From HowlBloom at aol.com Wed Jun 1 02:42:51 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Tue, 31 May 2005 22:42:51 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] free wills and quantum won'ts Message-ID: Sorry it took me so long to answer this. I puzzled over it considerably. Free will is a matter of whether there are choices and whether the choice we make is determined entirely by prior causes...or is this what the question of free will is about? The free-will debate is an intellectual ruckus over something worth ruckusing about--the question of whether we respond to a conundrum by making a pre-programmed, robotic decision, a decision that the ultimate mathematician or mechanician could theoretically predict, right? It's the question of whether our not we're kidding ourselves. We're under the impression that we have options and that the exertion of some sort of thought, feeling, and will really does help us make up our mind, or whether we simply pinball automatically down just one predetermined path. It's a question of what will is and if what we think it is is all wrong. Isn't it? Howard In a message dated 5/16/2005 8:28:09 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, dsmith06 at maine.rr.com writes: Traditionally, the problem of free will is not a question of whether or not we have choices, it is the question of whether or not these choices are caused by prior events. David ----- Original Message ----- From: _HowlBloom at aol.com_ (mailto:HowlBloom at aol.com) To: _paleopsych at paleopsych.org_ (mailto:paleopsych at paleopsych.org) Sent: Monday, May 16, 2005 11:19 PM Subject: [Paleopsych] free wills and quantum won'ts This is from a dialog Pavel Kurakin and I are having behind the scenes. I wanted to see what you all thought of it. Howard You know that I'm a quantum skeptic. I believe that our math is primitive. The best math we've been able to conceive to get a handle on quantum particles is probabilistic. Which means it's cloudy. It's filled with multiple choices. But that's the problem of our math, not of the cosmos. With more precise math I think we could make more precise predictions. And with far more flexible math, we could model large-scale things like bio-molecules, big ones, genomes, proteins and their interactions. With a really robust and mature math we could model thought and brains. But that math is many centuries and many perceptual breakthroughs away. As mathematicians, we are still in the early stone age. But what I've said above has a kink I've hidden from view. It implies that there's a math that would model the cosmos in a totally deterministic way. And life is not deterministic. We DO have free will. Free will means multiple choices, doesn't it? And multiple choices are what the Copenhagen School's probabilistic equations are all about? How could the concept of free will be right and the assumptions behind the equations of Quantum Mechanics be wrong? Good question. Yet I'm certain that we do have free will. And I'm certain that our current quantum concepts are based on the primitive metaphors underlying our existing forms of math. Which means there are other metaphors ahead of us that will make for a more robust math and that will square free will with determinism in some radically new way. Now the question is, what could those new metaphors be? Howard ---------- 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 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: Youthactivism.org; 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 ____________________________________ _______________________________________________ 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 ---------- 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 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: Youthactivism.org; 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 waluk at earthlink.net Wed Jun 1 03:12:09 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Tue, 31 May 2005 20:12:09 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] free wills and quantum won'ts In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <429D2789.7060008@earthlink.net> Howard writes: >>The free-will debate is an intellectual ruckus over something worth ruckusing about--the question of whether we respond to a conundrum by making a pre-programmed, robotic decision, a decision that the ultimate mathematician or mechanician could theoretically predict, right? It's the question of whether our not we're kidding ourselves. We're under the impression that we have options and that the exertion of some sort of thought, feeling, and will really does help us make up our mind, or whether we simply pinball automatically down just one predetermined path. It's a question of what will is and if what we think it is is all wrong. Isn't it? Howard >> Hi Howard, I agree that free will is worth all amounts of discourse both favorably disposed and those opinions opposite. The only groups of people I can think of who are without freewill are those controlled by a strong belief system such as a demanding religion or strong social imperative. Also could be that a political structure is controlling in that it does not allow its adherents the ability to think for themselves and cloisters them into a group-think. If one is able to reject the aforementioned groups (religious, social, political) then possibly free will is still free. Gerry HowlBloom at aol.com wrote: > Sorry it took me so long to answer this. I puzzled over it > considerably. Free will is a matter of whether there are choices and > whether the choice we make is determined entirely by prior causes...or > is this what the question of free will is about? > > The free-will debate is an intellectual ruckus over something worth > ruckusing about--the question of whether we respond to a conundrum by > making a pre-programmed, robotic decision, a decision that the > ultimate mathematician or mechanician could theoretically predict, > right? It's the question of whether our not we're kidding ourselves. > We're under the impression that we have options and that the exertion > of some sort of thought, feeling, and will really does help us make > up our mind, or whether we simply pinball automatically down just one > predetermined path. It's a question of what will is and if what we > think it is is all wrong. > > Isn't it? Howard > > In a message dated 5/16/2005 8:28:09 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, > dsmith06 at maine.rr.com writes: > > Traditionally, the problem of free will is not a question of > whether or not we have choices, it is the question of whether or > not these choices are caused by prior events. > > David > > > ----- Original Message ----- > > *From:* HowlBloom at aol.com > *To:* paleopsych at paleopsych.org > > *Sent:* Monday, May 16, 2005 11:19 PM > *Subject:* [Paleopsych] free wills and quantum won'ts > > This is from a dialog Pavel Kurakin and I are having behind > the scenes. I wanted to see what you all thought of it. Howard > > You know that I'm a quantum skeptic. I believe that our math > is primitive. The best math we've been able to conceive to > get a handle on quantum particles is probabilistic. Which > means it's cloudy. It's filled with multiple choices. But > that's the problem of our math, not of the cosmos. With more > precise math I think we could make more precise predictions. > > And with far more flexible math, we could model large-scale > things like bio-molecules, big ones, genomes, proteins and > their interactions. With