in US gasoline formulation regulation. There will be a production glitch that starves one area and not another and the obvious questions will get asked and the standard answers won't be accepted. 8/21/2005 7:16 PM J-Deal said... Peakguy, you stated "I urge you not to make hasty comments about this subject without more deep analysis. Oil is not just a commodity, it is THE commodity that makes everything in our modern world possible, in particular food production and most forms of transportation. Barring some major innovation, there is no technology or energy source that can replace oil and it's many uses. It's like water and air. 6 Billion people need oil. 100 million maybe..." Hmm, whatever did we do before Oil? Let me ask you, what would affect your life more, the loss of Oil? or the loss of Copper? Or maybe, lets be more fair, $600 dollar a barrel oil or $15 dollar a pound copper? I urge you not to be hasty, think about it. What is more important to you, having cheap electricity or having cheap gas? being able to cool your food in a fridge? or having cheap plastics? heck, using wood instead of plastics? A lot of people assume Oil is more important to us than it really is, just because we buy it at the pump everyday. We never think of the importance of copper. How copper is the commodity that makes our modern homes possible. As for the whole food production comment, I really don't even know what to say to this. Start buy learning how fertilizer is made. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process Oil is the #1 most important substance we have for transportation, you will get no argument from me on that one at all. However, ever since the 70's, we have shifted our oil use in other applications, over to alternatives. Open up an Almanac, look at our Oil use over the past 25 years, you might be surprised. hint, it's increased about 12% from 34.20 qbtu to 39.07 qbtu while total energy use has increased 19%. 8/21/2005 7:19 PM Loren Coleman said... The Copycat Effect Blog Sharks, Gators, Oil http://copycateffect.blogspot.com/2005/08/sharks-gators-oil.html 8/21/2005 7:24 PM odograph said... Just curious ... is "everyone drives a little electric car" optimistic or pessimistic? Is it the success of the invisible hand, or the end of life as we know it? I've got a sense that a lot of SUV families would see it as the sky falling. I get the idea it might be contrary to the "lifestyle" our government thinks it must defend. If it was me, I'd take freedom, honor, peace, and electric cars. YMMV. 8/21/2005 7:25 PM J-Deal said... Anon, you stated. "I would agree with you completely if it was guaranteed that oil depletion would be only "a few percent a year". Unfortunately, that's not a solid assumption. Various provinces either are or are about to deplete at over 10% per year. Eg the UK:" I don't disagree with this in theory at all. But the problem is, world production is still increasing. Even last year, which was a horrible year, we increased at about 2%. -And it wasn't until last year that Oil companies really started to ramp up, many still remeber the losses they took at 10 dollar oil. Now say next year, we are flat, or go down a a few %. Then we need to get our @sses in order, and fast. If it came in as you state, and dropped 10%. Then I think we'd have a few months of Havoc, as we went into a huge burst of energy production from other sources. Also I know it's generic to say, but kinda needs to be saying. France gets 80% of it's power from a source that was unknown 100 years ago. Whose to say that in 100 years, we won't be saying the same about the US. 8/21/2005 7:27 PM SW said... "The point isn't that we will never run out of oil, it is that by the time we do we probably won't care very much". It has bugger all to do with running out. It's all about RATES of production. You need to address that in a substantive way rather than invoking motivation. We agree that there will be plenty of motivation to inspire people to "unlock their creative genius". The question is, are you allowing yourself a realistic assessment of the physical realities that this genius is up against. I suggest not. If you want to make the argument that mining for sand and shale and the resulting processing is going to take the place of what we are losing to depletion and increased consumption and these new sources are going to come on line quickly enough to prevent near term supply shortages, I'd like to see the numbers. Where specifically are the projects where the anticipated production in the next five years can possibly compensate for the 4 million barrels per day we are losing to depletion plus the increased demand represented by growth both here and in India and China? I just don't see the numbers working out without significant 'demand destruction'. You can't just click your heels and make it happen. You can't rely on pixie dust. In the real world, most good leaders prepare for the worst and hope for the best. It is true that there is a real lack of solid data, particularly from the Middle East. And it is also true that a guy like Mat Simmons may be giving us what amounts to the worst case scenario. But given the implications, you would be a complete idiot not to have a plan to deal with the worst case scenario. To blithely assume that there is no chance that it could be an accurate prediction of what is to come amounts to public policy malpractice. The consequences of being wrong on this are simply too severe. Besides, the simple obvious things to do, are undeniably good anyway. Efficiency, doing the same amount of work, with less energy, is a growth industry. It is the next wave of high tech. Disengaging ourselves from the Middle East makes sense. Limiting our carbon emissions makes sense. So getting our public policy going in the right direction is going to help even if this turns out to be a pessimistic projection and we really have more time to prepare for something that is, I'm sure you will admit, inevitable. 8/21/2005 7:35 PM odograph said... "Whose to say that in 100 years, we won't be saying the same about the US." Oh, as an engineer I have seen the "invisible hand" fuel R&D ... they've just never let me deliver an "invisible product." Or put another way, the invisible hand is not a wishing well. 8/21/2005 7:43 PM cerqueira said... Steven, I was really disappointed by this post. By focusing on Maass' article, you've managed to avoid the real question of oil depletion and its implications on economy. If the "peak oilers" are right and oil production reaches a maximum then, surely, people will adapt. The cost of it, though, might be high. The last time oil prices raised, in the seventies and early eighties, it was followed by inflation and recession. Demand was destroyed by recession. In peripheral countries (I live in Brazil) the consequences (of high oil prices and high interest rates) were felt for a long time. As an engineer, I have almost the obligation to believe that energy conservation and alternative sources can cope with the needs. In my own country, ethanol from sugarcane constitutes some 50% of the fuel used by cars. But in the last three years world daily demand for oil has risen some two million barrels a year. Finding alternative sources for that much would be tough - and if you consider anthropogenic climate change, coal derived fuels are not an option. 8/21/2005 8:09 PM Sandy said... There was also no way the oil fires in Kuwait could be out in less than 10 years. There was also no way the Y2K problem could be solved in time to avoid TEOTWAWKI(tm). There was no way prices for commodities would be less in the 1980s than the 1970s. There was no way to feed the world in the 1980's, either. Remember when all of that happened? Me neither. Lots of bright people have said "there is no way that..." and produced lots of learned graphs and data as to why it can't be done, yet to date it has been done. Now, that's not a guarantee that this one time out of all the others, they'll be right, but the trend doesn't go their way. 8/21/2005 8:32 PM head lem said... Yes people have always predicted you will die, some promising it will happen very soon. They were all wrong so far. But now you are in ICU. The Chevron doctor has said "Will You Join Us?" http://www.willyoujoinus.com/ Still willing to bet on that next 5 minutes? 8/21/2005 8:38 PM Aaron said... The Saudis are repatriating billions in investments from abroad, which is just a nicer way of saying "we don't want to fund your consumption habits". No wonder Dick Cheney is coming to Canada in search of oil. There's plenty of it up here. It was profitable at 13 canadian dollars a barrel, or about 9 US. 8/21/2005 8:50 PM head lem said... Sandy, Thanks to "globalization", the markets provide their perfect solutions everywhere, even in Africa, today: http://www.sundayherald.com/51376 What exactly is the "market price" for a pauper's burial site in Africa? ... you know, speaking in cold terms of supply and demand? 8/21/2005 9:00 PM Anonymous said... Mike, and others - we have a serious arithmetic problem standing between us and doom. After all, at $6/gallon they're still building suburbs in Europe, although package tourists never see them. And Europeans still buy enough SUVs that their Socialist Parties keep dreaming up schemes to ban them from cities. A little back-of-the-envelope calculation clears up the mystery. Returning to the U S of A, housing in and near cities is unaffordable. So, in order to buy, people move 20, 30, or more miles out, even in out-of-the-way smaller cities like Madison, Wisconsin. Buying gets them an instant $20k or more a year in capital appreciation. It gets them another $10k or more from income tax they can shift to somebody else by taking the mortgage deduction. Double or triple these numbers around big coastal cities. Now, to swim in this $30k to $60k a year of government-subsidized free money, a couple might drive an extra 30k miles a year between them. That would take 1000 gallons of gas at 30mpg. Seems to me the minimum breakeven is $30k divided by 1000 gallons, or $30 a gallon, or $1260 a barrel - or $2520 a barrel along the coasts. Now, of course, that's a naive analysis holding all other things equal, and they never are. Still, as long as government policy is to keep real estate so hugely profitable, it might even be economically feasible to pay Norwegian trolls with soda straws to suck oil out of shale by the teaspoon. That sort of policy certainly makes gas (or diesel) at $3/gallon one of the all-time bargains in human history. It would remain so at $10 and beyond, which is much higher than any of the (serious) spike forecasts being bandied about. 8/21/2005 9:02 PM Anonymous said... It is not that oil will disappear, rather that to meet demand the price will rise high and quickly. Adapting to that price will be painful for us as the US has predicated its economy on cheap oil. Energy production is completely different from every other technology we know. In most industries, the more modifications or alterations you make to something the more value it has. A Porsche has more value than a VW due to the work and thought going into it. Energy production is the opposite. The more you have to do to produce a fuel the less valuable it is. Oil shales did not work because they required vast amounts of energy and water to convert them to fuel. Tar sands in Canada are marginally productive requiring a barrel or more of oil for every four barrels produced. This is what makes oil so fantastic. It has the highest energy density of any fuel except nuclear fuel and to obtain it we just stick a pipe in the ground and let it flow out (best case). No other fuel we know of provides so much benefit for so little work. This is what will make the transition to the age after cheap oil so painful. We'll have to make extensive changes to our lives and we won't have cheap oil to do it with. 8/21/2005 9:29 PM odograph said... To the Anonymous above this, talking about "doom" ... remember that doom is just one of the two extremes of opinion (or religion). The people who (in my opinion) don't think this through tend to immediately jump to one of two extremes. Either it is doom, or no problem at all. In the middle ground there are lots of scenarios ... clouds with or without various silver linings. Just to pick minor historical dislocations, think "farm crisis" or "rust belt" ... I think there is enought meat in the oil depletion argument to make that kind of "adjustment" possible. 8/21/2005 9:29 PM WHT said... I am very disappointed with Steve Levitt in his analysis. I thought Freakonomics was all about looking at the statistics and basic math underlying a premise and trying to debunk or support that premise. Many times you (Levit) have been able to do this in your book by demonstrating how that almost certain correlations between cause and effect were simply anomolies that could not overcome the null hypothesis. But now with this quickie study, you say " I don't know much about world oil reserves." So, with that, how can you say anything, one way or another, on how things will turn out. Cripes, in the whole post, you didn't even mention that the USA has gone through its own peak oil in the 70's and you could have started one of your classic Freakonomics statistical studies from that well-understood set of data. Actually I am not sure where you are going with this. I realize that you tend to take a balanced view of things, hitting progressive and conservative mistakes with eqivalent gusto. With this, it seems you clearly do not want to upset the conservative circle. 8/21/2005 10:04 PM Pixy Misa said... Energy production is completely different from every other technology we know. In most industries, the more modifications or alterations you make to something the more value it has. A Porsche has more value than a VW due to the work and thought going into it. Energy production is the opposite. The more you have to do to produce a fuel the less valuable it is. Baloney. Energy production works just the same as everything else. You're just confusing cost with value. 8/21/2005 10:13 PM Anonymous said... Hi Stephen, I had no idea you would take on peak oil so soon. I mentioned once about some of the undecidables in economic theory, but I found an interesting argument that points out the difference between humans and free markets. Suppose I have a pond full of trout and for some insane reason I introduce a breeding pair of Sea Lamprey. Of course from the lamprey's perpsective the market is flooded with trout so there is no real reason to plan family size or worry about supply. The lamprey population booms. Is it always true that the two species reach equilibrium? It is not always true, there exist systems in which the rapid rise of the lamprey and there life expectancy forces them to consume all of the trout in the pond. This example is like the interaction of renewables of supply and demand. But what if the trout were sterile so there was only a finite number? Then of course both the trout and lamprey would go extinct. Obviously evolution works too slow to make the lamprey suddenly eat pond scum. The question is when the fundamental need for oil is built into our way of life how quickly will we be able to change in the face of demand outstripping supply? Can we change easily at a rate of 3% of the auto fleet per year, that's only five million cars. Can we start to produce 3% more of our food locally or regionally to offset rising costs of imported food. If we can than great. But the secret underbelly of peak oil is the risk that we need to deal with. If OPEC artificially inflated its reserves back in 1980 then we are in for one hell of a decline. Why, because water infusion makes the wells produce in a skewed distribution, the decline is much steeper and therefore quicker. A good short term policy would be to get OPEC to allow auditing since the future of their resource is the future of the oil economy. The other thing I wanted to say is that just because the trout and lamprey system has a natural way of operating it does not mean that it is an acceptable way of operating or that it is the best way in light of other concerns. Thus the invisible hand, and glove and foot may be the way unfettered markets would act but underneath that chaotic dance with equilibrium is real human suffering. I can't imagine that you have contented yourself with that. 8/21/2005 10:39 PM Aaron Donovan said... The price of oil goes up, and demand for oil goes down. It's that simple. But because oil fuels economic activity, when the demand for oil goes down, economic activity has a way of slowing down too (remember '73, '79, and '90). So Dr. Levitt is right that the market always reaches an equilibrium, and the peak oilers are right in that the end of cheap oil would mean a global economic recession, followed by depression, unless some alternatives were found to stave that off. 8/21/2005 10:40 PM Tom Kelly said... It is now time to short oil. The guy who mows my grass almost quit mowing about five years ago to day trade internet stocks and then of course he got wiped out. Just today he stopped me to talk about how gas would soon be $5 a gallon. Since the New York Times has not shown itself recently to be half as smart as the guy who mows my grass- the end of high gas prices is certainly near. 8/21/2005 11:13 PM coffee17 said... j-deal: thanks for the links. Altho there's conflicting information in each article, from some other articles I'd read, it seemed like they were still taking a bath on oil sands. Then again, it is heavy oil, which is less useful, and while it's not particularly sour, it's definitely not sweet. But as you've said, there's more in the game than just oil sands. The only thing that really bothered me is one article says that they use oil and gas from within the tar sands for the extraction, and another article mentions the costs of the natural gas that they burned to extract the oil. As one who lives in Canada, where natural gas is the primary heating fuel, and knowing that natural gas has peaked in north america, and that liquid natural gas shipments aren't going to be ramping up quickly, it seems criminal to use it to make oil. What if we learned how to drill shale oil cheaply? Google for "Leon Smith" and shale, and apparently someone has found a way that's comparable to oil sands. Of course, there's not much else out there about him other than his announcement. But shale oil would be another issue like oil sands. There's a lot of oil, but it's low capacity. With depletion of existing wells, and most new wells coming on line are from the same fields (meaning they'll never produce as much capacity as the earlier wells did, and they'll go into depeltion sooner) capacity is the problem, not total reserves. Cheap is not enough, it has to be cheap and fast. If there was cheap and fast shale, that would be great for all but the environment. Yes, I admit that a quick 10% depletion of demand (not destruction) would be great. But I think you're overstating the "overnight" case. I don't think that society as we know it is going to end. But I do think there's going to be great difficulties because of the transition time, and current infrastructure. However million many cars there are in the US won't be replaced over night. Heck, there's a shortage of hybrid cars, and they've experienced more effort into producing a consumer product that hydrogen cars have been. Yes, hydrogen is simple to make, you don't even need to go to home depot, just cut an existing extension cord short and stick the ends in water. Or did you mean that there are products one can buy at home depot which will create and trap hydrogen which one could feed to an air compressor? Well, regardless, one could fashion things together at home depot, and eventually someone would put out a finished product. But how long until there's been enough hydrogen cars to take 10% of the gas guzzlers off the road? I suppose it would be more important to ask how long until there are enough hydrogen powered busses? They seem to just be hitting the market (as in first bus delivered, and pilot projects). We won't just run out of oil. But when we're short on capacity by 500,000 a day, how much will price have to rice until demand for those half million is destroyed? And how high will prices have to go before the next years shortfall of 1.5 mbpd or 2.5 mbpd? And when people are paying those prices what will happen to the economy with them not buying other stuff with that money (and if they're americans, they certainly wouldn't be saving it!)? Anonymous posts some equations showing that it's cost effective for people in the suburbs to pay $30 per gallon of gas. However, while some of that $30 they save via gas goes towards consummables, I think at least an equal portion went towards owning a more expensive house (essentially living beyond their means). And if there's $30 gas and the true costs of living in the suburbs are apparent, I'd be willing to wager home prices would go down, but that won't help the people with the APR mortgages. They'll still be paying the original amount, but at new interest rates, and I don't think they'll be as good as they were. For those who can't afford it and can't sell, they lose their initial investment, get to try and find a place to rent in the cities, or ... well, demand destruction? Again, I really don't think that this is the end of the world. But given the large unknowns from the oil companies, the knowledge that a corporation is quite willing to take advantage of the consumers, and even willing to take advantage of it's long term viability for short term profit (depending on individual corporations), I think that the problem is something that more people should be concerned about, and I don't think it's going to be without problems. Coal towns didn't have good prospects on the switch to oil, and that was under the best of terms. Unless we have a viable (read: as good or better) alternative to oil by the time desired demand outstrips supply, I think it could be worse. 8/21/2005 11:15 PM Anonymous said... Please note: lifting cost in Saudi is lower than other places, say 5 dollars a barrel. Canadian oil is perhaps 15 dollars a barrel. Money spent on increasing production at higher rates is wasted if the price of oil drops below 20 dollars a barrel. That is the problem with high cost energy sources, not so much the cost, but the risk of bankruptcy from a flucutating oil price. The US and other governments can act to stabilize oil prices by a policy of purchase for a petroleum reserve when the price drops below 25 dollars, and sales from the petroleum reserve when the price goes above 50 dollars a barrel. Another policy that would help would reduce 'designer gas' requirements so refineries could fill each others requirements when they have to shut down for maintenance. 8/21/2005 11:33 PM M. Simon said... For a lot of uses modems are a very good substitute for autos. The USA is ready if the need arises. The change could be done in days. 8/21/2005 11:41 PM Mr. Snitch said... Pretty healthy discussion as internet boards go, haven't seen the word 'wingnut' once. (This one won't count.) 1) Re predictions about 'dying': What actually happens is either some one predicts you'll die soon, and then when you die at 95 they say, 'See?', or when your continued living becomes embarassing to them, rather than changing their worldview they look for ways to make you die. Understanding that concept means understadning 95% of national politics. 2) I love these discussions about life-and-death commodities. When the power goes out, it's electricity that's indispensible. When it's oil we're concerned about, it's oil. One comment mentioned copper. There's only one vital commodity that we have to manage, and that's water. No one worries about that because it looks like there's plenty, but it's the one commodity we should be more concerned about - because there IS no alternative. 3) I like the potential energy alternatives we have now and am very encouraged about the prospect for electric (hydrogen) cars in ten years or so (they won't be around in large numbers much before that I think). That still means the hydrogen has to be produced somehow. I speculated on that here. 8/21/2005 11:44 PM M. Simon said... Basic economics: demand does not outstrip supply as long as prices can vary. The price of oil has hisen by a factor of 6X in 8 years without destroying the American economy. It is screwing the Chinese economy. Why? 8/21/2005 11:47 PM M. Simon said... Hydrogen cars are probably not the wave of the future. Methanol cars probably are. The problem with hydrogen is low densitty of energy when used as a transportation fuel. Why methanol? Because, computer companies want it to power laptops. Methanol is starting from behind but will catch up fast as the methanol fuel cells actually go to market in the next year or three. 8/21/2005 11:52 PM Gene Hoffman said... There are two separate issues and problems here. One set is macro and one set is micro. On the macro side, people are confusing cheap oil with cheap energy. The US economy is dependent on cheap energy. The US economy is so large and diversified that it can easily absorb a slight increase in what is the definition of cheap energy as the mix shifts away from oil simply on price. To show an anecdotal story to explain this, look at domestic transport. People point to trucks and trains as causing a huge impact on the price of consumer goods if oil prices increase substantially. However what is much more likely is that subsidized long haul trucking shifts in favor of rail lines that are more effecient and can further convert to electrical energy sources. We do face a technological challenge around batteries. Lots of alternative energy sources would be viable if we had serious improvements in our ability to store energy. The sad thing is that the best energy storage mechanism we've come up with is pumping water uphill. That should give you a sense of where we can make dramatic technological changes that would have a very real impact on the cost of useable energy. On the micro front, two items are pushing current prices higher. One is simply the lower value of the dollar relative to other currencies. As the dollar recovers strength the price of oil in dollars will decrease. The second is that the Chinese economy is distorting the price of oil by placing caps on the price paid at the pump. This is an attempt to stimulate growth but is not long term sustainable. As the political-economic reality sinks in, their demand will decrease and potentially decrease at a surprising rate. Artificial price mechanisms are as brittle as folks would like to say relatively free markets are. -Gene 8/22/2005 12:07 AM Anonymous said... Just to widen the discussion a little, they say a picture is worth a thousand words. Check out this guy's analysis. http://davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr71.html It's America we can have more than one take on things right guys? http://davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr70.html 8/22/2005 12:17 AM Anonymous said... http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112466148445219046,00.html How Oil Dependence Fuels U.S. Policies From Iraq to China, from the Gaza Strip to Iran, the biggest foreign-policy problems of the summer all are setting off the same alarm: It is imperative for the U.S. to become more energy independent. But that, of course, is precisely what Washington's policymakers have been unable, or unwilling, to accomplish. Instead, America's exposure to trouble in the world's volatile oil-producing regions actually is on the rise, even as the summer driving season heads toward its climax with oil near a once-unthinkable $65 a barrel. In brief, while the 20th century was the century of oil, the 21st already is unfolding as the century of whatever follows oil, or the century of fighting over what's left of oil -- or both. 8/22/2005 12:24 AM Anonymous said... "Which is exactly the situation with oil right now. I don't know much about world oil reserves." Opinion on a subject you base on economics without any industry experience. Nice one. 8/22/2005 12:28 AM Anonymous said... so when you take a whole bunch of speed, just fill your system with it over and over and over until at one point you cant get as much into the system as you need to keep the system running at such a high speed, and presumably inefficient way (compared to the way it was designed to run)... at that point is it really right to complain about the loss of speed or is it more right to realize that we shouldnt have been taking so much? 8/22/2005 12:32 AM M. Simon said... China uses 6X as much energy per unit of output as the USA does. Perhaps the problem is that the Chinese government controlled economy is not investing enough in energy efficiency because the government is screwing with price signals. 8/22/2005 12:49 AM William said... "As for people who drive their cars for 77 cents a gallon with vegetable oil" It was per-liter, which equates to roughly 2.50$ a gallon. And you need fertilizers (petro-based), and insecticides (petro-based), to grow those vegetables. I also suppose global warming's just a big liberal lie and we shouldn't worry at all about the fact that tar oil creates about 3 or 4 times more emmissions than "cheap oil" just through extraction. And the way societies & markets adapt is by panicking, and if you lay back and say things are going to fix themselves, they won't. 8/22/2005 1:12 AM Marty said... The rogue ecomomist says: "I don't know much about world oil reserves". Oh, how rascally of you. I originally got a degree in geology but now I study the brain. If somebody said, 'I don't know much about neuroscience, but here is how I think the brain works', I'd probably take them less seriously. Why not take a look at actual oil and energy numbers? I've summarized the basic ones here. After all, that's what the scientists you are depending on to save your butt do. 8/22/2005 1:42 AM Anonymous said... Anon -- "Energy production is completely different from every other technology we know. In most industries, the more modifications or alterations you make to something the more value it has. A Porsche has more value than a VW due to the work and thought going into it." This is Marxist stuff and Karl's biggest error. A product or service is worth EXACTLY what the market price is and not your inputs including cost of labor. An army of Garden Gnomes could sculpt and spray paint a pile of dog doo. You'd have a hard time selling it. In contrast people will pay for the most ridiculous junk simply because it has a designer name slapped on it. Point being that technology and substitution provide work-arounds and the market responds to buyer preferences expresses as willingness to buy at price points. The world was running out of Whale oil for lamps until some obscure Colonel found oil in Pennsylvania. Much of the discussion is being fueled by "why won't people live a morally pure life like we tell them to?" People abandoned the cities as soon as possible, when I lived in New Orleans it was clear that the streetcars in the 1840's onwards drove suburban life, starting out from the St. Charles line (the line is still in existence btw). Other lines along Magazine stimulated development upriver as well, with obvious fill-in housing as lines were added in between. This helps explain the curious set of mansions on the main streets and row houses off them a few blocks over. A few more high-profile terrorist attacks, coupled with continuing urban crime, and oil prices will have to be high indeed for suburban dwellers to trade safety and privacy for "moral living." That's the real incentive that drove people out to suburbs even back before WWII; the same pattern developed around rail lines in Victorian England. So sad isn't it that people live their own lives instead of what people lecture them to do? 8/22/2005 3:02 AM Red A said... "why buy a tomato from Chile when you can buy one from the farmer down the road, and that sort of thinking." Please let me know when the farmer down the road has tomatoes in winter. The reason many countries export fruit to the USA so well is their growing seasons are different - in Chile's case their summer is our winter. You know, electricty prices rocketed in California a few years ago...my mother tried to save energy and got her summer bill down to US$ 32.00 / month or some insanely low level. It was not too hard. I can imagine high oil prices will make people drive less, combine trips, and wear sweaters indoors and probably could save 30% on their bills. 8/22/2005 3:24 AM head lem said... Overheard in the cockpit of the Venezeulean airline that ran out of fuel (assuming news rumor is true): "Relax, market forces will soon equalize the gap between our fuel supply and gravity's demands (the latter having been recently renamed by the President of the USA as "intelligent falling" or "Rapture at 3,000 feet") http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/americas/08/21/venezuela.plane.cr ash.ap/index.html 8/22/2005 3:29 AM Anonymous said... Everything that has been said in the comments to this post was said in discussions I have had about this very same topic in the early 1970's, 1980's and 1990's with people who were convinced that oil would be prohibitively expensive and commercially unavailable sometime in the 1970's, 1980's or 1990's. If I were older, I suppose I might be able to refer to discussions on this same topic I had in the early 1960's, but alas I was only in elementary school in the early 1960's This doesn't mean that the pessimists will forever be wrong. I just think that they will have to develop better arguments to convince me that doomsday is looming than the same old tired arguments that have been wrong for as long as the topic has been discussed. As to how long will it take to adjust to lower suplies and higher prices I would make the following observation. Everyday I ride a bus to work on a half-empty bus and observe that almost every car that passes me has only one passenger. I would venture that the amount of gas used for commuting could be cut by 60% to 75% in the United States without enourmous effort simply by prividing sufficient price incentives to fill every existing bus and encourage people to drive into work with one or two other person in each car. Although people would gripe, the actual inconvenience of adopting these consevation measures is relatively small. The reason this hasn't already happened is that despite everyone's whining, gas is still relatively inexpensive compared to incomes so that people are not willing to foregoe the relatively inexpensive luxury of driving to work everyday in their own car. 8/22/2005 6:09 AM Anonymous said... I'm with you on the idea that reporting Shark Attacks ad-nausium is ridiculous. But, the reason is not because they do not occur - every story is true. The reason being informed about shark attacks is silly is that it affects a miniscule percentage of the miniscule number of people that swim in the ocean. Oil is a requirment for the lives of the vast majority of people on this earth. Comparing issues like this to shark attack stories is ignorant. 8/22/2005 7:40 AM Paul Dietz said... An earlier message mentioned methanol... Interestingly, a few years ago many methanol plants around the world were converted to use the Fischer-Tropsch method to produce hydrocarbons. This technique can produce an exceptional diesel fuel (very low sulfur, very high cetane number; low soot and other emissions; CARB was considering mandating its use in California) for the equivalent of $20 to $25/barrel oil, and it can be made to work with natural gas, coal, biomass, or any other material that can be converted to synthesis gas (a mixture of CO and hydrogen). The only reason very large scale construction of FT gas-to-oil plants isn't occuring more is the expectation that oil prices will decline in the near future. 8/22/2005 8:32 AM Anonymous said... Oil men in the White House have discouraged alt energy, and the industry bought up and buried the patents to most of the alternative energy sources developed since our last gas lines in '73. Wages have been stagnant while prices have risen sharply for everything that must be delivered (due to fuel costs). There is no room in the household budget for any of this. 8/22/2005 8:45 AM M. Simon said... There is a very simple reason oil consumption in China is rising 20% a year. It is priced below market. The purpose of below market pricing is to insure growth to keep domestic peace. How long can the Chinese keep the party going? My guess. The party is over. 8/22/2005 9:40 AM M. Simon said... Fuel cells (of any kind) have one significant problem. Platinum. There is not enough of it to support a 100% fuel cell transportation system. In time we will find a way around this problem. So far all we have is glimers (nickel maybe?) The fuel cell transportation system is not ready for prime time. 8/22/2005 9:45 AM TallDave said... The real problem is timing: it takes a few years to bring new production online. In a few years oil prices will probably dive again. 8/22/2005 9:49 AM Anonymous said... Interesting discussion. Professor Levitt, I commend your effort in taking up such an interesting matter. What is truly fascinating is the natural inclination toward catastrophic prospects that human beings keep on exhibiting. All these catastrophic scenarios, bei it overpopulation,oil depletion or whatever are nothing but the secular humanistic versions of the classical biblical Apocalyptical scenarios. It always amaze me how on earth could those "enlightended", atheistic, socialistic multiculturalists deride the "superstitious" beliefs of religious people. 8/22/2005 9:54 AM M. Simon said... Patents are public records. Could anon. cite a few that would solve our energy problems economically? I'm not interested in ownership. Just patent numbers. 8/22/2005 10:05 AM Anonymous said... "What is truly fascinating is the natural inclination toward catastrophic prospects that human beings keep on exhibiting." No, what is fascinating is how it drives home the old criticism that Americans have two modes: complacency and panic. What you typically see in a new "peak oil" discussion is an argument between the complacent and the paniced. Shades of gray, resonable questions in the middle ground, are slow to emerge. 8/22/2005 10:11 AM Anonymous said... Anon, It's 2005. 2005-1973=32 yrs. You suppose those patents are still in effect? All, Hydrogen is not an alternative fuel, merely a conversion/storage method. It has to be produced somehow...perhaps from electricity, derived from (usually) coal. 8/22/2005 10:15 AM M. Simon said... We have been running out of oil for my whole life time. (I was in high school in the 50s). It is one of the things that got me interested in a career in engineering. (I do aircraft electrical systems among other things. I have also worked on oil field monitoring systems - which surprisingly enough are solar powered.) Every time oil prices peaked the refrain was the same. BTW high rises and cities may be more efficient energy wise, but they have one huge drawback. Disease can run through them like wild fire. Dispersed housing is more disease resistant. 8/22/2005 10:21 AM odograph said... If we are going to digress on hydrogen, we should point out that most is now being made from natural gas. The "hydrogen highway" filling stations usually reform natural gas at the station. Nuclear, coal, electric sources for hydrogen auto fuel are all "promises." In the meantime we depelete our natural gas (which could easily drive cars directly and efficiently) to "prove" hydrogen ... what a scam. 8/22/2005 10:24 AM Anonymous said... Okay -- Now I understand what they mean by thinking inside the box. The specific box you doomsayer commenters -- not to mention the original NYT article -- are all trapped in is clearly of seventies manufacture. Less oil equals no suburbs, equals denser construction, equals life having to change to such an extent that a prolongued depression arises. Come into the twenty first century my friends and look at the object into which you're typing. It's a computer -- yep. Virtually miraculous in its capacities to allow people to conduct business at a distance. And all that's needed to use it for this purpose is... fewer regulations, incentives to businesses using telecommuting and other stroke-of-pen issues. Will people still need to show up to work. Oh, heck, yes. Manual and service workers. BUT if office workers can work from home, then oil demand will fall. A lot. And think of all those office buildings not getting heated. Will this happen? -- supposing a halfway rational, not inately anti-oil and for fuzzy wuzzy warm-and-cozy alternative fuels administration in the next ten years or so -- probably yes. So -- people will be at home more and there might be a fall in daycare business and a rise in divorces till situation stabilizes. I'd say not "end of the world as we know it" material. 8/22/2005 10:26 AM odograph said... Anonymous at 8/22/2005 10:26 AM, did you notice my comment way up above, saying: "Be careful that your prediction of optimism doesn't come to match someone else's prediction of pessimism!" I actually agree with you that this level of adjustment is possible. I also think you are looking at whole job categories, and perhaps industries, left behind. It is the difference between "end of the world" and "end of the world as we know it" 8/22/2005 10:32 AM Podchef said... Okay, so you've taken the moderate position on this "problem". Others want to be extreem on either side of the issue. Nevertheless, the real issue is being ignored: 1st World Countries are using too much of a non-renewable resource. The shortages, and problems this will lead to, maybe not today or tomorrow--or this decade--will be real and globally painful. Beyond wind generators and solar power we need to begin to solve this shortage issue--to send a message, like you said, to the oil producers--perhaps they will drop prices; but that only works for a while--even oil producers are up against fixed costs. How can we send this message and what will it be? Should we all switch to hybird cars? Quite possibly. But there are other solutions--using used vegetable oil from restaurants to power desiel vehicles is a start (frybird.com). Perhaps, today, don't drive so much. Stop waiting for the outcome to cry foul. Reduce your number of trips to WalBobs or the MiniMart now, not when things get worse--they already are worse. If you want to make more of an impact, start looking for local sources for your foods and other household items. Why pay, both in increased product cost and global costs, to have a sofa from the other side of the country? Or beets? Or carrots from China? Someone in your neck of the woods is growing carrots, beets and a whole lot more. Start going to Farmer's Markets and supporting the locals. If enough people do this then the money stays in the community and your neighbor begins to travel less, and their neighbor and so on. I'm not suggesting that everything we use can be found within 100 mile of us, but that by shopping as locally as we can. By reducing transportation times and costs, every individual can have a global impact by reducing fuel consumption. This winter, find a local craftsperson and spend a few extra dollars to buy a nice thick sweater from locally grown wool. Then keep the thermostat at 68 degrees during the day. At night drop it to 65 or 60. If Chicken Little had had any sense he would have pause for a moment, surveyed what his position was and cornered the market on falling acorns. The Sky-is-falling position is fearmongering and never leads to a solution in time. 8/22/2005 10:42 AM JLP said... Excellent post! Sadly, the people writing these articles don't know what they are talking about. I also remember seeing an article in the Wall Street Journal about how there is a theory that oil is replenishing itself. It was an interesting article and I could kick myself for not saving it. JLP at AllThingsFinancial 8/22/2005 10:42 AM JLP said... Hey, I found that article (it cost me a whopping $2.95) I was talking about. The article titled "Odd Reservoir Off Louisiana Prods Oil Experts to Seek a Deeper Meaning" was in the Wall Street Journal on April 16, 1999. It talks about how this oil field in the Gulf is supposedly replenishing itself. I haven't done any research to see if those claims still hold true. Anyway, it makes for an interesting read. JLP at AllThingsFinancial 8/22/2005 11:03 AM Mike said... "After all, at $6/gallon they're still building suburbs in Europe" Technically true, but you know damn well their suburbs aren't the same as ours - they're built on a scale that still allows for transit use and carpooling, while ours aren't. (I was in Yeovil UK a couple years back and even worked for a week at an office park out in the 'burbs; worked 3 weeks in Hursley for IBM a few years before that, driving back and forth from my hotel in central Winchester). 8/22/2005 11:43 AM Anonymous said... Lets check the oil market today, oh it is up again. Funny thing about the law of supply and demand, it cares not for National Boundaries or Political Demagoguery! All hail the infinite wisdom of the free market! Live or die!! Your kids Ivy League Education will come in very handy as mid-21st century horse and buggy farmer. 8/22/2005 12:14 PM Anonymous said... Oops, there goes the whole peak oil argument. When the price rises, demand falls, and oil prices slide. What happened to the "end of the world as we know it?" Now we are back to $10 a barrel oil. Without realizing it, the author just invoked basic economics to invalidate the entire premise of the article! It seems to me that the premise of the article is: "High demand and low supply for oil is likely to have serious and broad economic consequences, maybe a global recession." It seems to me that your counterargument is: "But if there's a global recession, the price of oil will come down! Neener neener neener!" It would be downright laughable in its cluelessness if so many people weren't taking you seriously. You've misrepresented the NYT article and the Peak Oil theory in order to debate them more effectively. Sure, there are exaggerated predictions of doom out there, but this kind of dishonesty isn't helping anyone. 8/22/2005 12:17 PM M. Simon said... The best way to get alternate fuels are: 1. Lower their cost 2. Raise the cost of current fuels If #1 is not possible in the short term then, driving a Hummer will help #2. Burn it up. As to the problems of the third world. Their #1 problem is bad government. The price of oil will have aproximately zero effect on that problem. There are too many thug regimes in the world. If the source of oil near the surface is deeper underground resivoirs then we do not have a resource problem. We have a technology problem. How to tap the deep resivoirs economically. We know there are huge planets whose atmospheres consist of a lot of methane. Did that methane come from biological activity? Very doubtful. Might not some of that glactic methane have been incorporated in the earth during its formation? Likely. Thomas Gold estimated that petrolium reserves may be 100X those already discovered based on interplanetary formation of hydrocarbons. Well you know how it is: fear will keep the star systems in line. I have been listening to the fear for 50 years. I'm bored with it. In the mean time for those of you who are fearful: I have some designs to reduce energy consumption and others to deal with electrical energy storage. Every time I get into one of these discussions I ask any one interested in investing in change to contact me. So far zero responses. That gives me one important data point. Lack of real interest. It is all talk. 8/22/2005 12:32 PM Anonymous said... "Technically true, but you know damn well their suburbs aren't the same as ours - they're built on a scale that still allows for transit use and carpooling" - Mike Ummm...yes and no, but a bit more of the no. Yes, they're more compact, but no, you can't walk much of anyplace useful because they tend to be single-use pods just like here. (And yes, just maybe you can walk to a small row of shops charging ghastly, exorbitant prices, but maybe not, and that's about it, and so what?) The denser scale doesn't help carpooling, because the issue is not how far you're going, but whether you're going to the same place at the same time and whether you want to have a life. And bus service to these pods tends to be only half-hourly even at rush hour, which I guess is OK if you have lots and lots of valueless time on your hands. BTW I was in Chiba, Japan recently, and it's amazing how over the last 15 years, bicycles have gone way, way down (but are still used much more than in the U S of A) and cars have gone up. That's at about $4.50/gallon - and with public transit to places where people actually live - as opposed to districts tourists see - more frequent and reliable than to such places in Europe. Some homeowners even purchase elevators to stow two cars (that pesky "we aren't actually going to the same place at the same time" issue) in the driveway, one over the other. The cars do, however, tend to be small. 8/22/2005 12:36 PM M. Simon said... We have had recessions when supply and demand get out of whack. We are richer than ever. How is that possible? 8/22/2005 12:39 PM odograph said... We are richer than ever. How is that possible? We? I might be. You might be. But I feel a little bit for the guys sleeping on the side of the road! 8/22/2005 1:15 PM Anonymous said... Here is something I posted on usenet a few days ago: If Americans drove cars that were a little more than twice as efficient, there would almost not be any need for oil imports -- which would mean there would be no need to attempt to control the Middle East's oil reserves with the Iraq invasion and our multiple bases all around Iran. It would also mean there would be an extra 12m barrels of oil on the market, which is something like 12% of world supply. I'm sure that would lower prices and make the oil supply last a bit longer. But, it's all kind of pointless now. With peak oil, the price will inexorably climb. Companies and governments will scramble with coal gassification, mining bitumen, heavy oils, biodiesel, ethanol, thermal depolymerization, etc., which will blunt the impact but not scale to meet current demand. Only by radically redesigning our way of life and economy can this be dealt with and even the mere mention of this is political death in America. Not to mention the fact that world populations are still growing, the population will have to be reduced, most likely by some very unpleasant means. Poorer nations are already feeling the pain. Their governments have been heavily subsidizing oil prices for years and now the chasm between what the people pay and what the government pays for oil is so large it threatens their solvency. Raise the price just a bit and you get riots, so shortages are the most likely scenario there. I expect a major global financial recession before 2010 followed by a brief collapse in oil prices followed by shortages and then oil prices that make $70/barrel seem ultra cheap. The whole American way of life is built on cheap energy. Sprawling cities, Wal-Mart, 10 MPG hummers, etc. -- Something is going to have to give somewhere, unless actually outright seizing oil fields and stealing oil is going to be palatable to the American public and the other nuclear powers of the world. Of course none of this will register with the US public. They'll blame the government, OPEC, oil companies, aliens, etc. -- Anything to avoid looking at the reality: Oil is a finite resource, no new oil is being made, and we've been gorging on it for over a century and the end of the party is in sight. The sad part is that this has been known since the 1950s, and pretty much proven in the 1970s. We've had 30 years to prepare, and we've done more or less the opposite, becoming more dependent on oil, especially foreign oil, not less. 8/22/2005 1:34 PM Mike said... "The denser scale doesn't help carpooling, because the issue is not how far you're going, but whether you're going to the same place at the same time and whether you want to have a life. And bus service to these pods tends to be only half-hourly even at rush hour, which I guess is OK if you have lots and lots of valueless time on your hands." Yes, it DOES help carpooling, in two ways: 1. Offices are more likely in the same area 2. Shorter distance to your next cow orker. To imply, as you do, that European work commuters suffer roughly the same issues as do American commuters is misleading AT BEST. The objective statistics for commute split SHOW you're not being accurate here - they STILL use transit, carpool, ride bikes, and walk at a far higher percentage than we do even in our more enlightened cities (i.e. London >> New York; Winchester >> Portland; etc.) 8/22/2005 1:36 PM M. Simon said... odo, I have slept beside the road. I'd rather do it in America than any other country I can think of. I've seen people throw away perfectly good 27" color TVs when they get their home theaters. You want to have a good life on the cheap? Scour the upscale neighborhoods on garbage day. If you have never been really poor and desperate you have no idea how good the poor and desperate have it in this country. 50% of the bottom 20% own their own homes. 8/22/2005 1:38 PM odograph said... All I'm getting at is that a smooth transition, from cheap oil to (ultimately) beyond oil, means less human tragedy. We are already dealing with this as a society. We have hybrid car hackers, and french fry biodiesel recyclers. We have hybrids from Japan and (pie in the sky) hybrids in Detroit. We fund ethanol on a truly massive scale. The only adjustment we need, in my opinion, is to be a little more "real" about our solutions. If ethanol is really a farm subsidy, then it isn't real as a fuel. If hydrogen is a way to deflect emissions and efficiency standards, then it isn't real as a fuel either. Today I feel pessimistic. I don't think the US can be real, in time. That means we'll have those painful little adjustments. We'll see those little human tragedies on nightly TV. And ultimately we'll buy our transportation solutions from Japan ... were (with no native fuel supply) they don't have the luxury of believing their own BS. 8/22/2005 1:49 PM odograph said... Sorry, meant to say "(pie in the sky) hydrogen from Detroit." If the blog owners want to mine a rich vein of funky economics, the hyrogen highway is probably it. Where else do we assume a one million dollar product (a hydrogen fuel cell car) can be made afordable for everyman ... just because we wish (or incentivise) it? Why don't we just go for flying cars while we're at it ... they're probably cheaper. 8/22/2005 2:01 PM M. Simon said... Odo, There is no direct line from here to where you want to go. Small adjustments if effective will expand to their limits. An economic system that does not constrain ideas grows organically. A trial here, a test there, more of the same if it is profitable. It looks messy but has an advantage: lots of ideas get tried. Those that are good enough get replicated. Organic growth and change are best. Even in industrial systems. 8/22/2005 2:08 PM odograph said... Oh I'm a big believer in the market ... but don't like the whipsaw corrections when people suddenly discover an error in their economic logic. All those little things I mentioned above (electric cars, hybrids, boidiesel, ethanol, hydrogen) are at the fringes. The bulk of America is out there driving along at 20 mpg (latest fleet average). I've heard recently that Ford's current product line averages poorer mpg than a ford model A. Indirect, organic, market adjustment might have worked (past tense) if we had been real about our oil supplies. Instead, we get to see a little of that old time Creative Destruction. Some in this thread might even find themselves on the wrong end of it ... and I've always said that creative destruction is more fun to watch than to live. 8/22/2005 2:19 PM Marty said... Boy, reading some of the delusional posts here makes me think we should call it "Intelligent Energy" -- that's the kind that senses when you're running out it, and then it replenishes itself. Several mentioned various alternative energy resources but without considering the fact that they are all made using non-renewable fossil and fission fuels. Not-yet-working alternatives like fusion also require limited resources like helium (for superconducting magnets). Helium cannot made and is instead extracted from a small number of oil and gas wells, and is on similar depletion curves to oil. Because of this, the price of renewables is likely to go up, not down as fossil fuels and other limited resources deplete. For example, the price of silicon photoelectric cells has been going up the past year (25%). This was explained as simple supply/demand by the NYT. The real situation is a little more complicated. Current generation photoelectric cells (the kind already on satellites decades ago) are made from silicon crystal rejects from the semiconductor industry. These have started to get scarce as forward-thinking well-to-do Californians have been installing them like no tomorrow. This is simple supply/demand. But as the throwaways are depleted, the price will likely go up even more because the throwaways were being sold for less than they cost to make. Third, if fossil fuel prices continue their rise (oil back up to $66/barrel today), the price of silicon photoelectric cells will go up yet further. Now, of course, there are other solar techs on the way, invented by number-loving people who did their homework problems, such as CIGS (copper/indium/gallium/selenium) photoelectric cells sputtered onto thin metal (the way harddisk surfaces are made), and solar-concentrator-driven Stirling engines. And hopefully, there will be enough indium and gallium (elements, which as the alchemists long ago discovered are very hard to make), and hopefully, the price of renewable energy will eventually stabilize when renewable energy devices (and mining, and steel production, etc, etc) all begin to be done using renewable energy. It's important to keep a positive attitude. From a recent cartoon: And so, while the end-of-the-world scenario will be rife with unimaginable horrors, we believe that the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit :-} 8/22/2005 2:36 PM drewhinton said... I want to believe in Markets. I really really do. But I'm not sure I trust human nature. I think markets are imperfect just like we are. They manage to pull out of crisis, perhaps more often than not, but many times people can't adapt because of their own assumptions or cultural baggage. I think the tale of the Viking settlers in Greenland is a poignant example. http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/greenland/ They ignored better methods for survival because of cultural hubris, and they perished. Markets are made of humans. And sometimes humans are just plain stupid. 8/22/2005 3:19 PM dag said... Freakonomics said: "I don't know much about world oil reserves." Obviously.....you dont maxrates 8/22/2005 3:51 PM M. Simon said... Hybrids are not on the fringes. Several million will get built this year with production ramping up. A guy in Cali. is retrofitting hybrids with more batteries creating the gasoline/electric hybrid. Toyota is taking note. Given Japanese design cycles expect to see them on the road in 2 1/2 years. Detriot will do it 4 years after they see a Japanese example on the road. If you are paying attention things are not so bad. The real boost will come when autos go to 36V (nominal) electrical systems with Integral Starter Generators (ISG). They will be defacto hybrids. There is time to work out the bugs. Wind is coming down the cost curve. Once turbine size reaches 8 - 12 MW (peak) the cost of wind will equal the best coal plants. About 5 to 10 years. In the mean time 3,000 MW (peak) of wind will get installed this year. About one nuke equivalent (1,000 MW). We are ramping up. BTW nice to see solar ramping up even if it is straining supples. If the buyers are there the industry will get stronger. 8/22/2005 4:45 PM Anonymous said... Let's clear up a couple of misunderstandings: First, for those criticising the OP for writing about oil when he doesn't know much about oil specifically: Economists can do this because the information they need revolves around prices, incentives, and the response of people to them. Economists can predict the movement of prices on pork bellies without knowing anything about pig farming. They can predict demand for real estate at a given price point without having to know how houses are built. And they can predict how consumers of oil will react when the price increases, without having to understand the oil industry. Now, assuming the market will 'solve' the problem supposes a couple of things: one is that alternatives to a commmodity exist, and the other is that prices reflect the true cost of a commodity and people are free actors to choose to buy or not. In the case of oil, this is not necessarily the case. For one thing, the price is not free to move with demand, due to the OPEC cartel, local price caps and subsidies, and other market-distorting interventions. For another, the availability of substitutes for oil is still debatable. Certainly it's possible to replace oil with alternatives, but there are legitimate questions about the rate at which this can be done and the eventual cost. However, we can make some good inferences from currently available information. The biggest is the price of oil futures. I believe 10 year oil contracts are currently set at about 65 dollars. This almost certainly represents our best understanding of what we're going to be paying for oil ten years from now. If some oil expert really knew that oil was about to peak, he would be buying up futures like mad and driving up the price. If he knew oil was much more abundant and that we're in a price bubble, he'd short like mad and drive the futures price down. So the futures price in a free market is a pretty good distillation of current understanding. If you don't believe this is the case, I suggest you put your money where your belief is and start buying oil contracts like mad. One thing you might consider first, however, is that the drop-off in supply will not be linear. As the price of oil reaches certain price points, alternative supplies will enter the market. Alberta's tar sands have recently been re-estimated to have 175 billion barrels of recoverable oil at today's prices, giving Alberta the second-largest oil reserves of any country on the planet after Saudi Arabia. If oil doubles in price, the recoverable barrels goes over 300 billion, and shale oil all over North America becomes cost-competitive. Also, oil wells are closed not when they are empty, but when the cost of recovering the remaining oil is so high as to make them uneconomic. At very high oil prices, many of those fields will be re-opened. Plus, alternative energy sources like wind and solar will become a bigger part of the picture as they become more profitable. Next: American energy independence. Here's the thing: oil is a fungible resource. That means that once it comes out of the ground, it's worth the same no matter where it came from. Saudi oil is no more or less valuable than Alberta oil (assuming the same grade). So if the U.S. suddenly stopped buying Saudi oil and instead bought Alberta oil or started using an energy source that was home grown but more expensive, all that would do is cause the U.S. to waste money. And the drop in demand from the U.S. leaving the world oil market would cause the price of oil to drop, benefiting everyone else and driving up demand for oil elsewhere. Net result: higher energy costs in the U.S., lower energy costs for everyone else, and an increase in demand for oil by others to offset the U.S. drop in demand. This is simply not an intelligent strategy from a purely economic standpoint. It might make better sense in terms of national defense, but that's a different argument. So the last question is whether or not we can move to an alternative fuel regime in a timely manner. And I believe the answer to that is yes, especially if the real problem takes a few years to appear. The current move to hybrids is important because it gives us a way to disconnect the drivetrain of a car from its fuel source. The power source for the car is electricity. How that electricity is generated doesn't really matter. For example, it would not take much of a change at all to turn a hybrid into a 'plug-in hybrid'. Add a little bigger battery and a charging plug, and now for short commutes (say less than 50 miles) the gas engine doesn't even come on. You've just completely removed the dependency on gasoline from the car, or reduced the consumption to just a fraction of the amount you need now. Perhaps we'll all be driving electric cars that still have gas engines, but the gas engine is really just an emergency charging device. Plug-in hybrids can get 100 mpg on average across the fleet. You still need to generate the electricity, but we know we can do that. Nuclear power. France gets 70% of its electrical energy from nuclear. The U.S., only 20%. Roughly 175 new reactors could produce enough hydrogen to completely replace gasoline for the U.S. vehicle fleet, assuming no changes in efficiency. So it can be done, and will be if we need to. 8/22/2005 5:04 PM From checker at panix.com Fri Aug 26 01:38:17 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 21:38:17 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: On DNA as Evidence Message-ID: History of Forensic Medicine: On DNA as Evidence To: checker at panix.com http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050826-6.htm The following points are made by Peter Gill (New Engl. J. Med. 2005 352:2669): 1) In 1983, in a village near Leicester, England, a local girl named Lynda Mann was found raped and murdered. Three years later, a second girl, Dawn Ashworth, was found dead under similar circumstances. The similarities between the two cases led the police to believe that the same person had committed both crimes. After extensive inquiries, an arrest was made. The suspect confessed to the murder of Lynda Mann but denied having killed Dawn Ashworth. Convinced that they had the right man, the police approached Sir Alec Jeffreys, a professor of genetics at the University of Leicester, with a request to conduct tests using a new method that he called "DNA fingerprinting," which had not yet been used in a real case. 2) The results were surprising: the suspect was exonerated, and the DNA profiles in the two murder cases were the same, indicating that a single, unknown person had committed both crimes. This finding led to the screening of all 5000 men in the area, using both conventional blood-group methods and DNA testing. The screening failed to identify a suspect -- because, as it turned out, the perpetrator, Colin Pitchfork, had paid a colleague to give a DNA sample in his place. When the colleague was overheard bragging to a friend about the incident, Pitchfork was quickly apprehended, analysis of a DNA sample confirmed his guilt in both murders, and he was duly convicted in 1988.[1] 3) Thus, the first criminal case in which DNA was used provided a vivid demonstration of the method's potential -- not only for convicting the guilty but also for exonerating the innocent. It also demonstrated for the first time that a DNA fingerprint could be used to find a perpetrator from within a population. 4) In 1985, a year after the development of DNA fingerprinting, the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was discovered.[2] The discovery would revolutionize the field of molecular biology, though the method would not come into routine use in forensic cases until the early 1990s, since new platforms and biochemical tools were needed in order to take full advantage of the potential of PCR. In particular, new automation technology was key, and the advent of the automated fluorescent DNA sequencer in the early 1990s was a major step forward. More generally, forensic DNA analysis has benefited substantially from the Human Genome Project, for the genome could be sequenced only with automated equipment that permitted high-throughput processing. Because forensic science could use the same equipment and biochemical tools that gene sequencing used, new methods were rapidly developed in the early 1990s that would have been considered impossible just a few years earlier. 5) Perhaps the best example of this adjunct benefit of genomics was the development of national DNA databases. Since its inception in 1995, the National DNA Database for England and Wales has expanded to include more than 2.75 million reference DNA profiles, against which all specimens obtained from the scene of a crime ("crime stains") are routinely compared.[3] The likelihood that a match will be found is approximately 30 percent. Many other countries have since followed suit, and the benefits of such databases are considerable, since persons who commit serious crimes such as murder usually have a previous criminal record. The United Kingdom's policy permits the collection of DNA profiles from all convicted criminals, as well as from anyone suspected of committing a crime that could lead to a prison sentence -- and the law allows authorities to retain the DNA profile even if the suspect is found innocent. Consequently, persons who later commit more crimes can be identified and apprehended quickly.