a really robust and mature math we > could model thought and brains. But that math is many > centuries and many perceptual breakthroughs away. > > As mathematicians, we are still in the early stone age. > > But what I've said above has a kink I've hidden from view. It > implies that there's a math that would model the cosmos in a > totally deterministic way. And life is not deterministic. We > DO have free will. Free will means multiple choices, doesn't > it? And multiple choices are what the Copenhagen School's > probabilistic equations are all about? > > How could the concept of free will be right and the > assumptions behind the equations of Quantum Mechanics be > wrong? Good question. Yet I'm certain that we do have free > will. And I'm certain that our current quantum concepts are > based on the primitive metaphors underlying our existing forms > of math. Which means there are other metaphors ahead of us > that will make for a more robust math and that will square > free will with determinism in some radically new way. > > Now the question is, what could those new metaphors be? > > Howard > > ---------- > 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 > 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: Youthactivism.org; 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 > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > _______________________________________________ > 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 > > > ---------- > 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 > 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: Youthactivism.org; 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 > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >paleopsych mailing list >paleopsych at paleopsych.org >http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych > > From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Jun 1 03:32:09 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Tue, 31 May 2005 20:32:09 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] free wills and quantum won'ts Message-ID: <01C5661F.D23560A0.shovland@mindspring.com> Maybe free will is like leading your partner in ballroom dance. You have to think just a little ahead and plan the moves. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: G. Reinhart-Waller [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2005 8:12 PM To: The new improved paleopsych list; HowlBloom at aol.com Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] free wills and quantum won'ts Howard writes: >>The free-will debate is an intellectual ruckus over something worth ruckusing about--the question of whether we respond to a conundrum by making a pre-programmed, robotic decision, a decision that the ultimate mathematician or mechanician could theoretically predict, right? It's the question of whether our not we're kidding ourselves. We're under the impression that we have options and that the exertion of some sort of thought, feeling, and will really does help us make up our mind, or whether we simply pinball automatically down just one predetermined path. It's a question of what will is and if what we think it is is all wrong. Isn't it? Howard >> Hi Howard, I agree that free will is worth all amounts of discourse both favorably disposed and those opinions opposite. The only groups of people I can think of who are without freewill are those controlled by a strong belief system such as a demanding religion or strong social imperative. Also could be that a political structure is controlling in that it does not allow its adherents the ability to think for themselves and cloisters them into a group-think. If one is able to reject the aforementioned groups (religious, social, political) then possibly free will is still free. Gerry HowlBloom at aol.com wrote: > Sorry it took me so long to answer this. I puzzled over it > considerably. Free will is a matter of whether there are choices and > whether the choice we make is determined entirely by prior causes...or > is this what the question of free will is about? > > The free-will debate is an intellectual ruckus over something worth > ruckusing about--the question of whether we respond to a conundrum by > making a pre-programmed, robotic decision, a decision that the > ultimate mathematician or mechanician could theoretically predict, > right? It's the question of whether our not we're kidding ourselves. > We're under the impression that we have options and that the exertion > of some sort of thought, feeling, and will really does help us make > up our mind, or whether we simply pinball automatically down just one > predetermined path. It's a question of what will is and if what we > think it is is all wrong. > > Isn't it? Howard > > In a message dated 5/16/2005 8:28:09 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, > dsmith06 at maine.rr.com writes: > > Traditionally, the problem of free will is not a question of > whether or not we have choices, it is the question of whether or > not these choices are caused by prior events. > > David > > > ----- Original Message ----- > > *From:* HowlBloom at aol.com > *To:* paleopsych at paleopsych.org > > *Sent:* Monday, May 16, 2005 11:19 PM > *Subject:* [Paleopsych] free wills and quantum won'ts > > This is from a dialog Pavel Kurakin and I are having behind > the scenes. I wanted to see what you all thought of it. Howard > > You know that I'm a quantum skeptic. I believe that our math > is primitive. The best math we've been able to conceive to > get a handle on quantum particles is probabilistic. Which > means it's cloudy. It's filled with multiple choices. But > that's the problem of our math, not of the cosmos. With more > precise math I think we could make more precise predictions. > > And with far more flexible math, we could model large-scale > things like bio-molecules, big ones, genomes, proteins and > their interactions. With a really robust and mature math we > could model thought and brains. But that math is many > centuries and many perceptual breakthroughs away. > > As mathematicians, we are still in the early stone age. > > But what I've said above has a kink I've hidden from view. It > implies that there's a math that would model the cosmos in a > totally deterministic way. And life is not deterministic. We > DO have free will. Free will means multiple choices, doesn't > it? And multiple choices are what the Copenhagen School's > probabilistic equations are all about? > > How could the concept of free will be right and the > assumptions behind the equations of Quantum Mechanics be > wrong? Good question. Yet I'm certain that we do have free > will. And I'm certain that our current quantum concepts are > based on the primitive metaphors underlying our existing forms > of math. Which means there are other metaphors ahead of us > that will make for a more robust math and that will square > free will with determinism in some radically new way. > > Now the question is, what could those new metaphors be? > > Howard > > ---------- > 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 > 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: Youthactivism.org; 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 > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > _______________________________________________ > 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 > > > ---------- > 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 > 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: Youthactivism.org; 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 > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >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 dsmith06 at maine.rr.com Wed Jun 1 11:18:00 2005 From: dsmith06 at maine.rr.com (David Smith) Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2005 07:18:00 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] free wills and quantum won'ts References: Message-ID: <005c01c5669b$92e3bdd0$0200a8c0@dad> The question of free will, as traditionally conceived by philosophers, is not the question of whether or not we make choices (nobody denies this): it is the question of whether our choosings are themselves caused by prior events. David ----- Original Message ----- From: HowlBloom at aol.com To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2005 10:42 PM Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] free wills and quantum won'ts Sorry it took me so long to answer this. I puzzled over it considerably. Free will is a matter of whether there are choices and whether the choice we make is determined entirely by prior causes...or is this what the question of free will is about? The free-will debate is an intellectual ruckus over something worth ruckusing about--the question of whether we respond to a conundrum by making a pre-programmed, robotic decision, a decision that the ultimate mathematician or mechanician could theoretically predict, right? It's the question of whether our not we're kidding ourselves. We're under the impression that we have options and that the exertion of some sort of thought, feeling, and will really does help us make up our mind, or whether we simply pinball automatically down just one predetermined path. It's a question of what will is and if what we think it is is all wrong. Isn't it? Howard In a message dated 5/16/2005 8:28:09 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, dsmith06 at maine.rr.com writes: Traditionally, the problem of free will is not a question of whether or not we have choices, it is the question of whether or not these choices are caused by prior events. David ----- Original Message ----- From: HowlBloom at aol.com To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org Sent: Monday, May 16, 2005 11:19 PM Subject: [Paleopsych] free wills and quantum won'ts This is from a dialog Pavel Kurakin and I are having behind the scenes. I wanted to see what you all thought of it. Howard You know that I'm a quantum skeptic. I believe that our math is primitive. The best math we've been able to conceive to get a handle on quantum particles is probabilistic. Which means it's cloudy. It's filled with multiple choices. But that's the problem of our math, not of the cosmos. With more precise math I think we could make more precise predictions. And with far more flexible math, we could model large-scale things like bio-molecules, big ones, genomes, proteins and their interactions. With a really robust and mature math we could model thought and brains. But that math is many centuries and many perceptual breakthroughs away. As mathematicians, we are still in the early stone age. But what I've said above has a kink I've hidden from view. It implies that there's a math that would model the cosmos in a totally deterministic way. And life is not deterministic. We DO have free will. Free will means multiple choices, doesn't it? And multiple choices are what the Copenhagen School's probabilistic equations are all about? How could the concept of free will be right and the assumptions behind the equations of Quantum Mechanics be wrong? Good question. Yet I'm certain that we do have free will. And I'm certain that our current quantum concepts are based on the primitive metaphors underlying our existing forms of math. Which means there are other metaphors ahead of us that will make for a more robust math and that will square free will with determinism in some radically new way. Now the question is, what could those new metaphors be? Howard ---------- 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 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: Youthactivism.org; 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 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ 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 ---------- 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 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: Youthactivism.org; 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ 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 Wed Jun 1 13:15:45 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2005 06:15:45 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Magnetic resonance goes nano Message-ID: <01C56671.59399250.shovland@mindspring.com> http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2005/060105/Magnetic_resonance_goes_nano_B rief_060105.html June 1/8, 2005 The magnetic resonance imaging devices that hospitals use to diagnose illnesses provide detailed pictures of the insides of the human body by measuring the unique responses of the atoms and molecules in specific types of tissue to particular sequences of radio waves and magnetic pulses. The technology also gives scientists a way to control the spins, or magnetic orientations of atoms; this ability has led to several prototype quantum computers. Although nuclear magnetic resonance quantum computer prototypes have been among the most advanced quantum devices built, such systems are generally limited to about 10 quantum bits, which is well short of the thousands needed for practical systems. Researchers from NTT Basic Research Labs in Japan and the Japan Science and Technology Agency have built a nuclear magnetic resonance device that has the potential to overcome the limit because it is small enough to fit on a computer chip. It could also be tapped to allow nuclear magnetic resonance devices used in chemistry, biology and medicine to examine smaller samples, according to the researchers. Quantum computers use properties like spin to represent the 1s and 0s of digital information. In theory, quantum computers would be able to solve certain types of very large problems, including those underpinning today's encryption technologies, many orders of magnitude faster than today's classical computers. The researchers' device measures spin by measuring electrical resistance across a 200-by-200-nanometer area of semiconductor material rather than using a centimeter-scale coil to pick up radio waves. This allows it to control and measure a much smaller number of atomic spins and to control and measure six distinct types of spin. The researchers' next step is to fabricate a quantum integrated circuit by connecting several nuclear magnetic resonance devices. Even without links to each other, the devices could be used as quantum memory, according to the researchers. It will be 10 or 20 years before quantum computers that contain 100 to 10,000 qubits are ready for commercial use, according to the researchers. The work appeared in the April 21, 2005 issue of Nature (Controlled Multiple Quantum Coherences of Nuclear Spins in a Nanometer-Scale Device). From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Jun 1 14:46:10 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2005 07:46:10 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Characteristics of Admired Leaders Message-ID: <01C5667D.FAFC96D0.shovland@mindspring.com> Honest Forward-Looking Competent Inspiring from The Leadership Challenge, by Kouzes and Posner. Based on a questionnaire administered to 75,000 people over 20 years. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Jun 1 16:25:16 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2005 09:25:16 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Anhydonia- mentioned by Whybrow on Coast Message-ID: <01C5668B.D3638850.shovland@mindspring.com> It's interesting to see a page in arabic listed -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From waluk at earthlink.net Wed Jun 1 19:06:37 2005 From: waluk at earthlink.net (G. Reinhart-Waller) Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2005 12:06:37 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] free wills and quantum won'ts In-Reply-To: <01C5661F.D23560A0.shovland@mindspring.com> References: <01C5661F.D23560A0.shovland@mindspring.com> Message-ID: <429E073D.2080702@earthlink.net> Or maybe free will is allowing one's parter to lead on the dance floor.....only performance can determine excellence of ability. Gerry Steve Hovland wrote: >Maybe free will is like leading your partner >in ballroom dance. You have to think just >a little ahead and plan the moves. > >Steve Hovland >www.stevehovland.net > > >-----Original Message----- >From: G. Reinhart-Waller [SMTP:waluk at earthlink.net] >Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2005 8:12 PM >To: The new improved paleopsych list; HowlBloom at aol.com >Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] free wills and quantum won'ts > >Howard writes: > >>The free-will debate is an intellectual ruckus over something worth >ruckusing about--the question of whether we respond to a conundrum by >making a pre-programmed, robotic decision, a decision that the ultimate >mathematician or mechanician could theoretically predict, right? It's >the question of whether our not we're kidding ourselves. We're under >the impression that we have options and that the exertion of some sort >of thought, feeling, and will really does help us make up our mind, or >whether we simply pinball automatically down just one predetermined >path. It's a question of what will is and if what we think it is is all >wrong. > >Isn't it? Howard >> > >Hi Howard, I agree that free will is worth all amounts of discourse >both favorably disposed and those opinions opposite. The only groups of >people I can think of who are without freewill are those controlled by a >strong belief system such as a demanding religion or strong social >imperative. Also could be that a political structure is controlling in >that it does not allow its adherents the ability to think for themselves >and cloisters them into a group-think. If one is able to reject the >aforementioned groups (religious, social, political) then possibly free >will is still free. > >Gerry > > >HowlBloom at aol.com wrote: > > > >>Sorry it took me so long to answer this. I puzzled over it >>considerably. Free will is a matter of whether there are choices and >>whether the choice we make is determined entirely by prior causes...or >>is this what the question of free will is about? >> >>The free-will debate is an intellectual ruckus over something worth >>ruckusing about--the question of whether we respond to a conundrum by >>making a pre-programmed, robotic decision, a decision that the >>ultimate mathematician or mechanician could theoretically predict, >>right? It's the question of whether our not we're kidding ourselves. >>We're under the impression that we have options and that the exertion >>of some sort of thought, feeling, and will really does help us make >>up our mind, or whether we simply pinball automatically down just one >>predetermined path. It's a question of what will is and if what we >>think it is is all wrong. >> >>Isn't it? Howard >> >>In a message dated 5/16/2005 8:28:09 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, >>dsmith06 at maine.rr.com writes: >> >> Traditionally, the problem of free will is not a question of >> whether or not we have choices, it is the question of whether or >> not these choices are caused by prior events. >> >> David >> >> >> ----- Original Message ----- >> >> *From:* HowlBloom at aol.com >> *To:* paleopsych at paleopsych.org >> >> *Sent:* Monday, May 16, 2005 11:19 PM >> *Subject:* [Paleopsych] free wills and quantum won'ts >> >> This is from a dialog Pavel Kurakin and I are having behind >> the scenes. I wanted to see what you all thought of it. Howard >> >> You know that I'm a quantum skeptic. I believe that our math >> is primitive. The best math we've been able to conceive to >> get a handle on quantum particles is probabilistic. Which >> means it's cloudy. It's filled with multiple choices. But >> that's the problem of our math, not of the cosmos. With more >> precise math I think we could make more precise predictions. >> >> And with far more flexible math, we could model large-scale >> things like bio-molecules, big ones, genomes, proteins and >> their interactions. With a really robust and mature math we >> could model thought and brains. But that math is many >> centuries and many perceptual breakthroughs away. >> >> As mathematicians, we are still in the early stone age. >> >> But what I've said above has a kink I've hidden from view. It >> implies that there's a math that would model the cosmos in a >> totally deterministic way. And life is not deterministic. We >> DO have free will. Free will means multiple choices, doesn't >> it? And multiple choices are what the Copenhagen School's >> probabilistic equations are all about? >> >> How could the concept of free will be right and the >> assumptions behind the equations of Quantum Mechanics be >> wrong? Good question. Yet I'm certain that we do have free >> will. And I'm certain that our current quantum concepts are >> based on the primitive metaphors underlying our existing forms >> of math. Which means there are other metaphors ahead of us >> that will make for a more robust math and that will square >> free will with determinism in some radically new way. >> >> Now the question is, what could those new metaphors be? >> >> Howard >> >> ---------- >> 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 >> 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: Youthactivism.org; 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 >> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> _______________________________________________ >> 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 >> >> >>---------- >>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 >>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: Youthactivism.org; 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 >> >>------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> >>_______________________________________________ >>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 Wed Jun 1 21:11:14 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2005 17:11:14 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Come Over to the Dark Side Message-ID: Come Over to the Dark Side The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.6.3 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i39/39a01001.htm It's tearing the universe apart and causing scientists to tear out their hair. Isn't it time you got to know dark energy? By RICHARD MONASTERSKY A mysterious force is ripping through physics and astronomy departments these days. It has splintered long-cherished theories and has caused otherwise rational scientists to latch onto a weird and ugly notion. Such is the might of dark energy, a hypothesis so powerful it dwarfs even the Star