[3-5] References: 1. Wambaugh J. The blooding. London: Bantam Press, 1989 2. Saiki RK, Scharf S, Faloona F, et al. Enzymatic amplification of beta-globin genomic sequences and restriction site analysis for diagnosis of sickle cell anemia. Science 1985;230:1350-1354 3. Werrett D, Pinchin R, Hale R. Problem solving: DNA data acquisition and analysis. Prof DNA 1998;2:1-6 4. Gill P, Whitaker J, Flaxman C, Brown N, Buckleton J. An investigation of the rigor of interpretation rules for STRs derived from less than 100 pg of DNA. Forensic Sci Int 2000;112:17-40 5. Marchi E. Methods developed to identify victims of the World Trade Center disaster. Am Lab 2004;36:30-36 New Engl. J. Med. http://www.nejm.org -------------------------------- Related Material: ON THE NATURAL SCIENCES AND FORENSICS The following points are made by Jessica Snyder Sachs (citation below): 1) Anthropologists were the first to cross over from the natural sciences to forensics. In America, the fateful jump came in the 1930s, when FBI agents setting up the bureau's first crime lab in Washington, D.C. discovered a whole nest of "bone detectives" in the red Gothic towers of the Smithsonian Institution, across the street. As the curators of one of the world's largest collection of human skeletons, the Smithsonian anthropologists were uniquely qualified to help the FBI distinguish human from animal remains. From the identification of bones as human, forensic anthropology quickly advanced to the identification of individuals, based on distinguishing bumps and bony scars left by past injuries and the wear and tear of daily toil (a milkmaid's worn elbow, a tailor's notched thumb, and a mailbag carrier's crooked spine). 2) But anthropologists quickly realized the near-impossibility of naming the dead without some method, however crude, of matching their identity clues to missing person reports for a given span of time. The most experienced among them could sometimes come up with a reasonable estimate of time since death by "feel" -- that admittedly nonscientific second sense based on a lifetime of processing decayed corpses and crumbling bones. But precious few ever attempted the monumental task of objectively studying the stages that mark a human body's passage back to dust. So far, the most valuable dating method to come out of their research belongs by all rights to another science. 3) In the i980s, the field of forensic entomology burst on the scene as if out of nowhere when bug and bone scientists independently discovered the value of what may be nature's ultimate postmortem clock -- the cadaver-feeding insect. Maggots, once routinely washed from the coroner's table with disgust, suddenly became the hot new thing in homicide investigation. Still, the extent of the bugs' testimony had yet to be fully fathomed. 4) As anthropologists and entomologists began teaming up in their forensic investigations, they naturally turned to a third specialty to make sense of the roots and vines winding through their death scenes: A delicate green tendril snaking through a sun-bleached skull. A tree growing down through a shallow grave in the woods. A flush of growth marking the outlines of an inexplicably fertile corner of an abandoned lot. Each became yet another promising measure of the seasons that follow "death most foul." Adapted from: Jessica Snyder Sachs: Corpse: Nature, Forensics, and the Struggle to Pinpoint Time of Death. Perseus Publishing 2001, p.9. More information at: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0738207713/scienceweek From checker at panix.com Fri Aug 26 22:35:08 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2005 18:35:08 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: Researchers Creating Life From Scratch Message-ID: Researchers Creating Life From Scratch http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/18/AR2005081801209_pf.html They're called "synthetic biologists" and they boldly claim the ability to make never-before-seen living things, one genetic molecule at a time. They're mixing, matching and stacking DNA's chemical components like microscopic Lego blocks in an effort to make biologically based computers, medicines and alternative energy sources. The rapidly expanding field is confounding the taxonomists' centuries-old system of classifying species and raising concerns about the new technology's potential for misuse. Though scientists have been combining the genetic material of two species for 30 years now, their work has remained relatively simplistic. Scientists might add one foreign gene to an organism to produce a drug like insulin. The technique is more art than science given the brute trial-and-error it takes to create cells that make drugs. So a new breed of biologists is attempting to bring order to the hit-and-miss chaos of genetic engineering by bringing to biotechnology the same engineering strategies used to build computers, bridges and buildings. The idea is to separate cells into their fundamental components and then rebuild new organisms, a much more complex way of genetic engineering. The burgeoning movement is attracting big money and some of the biggest names in biology, many of whom are attending the "Life Engineering Symposium" that begins Friday in San Francisco. "Synthetic biology is genetic engineering rethought," said Harvard Medical Center researcher George Church, a leader in the field. "It challenges the notion of what's natural and what's synthetic." Already, synthetic biologists have created a polio virus and another smaller virus by stitching together individual genes purchased from biotechnology companies. Now, researchers are getting closer to creating more complex living things with actual utility. In Israel, scientists have created the world's smallest computer by engineering DNA to carry out mathematical functions. J. Craig Venter, the entrepreneurial scientist who mapped the human genome, announced last month that he intends to string together genes to create from scratch novel organisms that can produce alternative fuels such as hydrogen and ethanol. With a $42.6 million grant that originated at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Berkeley researchers are creating a new malaria drug by removing genetic material of the E. coli bacterium and replacing it with genes from wormwood and yeast. "We're building parts that can be assembled into devices and devices that can be turned into systems," said Jay Keasling, head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Berkeley synthetic biology department, which was created last year. Keasling, who doubles as a chemical engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, hopes to create never-before-seen living molecules by fusing genes from the three species _ a new breed of bacteria capable of spitting out malaria-fighting artemisinin, a chemical now found only in small traces in the wormwood plant. Artemisinin has been extracted from finely ground sweet wormwood for more than 2,000 years as a treatment for a variety of ailments, but the method is expensive, time consuming and limited by access to wormwood, which is found mainly in China and Vietnam. Keasling has a similar project in the works to synthetically create a compound now found in Samoan trees, one that shows promise in fighting AIDS. Such efforts are attracting more than grant money. A group of topflight venture capitalists led by Vinod Khosla of the Menlo Park-based Perkins, Caufield & Byers invested $13 million in Codon Devices of Cambridge, Mass., which was co-founded by Keasling and Church. Keasling also co-founded Amyris Biotechnologies of Emeryville to build microbes that will produce novel or rare drugs. Venter, meanwhile, has launched Synthetic Genomics Inc. with Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith and will compete with Codon and several other recent startups to commercialize the technology. But with success also comes ethical questions. For example, national security experts and even synthetic biologists themselves fret that rogue scientists or "biohackers" could create new biological weapons _ like deadly viruses that lack natural foes. They also worry about innocent mistakes _ organisms that could potentially create havoc if allowed to reproduce outside the lab. "There are certainly a lot of national security implications with synthetic biology," said Gigi Kwik Gronvall, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Biosecurity. Researchers are casting about for ways to self-police the field before it really takes off. One solution could be to require the few companies that sell genetic material to register with some official entity and report biologists who order DNA strains with weapons potential. The Arthur P. Sloan Foundation in June awarded the Venter Institute, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Center for Strategic and International Studies a $570,000 grant to study the social implications of the new field. "There are a cascade of ecological issues," said Laurie Zoloth, a bioethics professor at Northwestern University. "Synthetic biology is like iron: You can make sewing needles and you can make spears. Of course, there is going to be dual use." From checker at panix.com Fri Aug 26 22:35:19 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2005 18:35:19 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] PNAS: Cultural variation in eye movements during scene perception Message-ID: Cultural variation in eye movements during scene perception Hannah Faye Chua, Julie E. Boland, and Richard E. Nisbett* Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, 530 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1043 Contributed by Richard E. Nisbett, July 20, 2005 *To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: nisbett at umich.edu. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0506162102 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences August 30, 2005 vol. 102 no. 35 12629-12633 [This is a Big Mac psychology article, but an important one. Nisbett is a big AntiRacist and wrote the best response to the Rushton-Jensen article "Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability," which appeared in the same issue of _Psychology, Public Policy, and Law_, the whole issue being unreported in both the mainstream and alternative press. [In fact, "racial differences" could have replaced "cultural differences" throughout the paper! The study found that East Asians look at the background in pictures more than Americans and claimed their "findings provide clear evidence that cultural differences in eye-movement patterns mirror and probably underlie the cultural differences in judgment and memory tasks." Toward the end the authors added ["In the past decade, cultural differences in perceptual judgment and memory have been observed: Westerners attend more to focal objects, whereas East Asians attend more to contextual information. However, the underlying mechanisms for the apparent differences in cognitive processing styles have not been known. In the present study, we examined the possibility that the cultural differences arise from culturally different viewing patterns when confronted with a naturalistic scene. We measured the eye movements of American and Chinese participants while they viewed photographs with focal object on complex background. In fact, the Americans fixated more on focal objects than did the Chinese, and the Americans tended to look at the focal object more quickly. In addition, the Chinese made more saccades to the background than did the Americans. Thus, it appears that differences in judgment and memory may have their origins in differences in what is actually attended as people view scene." [I see here a mixing of psychological and social layers. Once the idea of gene-culture co-evolution becomes acceptable (that is, after the battle between Big Med and Big Ed resolves in Big Ed's favor and Big Ed discovers that as big a cash cow can come with "race-based education" as with "race-based medicine), we'll get something like this: [For some reason or another, the *physical* environment in East Asia selected those whose visual systems focused upon the background more than the physical environment in Europe did. Weather patterns, reflectivity i snow or in the atmosphere, something like that. A byproduct of this difference in perceptual *psychology* was a psychology of greater attentiveness to holistic phenomenon in other aspects of the environment, including the social environment (other people). This byproduct had an impact on social organization as well, since those being attuned to other people are more likely to think in collectivist terms. [The authors, to the contrary, assert that more collectivist societies somehow affect visual processing, a nice AntiRacist claim but an ad hoc one. [I'm not sure the authors were really thinking about the co-evolution question, though. And they might have presented data about Chinese-Americans instead of just Chinese Chinese and White Americans. Nisbett did give data on Japanese Americans iirc in his excellent (but also AntiRacist) book, _The Geography of Thought_, cited at the end. If Chinese Americans performed exactly the same as Chinese Chinese in these experiments, we'd have something that is likely to be mostly the result of racial differences. But social organization can effect individual psychology (cultural anthropologists cite instances of this all the time), and it would have been fascinating to have had this extra information. [But it would be safer not have included Chinese Americans, as the SSSM collapses, which collapse I reported on earlier. AntiRacists are getting more and more alike Creationists every day. They needn't, for the race issue is no longer that of superiority and inferiority. It is that of pluralism and whether differences among the world's cultures are deep enough to put a brake on the American democratic capitalism juggernaut. [Invoking "culture" as an all-purpose explanation of everything is spiritualism, really, for such invocations brush aside any material substrate upon which culture can act! This is worse than Creationism. [Thanks to Peter for passing on the reference to this article. I can supply the PDF if you want to see the graphics. ------------ Summary: In the past decade, cultural differences in perceptual judgment and memory have been observed: Westerners attend more to focal objects, whereas East Asians attend more to contextual information. However, the underlying mechanisms for the apparent differences in cognitive processing styles have not been known. In the present study, we examined the possibility that the cultural differences arise from culturally different viewing patterns when confronted with a naturalistic scene. We measured the eye movements of American and Chinese participants while they viewed photographs with focal object on complex background. In fact, the Americans fixated more on focal objects than did the Chinese, and the Americans tended to look at the focal object more quickly. In addition, the Chinese made more saccades to the background than did the Americans. Thus, it appears that differences in judgment and memory may have their origins in differences in what is actually attended as people view scene. A growing literature suggests that people from different cultures have differing cognitive processing styles (1, 2) Westerners, in particular North Americans, tend to be more analytic than East Asians. That is, North Americans attend to focal objects more than do East Asians, analyzing their attributes and assigning them to categories. In contrast, East Asians have been held to be more holistic than Westerners and are more likely to attend to contextual information and make judgments based on relationships and similarities. --------------------------- Causal attributions for events reflect these differences in analytic vs. holistic thought. For example, Westerners tend to explain events in terms that refer primarily or entirely to salient objects (including people) whereas East Asians are more inclined to explain events in terms of contextual factors (3-5) There also are differences in performance on perceptual judgment and memory tasks (6-8) For example, Masuda and Nisbett (6) asked participants to report what they saw in underwater scenes. Americans emphasized focal objects, that is, large, brightly colored, rapidly moving objects. Japanese reported 60% more information about the background (e.g. rocks, color of water, small nonmoving objects) than did Americans. After viewing scenes containing single animal against realistic background, Japanese and American participants were asked to make old/new recognition judgments for animals in a new series of pictures. Sometimes the focal animal was shown against the original background; other times the focal animal was shown against a new background. Japanese and Americans were equally accurate in detecting the focal animal when it was presented in its original background. However, Americans were more accurate than East Asians when the animal was displayed against new background. plausible interpretation is that, compared with Americans, the Japanese encoded the scenes more holistically, binding information about the objects with the backgrounds, so that the unfamiliar new background adversely affected the retrieval of the familiar animal. The difference in attending to objects vs. context also was shown in perceptual judgment task, the Rod and Frame test (7) American and Chinese participants looked down long box. At the end of the box was rod whose orientation could be changed and frame around the rod that could be moved independently of the rod. The participants? task was to judge when the rod was vertical. Chinese participants? judgments of verticality were more dependent on the context, in that their judgments were more influenced by the position of the frame than were those of American participants. In change blindness study, Masuda and Nisbett asked American and Japanese participants to view sequence of still photos and also to view animated vignettes of complex visual scenes (unpublished data) Changes in focal object information (e.g. color and shape of foregrounded objects) and contextual information (e.g. location of background details) were introduced during the sequence of presentations. Overall, the Japanese reported more changes in the contextual details than did the Americans, whereas the Americans reported more changes in the focal objects than did the Japanese. This finding has at least two possible explanations (see ref. 9) On one account, the Asian participants had more detailed mental representations of the backgrounds, whereas the Westerners had more detailed representations of the focal objects. On the other account, the mental representations did not differ with culture, but the two groups differed in their accuracy for detecting deviation between their mental representation of the background/focal object and the current stimulus. Clearly, there were systematic differences between the Americans? and the East Asians? performance in the causal perception, memory, and judgment studies. However, it is unclear whether the effects occur at the level of encoding, retrieval, mental comparison, or differences in reporting bias. To identify the stages in perceptual-cognitive processing at which the cultural differences might arise, consider what is known about scene perception:(i) Within 100ms of first viewing a scene, people can often encode the gist of the scene, e.g. "picnic" or "building" (10) (ii) People then construct mental model of the scene in working memory (11). The mental representation is not an exact rendering of the original scene and is usually incomplete in detail (12-13).(iii) Although the initial eye fixation may not be related to the configuration of the scene, the following fixations are to the most informative regions of the scene for the task at hand (14) The fixation positions are important because foveated regions are likely to been coded in greater detail than peripheral regions (15) (iv) The mental representation of the scene is then transferred to and consolidated in long-term memory. (v) Successful retrieval from long-term memory relies on appropriate retrievalcues.(vi)Duringretrieval,therecalledinformationmay be filtered by experimental demands and cultural expectations. Past studies (3-8) have failed to establish whether the effects are due to differences in perception, encoding, consolidation, recall, comparison judgments, or reporting bias. To address this issue, we monitored eye movements of the American and the Chinese participants while they viewed scenes containing objects on relatively complex backgrounds. We chose this measure because eye fixations reflect the allocation of attention in fairly direct manner. Moreover, we have relatively little awareness of how our eyes move under normal viewing conditions. If differences in culture influence how participants actually view and encode the scenes, there will be differences in the pattern of saccades and fixations in the eye movements of the members of the two cultures. [Saccades are rapid, ballistic eye movements that shift gaze from one fixation to another (15). In particular, we would expect Americans to spend more time looking at the focal objects and less time looking at the context than the Chinese participants. Furthermore, if the Chinese participants perceive the picture more holistically and bind contextual features with features of the focal object, they might make more total saccades when surveying the scene than the Americans. On the other hand, if no eye movement differences emerge between the two cultures, then previous findings of memory and judgment differences are likely due to what happens at later stages, e.g. during memory retrieval or during reporting. Fig. 1. (omitted) Sample pictures presented in the study. Thirty-six pictures with a single foregrounded object (animals or nonliving entities) on realistic backgrounds were presented to participants. Methods Participants. Twenty-five European American graduate students (10 males, 15 females) and 27 international Chinese graduate students (14 males, 12 females, data missing) at the University of Michigan participated in the study. The mean ages of Americans and Chinese were 24.3 and 25.4 years, respectively. All of the Chinese participants were born in China and had completed their undergraduate degrees there. Participants from the two cultures were matched on age and graduate fields of study. Participants were graduate students from engineering, life sciences, business programs, and, in few cases, from the social sciences. Recruitment e-mails were sent to Chinese student organization as well as to different graduate academic departments. Volunteers were each paid $14.00 for their participation in the study. Materials. A collection of animals, nonliving things, and background scenes was obtained from the COREL image collection (Corel, Eden Prairie, MN) and few were obtained from previous study (6) The pictures were manipulated by using PHOTOSHOP software (Adobe Systems, San Jose, CA) to create 36 pictures of single, focal, foregrounded objects (animal or nonliving thing) with realistic complex backgrounds. The final set of pictures contained 20 foregrounded animals and 16 foregrounded nonliving entities, e.g., cars, planes, and boats (see Fig.1 for examples of the pictures shown). The set was composed mostly of culturally neutral photos, plus some Western and Asian objects and backgrounds. This set of 36 pictures was used in the study phase, during which the eye movement data were collected. For the recognition-memory task, the original 36 objects and backgrounds together with 36 new objects and backgrounds were manipulated to create set of 72 pictures. Half of the original objects were presented with old backgrounds and the other half with new backgrounds. Similarly, half of the new objects were presented with old backgrounds and the other half with new backgrounds. This procedure resulted in four picture combinations: (i) 18 previously seen objects with original backgrounds, (ii) 18 previously seen objects with new backgrounds, (iii) 18 new objects with original backgrounds, and (iv) 18 new objects with new backgrounds. This set of 72 pictures was used in the object-recognition phase. All participants saw the same set and sequence of trials to make comparisons of performance comparable. Procedure. Study phase. The participants sat on chair and placed their chin on chin rest to standardize the distance of the head from the computer monitor. The distance of the chin rest from the monitor was 52.8 cm. The size of the monitor was 37.4 cm. At the start of the session, participants wore 120-Hz head- mounted eye-movement tracker (ISCAN, Burlington, MA) and eye-tracking calibration was established before the presentation of stimuli. After this calibration, participants were given instructions on the screen. They were informed that they would be viewing several pictures, one at time. Before each picture was presented, blank screen with cross sign (+) was to appear. Participants were told to make sure that they looked at that cross sign. Once the picture appeared, they could freely move their eyes to look at the picture. For each of the pictures, participants verbally said number between and 7, indicating the degree to which they liked the picture (1, don't like at all; 4, neutral; 7, like verymuch).^ These instructions were followed by several screens showing sample of how the task would proceed. Once ready, participants started the actual task of viewing the 36 pictures. Each picture was presented for 3 s. Afterward, participants engaged in several distracter tasks for about 10 min. Participants were moved to different room and, for example, asked to do backward-counting task, subtracting starting from 100 until they reached zero. [^The Chinese participants gave higher liking ratings than did the Americans (Ms, 4.64 vs. 4.16; 0.005).] Object-recognition phase. Participants were brought back to the computer room to complete recognition-memory task. Participants were told that they would be viewing pictures. Their task was to judge as fast as they could whether they had seen an object before, that is, whether they had seen the particular animal, car, train, boat, etc. in the pictures during the study phase. Participants pressed key if they believed that they had seen the object before, and they pressed another key if they believed that it was new. If participants were unsure, they were told to make guess. Participants then were shown sample picture informing them which item in the picture was the object and that the rest of the visual scene was the background. Participants were informed that each picture would be shown only for specified period. In the event that the picture had already left the screen, they could still input their response. Seventy-two pictures, including 36 original objects and 36 lure objects, were presented. The objects were presented with either an old or new background. Each picture was again presented for s, and fixation screen was presented between the picture presentations. Fig.2. (not shown) Mean accuracy rates from the object-recognition phase (22 Ameri- cans and 24 Chinese). Data shown refer to correct recognition of old objects, when the old objects were presented in old backgrounds, compared with when old objects were presented in new backgrounds. Object refers to the single foregrounded animal or nonliving entity on the picture; background refers to the rest of the realistic, complex spatial area on the visual scene. Demographic questionnaire and debriefing. At the end of the study, participants engaged in an object-familiarity task. All 72 objects were presented against white screen on computer. Participantscircled"yes" if they thought they had seen the object in real life or in pictorial information before coming to the study and "no" if they had not. This procedure was similar to that in previous study (6) We repeated the analyses reported in this paper with familiarity as covariate, and there were no changes in the statistical patterns. Participants also completed demographic questionnaire asking information about their age, education, family history, and English language ability. Participants were debriefed and paid. Data analysis. Six participants had hit rate of /0.5 on the object-recognition task, averaged across conditions. These participants' data were excluded in all statistical analyses. One additional European American had poor eye-tracking data. These exclusions resulted in data for 21 European American and 24 international Chinese participants being included in the eye-tracking analyses. Results The results for the object-recognition task were consistent with previous findings (6) indicating that East Asians are less likely to correctly recognize old foregrounded objects when presented in new backgrounds [F(1,44)=5.72, P=0.02] (Fig. 2) Thus, we have additional evidence for relatively holistic perception by East Asians: they appear to "bind" object with background in perception. The eye-movement patterns of American and Chinese participants differed in several ways. As summarized in Fig. 3, the American participants looked at the foregrounded object sooner and longer than the Chinese, whereas the Chinese looked more at the background than did the Americans, confirming our predictions. Overall, both groups fixated the background more than the objects (Fig. 3A) probably because the background occupied a greater area of the visual scene [F(1,43)=72.46, P=0.001] The Chinese made more fixations during each picture presentation than the Americans [F(1,43)=4.43, P=0.05] but this was entirely due to the fact that Chinese made more fixations on the background [F(1,43)=9.50, P=0.005] The Americans looked at foregrounded objects 118 ms sooner than did the Chinese[t(43)=2.41, P=0.02] (Fig.3B). Participants from both cultures had longer fixations on the objects than on the backgrounds (Fig. 3C) [F(1,43)=17.27, P=0.001] but this was far more true for the Americans than for the Chinese [F(1,43)=5.97, P=0.02] In short, the cultural difference in the memory study was reflected in the eye movements as well.^ [^Across both groups and for each participant group, we examined the correlation between six eye-movement variables and the object-memory index, i.e., the difference score between old object-old background memory and old object-new background memory. Of the 18 correlations, only 2 were marginally significant, and neither of these was readily interpretable.] The cultural difference in eye-movement patterns emerged very early. At the onset of the picture slide, 32-35% of the time both the Americans and the Chinese happened to be looking at the object, but the first saccade increased that percentage by 42.8% for the Americans and only by 26.7% for the Chinese [t(43)=2.46, P=0.02] To better understand the time course of cultural differences, we examined the fixation patterns across the 3- duration of picture presentations. Fig. shows that whereas the Americans were most likely to be looking at the object for about 600 ms of the first second, the Chinese exhibited very different eye- movement pattern. For the first 300-400 ms, no cultural differences were observed; at picture onset, both Americans and Chinese fixated the backgrounds more than the focal objects [F(1,43)=235.91, P=0.001] By about 420 ms after picture onset, the Americans were equally likely to be looking at the background and the focal object. At this point, there was an interaction of culture and fixation region, with only the Chinese fixating the backgrounds more than the objects [F(1,43)=6.43, P=0.02] Based on Fig. 4, the region during which the Americans attended preferentially to the object spanned 420-1,100 ms. Averaging the data across this interval, the Americans fixated the objects proportionately more than the backgrounds, whereas this was not at all true for the Chinese [F(1,43)=7.31, P=0.01] There was no time point at which the Chinese were fixating the objects significantly more than the backgrounds during the 3- presentation. Averaging the data from 1,100 to 3,000 ms, the Chinese looked more at the backgrounds than at the objects, whereas this was much less true for the Americans [F(1,43)=6.64, P=0.02] Taken together with the summary data from Fig. 3, these findings provide clear evidence that cultural differences in eye-movement patterns mirror and probably underlie the cultural differences in judgment and memory tasks. Discussion The present findings demonstrate that eye movements can differ as function of culture. Easterners and Westerners allocated attentional resources differently as they viewed the scenes. Apparently, Easterners and Westerners differ in attributing informativeness to foregrounded objects vs. backgrounds in the context of generic "How much do you like this picture?" task. The Americans' propensity to fixate sooner and longer on the foregrounded objects suggests that they encoded more visual even against new background. The Chinese pattern of more details for the objects than did the Chinese. If so, this could balanced fixations to the foreground object and background is explain the Americans' more accurate recognition of the objects, consistent with previous reports of holistic processing of visual scenes (6-8) Thus, previous findings of cultural differences in visual memory are likely due to how people from Eastern and Western cultures view scenes and are not solely due to cultural norms or expectations for reporting knowledge about scenes. Fig. 3. Eye movement data. (A) Number of fixations to object or background by culture (21 Americans and 24 Chinese). Each picture was presented for 3 s. (B) Onset time to object by culture. Time was measured from onset of each picture to first fixation to object, comparing Americans and Chinese.(C) Average fixation times to object and background as a function of culture. All figures represent mean scores over 36 trials and SEM. Fig. 4. Proportion of fixations to object or background, across the 3-s time course of a trial. Data points are sampled every 10 ms for 0-1,500 ms, and every 50 ms for 1,500-3,000 ms, averaging over all 36 trials. The sum of percentages at each time point may not total 100% because, at times, participants were in the process of making a saccade, thus they were in between fixations. The graph illustrates distinct eye tracking patterns of Americans and Chinese during the 3-s period. Cultural differences begin by 420 ms after onset, when an interaction of culture and region was observed, with the Chinese, but not the Americans continuing to fixate the background more than the focal object. Averaging the data from 420 to 1,100 ms, Americans were fixating focal objects at a greater proportion than backgrounds, compared with Chinese. Averaging the data from 1,100 to 3,000 ms, Chinese were fixating more often to the backgrounds and less to the objects, compared with Americans. Cultural differences in eye movements, memory for scenes, and perceptual and causal judgments could stem from several sources, including differences in experience, expertise, or socialization. It is common to consider such factors in high-level cognition, but because such factors can influence the allocation of attention, they influence lower level cognition as well. Our hypothesis is that differential attention to context and object are stressed through socialization practices, as demonstrated in studies on childrearing practices by East Asians and Americans (16, 17) The childrearing practices are, in turn, influenced by societal differences. East Asians live in relatively complex social networks with prescribed role relations (18, 19) Attention to context is, therefore, important for effective functioning. In contrast, Westerners live in less constraining social worlds that stress independence and allow them to pay less attention to context. The present results provide useful warning in world where opportunities to meet people from other cultural backgrounds continue to increase: people from different cultures may allocate attention differently, even within shared environment. The result is that we see different aspects of the world, in different ways. We thank Chi-yue Chiu and Daniel Simons for their reviews of this paper and Meghan Carr Ahern, Chirag Patel, Jason Taylor, Holly Templeton, and Jeremy Phillips for their assistance in the study. This work was supported by the Culture and Cognition Program at the University of Michigan and National Science Foundation Grant 0132074. 1. Nisbett, R. E. Peng, K. Choi, I. Norenzayan, A. (2001) Psychol. Rev. 2, 291-310. 2. Nisbett, R. E. Masuda, T. (2003) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 100, 11163-11170. 3. Choi, I. Nisbett, R. E. (1998) Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 24, 949-960. 4. Morris, M.W. Peng, K. (1994) J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 67, 949-971. 5. Chua, H. F. Leu, J. Nisbett, R. E. (2005) Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 31, 10925-10934. 6. Masuda, T. Nisbett, R. E. (2001) J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 81, 922-934. 7. Ji, L. Peng, K. Nisbett, R. E. (2000) J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 78, 943-955. 8. Kitayama, S. Duffy, S. Kawamura, T. Larsen, J. T. (2003) Psychol. Sci. 14, 201-206. 9. Simons, D. J. Rensink, R. A. (2005) Trends Cognit. Sci. 9, 16-20. 10. Potter, M. C. (1976) J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Learn. Mem. 2, 509-522. 11. Enns, J. T. (2004) The Thinking Eye, the Seeing Brain: Explorations in Visual Cognition (Norton, New York) 12. Intraub, H. (1997) Trends Cognit. Sci. 1, 217-212. 13. Potter, M. C. O'Connor, D. H. Olivia, A. (2002) J. Vision 2, 516. 14. Henderson, J. H. Hollingworth, A. (1999) Annu. Rev. Psychol. 50, 243-271. 15. Smith, E. E. Fredrickson, B. Loftus, G. Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (2002) Atkinson and Hilgard's Introduction to Psychology (Wadsworth, Belmont, CA) 14th Ed. 16. Fernald, A. Morikawa, H. (1993) Child Dev. 64, 637-656. 17. Tardif, T. Gelman, S. A. Xu, F. (1999) Child Dev. 70, 620-635. 18. Markus, H. R. Kitayama, S. (1991) Psychol. Rev. 98, 224-253. 19. Nisbett, R. E. (2003) The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently.. And Why (Free Press, New York) From checker at panix.com Fri Aug 26 22:35:36 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2005 18:35:36 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Edge 165: (Goedel) Janna Levin: A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines Message-ID: Janna Levin: A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge165.html Edge 165-- August 15, 2005 [Her biography is attached.] A MADMAN DREAMS OF TURING MACHINES by Janna Levin G?del didn't believe that truth would elude us. He proved it would. He didn't invent a myth to conform to his prejudice of the world at least not when it came to mathematics. He discovered his theorem as surely as if it was a rock he had dug up from the ground. He could pass it around the table and it would be as real as that rock. If anyone cared to, they could dig it up where he buried it and find it just the same. Look for it and you'll find it where he said it is, just off center from where you're staring. There are faint stars in the night sky that you can see but only if you look to the side of where they shine. They burn too weakly or are too far to be seen directly, even if you stare. But you can see them out of the corner of your eye because the cells on the periphery of your retina are more sensitive to light. Maybe truth is just like that. You can see it, but only out of the corner of your eye. Introduction The following message arrived from Janna Levin, Barnard physicist and writer: "There have been a few recent articles in the press on the theme that "the novel is dead". Comments on Edge, on the other hand, have gone in the opposite direction, noting the widening umbrella of the third culture in terms of the work of accomplished novelists and playwrights who noodle around with scientific ideas like Ian McEwan in Saturday, Richard Powers in Galatea 2.2, Michael Frayne in Copenhagen, David Auburn in Proof - not to mention Mary Shelley in Frankenstein. Maybe these works hit some things more effectively than can be done in a straightforward popular science book. Conversely scientists have played with new forms of expression like Primo Levy in The Periodic Table and Alan Lightman in Einstein's Dreams. "So let me throw this out there in the hopes that Edge readers will find the attached piece of interest -- an early draft from a book I've been writing called A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines. This is a story. Does that make it fiction? It's based on truth like all of our stories. It's a story of coded secrets and psychotic delusions, mathematics and war. It's a chronicle of the strange lives of Alan Turing and Kurt G?del. These stories are so strange, so incredible, that they are totally unbelievable. Except they're true. And fact is more extraordinary than fiction. "This excerpt may be particularly relevant now given the recent Edge features on G?del with Rebecca Goldstein and Verena Huber-Dyson." JANNA LEVIN is a professor of physics at Barnard College of Columbia University and recently held a fellowship from NESTA (National Endowment for Science Technology and Arts) at the University of Oxford. She has worked on theories of the Early Universe, Chaos, and Black Holes. Her work tends to encompass the overlap of mathematics, general relativity, and astrophysics. She is the author of How The Universe Got Its Spots: Diary Of A Finite Time In A Finite Space. _________________________________________________________________ A MADMAN DREAMS OF TURING MACHINES Vienna, Austria. 1931. The scene is a coffeehouse. The Caf? Josephinum is a smell first, a stinging smell of roasted Turkish beans too heavy to waft on air and so waiting instead for the more powerful current of steam blown off the surface of boiling saucers fomenting to coffee. By merely snorting the vapors out of the air, patrons become over-stimulated. The caf? appears in the brain as this delicious, muddy scent first, awaking a memory of the shifting room of mirrors second the memory nearly as energetic as the actual sight of the room which appears in the mind only third. The coffee is a fuel to power ideas. A fuel for the anxious hope that the harvest of art and words and logic will be the richest ever because only the most fecund season will see them through the siege of this terrible winter and the siege of that terrible war. Names are made and forgotten. Famous lines are penned, along with not so famous lines. Artists pay their debt with work that colors some walls while other walls fall into an appealing decrepitude. Outside, Vienna deteriorates and rejuvenates in swatches, a motley, poorly tended garden. From out here, the windows of the coffeehouse seem to protect the crowd inside from the elements and the tedium of any given day. Inside, they laugh and smoke and shout and argue and stare and whistle as the milky brew hardens to lace along the lip of their cups. A group of scientists from the University begin to meet and throw their ideas into the mix with those of artists and novelists and visionaries who rebounded with mania from the depression that follows a nation's defeat. The few grow in number through invitation only. Slowly their members accumulate and concepts clump from the soup of ideas and take shape until the soup deserves a name, so they are called around Europe and even as far as the United States, The Vienna Circle. At the center of the Circle is a circle: a clean, round, white-marble tabletop. They select the caf? Josephinum precisely for this table. A pen is passed counterclockwise. The first mark is made, an equation applied directly to the tabletop, a slash of black ink across the marble, a mathematical sentence amid the splatters. They all read the equation honing in on the meaning amid the disordered drops. Mathematics is visual not auditory. They argue with their voices but more pointedly with their pens. They stain the marble with rays of symbolic logic in juicy black pigment that very nearly washes away. They collect here every Thursday evening to distill their ideas to distinguish science from superstition. At stake is Everything. Reality. Meaning. Their lives. They have lost any tolerance for ineffectual and embroidered attitudes, for mysticism or metaphysics. That is putting it too dispassionately. They hate mysticism and metaphysics, religion and faith. They loathe them. They want to separate out truth. They feel, I imagine, the near hysteria of sensing it just there, just beyond the nub of their fingers at the end of arms stretched to their limits. I'm standing there, looking three hundred and sixty degrees around the table. Some of them stand out brighter than the others. They press forward and announce themselves. The mathematician Olga Hahn-Neurath is here. She has a small but valuable part to play in this script as does her husband Otto Neurath, the oversized socialist. Most importantly, Moritz Schlick is here to form the acme and source of the Circle. Olga, whose blindness descended with the conclusion of an infection, smokes her cigar while Otto drinks lethal doses of caffeine and Moritz settles himself with a brush of his lapels. The participation of the others present today is less imperative. A circle can be approximated by a discrete handful of points and the others will not be counted. There are perhaps more significant members of the Circle over the years, but these are the people that glow in color against my grainy black and white image of history. A grainy, worn, poorly resolved, monochromatic picture of a still scene. I can make out details if I look the shot over carefully. Outside, a wind frozen in time burns the blurred faces of incidental pedestrians. Men pin their hats to their heads with hands gloved by wind-worn skin. Inside a grand mirror traps the window's images, a chunk of animated glass. In a plain, dark wooden chair near the wall, almost hidden behind the floral arm of an upholstered booth, caught in the energy and enthusiasm of that hopeful time as though caught in a sandstorm, is Kurt G?del. In 1931 he is a young man of twenty-five years, his sharpest edges still hidden beneath the soft pulp of youth. He has just discovered his theorems. With pride and anxiety he brings with him this discovery. His almost, not-quite paradox, his twisted loop of reason, will be his assurance of immortality. An immortality of his soul or just his name? This question will be the subject of his madness. Can I assert that suprahuman longevity will apply only to his name? And barely even that. Even now that we live under the shadow of his discovery, his name is hardly known. His appellation denotes a theorem, he's an initial, not a man. Only here he is, a man in defense of his soul, in defense of truth, ready to alter the view of reality his friends have formulated on this marble table. He has come to tell the circle that they are wrong, and he can prove it. G?del is taciturn, alone even in a crowd, back against the wall, looking out as though in the dark at the cinema. He is reticent but not un-likeable. The attention with which his smooth hair, brushed back over his head away from his face, is creamed and tended hints at his strongest interest next to mathematics, namely women. His efforts often come to fruition only adding to his mystery for a great many of the mathematicians around him. And while he has been known to show off a girlfriend or two, he keeps his real love a secret. His bruised apple, his sweet Adele. There is something sweet about his face too, hidden as it is behind thick-rimmed goggle glasses, inverted binoculars, so that those who are drawn into a discussion of mathematics with him feel as though they are peering into a blurry distant horizon. The completely round black frames with thick nosepiece have the effect of accentuating his eyes or replacing them with cartoon orbs a physical manifestation of great metaphorical vision. They leave the suggestion with anyone looking in that all emphasis should be placed there on those sad windows or, more importantly, on the vast intellectual world that lays just beyond the focus of the binocular lenses. He speaks only when spoken to and then only about mathematics. But his responses are stark and beautiful and the very few able to connect with him feel they have discovered an invaluable treasure. His sparse council is sought after and esteemed. This is a youth of impressive talent and intimidating strength. This is also a youth of impressive strangeness and intimidating weakness. Maybe he has no more than the rest of us harbor, but his weaknesses all seem so extreme hypochondria, paranoia, schizophrenia. They are even more pronounced when laid alongside his incredible mental strengths huge black voids, chunks taken out of an intensely shining star. He is still all potential. The potential to be great, the potential to be mad. He will achieve both magnificently. Everyone gathered on this Thursday, the rotating numbers accounting for some three dozen, believe in their very hearts that mathematics is unassailable. G?del has come tonight to shatter their belief until all that's left are convincing pieces that when assembled erect a powerful monument to mathematics, but not an unassailable one or at least not a complete one. G?del will prove that some truths live outside of logic and that we can't get there from here. Some people people who probably distrust mathematics are quick to claim that they knew all along that some truths are beyond mathematics. But they just didn't. They didn't know it. They didn't prove it. G?del didn't believe that truth would elude us. He proved it would. He didn't invent a myth to conform to his prejudice of the world at least not when it came to mathematics. He discovered his theorem as surely as if it was a rock he had dug up from the ground. He could pass it around the table and it would be as real as that rock. If anyone cared to, they could dig it up where he buried it and find it just the same. Look for it and you'll find it where he said it is, just off center from where you're staring. There are faint stars in the night sky that you can see but only if you look to the side of where they shine. They burn too weakly or are too far to be seen directly, even if you stare. But you can see them out of the corner of your eye because the cells on the periphery of your retina are more sensitive to light. Maybe truth is just like that. You can see it, but only out of the corner of your eye. ~~ The iron frame of Kurt's bed was a brutal conductor of the chill singeing his hand so sharply as he hoisted himself awake this morning that it might as well have left a burn and the cloud of condensation that escaped from his damp mouth could have been smoke. He prepared for his discussion with The Circle most the day and took care to present himself well. He applied layers of clothes like a dressing over a wound, carefully wrapping his limbs in strong woolen weaves. The third pair of pants buttoned easily over the inner two layers with just the right amount of resistance. He made sure the two pairs of trousers he wore closest were slightly short and stayed well hidden behind the cuff of the outer suit. A similar procedure was followed for his upper half a series of shirts and vests created a padding five garments thick. Even then he looked lean although less alarmingly so. Despite his detachment, his family's sophistication was not entirely lost on him and surfaced in the subtle choices he made, if not in the few kitsch objects he clashed against his mother's design in the interior of his large flat, then at least it showed in the many garments that he now used to flatter himself, a reference to the rich textiles manufactured in his father's factories. He applied the finely woven jacket that still hung loosely from the line connecting the points of his two shoulders and finally a handsome overcoat was draped over that. G?del loves these Thursday nights. The rest of the week is spent in near complete isolation, sometimes losing the sense of days. Comforted by the darkest hours when his loneliness is assured, he manipulates logical symbols into a flawless sequence, generating theorem after theorem in his notebooks. He fills the plain paper books with mathematical proofs that lead to new ideas that spawn new results. He can't always find a context for the proliferation of logical conclusions other than the pages themselves which are covered one-sided from left to right until the book is finished and he moves back through the volume covering the back of the pages from right to left. In these ordinary brown notebooks he builds a logical cosmos of his own in which the private ideas are nested, his secret gems. His most precious insights he transcribes in Garbelsberger, an obsolete form of German shorthand he was taught as a schoolboy and is sure no one else remembers. While he often loses Monday easily and tries to find root in Tuesday, though Wednesday is a mere link between nights, he always knows Thursday. He likes to arrive early and choose the same place each time, a dark wooden chair near the wall, almost hidden behind the floral arm of an upholstered booth, not too close to the center but not too far out where it might become crowded, people pressing in to warm themselves against the heat of argument emanating from the core. Comfortably still, with an undisturbed tepid coffee he never intends to drink, he listens to the debates, the ideas, and the laughter, like a man marooned on an island tuning into a distant radio broadcast. Proof that there are others out there. Proof that he is not alone. Proof. He usually disagrees with them. Still, The Circle gives him a clear form to relate to, an external setting for his private cosmos solid rocks of reality appearing in a fog of ghosts. This evening he is later than usual. Knocked unsteady as he has been by the recent turns. He has his latest notebook with him, pressed against his jacket. His knuckles protrude from the spine of the book like barbed wire lacings. The pages are nearly full, front and back covered, they must be read as a loop from the first page front to the last page back, then towards the first page again, a closed path, a broken triangle, and at the pointed tip a discovery. An incredible discovery. He is so impressed by the stream of symbols that accumulate particularly at the endpoint, where they began, that he feels lightheaded while his blood collects in pools about his boney knees. He's in front of the glass doors of the Caf? Josephinum. Through the filter of the windowpanes the activity becomes an unreal smear of lights and colors. His hand on the door, it opens, that aroma, and he moves into the room. Through the filter of his eyes the activity persists, an unreal smear of lights and colors. Who here is real? Pushing against a breeze of phantoms he moves towards the table, pressing into a chair. Amazing that he looks composed. His physical condition is fragile. His emotional condition is fragile. He hides the former behind thick textile weaves and a well-manicured fa?ade. He hides the latter behind the pattern of reflected lights off his glasses. On this stage provided by the Caf? Josephinum, he looks at ease, as though he belongs. But the past few days have been irregular at best. For one thing, Adele almost poisoned him. He woke into the hardest cold this morning like breaking through the surface of a frozen lake and gasped for breath the air shocking his nose and throat with brittle spikes of ice as his mind sucked in the progression of the past days. A terrible relief flooded his system and the relieved thoughts themselves confirmed to him that he was indeed alive. I think therefore I am, he thought. Both the thought and the condition of being alive amused him. While he has run the events over and over in his mind, they permute with each replay: An old woman, his death, then Adele who is kind until she dusts something into his stew. Then again: An old woman, his death, the rain, Adele manipulates his confession and blatantly builds a toxic pyre. An old woman. His death. The rain. Adele. Pretty, stained Adele. His heart aches with suspicion and the thick mucous of betrayal. His heart also aches with disease. He is fatigued. His chest is sore. He has no breath. This very evening he coughed up blood. His heart has become stiff and scarred after a bout of rheumatic fever at the age of eight. A valve in his atrium fused and constricted over years. It took the disease a full decade to declare the specific threat intended. He is plagued by attacks. A backwash of his blood stretches the chambers, depriving his arteries. He lives in constant fear for his life. Every minute framed by panic. The flutter in his chest a warning of a potential blood clot, suffocation, or heart failure. He shouldn't be here with the smoky air, warm and virulent. But the relief that filled his limbs this morning gave him a feeling of urgency and ambition. And he needs to see Moritz. The Circle doesn't take shape until Moritz Schlick arrives. He enters like a gale, his entrance embellished by a curl of eddies in his wake that flow around the door and into the room. He is the chair of natural philosophy at the University, a title that carries great prestige and authority. Moritz is always a gentleman, always gracious and earnest and admirable. As he rocks into a chair, hands are waved, more coffees are ordered and in the darkening room, darker than the ebbing day, they all begin to settle amid clanking dishes, knocking elbows, their collective weight leveraged inward. The table wobbles as cups rise and fall and a circle forms. It's Moritz Schlick's Circle. Drawn together by his invitation and kept together by his soothing tones. They come here to orbit around truth, to throw off centuries of misguided faith, the shackles of religion, the hypnotism of metaphysics. They celebrate the heft of their own weight in a solid chair, the heat off the coffee, the sound their voices manufacture within the walls of the caf?. Some are delirious with the immediacy of this day because it is all that matters. There is nothing else. Everything true is summed up in the chair, the cup, the building. There is only gravity, heat and force. The world is all that is the case. Moritz knows the greatness that can emerge from the members he has chosen by hand, so he smoothes the caustic edges between egos and makes out of them a collective, an eclectic orchestra out of dissonance. Moritz is the glue that holds together the communist, the mathematician, the empiricist. He selects each person here with care, patiently turning them over in his mind, studying them with his kind eyes. They are comforted by his self-assurance and are sincerely flattered by the invitation to Thursday's discussions, if they are ever fortunate enough to receive the summons. There are many for whom the hoped for invitation never comes. G?del blushed with either vanity or shyness, who can know for sure, when Moritz approached him in the room in the basement of the mathematics Institute and extended the invitation almost four years ago. Kurt was at the chalkboard organizing another student's thoughts in spare symbols, lovely dusty marks on a landscape of poorly erased predecessors. He always transcribes the skeleton in the pure notation of symbolic logic first and with such care before he begins to speak. Even though he was only a twenty-one year old student, the others watched with admiration for his ability to see through to the logical bones in their debates, like a chef skillfully removing the endoskeleton of a filleted fish without a morsel of clinging flesh. Moritz watched him too and moved by the lucidity of G?del's resolution to a problem he himself had found distractingly difficult, he came to his final decision to extend to Kurt an invitation to his Circle on Thursday nights. Moritz joined him at the board, quietly adding a fine comment on the infinite list of integers that might participate in the reasoning off the middle rib of the fish's spine. And in this smooth manner he eased G?del into conversation. Everyone either knows by instinct or learns by plain experiment to meet G?del with mathematics first. And so Moritz approached with the right words about infinity and integers and earned that look of gratitude and trust. As he shook Kurt's hand and his own head in grateful amazement, they talked: "Herr Professor, I have been thinking about the Liar's Paradox where the liar says, this sentence is false." "Ah, the antinomy of the liar. Yes, that liar who says, this sentence is false." "The sentence cannot be false." "Because if it is false as claimed, then it must be true. A contradiction." Studying his young student for a time Moritz stroked his lip dry and concluded his motion with the reply, "And it cannot be true. Because if it is true, then it is false which is again a contradiction. It is a paradox and an artifact of our careless use of language. Mathematics will never allow such a paradox. Mathematical propositions will either be true or false with no contradictions." "What if mathematics is not free of such propositions?" "It must be. Mathematics must be complete. There are no unsolvable problems." Ever since that morning of the invitation and the antinomy of the liar, G?del has found Moritz's very presence reassuring. If Kurt was different in character, more affectionate, less rigid, and if Moritz too were just a little different, more spontaneous, less reserved, G?del could have come to love Moritz like a father. Instead he feels something more formal, more distant, more appropriate probably. He feels grateful. He keeps this feeling to himself and the sentiment has almost no outward manifestation beyond his attendance here at Moritz's discussions. He believes that Moritz is real, that he exists and it happened in the moment that Moritz shared the comment on the infinite list of numbers. With that insight, it was as though he uttered a code word. I am one of the real ones, his comment certified, and with that he crystallized from the cloud and took shape. [Excerpted from A Madman Dreams Of Turing Machines by Janna Levin. Knopf, 2006.] References 22. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/levin.html ---------------- Edge: JANNA LEVIN http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/levin.html Janna Levin JANNA LEVIN is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. She received a BA in physics and astronomy with a concentration in philosophy from Barnard, a PhD from MIT in the Center for Theoretical Physics, and subsequently worked at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) and the Center for Particle Astrophysics (CfPA) at the University of California, Berkeley before moving to England. There she held an Advanced Fellowship at the University of Cambridge in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP). Just prior to returning to the states she was awarded a Fellowship from the National Endowment for Science Technology and Arts to be a scientist-in-residence at the Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing in Oxford. She has worked on theories of the Early Universe, Chaos, and Black Holes. She is the author of How The Universe Got Its Spots: Diary Of A Finite Time In A Finite Space. _________________________________________________________________ Beyond Edge: [10]Janna Levin's Website References 10. http://www.phys.barnard.edu/%7Ejanna/index.htm From checker at panix.com Fri Aug 26 22:36:01 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2005 18:36:01 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] ACC-list: Post-Darwinian Conflict Message-ID: Post-Darwinian Conflict Arthur C. Clarke list Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2005 15:59:36 -0000 From: "Alex Alaniz, PhD" To: acc-list at yahoogroups.com An essay concerning law, social identity, inequality, conflict, crime, warfare and economic reality at the cusp of humanity's entry into post-corporeal, post-Darwinian evolution Introduction--Humanity's entry into the post-Darwinian era A draft of the human genome was released in the journal Nature in 2001 [1]. Today, the technology to sequence a human genome from scratch is being reduced to smallish, so-called biochips by companies like Affymetrix. In addition to finding their way into your doctor's office in the not-too-distant future, such biochips are currently being used with other advanced technologies to study how our DNA circuitry works in real-time [2], as well as to compare how the circuitry changes from youth to old age [3]. Genome therapies, moreover, are currently working their way thru clinical trials, and are about to be performed on the unborn [4]. We have developed genetically modified foods, and have mixed monkeys with jelly fish [5] to name but a few examples of our growing prowess to treat genetic codes as so much software. Humanity, thus, for better or for worse, has entered the era of post-Darwinian evolution, and it will not be long before we begin tinkering with ways to extend our lives and augment our capabilities. Even more profoundly, it is not too far-fetched to imagine humanity entering a post-corporeal as well as a post-Darwinian era. Consider the recent development of neuroelectronic systems in particular [6] and the current clinical work to build direct brain/machine interfaces for paraplegics and quadriplegics [7]. The FDA has, in fact, recently granted approval to allow Cyberkinetics to begin a clinical trial in which small chips will be placed beneath the skulls of paraplegic patients to control computers by thought alone. Further down the line there are ongoing efforts to build brain chips to replace Alzheimer and stroke damaged brain tissue in general by Dr. Berger and colleagues at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Given the above developments and humanity's propensity for seeking out competitive advantages, it is likely that in the not-too-distant future people will seek out elective, post-Darwinian brain augmentation procedures, and that new kinds of social conflict will arise. In other words, we should be expecting profound changes in social identity, inequality, conflict, crime, warfare, economic and legal reality to come to pass in the not-too-distant future. To this end, many people, several organizations and even the United States government are already beginning to address some of the issues of a post-Darwinian, post-corporeal future. The United States, for instance, under the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant CTS-0128860 cosponsored a large, extensive study entitled, "Converging technologies for improving human performance: nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science." Additionally, in this case with the support of the Commerce Department, the Converging Technologies Bar Association (CTBA) was recently launched in New York. Please refer to the CTBA at http://www.convergingtechnologies.org/. Also recently, Professor George Khushf and several colleagues of the University of South Carolina won a 1.35 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study the societal impact of nanotech and related trends such as nano, bio, info and cognitive technology convergence. This essay will address some of the legal, social, and economic issues of a post-Darwinian future, pose many questions, and try to make the case that now is the time for active discussion regarding the development of legal and economic means to greatly reduce?if not altogether prevent?the dangers and pitfalls of the real future shock about to befall all of us, namely, our entry into a post-Darwinian evolutionary era. It will also touch on the possible natures and physical restrictions constraining a post-Darwinian evolution, and discuss our likely motivations for entry into a post-corporeal era, along with the possible attendant social and economic consequences, such as the possibility of the richest rich, as post corporeal beings, so rapidly consuming the world's resources, the poorest poor are starved out of existence. It will conclude with a call for simulations of the world in the not-too-distant future along the lines of the popular internet game SimCity. 1. Post-Darwinian, post-corporeal scenarios On the good side of the post-Darwinian, post-corporeal brain augmentation era, we can imagine that attorneys and medical doctors, for instance, would find it useful to store all case law and case histories, respectfully, for ready reference inside sophisticated cranial silico-bio-implants. Armies of financial analysts would find it advantageous to have all real-time data streams piped wirelessly into their heads along with all global news feeds. The flood of information would then be filtered and processed in real time by powerful data crunching neuroimplants to extract exploitable patterns in the less than efficient real world financial markets. The same could be said for soldiers, meteorologists, public health officials, and so on, all to humanity's better good, but there is also a more deleterious side to the technology to consider. Imagine, say, an aggressive financial analyst who, without scruple, would hack into the mental resources of one of his coworkers to steal information, plant a debilitating electronic virus, or even more maliciously, plant a deadly electronic virus that not only kills its intended victim, but, because of an unintended mutation in the wild, ultimately extinguishes humanity. On a larger scale, consider the neuro-embedded spying, mind control, even population control which, enabled by the mass production and mass use of neuroimplants, may be pursued by governments, or by terrorist groups, or even by a powerful, individual industrialist in the business of supplying neuroimplants. 2. Viruses Given today's electronic viral instabilities and their ever increasing number and pace, it seems foregone to conclude that if/when humanity begins wide scale use of neuroimplants, the electronic virus problem will grow far worse and far more personal. A brain surgeon for instance, using a neural implant chip to better navigate his telerobotic arm around an MRI-based three-dimensional projection of some lesion might, being infected by some teenager's electronic virus, snip a wrong section of tissue. Would his or her medical practice insurance cover electronic virus liability? What would be the legal standards required to prove that the severity of the electronic infection was the cause of the error versus the probability of it having been caused by a simple, old fashioned mistake? Would the manufacturer of the neurochip be fair game for a lawsuit, the claim being the manufacturer supplied insufficient or faulty virus protection in its product? Would the neurosurgeon who implanted the chip into the neurosurgeon who snipped the wrong section be sued as well? Where would the liability chain stop? Perhaps instead, either in anticipation, or, more likely, after too much damage has been done, lawmakers might require surgeons (and all other high stakes professionals) to undergo industry regulated virus scans before performing their specialties, cap legal damages, and cut the chain of liability to go no further than the producers of virus scanners. Perhaps lawmakers would relegate the ultimate responsibility of virus scanning to the appropriate government bodies only, say, the Federal Aviation Administration for scanning pilots, and similarly. 3. Cheating As touched upon in the introduction, a financial analyst, say, with freshly augmented state-of-the-art neuro-implanted capabilities, such as wireless connections to the internet, and new powerful number crunching functions, and so forth, might try to hack in a competitor's mind, via his competitor's own older, lesser capable neuroimplants. What combination of legal deterrents would it take to discourage such behavior before it occurs, and what kind of policing methods would it take to enforce anti-hacking laws and/or to detect hacking crimes after the fact? How would the degrees of the severity of the hacking crime be defined, and, for that matter, what legal elements would have to be proved in a hacking case? Moreover, what types of sentencing guidelines should lawmakers set, and would the victim financial analyst and his or her company be subject to legal action from financially hurt clients for not having used the latest neuroimplant and virus scanning technologies? 4. Murder Through many a Hollywood film, we have been presented with the idea that the internet may be used as an instrument to produce mass murder, e.g., the use of the internet to change airport approach patterns resulting in crashed airplanes for instance. Along this line, future heart rhythm defibrillators, like today's more expensive automobiles, will likely come built with wireless internet connectivity capabilities to be used to report impending problems to patients and doctors, and even to enable temporary adjustments to be made under more dire circumstances. What is to prevent someone wishing to collect his or her inheritance sooner than later from attempting to kill his or her wealthy, defibrillator using benefactor? Again a whole host of attendant legal and technological questions follow. 5. Post-Darwinian, post-corporeal evolution and ultimate winners The issues such as those discussed above, and their innumerable variations, have been predicated on human beings remaining, except for their neural implants, essentially as human as our species is today, circa 2004. I, however, very much doubt that once the neuro implant game begins, humanity will remain corporeal for very long afterwards. Research work going back more than a decade and reported in important, peer reviewed journals has demonstrated the joining of neuronal nets with electronics via impaled microelectrodes [8, 9, 10]. More recent research being conducted at the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry has reported in Physical Review Letters successful, direct, noninvasive coupling of a silicon chip with the basic element of neuronal learning via electric fields [6]. Along these lines, Dr. Berger at the University of Southern California is attempting to develop a hippocampus brain prosthesis chip for Alzheimer's disease. Given all this work, I can imagine the eventual development of hybrid silico-bacterial-nanobots designed to directly couple with a person's brain tissue to (1) absorb and archive all the person's knowledge in situ, (2) augment the person's mental capabilities in situ, and (3) connect the person's mind to the wireless internet. Such a person, much as we are oblivious of which brain cells drive our conscious thought, would, through his or her lifetime, remain oblivious that his or her brain cells, dying of old age, are being replaced by more robust, faster bio-silico replacements. He or she may even remain unaware that parts of his or her consciousness may begin to reside inside wirelessly linked extra-corporeal servers, which I dub IQ mindspace servers. With our frail human bodies being so susceptible to damage from bacterial and viral infections, cancers and accidents, why wouldn't the natural progression to humanity's use of neuroimplant technology be to embed itself directly into more robust, redundant IQ mindspace nano/bio-electronic/spintronic-based server farms spanning the Earth in bunkers, or orbiting it, or on the Moon, or beyond. In such an evolved post-Darwinian, post-corporeal world, all necessary interaction with the corporeal world to dig for energy resources, manufacture power plants, produce goods, run laboratories, explore the solar system, etc., could then be done telerobotically using (bio)robots ranging in size from the nano scale and upwards. Clearly, this path, should we take it, will spell the end of evolution by passive natural selection far more rapidly than our current post-genomic tinkering is already doing so. Lifespan lengths will then be indefinite, and humanity, moreover, will have entered the post-Darwinian, post-corporeal evolutionary phase. 5.1 Micro scale conflict, zombies and "unMurder" In such a post-Darwinian, post-corporeal world, on a smallish, micro scale, a financial analyst might rather infiltrate, overwhelm and ultimately control a competitor's very IQ mindspace's will, making the victim an overpowered lackey?read zombie?with the victim's cohorts, family and friends remaining none-the-wiser throughout some indefinite period. Would it seem reasonable to conclude that the victim would thus be rendered nonexistent, or should he or she be considered murdered and dead? Might it not be possible, the perpetrator having saved his victim's mental assets in some kind of static memory device, that such a murder could be undone? For the undoing of such type of murder, more akin to a coma, would one have to demonstrate to the court by a preponderance of evidence, from family members, friends and associates, under an extensive psychological examination process, that, more likely than not, the victim's characteristics have been restored wholly and with little or no significant corruption? Could spouses claim rape? Could employers claim sabotage? Finally, if the victim could not be legally proven to be unmurdered, would the "entity" remaining behind, unless family or friends took him or her in, be left out in the cold, having no access to any of his or her prior possessions or privileges. In such cases, would it be the government's responsibility to take care of the hapless victims? 5.2 Macro scale conflict and ultimate winners On a larger, macro scale, the issues of a post-Darwinian, post-corporeal world of competition and conflict would likely acquire a far more ominous tenor. Let us assume that business works as usual, and that the more money one has, the more one could and would use it to augment one's own brain. Then an empire builder such as Mr. Bill Gates, whose wealth exceeds the first billion or so poorest people, now becoming blessed with an indefinite cyber-based lifespan and controlling an army of employees, agents, as well as an army of semi-autonomous robots could come to dwarf humanity in a way the mortals Khan, Napoleon, Hitler, or Stalin never could. A post corporeal Mr. Bill Gates, occupying one of the world's largest IQ mindspace server farms, could in principle be running in the background all manner of (bio-molecular manufacturing based) factories, laboratories, fossil fuel extraction operations, and conventional, nuclear, solar or other types of unconventional power plants, with all of these facilities being manned by an army of semiautonomous robots ranging in size from the nano to the macro scale under his direct control, whilst he simultaneously occupies himself with manifold other activities. Moreover, unless he is either forced by some form of economic and/or legal system, or is philanthropically inclined, there is no fundamental reason why he should have to share his advancements with the remainder of humanity. Instead, he would rather likely not share his scientific and technological advancements for fear of giving any advantage to any potential, or real rivals of his own class. The richest rich will thus likely leave the poorer classes commensurately scientifically and technologically behind at an ever increasing pace, and this leads to two worst sub cases for the poorer classes, each of which could spell the end of humanity, save for a few ultimate winners, or even one ultimate winner. Let me explain what I mean by the phrase one ultimate winner. Let us suppose that we are in that period when the human race is transforming itself into an advanced post-corporeal IQ mindspace society which, for technical and/or economical reasons, remains bound to Earth. To continue to exist, the society must continue to consume resources to extract and use useful energy, with the supply of useful energy being restricted to what can be extracted from the Earth, the moon thru tidal power or lithium mining, and captured from the Sun. These energy constraints, then, would be the physical constraints restricting the initial post-Darwinian, post-corporeal evolution. Let us consider the worst case. Even if it is the case that the available supplies of energy, and the ability to exploit them with advanced technologies, are, by our present (corporeal) standards, illimitable, there is no apriori requirement that the transformation of humanity into IQ mindspace resources be done so equally or equitably according to current moral standards. At present, the poorest man and the wealthiest man cannot personally consume a significantly disparate amount of food and water on a day-to-day basis. But the wealthiest man, if his wealth be proportionately converted into IQ mindspace server capabilities (to store vast libraries of knowledge and acquire massive amounts of computational power to simulate market behavior, develop even more advanced technologies, and so forth) would dwarf the energy usage of the poorest man (reduced to a small IQ mindspace server if at all) by many orders of magnitude. Then, in much the same way that Earth's current, most advanced species is using increasingly greater planetary resources at an ever accelerating pace?because its science and technology are accelerating at an ever increasing pace?extinction of the less advanced beings of the future will happen at an accelerating pace in proportion to the rate at which their resources get usurped. That is, the richest rich, by rapidly outpacing the science and technology of the rest of humanity, will rapidly come to consume so much of the energy from the Earth, the Moon and the Sun, to the maximum rate physics allows, that the poorer (lower IQ mindspace) classes will literally be starved out of existence. Then, ultimately, after the sun is no longer useful, the richest rich will either migrate elsewhere in the galaxy, or, should it be the case that for physical reasons interstellar space travel never becomes practicable, the richest rich too will die out when the Sun can no longer be tenably exploited, and the human story ends. Two notes to the worst case: (1) Regarding the world's poorest people being converted into IQ mindspace entities, I wrote above that it might not happen at all to cast doubt that the conversion would necessarily happen to all of us. Not many of today's billion poorest can readily buy a low-end personal computer, let alone a massive supercomputer server farm. Thus it may be the case that a large fraction of humanity may be dropped off the evolutionary tree, but, as explained in the preceding paragraph, this is not to say that the situation for most of the remainder of humanity, from those with enough assets to purchase entry level IQ mindspace servers up to, but not including the richest rich, is any less dire. As has been argued above, we could all of us, en masse, be starved out. (2) Nothing so far expressed, including physical limitations, fundamentally precludes the eruption of IQ mindspace class warfare, and the possibility that only one future being might, by quashing out all other life (either directly or by passively starving the rest out) become the ultimate winner of Earth's four billion year old evolutionary competition, except perhaps the speed of light. It may be the case that the Earth is simply too big (light taking about 0.064 seconds to travel half way around its circumference) to allow a single being to maintain coherence between distant parts of itself, especially if the situation is very fluid. The larger dinosaurs for instance, with long distances between their brains and tails, and slowly traveling nerve signals, likely found it very disadvantageous to only eventually feel their tails being bitten by some rival. Thus, instead of there being one ultimate Darwinian winner dominating the Earth, it may be the case that there will be a multitude of such grand winners, with the "size" of the area of their control being limited to the longest reaction times that still allow them to maintain coherence across their largest dimension within a fluid, competitive environment. Given the latter case, namely, a population of grand winners, many more complex questions would arise. Among the first questions would concern population dynamics. Would there be tens of grand winners, or thousands, or even larger numbers of winners? Would they reproduce? It seems logical to believe that electronic/quantum computing beings would find sexual or asexual reproduction simple to do, and the process would likely consume little time. Among the winners and their progeny, we might then ask what kind of predator/prey dynamics would prevail. Control and coherence of the society, moreover, would also become an issue as the society spread out further from Earth, first reaching the moon and nearby planets, then venturing further out yet. Two great sources for further reading regarding many possible futures of post corporeal and arbitrarily advance life, each providing many references, are, respectively, Barrow and Tippler [11] and Kurzweil [12]. 6. A Different post-Darwinian future--A better case It is well researched and documented that collections of people working together on a common problem make better collective decisions the majority of the time than individuals themselves do [13]. Perhaps, if it cannot not be rigorously proved by iron clad mathematical argument, it can at least be reasonably demonstrated through various game theoretic studies that the net value of humanity would rise faster in a post corporeal world wherein everyone is allowed to continue to exist in peace, and no one person (or small group of persons) is allowed to dominate the world through unrestricted, electronic post-Darwinian, post-corporeal warfare. Such a demonstration would then provide humanity with a rational motivation for a smooth, controlled, legally regulated, economically constrained transition to post corporeal life. Yet even if the opposite were true according to theoretical modeling?that, in other words, the net value of humanity would grow more rapidly with unrestricted Darwinian warfare being allowed?I can imagine that very few people would willingly give up their existence for some mathematically demonstrable greater, but abstract good. Thus, there will either be a powerful and rational reason, or a powerful, self-preservation-based motivation to seek out a controlled, policy-based transition to post-corporeal life. Two simplistic, first order cases come to mind. Sub case I: Individuals are not allowed to transfer themselves to superior IQ mindspace servers. Everyone will share equally the fruits of all scientific and technical advances. Sub case II: Individuals may transfer themselves to IQ mindspace servers with capacities/capabilities commensurate to their wealth. However, most economic relationships existing prior to the post corporeal transformation will remain intact. Mr. Bill Gates will be required to keep his secretary. His secretary however, no longer a corporeal being, will not be required to use the services of a dentist. Dentists will have to find some new role in the post-corporeal world. Again, everyone will share equally the fruits of all scientific and technical advances. This post-corporeal transition will cause economic displacements much like the industrial revolution did. Certain elements of the workforce, as weavers and gun makers were once obviated by machines, will too be obviated, but novel opportunities will likely arise if history is any guide. Any such physical limits as those expressed above, designed to prevent a single, singular winner (or smallish group of winners) from ultimately usurping all resources would likely then lead to new kinds of legal and economic systems also with novel predator/prey resource relationships quite apart from those of today and yesteryear, or they might lead to a strange admixture of old and new systems. 7. Conclusions and future work We are in a period when our sciences and technologies are rapidly fusing together such that an advancement in one field rapidly parlays itself into advances in other fields. Consider as an instance the advancement of DNA biology in part leading to DNA computation, and conversely, the use of advanced robotics, powerful computers, and advanced computational algorithms to decipher our DNA-based genome. It follows then, unless there are limitations we have yet to run into, that the greater our scientific and technological capabilities become, the increasingly faster we develop even more advanced scientific and technological capabilities, including those which enable our fusion with our technologies. Certainly there can be no denying that we have steadfastly, and in my opinion, ineluctably, entered a post-Darwinian era which may rapidly, within a few decades, go post-corporeal. Accordingly, as is the case with the United States Social Security, and its aging population base, we are beginning to face unprecedented social, legal, economic, and political ramifications which need to be addressed now, before all hell breaks loose. If Darwinian evolution is about biological systems exploiting every possible, physically allowed niche and propagating the most fit specimens through natural, passive selection, without moral, man-made considerations, there is no fundamental reason post-Darwinian evolution?with or without a post-corporeal transformation?should, apart from involving active selection, be in any way less indifferent to us, unless we make it so. We need to begin to study these impending possibilities now, before it is too late. To this end, I believe it would be not only interesting, but also of the utmost importance, to not only begin to simulate the social, legal, economic predator/prey systems imagined above under various physical limitations, but many more situations so that we may begin to ferret out those solutions we can all of us be reasonably happy with during our post-Darwinian and/or post-corporeal transformation. Perhaps a good beginning would be the use of games such as SimCity, modified to play out various post-Darwinian, post-corporeal scenarios, e.g., stock broker versus stock broker, etc. Along these lines, Professor Ian Lustick at the University of Pennsylvania, for instance, is modeling the social structure of Pakistan with a Sims-like game. Someone out there should seek grant money to do the same thing for post-Darwinian, post-corporeal societies. References: [1] The International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium (IHGSC) , "A Physical Map of the Humane Genome", Nature 409, 934-941 (2001) [2] Duggan, D. J., M. Bittner, Y. Chen, P. Meltzer and J. M. Trent. 1999. Expression profiling using cDNA microarrays. Nature Genetics 21:10-14. [3] Ly et. al., "Mitotic Misregulation and Human Aging," Science 2000 287: 2486-2492 [4] BBC News, "Hope for gene transplants in womb", http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3581727.stm , 30 March 2004 [5] A. W. S. Chan, K. Y. Chong, C. Martinovich, C. Simerly, G. Schatten, "Transgenic Monkeys Produced by Retroviral Gene Transfer into Mature Oocytes," Science, Vol. 291, pp. 309-312 (January 12, 2001). [6] R. A. Kaul, N. I. Syed, and P. Fromherz, "Neuron-Semiconductor Chip with Chemical Synapse between Identified Neurons", Physical Review Letters, Vol. 92, No. 3, Jan. 2004. [7] Duke Med News, "Human Studies Show Feasibility of Brain-Machine Interfaces," http://www.dukemednews.org/news/article.php?id=7493 23 March 2004 [8] D. Kleinfeld, F. Raccuia-Behling, and H.J. Chiel, Biophys. J. 57, 697, 1990 [9] Y. Yarom, Neuroscience 44, 263, (1991) [10] A. A. Sharp et al., J. Neurophysiol. 69, 992 (1993) [11] J. D. Barrow and F. J. Tippler, "The Anthropic Cosmological Principle", Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, 1986 [12] R. Kurzweil, "The Age Of The Spiritual Machine", Viking, Penguin Group, Penguin Putman Books, Ltd., 275 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A., 1999 [13] Heiner R. A., "The Collective Decision Problem, and the Theory of Preference", Economic Inquiry, 1981, vol. 19, issue 2, pages 297-332 From checker at panix.com Fri Aug 26 23:58:09 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2005 19:58:09 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Archeology: The New Neandertal Message-ID: The New Neandertal http://www.archaeology.org/0507/etc/letter.html First, the summary from the "Magazine and Journal Reader" feature of the daily bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.8.17 http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/08/2005081701j.htm A glance at the July/August 2005 issue of Archaeology: A different sort of caveman New technology, combined with some very old fossils, is changing established theories about Neanderthals, writes Jean-Jacques Hublin, director of the department of human evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig. With their heavy brows and robust bones, Neanderthals were originally viewed as "brutish cave dwellers" much different from today's human beings, says Mr. Hublin. As more research was performed, though, scientists began to see more similarities between the ancient species and Homo sapiens. Through the use of "virtual fossils," a "new" Neanderthal is emerging that is "both very similar to and very different from us," he says. "Virtual fossils" are digitally manipulated projections that allow researchers to imagine missing pieces from existing fossils. For example, if one side of a skull is damaged, its opposite side can be copied and reversed to create a complete, composite specimen. Using similar technology to examine Neanderthal teeth, researchers have learned that Neanderthals reached adulthood approximately three years sooner than people do today. Neanderthals and Homo sapiens seem especially similar when researchers consider how much the two differ from apes, says Mr. Hublin. DNA studies of Neanderthals and modern humans, for instance, reveal a limited genetic variation in both that contrasts strongly with the high variability common among African apes. A Neanderthal in a suit and tie would still stand out today, he writes, but "as the last branching of the human evolutionary tree and our closest relatives in the recent past, they will remain an object of popular fascination" and "scientific interest." Perhaps, though, "how we envision Neandertals may tell us as much about the way we see ourselves as about them," writes Mr. Hublin. The article, "The New Neandertal," is available online at http://www.archaeology.org/0507/etc/letter.html --Jason M. Breslow _________________________________________________________________ departments Letter From New York: The New Neandertal Volume 58 Number 4, [4]July/August 2005 by Jean-Jacques Hublin Virtual fossils and real molecules are changing how we view our enigmatic cousin. Next year will mark the 150th anniversary of the discovery at Neandertal, a little valley near Duesseldorf in western Germany, of the first recognized fossil humans. The occasion will be commemorated with conferences and exhibitions at major German museums. As a warm-up for this "Neandertal Year," two dozen scholars gathered at New York University this past January, in a Manhattan suffering near-glacial conditions, to exchange views on the latest advances in the field. Our fascination with Neandertals is well founded. They were the first known example of an extinct species of human, they evolved mostly in Europe, and we now have an unrivaled fossil record accumulated by a century and a half of research. Because there are more specimens of Neandertals than any other premodern human, any new techniques or approaches in paleoanthropology are usually applied to them first. And in recent years we have learned a great deal about these humans that once seemed unattainable, including aspects of their biology such as genetics. Studies have also revealed unexpected features of their growth, development, and life history. Even more traditional approaches, such as the comparison of Neandertal and modern human bone shapes, continue to yield new data. Visions of the Neandertals as brutish cave dwellers prevailed for many years following their discovery. The first reconstruction, in 1908, was based on the partial skeleton of an old male found at La Chappelle aux Saints in France, but the individual had been stooped from arthritis. That fact, and its projecting face, heavy brow, and generally robust bones gave rise to our earliest, though inaccurate, view of Neandertals. But in the last decades of the twentieth century, the pendulum began to swing in the opposite direction. For some, Neandertals appeared only as a slightly different population of our own species, adapted to the cooler climates of the Paleolithic world. The most politically correct version saw them as almost indistinguishable from modern humans in abilities and behaviors, and hardly differing in many anatomical aspects. The New York conference provided a more balanced picture of a "New Neandertal" that is both very similar to and very different from us. Emblematic of this New Neandertal is a composite skeleton created at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and discussed at the conference by Ian Tattersall, one of its curators. Most scholars have focused on analyzing particular parts of the skeleton, such as the skull or pelvis, so the reconstruction is our first look at an entire one. It is a large male, built from casts of bones from several individuals (most are from two finds, one at La Ferrassie, France, and the other at Kebara, Israel). Tattersall emphasized how different it is from our own skeletons, not only in the anatomy of the skull, which is well known, but in entire body shape. If any living Neandertals had come to the conference dressed in a suit and tie, they still would have stood out. But this composite skeleton was only one of many innovative approaches to finding the new Neandertal that were presented in New York. Virtual Fossils Human fossils are precious and fragile, and to study them scientists have embraced or developed new methods in recent years. CT scanning, for example, is used with increasing frequency to assess fine internal details of specimens, such as the inner ear of Neandertals. Imaging techniques, combined with sophisticated software for manipulating digitized fossils, allow us to work with virtual objects rather than the originals. One can now reconstruct fragmentary specimens, piecing them together on the computer and supplying missing parts. If a skull's right side is damaged, the left can be copied and a mirror image of it substituted instead. Even specimens warped and distorted in the fossilization process can be straightened out. The new methods of "virtual paleoanthropology" have been used to investigate how modern humans and Neandertals differ even in childhood. At the New York meeting, Marcia Ponce de Leon and Christoph Zollikofer of the University of Zurich presented a computer model and simulation comparing skull growth, showing the divergence of shape began early in development and reflected different growth patterns in the bones. Another comparison of Neandertal and modern human childhood development was recently undertaken by Fernando Ramirez-Rozzi of the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris and Jose Maria Bermudez de Castro of Madrid's Natural History Museum. They looked at tooth enamel, which has microscopic striations that can be counted like the growth rings in a tree trunk, and concluded that Neandertals reached adulthood at about 15 rather than 18 years of age, as in present-day human populations. Further analysis will confirm whether or not this was the case. Modern human specimens are also being digitized, allowing us to assess bone shape and size variations and understand their significance in anatomical evolution. In a remarkable contribution at the conference, Katerina Harvati and Tim Weaver of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, looked at skull variation in modern humans from different climates and cultures. They found that the shape of the face is linked to local environmental conditions, which fits well with the current belief that the Neandertal's projecting face is a cold-climate adaptation. By contrast, the shape of the brain case, particularly the temporal bone (on the side of the skull), proved to be a good indicator of genetic closeness among populations. Real Molecules Meanwhile, the genuine specimens have been the object of increased attention through the study of DNA, proteins, and chemical elements that can be found in bones and teeth--giving us a completely new source of valuable information about our remote relatives' biology and their daily lives. In 1997, a fragment of DNA was reconstructed from the same bones that the quarry workers found in Neandertal in 1856. The DNA of the Neandertal fell outside modern human variation, and suggested a divergence between the ancestors of Neandertals and modern humans nearly half a million years ago. Since the original DNA study, nine other Neandertal individuals have yielded some genetic information, all similar to one another yet distinct from that of modern humans. Although this number is small, the evidence gives us insight into the demography of the Neandertals. The limited variability of their DNA suggests that there were times, perhaps during glacial advances, when their population was greatly reduced, resulting in genetic bottlenecking. The population recovered in size afterward but with fewer surviving different genetic lines. In this respect, humans--modern, Neandertal, and others--strongly contrast with African apes, which evolved in a much less stressful environment during the last several hundred thousand years, and therefore have much greater genetic variability. Interestingly, while we can now study Neandertal DNA, it is very difficult to analyze DNA from the early modern humans who replaced them between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago. Because Neandertal DNA is different from our own, modern contamination (from excavators, museum curators, or laboratory personnel) can be identified and discounted. With fossils of our own forebears, however, differentiating ancient DNA from recent contamination is virtually impossible. Such research can only be undertaken with new fossil finds that are kept in sterile conditions from the field to the lab. There is no evidence that the last Neandertals were evolving toward a physical appearance like our own, but the issue of the possible contribution of Neandertals to the modern European genetic makeup is still fervently debated. Even if Neandertals represented a distinct, although very close, species separate from modern humans, we know that in nature, hybridization is a common process under such circumstances. At the conference, Trenton Holliday of Tulane University surveyed the zoological evidence, pointing out many hybrids among large mammals including members of the camel, horse, dog, and cat families. Did Neandertals and modern humans interbreed? It is quite possible in some instances, but it had no major biological results. Proteins can now be recovered from bones and examined with methods similar to those used with DNA. This year, for the first time, Christina Nielsen-Marsh of the Max Planck Institute was able to extract and analyze a protein from Neandertal teeth from Shanidar, Iraq. In Neandertals, this particular protein (osteocalcin) displays a sequence similar to that of modern humans, indicating it has changed little over a long period of time. In the near future, extraction and sequencing of fossil proteins may open new ways to study evolutionary relationships between extinct species, and may allow us to go farther back in time than is possible with ancient DNA, which is more complex and degrades more quickly. Scientists are investigating other molecules and chemical elements found in Neandertal bones. Collagen, routinely extracted from bone today for radiocarbon dating, yields carbon and nitrogen, while strontium and calcium can be sampled from the mineral parts of bone. These four elements can give us indications of an individual's diet, since they come from foods. Studies by Herve Bocherens of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Montpellier and Michael Richards of the Max Planck Institute suggest the European Neandertals were highly carnivorous, a pattern not unlike that observed in modern hunter-gatherers in cold regions. In the future, such analyses may also reveal indicators of population movements, since bone chemistry also reflects, for example, specific elements in ground water that vary from region to region. The Last Neandertals The possible interactions between Neandertals and modern invaders between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago in Europe remains one of paleoanthropology's most debated issues, so it was no surprise that it surfaced in New York. There is little doubt that the presence of another group of humans in Europe played a major role in the extinction of the Neandertals, through competition for resources if nothing else. But other factors in the Neandertals' demise have been discussed recently. For example, Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, London, has shown that this period was characterized by repeated and extreme climatic changes occurring in rapid succession. Although Neandertals had faced and survived severe climatic crises along the course of their evolution, the coincidence of this climatic instability with the invasion of the European territory by modern humans presented a double challenge for the last Neandertals. Both groups must have tried adapting during this confrontation in a very difficult environment. At the conference, Shara Bailey of the Max Planck Institute and I showed that Neandertals at the French cave site of Arcy-sur-Cure are indisputably associated with stone tools and bone ornaments formerly thought to have been made only by modern humans. The acquisition during this period of new techniques and habits, such as the use of body ornaments, by the last Neandertals is much debated by specialists. Many scholars believe it may have resulted from their encounters with modern humans, who had developed this behavior more than 100,000 years ago, even before leaving Africa. These contacts, they argue, may have been seldom, but resulted in imitation by the Neandertals or even trade between the two populations. But modern humans might have been affected as well. It has been proposed that the burst of artistic expression--cave art, figurines, and the like--observed in our forebears at this time relates to group identification and may have resulted from the interaction with these indeed human, but very different, beings. Because Neandertals are the best-known group of fossil humans, they are the group that always raises the most questions. As the last branching of the human evolutionary tree and our closest relatives in the recent past, they will remain an object of popular fascination as well as scientific interest. In fact, how we envision Neandertals may tell us as much about the way we see ourselves as about them. With the "New Neandertal" we have definitively shed two such images, one in which our ancient cousin was brutish and far different from us, the other in which we were nearly identical. But perhaps our new-found knowledge, from virtual fossils and molecular studies, is taking us to a deeper understanding of Neandertals. Jean-Jacques Hublin, director of the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzeig, has led fieldwork in France, Spain, and Morocco, and is now participating in an international project at Dikika, Ethiopia. From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 27 00:00:08 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2005 20:00:08 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT Op-Ed: The Golf Gene Message-ID: The Golf Gene http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/20/opinion/20tierney.html [Letters to the editor appended.] By [3]JOHN TIERNEY The P.G.A. championship didn't end until Monday, which was ostensibly a workday, but more than five million men still managed to watch it on television. Why? As an action-packed sport, golf ranks down with baseball and bowling, except that baseball is faster-paced and bowlers are whirling dervishes compared with golfers. Some golfers do exhibit sudden movements when they win a tournament, but it's always a shock to see they can get both feet in the air at once. Golf features no body contact, no car crashes and no cheerleaders, yet men keep watching. They make up more than 80 percent of the TV audience for golf. This might simply be because they like watching a game they play themselves; men make up nearly 80 percent of the golfers in America, too. But then why do so many guys play such a frustrating game? You could theorize that this is a cultural phenomenon, a holdover from the days of alpha males playing at exclusive clubs. But even though most courses have been opened to women, the percentage of golfers who are women hasn't risen in 15 years. Another traditional country-club sport, tennis, is played by nearly as many women as men, but golf remains one of the most segregated sports by sex - more male-dominated than rock climbing, racquetball, pool or roller hockey. The male-female ratio is about the same as in paintball, a war game that always made more sense to me than golf. My basic feeling toward golf - hatred - probably has something to do with how badly I did the couple of times I played, but incompetence didn't seem to stop other guys from becoming obsessed with it. I couldn't imagine what possessed them until I learned about disc golf, which began as a mellow sport for both sexes three decades ago, played by hippies in Grateful Dead T-shirts who flung Frisbees into baskets mounted on poles in public parks. Today there are 1,700 courses and a pro tour that includes superb women players. But more than 90 percent of the disc golf players, pros and duffers, are men. The best explanation I can offer for the disparity is what happened to me the first time I teed off several years ago. Our foursome started at a tee on high ground, looking down a tree-lined swath of grass at the basket nearly 400 feet away. After we flung our discs, as we headed down the fairway, I felt a strange surge of satisfaction. I couldn't figure out why until it occurred to me what we were: a bunch of guys converging on a target and hurling projectiles at it. Was golf the modern version of Pleistocene hunting on the savanna? The notion had already occurred to devotees of evolutionary psychology, as I discovered from reading Edward O. Wilson and Steve Sailer. They point to surveys and other research showing that people in widely different places and cultures have a common vision of what makes a beautiful landscape - and it looks a lot like the view from golfers' favorite tees. The ideal is a vista from high ground overlooking open, rolling grassland dotted with low-branched trees and a body of water. It would have been a familiar and presumably pleasant view for ancient hunters: an open savanna where prey could be spotted as they grazed; a water hole to attract animals; trees offering safe hiding places for hunters. The descendants of those hunters seem to have inherited their fascination with hitting targets, because today's men excel at tests asking them to predict the flights of projectiles. They also seem to get a special pleasure from watching such flights, both in video games and real life. No matter how many times male pilots have seen a plane land, they'll watch another one just for the satisfaction of seeing the trajectory meet the ground. That's the only plausible excuse for watching golf. Men, besides having a primal affection for the vistas of fairways, get so much joy watching that little ball fly toward the green that they'll sit through everything else. One sight of a putt dropping in the hole makes up for long moments watching pudgy guys agonize over which club to use. I realize, of course, that this is conjecture. But it could be tested if some enterprising anthropologist showed a video of the P.G.A. championship to the men and women in one of the remaining hunter-gatherer societies. I predict that only the men would take the day off to watch. Email: [4]tierney at nytimes.com * * * For Further Reading: [5]From Bauhaus to Golf Course: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of the Art of Golf Course Architecture by Steve Sailer. The American Conservative, April 11, 2005. [6]The Natural History Of Art: Possible animal influence on human perception of art by Richard Conniff. Discover, November 1999. [7]Heroes, Rogues, and Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior by James McBride Dabbs with Mary Godwin Dabbs. McGraw-Hill, 256 pp., July 2000. [8]Aesthetics and Evolutionary Psychology by Denis Dutton. The Oxford Handbook for Aesthetics, edited by Jerrold Levinson. Oxford University Press, 2003. [9]Professional Disc Golf Association References 3. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/johntierney/index.html?inline=nyt-per&inline=nyt-per 4. mailto:tierney at nytimes.com 5. http://www.isteve.com/golf_art.htm 6. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1511/is_11_20/ai_57042527 7. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0071357394/002-3200268-7480058?v=glance 8. http://www.denisdutton.com/aesthetics_&_evolutionary_psychology.htm 9. http://www.pdga.com/ ------------- The Puzzling Lure of Golf (4 Letters) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/opinion/l23tierney.html To the Editor: Re "The Golf Gene" (column, Aug. 20): Baffled by the pursuit of a sport whose action he rates below bowling, John Tierney attributes his attitude to his own ineptitude. But skill should not be the central focus. Of the many reasons to pursue golf, high on the list is challenge. For most people, there are few activities over which we can exercise control, so conquering some of the mysteries of golf ("conquest" being in the eye of the guy who just beat his previous record) can be exhilarating. We watch the pros because we're seeking that single magical movement that will lift us from hacker to contenderhood. For most, that path remains clouded in mystery, but by our nature we tend to dismiss reality and keep on seeking - and that's not all bad. Robert Faber Ann Arbor, Mich., Aug. 20, 2005 To the Editor: As a woman who loves golf and may even be a bit obsessed by it, I have had ample opportunity to test John Tierney's theory. I play regularly on public courses with both men and women. I can attest that the women in my weekday league and the men I play with on weekends are equally fascinated by hitting targets, but neither group seems to derive any special pleasure from watching the flight of the golf ball. Most of the time, it's a painful thing to watch. But we keep coming back to play. There's the enigma. Denise Seigel Huntington, N.Y., Aug. 20, 2005 To the Editor: John Tierney did not answer the underlying question. What drives men to play golf? It's simply that unyielding quest of Sisyphus - to reach par. Robert H. Berrie Boca Raton, Fla., Aug. 20, 2005 To the Editor: It seems more logical to believe that men are greater consumers of golf than women not because they have inherited a hunter's fascination with hitting targets in the outdoors, but rather because someone else cooks their meals, washes their laundry, cleans their homes, chauffeurs and nurtures their children, supports their job advancement and on occasion says to them: "You've had a tense week. Why don't you play golf this weekend?" As I watched the end of the P.G.A. Championship with my golfer husband, I yearned for that moment when I can relax, erase my thoughts and swing the club. I looked at my calendar for a six-hour opening: fall 2015, after I drop the youngest at college. K. Louise Francis Berkeley, Calif., Aug. 20, 2005 From checker at panix.com Sat Aug 27 00:00:27 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2005 20:00:27 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] FrontPage: Symposium: Through the Eyes of a Suicide Bomber by Jamie Glazov Message-ID: Symposium: Through the Eyes of a Suicide Bomber by Jamie Glazov http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19110 et seq. August 12, 2005 The July suicide bombings in London were yet another horrifying reminder of the dreadful tactic perpetrated by Islamic jihadists in their holy war. To be sure, Israeli citizens have long known the nightmare of suicide bombing and Iraqis, unfortunately, have become acquainted with it daily. What exactly is inside the mind of the Islamic suicide bomber? What impulse motivates a human being, who supposedly believes in God, to blow himself up alongside innocent people? To discuss these and other questions with us today, Frontpage Symposium has assembled a distinguished panel. Our guests today are: Jessica Stern, an expert on terrorism, a lecturer on the subject at Harvard, and the author of [25]Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill; Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, a prison psychiatrist who has had much experience with treating Muslim patients in Britain and who has witnessed the "collision of cultures." He is the author of his new collection of essays, [26]Our Culture, What's Left of It. The Mandarins and the Masses; Dr. Nancy Kobrin, an affiliated professor to the University of Haifa, Arabist, psychoanalyst and author of the upcoming book, The Sheikh's New Clothes: Islamic Suicide Terror and What It's Really All About; and Dr. Hans-Peter Raddatz, a scholar of Islamic Studies and author of Von Allah zum Terror? Der Djihad und die Deformierung des Westens (From Allah to Terror? Jihad and the Western Deformation). FP: Jessica Stern, Dr. Tilman Nagel, Dr. Nancy Kobrin and Dr. Hans-Peter Raddatz, welcome to Frontpage Symposium. Suicide bombings are a perpetual reality in Iraq and Israel today. In Israel, we see Palestinians, often kids, blowing themselves up alongside Jewish inoccents while their parents cheer on in euphoria. In Iraq, we see foreign fighters coming from all over the Arab and Muslim world to detonate themselves amongst innocent civilians. Now they have struck in London. Lets start from square one to crystallize things. What instils the yearning to blow oneself up? Dr. Raddatz? Raddatz: If you were a molecule type of "personality" who has only one alternative of existence, namely being stripped of any individual ego and merged with the mass of the "umma", the community of Allah, you might also be tempted to look for some dynamite - or rather C4 - in order to focus your unimportant life into one single, supposedly grandiose moment. When you in addition to that are not able to distinguish spiritual from material aspects, you are in really serious trouble. In one previous symposium, Dr. Kobrin rightly mentioned the regrettable inabililty of not so too few Muslims to tell brain from mind. While they cut heads off, they think to destroy the thoughts of their victims. Similar to that they expect to meet innumerable beautiful girls in paradise since all their lives they have been told to proceed directly there as reward for the martyr death. Needless to mention that there will be unlimited erections as well as hymens renewed constantly. Some of the Palestinian suicide bombers wrap their penises into fire-proof aluminum foil to save them for the pleasures to come. Their parents get even doubly rewarded, by cash and "honor." Allah provides for an unusually profitable deal, indeed. What we are facing here is not only pre-modern but pre-cultural "thinking". The Koran and Islamic tradition set guidelines conserving a manichaean type of prevalence claim that ultimately rejects any other society alternative. While strengthening its orthodox structures worldwide, Islam keeps on lacking one very important feature which most cultures have developed and which is indispensable for diverting violence inside a group: the subliminal function of the sacrifice concept. The impossibility for the average Muslim individual to develop a thinking outside the community and for the Muslim collective to deal with power and with women without violence has prevailed until today and is even picking up again due to modernization conflicts. In this context, one has to keep in mind the Western "scientists" in sociolgy, anthropology, neuro-physiology etc. who deny the singularity of the human mind. Therefore, they have no problems with cognition Islamic style and thus explain "martyr" bombers as "emergency defence". Ultimately we are talking about politics, of course, renewing sympathies with a radical ideology quite close to the biology of Fascism. FP: Ms. Stern? Stern: There has been exponential growth in suicide attack worldwide, the most virulent form of terrorism, which accounts for less than 5 percent of all terrorist events but about 50 percent of all casualties. Many suicide attacks since1980 originated in organized campaigns to drive perceived occupiers from the attackers` homeland, and US military interventions have only exacerbated the problem. That said, most military occupations in history have not led to suicide bombing campaigns. The answer to your question - what instils the yearning to blow oneself up is dependent on many factors. I believe the reasons are likely to be a combination of political, religious, psychological, organizational, and material factors. But not all suicide-murder operations are committed by religious zealots. It used to be the case that a secular group Sri Lankas Tamil Tigers were responsible for most suicide-murder attacks. Now Islamist groups are more important. You mention two areas: Palestine and Iraq in particular. In Palestine, Hamas and the other terrorist groups use religion to justify their aspirations for political power and to recover Palestinian territory from Israeli occupation. Part of this land is sacred to Muslims but also to Jews and Christians. To achieve their ends, some of which are accepted as legitimate by much of the world, Hamas and the other terrorist groups in the region are committing atrocities against Israeli citizens and against the Palestinian people. The terrorist leaders deliberately inculcate the idea that martyrdom operations are sacred acts, worthy of both earthly and heavenly rewards. Mainstream Islamic scholars are increasingly voicing their view that suicide-bombing attacks against civilians are not acts of martyrdom but suicide and murder, both of which are forbidden by Islamic law. I believe the best way to understand the situation in Palestine is to see suicide-murder as a kind of epidemic disease. Ordinary suicide has been shown to spread through social contagion, especially among youth. Studies have shown that a teenager whose friend or relative attempts or commits suicide is more likely to attempt or commit suicide himself. Not surprisingly, ordinary suicide is more common among youths who are depressed or exposed to intense social stress. Suicide bombing is different from ordinary suicide: It entails a willingness not only to die, but also to kill others. Often, an organization takes charge of planning the suicide operation, and the terrorist may be on call for weeks or, in the case of the leaders of the September 11^th attacks, years. But there are some commonalties. The situation in Gaza suggests that suicide-murder can also be spread through social contagion, that there is some tipping point beyond which a cult of suicide-murder takes hold among youth. Once this happens, the role of the organization appears to be less critical: the bombing takes on a momentum of its own. Martyrdom operations have become part of the popular culture in Gaza and the West Bank. For example, on the streets of Gaza, children play a game called shuhada, which includes a mock funeral for a suicide bomber. Teenage rock groups praise martyrs in their songs. Asked to name their heroes, young Palestinians are likely to include suicide bombers on the list. There were more suicide attacks in Iraq in 2004 (104) than for the entire globe in any previous year of contemporary history, involving fighters from at least 15 Arab countries. And the rate of suicide attacks in Iraq in 2005 is likely to surpass that. From talking to terrorists and those who monitor them, I and others have learned that terrorism thrives in an atmosphere of humiliation, marginalization, and dashed expectations. Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, describes globalization as deeply humiliating to Muslims. That's why, he says, he encourages the youth of Islam to carry arms and defend their religion with pride and dignity rather than ignobly submit to the new world order. Perceived humiliation and religious fervor are both tools that terrorist leaders can cynically exploit to promote martyrdom. FP: Thanks Ms. Stern. To make the statement that US military interventions have only exacerbated the problem might be true on some levels, in the sense that if you confront your enemy he is going to engage in violence. But to mention U.S. intervention in the context of our discussion is to imply that it is Americas fault somewhere that a Muslim in the world gives up his college education and comfortable material existence and flocks to Iraq to blow himself up. Daniel Pipes article[27] The California Suicide Bomber is a perfect example of where a suicide bomber does not come from among the poor, the oppressed and the downtrodden. His cravings to kill himself alongside innocents stemmed from many factors other than having supposedly suffered from American imperialism. There can be all kinds of military occupations, invasions, etc. Not all people blow themselves up. Ms. Stern, you mention that mainstream Islamic scholars are increasingly voicing their view that suicide-bombing attacks against civilians are not acts of martyrdom but suicide and murder, both of which are forbidden by Islamic law. These are truly encouraging developments and we all hope they continue. But unfortunately, these Islamic scholars are pretty effective in their invisibility and in getting absolutely no respect from suicide bombers and from a large section of the Muslim world. Why is that? Why is it that the parents of Palestinian suicide bombers do not shiver in dread worrying that their dead kids are in hell -- because their clerics teach that suicide bombing is against Islamic law and will not lead you to paradise, but to ever-lasting hell-fire? How come the 9/11 hijackers werent depressed knowing they would be in hell after they would commit their crime, because their clerics and their religious texts told them this would be the case? Could it be that maybe suicide and murder might just not be all that directly in conflict with certain components of Islam law? Scholar Robert Spencers [28]Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West clearly demonstrates that Islamic jihad finds much of its basis in Islamic religious texts. Yes, there are many portions of Islamic texts that teach tolerance and peace, and we must all fight for this part of Islam to prevail and to defeat the side that Islamic extremists and terrorists refer to and manipulate. But can we, and is it wise for us, to deny that the negative and dark side exists? Terry McDermotts new book [29]Perfect Soldiers is a clear example of how the 9/11 hijackers were the last thing from impoverished and oppressed victims. For some reason, I highly doubt that if you gave a New Testament to each of those individuals and that if they experienced a religious conversion to Christianity, or if they became atheists, that they would still have longed with such fervor to leave this world though smashing planes into populated American buildings filled with thousands of innocent people. Humiliation, marginalization, and dashed expectations? Yes, those words can fit the plight of many Jews under Nazi occupation, but you didnt see them strapping bombs unto themselves and walking into caf?s and blowing themselves up. These terms also fit my Russian peoples and many of the Russian dissidents who suffered under the horror of Soviet tyranny. These dissidents included my parents and many of our friends. They were humiliated, marginalized and suffered dashed expectations. I cant name you one who walked into a caf? in Russia and blew himself up alongside innocents. It is clear that Islamist terrorists hate globalization. But they do so because it makes life on this earth even more materially comfortable. They reject earthly pleasure and happiness. The enjoyment of life represents humiliation to them. The sight of a happy free and spontaneous woman laughing, dressed as she wants to be dressed, represents humiliation to them. That is the problem. Can we really blame America for the unhappiness of those who venerate a death-cult that rejects individualism and the pursuit of happiness in earthly existence? Ms. Stern, I am by no means saying that you have argued some of these notions that I am questioning and criticizing. I am just provoking a dialogue here that I hope will help all of us crystallize some important themes relevant to this discussion. Dr. Dalrymple, tell us about your own personal experience with your patients and what it revealed about the Muslim mindset. As you answer this, please also include what we really want to narrow in on: what is inside the mind of the suicide bomber? Dalrymple: I agree that poverty and humiliation are not sufficient explanations of the phenomenon. These are things which are almost part of universal human experience. I think the problem is a combustible mixture of elements. The first is the belief that Muslims are in possession of the final revealed truth, and that they have a testament and a tradition of sayings of the Prophet that in essence answer all human questions, and by the light of which all such questions ought not only to be answered but are answerable. While no doubt there are Christians who feel more or less the same about their favoured scriptures, they now have to live in a world of competing ideas. Muslims have created societies in which it is possible, perhaps, to dispute what the Koran and hadith mean, but not their underlying authority to answer all questions. It is still not safe in a Muslim country to say 'There is no God and Mohammed was therefore not his prophet, but a man suffering from a delusion.' While in possession of transcendental religious and philosophical truth, however, it has not escaped notice that the Muslim world has fallen behind the rest of the world. Japan, China, India are fast catching up or overtaking the West: they have been able to meet the Western challenge. No Muslim country has managed more than a kind of parasitic prosperity, dependent on oil - the industry which no Muslim did anything to discover or develop. Even their wealth, then, is a reminder of the dependence. The whole of the Arab world, minus the oil, is economically less significant to the rest of the world than one Finnish telephone company. The fact that Islamic civilisation was once exquisite, and in advance of most others, is in this context a disadvantage. It means that Muslims tend to think in terms of recovery of glory, rather than anything new. In Muslim bookshops, you can find books about the scholars and scientists who led the world 600 years ago or more - who are a perfectly legitimate subject of enquiry of course - but after that there is a hiatus. If there had been no Muslims for the last 300 or 400 years, the world would have lost no technical or scientific advance. So there is both a sense of superiority and a gnawing sense of inferiority. Repeated attempts to 'catch up' within an Islamic context have failed. Moreover, there is an element of personal self-hatred as well. For all the hatred of the West, it is absolutely essential to the satisfaction of the tastes of the modern Muslims. They are all partly Westernised. Even Osama dresses half-Muslim, half-Western. His reliance of Western inventions is total. As for the attractions of the flesh-pots of the west, they need not be stressed. Then, of course, there is the day to day humiliation of individuals, who do not see a purely pragmatic way out of their impasse. I think this completes the mindset. In summary, we have: * Metaphysical superiority. * Technical and intellectual retardation. * Self-hatred caused by the impurity of their own desires. * No practical means of escape from genuine quotidian humiliations. * The promise of rewards, for their families on earth and for themselves in the other world. FP: Thank you Dr. Dalrymple. So, lets get deeper into this now. With this background and context, lets get inside the mind of a hypothetical suicide bomber. Paint a picture for us of a Muslim, let us say, that you once had in your psychiatrist office in Britain. Let us suppose that he decides to go to Iraq to blow himself up. Illustrate for us the step-by-step process that is going on in his mind, as he quits his life and heads off to Iraq. Sketch for us the thoughts patterns that lead to this decision-making. Pretend you are writing a script for a movie and we are listening to what is going on in his head as he quits school or his job, starts packing his suitcase or whatever, and is visualizing with great glee how he will detonate himself in a crowd of civilians in Baghdad. Dalrymple: Clearly, although the fundamental socio-psychological conditions I have described apply to millions - hundreds of millions - of people, only a vanishingly small proportion of them actually want to be suicide bombers, even if rather more admire and approve of suicide bombers. So what pushes someone over the edge, as it were? In my experience, which admittedly is limited, and of a selected sample, I would say the following: The suicide bomber is of above average intelligence. He, or she, is therefore searching for an explanation of his or her existential plight. (You need a certain level of intellection for this to be so.) This involves the identification of an enemy. The person who becomes a bomber often has a special, personal sense of grievance. This can derive from an intrinsic sensitivity to perceived insult, consequent upon the normal variation of human personality, or can come from outside, eg a person is humiliatingly accused of something of which he is guilty, but regards the accusation itself as lese majeste. For example, a Muslim rapist I know wanted to become a suicide bomber, having become convinced that the West was rotten to the core, deficient in moral worth, because it took the word of a mere woman against his. So to refine it further, we need all the general cultural and economic conditions, plus the personal particularities I have suggested. The act of killing oneself for a cause, in the process taking a few 'enemies' with one, is an apologia pro vita sua. Let us not forget that we in the West have a long and inglorious, irrational tradition of supposing that the lengths to which people are prepared to go in the furtherance of a cause is itself evidence of the moral worth of that cause. The kind of would-be suicide bomber I have known thinks to himself: They have accused me of what I have done. What I have done is no crime. Therefore those who accuse me are the corrupt of the earth. Those who accuse me are truly representative of the society from which they come. The destruction of the corrupt of the earth will be rewarded appropriately. Therefore it matters not which individuals I destroy. The belief is therefore not in representative government, but in representative guilt. FP: Thank you Dr. Dalrymple. This is fascinating and frightening stuff. Dr. Kobrin? Kobrin: Yes Jamie, it is perversely fascinating and downright terrifying. It is also part of the Eros of the terrorism. Dr. Dalrymple has succinctly described the crux of the problem that the other is always already guilty and hence expendable. Similarly Dr. Raddatz is correct in fore grounding the Ummah. Just as the child in Arab Muslim culture is not permitted to separate from the Umm [Ar. mother], this enmeshment gets repeated and reinforced by the Ummah as a singularly fused group. There are working groups which strive for the betterment of life and then, there are regressed destructive groups. The Islamic terrorist organizations are among the most destructive because they send their own to be killed off using women and children under the guise of martyrdom while attacking and murdering the innocent. Just because this is done consciously as a tactical tool does not mean there doesnt exist a vicious psychological undercurrent. When there is no sense of self, this leads to many problems. If you are denied a life and live in a community where power [meaning absolute control of the other] is the rule of thumb and it is enforced brutally through honor killings, child beating, sexual abuse, beheadings etc., fear and terror are pervasive. The need to hate and the need to have an enemy are in place by age 3 and the Jew is among the most hated of all. I will return to this in a moment. It is precisely because of the terror that few factor in the ramifications of shame-based child rearing practices because the implications are enormous and the ability to do effective interventions are highly compromised. What winds up happening, in a nutshell, is that the mother who has been so pervasively and insidiously traumatized struggles to give the child what s/he needs. Its not that the mother doesnt want to and I dont mean to minimize the role of the father either but it is here that the problem of splitting the world irrationally into loving vs. hating begins without being able to develop the cognitive piece to bridge between the two extremes. There are many adults who may appear to be high functioning but the splitting is there below the surface in their minds and they still struggle to be free from their terrors of abandonment and rejection, feeling humiliated and shamed by this impotent inability. So that when the terrorists and the Ummah scream in a deafening voice we have been shamed and humiliated! it might be worth the while to ask how did they themselves participate in creating a collective self which is so easily shamed by others? If a person has a realistic sense of self, it is hard to buy into being shamed as an adult. There is the Arabic saying: He hits me and cries, and races me to complain. Dr. Stern raises the subject of the Tamil Tigers. Yes, counter terrorism studies have repeatedly defined them as a secular nationalist ethno-separatist organization. However, the experts forget that it is the first three years of life when the cultural-religio ideologies are absorbed like a sponge ingrained into the personality. In Hindu culture as in Arab Muslim culture, the child is not supposed to separate from the mother. Prabhakaran, the charismatic leader of the LTTE, claims that religion is a non-issue and ironically vowed never to marry, yet did so in a Hindu ceremony. What is the importance of this? It shows that the process of identify formation is much more nuanced and complicated than we like to admit. It is a reminder that there is no purity of identity. Indeed the LTTE on the one hand threw out their Muslim Tamil-speaking members in the early 1990s and yet on the other, there are reports that they are recruiting people of mixed parentage Tamil-Muslim and Hindu-Catholic from the south (personal communication, A. Gunawardena) When I was in Sri Lanka in March, I wondered about this history and the growing local Arab Muslim community. This added dimension of religious identity is thrown into this mix. For example, Muslims refer to Hindus as najus meaning filthy because they are polytheists. This is its socially sanctioned prejudiced attitude. Then there are the Jews and Christians as Dr. Stern points out with the land of Israel being sacred to all three. But in the minds eye of the Muslim, Judaism and Christianity and their believers are subjugated to Islam as Dhimma. The root of the word means to blame so that the Prophet Muhammad built into the religion an institutionalized ideology where you can always blame the other and never have to assume responsibility for your own communitys predicament. This is to say nothing of the ideology of submission only to Allah and never to a non-Muslim so that any occupation stings deeply. You know, Musa (Moses) is the most frequently mentioned prophet in the Quran. Why? Because of the giving of the law at Sinai Moses makes divine will manifest in human discourse in the Torah. However, to be a believer requires a leap of faith. The Christians had to appropriate the giving of the law and then added to it with the New Testament. The Prophet Muhammad was faced with a much more difficult task since he had to juggle two preceding religious identities. Muhammad initially borrowed extensively from the Jews who at that time lived in what is now Judenrein Saudi Arabia. He borrowed with the hopes that the Jews would convert. When that didnt happen, he became enraged and more deeply engaged in Jihad and Dawa [the call to convert]. However, this still left him and his followers with the problem of their mixed heritage, that is their Judaic and Christian roots. The Ummah struggles to admit to this borrowing. It is very difficult to do so when the Jew and Israel are always at the eye of the storm. Muslims seek to cancel out their Judaic roots and the Islamic terrorists seek to kill them off rather than accepting the fact that Judaism and Islam are so similar up to a point. The unacknowledged terror is the fear of losing their identity in the other. Think: enmeshment. Jihad is unique to Islam Judaism and Christianity have nothing remotely similar. People routinely fail to remember that the Muslims invaded Spain fi sabil Allah [fighting] in the path of Allah in 711 AD. They came on Jihad. The Crusades were a response to massacre, forced conversions to Islam, Muslim invasion, conquest and the animosity for the Prophet co-opting the New Testament by the Quran. So the Islamic terrorists attempt to resolve their religious identity confusion by brute force, using suicide bombers as a tactical tool with this psychological undercurrent. By the way, the Sira (the biography of Muhammad) records that the prophet attempted suicide twice; though this has rarely been pointed out as a modeling moment for Muslim identity. (personal communication, R. Paz) Thus, it is not merely that the ideologies per se are exacerbating the violence but it is the way in which they function and are deployed by their practitioners. I agree with Dr. Dalrymple that poverty and humiliation are not sufficient explanations rather that there is a fear of recognizing that their identity is mixed not pure. They are uncomfortable with the impurity of their own desires which are accompanied by violent fantasies that get acted out in real time on innocent victims. Just like BTK, the serial killer, their external life is a mask of sanity but their internal life is a mess of psychosexual violent fantasies. But surely it cant be that hard to comprehend what kind of mind the suicide bomber must have, given the fact that s/he is part and parcel of the Umma, born and raised by the Umm. The vast majority of whom venerate Ayman al-Zawahiri who ordered the execution by firing squad of the 15 year old son of one of his closest confidants in the presence of the father and other colleagues. (Montasser al-Zayyat, The Road to Al-Qaeda, p.105) This mind is merely a reflection of the crisis within Islam. [E. Sivan, Hitnagshut btokh ha-Islam [The Crash Within Islam in Hebrew]. The crisis has been projected on to the West. Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Soviet Studies. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitzs new book [31]Left Illusions. He is also the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of the new book [32]The Hate America Left and the author of [33]Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchevs Soviet Union (McGill-Queens University Press, 2002) and [34]15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist. To see his previous symposiums, interviews and articles [35]Click Here. Email him at [36]jglazov at rogers.com. References 25. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/006050532X/qid=1123832248/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-7311062-5729652?v=glance&s=books 26. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1566636434/qid=1123832389/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-7311062-5729652?v=glance&s=books 27. http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17602 28. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0895261006/ref=ase_robertspencer-20/103-1603172-8127010?v=glance&s=books 29. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060584696/qid=1123833997/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/002-7311062-5729652 30. http://www.frontpagemag.com/articles/readarticle.asp?ID=19111&p=1 31. https://www.donationreport.com/init/controller/ProcessEntryCmd?key=D8Q0U3W0R8 32. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=6317 33. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=6158 34. https://www.donationreport.com/init/controller/ProcessEntryCmd?key=C1P3Y2N7P9 35. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/authors.asp?ID=3 36. mailto:jglazov at rogers.com -------------------- Through the Eyes of a Suicide Bomber: Continued by Jamie Glazov http://www.frontpagemag.com/articles/readarticle.asp?ID=19111&p=1 FP: Thank you Dr. Kobrin. One very powerful and clear dynamic here is the guilt these extremists feel for their own sexual desires, which have been demonized in their religion and culture, and now they seek the cleanse themselves of this guilt through hating the object of their lust (freedom in the West) and then ridding themselves of their dirty flesh (suicide) in an attempt to redeem themselves. Dr. Raddatz, could you kindly expand a bit and succinctly crystallize for us the meaning of: [1] having no sense of self. [2] shame-based child rearing practices. [3] splitting the world irrationally into loving vs. hating. And kindly comment how and why this pathology leads to scapegoating the Jew and hating him most of all. Also, why and how does suicide bombing become a rational and legitimate course of action within this pathological dynamic? And kindly comment on Dr. Kobrins point that the Sira records that the prophet attempted suicide twice. This is not a very well known fact. Could you integrate these phenomena for us? Raddatz: Quite an ambitious request as it goes right at the core of the whole question. The way we look at the problem of Islamic violence has a lot to do with our kind of fancy differentiating. I am far away from criticizing Ms. Stern, but when we stress that there are imams condemning suicide bombings we simply tranquilize ourselves with time-consuming platitudes. Firstly, as FP has pointed out, those imams do not play any mentionable role in Muslim politics. Secondly, they are part of what is referred to as "taqiya", the Islamic duty to systematically lie to non-Muslims, and thirdly the real heavyweights in the imam business, like Muhammad Tantawi and Yusuf Quaradhawi, make no bones about suicide terrorists belonging to the most valuable form of existence Allah has ever had the grace to create. As Tantawi pointed out, inside this privileged species there is even another inbuilt peak version: If you kill as many Jewish women and children your paradise guarantee is even more guaranteed, so to speak. What we have here is the usual - admittedly gruesome - ideology constructed by elites to manipulate people. By the same time we arrive at the first point FP wants me to elaborate on - the so-called self. Although many profit takers in the current science scene want to discuss it away, it is still there. It is still a generally accepted interpretation that the "self" is the somewhat paradoxical faculty to observe oneself observing oneself. In other words, the interaction between ego and self constitutes the personality that is able to separate - at least hypothetically - from its own role and judge it in a greater context. If it is, however, only thinkable as part of a mass, the "ummah" or any other politico-religious "movement", there will be little individual distance from any controversial question. Correspondingly, these "individuals" will be convinced more by material than by theoretical arguments. Thus, they will be rather "pre-destined" i.e. commanded by "holy books" and/or leaders who decide for the people and represent a collective self. What we have to keep in mind is this: Due to the still intact survival instinct only a small Muslim minority wants to blow itself and others up, but a large majority agrees to the Islamic justification of destroying non-Islamic situations. As a direct consequence we are faced with the "shame/honor" mechanism. Typical for totalitarian systems altogether. As being "oneself" is an aberration, it is a shame to insist on it and a corresponding honor to renounce it and denounce others if they do not follow this rule. "Ego-extinction" (Arabic: tadjarrud) is an official, high-ranking mental exercise to get rid of individual temptations. Among the "normal" Muslims you will find very few who allow themselves an independent, outspoken opinion outside the official Islam mainstream. Whoever has lived for a longer period of time in Islamic countries - like myself - very probably has experienced that there is a lot of distrust and tactical behaviour within the closest family relations. He or she who violates the rules or just makes simply a wrong decision, does bring shame over the family, over the tribe and - ultimately - Islam. Here we have the very reason why inventions are simply unknown, everyday things always delayed and almost only able to be accelerated by corruption. In this context I think Ms. Kobrin's concept of "umm" and "ummah" - mother and community - is very worthwhile pursuing. It will probably explain why we will eternalize our problems with Islam if we do not realize that the groundwork is being laid during earliest childhood. The forgoing absence of an intellectual distance to questions concerning Islam calls for Manichaean behaviour and language as well as readiness to exert violence. Therefore, the Western "dialogue" with Muslims has shied away from compromises let alone contradiction so far. Every major Muslim demand, especially the conservation of pressurizing women and the death threat to dissidents and converts, has been accepted and thereby added to the love/hate split thinking also in the Western migration scenario. This is what I meant by "fancy differentiating". It is our own political or rather "Islamic correctness" that has developed very hard codes of thinking and behaviour itself. Meanwhile we have a mandatory line of argumentation in Europe that depicts Islam as a problem-free phenomenon which has to be imported unchanged and kept as unintegrated as possible. The second highest constitution judge in Germany spreads the semi-official rule that Islam must not be forced to answer questions critical to the "religion". Thus, we should not be too astonished at the Western process - at least in some major European countries like England, Germany and France - of a distinct approach and assimilation to Islamic rules and regulations. It is accompanied by long-term aspects which are clearly meta-historical and out of direct political reach, namely a growing hostility against women, combined with an equally growing "understanding" for homosexual and paedophiliac interests, as well as renewed anti-Semitism. The latter is not restricted to Muslims but being emancipated again in Europe nowadays. It is an old phenomenon as the repeated attempt to "overcome" traditional society patterns, particularly connected to the Jews as "inventors" of the first law as such in the development of mankind. We have heard that Moses is mentioned frequently in the Koran, and I may add the well known fact that anti-Semitism goes historically along with periods of distinct power concentrations. So it is probably the decline of Western individuality, along with with the media info explosion, curtailing the collective memory, which promotes radical ideologies like Islam with all strings attached - growing sympathy for organized crime, violence and women's repression, anti-hetero sexual "theories" and other post-modern achievements. To blame the US is a favourite game in Europe, but does not grasp the overall picture at all. As for Muhammads biography (sira), the scholars are not very certain about the double suicide thing, as they are very shy about him altogether. We are faced with another psychological question here waiting for discussion and clarification. It has a lot to do with Muhammeds wildly changing mental states and obviously deeply rooted, rather psychotic situations, reported by his companions. As the Koran waits for a historical analysis, Muhammad waits to be laid on the couch. I call him the "burning glass" of Islam, meaning the representation of a world moving power in the nutshell of a personal but highly abstract lifetime. It is the combination of radical exclusiveness with the "leader's will" that justifies any violence and gives suicide bombers the illusion of individuality - a sense of life by dying. FP: Thank you Dr. Raddatz. While it is crucial that you bring up the reality of "taqiya" and that we must not be na?ve when confronting it, I think at the same time we must stress that there are many Muslims and Muslim clerics who are sincere in their belief in a peaceful Islam and are honest in their denunciation of terror. I think it would be fair to say that Sheikh Prof. Abdul Hadi Palazzi, Director of the Cultural Institute of the Italian Islamic Community, is one of them. In any case, Ms. Stern? Stern: Well, I agree with both you and Dr. Raddatz -- there are Muslim clerics who condemn suicide murder- as we have seen in the week following the London attacks. And yet we should not assume naively that the clerics who support suicide murder are unimportant in this war. We are all struggling with the question of why terrorists do what they do, and how their situations differ from those who are not terrorists. One problem we face is that we don't have enough interviews of radicals who said no to terrorist recruiters -- so it's hard for us to assess what qualities distinguishes those who say "yes" from those who say "no." The notion that poverty causes terrorism has been disproven again and again, as the other participants have pointed out. But terrorists I have interviewed tend to emphasize humiliation and confused identity in their answer to the question -- why do you do what you do? Sometimes it also seems to be a kind of vicarious humiliation - the notion that my people are humiliated so therefore I must act to avenge their pain. Still, as our other contributors have made clear, most people feel confused about their identities at some point in their lives, and most people feel humiliated. I think of my university, Harvard, as a humiliation factory - everyone feels humiliated, except, perhaps, the president. And yet we don't see a lot of terrorists emerging from Cambridge. Not yet, anyway. So if humiliation is important, it is certainly not sufficient. Could it be that the shame-based child-rearing practices and splitting the world into good and evil are important additional ingredients, as you suggest? I think that Dr. Raddatz is absolutely correct in emphasizing Manichean world views. I have the feeling that honor and shame are also critical here, but at this point it's just a feeling - I haven't been able to do the interviews that would allow me to assess your hypothesis. I brought up the question of military occupation only because it is described as the most important factor in a recent book, Robert Pape's Dying to Win. But I see terrorism as much more complex than this - it is not just a response to military occupation. Most military occupations have not resulted in terrorism, and much of the terrorism we worry about most today is not a response to military occupation. FP: Dr. Dalrymple? Dalrymple: I think the question of 'military occupation,' in light of the London bombings, must be viewed as at best an ostensible justification rather than a real reason for Islamic terrorism, at least outside Israel and Palestine. I was very interested to see that one of the people involved in the bombings was not only a believer, but a devotee of Elvis Presley. Now these things seem to me to be highly contradictory. I think it is difficult to find any interpretation of Islam that is reconcilable with an admiration for Elvis Presley, who is surely symbolic of all the decadence of the west that Muslims (not entirely mistakenly, I must confess) see. Elvis Presley represents the triumph of sexual desire over all restraints; nothing could be further from the spirit of Islam, at least in its sublunary phase. For these two things to exist in the same human breast creates a terrible and guilty conflict. (Another bomber loved cricket - the quintessentially English game.) Let us not forget that it is possible to be a terrorist - to kill people at random - without any wish or vocation to die oneself. It is true that a terrorist who kills himself while killing others is even more terrifying, since it is difficult to conceive of anything that might deter him, but overall the terrorist who lives to kill another day may be more effective in the pursuit of any definite end. The point is: i) that the Islamic terrorists, at least of the London bomber kind, have no specific demands to make ii) they are clearly trying to resolve some conflict within themselves. I think they are trying to prove to themselves that the west offers them no temptations, that they are actually more Islamic than the Prophet, though at the same time a still small voice tells them that this is not so. Death is a solution, it squares a circle. FP: Dr. Kobrin? Kobrin: First I want to extend my heartfelt condolences to Dr. Dalrymple on account of seven/seven. As someone who has been so involved in trying to understand the mind of the Islamic terrorist, I can only imagine how difficult these days have been. Now, there is no question that the entire Islamic terrorist organization and its members who are manufacturing suicide bombers like Al Qaeda lack a balanced, nuanced sense of self. The tragedy is that they and their Ummah have come up with a feeble justification of military occupation to excuse their aberrant behavior. Then there are the scholars of Academe who should know better and who should be more insightful but aren't. They willingly take the bait hook, line and sinker which only further compounds the matter, thereby putting more innocent people at risk of being murdered. They vicariously murder and are therefore, accomplices. This is not so passive aggressive behavior. All the ideologies of Islam especially tadjarrud and taqiyah which Dr. Raddatz explains, must be explored from not just a psychological point of view as to the meaning that they express but also how their practice impacts children in light of early childhood development. Here in lies the crux of the problem. The neighbors, friends and family who say that they never dreamt that so-and-so suicide bomber could do something like that or that he/she was a radical Islamist terrorist, remind me of the shocked family members and neighbors of serial killers. It is routinely understood in the field of mental health that a person can appear normal but mask violent fantasies and act them out in real time, murdering innocent victims. This is not rocket science. Dr. Raddatzs image of the Prophet Muhammad as the burning glass of Islam resonates with the intense charisma that he continues to hold for his followers. The sense of deprivation in the narratives of the Quran (cf. J. Lachkar.1983 The Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Psychoanalytic Perspective. Unpublished PhD thesis. Los Angeles: International University.), Sunna, Ahadith and Sira is huge and very attractive to many of the followers who carry within themselves their own deprivation. Deprivation should not be confused with poverty. Those hijackers of 9/11 and the suicide bombers who were well educated and came from middle to upper middle class families had their own sense of emotional deprivation, rejection and abandonment which went undetected and which was accompanied by profound rage leading to violence and cold blooded murder. Dr. Dalrymple points to the severe conflict within and an inability to reconcile and tolerate difference. He raises the important issue that you can be a terrorist and murder without committing suicide. However, the combination together is extremely terrifying because the dirty little secret is they do not want to die alone. No one probably does . . . but we dont go around taking out innocent people by murder in order to square the circle. It should not be forgotten too, that the Prophet Muhammad died with his head in the lap of his favorite wife Aisha whose name happens to mean life. Furthermore, he was buried in her room where she continued to live, earning her keep from the alms she received from pilgrims who visited the site. Think: Womb to Tomb. The image venerates a permanent fusion signaling that the ideal is never to separate. And by the way, whats with this favorite wife business? Polygamy is nothing more than a clever way to pit one wife against the other and never have to deal with male rage. Plus if you dont like what your wife says, you can merely blow her off and go on to the next so that you never have to learn how to resolve conflict. That would make learning how to negotiate a peace quite difficult dont you think? Thats why, if we are going to discuss the military occupation, it needs to be understood in light of Islamic history and its ideologies rather than taking it at face value. The ideology of submission, i.e. Islam, would make it very difficult for male Muslims to tolerate any other position than conqueror but certainly not that of the conquered. FP: Dr. Raddatz? Feel to comment on what has been said in the previous round, but let's also move on to the recent suicide bombers of 7/7 in London. In terms of what we have learned, up till now, of who they were, what do their pathologies and crimes bring to this discussion? Raddatz: As Ms. Stern rightly pointed out, our subject gets more complicated the more insight we gain, be it psychological, political, social and what have you. Islam appears as a comprehensive spectrum that contains and encourages all sorts of behaviour but clearly favours deceit and violence as far as the achievement of goals is concerned, especially in "competition" with non-Islam. I also agree that "humiliation" is one of the key words in the affair since the Western superiority in productivity and education is clearly staggering. Aside from this: Whatever negative happens it is somebody else's guilt anyhow. We have to consider again that the Islamic self is usually understood as part of a greater mass or "movement". Thus, the destruction of something un-Islamic may imply also self-destruction in order to get noticed at all. Insofar as Dr. Dalrymple's remark of the London terrorist being a Presley fan confirms the compatibility of both in the mass aspect. In other words, watching the behaviour of rock festival participants can be quite revealing if you search for signs for mass movements in the Western civilization. Moreover, it is amazing how parallel things seem to develop as far as "humiliation" at Harvard and European universities goes. It is a favourite term over here as well and exemplifies a fast spreading educational elitarianism that in turn fraternizes with the Islamic elites and purifies Islam from any violence reproach: The Islam is not the problem" and "violence is not the Islam". There should be consent not only on the spectral character of the Islamic culture but also the corresponding special kind of freedom it creates. As the Koran and tradition offer a wide variety of measures between peace and war, Muslim power has always preferred the violent side and, therefore, has brought about a historically grown phenomenon which I call "counter-ethics". This means to say that the special Muslim freedom created a similarly special inclination to violence wherever an opportunity arises to gain an advantage - inside and outside of Islam. We should note here some very important examples I have mentioned partially in a previous round. They confirm the power of man and a rather free interpretation of what is referred to as "religion" but is merely naked and mostly quite primitive power politics. Firstly, Jews and Christians have been historically extinguished although there are Koranic regulations to the opposite. Secondly, women have been historically humiliated, beaten, raped and killed although there are Koranic rules and many traditions to the opposite. Thirdly, dissenters and apostates are badly beaten and often killed although there are clear rules saying that their punisment should be postponed into the beyond. So we should not be very astonished if we are repeatedly confronted with "honor" murderers, suicide bombers and other Islamic geared perpetrators as long as our "elites" tell us that "Islam is not the problem". In my new book coming out next month ("Allahs Women - Djihad between Sharia and Denocracy") I describe - among other subjects - exactly this self-legitimizing violence which does not need a "self" but simply asks for and lives on "individuals" serving indoctrination purposes. In London, terrorists were at work who grew up in the Western environment, obviously without assuming any individualizing element of this civilization. They confirm the complete failure of "integration" and, moreover, Dr. Kobrin's impressive formula of "womb to tomb". The "divinely" granted freedom to kill secures Allahs community and simultaneously the only form of "individuality" possible in Islam. We know that "not all" followers of Islam are violent but its spectral structure and growing populations will provide for vast supply in the future. However our politicians may twist the matter, as long as they are unable and/or unprepared to face these Islamic realities they will not only violate their responsibility towards the non-Muslim majority - they will encourage further bombings and "honor" killings as well as the risks of greater conflicts. In this context we should not forget either the growing pressure coming from the Islamic investor side which plays a fast rising role in the global portfolio management and state financing game, thereby adding to corruption and political paralyzation. The major players in Jeddah, Riadh and elsewhere are often identical with those who finance Al-Qa'ida, PLO, Hamas and so on. FP: Ms. Stern, your comment on the Pakistani suicide bombers in London? And, by the way, this conversation is getting me very depressed. Is there any hope is combating this enemy? From this discussion, it seems hopeless. Can you please offer some optimism how we might prevail over this death-cult and threat to our freedom, safety and overall way of life? Stern: Well there are reasons to feel hopeful. First, the Muslim community in London reacted very swiftly to condemn the attacks on the public transportation system there, something we did not see enough of after 9 11. Second, I think law enforcement and intelligence officials have a better understanding of the "enemy" than they did immediately after 9/11. There is growing recognition that obliterating the threat is not possible, that penetration of terrorist organizations is often a better approach than capturing or killing operatives, and the level of cooperation among and between law enforcement and intelligence agencies continues to expand. It is also important to remember that terrorism tends to run in fads -- Islamist terrorism will not be with us forever, although, admittedly, it is likely to replaced by other "brands..". Alas, risk is part of life -- and terrorism is unlikely to go away. All this suggests that the most important thing we can do as individuals is to make sure we are loving our family as friends as well as we can: every day is precious. FP: Dr. Dalrymple, do you have some words of optimism and hope? Dalrymple: The London bombings may have caused at long last people to examine their fatuous multiculturalist pieties, which I believe are fundamentally derived from the restaurant model: today we eat Hungarian, tomorrow Mexican, the day after Lebanese, and so forth. Clearly, this is possible and very enjoyable, but there are more important and deeper things in life than a variety of cuisines. Perhaps people will begin to see that some values are simply not compatible with others, and will now be prepared to stand up for those that we believe in. Certainly I hope people will start to examine the abominable abuse of women that, if not universal, is very widespread in the Moslem population, and that is a large part - I believe - of the attraction of Islam to increasingly and essentially secularised men. (Interestingly, a recent article in Le Monde about French converts to Islam gave the statistic that 83 per cent were men -and I suspect that the 17 per cent of women were in response to love affairs, though I don't know this to be the case. This is eloquent testimony.) In Britain, if we had the courage to defend Moslem women, I think Islam would lose a lot of it residual attraction. Unfortunately, the Prime Minister's wife went into court shortly before the last election to defend a Moslem schoolgirl's right to wear 'traditional' costume - not traditional in Luton, by the way - I suspect to obtain the Moslem vote for her husband, and probably knowing, and certainly with the duty to know, the often abominable social meaning of this costume. Let us hope the recent events have taught the Prime Minister the folly - no, the sheer wickedness - of this. FP: Dr. Kobrin, last word goes to you. Kobrin: It might be helpful to consider that when we find ourselves feeling hopeless and helpless about terrorism that these feelings are really not ours but rather those of the terrorists denied, split-off and quite literally inflicted on us. I agree with Dr. Stern that the counter terrorist experts, law enforcement and the military are broadening and deepening their thinking which will help facilitate more effective strategies. Its interesting too that Dr. Stern characterizes terrorism as a fad. Psychologically fads express imitative behavior. This links back to a point which Dr. Raddatz made of singular importance the lack of a self. The terrorist persona is as if it had one when it doesnt. I find it ironic that identity theft is a frequently occurring crime which sponsors terrorism because the term itself exposes not only the terrorists problem of identity but more importantly that the terrorist actually must steal from another in order to bolster this tragically fragile sense of self. In the expression identity theft we have a good example of the transparency of the terrorists and their concrete, imitative behavior about which they themselves remain clueless. Unfortunately, it comes with a significant price tag for us and I agree with Dr. Raddatz we should be very concerned about the push to expand investment and banking. Dr. Dalrymples restaurant model is valuable in understanding the disastrous effect of such superficiality nor could I agree more about why there are so many European secularized male converts to Islam. Coming on the heels of the initial London bombings, we now have Egypts Sharm El-Sheikhs tragedy. Unfortunately, things will probably have to hit rock bottom in a series of Muslim countries before the Ummah really takes on the problem of Islamic suicide terrorism which is of its own making. For us, several things might be important to keep in mind as we learn to counter terrorism in our daily life that perseverance and endurance are needed over the long haul, being prudent rather than hyper vigilant, remaining skeptical rather than cynical when possibly encountering the Islamic demeanor of deception. We should also enjoy life not because the terrorists are envious that we can and they cant but because it is part and parcel of loving our family and friends and caring about others. Countering terrorism entails knowing not only ourselves well including our deepest fears but now more than ever we must know the terrorists terrors their deepest and darkest -- in order to be effective in containing the violence. FP: Jessica Stern, Dr. Tilman Nagel, Dr. Nancy Kobrin and Dr. Hans-Peter Raddatz, thank you for joining Frontpage Symposium. Well see you again soon. Previous Symposiums: [25]Iraq: A Report Card, Jeffrey White, Turi Munthe, Karl Zinsmeister, Steven Vincent, Cliff May and Jacob Helibrunn. [26]Russia's Darkness at Noon, Richard Pipes, Fredo Arias-King, Yuri Yarim-Agaev, Dick Morris and Ramsey Flynn. [27]Muslims in France: A Ticking Time Bomb? Mohamed Ibn Guadi, Soner Cagaptay, Laurent Murawiec and Reza Bayegan. [28]Murdering Women For Honor, Dr. Gudrun Eussner, Dr. Nancy Kobrin, Dr. Hans-Peter Raddatz and Seyran Ates. ______________________________________________________________________ Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Soviet Studies. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitzs new book [29]Left Illusions. He is also the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of the new book [30]The Hate America Left and the author of [31]Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchevs Soviet Union (McGill-Queens University Press, 2002) and [32]15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist. To see his previous symposiums, interviews and articles [33]Click Here. Email him at [34]jglazov at rogers.com. References 25. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19031 26. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=18782 27. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=18631 28. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=18370 29. https://www.donationreport.com/init/controller/ProcessEntryCmd?key=D8Q0U3W0R8 30. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=6317 31. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=6158 32. https://www.donationreport.com/init/controller/ProcessEntryCmd?key=C1P3Y2N7P9 33. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/authors.asp?ID=3 34. mailto:jglazov at rogers.com From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 28 00:14:32 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 27 Aug 2005 20:14:32 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Independent: Designer babies may be an option in massive fertility law shake-up Message-ID: Designer babies may be an option in massive fertility law shake-up http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/article306435.ece The biggest shake-up of Britain's fertility laws for 15 years could usher in an era when couples may be able to choose the sex and possibly the genes of their "designer" babies. The Government highlighted more than 70 fertility issues yesterday that are to be totally reappraised in its proposed update of the 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act - a law formulated after the Warnock Report of 1985. For the first time, ministers are contemplating the possibility of allowing scientists to alter the genes of future generations as part of a reappraisal of the blanket ban on altering the genetic structure of embryos. The public consultation document published by the Department of Health also raises the possibility of allowing research on human embryos such as the creation of animal-human "chimeric" embryos. Ministers also want the public to submit its views on whether couples should be able to use embryo-screening or sperm-sorting techniques to choose the sex of their unborn babies. Although the document emphasises that it is not the Government's intention to rewrite the existing fertility laws wholesale, the aim is to allow the law to keep pace with a fast-moving field of medical science. Caroline Flint, the public health minister, said that the 1990 Fertility Act governing in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) technology was a landmark piece of legislation but, in the past 15 years, the science had changed along with public attitudes. "The Act has done a good job in taking public confidence with it but we need to take stock. We need to strike the right balance," Ms Flint said. "We never expected that the Act would remain forever unchanged in the face of major developments in science and medicine," she said. The existing law bans the alteration of the genetic structure of any cell that is part of a human embryo but the Government wants to test public opinion to see whether it could be allowed for research purposes. It also points out it may soon be possible to repair genetic defects in embryos, sperm or eggs by genetic modification and, if that can be done safely, then it could lead to the curing of genetic disorders in subsequent generations of a family. While the consultation document emphasises that is not yet possible, and the existing ban should be retained, it suggests future legislation might be framed so any ban could be relaxed. "We invite views as to whether the legislation should include a power for Parliament to relax this ban through regulations (rather than primary legislation) if assured of safety and efficacy," it says. Some fertility centres already screen IVF embryos for serious genetic disorders using a technique called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), so only those embryos shown to be free of certain condition are implanted into the womb. However, the advent of PGD allows embryos to be screened for other purposes, perhaps for even for ensuring that a genetic defect is deliberately screened in rather than screened out. So a deaf couple for instance could, in theory, select to have a deaf child. The Government is asking whether selecting for certain defects - which is banned - should be allowed. Embryos could also be screened for gender, allowing couples to select the sex of their baby to "balance" a family of all boys or all girls. "The Government seeks views on sex selection for non-medical reasons. In particular, should this be banned? Or should people be allowed to use sex selection techniques for family balancing purposes?" the consultation document says. "If so, how many children of one gender should a couple already have before being allowed to use sex selection techniques to try for a child of the other gender?" it asks. Under the existing law, no fertility centre in Britain can offer IVF treatment to a couple unless it takes into account the welfare of the child born as a result of the treatment, including the need for a father. The consultation document asks whether it is still valid for the state to intervene in such a way. "Some have argued that, as the law does not intervene in the reproductive choices of people who are able to conceive naturally, it is therefore discriminatory to intervene where people happen to have fertility problems," the document says. Lord Winston, the fertility expert dismissed the public consultation as a flawed process yesterday. "I welcome the reopening of the debate on sex selection but the Government ought to be highly embarrassed about gauging public opinion through website consultations when their own research shows this is a deeply flawed process," Lord Winston said. People who want to respond to the consultation have until 25 November. They can respond by e-mail to review-hfe-act@ dh.gsi.gov.uk or to Christopher Cox, Department of Health, Room 651c, Skipton House, 80 London Road, London SE1 6LH 5 key issues that will come under scrutiny Selection of child's sex Existing fertility law prohibits the selection of an IVF embryo's gender unless it is for medical reasons, for instance to avoid the birth of a boy with haemophilia. A public consultation three years ago found there was strong opposition to sex selection for non-medical reasons but the Government would like to revisit the issue and has asked whether it should be allowed. Altering embryo genes There is an absolute ban on altering the genetic structure of any cell while it is still part of a human embryo - which is defined as an egg that has been fertilised by a sperm. The Government is asking whether research should be permitted to allow genetic modification for research in order to see whether it is possible to safely prevent the transmission of harmful genes, or even repair gene defects. The role of the father The 1990 Act specifically states that the welfare of the IVF child should be taken into account and that this should include "the need of the child for a father". Some argue this is inappropriate - there is no mention in the Act for instance of the need for a mother. The Government is asking whether the state should continue to demand this or whether references to fathers should be dropped completely. Sperm on the internet Sperm and eggs donated through a fertility clinic are currently controlled by existing legislation but sperm sold over the Internet falls outside the current scope of the law. The Government argues that there are concerns about the health of such sperm and the legal status of the donors. The Government wants to bring internet sperm services under the law, either by banning them altogether or regulating them. Artificial gametes Scientists are working on the possibility of creating gametes - sperm and egg cells - from other "somatic" cells of the body, such as skin tissue. This would be of benefit to infertile men and women. But it also raises the possibility of two women (or men) producing both sperm and eggs to produce their own biological child. The Government wants to ban the use of artificial gametes. From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 28 00:14:54 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 27 Aug 2005 20:14:54 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Guardian: Daisy has all the digital answers to life on Earth Message-ID: Daisy has all the digital answers to life on Earth http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1552060,00.html Scientists have unveiled plans to create a digital library of all life on Earth. They say that the Digital Automated Identification System (Daisy), which harnesses the latest advances in artificial intelligence and computer vision, will have an enormous impact on research into biodiversity and evolution. Daisy will also give Britain's army of amateur naturalists unprecedented access to the world's taxonomic expertise: send Daisy a camera-phone picture of a plant or animal and, within seconds, you will get detailed information about what you are looking at. Norman MacLeod, the Natural History Museum's keeper of palaeontology, has spent several years developing the new technology. He said that Daisy will make the identification of plants and animals more objective and directly comparable. "Right now, taxonomy is as much of an art form as it is a science," Prof MacLeod said. He will present his vision for Daisy to an international meeting of taxonomists at the museum today. Taxonomists normally identify specimens through a painstaking process in which the features of an unknown plant or animal are compared with identified specimens in the museum's collections. If it is sufficiently different, the unknown specimen is confirmed as a new species. However, there is plenty of room for error - the museum's collection might be incomplete or the person making the identification could make a mistake. If scientists did not have to make routine identifications and teach others how to do it, argues Prof MacLeod, they could get on with the business of learning more about biodiversity and evolution. "Say you saw a butterfly, you might take a digital image of it, connect up to the world wide web and access a Daisy internet portal," said Prof MacLeod. "The portal would accept the picture and farm it out to the servers in individual institutions, such as the Natural History Museum." Using pattern-recognition software, Daisy would try to match the picture with images in its archives. "The portal would route the answer back as a web page that had the confidence level of the identification and the institution that made the identification," said Prof MacLeod. Daisy can also identify sounds and scans of DNA barcodes. For something so useful, it is perhaps a surprise that no one has thought of such a system before. According to Prof MacLeod , the hold-up has been the lack of neural network software - programmes that learn - required by Daisy. "New developments in artificial intelligence and computer algorithms have taken neural nets to where they act more like human intelligence," he said. "When we see something new, we don't have to re-compute our understanding of everything else we've ever seen, we just add it to the mix. That's pretty much what we're doing with Daisy." The other limitation with Daisy is that the system will only be as good as the quality and quantity of its reference images. "Museums are only just starting to get into that type of work," said Prof MacLeod. "That has its own technological and storage and manpower barriers. "Now there's a tool that we can use to justify making the investment in getting these collections of images together and building the software structures that are necessary to make the neural net able to access the images, then there's a reason to do it." There is also a role for Britain's army of amateur naturalists in improving the library. "One of the neat things about Daisy is that, if you submit an image and it's identified with a high level of certainty, that can then be added to the library of images, which makes Daisy more powerful," said Prof MacLeod. "That information can keep growing. The more people that use [the system], the better it gets." He said that the first images and sounds have already been used to test that everything works. But filling Daisy with data from all the museums will take several years. The Natural History Museum has 70 million specimens that would need to be entered into the database. Daisy is part of a series of projects set up by the museum to identify and catalogue life on Earth. In February, the museum announced plans to record the genetic fingerprints for the species, to begin the process of providing a kind of biometric identity card for millions of species by 2010. From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 28 00:15:08 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 27 Aug 2005 20:15:08 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Usatoday: Nanotech researchers report big breakthrough Message-ID: Nanotech researchers report big breakthrough http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/nano/2005-08-18-nanotube-breakthrough_x.htm An advance in nanotechnology may lead to the creation of artificial muscles, superstrong electric cars and wallpaper-thin electronics, researchers report. Nanotechnology has tantalized researchers for decades, promising a new era in stronger and lighter electronic materials. Nanotechnology is the science of engineering such properties at the molecular, or nanometer, scale. For all its promise, the technology has mostly been locked in laboratories. In Friday's edition of the journal Science, however, scientists from the University of Texas and Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization report the creation of industry-ready sheets of materials made from nanotubes. Nanotubes are tiny carbon tubes with remarkable strength that are only a few times wider than atoms. They can also act as the semiconductors found in modern electronics. "This is fundamentally a new material," says team leader Ray Baughman of the University of Texas at Dallas in Richardson. . Self-supporting, transparent and stronger than steel or high-strength plastics, the sheets are flexible and can be heated to emit light. . A square mile of the thinnest sheets, about 2-millionths-of-an-inch thick, would weigh only about 170 pounds. . In lab tests, the sheets demonstrated solar cell capabilities, using sunlight to produce electricity. The team has developed an automated process that produced 2 ?-inch-wide strips of nanotubes at a rate of about 47 feet per minute. Other methods take much longer to create nanotube sheets. "The technique is most elegant and the applications they've shown are quite impressive," says nanotube expert Shalom Wind of Columbia University in New York. Industry and academic researchers are already regarding nanotubes with avid interest, he adds. Future applications that scientists have discussed include creating artificial muscles whose movement is electrically charged, or race cars with stronger, lighter bodies that could also serve as batteries, says chemist Andrew Barron of Rice University in Houston. "We could see this on Formula 1 (racing) cars by next season, says Barron. "This is a jumping-off point for a technology a lot of people will pursue." Wind is more cautious about the future. "We'll really have to wait to see the impact this has and whether it will pan out in commercial technology." The federal government has made nanotechnology a research priority in recent years. Funding for the scientists' research came from the Defense Department, the Texas government and a partnership of nanotechnology labs. The research team suggests first using the nanotube sheets as transparent antennae for cars or as electrically heated windows. "We do need to think of a catchier name than 'nanotube sheets,' " Baughman says. From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 28 00:15:26 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 27 Aug 2005 20:15:26 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] physorg: 'Fold here,' say 130,000 computers Message-ID: 'Fold here,' say 130,000 computers http://www.physorg.com/news5907.html It's already made computations equal to a single PC running continuously for more than 14,000 years. It has 83,000 human members and more than 130,000 machines. It may be among the 20 largest "computers" in the world. It's World Community Grid. Announced in November, World Community Grid is simple in concept: harness some of the unused computing power of the world's 650 million PCs. To join, anyone with Internet access simply downloads a secure, free, and small software program onto their laptop or home computer. Then with World Community Grid's agent running in the background of each PC, the project applies massed computing power to math-intensive research that will unlock genetic codes underlying diseases such as cancer, HIV and Alzheimer's. It's a model similar to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), but with a more down to earth focus. As one headline writer put it: Forget aliens; cure malaria. Currently World Community Grid is running research for the Human Proteome Folding Project. Knowing the shapes of proteins will help researchers understand how proteins do the work they're supposed to and how diseases stop proteins from maintaining healthy cells. The versatile grid can also take aim at HIV and AIDS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), malaria and other diseases. And grid applications can help researchers and scientists with earthquake warnings, improving crop yields and evaluating the supply of critical natural resources like water. The organization is accepting proposals for other research projects. IBM donated the hardware, software, technical services and expertise to build the infrastructure for World Community Grid and provides free hosting, maintenance and support. "We're taking IBM's innovative on demand grid technology - the same technology we share with customers - and applying it to humanitarian issues about which the world cares. We look forward to working with our employees, customers and the public to execute this exciting vision," said Stanley S. Litow, vice president of IBM Corporate Community Relations and president of the IBM International Foundation. World Community Grid also continues to build a network of dedicated partners who encourage their employees, members, students and faculty to join. Along with IBM, other partners include United Devices, Semiconductor Industry Association, United Way of New York City, the Center for Corporate Citizenship at Boston College and Information Technology Association of Canada. You can join at http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 28 00:25:44 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 27 Aug 2005 20:25:44 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: The Other Brain Also Deals With Many Woes Message-ID: The Other Brain Also Deals With Many Woes http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/health/23gut.html By [3]HARRIET BROWN Two brains are better than one. At least that is the rationale for the close - sometimes too close - relationship between the human body's two brains, the one at the top of the spinal cord and the hidden but powerful brain in the gut known as the enteric nervous system. For Dr. Michael D. Gershon, the author of "The Second Brain" and the chairman of the department of anatomy and cell biology at Columbia, the connection between the two can be unpleasantly clear. "Every time I call the National Institutes of Health to check on a grant proposal," Dr. Gershon said, "I become painfully aware of the influence the brain has on the gut." In fact, anyone who has ever felt butterflies in the stomach before giving a speech, a gut feeling that flies in the face of fact or a bout of intestinal urgency the night before an examination has experienced the actions of the dual nervous systems. The connection between the brains lies at the heart of many woes, physical and psychiatric. Ailments like anxiety, [4]depression, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcers and Parkinson's disease manifest symptoms at the brain and the gut level. "The majority of patients with anxiety and depression will also have alterations of their GI function," said Dr. Emeran Mayer, professor of medicine, physiology and psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles. A study in 1902 showed changes in the movement of food through the gastrointestinal tract in cats confronted by growling dogs. One system's symptoms - and cures - may affect the other. Antidepressants, for example, cause gastric distress in up to a quarter of the people who take them. Butterflies in the stomach are caused by a surge of stress [5]hormones released by the body in a "fight or flight" situation. Stress can also overstimulate nerves in the esophagus, causing a feeling of choking. Dr. Gershon, who coined the term "second brain" in 1996, is one of a number of researchers who are studying brain-gut connections in the relatively new field of neurogastroenterology. New understandings of the way the second brain works, and the interactions between the two, are helping to treat disorders like constipation, ulcers and Hirschprung's disease. The role of the enteric nervous system is to manage every aspect of digestion, from the esophagus to the stomach, small intestine and colon. The second brain, or little brain, accomplishes all that with the same tools as the big brain, a sophisticated nearly self-contained network of neural circuitry, neurotransmitters and proteins. The independence is a function of the enteric nervous system's complexity. "Rather than Mother Nature's trying to pack 100 million neurons someplace in the brain or spinal cord and then sending long connections to the GI tract, the circuitry is right next to the systems that require control," said Jackie D. Wood, professor of physiology, cell biology and internal medicine at Ohio State. Two brains may seem like the stuff of science fiction, but they make literal and evolutionary sense. "What brains do is control behavior," Dr. Wood said. "The brain in your gut has stored within its neural networks a variety of behavioral programs, like a library. The digestive state determines which program your gut calls up from its library and runs." When someone skips lunch, the gut is more or less silent. Eat a pastrami sandwich, and contractions all along the small intestines mix the food with enzymes and move it toward the lining for absorption to begin. If the pastrami is rotten, reverse contractions will force it - and everything else in the gut - into the stomach and back out through the esophagus at high speed. In each situation, the gut must assess conditions, decide on a course of action and initiate a reflex. "The gut monitors pressure," Dr. Gershon said. "It monitors the progress of digestion. It detects nutrients, and it measures acid and salts. It's a little chemical lab." The enteric system does all this on its own, with little help from the central nervous system. The enteric nervous system was first described in 1921 by Dr. J. N. Langley, a British physician who believed that it was one of three parts - along with the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems - of the autonomic nervous system, which controls involuntary behaviors like breathing and circulation. In this triad, the enteric nervous system was seen as something of a tag-along to the other two. After Langley died, scientists more or less forgot about the enteric nervous system. Years later, when Dr. Gershon reintroduced the concept and suggested that the gut might use some of the same neurotransmitters as the brain, his theory was widely ridiculed. "It was like saying that New York taxi drivers never miss a showing of 'Tosca' at the Met," he recalled. By the early 80's, scientists had accepted the idea of the enteric nervous system and the role of neurotransmitters like serotonin in the gut. It is no surprise that there is a direct relationship between emotional stress and physical distress. "Clinicians are finally acknowledging that a lot of dysfunction in GI disorders involves changes in the central nervous system," said Gary M. Mawe, a professor of anatomy and neurobiology at the University of Vermont. The big question is which comes first, physiology or psychology? The enteric and central nervous systems use the same hardware, as it were, to run two very different programs. Serotonin, for instance, is crucial to feelings of well-being. Hence the success of the antidepressants known as S.S.R.I.'s that raise the level of serotonin available to the brain. But 95 percent of the body's serotonin is housed in the gut, where it acts as a neurotransmitter and a signaling mechanism. The digestive process begins when a specialized cell, an enterochromaffin, squirts serotonin into the wall of the gut, which has at least seven types of serotonin receptors. The receptors, in turn, communicate with nerve cells to start digestive enzymes flowing or to start things moving through the intestines. Serotonin also acts as a go-between, keeping the brain in the skull up to date with what is happening in the brain below. Such communication is mostly one way, with 90 percent traveling from the gut to the head. Many of those messages are unpleasant, and serotonin is involved in sending them. Chemotherapy drugs like doxorubicin, which is used to treat breast [6]cancer, cause serotonin to be released in the gut, leading to nausea and vomiting. "The gut is not an organ from which you wish to receive frequent progress reports," Dr. Gershon said. Serotonin is also implicated in one of the most debilitating gut disorders, irritable bowel syndrome, or I.B.S., which causes abdominal pain and cramping, bloating and, in some patients, alternating diarrhea and constipation. "You can run any test you want on people with I.B.S., and their GI tracts look essentially normal," Dr. Mawe said. The default assumption has been that the syndrome is a psychosomatic disease. But it turns out that irritable bowel syndrome, like depression, is at least in part a function of changes in the serotonin system. In this case, it is too much serotonin rather than too little. In a healthy person, after serotonin is released into the gut and initiates an intestinal reflex, it is whisked out of the bowel by a molecule known as the serotonin transporter, or SERT, found in the cells that line the gut wall. People with irritable bowel syndrome do not have enough SERT, so they wind up with too much serotonin floating around, causing diarrhea. The excess serotonin then overwhelms the receptors in the gut, shutting them down and causing constipation. When Dr. Gershon, whose work has been supported by Novartis, studied mice without SERT, he found that they developed a condition very much like I.B.S. in humans. Several new serotonin-based drugs - intestinal antidepressants, in a way - have brought hope for those with chronic gut disorders. Another mechanism that lends credence to physiology as the source of intestinal dysfunctions is the system of mast cells in the gut that have an important role in immune response. "During stress, trauma or 'fight or flight' reactions, the barrier between the lumen, the interior of the gut where food is digested, and the rest of the bowel could be broken, and bad stuff could get across," Dr. Wood said. "So the big brain calls in more immune surveillance at the gut wall by activating mast cells." These mast cells release histamines and other inflammatory agents, mobilizing the enteric nervous system to expel the perceived intruders, and causing diarrhea. Inflammation induced by mast cells may turn out to be crucial in understanding and treating GI disorders. Inflamed tissue becomes tender. A gut under stress, with chronic mast cell production and consequent inflammation, may become tender, as well. In animals, Dr. Mawe said, inflammation makes the sensory neurons in the gut fire more often, causing a kind of sensory hyperactivity. "I have a theory that some chronic disorders may be caused by something like attention deficit disorder in the gut," he said. Dr. Gershon, too, theorizes that physiology is the original culprit in brain-gut dysfunctions. "We have identified molecular defects in the gut of everyone who has irritable bowel syndrome," he said. "If you were chained by bloody diarrhea to a toilet seat, you, too, might be depressed." Still, psychology clearly plays a role. Recent studies suggest that stress, especially early in life, can cause chronic GI diseases, at least in animals. "If you put a rat on top of a little platform surrounded by water, which is very stressful for a rat, it develops the equivalent of diarrhea," Dr. Mayer said. Another experiment showed that when young rats were separated from their mothers, the layer of cells that line the gut, the same barrier that is strengthened by mast cells during stress, weakened and became more permeable, allowing bacteria from the intestine to pass through the bowel walls and stimulate immune cells. "In rats, it's an adaptive response," Dr. Mayer said. "If they're born into a stressful, hostile environment, nature programs them to be more vigilant and stress responsive in their future life." He said up to 70 percent of the patients he treats for chronic gut disorders had experienced early childhood traumas like parents' divorces, chronic illnesses or parents' deaths. "I think that what happens in early life, along with an individual's genetic background, programs how a person will respond to stress for the rest of his or her life," he said. Either way, what is good for one brain is often good for the other, too. A team of researchers from Penn State University recently discovered a possible new direction in treating intestinal disorders, biofeedback for the brain in the gut. In an experiment published in a recent issue of Neurogastroenterology and Motility, Robert M. Stern, a professor of psychology at Penn State, found that biofeedback helped people consciously increase and enhance their gastrointestinal activity. They used the brains in their heads, in other words, to help the brains in their guts, proving that at least some of the time two brains really are better than one. References 3. http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=HARRIET%20BROWN&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=HARRIET%20BROWN&inline=nyt-per 4. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/depression/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier 5. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/hormones/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier 6. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/cancer/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 28 00:25:53 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 27 Aug 2005 20:25:53 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Boston Globe: What Makes People Gay? Message-ID: What Makes People Gay? http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2005/08/14/what_makes_people_gay?mode=PF The debate has always been that it was either all in the child's upbringing or all in the genes. But what if it's something else? By Neil Swidey | August 14, 2005 With crystal-blue eyes, wavy hair, and freshly scrubbed faces, the boys look as though they stepped out of a Pottery Barn Kids catalog. They are 7-year-old twins. I'll call them Thomas and Patrick; their parents agreed to let me meet the boys as long as I didn't use their real names. Spend five seconds with them, and there can be no doubt that they are identical twins - so identical even they can't tell each other apart in photographs. Spend five minutes with them, and their profound differences begin to emerge. Patrick is social, thoughtful, attentive. He repeatedly addresses me by name. Thomas is physical, spontaneous, a bit distracted. Just minutes after meeting me outside a coffee shop, he punches me in the upper arm, yells, "Gray punch buggy!" and then points to a Volkswagen Beetle cruising past us. It's a hard punch. They horse around like typical brothers, but Patrick's punches are less forceful and his voice is higher. Thomas charges at his brother, arms flexed in front of him like a mini-bodybuilder. The differences are subtle - they're 7-year-old boys, after all - but they are there. When the twins were 2, Patrick found his mother's shoes. He liked wearing them. Thomas tried on his father's once but didn't see the point. When they were 3, Thomas blurted out that toy guns were his favorite things. Patrick piped up that his were the Barbie dolls he discovered at day care. When the twins were 5, Thomas announced he was going to be a monster for Halloween. Patrick said he was going to be a princess. Thomas said he couldn't do that, because other kids would laugh at him. Patrick seemed puzzled. "Then I'll be Batman," he said. Their mother - intelligent, warm, and open-minded - found herself conflicted. She wanted Patrick - whose playmates have always been girls, never boys - to be himself, but she worried his feminine behavior would expose him to ridicule and pain. She decided to allow him free expression at home while setting some limits in public. That worked until last year, when a school official called to say Patrick was making his classmates uncomfortable. He kept insisting that he was a girl. Patrick exhibits behavior called childhood gender nonconformity, or CGN. This doesn't describe a boy who has a doll somewhere in his toy collection or tried on his sister's Snow White outfit once, but rather one who consistently exhibits a host of strongly feminine traits and interests while avoiding boy-typical behavior like rough-and-tumble play. There's been considerable research into this phenomenon, particularly in males, including a study that followed boys from an early age into early adulthood. The data suggest there is a very good chance Patrick will grow up to be homosexual. Not all homosexual men show this extremely feminine behavior as young boys. But the research indicates that, of the boys who do exhibit CGN, about 75 percent of them - perhaps more - turn out to be gay or bisexual. What makes the case of Patrick and Thomas so fascinating is that it calls into question both of the dominant theories in the long-running debate over what makes people gay: nature or nurture, genes or learned behavior. As identical twins, Patrick and Thomas began as genetic clones. From the moment they came out of their mother's womb, their environment was about as close to identical as possible - being fed, changed, and plopped into their car seats the same way, having similar relationships with the same nurturing father and mother. Yet before either boy could talk, one showed highly feminine traits while the other appeared to be "all boy," as the moms at the playgrounds say with apologetic shrugs. "That my sons were different the second they were born, there is no question about it," says the twins' mother. So what happened between their identical genetic starting point and their births? They spent nine months in utero. In the hunt for what causes people to be gay or straight, that's now the most interesting and potentially enlightening frontier. WHAT DOES IT MATTER WHERE HOMOSEXUALITY COMES FROM? Proving people are born gay would give them wider social acceptance and better protection against discrimination, many gay rights advocates argue. In the last decade, as this "biological" argument has gained momentum, polls find Americans - especially young adults - increasingly tolerant of gays and lesbians. And that's exactly what has groups opposed to homosexuality so concerned. The Family Research Council, a conservative Christian think tank in Washington, D.C., argues in its book Getting It Straight that finding people are born gay "would advance the idea that sexual orientation is an innate characteristic, like race; that homosexuals, like African-Americans, should be legally protected against 'discrimination;' and that disapproval of homosexuality should be as socially stigmatized as racism. However, it is not true." Some advocates of gay marriage argue that proving sexual orientation is inborn would make it easier to frame the debate as simply a matter of civil rights. That could be true, but then again, freedom of religion enjoyed federal protection long before inborn traits like race and sex. For much of the 20th century, the dominant thinking connected homosexuality to upbringing. Freud, for instance, speculated that overprotective mothers and distant fathers helped make boys gay. It took the American Psychiatric Association until 1973 to remove "homosexuality" from its manual of mental disorders. Then, in 1991, a neuroscientist in San Diego named Simon LeVay told the world he had found a key difference between the brains of homosexual and heterosexual men he studied. LeVay showed that a tiny clump of neurons of the anterior hypothalamus - which is believed to control sexual behavior - was, on average, more than twice the size in heterosexual men as in homosexual men. LeVay's findings did not speak directly to the nature-vs.