Wars merchandising campaign. In the space of seven years, the dark-energy revolution has rewritten textbook entries on how the universe operates and what will ultimately happen to the cosmos. Yet dark energy is a nebulous concept, one that has thus far flummoxed some of the smartest researchers on the planet. "The fundamental physics of dark energy is a complete mystery to us right now," says Sean Carroll, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Chicago. With a pull even stronger than that of gravity, the concept has captured the attention of scientists across the globe, who are brainstorming new theories and aiming their telescopes at the mystery to search for some chink in its opacity. When the National Research Council listed the top new developments in astronomy this year, dark energy took first place. "It is now clear that dark energy exists, and that it governs the destiny of the universe, even if its nature remains completely unknown," the council reported. To help shed some light on dark energy, we've compiled a list of fundamental questions that sentient residents of the universe should know the answers to. What is dark energy? The bad news is: Nobody knows. The good news is that grant-hungry physicists can instantly boost their chances of success by inserting "dark energy" into the title of a proposal. The term "dark energy" is one that cosmologists dreamed up to explain a strange, repulsive type of gravity that is blowing up the universe, causing it to grow faster as it ages. Since the 1930s, astronomers have known that the universe is expanding, but they believed that gravity was slowing down that growth because galaxies tug on each other. In 1998, however, studies of distant stellar explosions, called supernovae, indicated that they were farther away than they should be. Something, it seemed, was causing the cosmic expansion to speed up. "It's as if you threw a ball up in the air and, just when you would expect to see it turn and fall back, it starts moving upward further and faster," says Licia Verde, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Pennsylvania, who is trying to measure aspects of dark energy. Confronted by such a strange discovery, physicists suggested that a repulsive force, which they called dark energy, was speeding up the cosmic growth. And while they don't know what dark energy is, they know there is a lot of it. Judging from various pieces of astronomical evidence, researchers estimate that ordinary matter makes up only 5 percent of the universe. Another 25 percent is so-called dark matter, which emits no light and is hard to pin down but otherwise behaves like matter. "We don't have a clue what is the remaining 70 percent," says Ms. Verde. Chalk that remainder up to dark energy. It's a different beast from everything we know because it has no mass and it doesn't clump up in regions, like matter or dark matter. Most intriguingly, it doesn't thin out when the universe expands. Why were scientists so quick to jump on the bandwagon? Normally scientists are a conservative lot. They sign onto new paradigms only after their old ones grow so rickety that they topple under the weight of countervailing facts and withering debates. But the dark-energy revolution was a bloodless coup, one that took only a few years to win over most scientists. It helped that the idea wasn't new. Einstein cooked up a somewhat related concept in 1917 because he thought that the universe was static, neither growing nor shrinking. So he introduced a constant to an equation to balance against the tug of gravity. When the astronomer Edwin P. Hubble discovered that the universe was actually expanding, Einstein threw out his "cosmological constant" and later called it his biggest blunder. Over the decades since, various researchers have reintroduced the cosmological constant or similar terms, but they always seemed outlandish. In the 1990s, though, some physicists tried to revive the idea. Three years before the supernovae data confirmed that the universe's growth was speeding up, Lawrence M. Krauss, of Case Western Reserve University, and Michael S. Turner, of the University of Chicago, wrote a paper titled "The Cosmological Constant Is Back." They argued that various knotty issues, such as the age of the universe and the amount of matter it holds, argue for the existence of some additional type of energy with characteristics like Einstein's cosmological constant. Other researchers also suggested reviving the constant. When the two groups studying supernovae independently found evidence of the accelerating universe, researchers quickly latched onto the cosmological constant as a potential answer. "It is truly amazing how quickly the switch turned," says Mr. Krauss, a professor of physics and astronomy. What is the source of dark energy? Physicists now entertain two possibilities: Dark energy is a constant, as Einstein suggested, or it is a slowly changing type of energy, dubbed "quintessence." The cosmological constant would be an energy that comes from empty space. Although hard to fathom, the concept holds that even the vacuum of the universe is quivering with energy. According to the rules of quantum mechanics, particles and their antiparticle siblings -- like electrons and positrons, respectively -- should be popping into existence and then annihilating each other all throughout space. These shadowy objects don't survive long, the rules say, but they do create a buzzing energy in empty space that could fuel the cosmic acceleration. Quintessence would work differently. It's more like an intrinsic heat stored in the universe, says Mr. Krauss. Although the universe would cool over time, the process has not happened quickly enough to drain all of the energy from the empty regions of the universe. At present, physicists can't pick between the cosmological constant and quintessence -- but some find the idea of a varying dark energy easier to stomach. Why don't physicists like the idea of a vacuum filled with energy? The cosmological constant gives researchers headaches. Although quantum theory says empty space should have energy, the relevant equations predict that the energy should be 10120 times more powerful than the tiny value consistent with the rate of acceleration seen today. At the theoretically predicted value, the universe would have flown apart so rapidly that no atoms would ever have formed. No molecules, no galaxies, no Starbucks. So theorists had been in the habit of tweaking their equations to make the vacuum energy zero, which allows them to justify the fact of their own existence. The theories can explain a giant vacuum energy or none at all. But nobody knows of a way to get a tiny cosmological constant like the one suggested by the supernovae data. "A nonzero cosmological constant is ugly beyond all belief," says Mr. Krauss, "because it's small. And it's too hard." What if dark energy doesn't exist? "We might be completely fooled by the data," says Gia Dvali, a professor of physics at New York University. He is one of several researchers who suggest that something even more radical might explain the cosmic acceleration. Mr. Dvali thinks that it might be time to revise Einstein's general-relativity theory of gravity. "I really think there is a modification of gravity," he argues. "Whatever is happening at those distances, there is something strange happening with gravity, which is not related to dark energy." It gets even weirder when Mr. Dvali goes into detail. Gravity, he suggests, leaks into unseen dimensions