-nurture debate - the clumps could, theoretically, have changed size because of homosexual behavior. But that seemed unlikely, and the study ended up jump-starting the effort to prove a biological basis for homosexuality. Later that same year, Boston University psychiatrist Richard Pillard and Northwestern University psychologist J. Michael Bailey announced the results of their study of male twins. They found that, in identical twins, if one twin was gay, the other had about a 50 percent chance of also being gay. For fraternal twins, the rate was about 20 percent. Because identical twins share their entire genetic makeup while fraternal twins share about half, genes were believed to explain the difference. Most reputable studies find the rate of homosexuality in the general population to be 2 to 4 percent, rather than the popular "1 in 10" estimate. In 1993 came the biggest news: Dean Hamer's discovery of the "gay gene." In fact, Hamer, a Harvard-trained researcher at the National Cancer Institute, hadn't quite put it that boldly or imprecisely. He found that gay brothers shared a specific region of the X chromosome, called Xq28, at a higher rate than gay men shared with their straight brothers. Hamer and others suggested this finding would eventually transform our understanding of sexual orientation. That hasn't happened yet. But the clear focus of sexual-orientation research has shifted to biological causes, and there hasn't been much science produced to support the old theories tying homosexuality to upbringing. Freud may have been seeing the effect rather than the cause, since a father faced with a very feminine son might well become more distant or hostile, leading the boy's mother to become more protective. In recent years, researchers who suspect that homosexuality is inborn - whether because of genetics or events happening in the womb - have looked everywhere for clues: Prenatal hormones. Birth order. Finger length. Fingerprints. Stress. Sweat. Eye blinks. Spatial relations. Hearing. Handedness. Even "gay" sheep. LeVay, who is gay, says that when he published his study 14 years ago, some gays and lesbians criticized him for doing research that might lead to homosexuality once again being lumped in with diseases and disorders. "If anything, the reverse has happened," says LeVay, who is now 61 and no longer active in the lab. He says the hunt for a biological basis for homosexuality, which involves many researchers who are themselves gay or lesbian, "has contributed to the status of gay people in society." These studies have been small and underfunded, and the results have often been modest. Still, because there's been so much of this disparate research, "all sort of pointing in the same direction, makes it pretty clear there are biological processes significantly influencing sexual orientation," says LeVay. "But it's also kind of frustrating that it's still a bunch of hints, that nothing is really as crystal clear as you would like." Just in the last few months, though, the hints have grown stronger. In May, Swedish researchers reported finding important differences in how the brains of straight men and gay men responded to two compounds suspected of being pheromones - those scent-related chemicals that are key to sexual arousal in animals. The first compound came from women's urine, the second from male sweat. Brain scans showed that when straight men smelled the female urine compound, their hypothalamus lit up. That didn't happen with gay men. Instead, their hypothalamus lit up when they smelled the male-sweat compound, which was the same way straight women had responded. This research once again connecting the hypothalamus to sexual orientation comes on the heels of work with sheep. About 8 percent of domestic rams are exclusively interested in sex with other rams. Researchers found that a clump of neurons similar to the one LeVay identified in human brains was also smaller in gay rams than straight ones. (Again, it's conceivable that these differences could be showing effect rather than cause.) In June, scientists in Vienna announced that they had isolated a master genetic switch for sexual orientation in the fruit fly. Once they flicked the switch, the genetically altered female flies rebuffed overtures from males and instead attempted to mate with other females, adopting the elaborate courting dance and mating songs that males use. And now, a large-scale, five-year genetic study of gay brothers is underway in North America. The study received $2.5 million from the National Institutes of Health, which is unusual. Government funders tend to steer clear of sexual orientation research, aware that even small grants are apt to be met with outrage from conservative congressmen looking to make the most of their C-Span face time. Relying on a robust sample of 1,000 gay-brother pairs and the latest advancements in genetic screening, this study promises to bring some clarity to the murky area of what role genes may play in homosexuality. This accumulating biological evidence, combined with the prospect of more on the horizon, is having an effect. Last month, the Rev. Rob Schenck, a prominent Washington, D.C., evangelical leader, told a large gathering of young evangelicals that he believes homosexuality is not a choice but rather a predisposition, something "deeply rooted" in people. Schenck told me that his conversion came about after he'd spoken extensively with genetic researchers and psychologists. He argues that evangelicals should continue to oppose homosexual behavior, but that "many evangelicals are living in a sort of state of denial about the advance of this conversation." His message: "If it's inevitable that this scientific evidence is coming, we have to be prepared with a loving response. If we don't have one, we won't have any credibility." AS THE 21-YEAR-OLD COLLEGE JUNIOR IN A HOSPITAL JOHNNY slides into the MRI, she is handed controls with buttons for "strongly like" and "strongly dislike." Hundreds of pornographic images - in male-male and female-female pairings - flash before her eyes. Eroticism eventually gives way to monotony, and it's hard to avoid looking for details to distinguish one image from the rest of the panting pack. So it goes from "Look at the size of those breasts!" to "That can't be comfortable, given the length of her fingernails!" to "Why is that guy wearing nothing but work boots on the beach?" Regardless of which buttons the student presses, the MRI scans show her arousal level to each image, at its starting point in the brain. Researchers at Northwestern University, outside Chicago, are doing this work as a follow-up to their studies of arousal using genital measurement tools. They found that while straight men were aroused by film clips of two women having sex, and gay men were aroused by clips of two men having sex, most of the men who identified themselves as bisexual showed gay arousal patterns. More surprising was just how different the story with women turned out to be. Most women, whether they identified as straight, lesbian, or bisexual, were significantly aroused by straight, gay, and lesbian sex. "I'm not suggesting that most women are bisexual," says Michael Bailey, the psychology professor whose lab conducted the studies. "I'm suggesting that whatever a woman's sexual arousal pattern is, it has little to do with her sexual orientation." That's fundamentally different from men. "In men, arousal is orientation. It's as simple as that. That's how gay men learn they are gay." These studies mark a return to basics for the 47-year-old Bailey. He says researchers need a far deeper understanding of what sexual orientation is before they can determine where it comes from. Female sexual orientation is particularly foggy, he says, because there's been so little research done. As for male sexual orientation, he argues that there's now enough evidence to suggest it is "entirely in-born," though not nearly enough to establish how that happens. Bailey's 1991 twin study is still cited by other researchers as one of the pillars in the genetic argument for homosexuality. But his follow-up study using a comprehensive registry of twins in Australia found a much lower rate of similarity in sexual orientation between identical twins, about 20 percent, down from 50 percent. Bailey still believes that genes make important contributions to sexual orientation. But, he says, "that's not where I'd bet the real breakthroughs will come." His hunch is that further study of childhood gender nonconformity will pay big. Because it's unclear what percentage of homosexuals and lesbians showed CGN as children, Bailey and his colleagues are now running a study that uses adult participants' home movies from childhood to look for signs of gender-bending behavior. Cornell psychologist Daryl Bem has proposed an intriguing theory for how CGN might lead to homosexuality. According to this pathway, which he calls "the exotic becomes erotic," children are born with traits for temperament, such as aggression and activity level, that predispose them to male-typical or female-typical activities. They seek out playmates with the same interests. So a boy whose traits lead him to hopscotch and away from rough play will feel different from, and ostracized by, other boys. This leads to physiological arousal of fear and anger in their presence, arousal that eventually is transformed from exotic to erotic. Critics of homosexuality have used Bem's theory, which stresses environment over biology, to argue that sexual orientation is not inborn and not fixed. But Bem says this pathway is triggered by biological traits, and he doesn't really see how the outcome of homosexuality can be changed. Bailey says whether or not Bem's theory holds up, the environment most worth focusing in on is the one a child experiences when he's in his mother's womb. LET'S GET BACK TO THOMAS AND PATRICK. BECAUSE IT'S UNCLEAR why twin brothers with identical genetic starting points and similar post-birth environments would take such divergent paths, it's helpful to return to the beginning. Males and females have a fundamental genetic difference - females have two X chromosomes, and males have an X and a Y. Still, right after conception, it's hard to tell male and female zygotes apart, except for that tucked-away chromosomal difference. Normally, the changes take shape at a key point of fetal development, when the male brain is masculinized by sex hormones. The female brain is the default. The brain will stay on the female path as long as it is protected from exposure to hormones. The hormonal theory of homosexuality holds that, just as exposure to circulating sex hormones determines whether a fetus will be male or female, such exposure must also influence sexual orientation. The cases of children born with disorders of "sexual differentiation" offer insight. William Reiner, a psychiatrist and urologist with the University of Oklahoma, has evaluated more than a hundred of these cases. For decades, the standard medical response to boys born with severely inadequate penises (or none at all) was to castrate the boy and have his parents raise him as a girl. But Reiner has found that nurture - even when it involves surgery soon after birth - cannot trump nature. Of the boys with inadequate penises who were raised as girls, he says, "I haven't found one who is sexually attracted to males." The majority of them have transitioned back to being males and report being attracted to females. During fetal development, sexual identity is set before the sexual organs are formed, Reiner says. Perhaps it's the same for sexual orientation. In his research, of all the babies with X and Y chromosomes who were raised as girls, the only ones he has found who report having female identities and being attracted to males are those who did not have "receptors" to let the male sex hormones do their masculinizing in the womb. What does this all mean? "Exposure to male hormones in utero dramatically raises the chances of being sexually attracted to females," Reiner says. "We can infer that the absence of male hormone exposure may have something to do with attraction to males." Michael Bailey says Reiner's findings represent a major breakthrough, showing that "whatever causes sexual orientation is strongly influenced by prenatal biology." Bailey and Reiner say the answer is probably not as simple as just exposure to sex hormones. After all, the exposure levels in some of the people Reiner studies are abnormal enough to produce huge differences in sexual organs. Yet, sexual organs in straight and gay people are, on average, the same. More likely, hormones are interacting with other factors. Canadian researchers have consistently documented a "big-brother effect," finding that the chances of a boy being gay increase with each additional older brother he has. (Birth order does not appear to play a role with lesbians.) So, a male with three older brothers is three times more likely to be gay than one with no older brothers, though there's still a better than 90 percent chance he will be straight. They argue that this results from a complex interaction involving hormones, antigens, and the mother's immune system. By now, there is substantial evidence showing correlation - though not causation - between sexual orientation and traits that are set when a baby is in the womb. Take finger length. In general, men have shorter index fingers in relation to their ring fingers; in women, the lengths are generally about the same. Researchers have found that lesbians generally have ratios closer to males. Other studies have shown masculinized results for lesbians in inner-ear functions and eye-blink reactions to sudden loud noises, and feminized patterns for gay men on certain cognitive tasks like spatial perception and remembering the placement of objects. New York University researcher Lynn S. Hall, who has studied traits determined in the womb, speculates that Patrick was somehow prenatally stressed, probably during the first trimester, when the brain is really developing, particularly the structures like the hypothalamus that influence sexual behavior. This stress might have been based on his position in the womb or the blood flow to him or any of a number of other factors not in his mother's control. Yet more evidence that identical twins have womb experiences far from identical can be found in their often differing birth weights. Patrick was born a pound lighter than Thomas. Taken together, the research suggests that early on in the womb, as the fetus's brain develops in either the male or female direction, something fundamental to sexual orientation is happening. Nobody's sure what's causing it. But here's where genes may be involved, perhaps by regulating hormone exposure or by dictating the size of that key clump of neurons in the hypothalamus. Before researchers can sort that out, they'll need to return to the question of whether, in fact, there is a "gay gene." THE CROWD ON BOSTON COMMON IS THICK ON THIS SCORCHER of a Saturday afternoon in June, as the throngs make their way around the 35th annual Boston Pride festival, past booths peddling everything from "Gayopoly" board games to Braveheartian garments called Utilikilts. Sitting quietly in his booth is Alan Sanders, a soft-spoken 41-year-old with a sandy beard and thinning hair. He's placed a mound of rainbow-colored Starbursts on the table in front of him and hung a banner that reads: "WANTED: Gay Men with Gay Brothers for Molecular Genetic Study of Sexual Orientation." Sanders is a psychiatrist with the Evanston Northwestern Healthcare Research Institute who is leading the NIH-funded search for the genetic basis of male homosexuality ([2]www.gaybros.com). He is spending the summer crisscrossing the country, going to gay pride festivals, hoping to recruit 1,000 pairs of gay brothers to participate. (His wife, who just delivered their third son, wasn't crazy about the timing.) When people in Boston ask him how much genes may contribute to homosexuality, he says the best estimate is about 40 percent. Homosexuality runs in families - studies show that 8 to 12 percent of brothers of gay men are also gay, compared with the 2 to 4 percent of the general population. Sanders spends much of the afternoon handing out Starbursts to people who clearly don't qualify for a gay brothers study - preteen girls, adult lesbians wearing T-shirts that read "I Like Girls Who Like Girls," and elderly women in straw hats who speak only Chinese. But many of the gay men who stop by are interested in more than free candy. Among the people signing up is James Daly, a 31-year-old from Salem. "I think it's important for the public - especially the religious right - to know it's not a choice for some people," Daly says. "I feel I was born this way." (In fairness, there aren't many leaders of groups representing social and religious conservatives who still argue that homosexual orientation - as opposed to behavior - is a matter of choice. Even as he insists that no one is born gay, Peter Sprigg, the point person on homosexuality for the Family Research Council, says, "I don't think that people choose their sexual attraction.") In the decade since Dean Hamer made headlines, the gay gene theory has taken some hits. A Canadian team was unable to replicate his findings. Earlier this year, a team from Hamer's own lab reported only mixed results after having done the first scan of the entire human genome in the search for genes influencing sexual orientation. But all of the gene studies so far have been based on small samples and lacked the funding to do things right. Sanders's study should be big enough to provide some real answers on linkage as well as shed light on gender nonconformity and the big-brother effect. There is, however, a towering question that Sanders's study will probably not be able to answer. That has to do with evolution. If a prime motivation of all species is to pass genes on to future generations, and gay men are estimated to produce 80 percent fewer offspring than straight men, why would a gay gene not have been wiped out by the forces of natural selection? This evolutionary disadvantage is what led former Amherst College biologist Paul Ewald to argue that homosexuality might be caused by a virus - a pathogen most likely working in utero. That argument caused a stir when he and a colleague proposed it six years ago, but with no research done to test it, it remains just another theory. Other scientists have offered fascinating but unpersuasive explanations, most of them focusing on some kind of compensatory benefit, in the same way that the gene responsible for sickle cell anemia also protects against malaria. A study last year by researchers in Italy showed that female relatives of gay men tended to be more fertile, though, as critics point out, not nearly fertile enough to make up for the gay man's lack of offspring. But there will be plenty of time for sorting out the evolutionary paradox once - and if - researchers are able to identify actual genes involved in sexual orientation. Getting to that point will likely require integrating multiple lines of promising research. That is exactly what's happening in Eric Vilain's lab at the University of California, Los Angeles. Vilain, an associate professor of human genetics, and his colleague, Sven Bocklandt, are using gay sheep, transgenic mice, identical twin humans, and novel approaches to human genetics to try to unlock the mystery of sexual orientation. Instead of looking for a gay gene, they stress that they are looking for several genes that cause either attraction to men or attraction to women. Those same genes would work one way in heterosexual women and another way in homosexual men. The UCLA lab is examining how these genes might be turned "up" or "down." It's not a question of what genes you have, but rather which ones you use, says Bocklandt. "I have the genes in my body to make a vagina and carry a baby, but I don't use them, because I am a man." In studying the genes of gay sheep, for example, he's found some that are turned "way up" compared with the straight rams. The lab is also testing an intriguing theory involving imprinted genes. Normally, we have two copies of every gene, one from each parent, and both copies work. They're identical, so it doesn't matter which copy comes from which parent. But with imprinted genes, that does matter. Although both copies are physically there, one copy - either from the mom or the dad - is blocked from working. Think of an airplane with an engine on each wing, except one of the engines is shut down. A recent Duke University study suggests humans have hundreds of imprinted genes, including one on the X chromosome that previous research has tied to sexual orientation. With imprinted genes, there is no backup engine. So if there's something atypical in the copy from mom, the copy from dad cannot be turned on. The UCLA lab is now collecting DNA from identical twins in which one twin is straight and the other is gay. Because the twins begin as genetic clones, if a gene is imprinted in one twin, it will be in the other twin as well. Normally, as the fetuses are developing, each time a cell divides, the DNA separates and makes a copy of itself, replicating all kinds of genetic information. It's a complicated but incredibly accurate process. But the coding to keep the backup engine shut down on an imprinted gene is less accurate. So how might imprinted genes help explain why one identical twin would be straight and the other gay? Say there's an imprinted gene for attraction to females, and there's something atypical in the copy the twin brothers get from mom. As all that replicating is going on, the imprinting (to keep the copy from dad shut down) proceeds as expected in one twin, and he ends up gay. But somehow with his brother, the coding for the imprinting is lost, and rather than remain shut down, the fuel flows to fire up the backup engine from dad. And that twin turns out to be straight. IN THE COURSE OF REPORTING THIS STORY, I EXPERIENCED A good deal of whiplash. Just when I would become swayed by the evidence supporting one discreet theory, I would stumble onto new evidence casting some doubt on it. Ultimately, I accepted this as unavoidable terrain in the hunt for the basis of sexual orientation. This is, after all, a research field built on underfunded, idiosyncratic studies that are met with full-barreled responses from opposing and well-funded advocacy groups determined to make the results from the lab hew to the scripts they've honed for the talk-show circuit. You can't really blame the advocacy groups. The stakes are high. In the end, homosexuality remains such a divisive issue that only thoroughly tested research will get society to accept what science has to say about its origin. Critics of funding for sexual orientation research say that it isn't curing cancer, and they're right. But we devote a lot more dollars to studying other issues that aren't curing cancer and have less resonance in society. Still, no matter how imperfect these studies are, when you put them all together and examine them closely, the message is clear: While post-birth development may well play a supporting role, the roots of homosexuality, at least in men, appear to be in place by the time a child is born. After spending years sifting through all the available data, British researchers Glenn Wilson and Qazi Rahman come to an even bolder conclusion in their forthcoming book Born Gay: The Psychobiology of Sex Orientation, in which they write: "Sexual orientation is something we are born with and not `acquired' from our social environment." Meanwhile, the mother of twins Patrick and Thomas has done her own sifting and come to her own conclusions. She says her son's feminine behavior suggests he will grow up to be gay, and she has no problem with that. She just worries about what happens to him between now and then. After that fateful call from Patrick's school, she says, "I knew I had to talk to my son, and I had no clue what to say." Ultimately, she told him that although he could play however he wanted at home, he couldn't tell his classmates he was a girl, because they'd think he was lying. And she told him that some older boys might be mean to him and even hit him if he continued to claim he was a girl. Then she asked him, "Do you think that you can convince yourself that you are a boy?" "Yes, Mom," he said. "It's going to be like when I was trying to learn to read, and then one day I opened the book and I could read." His mother's heart sank. She could tell that he wanted more than anything to please her. "Basically, he was saying there must be a miracle - that one day I wake up and I'm a boy. That's the only way he could imagine it could happen." In the year since that conversation, Patrick's behavior has become somewhat less feminine. His mother hopes it's just because his interests are evolving and not because he's suppressing them. "I can now imagine him being completely straight, which I couldn't a year ago," she says. "I can imagine him being gay, which seems to be statistically most likely." She says she's fine with either outcome, just as long as he's happy and free from harm. She takes heart in how much more accepting today's society is. "By the time my boys are 20, the world will have changed even more." By then, there might even be enough consensus for researchers to forget about finger lengths and fruit flies and gay sheep, and move on to a new mystery. Neil Swidey is a member of the Globe Magazine staff. He can be reached at [3]swidey at globe.com. From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 28 00:26:09 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 27 Aug 2005 20:26:09 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Buchanan and Yoon: Globalization as Framed by the Two Logics of Trade Message-ID: Buchanan and Yoon: Globalization as Framed by the Two Logics of Trade Globalization as Framed by the Two Logics of Trade JAMES M. BUCHANAN AND YONG J. YOON The Independent Review, v.VI, n.3, Winter 2002, ISSN 1086-1653, 2002, pp. 399-405. [This should be read "sitting bolt upright in a hard chair," as Professor Vining used to say. It will take more than one reading. I redirects the debate.] James M. Buchanan is the advisory general director of the Center for Study of Public Choice, George Mason University, and the 1986 recipient of the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Yong J. Yoon is a senior fellow of the Center for Study of Public Choice, George Mason University. Economists are professionally biased in favor of free trade and open markets. Indeed, normative support for open markets is so universal among practicing economists that the logical origins of their positions are often obscured. Observers and sometimes economists themselves may fail to recognize that two categorically different logical arguments inform economists? thinking and that these arguments, these separate ?logics,? may have different consequences for generalized public and political attitudes toward the openness of markets. Globalization, as a catch-all term for movements toward more inclusive trading networks, may be viewed quite differently by persons who, even if vaguely, locate its normative bases differently. Such differences may surface more or less directly as explicit policies for moving toward or away from further globalization become alternatives for choice in democratic polities. For expository purposes, we may label the two logics of trade as Smithean and Ricardian, with reference to the two leading figures of classical political economy, Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Neoclassical economic analysis, which dominated the discipline of economics from 1870 to 1970, was informed during that century by the Ricardian logic before returning partially and somewhat reluctantly to the Smithean logic in the 1980s and later. As the scientific arguments spill over into public and political attitudes, however, the Ricardian logic continues to hold its place, with obvious implications for the public perception of the effects of policy alternatives. Specialization and Exchange The Smithean logic is straightforward. Why do persons trade with one another? They do so because specialization is productive; people can produce more economic value if each person does one thing instead of trying to do everything. Concentration of productive effort on one good followed by exchange for other goods becomes a means of getting more of all goods than can possibly be attained in autarky. Trading is, quite simply, a more efficient means of producing. Note particularly that in this model of exchange people need not differ either in their relative capacities to produce goods or in their preferences for the goods in consumption. Specialization and subsequent trade emerge between the parties because of a recognition that mutual gains are available, that there are increasing returns to be secured from concentrating effort in one activity or the other. Note also that if people do not differ, it is impossible to identify in advance which persons will specialize in which activity involved in the production of which good. Specialization will be observed, but there will be no naturally specialized factors of production. Comparative Advantage The Ricardian logic that explains the origins of trade differs categorically from the Smithean argument just outlined. As noted, Adam Smith?s account of the benefits of specialization explains why exchange will be mutually beneficial even if the trading parties are initially identical in all respects. By contrast, the Ricardian logic locates the origins of exchange in the differences among persons?differences in their capacities to produce separate final goods. If such differences exist, specialization and exchange will always prove mutually beneficial. Trade emerges because different persons (or trading units, including countries) have different comparative advantages in producing different goods. Consider what we might call a pure Ricardian setting in which there are no potential gains from specialization as such, even over small ranges of production. If persons are identical in both their capacities to produce and their preferences, trade produces no benefits. For mutually beneficial trade, persons must be presumed to differ in either productive capacities or preferences. Note the somewhat subtle reversal of the logical sequence in the two stylized settings outlined. In the Smithean setting, exchange emerges because of the advantages of specialization; in the Ricardian setting, specialization and subsequent trade become advantageous because of the inherent differences among potential trading parties. The differences in the constraints in the two models warrant attention. In the Smithean model, as stylized, persons can freely choose their specializations, and because they can do so, equilibrating forces are present to ensure against permanent differentials in rewards. Adam Smith?s familiar deer-beaver illustration is useful here. Because persons may become either deer hunters or beaver hunters, no differential in the net rewards of the two occupations need exist in the natural or long-term equilibrium. By contrast, in the pure Ricardian setting some persons are by nature relatively more adept at hunting deer than at hunting beaver, given any relative demand for the two goods. The net returns from the two occupations may remain different, even in a long-term equilibrium. Generalization Empirically, economic exchange, from its simplest to its most complex forms, is explained by some combination of the two elements emphasized in the contrasting logics we have just outlined. Specialization has inherent advantages, as each of us recognizes in managing our personal affairs. Each of us can produce more economic value by concentrating on one thing than by trying to do a little of everything. But people also differ: each of us presumably has a comparative advantage in one sort of productive activity or another. Each of the two basic arguments or any combination of them can be readily generalized into a normative defense of free trade. The articulation of this defense may be considered a fundamental task of economists, who may rest secure in their conviction that everyone?s well-being is advanced by generalized public acceptance of the elementary principles. Our thesis here is that the relative weights assigned to the quite different Smithean and Ricardian logics, as they are transmitted from economists and ultimately translated into public attitudes, are important factors in determining the level of support for extensions of the trading network, especially as that support?or opposition? comes to be institutionalized in political coalitions in democracies. Specifically, we suggest that an incorporation of the basic Smithean logic generates stronger support for extensions of the market nexus than does a comparable incorporation of the Ricardian logic. Unfortunately, as we later discuss, neoclassical economics tends to assign almost exclusive weight to the Ricardian explanation. Extending the Market In discussions of globalization, the question is not whether or not to engage in trade, but whether or not to allow reciprocal entry and exit opportunities to a larger number of potential traders. In any economy, trade is carried out primarily among persons and groups within a defined polity, and goods and services are produced largely by specialized producers. In the Smithean conception, production takes place under generalized increasing returns but without any natural or inherent differences among persons. How will an increase in the size of the nexus for potential exchange affect market participants? The additional exploitation of specialization will increase the ratio of output value to input value for all participants. Aside from possible transitional adjustments, there are no net losers, and ultimately everyone gains. In the Ricardian conception, the observed preexpansion patterns of production and exchange reflect, in part, the prevailing differences in natural capacities. Differences in the net rewards of workers in separate occupational categories are determined by their relative capacities to produce and by the prevailing patterns of demand for final goods. In this setting, what are the predicted effects of extending the trading nexus? Persons who find it advantageous to enter the now opened market and to offer goods for exchange will resemble some groups of internal or domestic producers more closely than others. Net losers in the process may be those persons who prior to the expansion had relative advantages in the production of goods that after the expansion are offered for importation, even after transitional adjustments, despite the aggregate gains resulting from the enhanced exploitation of comparative advantage. By comparison, those to secure net gains will be persons whose comparative advantage does not lie in the production of importable goods. In their role as consumers, all persons will secure gains, but those gains may be overwhelmed by losses as producers for the groups threatened by imports. The Ricardian logic necessarily draws attention to the differential effects of extending market size on separate groups of specialized producers, a feature that is totally absent from the basic Smithean logic. Economics within Neoclassical Limits The possibly conflicting implications of the two basic logics of trade have not adequately informed the thinking of economists because economists implicitly have been quite willing to add up gains and losses, despite the putative rejection of naive utilitarianism in their normative judgments. Because the gainers from market extensions can, in principle, always overcompensate the losers, the fact that such compensation does not normally occur has not received much attention. Economists might therefore accept and employ the Ricardian explanatory framework without sensing the dramatic difference of normative implications between it and the Smithean framework. Importantly, acceptance of the Ricardian explanatory logic became necessary for economists once the classical intellectual enterprise was replaced by the neoclassical analytical structure, a shift that dates roughly from the 1870s. The presumed lasting contribution of early neoclassical analysis was its success in ?closing the circle,? by which we refer to the incorporation of a theory of distributive shares into the general theory of prices. Neoclassical economics offered a theory of both input prices and output prices. In order to effect this contribution, however, the so-called imputation problem had to be resolved. How were economists to prove that the amount paid for inputs equaled the amount paid for the total product created by those inputs? How were they to explain the absence of either a surplus or a deficit? Economists resolved this problem by imposing the constraint that the market economy was characterized by constant returns to scale, that production functions were everywhere ?linear and homogeneous.? In arriving at this solution, however, they almost universally failed to recognize that the constraint of constant returns conflicted with Adam Smith?s basic precept about specialization. Smith?s principle was placed in the dustbin, to be dredged up only now and again over the course of a century until being recovered in the last decades of the twentieth century. The neoclassical constraint of constant returns forced economists to adopt the Ricardian logic as their basic explanation of trade. In their textbook examples, trade emerges under conditions of comparative advantage even when constant returns are imposed down to the level of individual effort. In other words, there is no inherent conflict between the Ricardian principle of comparative advantage and the neoclassical constraint of constant returns. It is small wonder that economists subconsciously locate the origins of trade in a Ricardian framework. From Markets to Politics Our elaboration of the distinction between the two basic logics of trade might be viewed as an esoteric intellectual exercise if the subject of concern were only the natural emergence and operation of markets. The distinction becomes more significant, however, when we recognize that ultimately the extent of the effective market nexus is determined politically?that is, through explicit collective action. Nation-states exist and draw boundaries. Almost everywhere throughout history, the activities of participants in markets within the boundaries of the polity have been treated differently from the activities of participants in markets that extend beyond political borders. Only in a relatively few instances have markets been opened to all who might choose to enter into trading relationships, regardless of political identity. Because ?the extent of the market? is subject to political choice, questions about its appropriate size are central to present-day discussions of globalization, a term that has become a catchall for a whole set of related issues. We suggest that people?s understandings of the two separate logics of trade may, and perhaps do, exert an important influence on public attitudes and hence on political attitudes toward restrictions or expansions of markets, toward immigration policies, and toward the increasing integration of historically separated national economies, as exemplified by attitudes toward such institutions as the European Union, the North American Free Trade Association, Mercosur, and others. The basic Smithean logic lends more or less direct and more or less universal support for market extension. The central principle of this logic, enunciated by Smith himself, states that the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market, with the implication that the ?wealth of nations? increases directly with the size of the market nexus. Importantly, in this intellectual-analytical structure, no need arises for a measure of gains to gainers as against losses to losers. Basically, there are no permanent losers, and everyone is a gainer. The expanded market nexus makes for further specialization, with generalized gains in economic value. In contrast, the Ricardian logic offers a much more questionable rationale when a polity faces a necessary political choice concerning a proposed extension of the scope of the market. Overall, the gains in aggregate value consequent on a fuller exploitation of comparative advantages may be acknowledged, but identifiable persons and groups may be affected differently by the extension of the market precisely because persons differ among themselves in productive capacities. Persons and groups who possess comparative advantages internally in the production of the same goods in which potential entrants possess comparative advantages may be damaged by the proposed extension of the market. Members of such groups would tend to oppose proposals for integration of markets across national boundaries, and their opposition would influence the formation and impact of political coalitions. Those economists locked implicitly into the Ricardian framework may still be willing to defend the proposed expansion of markets by resort to concealed utilitarian evaluation, even if they acknowledge the improbability of compensation payments. But even such economists will for the most part accept that the defense of ?economic efficiency? in the abstract is a weak reed for political argumentation. The Mind-Set of the Market The Smithean and the Ricardian models offer differing lenses through which we may view the observed processes of market exchanges. The phenomena themselves, of course, are the same, and empirically observed exchange relationships surely embody elements of both explanatory models. Persons specialize (including specialization in the organization of institutions) because specialization as such produces gains. As Adam Smith noted, the differences between the philosopher and the street porter may be small prior to their commitments to a specialty. But persons also differ in their relative capacities to produce economic value. Presumably there exist noncompeting groups that would retain relative advantages even after a full temporal adjustment to reach equilibrium. Only a few persons are seven feet tall and adept at playing basketball. The two contrasting mind-sets about the origins of trade are important in determining how people evaluate the composite reality they observe. Persons will be observed to differ, perhaps widely, in income and wealth. In the stripped-down Smithean model, in which exchange is explained exclusively by choice-driven specialization, people will tend to view the observed differences as temporary and subject to elimination as market prices move toward their ?natural? levels. If philosophers currently earn much more than street porters, we can predict that more persons will begin to specialize in philosophy. Moreover, because the Smitheans? mind-set suggests that street porters indeed can become philosophers, they feel no need to express great concern about the immigration of additional street porters or about the importation of goods that are or might be produced domestically. The Ricardian mind-set, by contrast, leads people to make a quite different evaluation of the observed reality that contains major differences in incomes among persons in differing occupational categories. Ricardians will view those economic differences as more permanent and the forces of adjustment that tend to reduce them as less effective. In particular, as may be the case in the United States, if the opening of markets suggests that more of the types of goods currently produced by relatively unskilled members of the domestic labor force will be imported, political coalitions organized in opposition to market extension will find support among unions and their political representatives. Further, schemes for payments of compensation to those that seem likely to suffer from the opening of markets will command more sympathetic hearings. Thus, the basic mind-set about the origins of exchange may exert important effects on public and political attitudes toward globalization and therefore on the ultimate political choices that may be made. By exclusively following the Ricardian digression, economists have perhaps been responsible for unwittingly making movements toward open markets more difficult than they otherwise would have been. Smitheans, Ricardians, and Democracy Finally, a note about politics and economics in general. The ?open politics? that democrats putatively hold as an attainable ideal depends on the presumption that all persons in the polity are competent to participate fully in collective choices. Democracy, as a plausible ideal, seems much more compatible with the Smithean conception of personal capabilities than with the Ricardian. If our mind-set allows for equality among all persons in their ultimate competencies as citizens, should not our mind-set also allow for equality among all persons in their ultimate competencies as creators of economic value? An Adam Smith ?democrat? is not at all self-contradictory. But what about a David Ricardo ?democrat,? who is forced, willy-nilly, to judge that some of us are more equal than others?1 References Buchanan, James M., and Yong J. Yoon, eds. 1994. The Return to Increasing Returns. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Yang, Xiaokai. 2001. Economics: New Classical versus Neoclassical Frameworks. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1. The argument in this article implicitly incorporates our interpretation of a research program that has emerged since the early 1980s. For a collection of the important contributions to this program, including relevant precursory materials, see Buchanan and Yoon 1994. For the most comprehensive treatment of the approach, see Yang 2001. From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 28 20:03:41 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 28 Aug 2005 16:03:41 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NS: Computer analysis provides Incan string theory Message-ID: Computer analysis provides Incan string theory * 19:00 11 August 2005 * Will Knight Computer analysis reveals that information is collated from some Khipu into high level ones The mystery surrounding a cryptic string-based communication system used by ancient Incan administrators may at last be unravelling, thanks to computer analysis of hundreds of different knotted bundles. The discovery provides a tantalising glimpse of bureaucracy in the Andean empire and may, for the first time, also reveal an Incan word written in string. Woven from cotton, llama or alpaca wool, the mysterious string bundles - known as Khipu - consist of a single strand from which dangle up to thousands of subsidiary strings, each featuring a bewildering array of knots. Of the 600 or so Khipu that have been found, most date from between 1400 AD and 1500 AD. However, a few are thought to be about 1000 years old. Spanish colonial documents suggest that Khipu were in some way used to keep records and communicate messages. Yet how the cords were used to convey useful information has puzzled generations of experts. Now, anthropologist Gary Urton and mathematician Carrie Brezine at Harvard University, Massachusetts, US, think they may have begun unravelling the knotty code. The pair built a searchable database containing key information about Khipu strings, such as the number and position of subsidiary strings and the number and position of knots tied in them. The pair then used this database to search for similarities between 21 Khipus discovered in 1956 at the key Incan administrative base of Puruchuco, near modern day Lima in Peru. Superficial similarities suggested that the Khipu could be connected but the database revealed a crucial mathematical bond - the data represented by subsidiary strands on some of Khipu could be combined to create the strands found on more complex ones. This suggests the Khipu were used to collate information from different parts of the empire, which stretched for more than 5500 kilometres. Brezine used the mathematical software package Mathematica to scour the database for other mathematical links - and found several. "Local accountants would forward information on accomplished tasks upward through the hierarchy, with information at each successive level representing the summation of accounts from the levels below," Urton says. "This communication was used to record the information deemed most important to the state, which often included accounting and other data related to censuses, finances and the military." And Urton and Brezine go a step further. Given that the Puruchuco strings may represent collations of data different regions, they suggest that a characteristic figure-of-eight knot found on all of the 21 Puruchuco strings may represent the place itself. If so, it would be the first word to ever be extracted from an Incan Khipu. Completely deciphering the Khipu may never be possible, Urton says, but further analysis of the Khipu database might reveal other details of life. New archaeological discoveries could also throw up some more surprises, Urton told New Scientist. From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 28 20:03:51 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 28 Aug 2005 16:03:51 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Confounding Machines: How the Future Looked Message-ID: Confounding Machines: How the Future Looked http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/weekinreview/28edid1.html By PETER EDIDIN SMALL children and prescientific peoples, it is said, employ magical thinking to deal with a world they can't understand or control. But magical thinking isn't limited to children or those who are indulgently seen as childlike. In an age of technology, which produces a constant flood of incomprehensible phenomena, such forms of thinking may be an occasional necessity for everyone. In the August issue of Wired, for example, Kevin Kelly celebrates the 10th anniversary of the initial public offering of Netscape stock, which he takes as marking the start of the Internet revolution. The Internet, in Mr. Kelly's evangelical eyes, is alive, overwhelming, sublime and, finally, magical. It has created, he writes, "a new type of thinking - part human and part machine - found nowhere else on the planet or in history." Three thousand years hence, he concludes, historians will say: "The Machine provided ... a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning." One way to look at such a claim - a common one among Internet enthusiasts - is through the writer Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law, from his 1962 book "Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry Into the Limits of the Possible." It states: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." And in fact, Mr. Kelly's reaction has been preceded, over the past 100 years or so, by similar reactions to the introduction of motion pictures, radio and television. Each in turn so astonished those who encountered it that magic - black or white - seemed the only explanation. In fairness to the human mind, each of these technologies was, and is, uncanny. Nineteenth-century audiences gasped when a beam of light conjured an onrushing train into existence, and there was something even weirder about radio, which millions saw as a miracle that plucked sounds and voices out of the "ether." Another common response to technological innovation has been to predict where it will lead, which is also an assertion of control over it. But as the following excerpts show, the crystal balls are almost always cracked. With some startling exceptions, prognosticators are usually dead wrong. This is something worth remembering in the midst of today's revolution - the rise of the Internet and the rapid spread of broadband connections. These technologies have already had a profound effect on everything from presidential elections to the music business to the doctor-patient relationship. How far they will reach and to what extent they will alter the terrain of daily life is anyone's guess, but it's a fair bet most of the guesses made by the growing industry of pundits and consultants will be wide of the mark. [wireless.gif] RADIO 1920 M. J. Caveney, "New Voices in the Wilderness." I am in a log shack in Canada's northland. Only yesterday to be out here was to be out of the world. But no longer. The radiophone has changed all that. Remember where I am and then you can realize how "homey" it is to hear a motherly voice carefully describing in detail just how to make the pie crust more flaky. [armstrong.gif] 1921 Velimir Khlebnikov, Russian poet, "The Radio of the Future." The Radio of the Future - the central tree of our consciousness - will inaugurate the new ways to cope with our endless undertakings and will unite all mankind. The main radio station, that stronghold of steel, where clouds of wires cluster like strands of hair, will surely be protected by a sign with a skull and crossbones and the familiar word "Danger," since the least disruption of radio operations would produce a mental blackout over the entire country, a temporary loss of consciousness. 1922 Bruce Bliven, "The Ether Will Now Oblige," in The New Republic. There will be only one orchestra left on earth, giving nightly worldwide concerts; when all universities will be combined into one super-institution, conducting courses by radio for students in Zanzibar, Kamchatka and Oskaloose; when, instead of newspapers, trained orators will dictate the news of the world day and night, and the bedtime story will be told every evening from Paris to the sleepy children of a weary world; when every person will be instantly accessible day or night to all the bores he knows, and will know them all: when the last vestiges of privacy, solitude and contemplation will have vanished into limbo. [theremin4.gif] 1923 J. M. McKibben, "New Way to Make Americans." Today this nation of ours is slowly but surely being conquered, not by a single enemy in open warfare, but by a dozen insidious (though often unconscious) enemies in peace. Millions of foreigners were received into the country, with little or no thought given to their assimilation. But now the crisis is upon us; and we must face it without a great leader. Perhaps no man could mold the 120 million people in a harmonious whole, bound together by a strong national consciousness: but in the place of a superhuman individual, the genius of the last decade has provided a force - and that force is radio. [radio.gif] 1924 Waldemar Kaempffert, "The Social Destiny of Radio." It so happens that the United States and Great Britain have taken the lead in broadcasting. If that lead is maintained it follows that English must become the dominant tongue. Compared with our efforts at mass entertainment and mass education, European competition is pathetic. All ears may eventually be cocked to hear what the United States and Great Britain have to say. Europe will find it desirable, even necessary, to learn English. 1928 The New York Times on how radio might affect voters. It is believed that brief pithy statements as to the positions of the parties and candidates, which reach the emotions through the minds of millions of radio listeners, will play an important part in the race to the White House. 1930 Martin Codel, "Radio and Its Future." That anything man can imagine he can do in the ethereal realm of radio will probably be an actual accomplishment some day. Perhaps radio, or something akin to radio, will one day give us mortals telepathic or occult senses! [edison.gif] FILM 1895 A journalist in Paris after viewing the premiere of Louis Lumi?re's films. Photography has ceased to record immobility. It perpetuates the image of movement. When these gadgets are in the hands of the public, when anyone can photograph the ones who are dear to them, not just in their immobile form, but with movement, action, familiar gestures and the words out of their mouths, then death will no longer be absolute, final. [kinemat2.gif] 1896 The projectionist of the first Lumi?re screening in New York. You had to have lived these moments of collective exaltation, have attended these thrilling screenings in order to understand just how far the excitement of the crowd could go. With the flick of a switch, I plunge several thousand spectators into darkness. Each scene passes, accompanied by tempestuous applause; after the sixth scene, I return the hall to light. The audience is shaking. Cries ring out. Maxim Gorky, on seeing the Lumi?re Cin?matographe in Nizhny Novgorod. Last evening, I was in the Kingdom of the Shadows. If one could only convey the strangeness of this world. A world without color and sound. Everything here- the earth, water, and air, the trees, the people-everything is mad of a monotone gray. Gray rays of sunlight in a gray sky, gray eyes in a gray face, leaves as gray as cider. Not life, but the shadow of life. Not life's movement, but a sort of mute specter. Their movements are full of vital energy and so rapid that you scarcely see them, but their smiles have nothing of life in them. You see their facial muscles contract but their laugh cannot be heard. A life is born before you, a life deprived of sound and the specter of color - a gray and noiseless life - a wan and cut-rate life. 1913 A Universal Studio advertisement at the creation of Hollywood's star system. What is the earthly use of showing pictures posed by amateurs and unknowns when you can get the very best known stars of the screen by using that Universal program? ... The photograph of any star on this wonderful list if displayed in your lobby with the words "Here Today" is positively bound to boost your receipts. [griffith.gif] 1915 The New York Times, from an interview with D. W. Griffith. The time will come, and in less than 10 years, when the children in the public schools will be taught practically everything by moving pictures. Certainly they will never be obliged to read history again. Imagine a public library of the near future, for instance. There will be long rows of boxes of pillars, properly classified and indexed, of course. At each box a push button and before each box a seat. Suppose you wish to "read up" on a certain episode in Napoleon's life. Instead of consulting all the authorities, wading laboriously through a host of books, and ending bewildered, without a clear idea of exactly what did happen and confused at every point by conflicting opinions about what did happen, you will merely seat yourself at a properly adjusted window, in a scientifically prepared room, press the button, and actually see what happened. [valentino2.gif] 1921 James Quirk, Photoplay magazine We talk of the worth, the service, the entertaining power, the community value, the recreative force, the educational influence, the civilizing and commercial possibilities of the motion picture. And everyone has, singularly enough, neglected to mention its rarest and subtlest beauty: "Silence." [farnsworth.gif] TELEVISION 1925 The reaction of a London schoolgirl after watching a demonstration of television. And then we all clapped politely because we were all rather frightened of television. I think the trouble was that we believed that, if they could make this film, they could see into our houses. We could see them; they could see us. [roundtv.gif] 1936 Rex Lambert in "The Listener." Television won't matter in your lifetime or mine. J.C. Furnas , "The Next Hundred Years." It is my hope, and I see no reason why it should not be realized, to be able to go to an ordinary movie theater when some great national event is taking place across the country and see on the screen the sharp image of the action reproduced - at the same instant it occurs. This waiting for the newsreels to come out is a bit tiresome for the 20th century. Some time later I hope to be able to take my inaugurals, prize fights and football games at home. I expect to do it satisfactorily and cheaply. Only under those conditions can a television get into my house. [sarnoff.gif] 1939 David Sarnoff, the chairman of RCA, at the televised opening of the RCA Pavilion at the World's Fair in New York. Now we add sight to sound. It is with a feeling of humbleness that I come to this moment of announcing the birth, in this country, of a new art so important in its implications that it is bound to affect all society. It is an art which shines like a torch in a troubled world. New York Times editorial The problem with television is that people must sit and keep their eyes glued to the screen; the average American family hasn't time for it. Therefore the showmen are convinced that for this reason, if no other, television will never be a serious competitor of broadcasting. [tvs.gif] 1946 Thomas Hutchinson, "Here is Television: Your Window on the World." Television means the world is your home and in the homes of all the people of the world. It is the greatest means of communication ever developed by the mind of man. It should do more to develop friendly neighbors, and to bring understanding and peace on earth, than any other single material force in the world today. Samuel Cuff, general manager of WABD in New York. There are certain people who have maintained that the American housewife would turn television on early in the morning just as she does the radio, and leave it on through the day and most of the night. That, of course, is hardly so, because the benefits of television can be derived only when you are looking at it directly and not doing anything else. The housewife will not very long remains a housewife who attempts to watch television programs all afternoon and evening instead of cooking or darning socks. 1963 T.S. Eliot It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome. Sources Radio: Radio Voices, by Michele Hilmes (1997, Minnesota University Press) ; The King of Time, by Velimir Khlebnikov, edited by Charlotte Douglas (1985, Harvard University Press); New Media and Popular Imagination, by William Boddy (Oxford University Press, 2004); Radio Lessons for the Internet by Martin Spinelli, in Postmodern Culture, January 1996. Television: Television: A History, by Francis Wheen (Century, 1985); The New York Public Library Book of 20th Century American Quotations (Wiley, 1992); A Pictorial History of Television, by Irving Settel and William Laas (Grosset & Dunlap, 1969); A Godlike Presence: The Impact of Radio on the 1920s and 1930s, by Tom Lewis. (OAH Magazine of History 6, Spring 1992); Here Is Television: Your Window on the World (Hastings House, 1946); The New York Post (Sept 22, 1963). Film: Birth of the Motion Picture, by Emmanuelle Toulet (Abrams, 1995); Kino: A History of Russian and Soviet Film, by Jay Leyda (Princeton University Press, 1983) ; From Peepshow to Palace: The Birth of American Film, by David Robinson (Columbia University Press, 1995); The Parades Gone By, by Kevin Brownlow (Knopf, 1968) From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 28 20:04:13 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 28 Aug 2005 16:04:13 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] New Yorker: Jim Holt: Say Anything: Three books find truth under cultural and conceptual assault. Message-ID: Jim Holt: Say Anything: Three books find truth under cultural and conceptual assault. http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/050822crat_atlarge Issue of 2005-08-22 Posted 2005-08-15 People have been talking bull, denying that they were talking bull, and accusing others of talking bull for ages. "Dumbe Speaker! that's a Bull," a character in a seventeenth-century English play says. "It is no Bull, to speak of a common Peace, in the place of War," a statesman from the same era declares. The word "bull," used to characterize discourse, is of uncertain origin. One venerable conjecture was that it began as a contemptuous reference to papal edicts known as bulls (from the bulla, or seal, appended to the document). Another linked it to the famously nonsensical Obadiah Bull, an Irish lawyer in London during the reign of Henry VII. It was only in the twentieth century that the use of "bull" to mean pretentious, deceitful, jejune language became semantically attached to the male of the bovine species--or, more particularly, to the excrement therefrom. Today, it is generally, albeit erroneously, thought to have arisen as a euphemistic shortening of "bullshit," a term that came into currency, dictionaries tell us, around 1915. If "bullshit," as opposed to "bull," is a distinctively modern linguistic innovation, that could have something to do with other distinctively modern things, like advertising, public relations, political propaganda, and schools of education. "One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit," Harry G. Frankfurt, a distinguished moral philosopher who is professor emeritus at Princeton, says. The ubiquity of bullshit, he notes, is something that we have come to take for granted. Most of us are pretty confident of our ability to detect it, so we may not regard it as being all that harmful. We tend to take a more benign view of someone caught bullshitting than of someone caught lying. ("Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through," a father counsels his son in an Eric Ambler novel.) All of this worries Frankfurt. We cannot really know the effect that bullshit has on us, he thinks, until we have a clearer understanding of what it is. That is why we need a theory of bullshit. Frankfurt's own effort along these lines was contained in a paper that he presented two decades ago at a faculty seminar at Yale. Later, that paper appeared in a journal, and then in a collection of Frankfurt's writings; all the while, photocopies of it passed from fan to fan. Earlier this year, it was published as "On Bullshit" (Princeton; $9.95), a tiny book of sixty-seven spaciously printed pages that has gone on to become an improbable best-seller. Philosophers have a vocational bent for trying to divine the essences of things that most people never suspected had an essence, and bullshit is a case in point. Could there really be some property that all instances of bullshit possess and all non-instances lack? The question might sound ludicrous, but it is, at least in form, no different from one that philosophers ask about truth. Among the most divisive issues in philosophy today is whether there is anything important to be said about the essential nature of truth. Bullshit, by contrast, might seem to be a mere bagatelle. Yet there are parallels between the two which lead to the same perplexities. Where do you start if you are an academic philosopher in search of the quiddity of bullshit? "So far as I am aware," Frankfurt dryly observes, "very little work has been done on this subject." He did find an earlier philosopher's attempt to analyze a similar concept under a more genteel name: humbug. Humbug, that philosopher decided, was a pretentious bit of misrepresentation that fell short of lying. (A politician talking about the importance of his religious faith comes to mind.) Frankfurt was not entirely happy with this definition. The difference between lies and bullshit, it seemed to him, was more than a matter of degree. To push the analysis in a new direction, he considers a rather peculiar anecdote about the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. It was the nineteen-thirties, and Wittgenstein had gone to the hospital to visit a friend whose tonsils had just been taken out. She croaked to Wittgenstein, "I feel just like a dog that has been run over." Wittgenstein (the friend recalled) was disgusted to hear her say this. "You don't know what a dog that has been run over feels like," he snapped. Of course, Wittgenstein might simply have been joking. But Frankfurt suspects that his severity was real, not feigned. This was, after all, a man who devoted his life to combatting what he considered to be pernicious forms of nonsense. What Wittgenstein found offensive in his friend's simile, Frankfurt guesses, was its mindlessness: "Her fault is not that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even trying." The essence of bullshit, Frankfurt decides, is that it is produced without any concern for the truth. Bullshit needn't be false: "The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong." The bullshitter's fakery consists not in misrepresenting a state of affairs but in concealing his own indifference to the truth of what he says. The liar, by contrast, is concerned with the truth, in a perverse sort of fashion: he wants to lead us away from it. As Frankfurt sees it, the liar and the truthteller are playing on opposite sides of the same game, a game defined by the authority of truth. The bullshitter opts out of this game altogether. Unlike the liar and the truthteller, he is not guided in what he says by his beliefs about the way things are. And that, Frankfurt says, is what makes bullshit so dangerous: it unfits a person for telling the truth. Frankfurt's account of bullshit is doubly remarkable. Not only does he define it in a novel way that distinguishes it from lying; he also uses this definition to establish a powerful claim: "Bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are." If this is true, we ought to be tougher on someone caught bullshitting than we are on someone caught lying. Unlike the bullshitter, the liar at least cares about the truth. But isn't this account a little too flattering to the liar? In theory, of course, there could be liars who are motivated by sheer love of deception. This type was identified by St. Augustine in his treatise "On Lying." Someone who tells a lie as a means to some other goal tells it "unwillingly," Augustine says. The pure liar, by contrast, "takes delight in lying, rejoicing in the falsehood itself." But such liars are exceedingly rare, as Frankfurt concedes. Not even Iago had that purity of heart. Ordinary tellers of lies simply aren't principled adversaries of the truth. Suppose an unscrupulous used-car salesman is showing you a car. He tells you that it was owned by a little old lady who drove it only on Sundays. The engine's in great shape, he says, and it runs beautifully. Now, if he knows all this to be false, he's a liar. But is his goal to get you to believe the opposite of the truth? No, it's to get you to buy the car. If the things he was saying happened to be true, he'd still say them. He'd say them even if he had no idea who the car's previous owner was or what condition the engine was in. Frankfurt would say that this used-car salesman is a liar only by accident. Even if he happens to know the truth, he decides what he's going to say without caring what it is. But then surely almost every liar is, at heart, a bullshitter. Both the liar and the bullshitter typically have a goal. It may be to sell a product, to get votes, to keep a spouse from walking out of a marriage in the wake of embarrassing revelations, to make someone feel good about himself, to mislead Nazis who are looking for Jews. The alliance the liar strikes with untruth is one of convenience, to be abandoned the moment it ceases to serve this goal. The porousness of Frankfurt's theoretical boundary between lies and bullshit is apparent in Laura Penny's "Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit" (Crown; $21.95). The author, a young Canadian college teacher and former union organizer, begins by saluting Frankfurt's "subtle and useful" distinction: "The liar still cares about the truth. The bullshitter is unburdened by such concerns." She then proceeds to apply the term "bullshit" to every kind of trickery by which powerful, moneyed interests attempt to gull the public. "Most of what passes for news," Penny submits, "is bullshit"; so is the language employed by lawyers and insurance men; so is the use of rock songs in ads. She even stretches the rubric to apply to things as well as to words: "The new product that will change your life is probably just more cheap, plastic bullshit," she writes. At times, despite her nod to Frankfurt, Penny appears to equate bullshit with deliberate deceit: "Never in the history of mankind have so many people uttered statements they know to be untrue." But then she says that George W. Bush ("a world-historical bullshitter") and his circle "distinguish themselves by believing their own bullshit," which suggests that they themselves are deluded. Frankfurt concedes that in popular usage "bullshit" is employed as a "generic term of abuse, with no very specific literal meaning." What he wanted to do, he says, was to get to the essence of the thing in question. But does bullshit have a single essence? In a paper published a few years ago, "Deeper Into Bullshit," G. A. Cohen, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, protested that Frankfurt excludes an entire category of bullshit: the kind that appears in academic works. If the bullshit of ordinary life arises from indifference to truth, Cohen says, the bullshit of the academy arises from indifference to meaning. It may be perfectly sincere, but it is nevertheless nonsensical. Cohen, a specialist in Marxism, complains of having been grossly victimized by this kind of bullshit as a young man back in the nineteen-sixties, when he did a lot of reading in the French school of Marxism inspired by Louis Althusser. So traumatized was he by his struggle to make some sense of these defiantly obscure texts that he went on to found, at the end of the nineteen-seventies, a Marxist discussion group that took as its motto Marxismus sine stercore tauri--"Marxism without the shit of the bull." Anyone familiar with the varieties of "theory" that have made their way from the Left Bank of Paris into American English departments will be able to multiply examples of the higher bullshit ad libitum. A few years ago, the physicist Alan Sokal concocted a deliberately meaningless parody under the title "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," and then got it accepted as a serious contribution to the journal Social Text. It would, of course, be hasty to dismiss all unclear discourse as bullshit. Cohen adduces a more precise criterion: the discourse must be not only unclear but unclarifiable. That is, bullshit is the obscure that cannot be rendered unobscure. How would one defend philosophers like Hegel or Heidegger from the charge that their writings are bullshit? Not, Cohen says, by showing that they cared about the truth (which would be enough to get them off the hook if they were charged with being bullshitters under Frankfurt's definition). Rather, one would try to show that their writings actually made some sense. And how could one prove the opposite: that a given statement is hopelessly unclear, and hence bullshit? One proposed test is to add a "not" to the statement and see if that makes any difference to its plausibility. If it doesn't, that statement is bullshit. As it happens, Heidegger once came very close to doing this himself. In the fourth edition of his treatise "What Is Metaphysics?" (1943), he asserted, "Being can indeed be without beings." In the fifth edition (1949), this sentence became "Being never is without beings." Frankfurt acknowledges the higher bullshit as a distinctive variety, but he doesn't think it's very dangerous compared with the sort of bullshit that he is concerned about. While genuinely meaningless discourse may be "infuriating," he says, it is unlikely to be taken seriously for long, even in the academic world. The sort of bullshit that involves indifference to veracity is far more insidious, Frankfurt claims, since the "conduct of civilized life, and the vitality of the institutions that are indispensable to it, depend very fundamentally on respect for the distinction between the true and the false." How evil is the bullshitter? That depends on how valuable truthfulness is. When Frankfurt observes that truthfulness is crucial in maintaining the sense of trust on which social co?peration depends, he's appealing to truth's instrumental value. Whether it has any value in itself, however, is a separate question. To take an analogy, suppose a well-functioning society depends on the belief in God, whether or not God actually exists. Someone of subversive inclinations might question the existence of God without worrying too much about the effect that might have on public morals. And the same attitude is possible toward truth. As the philosopher Bernard Williams observed in a book published in 2002, not long before his death, a suspicion of truth has been a prominent current in modern thought. It was something that Williams found lamentable. "If you do not really believe in the existence of truth," he asked, "what is the passion for truthfulness a passion for?" The idea of questioning the existence of truth might seem bizarre. No sane person doubts that the distinction between true and false is sharp enough when it comes to statements like "Saddam had W.M.D.s" or "The cat is on the mat." But when it comes to more interesting propositions-assertions of right and wrong, judgments of beauty, grand historical narratives, talk about possibilities, scientific statements about unobservable entities--the objectivity of truth becomes harder to defend. "Deniers" of truth (as Williams called them) insist that each of us is trapped in his own point of view; we make up stories about the world and, in an exercise of power, try to impose them on others. The battle lines between deniers and defenders of absolute truth are strangely drawn. On the pro-truth side, one finds Pope Benedict XVI, who knows that moral truths correspond to divine commands and rails against what he calls the "dictatorship of relativism." On the "anything goes" side, one finds the member of the Bush Administration who mocked the idea of objective evidence by declaring, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." Among philosophers, Continental poststructuralists like Bruno Latour, Jean Baudrillard, and the late Jacques Derrida tend to be arrayed on the anti-truth side. One might expect their hardheaded counterparts in Britain and the United States--practitioners of what is called analytical philosophy--to be firmly in the pro-truth camp. And yet, as Simon Blackburn observes in "Truth: A Guide" (Oxford; $25), the "brand-name" Anglophone philosophers of the past fifty years--Wittgenstein, W. V. Quine, Thomas Kuhn, Donald Davidson, Richard Rorty--have developed powerful arguments that seem to undermine the commonsense notion of truth as agreement with reality. Indeed, Blackburn says, "almost all the trends in the last generation of serious philosophy lent aid and comfort to the 'anything goes' climate"--the very climate that, Harry Frankfurt argued, has encouraged the proliferation of bullshit. Blackburn, who is himself a professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, wants to rally the pro-truth forces. But he is also concerned to give the other side its due. In "Truth," he scrupulously considers the many forms that the case against truth has taken, going back as far as the ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras, whose famous saying "Man is the measure of all things" was seized upon by Socrates as an expression of dangerous relativism. In its simplest form, relativism is easy to refute. Take the version of it that Richard Rorty, a philosopher who teaches at Stanford, once lightheartedly offered: "Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with." The problem is that contemporary Americans and Europeans won't let you get away with that characterization of truth; so, by its own standard, it cannot be true. (The late Sidney Morgenbesser's gripe about pragmatism--which, broadly speaking, equates truth with usefulness--was in the same spirit: "The trouble with pragmatism is that it's completely useless.") Then, there is the often heard complaint that the whole truth will always elude us. Fair enough, Blackburn says, but partial truths can still be perfectly objective. He quotes Clemenceau's riposte to skeptics who asked what future historians would say about the First World War: "They will not say that Belgium invaded Germany." If relativism needed a bumper-sticker slogan, it would be Nietzsche's dictum "There are no facts, only interpretations." Nietzsche was inclined to write as if truth were manufactured rather than discovered, a matter of manipulating others into sharing our beliefs rather than getting those beliefs to "agree with reality." In another of his formulations, "Truths are illusions that we have forgotten are illusions." If that's the case, then it is hard to regard the bullshitter, who does not care about truth, as all that villainous. Perhaps, to paraphrase Nietzsche, truth is merely bullshit that has lost its stench. Blackburn has ambivalent feelings about Nietzsche, who, were it not for his "extraordinary acuteness," would qualify as "the pub bore of philosophy." Yet, he observes, at the moment Nietzsche is the most influential of the great philosophers, not to mention the "patron saint of postmodernism," so he must be grappled with. One of Nietzsche's more notorious doctrines is perspectivism-the idea that we are condemned to see the world from a partial and distorted perspective, one defined by our interests and values. Whether this doctrine led Nietzsche to a denial of truth is debatable: in his mature writings, at least, his scorn is directed at the idea of metaphysical truth, not at the scientific and historical varieties. Nevertheless, Blackburn accuses Nietzsche of sloppy thinking. There is no reason, he says, to assume that we are forever trapped in a single perspective, or that different perspectives cannot be ranked according to accuracy. And, if we can move from one perspective to another, what is to prevent us from conjoining our partial views into a reasonably objective picture of the world? Today, Richard Rorty is probably the most prominent "truth-denier" in the academy. What makes him so formidable is the clarity and eloquence of his case against truth and, by implication, against the Western philosophical tradition. Our minds do not "mirror" the world, he says. The idea that we could somehow stand outside our own skins and survey the relationship between our thoughts and reality is a delusion. Language is an adaptation, and the words we use are tools. There are many competing vocabularies for talking about the world, some more useful than others, given human needs and interests. None of them, however, correspond to the Way Things Really Are. Inquiry is a process of reaching a consensus on the best way of coping with the world, and "truth" is just a compliment we pay to the result. Rorty is fond of quoting the American pragmatist John Dewey to the effect that the search for truth is merely part of the search for happiness. He also likes to cite Nietzsche's observation that truth is a surrogate for God. Asking of someone, "Does he love the truth?," Rorty thinks, is like asking, "Is he saved?" In our moral reasoning, he says, we no longer worry about whether our conclusions correspond to the divine will; so in the rest of our inquiry we ought to stop worrying about whether our conclusions correspond to a mind-independent reality. Do Rorty's arguments offer aid and comfort to bullshitters? Blackburn thinks so. Creating a consensus among their peers is something that hardworking laboratory scientists try to do. But it is also what creationists and Holocaust deniers do. Rorty insists that, even though the distinction between truth and consensus is untenable, we can distinguish between "frivolous" and "serious." Some people are "serious, decent, and trustworthy"; others are "unconversable, incurious, and self-absorbed." Blackburn thinks that the only way to make this distinction is by reference to the truth: serious people care about it, whereas frivolous people do not. Yet there is another possibility that can be extrapolated from Rorty's writings: serious people care not only about producing agreement but also about justifying their methods for producing agreement. (This is, for example, something that astronomists do but astrologers don't.) That, and not an allegiance to some transcendental notion of truth, is the Rortian criterion that distinguishes serious inquirers from bullshitters. Pragmatists and perspectivists are not the only enemies Blackburn considers, though, and much of his book is taken up with contemporary arguments turning on subversive-sounding expressions like "holism," "incommensurability," and the "Myth of the Given." Take the last of these. Our knowledge of the world, it seems reasonable to suppose, is founded on causal interactions between us and the things in it. The molecules and photons impinging on our bodies produce sensations; these sensations give rise to basic beliefs--like "I am seeing red now"--which serve as evidence for higher-level propositions about the world. The tricky part of this scheme is the connection between sensation and belief. As William James wrote, "A sensation is rather like a client who has given his case to a lawyer and then has passively to listen in the courtroom to whatever account of his affairs, pleasant or unpleasant, the lawyer finds it most expedient to give." The idea that a sensation can enter directly into the process of reasoning has become known as the Myth of the Given. The late philosopher Donald Davidson, whose influence in the Anglophone philosophical world was unsurpassed, put the point succinctly: "Nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief." This line of thought, as Blackburn observes, threatens to cut off all contact between knowledge and the world. If beliefs can be checked only against other beliefs, then the sole criterion for a set of beliefs' being true is that they form a coherent web: a picture of knowledge known as holism. And different people interacting with the causal flux that is the world might well find themselves with distinct but equally coherent webs of belief--a possibility known as incommensurability. In such circumstances, who is to say what is truth and what is bullshit? But Blackburn will have none of this. The slogan "Nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief" can't be right, he claims. After all, if "John comes in and gets a good doggy whiff, he acquires a reason for believing that Rover is in the house. If Mary looks in the fridge and sees the butter, she acquires a reason for believing that there is butter in the fridge." Not so fast, a Davidsonian might reply. Sensations do not come labelled as "doggy whiffs" or "butter sighting"; such descriptions imply a good deal of prior concept formation. What gives John a reason to believe that Rover is in the house is indeed another belief: that what he is smelling falls under the category of "doggy whiff." Blackburn is obviously right in maintaining that such beliefs arise from causal interaction with the world, and not just from voices in our heads. But justifying those beliefs--determining whether we are doing well or badly in forming them--can be a matter only of squaring them with other beliefs. Derrida was not entirely bullshitting when he said, "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte" ("There is nothing outside the text"). Although Blackburn concludes that objective truth can and must survive the assaults of its critics, he himself has been forced to diminish that which he would defend. He and his allies, one might think, should be willing to give some sort of answer to the question that "jesting Pilate" put to Jesus: What is truth? The most obvious answer, that truth is correspondence to the facts, founders on the difficulty of saying just what form this "correspondence" is supposed to take, and what "facts" could possibly be other than truths themselves. Indeed, about the only thing that everyone can agree on is that each statement supplies its own conditions for being true. The statement "Snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white; the statement "The death penalty is wrong" is true if and only if the death penalty is wrong; and so forth. As far as Blackburn is concerned, any attempt to go beyond this simple observation by trying to mount a general theory of what makes things true or false is wrongheaded. That makes him, to use his own term, a "minimalist" about truth. By reducing truth to something "small and modest," Blackburn hopes to induce its enemies to call off their siege. The problem with this strategy is that it leaves us with little to care about. If truth necessarily eludes our theoretical grasp, then how do we know that it has any value, let alone that it is an absolute good? Why should we worry about whether our beliefs deserve to be called "true"? Deep down, we might prefer to believe whatever helps us achieve our ends and enables us to flourish, regardless of whether it is true. We may be happier believing in God even if there is no God. We may be happier thinking that we are really good at what we do even if that is a delusion. (The people with the truest understanding of their own abilities, research suggests, tend to be depressives.) However one feels about the authority of truth, there is a separate reason for deploring bullshit; namely, that most bullshit is ugly. When it takes the form of political propaganda, management-speak, or P.R., it is riddled with euphemism, clich?, fake folksiness, and high-sounding abstractions. The aesthetic dimension of bullshit is largely ignored in Frankfurt's essay. Yet much of what we call poetry consists of trite or false ideas in sublime language. (Oscar Wilde, in his dialogue "The Decay of Lying," suggests that the proper aim of art is "the telling of beautiful untrue things.") Bullshitting can involve an element of artistry; it offers, as Frankfurt acknowledges, opportunities for "improvisation, color, and imaginative play." When the bullshitting is done from an ulterior motive, like the selling of a product or the manipulation of an electorate, the outcome is likely to be a ghastly abuse of language. When it is done for its own sake, however, something delightful just might result. The paradigm here is Falstaff, whose refusal to be enslaved by the authority of truth is central to his comic genius. Falstaff's merry mixture of philosophy and bullshit is what makes him such a clubbable man, far better company than the dour Wittgenstein. We should by all means be severe in dealing with bullshitters of the political, the commercial, and the academic varieties. But let's not banish plump Jack. From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 28 20:04:39 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 28 Aug 2005 16:04:39 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: A Doll That Can Recognize Voices, Identify Objects and Show Emotion Message-ID: A Doll That Can Recognize Voices, Identify Objects and Show Emotion http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/25/technology/circuits/25doll.html By [3]MICHEL MARRIOTT Judy Shackelford, who has been in the toy industry for more than 40 years, has seen a lot of dolls. But none, she says, like her latest creation, a marvel of digital technologies, including speech-recognition and memory chips, radio frequency tags and scanners, and facial robotics. She and her team have christened it Amazing Amanda. "The toy industry is sort of like 'MacGyver,' " Ms. Shackelford said, invoking the problem-solving 1980's television hero. "You're always doing workarounds, figuring out how to rearrange the old in some new way to create something new. And you've got to do it for nickels and dimes and quarters." She then turned to the doll seated on her lap. "Hi, honey," Ms. Shackelford said gently to Amazing Amanda, a blond, blue-eyed figure bearing more than a remote likeness to its creator. "Hello, my name is Amanda," the doll replied as Ms. Shackelford smiled warmly at its rosy face. "We're going to have the best time together," the doll promised. Amazing Amanda, scheduled for release next month by Playmates Toys, is expected to cost $99, said Ms. Shackelford, the chief executive of J. Shackelford & Associates, a product and marketing company in Moorpark, Calif., that specializes in toys and children's entertainment. At that price, the same as Apple's entry-level [4]iPod Shuffle digital music player, the 18-inch-tall doll promises - right on the box it will be sold in - to "listen, speak and show emotion." Some analysts and buyers who have seen Amanda say it represents an evolutionary leap from earlier talking dolls like Chatty Cathy of the 1960's, a doll that cycled through a collection of recorded phrases when a child pulled a cord in its back. Radio frequency tags in Amanda's accessories - including toy food, potty and clothing - wirelessly inform the doll of what it is interacting with. For instance, if the doll asks for a spoon of peas and it is given its plastic cookie, it will gently admonish its caregiver, telling her that a cookie is not peas. While $99 is a premium price for a doll, it is only about $10 more than the price of the popular American Girl dolls. And, Ms. Shackelford said, Amanda may prove that girls as well as boys can embrace technology in their toys. While video games and interactive robots, like Wow Wee's Robosapien, have long been successful in capturing the imaginations and buying power of preteenage and adolescent boys, a different assumption has been made about what girls want, analysts say. Part of the popularity of low-tech dolls like [5]Mattel's Chatty Cathy and Barbie, and more recent additions like Bratz (from MGA Entertainment) and the American Girl dolls (a line acquired by Mattel), has been that they allowed young girls to use their imagination, said David Riley, a senior manager at the NPD Group, a market research firm. "I think girls have more active imaginations than boys do when it comes to play," Mr. Riley noted. "If girls have a button on their doll and can feel an engine inside it, that takes away from their ability to imagine." He said that from what he knows of Amazing Amanda, Ms. Shackelford and her company appear to have overcome such problems, noting that Amanda appears to be more doll than robot. Mr. Riley added that the $20 billion toy industry has faltered in recent years as children's tastes and styles of play have changed. Toy spending has been widely seen as migrating to consumer electronics. Children are increasingly craving devices their parents want, many analysts say, like cellphones, digital cameras and portable digital music players. One way to counter that trend, Ms. Shackelford said, is a meaningful integration of advanced technologies into traditional toys, like dolls. "You've got to get out of the mind dodge," she said. "You have to push the envelope." Ms. Shackelford has been testing limits since she joined Mattel in 1976 as manager of preschool marketing. Three years later she became the highest-ranking woman in the American toy industry when she was named a Mattel vice president, the first woman to reach that rank. Credited with reviving the Barbie line of dolls and toys in the late 1970's, she left Mattel in 1986 to establish her own company. There, Ms. Shackelford created a series of doll lines, including other Amazing dolls - Amy, Ally, Maddie, Ashley and Baby - that all incorporated electronics so they could virtually "know" things like when to wake up, and a child's birthday and favorite holidays. And now she is trying a new frontier with Amazing Amanda, convinced that it will stoke a girl's imagination, not take its place. One prerelease model of Amazing Amanda, once it was activated (by flipping the toy's only visible switch hidden high on its back and beneath its clothing), woke with a yawn, slowly opened its eyes and started asking questions in a cutesy, almost cartoonlike girl's voice. What the doll is actually doing, Ms. Shackelford said, is "voice printing" the primary user's voice pattern. By asking a child to repeat "Amanda" several times, the doll quickly comes to recognize and store in its electronic memory that child's voice, and only that child's voice, as its "mommy." Other voices are greeted with Amanda's cautionary proclamation, "You don't sound like Mommy." In all, Ms. Shackelford said, the doll is equipped for almost an hour of speech that includes various questions, programmed responses, requests, songs and games. And as Amanda speaks, the doll's soft-plastic lips move and its face, using Disney-like animatronics, help to suggest expressions. For instance, when Amazing Amanda plays a game called funny face, she asks if you would like to see a happy face or a sad one. If you answer "funny face," the doll's eyes brighten and she looks as if she is smiling. If Amanda is asked to make a sad one, her lower lip protrudes as her lids lower. She might even ask if you would like to see her cry, responding to "yes" or "no." "The speech-recognition chip running in Amazing Amanda acts not only as speech recognition, but also allows her to talk," said Todd Mozer, chief executive of Sensory, a speech-technology company in Santa Clara, Calif., that developed the chip used in the doll. He noted that the technology could interpret a range of languages and dialects. Sensory executives said that was vitally important to Ms. Shackelford, whose new doll is one of the first products to use the new speech chip. Ms. Shackelford said the chip's multidialect capacities are important for her doll, which is being manufactured in China to be sold to English-speaking markets around the world. The chip, explained Adam Anderson, one of the lead project managers, carries additional dialect references gleaned from children's voices recorded in England, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. And by asking children to repeat words like "pizza," the doll can lock in specific dialects, "remember" and respond accordingly, Mr. Anderson said. Some 150 pages of logic programmed into Amanda help guide children through activities as if journeying through verbal mazes, Ms. Shackelford said. "The idea that a child can be led through play, that it can be done intuitively, is so important to me," she said, adding that her doll's sophisticated technologies must be invisible. "We don't want to make kids scared of technology," said Ms. Shackelford, who says she is in her mid-60's and has no children of her own. "You have a baby doll that is supposed to make a little girl feel like the doll loves her. Girls tell dolls all the time that they love them. "This doll," Ms. Shackelford said, "acts like she loves you." References 3. http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=MICHEL%20MARRIOTT&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=MICHEL%20MARRIOTT&inline=nyt-per 4. http://tech2.nytimes.com/gst/technology/techsearch.html?st=p&cat=&query=ipod&inline=nyt-classifier 5. http://www.nytimes.com/redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=MAT From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 28 20:06:03 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 28 Aug 2005 16:06:03 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Commentary: Charles Murray: The Inequality Taboo Message-ID: Charles Murray: The Inequality Taboo http://www.commentarymagazine.com/production/files/murray0905.html September 2005 When the late Richard Herrnstein and I published The Bell Curve eleven years ago, the furor over its discussion of ethnic differences in IQ was so intense that most people who have not read the book still think it was about race. Since then, I have deliberately not published anything about group differences in IQ, mostly to give the real topic of The Bell Curve-the role of intelligence in reshaping America's class structure-a chance to surface. The Lawrence Summers affair last January made me rethink my silence. The president of Harvard University offered a few mild, speculative, off-the-record remarks about innate differences between men and women in their aptitude for high-level science and mathematics, and was treated by Harvard's faculty as if he were a crank. The typical news story portrayed the idea of innate sex differences as a renegade position that reputable scholars rejected. It was depressingly familiar. In the autumn of 1994, I had watched with dismay as The Bell Curve's scientifically unremarkable statements about black IQ were successfully labeled as racist pseudoscience. At the opening of 2005, I watched as some scientifically unremarkable statements about male-female differences were successfully labeled as sexist pseudoscience. The Orwellian disinformation about innate group differences is not wholly the media's fault. Many academics who are familiar with the state of knowledge are afraid to go on the record. Talking publicly can dry up research funding for senior professors and can cost assistant professors their jobs. But while the public's misconception is understandable, it is also getting in the way of clear thinking about American social policy. Good social policy can be based on premises that have nothing to do with scientific truth. The premise that is supposed to undergird all of our social policy, the founders' assertion of an unalienable right to liberty, is not a falsifiable hypothesis. But specific policies based on premises that conflict with scientific truths about human beings tend not to work. Often they do harm. One such premise is that the distribution of innate abilities and propensities is the same across different groups. The statistical tests for uncovering job discrimination assume that men are not innately different from women, blacks from whites, older people from younger people, homosexuals from heterosexuals, Latinos from Anglos, in ways that can legitimately affect employment decisions. Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 assumes that women are no different from men in their attraction to sports. Affirmative action in all its forms assumes there are no innate differences between any of the groups it seeks to help and everyone else. The assumption of no innate differences among groups suffuses American social policy. That assumption is wrong. When the outcomes that these policies are supposed to produce fail to occur, with one group falling short, the fault for the discrepancy has been assigned to society. It continues to be assumed that better programs, better regulations, or the right court decisions can make the differences go away. That assumption is also wrong. Hence this essay. Most of the following discussion describes reasons for believing that some group differences are intractable. I shift from "innate" to "intractable" to acknowledge how complex is the interaction of genes, their expression in behavior, and the environment. "Intractable" means that, whatever the precise partitioning of causation may be (we seldom know), policy interventions can only tweak the difference at the margins. I will focus on two sorts of differences: between men and women and between blacks and whites. Here are three crucial points to keep in mind as we go along: 1. The differences I discuss involve means and distributions. In all cases, the variation within groups is greater than the variation between groups. On psychological and cognitive dimensions, some members of both sexes and all races fall everywhere along the range. One implication of this is that genius does not come in one color or sex, and neither does any other human ability. Another is that a few minutes of conversation with individuals you meet will tell you much more about them than their group membership does. 2. Covering both sex differences and race differences in a single, non-technical article, I had to leave out much in the print edition of this article. This online version is fully annotated and includes extensive supplementary material. 3. The concepts of "inferiority" and "superiority" are inappropriate to group comparisons. On most specific human attributes, it is possible to specify a continuum running from "low" to "high," but the results cannot be combined into a score running from "bad" to "good." What is the best score on a continuum measuring aggressiveness? What is the relative importance of verbal skills versus, say, compassion? Of spatial skills versus industriousness? The aggregate excellences and shortcomings of human groups do not lend themselves to simple comparisons. That is why the members of just about every group can so easily conclude that they are God's chosen people. All of us use the weighting system that favors our group's strengths.1 II The technical literature documenting sex differences and their biological basis grew surreptitiously during feminism's heyday in the 1970's and 1980's. By the 1990's, it had become so extensive that the bibliography in David Geary's pioneering Male, Female (1998) ran to 53 pages.2 Currently, the best short account of the state of knowledge is Steven Pinker's chapter on gender in The Blank Slate (2002).3 Rather than present a telegraphic list of all the differences that I think have been established, I will focus on the narrower question at the heart of the Summers controversy: as groups, do men and women differ innately in characteristics that produce achievement at the highest levels of accomplishment? I will limit my comments to the arts and sciences. Since we live in an age when students are likely to hear more about Marie Curie than about Albert Einstein, it is worth beginning with a statement of historical fact: women have played a proportionally tiny part in the history of the arts and sciences.4 Even in the 20th century, women got only 2 percent of the Nobel Prizes in the sciences-a proportion constant for both halves of the century-and 10 percent of the prizes in literature. The Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics, has been given to 44 people since it originated in 1936. All have been men. The historical reality of male dominance of the greatest achievements in science and the arts is not open to argument. The question is whether the social and legal exclusion of women is a sufficient explanation for this situation, or whether sex-specific characteristics are also at work. Mathematics offers an entry point for thinking about the answer. Through high school, girls earn better grades in math than boys, but the boys usually do better on standardized tests.5 The difference in means is modest, but the male advantage increases as the focus shifts from means to extremes. In a large sample of mathematically gifted youths, for example, seven times as many males as females scored in the top percentile of the SAT mathematics test.6 We do not have good test data on the male-female ratio at the top one-hundredth or top one-thousandth of a percentile, where first-rate mathematicians are most likely to be found, but collateral evidence suggests that the male advantage there continues to increase, perhaps exponentially.7 Evolutionary biologists have some theories that feed into an explanation for the disparity. In primitive societies, men did the hunting, which often took them far from home. Males with the ability to recognize landscapes from different orientations and thereby find their way back had a survival advantage. Men who could process trajectories in three dimensions-the trajectory, say, of a spear thrown at an edible mammal-also had a survival advantage.8 Women did the gathering. Those who could distinguish among complex arrays of vegetation, remembering which were the poisonous plants and which the nourishing ones, also had a survival advantage. Thus the logic for explaining why men should have developed elevated three-dimensional visuospatial skills and women an elevated ability to remember objects and their relative locations-differences that show up in specialized tests today.9 Perhaps this is a just-so story.10 Why not instead attribute the results of these tests to socialization? Enter the neuroscientists. It has been known for years that, even after adjusting for body size, men have larger brains than women. Yet most psychometricians conclude that men and women have the same mean IQ (although debate on this issue is growing).11 One hypothesis for explaining this paradox is that three-dimensional processing absorbs the extra male capacity. In the last few years, magnetic-resonance imaging has refined the evidence for this hypothesis, revealing that parts of the brain's parietal cortex associated with space perception are proportionally bigger in men than in women.12 What does space perception have to do with scores on math tests?13 Enter the psychometricians, who demonstrate that when visuospatial ability is taken into account, the sex difference in SAT math scores shrinks substantially.14 Why should the difference be so much greater at the extremes than at the mean? Part of the answer is that men consistently exhibit higher variance than women on all sorts of characteristics, including visuospatial abilities, meaning that there are proportionally more men than women at both ends of the bell curve.15 Another part of the answer is that someone with a high verbal IQ can easily master the basic algebra, geometry, and calculus that make up most of the items in an ordinary math test. Elevated visuospatial skills are most useful for the most difficult items.16 If males have an advantage in answering those comparatively few really hard items, the increasing disparity at the extremes becomes explicable. Seen from one perspective, this pattern demonstrates what should be obvious: there is nothing inherent in being a woman that precludes high math ability. But there remains a distributional difference in male and female characteristics that leads to a larger number of men with high visuospatial skills. The difference has an evolutionary rationale, a physiological basis, and a direct correlation with math scores. Now put all this alongside the historical data on accomplishment in the arts and sciences. In test scores, the male advantage is most pronounced in the most abstract items. Historically, too, it is most pronounced in the most abstract domains of accomplishment.17 In the humanities, the most abstract field is philosophy-and no woman has been a significant original thinker in any of the world's great philosophical traditions. In the sciences, the most abstract field is mathematics, where the number of great women mathematicians is approximately two (Emmy Noether definitely, Sonya Kovalevskaya maybe). In the other hard sciences, the contributions of great women scientists have usually been empirical rather than theoretical, with leading cases in point being Henrietta Leavitt, Dorothy Hodgkin, Lise Meitner, Ir?ne Joliot-Curie, and Marie Curie herself. In the arts, literature is the least abstract and by far the most rooted in human interaction; visual art incorporates a greater admixture of the abstract; musical composition is the most abstract of all the arts, using neither words nor images. The role of women has varied accordingly. Women have been represented among great writers virtually from the beginning of literature, in East Asia and South Asia as well as in the West. Women have produced a smaller number of important visual artists, and none that is clearly in the first rank. No female composer is even close to the first rank. Social restrictions undoubtedly damped down women's contributions in all of the arts, but the pattern of accomplishment that did break through is strikingly consistent with what we know about the respective strengths of male and female cognitive repertoires. Women have their own cognitive advantages over men, many of them involving verbal fluency and interpersonal skills. If this were a comprehensive survey, detailing those advantages would take up as much space as I have devoted to a particular male advantage. But, sticking with my restricted topic, I will move to another aspect of male-female differences that bears on accomplishment at the highest levels of the arts and sciences: motherhood. Regarding women, men, and babies, the technical literature is as unambiguous as everyday experience would lead one to suppose. As a rule, the experience of parenthood is more profoundly life-altering for women than for men. Nor is there anything unique about humans in this regard. Mammalian reproduction generally involves much higher levels of maternal than paternal investment in the raising of children.18 Among humans, extensive empirical study has demonstrated that women are more attracted to children than are men, respond to them more intensely on an emotional level, and get more and different kinds of satisfactions from nurturing them. Many of these behavioral differences have been linked with biochemical differences between men and women.19 Thus, for reasons embedded in the biochemistry and neurophysiology of being female, many women with the cognitive skills for achievement at the highest level also have something else they want to do in life: have a baby. In the arts and sciences, forty is the mean age at which peak accomplishment occurs, preceded by years of intense effort mastering the discipline in question.20 These are precisely the years during which most women must bear children if they are to bear them at all. Among women who have become mothers, the possibilities for high-level accomplishment in the arts and sciences shrink because, for innate reasons, the distractions of parenthood are greater. To put it in a way that most readers with children will recognize, a father can go to work and forget about his children for the whole day. Hardly any mother can do this, no matter how good her day-care arrangement or full-time nanny may be. My point is not that women must choose between a career and children, but that accomplishment at the extremes commonly comes from a single-minded focus that leaves no room for anything but the task at hand.21 We should not be surprised or dismayed to find that motherhood reduces the proportion of highly talented young women who are willing to make that tradeoff. Some numbers can be put to this observation through a study of nearly 2,000 men and women who were identified as extraordinarily talented in math at age thirteen and were followed up 20 years later.22 The women in the sample came of age in the 1970's and early 1980's, when women were actively socialized to resist gender stereotypes. In many ways, these talented women did resist. By their early thirties, both the men and women had become exceptional achievers, receiving advanced degrees in roughly equal proportions. Only about 15 percent of the women were full-time housewives. Among the women, those who did and those who did not have children were equally satisfied with their careers. And yet. The women with careers were four-and-a-half times more likely than men to say they preferred to work fewer than 40 hours per week. The men placed greater importance on "being successful in my line of work" and "inventing or creating something that will have an impact," while the women found greater value in "having strong friendships," "living close to parents and relatives," and "having a meaningful spiritual life." As the authors concluded, "these men and women appear to have constructed satisfying and meaningful lives that took somewhat different forms."23 The different forms, which directly influence the likelihood that men will dominate at the extreme levels of achievement, are consistent with a constellation of differences between men and women that have biological roots. I have omitted perhaps the most obvious reason why men and women differ at the highest levels of accomplishment: men take more risks, are more competitive, and are more aggressive than women.24 The word "testosterone" may come to mind, and appropriately. Much technical literature documents the hormonal basis of personality differences that bear on sex differences in extreme and venturesome effort, and hence in extremes of accomplishment-and that bear as well on the male propensity to produce an overwhelming proportion of the world's crime and approximately 100 percent of its wars. But this is just one more of the ways in which science is demonstrating that men and women are really and truly different, a fact so obvious that only intellectuals could ever have thought otherwise. III Turning to race, we must begin with the fraught question of whether it even exists, or whether it is instead a social construct. The Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin originated the idea of race as a social construct in 1972, arguing that the genetic differences across races were so trivial that no scientist working exclusively with genetic data would sort people into blacks, whites, or Asians. In his words, "racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance."25 Lewontin's position, which quickly became a tenet of political correctness, carried with it a potential means of being falsified. If he was correct, then a statistical analysis of genetic markers would not produce clusters corresponding to common racial labels. In the last few years, that test has become feasible, and now we know that Lewontin was wrong.26 Several analyses have confirmed the genetic reality of group identities going under the label of race or ethnicity.27 In the most recent, published this year, all but five of the 3,636 subjects fell into the cluster of genetic markers corresponding to their self-identified ethnic group.28 When a statistical procedure, blind to physical characteristics and working exclusively with genetic information, classifies 99.9 percent of the individuals in a large sample in the same way they classify themselves, it is hard to argue that race is imaginary. Homo sapiens actually falls into many more interesting groups than the bulky ones known as "races."29 As new findings appear almost weekly, it seems increasingly likely that we are just at the beginning of a process that will identify all sorts of genetic differences among groups, whether the groups being compared are Nigerian blacks and Kenyan blacks, lawyers and engineers, or Episcopalians and Baptists. At the moment, the differences that are obviously genetic involve diseases (Ashkenazi Jews and Tay-Sachs disease, black Africans and sickle-cell anemia, Swedes and hemochromatosis). As time goes on, we may yet come to understand better why, say, Italians are more vivacious than Scots. Out of all the interesting and intractable differences that may eventually be identified, one in particular remains a hot button like no other: the IQ difference between blacks and whites. What is the present state of our knowledge about it? There is no technical dispute on some of the core issues. In the aftermath of The Bell Curve, the American Psychological Association established a task force on intelligence whose report was published in early 1996.30 The task force reached the same conclusions as The Bell Curve on the size and meaningfulness of the black-white difference. Historically, it has been about one standard deviation31 in magnitude among subjects who have reached adolescence;32 cultural bias in IQ tests does not explain the difference; and the tests are about equally predictive of educational, social, and economic outcomes for blacks and whites. However controversial such assertions may still be in the eyes of the mainstream media, they are not controversial within the scientific community. The most important change in the state of knowledge since the mid-1990's lies in our increased understanding of what has happened to the size of the black-white difference over time. Both the task force and The Bell Curve concluded that some narrowing had occurred since the early 1970's. With the advantage of an additional decade of data, we are now able to be more precise: (1) The black-white difference in scores on educational achievement tests has narrowed significantly. (2) The black-white convergence in scores on the most highly "g?-loaded" tests-the tests that are the best measures of cognitive ability-has been smaller, and may be unchanged, since the first tests were administered 90 years ago. With regard to the difference in educational achievement, the narrowing of scores on major tests occurred in the 1970's and 80's. In the case of the SAT, the gaps in the verbal and math tests as of 1972 were 1.24 and 1.26 standard deviations respectively.33 By 1991, when the gaps were smallest (they have risen slightly since then), those numbers had dropped by .37 and .35 standard deviations. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is not limited to college-bound students, is preferable to the SAT for estimating nationally representative trends, but the story it tells is similar.34 Among students ages nine, thirteen, and seventeen, the black-white differences in math as of the first NAEP test in 1973 were 1.03, 1.29, and 1.24 standard deviations respectively. For nine-year-olds, the difference hit its all-time low of .73 standard deviations in 2004, a drop of .30 standard deviations. But almost all of that convergence had been reached by 1986, when the gap was .78 standard deviations. For thirteen-year-olds, the gap dropped by .45 standard deviations, reaching its low in 1986. For seventeen-year-olds, the gap dropped by .52 standard deviations, reaching its low in 1990. In the reading test, the comparable gaps for ages nine, thirteen, and seventeen as of the first NAEP test in 1971 were 1.12, 1.17, and 1.25 standard deviations. Those gaps had shrunk by .38, .62, and .68 standard deviations respectively at their lowest points in 1988.35 They have since remained effectively unchanged. An analysis by Larry Hedges and Amy Nowell uses a third set of data, examining the trends for high-school seniors by comparing six large data bases from different time periods from 1965 to 1992. The black-white difference on a combined measure of math, vocabulary, and reading fell from 1.18 to .82 standard deviations in that time, a reduction of .36 standard deviations.36 So black and white academic achievement converged significantly in the 1970's and 1980's, typically by more than a third of a standard deviation, and since then has stayed about the same.37 What about convergence in tests explicitly designed to measure IQ rather than academic achievement?38 The ambiguities in the data leave two defensible positions. The first is that the IQ difference is about one standard deviation, effectively unchanged since the first black-white comparisons 90 years ago. The second is that harbingers of a narrowing difference are starting to emerge. I cannot settle the argument here, but I can convey some sense of the uncertainty. The case for an unchanged black-white IQ difference is straightforward. If you take all the black-white differences on IQ tests from the first ones in World War I up to the present, there is no statistically significant downward trend. Of course the results vary, because tests vary in the precision with which they measure the general mental factor (g) and samples vary in their size and representativeness. But results continue to center around a black-white difference of about 1.0 to 1.1 standard deviations through the most recent data.39 The case for a reduction has two important recent results to work with. The first is from the 1997 re-norming of the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), which showed a black-white difference of .97 standard deviations.40 Since the typical difference on paper-and-pencil IQ tests like the AFQT has been about 1.10 standard deviations, the 1997 results represent noticeable improvement.41 The second positive result comes from the 2003 standardization sample for the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-IV), which showed a difference of .78 standard deviations, as against the 1.0 difference that has been typical for individually administered IQ tests.42 One cannot draw strong conclusions from two data points. Those who interpret them as part of an unchanging overall pattern can cite another recent result, from the 2001 standardization of the Woodcock-Johnson intelligence test. In line with the conventional gap, it showed an overall black-white difference of 1.05 standard deviations and, for youths aged six to eighteen, a difference of .99 standard deviations.43 There is more to be said on both sides of this issue, but nothing conclusive.44 Until new data become available, you may take your choice. If you are a pessimist, the gap has been unchanged at about one standard deviation. If you are an optimist, the IQ gap has decreased by a few points, but it is still close to one standard deviation. The clear and substantial convergence that occurred in academic tests has at best been but dimly reflected in IQ scores, and at worst not reflected at all. Whether we are talking about academic achievement or about IQ, are the causes of the black-white difference environmental or genetic? Everyone agrees that environment plays a part. The controversy is about whether biology is also involved. It has been known for many years that the obvious environmental factors such as income, parental occupation, and schools explain only part of the absolute black-white difference and none of the relative difference. Black and white students from affluent neighborhoods are separated by as large a proportional gap as are blacks and whites from poor neighborhoods.45 Thus the most interesting recent studies of environmental causes have worked with cultural explanations instead of socioeconomic status.46 One example is Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement (2003) by the Berkeley anthropologist John Ogbu, who went to Shaker Heights, Ohio, to explore why black students in an affluent suburb should lag behind their white peers.47 Another is Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005) by Thomas Sowell, who makes the case that what we think of as the dysfunctional aspects of urban black culture are a legacy not of slavery but of Southern and rural white "cracker" culture.48 Both Ogbu and Sowell describe ingrained parental behaviors and student attitudes that must impede black academic performance. These cultural influences often cut across social classes. From a theoretical standpoint, the cultural explanations offer fresh ways of looking at the black-white difference at a time when the standard socioeconomic explanations have reached a dead end. From a practical standpoint, however, the cultural explanations point to a cause of the black-white difference that is as impervious to manipulation by social policy as causes rooted in biology. If there is to be a rapid improvement, some form of mass movement with powerful behavioral consequences would have to occur within the black community. Absent that, the best we can hope for is gradual cultural change that is likely to be measured in decades. This brings us to the state of knowledge about genetic explanations. "There is not much direct evidence on this point," said the American Psychological Association's task force dismissively, "but what little there is fails to support the genetic hypothesis."49 Actually, there is no direct evidence at all, just a wide variety of indirect evidence, almost all of which the task force chose to ignore.50 As it happens, a comprehensive survey of that evidence, and of the objections to it, appeared this past June in the journal Psychology, Public Policy, and Law. There, J. Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen co-authored a 60-page article entitled "Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability."51 It incorporates studies of East Asians as well as blacks and whites and concludes that the source of the black-white-Asian difference is 50- to 80-percent genetic. The same issue of the journal includes four commentaries, three of them written by prominent scholars who oppose the idea that any part of the black-white difference is genetic.52 Thus, in one place, you can examine the strongest arguments that each side in the debate can bring to bear. Rushton and Jensen base their conclusion on ten categories of evidence that are consistent with a model in which both environment and genes cause the black-white difference and inconsistent with a model that requires no genetic contribution.53 I will not try to review their argument here, or the critiques of it. All of the contributions can be found on the Internet, and can be understood by readers with a grasp of basic statistical concepts.54 For those who consider it important to know what percentage of the IQ difference is genetic, a methodology that would do the job is now available. In the United States, few people classified as black are actually of 100-percent African descent (the average American black is thought to be about 20-percent white).55 To the extent that genes play a role, IQ will vary by racial admixture. In the past, studies that have attempted to test this hypothesis have had no accurate way to measure the degree of admixture, and the results have been accordingly muddy.56 The recent advances in using genetic markers solves that problem. Take a large sample of racially diverse people, give them a good IQ test, and then use genetic markers to create a variable that no longer classifies people as "white" or "black," but along a continuum. Analyze the variation in IQ scores according to that continuum. The results would be close to dispositive.57 None of this is important for social policy, however, where the issue is not the source of the difference but its intractability. Much of the evidence reviewed by Rushton and Jensen bears on what we can expect about future changes in the black-white IQ difference. My own thinking on this issue is shaped by the relationship of the difference to a factor I have already mentioned-"g"-and to the developing evidence for g's biological basis. When you compare black and white mean scores on a battery of subtests, you do not find a uniform set of differences; nor do you find a random assortment. The size of the difference varies systematically by type of subtest. Asked to predict which subtests show the largest difference, most people will think first of ones that have the most cultural content and are the most sensitive to good schooling. But this natural expectation is wrong. Some of the largest differences are found on subtests that have little or no cultural content, such as ones based on abstract designs. As long ago as 1927, Charles Spearman, the pioneer psychometrician who discovered g, proposed a hypothesis to explain the pattern: the size of the black-white difference would be "most marked in just those [subtests] which are known to be saturated with g."58 In other words, Spearman conjectured that the black-white difference would be greatest on tests that were the purest measures of intelligence, as opposed to tests of knowledge or memory. A concrete example illustrates how Spearman's hypothesis works. Two items in the Wechsler and Stanford-Binet IQ tests are known as "forward digit span" and "backward digit span." In the forward version, the subject repeats a random sequence of one-digit numbers given by the examiner, starting with two digits and adding another with each iteration. The subject's score is the number of digits that he can repeat without error on two consecutive trials. Digits-backward works exactly the same way except that the digits must be repeated in the opposite order. Digits-backward is much more g-loaded than digits-forward. Try it yourself and you will see why. Digits-forward is a straightforward matter of short-term memory. Digits-backward makes your brain work much harder.59 The black-white difference in digits-backward is about twice as large as the difference in digits-forward.60 It is a clean example of an effect that resists cultural explanation. It cannot be explained by differential educational attainment, income, or any other socioeconomic factor. Parenting style is irrelevant. Reluctance to "act white" is irrelevant. Motivation is irrelevant. There is no way that any of these variables could systematically encourage black performance in digits-forward while depressing it in digits-backward in the same test at the same time with the same examiner in the same setting.61 In 1980, Arthur Jensen began a research program for testing Spearman's hypothesis. In his book The g Factor (1998), he summarized the results from seventeen independent sets of data, derived from 149 psychometric tests. They consistently supported Spearman's hypothesis.62 Subsequent work has added still more evidence.63 Debate continues about what the correlation between g-loadings and the size of the black-white difference means, but the core of Spearman's original conjecture, that a sizable correlation would be found to exist, has been confirmed.64 During the same years that Jensen was investigating Spearman's hypothesis, progress was also being made in understanding g. For decades, psychometricians had tried to make g go away. Confident that intelligence must be more complicated than a single factor, they strove to replace g with measures of uncorrelated mental skills. They thereby made valuable contributions to our understanding of intelligence, which really does manifest itself in different ways and with different profiles, but getting rid of g proved impossible. No matter how the data were analyzed, a single factor kept dominating the results.65 By the 1980's, the robustness and value of g as an explanatory construct were broadly accepted among pyschometricians, but little was known about its physiological basis.66 As of 2005, we know much more. It is now established that g is by far the most heritable component of IQ.67 A variety of studies have found correlations between g and physiological phenomena such as brain-evoked potentials, brain pH levels, brain glucose metabolism, nerve-conduction velocity, and reaction time.68 Most recently, it has been determined that a highly significant relationship exists between g and the volume of gray matter in specific areas of the frontal cortex, and that the magnitude of the volume is under tight genetic control.69 In short, we now know that g captures something in the biology of the brain. So Spearman's basic conjecture was correct-the size of the black-white difference and g-loadings are correlated-and g represents a biologically grounded and highly heritable cognitive resource. When those two observations are put together, a number of characteristics of the black-white difference become predictable, correspond with phenomena we have observed in data, and give us reason to think that not much will change in the years to come.70 One implication is that black-white convergence on test scores will be greatest on tests that are least g-loaded. Literacy is the obvious example: people with a wide range of IQ's can be taught to read competently, and it is the reading test of the NAEP in which convergence has reached its closest point (.55 standard deviations in the 1988 test). More broadly, the confirmation of Spearman's hypothesis explains why the convergence that has occurred on academic achievement tests has not been matched on IQ tests. A related implication is that the source of the black-white difference lies in skills that are hardest to change. Being able to repeat many digits backward has no value in itself. It points to a valuable underlying mental ability, in the same way that percentage of fast-twitch muscle fibers points to an underlying athletic ability. If you were to practice reciting digits backward for a few days, you could increase your score somewhat, just as training can improve your running speed somewhat. But in neither case will you have improved the underlying ability.71 As far as anyone knows, g itself cannot be coached. The third implication is that the "Flynn effect" will not close the black-white difference. I am referring here to the secular increase in IQ scores over time, brought to public attention by James Flynn.72 The Flynn effect has been taken as a reason for thinking that the black-white difference is temporary: if IQ scores are so malleable that they can rise steadily for several decades, why should not the black-white difference be malleable as well?73 But as the Flynn effect has been studied over the last decade, the evidence has grown, and now seems persuasive, that the increases in IQ scores do not represent significant increases in g.74 What the increases do represent-whether increases in specific mental skills or merely increased test sophistication-is still being debated. But if the black-white difference is concentrated in g and if the Flynn effect does not consist of increases in g, the Flynn effect will not do much to close the gap. A 2004 study by Dutch scholars tested this question directly. Examining five large databases, the authors concluded that "the nature of the Flynn effect is qualitatively different from the nature of black-white differences in the United States," and that "the implications of the Flynn effect for black-white differences appear small."75 These observations represent my reading of a body of evidence that is incomplete, and they will surely have to be modified as we learn more. But taking the story of the black-white IQ difference as a whole, I submit that we know two facts beyond much doubt. First, the conventional environmental explanation of the black-white difference is inadequate. Poverty, bad schools, and racism, which seem such obvious culprits, do not explain it. Insofar as the environment is the cause, it is not the sort of environment we know how to change, and we have tried every practical remedy that anyone has been able to think of. Second, regardless of one's reading of the competing arguments, we are left with an IQ difference that has, at best, narrowed by only a few points over the last century. I can find nothing in the history of this difference, or in what we have learned about its causes over the last ten years, to suggest that any faster change is in our future. IV Elites throughout the West are living a lie, basing the futures of their societies on the assumption that all groups of people are equal in all respects. Lie is a strong word, but justified. It is a lie because so many elite politicians who profess to believe it in public do not believe it in private. It is a lie because so many elite scholars choose to ignore what is already known and choose not to inquire into what they suspect. We enable ourselves to continue to live the lie by establishing a taboo against discussion of group differences. The taboo is not perfect-otherwise, I would not have been able to document this essay-but it is powerful. Witness how few of Harvard's faculty who understood the state of knowledge about sex differences were willing to speak out during the Summers affair. In the public-policy debate, witness the contorted ways in which even the opponents of policies like affirmative action frame their arguments so that no one can accuse them of saying that women are different from men or blacks from whites. Witness the unwillingness of the mainstream media to discuss group differences without assuring readers that the differences will disappear when the world becomes a better place. The taboo arises from an admirable idealism about human equality. If it did no harm, or if the harm it did were minor, there would be no need to write about it. But taboos have consequences. The nature of many of the consequences must be a matter of conjecture because people are so fearful of exploring them.76 Consider an observation furtively voiced by many who interact with civil servants: that government is riddled with people who have been promoted to their level of incompetence because of pressure to have a staff with the correct sex and ethnicity in the correct proportions and positions. Are these just anecdotes? Or should we be worrying about the effects of affirmative action on the quality of government services?77 It would be helpful to know the answers, but we will not so long as the taboo against talking about group difference prevails. How much damage has the taboo done to the education of children? Christina Hoff Sommers has argued that willed blindness to the different developmental patterns of boys and girls has led many educators to see boys as aberrational and girls as the norm, with pervasive damage to the way our elementary and secondary schools are run.78 Is she right? Few have been willing to pursue the issue lest they be required to talk about innate group differences. Similar questions can be asked about the damage done to medical care, whose practitioners have only recently begun to acknowledge the ways in which ethnic groups respond differently to certain drugs.79 How much damage has the taboo done to our understanding of America's social problems? The part played by sexism in creating the ratio of males to females on mathematics faculties is not the ratio we observe but what remains after adjustment for male-female differences in high-end mathematical ability. The part played by racism in creating different outcomes in black and white poverty, crime, and illegitimacy is not the raw disparity we observe but what remains after controlling for group characteristics. For some outcomes, sex or race differences nearly disappear after a proper analysis is done. For others, a large residual difference remains.80 In either case, open discussion of group differences would give us a better grasp on where to look for causes and solutions. What good can come of raising this divisive topic? The honest answer is that no one knows for sure. What we do know is that the taboo has crippled our ability to explore almost any topic that involves the different ways in which groups of people respond to the world around them-which means almost every political, social, or economic topic of any complexity. Thus my modest recommendation, requiring no change in laws or regulations, just a little more gumption. Let us start talking about group differences openly-all sorts of group differences, from the visuospatial skills of men and women to the vivaciousness of Italians and Scots. Let us talk about the nature of the manly versus the womanly virtues. About differences between Russians and Chinese that might affect their adoption of capitalism. About differences between Arabs and Europeans that might affect the assimilation of Arab immigrants into European democracies. About differences between the poor and non-poor that could inform policy for reducing poverty. Even to begin listing the topics that could be enriched by an inquiry into the nature of group differences is to reveal how stifled today's conversation is. Besides liberating that conversation, an open and undefensive discussion would puncture the irrational fear of the male-female and black-white differences I have surveyed here. We would be free to talk about other sexual and racial differences as well, many of which favor women and blacks, and none of which is large enough to frighten anyone who looks at them dispassionately. Talking about group differences does not require any of us to change our politics. For every implication that the Right might seize upon (affirmative-action quotas are ill-conceived), another gives fodder to the Left (innate group differences help rationalize compensatory redistribution by the state).81 But if we do not need to change our politics, talking about group differences obligates all of us to renew our commitment to the ideal of equality that Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he wrote as a self-evident truth that all men are created equal. Steven Pinker put that ideal in today's language in The Blank Slate, writing that "Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group."82 Nothing in this essay implies that this moral principle has already been realized or that we are powerless to make progress. In elementary and secondary education, many outcomes are tractable even if group differences in ability remain unchanged. Dropout rates, literacy, and numeracy are all tractable. School discipline, teacher performance, and the quality of the curriculum are tractable. Academic performance within a given IQ range is tractable. The existence of group differences need not and should not discourage attempts to improve schooling for millions of American children who are now getting bad educations. In university education and in the world of work, overall openness of opportunity has been transformed for the better over the last half-century. But the policies we now have in place are impeding, not facilitating, further progress. Creating double standards for physically demanding jobs so that women can qualify ensures that men in those jobs will never see women as their equals. In universities, affirmative action ensures that the black-white difference in IQ in the population at large is brought onto the campus and made visible to every student. The intentions of their designers notwithstanding, today's policies are perfectly fashioned to create separation, condescension, and resentment-and so they have done. The world need not be that way. Any university or employer that genuinely applied a single set of standards for hiring, firing, admitting, and promoting would find that performance across different groups really is distributed indistinguishably. But getting to that point nationwide will require us to jettison an apparatus of laws, regulations, and bureaucracies that has been 40 years in the making. That will not happen until the conversation has opened up. So let us take one step at a time. Let us stop being afraid of data that tell us a story we do not want to hear, stop the name-calling, stop the denial, and start facing reality. CHARLES MURRAY is the W.H. Brady Scholar in Freedom and Culture at the American Enterprise Institute. His previous contributions to COMMENTARY, available online, include "The Bell Curve and Its Critics" (May 1995, with a subsequent exchange in the August 1995 issue). Notes My thanks go to Michael Ashton, Thomas Bouchard, Gregory Carey, Christopher DeMuth, David Geary, Linda Gottfredson, Arthur Jensen, John Loehlin, David Lubinski, Kevin McGrew, Richard McNally, Derek Neal, Steven Pinker, Philip Roth, Philippe Rushton, Sally Satel, Christina Hoff Sommers, Hua Tang, Marley Watkins, Lawrence Weiss, and James Q. Wilson for responding to questions or commenting on drafts. Their appearance on this list does not imply their endorsement of anything in the essay. * This is a fully annotated version of the article that appears in the September 2005 issue of COMMENTARY. 