when it traverses huge distances. That leakage weakens gravity in our three-dimensional universe, so the cosmos accelerates faster than expected. This hypothesis is an outgrowth of string theory, which holds that every fundamental particle is made of tiny vibrating bits of energy called strings. As a consequence of the theory, physicists propose that the universe holds seven or eight additional dimensions beyond the three that we inhabit. All forces and particles aside from gravity are trapped in our three-dimensional space, which physicists call a membrane, or "brane" for short. Gravity is free, however, to slip off our brane into extra dimensions, says Mr. Dvali. How can we tell if gravity is leaking from our universe? Just look at the moon, says Mr. Dvali. If the extra dimensions exist, they affect gravity in a couple of ways. At cosmic distances, gravity could leak from our brane. But at shorter distances, gravity is trapped here, and the presence of extra dimensions slightly boosts gravity's power. Theoretically, that should have an effect on the moon, nudging its position by about a millimeter from where it would otherwise be. Scientists are working on ways to measure the moon's position that accurately. The Apollo astronauts left mirrors on the moon, and researchers can bounce laser beams off those mirrors to gauge the distance. This method is accurate to within a centimeter, says Mr. Dvali, but in the near future, scientists might be able to push their techniques to the point at which it could detect subtler alterations in gravity's strength. Is it possible that the dark energy concept is just a big mistake? There is a chance that the exploding stars have fooled everybody, says Alain Blanchard, a professor of astrophysics at the Paul Sabatier University-Toulouse III, in France. To date, he says, only one piece of direct evidence points to the presence of dark energy: the distant supernovae, which appear farther away than they should be. "That's a reasonable assumption," says Mr. Blanchard, "but I find it's not enough to conclude that 70 percent of the universe is composed of strange stuff." To try to trace the universe's evolution, he has taken a different tack, studying giant clusters of galaxies that emit X-rays. Those studies suggest that the universe holds far more matter than most cosmologists have assumed. In fact, with all that matter in the universe, there is no need to invoke dark energy, he says: "When you introduce something really different, you have to really investigate all the possibilities. For the cosmological constant, it's my impression that people have adopted it too fast." Mr. Blanchard is not winning over other physicists, however. "It's my belief that he's just plain wrong," says Chicago's Mr. Carroll. "The very widespread consensus is not only that the universe is expanding, but we have evidence of the acceleration from multiple, completely independent lines of evidence." How will we eventually find answers? Researchers are going to opposite extremes -- from the biggest objects in the universe to the smallest -- in search of clues to dark energy. On the large scale, astrophysicists are measuring giant clusters of galaxies, which were formed out of dense regions in the infant universe. By surveying the number of clusters back in time, they hope to make a growth chart of the universe. Another type of expansion data will come from measuring the brightness of many more supernovae, going back further and further in time. If researchers can accurately gauge the growth of the universe, they can tell what kind of dark energy is driving the acceleration -- either the vacuum energy of the cosmological constant or a changing force like quintessence. "If you would find a deviation from the vacuum energy, that would be very significant because that would be something new, something we have had no knowledge of up until now," says Martin Kunz, an assistant professor of theoretical physics at the University of Geneva, in Switzerland, who is using many types of data to try to distinguish among different models of dark energy. Another source of answers could come from the world's largest particle accelerator, under construction by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN. When that facility goes on line, in 2007, physicists will smash together protons at energies beyond the intensity of any previous experiments. They will be looking for new kinds of matter, called supersymmetric particles, which are thought to be the unseen partners of fundamental particles like electrons and quarks. Physicists have theorized that supersymmetric particles could be part of the missing dark matter in the universe. At the same time, those particles might also point the way toward understanding what dark energy is, says Mr. Kunz. "If they do find signs of supersymmetry, that would be very important for research into dark energy," he says. Mr. Carroll is betting that such particle experiments will yield the next big development in physics. But he doesn't want to wager much on that forecast. "My track record and everybody else's track record at predicting these things is abysmally bad," he says. For now, all the uncertainty has given a jolt of energy to physicists, even as they worry about shrinking budgets. "Occasionally a science reaches a precipice -- a junction where all paths seem to lead to confusion," concluded a panel of the National Academy of Sciences in a report on the future of physics. "These crises are often a precursor to major conceptual breakthroughs. By any measure, cosmologists and physicists now find themselves in such a (wonderful) quandary." From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 1 21:11:23 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2005 17:11:23 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: John Horgan: Brain Chips and Other Dreams of the Cyber-Evangelists Message-ID: John Horgan: Brain Chips and Other Dreams of the Cyber-Evangelists The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.6.3 http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v51/i39/39b01201.htm By JOHN HORGAN At times, I confess, I yearn for a brain chip. Dissatisfied with the sluggish, aging, three-pound lump of neurons that nature bequeathed me, I fantasize that a surgeon has drilled a hole in my cranium and installed a Neuromorphic Adaptive Quantum Nanoprocessor in my cortex. Its features would include a Wi-Fi Internet link-up and an artificial-pundit program customized to reflect my rhetorical and intellectual idiosyncracies. Instead of agonizing over this essay, I'd let my brain chip do the work. I'd mentally specify the essay's topic, target audience, word count, and tone (settings: mildly skeptical to viciously snarky). My brain chip would scour cyberspace for relevant readings, distill the mass of data and opinion into a nifty 2,000-word essay, and beam it to my editor -- all in less time than it takes my "real" self to type this period. "I" could finally make a decent living as a freelancer. Brain chips are only one of many technologies that could allow us to transcend our natural limits, but they appeal to those who consider genetic or pharmaceutical enhancement too subtle and slow. Think of the difference between the films Gattaca, whose genetically souped-up characters resembled supermodels with high IQ's, and The Matrix, in which everyone sported brain jacks. Brain chips could, in principle, allow us to download digitized knowledge of kung fu or helicopter navigation directly into our memory