1 If you think this is mushy nonjudgmentalism, try a thought experiment: Suppose that a pill exists that, if all women took it, would give them exactly the same mean and variance on every dimension of human functioning as men-including all the ways in which women now surpass men. How many women would want all women to take it? Or suppose that the pill, taken by all blacks, would give them exactly the same mean and variance on every dimension of human functioning as whites-including all the ways in which blacks now surpass whites. How many blacks would want all blacks to take it? To ask such questions is to answer them: hardly anybody. Few want to trade off the unique virtues of their own group for the advantages that another group may enjoy. Sometimes these preferences for one's own group are rational, sometimes not. I am proud of being Scots-Irish, for example, even though the Scots-Irish group means for violence, drunkenness, and general disagreeableness seem to have been far above those of other immigrant groups. But the Scots-Irish made great pioneers-that's the part of my heritage that I choose to value. A Thai friend gave me an insight into this human characteristic many years ago when I remarked that Thais were completely undefensive about Westerners despite the economic backwardness of Thailand in those days. My friend explained why. America has wealth and technology that Thailand does not have, he acknowledged, just as the elephant is stronger than a human. "But," he said with a shrug, "who wants to be an elephant?" None of us wants to be an elephant and, from the perspective of our own group, every other group has something of the elephant about it. All of us are right, too. 2 Geary (1998). 3 Pinker (2002). A non-technical book-length treatment is Rhoads (2004). Halpern (2000) and Kimura (1999) are good one-volume discussions of cognitive differences between the sexes. An up-to-date summary of neuro-physiological findings about sex differences in the brain appeared in last May's Scientific American, Cahill (2005). Baron-Cohen (2003) is an ambitious attempt to tie together known sex differences into an overall theory. Those who want to compare these accounts with defenses of the no-innate-differences position can look at Valian (1999) and a set of essays weighted toward social explanations of math differences in Gallagher and Kaufman (2005). 4 My discussion of women and accomplishment in the arts and sciences is in Murray (2003): 265-293. For a complementary discussion, see Simonton (1999): chapter 6. 5 For the story on grades, see Kimball (1989). For a review of the literature on male-female differences in means and methods of mathematical processing, see Geary, Saults, Liu et al. (2000). For discussions of sex stereotyping, see Brown and Josephs (1999), Stipek and Gralinski (1991), and several of the essays in Gallagher and Kaufman (2005). 6 This ratio is based on the percentages of boys and girls from Talent Search who later, as high-school students, got the top possible score in the SAT-Math (12.7 percent of males and 1.9 percent of females, given in Lubinski, Benbow, Shea et al., 2001). Julian Stanley, who has been associated with Talent Search for many years, is said to have asserted in an interview that the male:female ratio among such students has dropped to about 3 to 1. I have not been able to locate the interview or any data substantiating that ratio. In any case, here is a reminder: currently, the 800 top score in the SAT-Math is only about 2.6 standard deviations above the mean-that is, it includes about one in 200 test-takers. This is nowhere close to the extreme right end of the bell curve from which top mathematicians are drawn. 7 Nyborg (in press) finds a sex difference in the general mental ability g, not just in spatial skills, and evidence that the male advantage increases exponentially as distance from the mean increases. 8 For a review of studies about sex differences in throwing ability, see Geary (1998): 213-14, 284-85. For a presentation of the evolutionary explanation, see Jones, Braithwaite, and Healy (2003) and Kimura (1999): 11-30. It has also been argued that spatial skills were an advantage in tool-making. See Wynn, Tierson, and Palmer (1996). 9 Geary (1998): 286-90; Kimura (1999): 43-66. 10 A continuing problem for evolutionary biology is the accusation that its scholars observe human characteristics today and work backward into a rationale that fits. But a sex difference in visuospatial abilities is found in many other animals besides humans, always favoring males-which gives good reason for thinking that in this case we are observing something more than a just-so story. See Jones, Braithwaite, and Healy (2003). 11 For a review of the evidence that male and female IQ is the same, see Jensen (1998): 536-42. The underlying problem is that the subtests in IQ tests have been developed and normed in ways that tend to push male and female IQs toward the same mean IQ (for example, items that show a large sex difference are usually discarded). For the evidence that men have a higher mean IQ than women, see Ankney (1992), Lynn (1999), Lynn and Irwing (2004), and Nyborg (in press). 12 See Goldstein, Seidman, Horton et al. (2001) and the interpretation of those findings in Cahill (2005). This is far from a settled issue. Research into the neurophysiology of sex differences is exploring a variety of trails. For example, Gron, Spitzer, Tomczak et al. (2000) discovered that men and women activate different parts of the brain when they are working out navigation tasks, and do so in patterns consistent with the proposition that navigation is cognitively more difficult for women. Consistent evidence also links the size of brain regions with level of capability (Cahill 2005). This relationship between specific parts of the brain and capability holds at an aggregate level as well: IQ is correlated with brain size (adjusted for body size). The relationship of brain size to IQ has often been derided (e.g., Gould 1981), and indeed brain size was a problematic measure when it had to be based on skull size or post-mortem data. But magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies of brain size have ended the uncertainty about the existence of its relationship with IQ. For meta-analyses of MRI and other in vivo studies, see Jensen (1998): 147, which puts the correlation between brain size and IQ at about .40, and McDaniel (2005), which puts it at about .33. 13 E.g., Johnson (1984), Casey, Nuttall, Pezaris et al. (1995), and Geary, Saults, Liu et al. (2000). There has been dispute on this point. Friedman (1995) argues that performance in math tests is more strongly related to verbal ability than to visuospatial abilities. Royer, Tronsky, Chan et al. (1999) present evidence that the real source of the male advantage is faster retrieval of arithmetic facts from long-term memory. A third line of argument has been that the apparent male advantage is actually mediated by IQ (e.g., Linn and Peterson 1985). Geary, Saults, Liu et al. (2000) controlled for IQ and found that both visuospatial abilities and the computational advantage found by Royer, Tronsky, Chan et al. (1999) were at work. 14 Casey, Nuttall, Pezaris et al. (1995). 15 Pinker (2002): 344-45. 16 Visuospatial skills are helpful across the entire range of items (see Geary, Saults, Liu et al. 2000), but good verbal skills can substitute in solving the less difficult items. 17 For a more detailed presentation of the evidence about the pattern of female accomplishment in the arts and sciences, see Murray (2003): 265-69. 18 Geary (1998): 20-28, 97-120. 19 For an analysis of sex differences in nurturing, written by a committed feminist who is also a scientist (an anthropologist), see Hrdy (1999). For a short review of studies on the importance of children and of the biological sources of nurturing differences, see Rhoads (2004): 190-222. 20 Simonton (1984): chapter 6. 21 Ochse (1990), Simonton (1994): chapter 5. 22 Benbow, Lubinski, Shea et al. (2000). 23 Ibid., 479. The figures in the text combine the data reported for two separate cohorts. 24 For a meta-analysis of sex differences in risk-taking, see Byrnes, Miller, and Schafer (1999). For a discussion of the role of testosterone, see J.M. Dabbs and M.G. Dabbs (2000). 25 Lewontin (1972). 26 For a technical description of what has been labeled "Lewontin's fallacy," see Edwards (2003). For a nontechnical statement of how the understanding of this issue has been changing, see Leroi (2005). 27 Studies incorporating some variant of this type of analysis include Bamshad, Wooding, Watkins et al. (2003), Bowcock, Ruiz-Linares, Romfohrde et al. (1994), Calafell, Shuster, Speed et al. (1998), Mountain and Cavalli-Sforza (1997), Rosenberg, Pritchard, Weber et al. (2002), and Stephens, Schneider, Tanguay et al. (2001). 28 Tang, Quertermous, Rodriguez et al. (2005). The self-identified ethnic groups consisted of non-Hispanic black, non-Hispanic white, East Asian, and Hispanic. The statistical procedure was cluster analysis. The algorithms in cluster analysis are not trying to find groupings that correspond to any pre-identified characteristic of the people in the sample-that is, the researchers did not use any information about the physical characteristics that humans use to identify ethnicity. Cluster analysis simply looks for interrelationships among the genetic markers that identify statistically distinct entities. 29 In Tang, Quertermous, Rodriguez et al. (2005), "Hispanic" corresponded to a cluster, even though no one thinks of "Hispanic" as a race. People do not need to belong to different races, conventionally defined, to be genetically distinct. 30 Neisser, Boodoo, Bouchard et al. (1996). 31 The standard deviation is a statistic that (simplified) expresses the average difference of all the scores from the mean. More precisely, the standard deviation is calculated by squaring the deviation from the mean for each score, summing all those squared deviations, finding the mean of that sum, then taking the square root of the result. Given a normal distribution-a bell curve-someone who is one standard deviation above the mean is at the 84th percentile. Two standard deviations above the mean put that person at the 98th percentile. IQ tests are normed to have a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. 32 The black-white difference emerges as early as IQ can be tested, but the gap is usually smaller in pre-adolescence. Among pre-schoolers, the gap can be just a few IQ points. Why does it increase with age? One obvious hypothesis is inferior schooling-e.g., Fryer and Levitt (2004). But black children attending excellent schools also fall behind their white counterparts, as discussed subsequently in the text and in note 14. The alternative explanation is that the heritability of IQ increases with age for people of all races, and this is reflected in black IQ scores in adolescence and adulthood. See Jensen (1998): 178. 33 My analysis of its annual College-Bound Seniors report, distributed as printed material prior to 1996 and available online from 1996 onward. A word about the method of calculating the difference. When comparing scores from two groups, the preferred method is to divide the difference in the two scores by the pooled standard deviations of the two groups. The equation is [omitted] where N is the sample size, X is the sample mean, ? is the standard deviation, and the subscripts a and b denote each group. When the black-white difference for a specific test is reported subsequently in the text, this equation has been used to compute it. 34 The Long Term Trend Study with consistent data for the NAEP from the early 1970's through 2004 is now available in mathematics and reading for students tested at ages nine, thirteen, and seventeen. 35 For nine-year-olds, the gap in reading scores expressed as points was smaller in 2004 (26 points) than in 1988 (29 points), but the difference in standard deviations was fractionally larger (.76 standard deviations in 2004 as compared with .74 in 1988). 36 Hedges and Nowell (1998): 154. 37 I will venture a prediction that a variety of academic achievement measures in elementary and secondary school will soon show renewed convergence because of the No Child Left Behind Act, which puts schools under intense pressure to teach to the test in basic skills. If students are drilled on limited ranges of subject matter, scores will tend to rise. The more basic the tests are (that is, the easier they are), the more that improvements among the least skilled will affect the mean. Also, the higher the stakes facing a school-and the No Child Left Behind Act makes those stakes very high indeed-the greater will be the incentives for administrators to use some of the many resources at their disposal to make the results come out right, through the judicious manipulation of suspensions and absences, and through outright cheating (yes, it has been known to happen). Some convergence in black and white test scores will probably occur, but partitioning that effect among the competing explanations is a task that will take a few years. Insofar as the convergence has been the result of teaching to the test and of artifacts, it will be temporary. 38 In a given year, IQ tests and academic tests administered to the same sample will produce similar results. Thus, it is possible to make a reasonably good guess about a person's IQ based on his SAT score compared to the distribution of SAT scores in a given year, and after taking the composition of the SAT population into account. But the results of academic tests are sensitive to changes in academic achievement, whereas IQ tests are explicitly designed to measure a general mental factor, g, that is independent of academic achievement. A notorious illustration of the way that academic test scores can drop is the period during the 1960's and 1970's when SAT scores declined substantially, even after accounting for changes in the pool of test-takers (Murray and Herrnstein 1992). The intelligence of American youth was not declining, just their academic achievement. 39 The significance of g-loadings is discussed later in the text. In terms of interpreting trends over time, the problem is that tests are not equally good measures of g. They go from poor (e.g., a basic reading test) to excellent (the most highly g-loaded, individually administered IQ test). It is as if you were trying to measure changes in average height with measuring tapes of varying accuracy. For a statement of the no-change position, see Gottfredson (2005a), or a summary of her argument in Gottfredson (2005b). 40 The .97 figure comes from my analysis of the proxy AFQT score in the most recent release of the 1997 cohort of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY). I call it a proxy score because, eight years after the test battery was administered, the Armed Forces still has not gotten around to creating an official AFQT score. The version created by the NLSY staff is a composite of the same subtests used for previous versions of the AFQT, and takes the subject's age into account. The NLSY has released the percentile scores, which I converted to standard scores. The analysis used the NLSY's sample weights to make the results representative of the national population. The NLSY data can be downloaded online. 41 I take the 1.10 figure from Roth, Bevier, Bobko et al. (2001), a meta-analysis of the black-white difference in both achievement tests and IQ tests. The Roth et al. results are necessarily reflective of pencil-and-paper tests, because that is where the overwhelming majority of published test data come from. With rare exceptions, the data on individually administered IQ tests such as the Wechsler, Stanford-Binet, and Woodcock-Johnson are limited to their periodic standardization samples. The number of such studies is small. These results are overwhelmed in a meta-analysis by the many more studies based on pencil-and-paper tests. The previous re-norming of the AFQT occurred in 1979, when the AFQT was administered to the 1979 cohort of the NLSY. Herrnstein and Murray (1994) put the black-white difference for that cohort at 1.21 standard deviations. Compared with that figure, the improvement in the 1997 cohort (a .97 black-white difference) is .24 standard deviations. But Neal (in press) has uncovered patterns in the answers of black members of the 1979 cohort that indicate the 1979 cohort produced an artificially low black mean. First, some background: Any test that tries to measure cognitive ability has to make assumptions about baseline skills. If a person can read, even if not very well, then an IQ test can make use of written items; if the subject is illiterate, it cannot. Similarly, if a person knows numbers and the principles of basic arithmetic, even if not very well, then an IQ test can make use of numeric problems; but if the subject is innumerate, it cannot. Neal argues that the pattern of answers for the 1979 cohort indicates that "a substantial fraction of the NLSY79 sample of black males who took the ASVAB test lacked the basic math and reading skills covered by the exam, lacked any motivation to put forth effort during the exam, or both," with a similar situation, not quite as bad, for black females (Neal, in press: 13) Given the convergence in academic test scores during the 1980's, it is likely that the proportion of the 1997 NLSY cohort so completely lacking in the basic skills was smaller than in the 1979 cohort. If so, this change alone, not an increase in cognitive ability, would produce convergence in the black-white difference in the AFQT. In addition, the administration of the ASVAB in 1997 was computer-adaptive. Instead of being confronted with pages of questions (105 of them) as in the traditional paper-and-pencil ASVAB (the kind used in 1979), subjects saw one question at time, and the difficulty of each subsequent question was adapted to the subject's previous answer-a method less likely to provoke the kind of give-up response that Neal found in the 1979 data. Neal did not try to estimate the magnitude of the artifact in the 1979 data, but if a "substantial fraction" of the NLSY males had unrealistically low scores, some figure lower than 1.21 standard deviations would be appropriate as a baseline for comparing the 1997 AFQT results. The overall black-white difference of 1.10 standard deviations as found in the meta-analysis is the natural choice. 42 The black and white means on the WISC-IV's measure of full-scale IQ were 91.7 and 103.2 respectively (Prifitera, Weiss, Saklofske et al. 2005: 24). Standard deviations for computing the black-white difference were supplied by the Psychological Corporation, which produces the Wechsler tests. 43 The 1.05 and .99 figures come from my analysis of data for the 2001 standardization sample for the Woodcock-Johnson III (WJ-III) test of cognitive ability, provided courtesy of the Woodcock-Munoz Foundation. The results from the WJ-III are noteworthy because the WJ-III provides the best known statistical estimate of g. Uniquely among the major standardized tests, the scoring system for the WJ-III uses principal-components analysis to find the best weighted combination of subtests instead of treating all subtests equally (Schrank, McGrew, and Woodcock 2001). 44 Two resourceful defenders of the environmental hypothesis about the black-white difference, James Flynn and William Dickens, are working on their own analysis of the black-white difference over time that should materially add to the state of knowledge when it is released. Here are a few examples of the ambiguities that complicate the assessment of whether the IQ difference has changed, and that have prevented me from stating a confident conclusion: Example 1. One of the few sources that has several data points over time with a consistent measure is the General Social Survey (GSS) available online, conducted annually by the National Opinion Research Center; which in most years through the 2000 survey, it included a ten-item vocabulary test. Example 2. The Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC) is a test that has consistently shown smaller black-white differences than other IQ tests. There are a number of reasons for this, one being that subtests showing large black-white differences were excluded (the K-ABC includes forward-digit span but not backward-digit span, for example). See Jensen (1984) for a full discussion. But though the black-white difference is smaller, it has not changed. In the manual for the original standardization published in 1983, the means on the "Mental Processing Composite" ( K-ABC's version of an IQ score) for the white and black samples were 102.0 and 95.0 respectively (A. S. Kaufman and Kaufman 1983: 152). Twenty-one years later, those means were both within a point of their 1983 values-102.7 and 94.8 respectively (A.S. Kaufman and N.L. Kaufman 2004: 96). Which is more meaningful? The smaller black-white difference shown by the K-ABC? Or the absence of any convergence over time? Example 3. In trying to discriminate between increases in IQ and improvements in academic achievement, one strategy is to explore which parts of the distribution of scores show the most change. Convergence that occurs because of improvements at the bottom of the distribution is likely to reflect remediation of fundamental educational deficits, which could leave the IQ distribution more or less untouched. In their analysis of six major cross-sectional databases spanning the period from 1965 to 1992, Hedges and Nowell (1998) found that "Racial disparities have diminished over time in the lower tail, but not in the upper tail" (159). In the NAEP, they found that "From 1980 to 1988 there was a substantial increase at all points on the black distribution, with much greater change in the lower percentiles" for the reading scores, and a similar pattern for math scores (161). Another analysis, however, finds that almost all of the improvement in scores has occurred among black students in the upper half of the black distribution. For example, the AFQT math score of a black male age 15-17 at the 70th percentile of the black distribution in 1980 was equivalent to the score of a white male at about the 28th percentile of the white distribution (Neal, in press, Figure 2a). In 1997, a black male at the 70th percentile of the black distribution had risen to about the 40th percentile of the white distribution. Neal finds a similar result for math scores in the NAEP in the period 1978-1992/96 (Figures 2c and 2d). In contrast, Neal has found almost no increases among students in the bottom half of the black distribution. How can the results from two analyses be so different? The apparent contradiction-it is not a real contradiction-arises from the fact that almost all of the improvement of blacks in the upper half of the black distribution represents improvement in scores in the lower half of the national distribution of scores. But return to the example of the AFQT: even in 1997, a black subject with a score that put him at the 50th percentile of the white distribution-in other words, a little above the overall national mean-was at about the 80th percentile of the black distribution. In 1980, a black student had to be at about the 90th percentile of the black distribution to have a score above the national mean. Which analysis should one use? That depends on the topic for which one wants information. If the question is, "Who improved their scores relative to whites, the students at the bottom of the black distribution or the students at the top of it?," Neal's analysis provides the correct answer. If the question is, "Did most of the improvement in black scores occur at the bottom or the top of the national distribution of scores?," then Hedges and Nowell's approach provides the correct answer. In deciding whether IQ has risen, how does one balance these results? I am an optimist about the recent past. To me, the various ambiguous indicators add up to the likelihood that a reduction in the IQ gap has occurred alongside the reduction in the academic-achievement gap. Forced to make a bet, I would guess that the black-white difference in IQ has dropped by somewhere in the range of .10-.20 standard deviations over the last few decades. I must admit, however, that I am influenced by a gut-level conviction that the radical improvement in the political, legal, and economic environment for blacks in the last half of the 20th century must have had an effect on IQ. To conclude that no narrowing whatsoever has occurred raises the question, "How can that be?" One would have to argue that all of the gains in some aspects of the environment have been counterbalanced by new deficits in other aspects, and that those new deficits affect different socioeconomic classes similarly. If the argument is restricted to environmental changes, I cannot imagine how that case might be made. Another possibility is that improvement in the environmental causes of IQ has been counterbalanced by what is known as "dysgenic" fertility. For several decades at least, women with the highest IQs have been having the fewest babies, and black women have been no different from anyone else (Herrnstein and Murray 1994: chapter 15). But the problem is especially acute among blacks because it is not just black women above the national average IQ who are having the fewest babies but women above the black average. Consider the results for the women of the 1979 NLSY cohort, whose childbearing years are effectively over (they ranged in age from thirty-eight to forty-five when these numbers were collected). Using a nationally representative subsample for the analysis, one finds that the mean AFQT score of the black women was 85.7. Sixty percent of the children born to this cohort were born to women with AFQT scores below that average. Another 33 percent were born to women with scores from 85.7 to 100. Only 7 percent were born to women with IQs of 100 and over. Did the children do better? A total of 716 of them were tested with a highly g-loaded verbal test, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (revised). The mean of the subset of mothers whose children were tested was 83.7. The mean of their children was 80.2. The mothers and children were tested with different instruments, so it should not be concluded that the black mean actually went down in the new generation. But these data certainly give no reason to think it went up. It is thus technically possible that black IQ could have remained about the same during the last half-century despite the revolutionary changes for the better in the status of black Americans. Deciding whether that in fact happened requires more evidence than I have presented here. When I try to forecast the future, I become a pessimist. Here is how I read the overall patterns of change in the academic achievement tests versus the IQ tests: In a world where Rushton and Jensen are right and the black-white difference is 50- to 80-percent genetic, academic performance and IQ will both improve as the environment improves, and for the same reason: environment plays a role in both measures. Academic test scores will begin to rise before IQ does, because academic performance can improve immediately upon getting a better education whereas the environmental factors affecting IQ are more diffuse. For a related reason-changes in the quality of education can cause substantial increases or drops in academic achievement, whereas IQ cannot be changed much by any known discrete, time-limited environmental change-convergence will be greater in academic achievement than in IQ. Since the environmental role is only 20 to 50 percent of the total, the improvements in both academic and IQ test scores will eventually level off as the limits of environmental change are reached. To me, the pattern we have observed since good longitudinal data became available in the early 1970's is consistent with these expectations. The only surprise is that evidence for convergence in IQ scores has been so slow to emerge and so spotty. I interpret the pattern as indicating that convergence is nearing an asymptote and that not much will change in the future. 45 Blacks and whites have different distributions of socioeconomic status (SES), and SES is correlated with IQ among both blacks and whites. When the difference in black and white SES distributions is statistically controlled, studies have typically found that the black-white difference is reduced by about a third of a standard deviation. But when blacks and whites of similar socioeconomic status are compared with each other, the difference as measured in standard deviations remains the same or increases as SES goes up. For a review of the evidence on this point, see Herrnstein and Murray (1994): 286-89. 46 I put aside here the explanation that has received the most publicity in recent years, the phenomenon labeled "stereotype threat." Its discoverers, Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, demonstrated experimentally that test performance by academically talented blacks was worse when a test was called an IQ test than when it was innocuously described as a research tool (Steele and Aronson 1995). Press reports erroneously interpreted this as meaning that stereotype threat explained away the black-white difference. In reality, Steele and Aronson showed only that it increases the usual black-white difference; if one eliminates stereotype threat, the usual difference remains. The misrepresentation of these results in the mainstream media was grotesque. For example, the narrator of the PBS television program Frontline told his viewers that "blacks who believed the test was merely a research tool did the same as whites." The Boston Globe reported that "Black students who think a test is unimportant match their white counterparts' scores." Newsweek reported that "blacks who were told that the test was a laboratory problem-solving task that was not diagnostic of ability scored about the same as whites." Such claims have now infiltrated major psychology texts. The third edition of Psychology by Davis and Palladino (2002) reports that "The results revealed that African-American students who thought they were simply solving problems performed as well as white students." Similar statements have appeared in scientific journals. All of the above examples are taken from Sackett, Hardison, and Cullen (2004). Sackett et al. also have a nice description of how the research results should have been described: "In the sample studied, there are no differences between groups in prior SAT scores, as a result of the statistical adjustment. Creating stereotype threat produces a difference in scores; eliminating threat returns to the baseline condition of no difference" (9). Readers may follow the latest in the debate by reading a set of responses to Sackett, Hardison, and Cullen (2004) in the April 2005 issue of American Psychologist, but nothing in the critiques overturns the above description. The existence of stereotype threat has indeed been demonstrated. It is an interesting phenomenon, and some claims have been made that reducing stereotype threat can improve scores on certain tests (Good, Aronson, and Inzlicht 2003), but the widespread assertion that stereotype threat explains a significant part of the observed black-white difference is wrong. The dissemination of that false assertion is perhaps understandable in the case of journalists who are not supposed to be sophisticated about such topics. It is less easily explained away when done by authors of technical articles and textbooks. 47 Ogbu (2003). 48 Sowell (2005). 49 Neisser, Boodoo, Bouchard et al. (1996): 95. 50 Neisser, Boodoo, Bouchard et al. (1996): 95. In truth, the closest thing to direct evidence involves brain size, which is known to have a correlation with IQ (see note 12) and to be different for blacks, whites, and East Asians. See J.P. Rushton and E.W. Rushton (2003) for a recent literature review of the evidence. But the task force did not mention brain size. There is also no mention of IQ in sub-Saharan Africa, the results of transracial adoption studies, the correlation of the black-white difference with the g-loadedness of tests, regression to racial means across the range of IQ, or other relevant data. What the task force chose to define as "direct evidence" was a study of children of American black soldiers born to German women after World War II, and studies that use blood-group methods to estimate the degree of African ancestry in American blacks. Both are discussed at length in Rushton and Jensen (2005a) and Nisbett (2005). 51 Rushton and Jensen (2005a). 52 The other articles are Sternberg (2005), Nisbett (2005), Suzuki and Aronson (2005), Gottfredson (2005b), and Rushton and Jensen (2005b) 53 The ten categories, following Rushton and Jensen's wording, are as follow: (1) the world-wide evidence of a consistent black-white-Asian difference, (2) the greater black-white difference on g-loaded subtests than on culture-bound subtests, (3) the greater black-white difference on highly heritable subtests than on culturally malleable subtests, (4) the association of the black-white-Asian difference with differences in brain size, (5) the persistence of the black-white-Asian difference among trans-racial adoptees, (6) the consistency of the black-white difference with studies of racial admixture, (7) regression of black and white relatives (offspring or siblings) to their respective racial means, (8) consistency of the black-white-Asian IQ differences with differences in 60 other behavioral traits, (9) consistency of the black-white-Asian differences with evolutionary explanations, and (10) the inability to explain black-white-Asian differences with a zero-genetic model or even with a 50-percent environmental model. 54 Rushton has posted all of the articles at his website. 55 Chakraborty, Kamboh, Nwankwo et al. (1992), Parra, Marcini, Akey et al. (1998). 56 A variety of studies, summarized in Rushton and Jensen (2005a): 260-61, generally show that the IQs for mixed-race children are about midway between those of children with two white and two black parents. On the other hand, studies that characterized racial composition based on blood group do not predict IQ (Nisbett 2005: 306-07). 57 The results of such a study would be especially powerful if the study also characterized variables like skin color, making it possible to compare the results for subjects for whom genetic heritage and appearance are discrepant. For example, suppose it were found that light-skinned blacks do better in IQ tests than dark-skinned blacks even when their degree of African genetic heritage is the same. This would constitute convincing evidence that social constructions about race, not the genetics of race, influence the development of IQ. Given a well-designed study, many such hypotheses about the conflation of social and biological effects could be examined. 58 Spearman (1927): 379. 59 The average adult gets a digits-backward score of 5 (Jensen 1998: 263). You may compare your own score with the highest I have observed, 13 and 12, achieved respectively by Jos? Zalaquett, former chairman of Amnesty International, and the political analyst Charles Krauthammer. Zalaquett's score might have been higher if he had not been in a car weaving through traffic at 70 miles per hour on the New Jersey Turnpike. Krauthammer's score might have been higher if he hadn't been driving. 60 Jensen (1998): 370. 61 A similarly clean example of a black-white difference is produced by reaction-time tests, in which two different measures are taken: the time it takes for the subject to respond to the lighted buttons that constitute the stimulus (a g-loaded measure) and the time it takes to move one's finger from the home button to the appropriate lighted button (no g-loading). Black subjects have faster movement times and slower response times-once again a contrast, consistent with Spearman's hypothesis, produced at the same time with the same examiner in the same setting. None of the usual ways to explain away the black-white difference through cultural causes applies. See Jensen (1998): 389-93. 62 Jensen (1998): 369-402. 63 Nyborg and Jensen (2000). It should also be noted that one test of Spearman's hypothesis has been conducted comparing East Asians and whites. The better the measure of g, the greater the advantage of East Asians over whites. See Nagoshi, Johnson, DeFries et al. (1984). 64 Jensen's evidence has been accompanied by a debate over his method of correlated vectors for testing Spearman's hypothesis. P.H. Sch?nemann has argued, most extensively in Sch?nemann (1997), that Jensen's evidence was no more than a statistical artifact, a claim refuted by Dolan and Lubke (2001). But other ways in which the method of correlated vectors might yield spurious results are still being debated; e.g., Dolan (2000), Lubke, Dolan, and Kelderman (2001), Dolan, Roorda, and Wicherts (2004), Ashton and Lee (in press). These arguments are being carried on at an arcane methodological level. I am making a limited claim about what Jensen has established beyond dispute: when you take a battery of mental tests, subject them to a factor analysis, and correlate the loadings on the first factor with the size of the black-white difference, the correlation will average about .6. The actual method of correlated vectors is more complicated than this, and is described in Jensen (1998): 372-74. 65 Factor analysis can be conducted in many different ways, which has led to widespread popular acceptance of one of Stephen Jay Gould's allegations in his best-selling book, The Mismeasure of Man (1981), namely, that g is a statistical artifact that appears only when certain analytic choices are made. Actually, the opposite is true. A single factor, typically explaining about three times as much variance as all the other factors combined, emerges under all of the normal methods of conducting a factor analysis. The only exception occurs if the factor-analysis program is explicitly instructed to apportion the variance in such a way that a single factor does not emerge. But if you do that and then try to publish your results, the reviewers will point out that if you hadn't issued that instruction, you would have gotten a dominant single factor. As Richard Herrnstein liked to say, "You can make g hide, but you can't make it go away." For a review of this issue with sources, see the Afterword to the softcover edition of The Bell Curve (559-62). For a technical demonstration of the convergent results from alternative ways of conducting a factor analysis, see Ree and Earles (1991). For a wide-ranging set of articles about the current role of g in understanding intelligence, see the articles in the special section of the January 2004 issue of Journal of Personality & Social Psychology commemorating the 100th anniversary of Spearman's discovery of g. An overview is given in Lubinski (2004). 66 Gould (1981) still shapes the lay received wisdom about IQ tests, but his denunciation of g was already technically outdated when it was published. For an account of the differing ways in which The Mismeasure of Man was assessed by the media and by scholars, see Davis (1983). For a recent discussion of the nature of g and the issues that Gould was wrong about, see Bartholomew (2004). 67 Jensen (1998): 182-89. 68 Jensen (1998): 137-68. 69 Haier, Jung, Yeo et al. (2004); Thompson, Cannon, Narr et al. (2001). 70 Let it be clear: I am not asserting that putting these two facts together proves that the black-white difference is genetic. The logic of the situation was memorably converted to an analogy in Lewontin (1970) and adapted in Herrnstein & Murray (1994): 298. If you take two handfuls of genetically identical seed corn and plant one in Iowa and the other in the Mohave Desert, you will get a large group difference in results despite the high heritability of the traits of corn. William Dickens and James Flynn have operationalized the analogy through a simulation model that produces a large black-white difference from environmental factors even given high heritability (Dickens and Flynn 2001). The validity of that model was subsequently disputed by Loehlin (2002) and Rowe and Rodgers (2002), with a reply by Dickens and Flynn (2002). But that debate does not pertain here. The implications I describe follow simply from knowing that g is highly heritable among blacks, as it is among all groups, and that the black-white difference is largely a difference in g. 71 See te Nijenhuis, Voskuijl, and Schijve (2001), who also found evidence, as did Neubauer and Freudenthaler (1994), that coaching also reduced the g-loadedness of the test, and for the obvious reason: noise has been introduced into the IQ score, changing the score but not the thing that makes an IQ test predictive, g. An athletic analogy may be usefully pursued for understanding these results. Suppose you have a friend who is a much better athlete than you, possessing better depth perception, hand-eye coordination, strength, and agility. Both of you try high-jumping for the first time, and your friend beats you. You practice for two weeks; your friend doesn't. You have another contest and you beat your friend. But if tomorrow you were both to go out together and try tennis for the first time, your friend would beat you, just as your friend would beat you in high-jumping if he practiced as much as you did. 72 Flynn (1984) is an early statement. Over the years since The Bell Curve was published, it has been especially exasperating to be told, or to see it written, that Herrnstein and I were wrong because we did not know about the Flynn effect. We not only provided the first discussion of the Flynn effect aimed at a general audience; we named it (Herrnstein and Murray 1994: 307-09). Some scholars, notably J. Philippe Rushton, have subsequently called it the "Lynn-Flynn effect," thereby acknowledging Richard Lynn's role in identifying the rise in IQ scores. 73 Flynn (1998). 74 An early statement of this evidence, based on analysis of the g loadings of subtests, is Jensen (1998): 320-21. Rushton (1999) elaborates, disputed in Flynn (1999) and Flynn (2000), with a rejoinder in Rushton (2000). Since then the evidence that the Flynn effect does not consist of increases in g has been augmented by an independent method, multigroup confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA), which permits a test for factorial invariance between cohorts. In less technical terms, the method tests for whether differences in IQ scores between groups reflects true differences in g. See Lubke, Dolan, Kelderman et al. (2003) for a description of the method and its uses. Wicherts, Dolan, Hessen et al. (2004) used MGCFA on five large databases: Dutch adults in 1967/68 and 1998/99; Danish draftees in 1988 and 1998; Dutch high-school students in 1984 and 1994/95; Dutch children in 1981/82 and 1992/93; and Estonian children 1934/36 and 1997/98. The authors found that the hypothesis of factor invariance was untenable, and that the gains in intelligence-test scores were not manifestations of increases in g. Previously, Dolan (2000) and Dolan & Hamaker (2001) had used the MGCFA to test for factor invariance between blacks and whites on IQ tests, and had concluded that the results passed the MGCFA test. In other words, the black-white differences were consistent with a difference in g. It was this contrast in results that led Wicherts and his colleagues to conclude that the Flynn effect would have little effect on the black-white difference. 75 Wicherts, Dolan, Hessen et al. (2004): 531. 76 In the text I ignore Europe, where both academic and political elites have suppressed the discussion of group differences even more effectively than in America. Contemporaneously, the European Union has revolutionized free movement within Europe. That, combined with immigration from outside Europe, legal and illegal, has produced unprecedented population change in countries that historically have been ethnically homogeneous. Immigration poses problems for European countries that are qualitatively different from those faced by the United States. Becoming an American requires only that immigrants buy into a set of American ideals. You can move to America from anywhere in the world, be of any ethnicity, social class, or race, and become an American. Assimilation is what America does-not as well as it used to, but still pretty well. The European Union's immigration policy has, willy-nilly, decided that now you can move to Denmark and become Danish or move to France and become French. Is this true? Everyday experience suggests that Denmark's culture works because it fits the characteristics of Danes, that France's culture works because it fits the characteristics of the French, and that these ethnic characteristics are importantly different and deeply rooted, whether in genes or in habits of the heart. Replace a large proportion of French with Danes-let alone peoples more distant-and French culture will be profoundly changed. But it is taboo among the elites to talk about such things (although ordinary people sense what is at stake), and so a momentous social experiment is under way without any reason to think that its assumptions are correct, many historical reasons for thinking they are wrong, and recurring stories on the evening news suggesting that the social fabrics of Europe will be shredded before the elites can make themselves come to grips with what they have been doing. 77 A few systematic examinations of this issue have been published; e.g., Lott (2000) on the effects of affirmative action on policing. 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From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 28 20:06:20 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 28 Aug 2005 16:06:20 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] WSJ: It's, Like, So Totally Cool Message-ID: It's, Like, So Totally Cool http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110007132 Or Whatever Girls' magazines are filled with bad grammar, but their content is even worse. BY MEGHAN COX GURDON Friday, August 19, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT Last summer a polite, articulate 11-year-old friend of my daughter's went off eagerly to a week of summer nature camp--and found herself ridiculed and ostracized for what the other children considered her peculiar manner of speech. "She was mocked," the girl's parents recounted, "for speaking in complete sentences." I had largely forgotten this sad little anecdote until I happened on an online edition of Girls Life Magazine. "Girls Life?" thought I, all innocence. "Why, that must have something to do with the Girl Scouts." An image of wholesome do-goodery, of scrubbed cheeks and Norman Rockwell freshness, rose obediently in my mind--only to sink instantly under a deluge of inane headlines: "Too cute suits!" "Guys, Life, Friends, Body: Real Advice Just for You." "Wanna sound off about GL mag?" "Win FREE stuff! Feelin' lucky? Enter now!" Guys? Wanna? Feelin'? Ugh! Yet it turns out that Girls Life is indeed the magazine of the Girl Scouts of America (GSA), that high-minded organization originally modeled on Britain's Girl Guides, which itself sprang from the rib of Lord Robert Baden-Powell's turn-of-the-century Boy Scout movement. Girls Life is a successful stand-alone magazine ("From liking boys to 'like-liking' boys, Girls Life has it all!") and a five-time recipient of the Parents' Choice Award; the copies that Girl Scout subscribers receive contain a special four-page GSA insert. Yet isn't it piquant, even painful, to consider that an organization created to promote children's spine-straightening moral and physical development has devolved into one that through its magazine asks: "Poll Party: Favorite nail polish color?" "If an article comes in and it's a snore, and just needs to be funned up a little, I fun it up," the executive editor of Girls Life, Kelly White, told the online writers' magazine, The Purple Crayon. "I inject it with words like 'swank' and 'stoked.'" Girls Life, Ms. Kelly emphasized, is "not condescending. Still, we try to speak our readers' language." No wonder my daughter's friend had such trouble at summer camp. When adult editors talk of "funning up" the English language, when the vast panoply of info-tainment aimed at children parrots and reinforces the cheesiest pubescent vocabulary and preoccupations, what chance does a well-read, well-spoken child stand? In the terrible, gleaming world of adult-facilitated teen culture, talking calmly in complete sentences marks you as a freak. Teen People asks, "How Sexy Are You?" and "Gotta Hottie Next Door?" Cosmo Girl hosts a "Battle of the Boys: Who's the Hottest?" and Bop magazine online offers a male-as-sex-object game called Frankenboy: "Build your dream boy and e-mail him to a friend!" But magazines are only a part of it. Watch television aimed at the young and it is difficult to escape the disquieting sense that too much children's programming exists to--well, program children. Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel teach children through precept and relentless example how to preen, how to diss and how, if d''ark-skinned, to talk Ebonics. Virtually every girl sashays in heels, miniskirts and lipgloss; virtually every adult is an easily outsmarted villain or an eyeroll-worthy chump. And always, coiled beneath the amped-up happy talk of cool stuff, mean girls and cute guys, is sex. Children groomed within an inch of supermodeldom, with flashing teeth, gleaming hair and sexy clothes, are shown having crushes, yearning for dates and trying to act cool so as to get dates. Though for the misery that often results from too-early dating and consequent backseat fumbling, you presumably have to switch to Lifetime . . . [081905scouts.jpg] It used to be that adults talked about bringing children up, of raising them. Today the mass media, with the tacit support of parents, has largely abandoned any effort to lift children up and instead crouches ever lower to what it thinks is their aesthetic and linguistic level. Slam poet Taylor Mali's witty cri de coeur "Totally like whatever, you know?" aptly laments the pandemic brainlessness this fosters: Has society become so, like, totally . . . I mean absolutely . . .You know? That we've just gotten to the point where it's just, like . . . whatever! So actually our disarticulation . . .ness is just a clever sort of . . .thing to disguise the fact that we've become the most aggressively inarticulate generation to come along since . . . you know, a long, long time ago! Clunky bottom-feeding language is, of course, an expression of clunky bottom-feeding thinking. And when you "fun up" language, you trivialize thinking, fueling the already unhelpful suspicion among young teens that someone who talks seriously is ipso facto boring. So what we have is this extraordinary wave of empty, glittering, funned-up teen culture that rushes children into an ersatz maturity--chiefly sexual--and where the only reward is a jaded heart and an empty head. The natural defense, of course, is that the purveyors of mass culture are only giving young consumers what they want. Yet it is also true that magazines, Web sites and TV shows do not just minister to taste; they create taste. And here is where adults are grievously culpable, for it is not children who pitch ditzy show ideas, write facile scripts, edit funned-up, dumbed-down copy or crop photos to make Lindsay Lohan's breasts look melon-esque. It is worth mentioning that this awfulness applies chiefly to girl-consumers. Boy's Life, the magazine for Cub and Boy Scouts (and published by the Boy Scouts of America), is fully of goofy jokes, puzzles, jazzy photos of boys swooshing on surfboards or white-water rafting--even a Bible Heroes comic strip--but there is not a girl to be seen, or alluded to, except a few little-sister-types in the ads. But then, lip gloss, hip inarticulateness and sashaying in heels don't really have male counterparts. So perhaps there is no consumer demand. When a girl recites the Girl Scout Law, she promises to respect herself and others. Somehow I don't think the founder of the American Scouts, Juliette Gordon Low, would have dreamt this to include having "beach-perfect hair" or "crushing on a Momma's boy." And when there is scarcely a stiletto-height's difference between the magazine vehicle of the Girl Scouts of America and, say, Cosmo Girl, something is rotten in the culture--not teen culture (that goes without saying) but adult culture. Mrs. Gurdon is a columnist for National Review Online. From checker at panix.com Sun Aug 28 20:06:48 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 28 Aug 2005 16:06:48 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] WP: Dr. Gridlock on Obese Riders Message-ID: Dr. Gridlock on Obese Riders http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/20/AR2005082001038_pf.html By Ron Shaffer Sunday, August 21, 2005; C02 Dear Dr. Gridlock: Obese people should be charged double to ride Metrorail. Are these people aware that the seats on Metro cars are only 22 inches wide, and when they are also using half the seat next to them, it is unfair to fellow riders? Even when they stand, they block the aisles and doors. Lynn Wood Bowie Southwest Airlines (and perhaps others) will have large people sit in airline seats to see if they fit. If they don't, they are charged for two seats. But Metro handles 650,000 trips a day. It is unlikely the transit agency could enforce an arbitrary size limit on passengers. For those who object about a fellow passenger's size, smell or personal habits, remember: It's mass transit. --------------- For Train Riders, Middle Seat Isn't the Center of Attention http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/31/nyregion/31seat.html [This problem will solve itself. As the American population widens, three people will occupy two seats.] By PATRICK McGEEHAN Before the 5:19 p.m. train headed north out of Grand Central Terminal last week, some passengers were already sitting on the floor, surrounded by the scuffed shoes and stuffed briefcases of people leaning against the walls. Another overcrowded shuttle during the evening rush to the suburbs? Hardly. In fact, empty seats easily outnumbered the unseated riders. Throughout the car, all of the window and aisle seats were occupied. But there was an unbroken column of 18 unfilled seats - straight down the middle - along the eastern side of each car, where the wider space could accommodate three people. Once again, everybody had steered clear of the middle seats. People around New York have a hard time reaching a consensus on many things, but on this they - and, really, commuters everywhere - tend to agree: Nobody wants to sit in the center. Transit officials are gradually getting the picture and, wherever practical, are eliminating middle seats. Following the lead of the Long Island Rail Road, New Jersey Transit has ordered double-decker coaches with two seats on each side of the aisle, rather than the three-and-two combination that has been the norm. Several other commuter railroads across the country have been making the switch to double-decker trains without middle seats. Two systems near Washington, the Virginia Railway Express and the Maryland Rail Commuter trains, are adding bilevel cars with only pairs of seats. In San Diego and Seattle, there are new commuter systems without middle seats. The Virginia railway, which awarded a $109 million contract for as many as 61 cars two weeks ago, trumpeted its return "to the two-on-two design, eliminating the underused third seat." The idea of being squeezed elbow to elbow with two strangers on a ride that can last an hour or more causes many commuters to shudder. The hope of avoiding that bind can inspire long hikes from car to car in search of that one available window or aisle seat. This is true even where the seats are new and fitted to support aching backs and nodding heads, as they are in cars that Metro-North Railroad started running last year. So while the first prototype train for New Jersey Transit with no middle seats is not due until the end of the summer, some commuters are already eagerly anticipating the disappearance of some middle seats. Maxine Marshall, a financial executive from Plainfield, N.J., said she and other riders cheered when they saw that mock-ups of the new cars had only pairs of seats. Ms. Marshall, 35, was one of about 20 people New Jersey Transit invited to critique its plan for the coaches' interiors. "The middle seat was gone and that was one of the things that everybody liked," she said. "It was just smooth sailing from there." New Jersey Transit's primary reason for ordering the bilevel cars was to increase the capacity of its trains; being able to remove the middle seats was more of a bonus. The railroad agreed to pay $243 million for 100 of the cars. That amounts to about $600,000 more per car than Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road have paid for their new cars with middle seats. But for New Jersey Transit's customers, Ms. Marshall said, customers think the new cars will be worth the money. "Culturally, we like our space," she said. Ms. Marshall, who is well versed in rail car rituals after five years of traveling to and from her office in Jersey City, said aisle and window riders engage in not-so-subtle schemes to discourage interlopers. "They are blocking that seat with whatever they have," she said. There are also the spread newspapers and the closed eyes to encourage commuters to move on. When those tactics do not work, there can be huffing, whining or even arguing. Rarely does an aisle sitter move to that middle seat to make way. Since Metro-North introduced its new coaches, riders have been complaining that they are overcrowded. While the cars do have fewer seats, an average of about 15 fewer than their predecessors, frustrated Metro-North officials say that is not the problem. There are plenty of seats on most trains, they insist, if only people would sit in all of them. "There definitely is a sense of frustration over that," said Jeffrey Olwell, Metro-North's manager of market research. The reaction is particularly troubling, he and other transit officials said, because the new middle seats were designed to be more inviting than earlier models, or even than typical coach-class seats on commercial airliners, which are as narrow as 17? inches across. The bottom cushions are just as wide as those on the aisle seats (19 1/8 inches) and wider than those on the window seats by almost half an inch. In the newest cars on the Long Island Rail Road, the middle seats, at 19.3 inches, are wider than those on either side and slightly wider and deeper than the middle seats on the cars they replaced, said Dave Elliott, the railroad's general manager of fleet support. Commuters' responses probably have more to do with perceptions and attitudes than actual latitude, said Richard E. Wener, an associate professor of environmental psychology at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn. He said that passengers are more likely to say they feel crowded if there is somebody sitting beside them than if the adjacent seat is empty, no matter how many other people are on the train. "It's clear that people feel more crowded when they're sitting next to someone," said Dr. Wener, who studies what causes stress for commuters. "You can design the middle seat so it's more comfortable, but that doesn't mean people will sit in it." When the Long Island Rail Road introduced bilevel coaches on its Port Jefferson line in the 1980's, they had the traditional configuration of three seats on one side of the aisle and two on the other. The seats were tight and riders were not very pleased, Mr. Elliott recalled. "We never really got full occupancy within those middle seats," he said. Several years later, when the railroad ordered a whole fleet of bilevel coaches for its diesel locomotives to haul, the managers decided to switch to two-by-two seating exclusively. But on its other lines, which are powered by electricity, the Long Island Rail Road cannot use the taller bilevel coaches, leaving no option of throwing out the middle seats. Metro-North, whose trains must fit through the long, low tunnels at Grand Central, is also confined to single-level cars with a traditional three-by-two seating chart. Women especially dislike being sandwiched between strangers, Dr. Wener said. Academic studies have found that women "are more uncomfortable being encroached on side to side," he said, adding that men are bothered more by being face to face with strangers. Does that mean Ms. Marshall, the New Jersey financial executive, will walk on by when the only available seats on her trains are buried under coats and briefcases? Not necessarily. "If I'm tired enough," she said, "you're going to have to get the bag up off of the seat." From Euterpel66 at aol.com Mon Aug 29 14:02:47 2005 From: Euterpel66 at aol.com (Euterpel66 at aol.com) Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2005 10:02:47 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] idle brain invites dementia Message-ID: <19c.3a8381a1.30446f87@aol.com> http://www.newsday.com/mynews/ny-hsalz254396781aug25,0,344754.story Lorraine Rice Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. ---Andre Gide http://hometown.aol.com/euterpel66/myhomepage/poetry.