banks, like characters in The Matrix. We could also control our computers and toaster ovens with our thoughts; communicate with other chip-equipped people, not in our current tedious, one-word-at-a-time fashion but broadband; and exchange virtual fluids with ultra-talented "sexbots." Such sci-fi scenarios are imminent, if we are to believe recent books like Digital People, Citizen Cyborg, I, Cyborg, and Flesh and Machines. The tone of the books varies from sober to silly, but their perspectives overlap enough to form a distinct genre, which we might call cyber-evangelism. The basic theme is that science is on the verge of bringing about an astounding merger of machine and man. I say "man" advisedly: All the authors are men, and their infatuation with technology has a male cast. The major disagreement among the authors concerns how far we will go in embracing what Sidney Perkowitz, a physicist at Emory University, calls "neurobionics" in Digital People. Some cyber-evangelists believe that we will eventually abandon our flesh-and-blood selves and become entirely artificial -- like Hollywood starlets, but more so. Not everyone is thrilled by the prospect of cyborgs. Those fuddy-duddies on President Bush's Council on Bioethics have fretted that the capacity to download textbooks directly into the human brain could undermine students' work ethic. (Oh, the horror.) What if someone hacks into your brain chip to read your thoughts, or to control you, as in the recent remake of The Manchurian Candidate? And won't neurobionics deepen the gap between haves and have-nots? James Hughes, a bioethicist at Trinity College, in Hartford, nonetheless contends that the benefits of neurobionics far outweigh the risks. We could minimize potential problems, he argues in Citizen Cyborg, by establishing a benign, global government that made brain chips available to everyone and regulated their use. To ensure that cyborgs behaved, for example, the government would test them for moral decency; those who failed would have "morality chips" installed. Hughes is executive director of the World Transhumanist Association, whose members favor transcendence of our biological limits. Transhumanists enjoy debating issues like cryonic preservation: After you die, should you have your whole body frozen for revival after science has solved the problem of death -- or will your head alone suffice? Hughes also proposes equipping dolphins and monkeys with brain chips so that we can communicate with them. You would think someone who entertains such notions would be a fun guy, and perhaps Hughes is in person. But Citizen Cyborg has the deadly earnestness of an Al Gore white paper on toxic waste. Hughes wants us to take this cyborg stuff very, very seriously. Those who find Hughes too dry may prefer the flamboyant -- albeit relentlessly self-aggrandizing -- authorial persona of Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading who has transformed himself into a kind of neurobionic performance artist. In I, Cyborg, a masterpiece of na?ve, unwittingly comic narration, Warwick recounts how in 2002 he persuaded a surgeon to implant a chip in his forearm and another chip in the forearm of his hapless wife, Irena. As the surgeon pushed the chip into Irena's incision, "she remained brave," Warwick recalls, "shrieking on a couple of occasions when it was particularly painful." After the implantations, when Warwick made a fist, his chip picked up the minute electrical surge in his arm and sent a signal to his wife's chip, which buzzed her. She then flexed her hand, and he felt "a beautiful, sweet, deliciously sexy charge." Of course the Warwicks could have achieved an equivalent intimacy with vibrating cellphones; the fact that the chips were embedded in their bodies made no functional difference. Warwick nonetheless calls his stunt "the most incredible scientific project imaginable, one that is sure to change, incalculably, humankind and the future." We must begin asking ourselves, Warwick says, how to "deal with the possibility of superhumans." The real question Inman Harvey, another British scientist, remarked in Discover magazine, is whether Warwick is a "buffoon," who actually believes his own hype, or a "charlatan." Unlike Warwick, Ray Kurzweil is an accomplished authority in the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence; his many inventions include the first computer-based reading machine for the blind. But his worldview is if anything even wackier than Warwick's. In his manifesto The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil predicts that within a couple of decades, computers will become fully conscious and autonomous, and will begin rapidly evolving in unpredictable directions. Borrowing a term that refers to black holes and other phenomena that strain physics theories to the breaking point, Kurzweil calls that event "the singularity." Rather than passively allowing machines to leave us in the cognitive dust, we will have the option of digitizing our personalities and "uploading" them into computers, where we can live forever as software programs. That vision has been spelled out previously by others -- notably the roboticist Hans Moravec, in Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Harvard University Press, 1988) and Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (Oxford University Press, 1999) -- but Kurzweil's faith is especially fervent. In his recent Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, written with a physician, Kurzweil advises us how to stay alive until uploading becomes possible. His regimen calls for exercising and meditating, eating organic vegetables and meat, drinking alkaline water (to keep the blood from being acidic), taking nutritional supplements (Kurzweil swallows 250 pills a day), and, of course, having injections of pineal cells culled from hydroponically grown fetuses (just kidding). Halfway into Flesh and Machines, by Rodney A. Brooks, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I thought finally common sense might prevail. Brooks points out that -- notwithstanding the precipitous increase in computer power over the past few decades -- AI has in many respects been a failure. No existing computer remotely resembles HAL, the smooth-talking, homicidal machine that was by far the most interesting, complex chararacter in the film 2001. Computers cannot even recognize faces in natural settings, which we can do effortlessly. Our fastest, most sophisticated machines still lack some mysterious, fundamental quality -- which Brooks calls "juice" -- that biological systems possess. So where does Brooks's candid acknowledgement of his field's shortcomings leave him, vis-?