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Mon Aug 29 14:37:00 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2005 08:37:00 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] idle brain invites dementia In-Reply-To: <19c.3a8381a1.30446f87@aol.com> References: <19c.3a8381a1.30446f87@aol.com> Message-ID: <43131D8C.8030308@solution-consulting.com> Lorraine, why isn't this an example of post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy? Lynn If I find the truth, I promise to keep it a secret from Lorraine. --Lynn (re: gide, below) Euterpel66 at aol.com wrote: > http://www.newsday.com/mynews/ny-hsalz254396781aug25,0,344754.story > > Lorraine Rice > > Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. > ---Andre Gide > > http://hometown.aol.com/euterpel66/myhomepage/poetry.html > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From checker at panix.com Tue Aug 30 21:46:41 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2005 17:46:41 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] PLoS Medicine: Why Most Published Research Findings Are False Message-ID: PLoS Medicine: Why Most Published Research Findings Are False http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10%2E1371%2Fjournal%2Epmed%2E0020124 Volume 2 | Issue 8 | AUGUST 2005 John P. A. Ioannidis Summary There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. In this essay, I discuss the implications of these problems for the conduct and interpretation of research. John P. A. Ioannidis is in the Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology, University of Ioannina School of Medicine, Ioannina, Greece, and Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies, Department of Medicine, Tufts-New England Medical Center, Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America. E-mail: jioannid at cc.uoi.gr Competing Interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist. Published: August 30, 2005 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 Abbreviation: PPV, positive predictive value Citation: Ioannidis JPA (2005) Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Med 2(8): e124 ______________________________________________________________________ Published research findings are sometimes refuted by subsequent evidence, with ensuing confusion and disappointment. Refutation and controversy is seen across the range of research designs, from clinical trials and traditional epidemiological studies [[24]1-3] to the most modern molecular research [[25]4,[26]5]. There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims [[27]6-8]. However, this should not be surprising. It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false. Here I will examine the key factors that influence this problem and some corollaries thereof. Modeling the Framework for False Positive Findings Several methodologists have pointed out [[28]9-11] that the high rate of nonreplication (lack of confirmation) of research discoveries is a consequence of the convenient, yet ill-founded strategy of claiming conclusive research findings solely on the basis of a single study assessed by formal statistical significance, typically for a p-value less than 0.05. Research is not most appropriately represented and summarized by p-values, but, unfortunately, there is a widespread notion that medical research articles should be interpreted based only on p-values. Research findings are defined here as any relationship reaching formal statistical significance, e.g., effective interventions, informative predictors, risk factors, or associations. "Negative" research is also very useful. "Negative" is actually a misnomer, and the misinterpretation is widespread. However, here we will target relationships that investigators claim exist, rather than null findings. It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false. As has been shown previously, the probability that a research finding is indeed true depends on the prior probability of it being true (before doing the study), the statistical power of the study, and the level of statistical significance [[29]10,[30]11]. Consider a 2 ? 2 table in which research findings are compared against the gold standard of true relationships in a scientific field. In a research field both true and false hypotheses can be made about the presence of relationships. Let R be the ratio of the number of "true relationships" to "no relationships" among those tested in the field. R is characteristic of the field and can vary a lot depending on whether the field targets highly likely relationships or searches for only one or a few true relationships among thousands and millions of hypotheses that may be postulated. Let us also consider, for computational simplicity, circumscribed fields where either there is only one true relationship (among many that can be hypothesized) or the power is similar to find any of the several existing true relationships. The pre-study probability of a relationship being true is R/(R + 1). The probability of a study finding a true relationship reflects the power 1 - b (one minus the Type II error rate). The probability of claiming a relationship when none truly exists reflects the Type I error rate, a. Assuming that c relationships are being probed in the field, the expected values of the 2 ? 2 table are given in [31]Table 1. After a research finding has been claimed based on achieving formal statistical significance, the post-study probability that it is true is the positive predictive value, PPV. The PPV is also the complementary probability of what Wacholder et al. have called the false positive report probability [[32]10]. According to the 2 ? 2 table, one gets PPV = (1 - b)R/(R - bR + a). A research finding is thus more likely true than false if (1 - b)R > a. Since usually the vast majority of investigators depend on a = 0.05, this means that a research finding is more likely true than false if (1 - b)R > 0.05. [33][table_thumb.gif] [34]Table 1. Research Findings and True Relationships What is less well appreciated is that bias and the extent of repeated independent testing by different teams of investigators around the globe may further distort this picture and may lead to even smaller probabilities of the research findings being indeed true. We will try to model these two factors in the context of similar 2 ? 2 tables. Bias First, let us define bias as the combination of various design, data, analysis, and presentation factors that tend to produce research findings when they should not be produced. Let u be the proportion of probed analyses that would not have been "research findings," but nevertheless end up presented and reported as such, because of bias. Bias should not be confused with chance variability that causes some findings to be false by chance even though the study design, data, analysis, and presentation are perfect. Bias can entail manipulation in the analysis or reporting of findings. Selective or distorted reporting is a typical form of such bias. We may assume that u does not depend on whether a true relationship exists or not. This is not an unreasonable assumption, since typically it is impossible to know which relationships are indeed true. In the presence of bias ([35]Table 2), one gets PPV = ([1 - b]R + ubR)/(R + a - bR + u - ua + ubR), and PPV decreases with increasing u, unless 1 - b =< a, i.e., 1 - b =< 0.05 for most situations. Thus, with increasing bias, the chances that a research finding is true diminish considerably. This is shown for different levels of power and for different pre-study odds in [36]Figure 1. [37][10.1371_journal.pmed.0020124.g001-M.jpg] [38]Figure 1. PPV (Probability That a Research Finding Is True) as a Function of the Pre-Study Odds for Various Levels of Bias, u Panels correspond to power of 0.20, 0.50, and 0.80. [39][table_thumb.gif] [40]Table 2. Research Findings and True Relationships in the Presence of Bias Conversely, true research findings may occasionally be annulled because of reverse bias. For example, with large measurement errors relationships are lost in noise [[41]12], or investigators use data inefficiently or fail to notice statistically significant relationships, or there may be conflicts of interest that tend to "bury" significant findings [[42]13]. There is no good large-scale empirical evidence on how frequently such reverse bias may occur across diverse research fields. However, it is probably fair to say that reverse bias is not as common. Moreover measurement errors and inefficient use of data are probably becoming less frequent problems, since measurement error has decreased with technological advances in the molecular era and investigators are becoming increasingly sophisticated about their data. Regardless, reverse bias may be modeled in the same way as bias above. Also reverse bias should not be confused with chance variability that may lead to missing a true relationship because of chance. Testing by Several Independent Teams Several independent teams may be addressing the same sets of research questions. As research efforts are globalized, it is practically the rule that several research teams, often dozens of them, may probe the same or similar questions. Unfortunately, in some areas, the prevailing mentality until now has been to focus on isolated discoveries by single teams and interpret research experiments in isolation. An increasing number of questions have at least one study claiming a research finding, and this receives unilateral attention. The probability that at least one study, among several done on the same question, claims a statistically significant research finding is easy to estimate. For n independent studies of equal power, the 2 ? 2 table is shown in [43]Table 3: PPV = R(1 - b^n)/(R + 1 - [1 - a]^n - Rb^n) (not considering bias). With increasing number of independent studies, PPV tends to decrease, unless 1 - b < a, i.e., typically 1 - b < 0.05. This is shown for different levels of power and for different pre-study odds in [44]Figure 2. For n studies of different power, the term b^n is replaced by the product of the terms b[i] for i = 1 to n, but inferences are similar. [45][10.1371_journal.pmed.0020124.g002-M.jpg] [46]Figure 2. PPV (Probability That a Research Finding Is True) as a Function of the Pre-Study Odds for Various Numbers of Conducted Studies, n Panels correspond to power of 0.20, 0.50, and 0.80. [47][table_thumb.gif] [48]Table 3. Research Findings and True Relationships in the Presence of Multiple Studies Corollaries A practical example is shown in [49]Box 1. Based on the above considerations, one may deduce several interesting corollaries about the probability that a research finding is indeed true. Corollary 1: The smaller the studies conducted in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. Small sample size means smaller power and, for all functions above, the PPV for a true research finding decreases as power decreases towards 1 - b = 0.05. Thus, other factors being equal, research findings are more likely true in scientific fields that undertake large studies, such as randomized controlled trials in cardiology (several thousand subjects randomized) [[50]14] than in scientific fields with small studies, such as most research of molecular predictors (sample sizes 100-fold smaller) [[51]15]. Corollary 2: The smaller the effect sizes in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. Power is also related to the effect size. Thus research findings are more likely true in scientific fields with large effects, such as the impact of smoking on cancer or cardiovascular disease (relative risks 3-20), than in scientific fields where postulated effects are small, such as genetic risk factors for multigenetic diseases (relative risks 1.1-1.5) [[52]7]. Modern epidemiology is increasingly obliged to target smaller effect sizes [[53]16]. Consequently, the proportion of true research findings is expected to decrease. In the same line of thinking, if the true effect sizes are very small in a scientific field, this field is likely to be plagued by almost ubiquitous false positive claims. For example, if the majority of true genetic or nutritional determinants of complex diseases confer relative risks less than 1.05, genetic or nutritional epidemiology would be largely utopian endeavors. Corollary 3: The greater the number and the lesser the selection of tested relationships in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. As shown above, the post-study probability that a finding is true (PPV) depends a lot on the pre-study odds (R). Thus, research findings are more likely true in confirmatory designs, such as large phase III randomized controlled trials, or meta-analyses thereof, than in hypothesis-generating experiments. Fields considered highly informative and creative given the wealth of the assembled and tested information, such as microarrays and other high-throughput discovery-oriented research [[54]4,[55]8,[56]17], should have extremely low PPV. Corollary 4: The greater the flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. Flexibility increases the potential for transforming what would be "negative" results into "positive" results, i.e., bias, u. For several research designs, e.g., randomized controlled trials [[57]18-20] or meta-analyses [[58]21,[59]22], there have been efforts to standardize their conduct and reporting. Adherence to common standards is likely to increase the proportion of true findings. The same applies to outcomes. True findings may be more common when outcomes are unequivocal and universally agreed (e.g., death) rather than when multifarious outcomes are devised (e.g., scales for schizophrenia outcomes) [[60]23]. Similarly, fields that use commonly agreed, stereotyped analytical methods (e.g., Kaplan-Meier plots and the log-rank test) [[61]24] may yield a larger proportion of true findings than fields where analytical methods are still under experimentation (e.g., artificial intelligence methods) and only "best" results are reported. Regardless, even in the most stringent research designs, bias seems to be a major problem. For example, there is strong evidence that selective outcome reporting, with manipulation of the outcomes and analyses reported, is a common problem even for randomized trails [[62]25]. Simply abolishing selective publication would not make this problem go away. Corollary 5: The greater the financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. Conflicts of interest and prejudice may increase bias, u. Conflicts of interest are very common in biomedical research [[63]26], and typically they are inadequately and sparsely reported [[64]26,[65]27]. Prejudice may not necessarily have financial roots. Scientists in a given field may be prejudiced purely because of their belief in a scientific theory or commitment to their own findings. Many otherwise seemingly independent, university-based studies may be conducted for no other reason than to give physicians and researchers qualifications for promotion or tenure. Such nonfinancial conflicts may also lead to distorted reported results and interpretations. Prestigious investigators may suppress via the peer review process the appearance and dissemination of findings that refute their findings, thus condemning their field to perpetuate false dogma. Empirical evidence on expert opinion shows that it is extremely unreliable [[66]28]. Corollary 6: The hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true. This seemingly paradoxical corollary follows because, as stated above, the PPV of isolated findings decreases when many teams of investigators are involved in the same field. This may explain why we occasionally see major excitement followed rapidly by severe disappointments in fields that draw wide attention. With many teams working on the same field and with massive experimental data being produced, timing is of the essence in beating competition. Thus, each team may prioritize on pursuing and disseminating its most impressive "positive" results. "Negative" results may become attractive for dissemination only if some other team has found a "positive" association on the same question. In that case, it may be attractive to refute a claim made in some prestigious journal. The term Proteus phenomenon has been coined to describe this phenomenon of rapidly alternating extreme research claims and extremely opposite refutations [[67]29]. Empirical evidence suggests that this sequence of extreme opposites is very common in molecular genetics [[68]29]. These corollaries consider each factor separately, but these factors often influence each other. For example, investigators working in fields where true effect sizes are perceived to be small may be more likely to perform large studies than investigators working in fields where true effect sizes are perceived to be large. Or prejudice may prevail in a hot scientific field, further undermining the predictive value of its research findings. Highly prejudiced stakeholders may even create a barrier that aborts efforts at obtaining and disseminating opposing results. Conversely, the fact that a field is hot or has strong invested interests may sometimes promote larger studies and improved standards of research, enhancing the predictive value of its research findings. Or massive discovery-oriented testing may result in such a large yield of significant relationships that investigators have enough to report and search further and thus refrain from data dredging and manipulation. Most Research Findings Are False for Most Research Designs and for Most Fields In the described framework, a PPV exceeding 50% is quite difficult to get. [69]Table 4 provides the results of simulations using the formulas developed for the influence of power, ratio of true to non-true relationships, and bias, for various types of situations that may be characteristic of specific study designs and settings. A finding from a well-conducted, adequately powered randomized controlled trial starting with a 50% pre-study chance that the intervention is effective is eventually true about 85% of the time. A fairly similar performance is expected of a confirmatory meta-analysis of good-quality randomized trials: potential bias probably increases, but power and pre-test chances are higher compared to a single randomized trial. Conversely, a meta-analytic finding from inconclusive studies where pooling is used to "correct" the low power of single studies, is probably false if R =< 1:3. Research findings from underpowered, early-phase clinical trials would be true about one in four times, or even less frequently if bias is present. Epidemiological studies of an exploratory nature perform even worse, especially when underpowered, but even well-powered epidemiological studies may have only a one in five chance being true, if R = 1:10. Finally, in discovery-oriented research with massive testing, where tested relationships exceed true ones 1,000-fold (e.g., 30,000 genes tested, of which 30 may be the true culprits) [[70]30,[71]31], PPV for each claimed relationship is extremely low, even with considerable standardization of laboratory and statistical methods, outcomes, and reporting thereof to minimize bias. [72][table_thumb.gif] [73]Table 4. PPV of Research Findings for Various Combinations of Power (1 - b), Ratio of True to Not-True Relationships (R), and Bias (u) Claimed Research Findings May Often Be Simply Accurate Measures of the Prevailing Bias As shown, the majority of modern biomedical research is operating in areas with very low pre- and post-study probability for true findings. Let us suppose that in a research field there are no true findings at all to be discovered. History of science teaches us that scientific endeavor has often in the past wasted effort in fields with absolutely no yield of true scientific information, at least based on our current understanding. In such a "null field," one would ideally expect all observed effect sizes to vary by chance around the null in the absence of bias. The extent that observed findings deviate from what is expected by chance alone would be simply a pure measure of the prevailing bias. For example, let us suppose that no nutrients or dietary patterns are actually important determinants for the risk of developing a specific tumor. Let us also suppose that the scientific literature has examined 60 nutrients and claims all of them to be related to the risk of developing this tumor with relative risks in the range of 1.2 to 1.4 for the comparison of the upper to lower intake tertiles. Then the claimed effect sizes are simply measuring nothing else but the net bias that has been involved in the generation of this scientific literature. Claimed effect sizes are in fact the most accurate estimates of the net bias. It even follows that between "null fields," the fields that claim stronger effects (often with accompanying claims of medical or public health importance) are simply those that have sustained the worst biases. For fields with very low PPV, the few true relationships would not distort this overall picture much. Even if a few relationships are true, the shape of the distribution of the observed effects would still yield a clear measure of the biases involved in the field. This concept totally reverses the way we view scientific results. Traditionally, investigators have viewed large and highly significant effects with excitement, as signs of important discoveries. Too large and too highly significant effects may actually be more likely to be signs of large bias in most fields of modern research. They should lead investigators to careful critical thinking about what might have gone wrong with their data, analyses, and results. Of course, investigators working in any field are likely to resist accepting that the whole field in which they have spent their careers is a "null field." However, other lines of evidence, or advances in technology and experimentation, may lead eventually to the dismantling of a scientific field. Obtaining measures of the net bias in one field may also be useful for obtaining insight into what might be the range of bias operating in other fields where similar analytical methods, technologies, and conflicts may be operating. How Can We Improve the Situation? Is it unavoidable that most research findings are false, or can we improve the situation? A major problem is that it is impossible to know with 100% certainty what the truth is in any research question. In this regard, the pure "gold" standard is unattainable. However, there are several approaches to improve the post-study probability. Better powered evidence, e.g., large studies or low-bias meta-analyses, may help, as it comes closer to the unknown "gold" standard. However, large studies may still have biases and these should be acknowledged and avoided. Moreover, large-scale evidence is impossible to obtain for all of the millions and trillions of research questions posed in current research. Large-scale evidence should be targeted for research questions where the pre-study probability is already considerably high, so that a significant research finding will lead to a post-test probability that would be considered quite definitive. Large-scale evidence is also particularly indicated when it can test major concepts rather than narrow, specific questions. A negative finding can then refute not only a specific proposed claim, but a whole field or considerable portion thereof. Selecting the performance of large-scale studies based on narrow-minded criteria, such as the marketing promotion of a specific drug, is largely wasted research. Moreover, one should be cautious that extremely large studies may be more likely to find a formally statistical significant difference for a trivial effect that is not really meaningfully different from the null [[74]32-34]. Second, most research questions are addressed by many teams, and it is misleading to emphasize the statistically significant findings of any single team. What matters is the totality of the evidence. Diminishing bias through enhanced research standards and curtailing of prejudices may also help. However, this may require a change in scientific mentality that might be difficult to achieve. In some research designs, efforts may also be more successful with upfront registration of studies, e.g., randomized trials [[75]35]. Registration would pose a challenge for hypothesis-generating research. Some kind of registration or networking of data collections or investigators within fields may be more feasible than registration of each and every hypothesis-generating experiment. Regardless, even if we do not see a great deal of progress with registration of studies in other fields, the principles of developing and adhering to a protocol could be more widely borrowed from randomized controlled trials. Finally, instead of chasing statistical significance, we should improve our understanding of the range of R values--the pre-study odds--where research efforts operate [[76]10]. Before running an experiment, investigators should consider what they believe the chances are that they are testing a true rather than a non-true relationship. Speculated high R values may sometimes then be ascertained. As described above, whenever ethically acceptable, large studies with minimal bias should be performed on research findings that are considered relatively established, to see how often they are indeed confirmed. I suspect several established "classics" will fail the test [[77]36]. Nevertheless, most new discoveries will continue to stem from hypothesis-generating research with low or very low pre-study odds. We should then acknowledge that statistical significance testing in the report of a single study gives only a partial picture, without knowing how much testing has been done outside the report and in the relevant field at large. Despite a large statistical literature for multiple testing corrections [[78]37], usually it is impossible to decipher how much data dredging by the reporting authors or other research teams has preceded a reported research finding. Even if determining this were feasible, this would not inform us about the pre-study odds. Thus, it is unavoidable that one should make approximate assumptions on how many relationships are expected to be true among those probed across the relevant research fields and research designs. The wider field may yield some guidance for estimating this probability for the isolated research project. Experiences from biases detected in other neighboring fields would also be useful to draw upon. Even though these assumptions would be considerably subjective, they would still be very useful in interpreting research claims and putting them in context. Box 1. An Example: Science at Low Pre-Study Odds Let us assume that a team of investigators performs a whole genome association study to test whether any of 100,000 gene polymorphisms are associated with susceptibility to schizophrenia. Based on what we know about the extent of heritability of the disease, it is reasonable to expect that probably around ten gene polymorphisms among those tested would be truly associated with schizophrenia, with relatively similar odds ratios around 1.3 for the ten or so polymorphisms and with a fairly similar power to identify any of them. Then R = 10/100,000 = 10^ -4, and the pre-study probability for any polymorphism to be associated with schizophrenia is also R/(R + 1) = 10^ -4. Let us also suppose that the study has 60% power to find an association with an odds ratio of 1.3 at a = 0.05. Then it can be estimated that if a statistically significant association is found with the p-value barely crossing the 0.05 threshold, the post-study probability that this is true increases about 12-fold compared with the pre-study probability, but it is still only 12 ? 10^ -4. Now let us suppose that the investigators manipulate their design, analyses, and reporting so as to make more relationships cross the p = 0.05 threshold even though this would not have been crossed with a perfectly adhered to design and analysis and with perfect comprehensive reporting of the results, strictly according to the original study plan. Such manipulation could be done, for example, with serendipitous inclusion or exclusion of certain patients or controls, post hoc subgroup analyses, investigation of genetic contrasts that were not originally specified, changes in the disease or control definitions, and various combinations of selective or distorted reporting of the results. Commercially available "data mining" packages actually are proud of their ability to yield statistically significant results through data dredging. In the presence of bias with u = 0.10, the post-study probability that a research finding is true is only 4.4 ? 10^ -4. Furthermore, even in the absence of any bias, when ten independent research teams perform similar experiments around the world, if one of them finds a formally statistically significant association, the probability that the research finding is true is only 1.5 ? 10^ -4, hardly any higher than the probability we had before any of this extensive research was undertaken! References 1. 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Aug 2005 17:46:46 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] VDare: Steve Sailer: Charles Murray Re-enters Great American Inequality Debate Message-ID: Steve Sailer: Charles Murray Re-enters Great American Inequality Debate http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050828_murray.htm 5.8.28 [14]Steve Sailer Archive Charles Murray Re-enters Great American Inequality Debate By [17]Steve Sailer Social scientist [18]Charles Murray, the co-author of the [19]1994 bestseller [20]The Bell Curve, is perhaps America's premier [21]data analyst. His 1984 book [22]Losing Ground provided the [23]intellectual impetus for the successful 1996 welfare reform law. His 2003 work [24]Human Accomplishment is a delightful statistical romp among the most [25]eminent scientists and artists in global history. Now, Murray is back with a landmark essay, "[26]The Inequality Taboo," in the September issue of [27]Commentary. The printed text alone totals 7,500 words, and the web version contains over 10,000 additional words of notes and sources. If published just by itself, Murray's 1,500-word [28]Footnote 44 would rank as the crucial statement on the recent trends and future prospects of the white-black IQ gap. Known among his friends for his remarkable judiciousness, Murray is a rather sensitive soul. The foul calumny he has been [29]subjected to over the last eleven years must have been tiresome. Murray hadn't crafted an essay about IQ since his little known (but important) [30]1999 effort reporting the then latest results of the enormous military-funded National Longitudinal Study of Youth look at IQ and life outcomes. This year, however, the [31]absurd denunciations visited upon Harvard president [32]Larry Summers for offering what Murray calls "a few mild, speculative, off-the-record remarks about [33]innate differences between men and women in their aptitude for high-level science and mathematics," persuaded Murray that intellectual discourse in America had decayed so shamefully that he needed to return to the fray. "[34]The Inequality Taboo" consists of three parts: bullet A defense of Summers's discussion of why brainiac math nerds are more likely to be male than female; bullet An updating on the last decade's worth of new findings on the white-black IQ gap; bullet And a ringing call to Americans to start discussing honestly the group differences that we see every day: "What good can come of raising this divisive topic? The honest answer is that no one knows for sure. What we do know is that the [35]taboo has crippled our ability to explore almost any topic that involves the different ways in which groups of people respond to the world around them--which means almost every political, social, or economic topic of any complexity." Murray suggests that both high-end male-female cognitive differences and the white-black IQ gap appear to be more or less "intractable"--he writes: "Whatever the precise partitioning of causation may be (we seldom know), policy interventions can only tweak the difference at the margins." Murray's defense of Summers is well-done, although the [36]stupidity and [37]bad faith of the attacks on the Harvard president were so blatant that [38]lesser analysts managed to make most of Murray's points [39]last winter. One interesting fact that Murray doesn't mention is that the much-demonized IQ researcher [40]Cyril Burt was the first to determine that women were equal to men in intelligence. British psychometrician [41]Chris Brand writes: "[I]n 1912, the British psychologist Cyril Burt overturned Victorian wisdom by finding males to have the same average general intelligence as females (using the new [42]Binet tests from France), [and] this finding was replicated in countless investigations (and qualified by the observations that males have a wider range of IQs--thus producing more geniuses and more mental defectives--and that adolescent boys only temporarily lag behind adolescent girls in mental development)." The majority of psychometricians, including, most notably, [43]Arthur Jensen, support Burt's finding of mean gender equality. (However, [44]Richard Lynn has a paper coming out [45]arguing that men average a third of a standard deviation--or five points--higher in IQ). Nor is there any dispute that, just as Summers said, at the [46]extreme right edge of the Bell Curve, from which Harvard's [47]math and science professors are drawn, there are more men than women. One of the most newsworthy aspects of "The Inequality Taboo" is Murray's view that the [48]white-black IQ gap may have narrowed slightly in recent years. According to Murray's article, the three most recent re-normings of major IQ tests came up with a mean white-black gap of 0.92 standard deviations, or 14 points. That doesn't sound like much of a change from the one standard deviation (15 points) racial gap that IQ realists have been talking about for decades. But, in reality, they've been intentionally understating the traditional size of the difference. A 2001 [49]meta-analysis of eight decades of data suggested a 1.1 standard deviation gap (16.5) points. So, if this new 14 point gap found in the three recent re-normings holds up as more data comes in, we may have seen some significant progress on this massive social problem. Currently, though, the evidence remains far from clear. Murray writes in a [50]footnote: "Forced to make a bet, I would guess that the black-white difference in IQ has dropped by somewhere in the range of .10-.20 standard deviations over the last few decades. I must admit, however, that I am influenced by a gut-level conviction that the radical improvement in the political, legal, and economic environment for blacks in the last half of the 20th century must have had an effect on IQ." Murray is too honest, however, to skip over the other, more disturbing, possibility: that the [51]greater fertility of lower IQ women has had a dysgenic and/or "[52]dyscultural" effect. Murray has calculated that 60% of the babies born to black women who began participating in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth in 1979 were born to women with IQs below the black female average of 85.7. Only 7% were born to black women with IQs over 100. I hope that the improved nutrition, health care, and other environmental enhancements that have allowed African-Americans to come to dominate [53]basketball, [54]football, and [55]sprinting in recent decades have also driven up black IQ scores more than the tendency of intelligent black women to [56]remain childless has driven them down. But the overall situation remains murky. It needs more research than is currently being funded. Does part of the white-black IQ gap have a genetic basis? Murray suggests an experiment that might prove conclusive: "To the extent that genes play a role, IQ will vary by racial admixture. In the past, studies that have attempted to test this hypothesis have had no accurate way to measure the degree of admixture, and the results have been accordingly muddy. The recent advances in using [57]genetic markers solve that problem. Take a large sample of racially diverse people, give them a good IQ test, and then use genetic markers to create a variable that no longer classifies people as 'white' or 'black,' but along a continuum. Analyze the variation in IQ scores according to that continuum. The results would be close to dispositive." I bet, however, that Murray's critics won't rush to [58]fund this study and put their money where their mouths are. In his coda, Murray says: "Thus my modest recommendation, requiring no change in laws or regulations, just a little more gumption. Let us start talking about group differences openly--all sorts of group differences, from the visuospatial skills of men and women to the vivaciousness of [59]Italians and [60]Scots. Let us talk about the nature of the manly versus the womanly virtues. About differences between Russians and Chinese that might affect their adoption of capitalism. About differences between [61]Arabs and Europeans that might affect the assimilation of [62]Arab immigrants into European democracies. About differences between the [63]poor and non-poor that could inform policy for [64]reducing poverty." Sounds like the table of contents for VDARE.com! Murray concludes: "Even to begin listing the topics that could be enriched by an inquiry into the nature of group differences is to reveal how stifled today's conversation is... Let us stop being afraid of data that tell us a story we do not want to hear, stop the name-calling, stop the denial, and start facing reality." I'm sometimes asked why I come up with more new insights than the typical pundit. (Here's a [65]list of four dozen things I've either discovered myself, accurately forecasted, or scooped the rest of the press about). It's not because I'm smarter. It's because I just tell the truth. The great thing about truths is that they are causally connected to all the other truths in the world. If you follow one truth bravely, it will lead you to another. In contrast, lies, ignorance, and wishful thinking are dead ends. The Great American Inequality Debate is in one of those dead ends. Charles Murray--and we here at VDARE.COM--are trying to rescue it. [Steve Sailer [[66]email him], is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and [67]movie critic for [68]The American Conservative. His website [69]www.iSteve.com features site-exclusive commentaries.] References 14. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/index.htm 17. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/index.htm 18. http://www.isteve.com/2003_QA_with_Charles_Murray_on_Human_Accomplishment.htm 19. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/bell_curve_10yr.htm 20. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684824299/vdare 21. http://olimu.com/Journalism/Texts/Reviews/HumanAccomplishment.htm 22. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465042333/vdare 23. http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/lm_pr_address.htm 24. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/006019247X/vdare 25. http://www.amconmag.com/11_17_03/review.html 26. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/production/files/murray0905.html 27. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/production/files/murray0905.html 28. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/production/files/murray0905.html#_edn44 29. http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/People/Murray/bc-crit.html 30. http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/taboos/cmurraybga0799.pdf 31. http://www.vdare.com/francis/050124_harvard_women.htm 32. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050220_summers.htm 33. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050306_summers.htm 34. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/production/files/murray0905.html 35. http://www.vdare.com/pb/gambler_dan.htm 36. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050220_summers.htm 37. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050306_summers.htm 38. http://www.isteve.com/2005_National_Post_Summers_Harvard.htm 39. http://www.isteve.com/2005_Education_of_Larry_Summers.htm 40. http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/burtaffair.shtml 41. http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/vol3no2/cb-boasa.html 42. http://www.psych.umn.edu/psylabs/CATCentral/Binet.htm 43. http://www.isteve.com/jensen.htm 44. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4183166.stm 45. http://www.vdare.com/misc/mercer_050106_silly.htm 46. http://www.isteve.com/2005_National_Post_Summers_Harvard.htm 47. http://www.vdare.com/pb/purpose_of_tenure.htm 48. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/no_excuses.htm 49. http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5001029349 50. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/production/files/murray0905.html#_edn44 51. http://olimu.com/WebJournalism/Texts/Commentary/MarchingMorons.htm 52. http://slate.msn.com/id/33569/entry/33726/ 53. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/march_madness.htm#hoops 54. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/limbaugh.htm 55. http://vdare.com/sailer/lynch_mob.htm 56. http://www.isteve.com/IsLoveColorblind.htm 57. http://www.isteve.com/2002_How_White_Are_Blacks.htm 58. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/pioneer.htm 59. http://www.vdare.com/guzzardi/basta.htm 60. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/fischer.htm 61. http://www.vdare.com/sailer/risky_transactions.htm 62. http://www.vdare.com/fulford/racial_rape.htm 63. http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/murray-poor?embedded=yes&cumulative_category_title=Charles+Murray&cumulative_category_id=Murray 64. http://www.vdare.com/francis/culture_of_poverty.htm 65. http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/08/return-of-second-istevecom-panhandling.html 66. mailto:steveslr at aol.com 67. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/iSteve-movies/ 68. http://www.amconmag.com/ 69. http://www.isteve.com/ 70. http://www.vdare.com/asp/donate.asp From checker at panix.com Tue Aug 30 21:46:56 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2005 17:46:56 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] J. Andrew Rogers: Death by terrorism Message-ID: From: "J. Andrew Rogers" Date: Sat, 13 Aug 2005 15:34:37 -0700 To: FoRK Subject: Re: [FoRK] Death by terrorism User-Agent: Microsoft-Entourage/11.1.0.040913 On 8/12/05 2:09 PM, "Ian Andrew Bell (FoRK)" wrote: > Heh. I guess if I were a terrorist I would have to ask myself why > I'd need to use a SCUD vs. just stuffing a ship full of explosives > and sailing up the Hudson River... what's the incremental benefit? Yup. A lot of the proposed countermeasures are absurd and reek of pork. There are several cases of high price tag countermeasures with no realistic utility. An old shipping vessel can be purchased for less than US$1M, and packing it to the gills with Chinese bulk explosive (the Chinese export thousands of tons of explosives around the world) would be cheap and completely legal. Another fine example of this is the proposed man-portable surface-to-air missile countermeasures they've talked about installing on all commercial passenger jets for some crazy amount of money. Old and readily available MANPADs like the SA-7 are nearly useless against commercial passenger jets (way outside the design spec for a weapon that was marginal even in its day), rendering countermeasures largely pointless. Modern and very difficult to come by MANPADs are nearly impervious to the types of countermeasures they are discussing, but they are not going to be installing state-of-the-art classified SAM counter-battery and active intercept technology on commercial jets, again rendering such proposals pointless. They would be better off using that money for direct intelligence operations. > And just because I did a standoff attack doesn't mean I'm going to get away > with it. Obviously someone will figure out where it came from before I can > steam away, and there will be launch rails, fueling tools, and all kinds of > other evidence. They would probably have point-of-origin pegged within seconds of launch and before it lands. There is a legion of satellites orbiting for precisely this purpose, never mind ground-based radar. Like you, I find the notion absurd. > And Patriots might be good at knocking down missiles, but not so good at > destroying them. The rain of SCUD debris on Tel Aviv after a successful > Patriot intercept was exactly as dangerous as the successful impact and > detonation of a SCUD itself. And the Patriot had a pretty awful success rate > in the Gulf War (I) to boot. The Patriot was an anti-aircraft system, but by good fortune of being over-engineered for its intended use, had modest capability at intercepting ballistic missiles. As you point out, it proved to be almost worthless because ballistic missiles are harder targets than aircraft and will happily continue on their course even if jostled a bit by a SAM. After that war, they re-did the software and warhead to have much more efficacy against ballistic missiles, but it is still just an over-engineered anti-aircraft system. > This will hopefully die on the vine, just as the whole National Missile > Defense pipe dream appears to be withering slowly. Missile Defense is completely viable, but they have had a lot of teething problems with one of the fundamentally new technology platforms they were counting on that has delayed deployment by quite some time. Since many unrelated weapon systems are relying on this same technology and they have made a lot of progress in getting it working reliably, it is just a matter of time before they deploy comprehensive anti-missile systems that range from tactical all the way up to strategic. We've been hearing less about it because it has been working better. In the near future, there will be no distinction between surface anti-aircraft and ABM weapon systems; they will all be hyperkinetic "hit a bullet with a bullet" technologies -- technology convergence. I do not think many people understand what is currently unreliable about ABM technology. It is NOT the ability to "hit a bullet with a bullet", as the discrimination and guidance system works almost flawlessly and has been deployed in other weapon systems for a number of years now -- guidance and discrimination packages are heavily re-used once perfected. Contrary to some speculation to the contrary, this particular package is almost impervious to countermeasures, decoys, and spoofing. Very capable weapons like the new generation AIM-9X Sidewinder use a cut-down variation on the same guidance and discrimination package. The technology problem has been a brand new rocket platform, that is supposed to eventually replace most existing rocket motors platforms in use by the US military. The Army was the first to bite the bullet and commit to these new rocket motors for all their new systems, and have had a number of problems as a result. The Navy was more conservative and has deployed the same ABM guidance package on their old proven rocket platform and it has worked perfectly for them, though without the advantages the new rocket motors offer. The specific problem is that the new hyperkinetic motor platform generates extremely high acceleration and peak velocity that is pushing the engineering envelope right up against the limits of materials science and requiring the use of the most advanced exotic fabrication and materials the US knows how to produce. It has spectacular range, closing speed, and terminal performance if you can keep the bloody thing together in flight, and because it moves so fast, you can count on a kinetic energy kill. All in a very compact package. There is footage on the web of small hyperkinetic rocket based weapon tests being used against armor at a couple miles range. They make normal missiles look like they are standing still -- it is something to see. Most of the other missile defense deployments that have been going on are stopgaps until they can get the rocket motor platform to function reliably under all environments. Once they figure out the engineering loose-ends, ABM capable weapons will become prolific in the US arsenal. It might not be a national missile defense as originally envisioned, but that technology will create a de facto national missile defense. Once they get the bugs worked out. Cheers, J. Andrew Rogers From checker at panix.com Tue Aug 30 21:47:08 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2005 17:47:08 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: Gender and Brain Dysfunction Message-ID: Neuroscience: Gender and Brain Dysfunction http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050819-1.htm The following points are made by Constance Holden (Science 2005 308:5728): 1) Researchers are seeking biological reasons for the widespread gender differences in the prevalence and symptomatology of mental disorders. There is little debate that patterns of mental illness and disorders vary between the sexes. Women, for example, are more likely to get depressed. Men are more severely afflicted by schizophrenia. Females have more anxiety. Males exhibit more antisocial behavior. Most alcoholics and drug addicts are male; females have more eating disorders. Even suicide has a gender bias. Females make more attempts; males are more successful. Although culture helps shape how the two sexes express mental problems, some differences persist across cultures and across time. It's difficult to find any single factor more predictive for some of these disorders than gender. 2) Talking about sex differences has long been taboo in some quarters -- people hear "sex differences" and think you're talking about individuals, not populations. There is a huge amount of variation within a population and overlap between populations. But neuroscience research, especially the explosion in brain imaging, has produced data that are hard to ignore. "Every time you do a functional MRI on any test, different parts of the brain light up in men and women," says Florence Haseltine, a reproductive endocrinologist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) in Bethesda, Maryland. "It's clear there are big differences." Understanding these differences will have implications for treatments of brain diseases and brain injuries. 3) Most mental disorders are complex and resist the hunt for specific genes, yet family and twin studies have demonstrated significant heritability for them. These disorders interact with brain differences between the sexes that arise from genes on the X and Y chromosomes and from the bath of gonadal hormones that soak fetal brains early in gestation. Sex hormones are far-reaching in their powers. They are master transcription regulators; they affect hundreds of downstream genes. There is no question these are big players in mental disorders. These sex-related changes are sort of early filters, influencing the expression of underlying disorders in different ways. 4) No one has managed to draw an unbroken line from prenatal development to adult behavior. But some researchers are now trying to tease apart just what aspects of brain anatomy and chemistry can help account for the gender skewing in mental disorders. Some studies are contradictory, and there is still more known about animals than about humans. Science http://www.sciencemag.org -------------------------------- Related Material: MEDICAL BIOLOGY: SEX DIFFERENCES READING DISABILITY The following points are made by M. Rutter et al (J. Am. Med. Assoc. 2004 291:2007): 1) Are boys more likely than girls to have reading disability? The answer to this question has both theoretical implications (with respect to possible causal mechanisms) and practical implications (with respect to service provision). If boys are truly more likely to have reading disability, this would direct research attention to uncovering the possible source of the sex difference. Also, the sex difference would offer a window into the understanding of the causal processes involved in the origins of developmental reading disability.(1) In addition, if boys are more prone to have reading disability, this should motivate educational programs to address boys' early emerging disability. Given that reading disability in childhood is associated with adjustment problems and long-term adverse outcomes in multiple life domains,(2) the elucidation of this disability should constitute a high priority. 2) Thirty years ago, epidemiological studies drew attention to the preponderance of male children with reading disability. Surveys both on the Isle of Wight and in an inner London borough(3) were consistent in showing that reading disability, whether assessed through group or individual tests, was substantially more frequent in boys than in girls. Moreover, the sex difference was evident whether reading disability was considered in terms of IQ-referenced (adjusted) specific reading retardation (in which reading was markedly lower than that predicted on the basis of age and IQ) or non-IQ-referenced general low achievement in reading. Thus, in the inner London sample of 10-year-olds, the rates of specific reading retardation on group tests were 16.9% in boys compared with 7.2% in girls. Using individual testing in those with positive screens on the group reading test, the rates were 4.6% vs 2.0%. The comparable data for Isle of Wight 10-year-old boys and girls were 8.6% vs 3.7% on group tests and 5.6% vs 2.9% on individual tests.3 3) When non-IQ-referenced reading disability was defined as performance at least 28 months behind population norms on either reading accuracy or reading comprehension, the male-female difference on group tests was 15.9% vs 7.2% in inner London, with 22.2% vs 15.6% on the basis of individual testing of those who had positive screens. The comparable Isle of Wight data were 8.6% vs 3.7% on group testing and 10.5% vs 6.1% on individual testing. The sample sizes in both cases were large: 1689 for the inner London 10-year-olds and 1142 for the Isle of Wight 10-year-olds. 4) Some 15 years later, in 1990, Shaywitz et al,(4) reporting on a sample of 414 children aged 7 to 8 years, drew attention to their finding that the sex ratio in their epidemiological study was very much less than that in their sample of children identified on the basis of school records. Among the children in second grade, the rates were 8.7% in boys vs 6.9% in girls, and 1 year later (at a mean age of 8.7 years), the comparison was 9.0% vs 6.0%. 5) The authors summarize the history of research on sex differences in reading disability and provide new evidence from four independent epidemiological studies about the nature, extent, and significance of sex differences in reading disability. In all 4 studies, the rates of reading disability were significantly higher in boys. The authors conclude: "Reading disabilities are clearly more frequent in boys than in girls."(5) References (abridged): 1. Rutter M, Caspi A, Moffitt TE. Using sex differences in psychopathology to study causal mechanisms: unifying issues and research strategies. J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2003;44:1092-1115 2. Snowling MJ. Reading and other learning difficulties. In: Rutter M, Taylor E, eds. Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 4th Edition. Oxford, England: Blackwell Science; 2002:682-696 3. Berger M, Yule W, Rutter M. Attainment and adjustment in two geographical areas, II: the prevalence of specific reading retardation. Br J Psychiatry. 1975;126:510-519 4. Shaywitz SE, Shaywitz BA, Fletcher JM, Escobar MD. Prevalence of reading disability in boys and girls: results of the Connecticut Longitudinal Study. JAMA. 1990;264:998-1002 5. Flannery KA, Liederman J, Daly L, Schultz J. Male prevalence for reading disability is found in a large sample of black and white children free from ascertainment bias. J Int Neuropsychol Soc. 2000;6:433-442 J. Am. Med. Assoc. http://www.jama.com -------------------------------- Related Material: SEX DIFFERENCES IN THE NEURAL BASIS OF EMOTIONAL MEMORIES. The following points are made by T. Canli et al (Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 2002 99:11802): 1) Emotionally arousing experiences are more memorable than neutral experiences. There is superior memory for traumatic relative to mundane events (1) and for emotionally provocative relative to neutral words (2) and pictures (3). Memory for emotional stimuli and experiences differs between the sexes (4,5). Women recall more emotional autobiographical events than men in timed tests, produce memories more quickly or with greater emotional intensity in response to cues, and report more vivid memories than their spouses for events related to their first date, last vacation, and a recent argument (4). 2) Two explanations for the difference in memory performance have been proposed. The "affect-intensity" hypothesis posits that women have better memory because they experience life events more intensely than men and thus may better encode such events into memory (4). Controlling for affect intensity at encoding should therefore eliminate women's superior memory performance. The "cognitive-style" hypothesis posits that women may differ from men in how they encode, rehearse, or think about their affective experiences or in how they generate responses in a memory test (5). According to this view, controlling for affect intensity at encoding should not remove sex-based differences in memory performance. 3) In summary: Psychological studies have found better memory in women than men for emotional events, but the neural basis for this difference is unknown. The authors report they used event-related functional MRI to assess whether sex differences in memory for emotional stimuli is associated with activation of different neural systems in men and women. Brain activation in 12 men and 12 women was recorded while they rated their experience of emotional arousal in response to neutral and emotionally negative pictures. In a recognition memory test 3 weeks after scanning, highly emotional pictures were remembered best, and remembered better by women than by men. Men and women activated different neural circuits to encode stimuli effectively into memory even when the analysis was restricted to pictures rated equally arousing by both groups. Men activated significantly more structures than women in a network that included the right amygdala, whereas women activated significantly fewer structures in a network that included the left amygdala. Women had significantly more brain regions where activation correlated with both ongoing evaluation of emotional experience and with subsequent memory for the most emotionally arousing pictures. Greater overlap in brain regions sensitive to current emotion and contributing to subsequent memory may be a neural mechanism for emotions to enhance memory more powerfully in women than in men. References (abridged): 1. Christianson, S.-A. & Loftus, E. F. (1987) Appl. Cogn. Psychol. 1, 225-239. 2. LaBar, K. S. & Phelps, E. A. (1998) Psychol. Sci. 9, 490-493. 3. Bradley, M. M. , Greenwald, M. K. , Petry, M. C. & Lang, P. J. (1992) J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cognit. 18, 379-390. 4. Fujita, F. , Diener, E. & Sandvik, E. (1991) J. Pers. Soc. Pychol. 61, 427-434. 5. Seidlitz, L. & Diener, E. (1998) J. Pers. Soc. Pychol. 74, 262-271. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. http://www.pnas.org -------------------------------- Related Material: COGNITIVE SCIENCE: SEX DIFFERENCES IN CHIMPANZEE LEARNING The following points are made by E.V. Lonsdorf et al (Nature 2004 428:715): 1) The wild chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, fish for termites with flexible tools that they make out of vegetation, inserting them into the termite mound and then extracting and eating the termites that cling to the tool(1). Tools may be used in different ways by different chimpanzee communities according to the local chimpanzee culture(2). 2) Chimpanzees use tools for more purposes than any other non-human species(3). The cultural variation in tool-use repertoires among chimpanzee communities may be attributable to individuals socially learning from other members of their community(2). The authors investigated this process in wild chimpanzees in Gombe National Park by videotaping 14 animals (who were all under 11 years old) and their mothers during termite-fishing sessions. 3) There were no significant differences between the sexes in the frequency of social interaction with the mothers, and mothers did not show any difference in tolerance towards male or female offspring. Because active demonstration of nut-cracking by a chimpanzee mother in the Tai forest has been described(5), the authors looked for evidence of such behavior in mothers at Gombe. They saw no cases of active teaching, by mothers or any other individuals, which would have been indicated, for example, by the offering of tools or modification of offspring behavior. 4) The authors conclude: "Our findings indicate that female chimpanzees start to fish for termites at a younger age than males; they are more proficient than males once they have acquired the skill; and they each use a technique similar to their mother's, although males do not. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic evidence of a difference between the sexes in the learning or imitation of a tool-use technique in wild chimpanzees. A similar disparity in the ability of young males and females to learn skills has been demonstrated in human children and may be indicative of different learning processes. A sex-based learning difference may therefore date back at least to the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans.(3,4) References (abridged): 1. Goodall, J. Symp. Zool. Soc. Lond. 10, 39-48 (1963) 2. Whiten, A. et al. Nature 399, 682-685 (1999) 3. McGrew, W. C. Chimpanzee Material Culture: Implications for Human Evolution (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1992) 4. McCulloch, C. E. & Searle, S. R. Generalized, Linear, and Mixed Models (Wiley, New York, 2000) 5. Boesch, C. Anim. Behav. 41, 530-532 (1991) Nature http://www.nature.com/nature From checker at panix.com Tue Aug 30 21:48:30 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2005 17:48:30 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] spiked: The assault on pleasure Message-ID: The assault on pleasure http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CACEF.htm 11 August 2005 Is a new Puritanism on the march? by James Murphy That the maximum boat-speed on a famous Cumbrian lake has now been set at a stately 10 miles per hour may not seem like a throbbing issue in itself. And, probably, many living in metropolitan UK would instinctively conclude that such a restriction would be better for the environment, safety, peace and quiet, and so on. The fact that the Cumbria Tourist Board and local hoteliers are claiming that the new speed limit is having a ruinous effect on holiday trade has hardly made front-page news. Even if it did, one wonders whether the chattering classes would notice - or care enough to change their view. At the Future Foundation, we are ready to lay enormous symbolic significance on to the battle of Lake Windermere. The marketing services community is slowly realising that a new culture of regulation and restraint is busily corroding consumer access to so many markets. Individuals too are facing inhibitions to modes of consumption that only a few years ago would have seemed ordinary, harmless, unquestionably fun. It is getting harder and harder to sell certain things, especially in markets with an indulgence dimension, and ever trickier to procure them. This 'assault on pleasure' takes two interactive forms. Firstly, public authorities - from the Lake District National Park Authority upwards - are, often driven by the best of motives, introducing more formal regulation into more aspects of our lives. The Scottish Executive is to ban smoking in public places. A health authority in Norfolk has banned a famous fast-food chain from giving free vouchers to hospitalised families. A school in Shropshire has banned pupils from bringing birthday cakes on to the premises. As you look around at common-or-garden politics today, it's not hard to find the itch-to-prohibit being noisily scratched by important people everywhere. Secondly, there is a new strain of moral opprobrium spreading through the body social. We all have an ever-swelling inventory of things we feel we ought not to do - both because lobbies or pressure groups suggest they damage the common good and because our friends might like us less if they knew we did them. Green campaigners tell us to question whether we really ought to take long-haul flights. Health campaigners invite us not to give sweets to one another. Safety campaigners insist we drive at much lower speeds. There is a censor at every corner. It is hard to deny that a new Puritanism is abroad. A national study run by the Future Foundation in 2005 has found that nearly half the country now thinks that the government should ban chocolate-vending machines in schools and hospitals. Around 40 per cent of us now agree that jeeps and four-wheel drive cars should not be allowed into city centres. Perhaps most eerie, is the finding that 30 per cent of us now endorse the proposition that a pregnant woman found smoking in a public place should be given a caution by a police officer. To some, all this will seem like progress, evidence of a society with the maturity to discipline excess and to contain indulgence of all kinds. And it is not easy for anyone to argue that the environment can take care of itself or that children do not need better food or that speed is danger-free. Majorities of common-sense support can naturally form in favour of many of the new restrictions and restraints. But it is the apparently tentacular reach of modern regulation and the sheer unchecked energy behind it that should give us pause. In five years' time, will giving sweets to children be tugging the same moral tripwires as smacking does today? Will all office Christmas parties, by diktat, be shandy-only? Will tourists for Petra or Machu Picchu be booed as they arrive at Heathrow to board their flights? Will your Friday night Bacardi Breezer come with a Department of Health beer-mat decorated with a drawing of a diseased liver? Will a new law ban angling because fish might be able to feel pain? The evidence of the past few years hardly suggests we are holding hyperbolic thoughts here. We are not arguing that the future will bring no perfectly sensible changes to attitude and behaviour. But that might be more by luck than detached judgement. For we live today in something of a quiet chaos of political power and practical authority. In a time drained of ideological struggling where the macro-economy is well run by steady-as-she-goes technocrats, policy-makers of all kinds are in a constant search for something valuable to do. At the same time, single-issue lobbies press their claims with a moral superiority which the media - awash with disdain for the doings of the conventional political class - are generally happy to endorse. It seems arrogant to reject the principled case mounted by nutrition campaigners, anti-alcohol groups, GMO protestors and road safety lobbies. Policy-makers thus fall in line. This universe of one-issue agit-prop has one abiding, perhaps under-noticed feature. And that is what we might call insatiable incrementalism. As restraints on behaviour are ever more formalised in the name of the common good, so lobbies have a habit of not disappearing. Indeed, even though the world, by their lights, may have been measurably improved by the success of a particular campaign, their politically monotone clamour can remain as loud as ever. The Office of National Statistics might well tell us that between 1998 and 2004 there was 'little change in the proportions of men and women exceeding the daily benchmarks' for alcohol consumption. The World Health Organisation might well add that alcohol consumption in the UK is running at less per capita/per annum than in France, Germany or Spain and that we have less cirrhosis here than in any of those countries. But you would hardly get this impression from the websites of alcohol-anxiety movements. Alcohol abuse is a social evil, and temperate drinking should be encouraged. But can the lobby groups really cope with the possibility that things are not actually getting any worse and may even be getting a little better? Under what conceivable conditions will any such lobby simply declare their war over, pack up and go home? The 'assault on pleasure' seems to be rooted in a myth of decline. Life is not as good as before. Social problems are multiplying and intensifying. Too much individualism and free choice - and certainly too much consumerism - are depleting our stock of spiritual resources...and so on. Versions of these pessimisms are to be found in much of the learned commentary that is offered about life in Britain now. In Richard Layard's recent Happiness - Lessons from a New Science, the distinguished economist tells us that 'despite all the efforts of governments, teachers, doctors and businessmen, human happiness has not improved' - the fault variously of competitive individualism, too much divorce, too much TV, too much secularism, and something called the 'hedonic treadmill'. Such statements are taken as superior wisdom, and they reinforce attempts to regulate, restrict and restrain. Any one of us can reach a dispassionate view as to whether a speed limit on Lake Windermere is a good thing or a bad thing. And many good instincts are at work in all the debates we have about nutrition and drinking and smoking and hunting with dogs and global warming and children's wellbeing. But maybe we can feel too that regulatory impulses are spreading into too many crannies of our lives; that there is too much randomness and incoherence in the way certain behaviours are being stopped or discouraged; that there is in the air the unmistakeable pungency of puritanical bossiness. A quarter of us now agree that only a limited number should be allowed to visit the Lake District each year. Just how and where and when will this overheating culture of inhibition come to a sensible close? James Murphy is Director of Model Reasoning and Associate of the Future Foundation. He is co-directing the Assault on Pleasure project (for further details see [2]www.futurefoundation.net). Email [3]jmurphy at modelreasoning.com