-vis uploading and other neurobionic scenarios? He thinks uploading will eventually be possible, just not soon enough for Kurzweil or anyone else alive today. "I think we are all going to have to die eventually," Brooks boldly ventures. But like Kevin Warwick, he believes that within a decade or two we will transform ourselves with brain-machine interfaces. "We will be superhumans in many respects. And through our thought-mediated connections to cyberspace, we will have access to physical control of our universe, just with our thoughts." What neither Brooks nor any other cyber-evangelist considers in any depth is the fundamental assumption of all their scenarios, that the brain is a digital computer. According to that view, the minute "action potentials" emitted by individual nerve cells are analogous to the electrical pulses that represent information in computers, and just as computers operate according to a machine code, so action potentials are arranged according to a "neural code." Given the right interface and knowledge of the neural code, brains and computers should be able to communicate as easily as iMacs and PC's. If a neural code exists, however, neuroscientists have no idea what it is. They cannot explain how the brain achieves even rudimentary feats of cognition, like my ability to recall Neo's final battle with Agent Smith in The Matrix. Such cognition may depend not only on action potentials but also on other processes at larger or smaller scales. No one knows. Moreover, my brain almost certainly represents Neo with a pattern of neural activity quite unlike yours. Not only is each person's code probably idiosyncratic, the product of his or her unique biology, but our individual codes may also constantly evolve in response to new experiences. For all those reasons, some neuroscientists suspect that uploading, downloading, telepathic conversations, and other scenarios that involve precise reading and manipulation of thoughts may never be possible -- no matter how far brain-chip technology advances. That view is corroborated by the slow progress of research on so-called neural prostheses, which replace or supplement capacities lost because of damage to the nervous system. Artificial retinas, light-sensitive chips that mimic the eye's signal-processing ability and stimulate the optical nerve or visual cortex, have been tested in a handful of blind subjects, but most have been able to see nothing more than phosphenes, or bright spots. A few paralyzed patients have learned to control a computer cursor -- "merely by thinking," as the media invariably put it, though the control is not telekinetic but via implanted electrodes that pick up the patients' neural signals -- but communicating that way remains slow and unreliable. The only truly successful neural prosthesis is the artificial cochlea. More than 50,000 hearing-impaired people have been equipped with those devices, which restore hearing by feeding signals from an external microphone to the auditory nerve. But as Michael Chorost makes clear in his memoir, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human, artificial cochleas are far from perfect. Hard of hearing since childhood, Chorost was getting by with conventional hearing aids and writing reports for a Silicon Valley research firm when he suddenly went totally deaf in 2001. In Rebuilt -- which is by far the most original, honest, and authoritative book I've read on human-machine interfaces -- he recounts how he was equipped and learned to live with an artificial cochlea. Although Chorost was immensely grateful for the device, which restored some semblance of normality to his social life, he notes that it is a crude simulacrum of our innate auditory system. Artificial cochleas generally require a breaking-in period, during which technicians tweak the device's settings to optimize its performance. With that assistance, the brain learns how to make the most of the peculiar, artificial signals. Even then, the sound quality is often poor, especially in noisy settings. Chorost still occasionally relies on lip reading and contextual guessing to decipher what someone is saying to him. Some people are never able to use artificial cochleas, for reasons that are not clearly understood. Chorost's experience leaves him both impressed with the ingenuity of scientists and cognizant of how little they really know about how the brain works. He thus looks askance at the predictions of Warwick and others that neurobionics will eventually give us supernatural powers: "We are a long way from understanding our own brains well enough to implant devices in them to enhance our mental functioning." Chorost suspects that the prophesies of Warwick et al. have less to do with science than with the perennial human desire to transcend the loneliness and pain of the human condition. Indeed, now and for the foreseeable future, cyber-evangelism is best understood as an escapist, quasi-religious fantasy, which reflects an oddly dated, Jetsons-esque faith in scientific progress and its potential to cure all that ails us. Even those cyber-evangelical books published well after September 11, 2001, and the end of the dot-com boom echo the hysterical techno-optimism of the late 1990s. At their best, they raise some diverting questions: Would you rather live in a pleasant virtual world, or in an unpleasant real one? Would cyber-sex satisfy you? Would we still be recognizably human if we were immortal, or had IQ's over 1,000, or were immune to pain? But I felt my cognitive-dissonance alarm clanging whenever I reminded myself of the issues that preoccupy most mature adults these days: terrorism, overpopulation, poverty, environmental degradation, AIDS and other diseases, and all the pitfalls of ordinary life. I try to forget this vale of tears myself now and then by reading books like William Gibson's Neuromancer (Ace Books, 1994) or watching movies like The Matrix. But I also try not to confuse science fiction with science. John Horgan is a freelance writer and author of The End of Science (Addison-Wesley, 1996), The Undiscovered Mind (Free Press, 1999), and Rational Mysticism (Houghton Mifflin, 2003). SOME BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, by Ray Kurzweil (Viking, 1999) Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future, by James Hughes (Westview Press, 2004) Digital People: From Bionic Humans to Androids, by Sidney Perkowitz (Joseph Henry Press, 2004) Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman (Rodale, 2004) Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us, by Rodney A. Brooks (Pantheon Books, 2002) I, Cyborg, by Kevin Warwick (Century, 2002) Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human, by Michael Chorost (Houghton Mifflin, 2005) From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Wed Jun 1 21:20:45 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2005 14:20:45 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] free will In-Reply-To: <200506011800.j51I0SR04510@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050601212045.47200.qmail@web30811.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Howard says: >>We're under the impression that we have options and that the exertion of some sort of thought, feeling, and will really does help us make up our mind, or whether we simply pinball automatically down just one predetermined path. It's a question of what will is and if what we think it is is all wrong.<< --I think the problem is due to confusion between past determining factors and present computation. We are all computing, at every moment, what our actions are going to be. We are all, to some degree, ignorant of our own future actions (or else they'd be preprogrammed and we'd be coasting into the known). So, even if it's all deterministic, we still have the feeling, an accurate one, of being involved in determining our fate at each step. And, because it's very difficult to make decisions while knowing every factor that determines the outcome, we make decisions first, then perform the autopsy. This means free will is *virtually* real, even if literally false. There is also the fact that very few people can handle the feeling of being enmeshed in the same system with everyone else. It feels cleaner, safer and less confusing to perceive oneself as separate and in control, even if one is out of control (addicts have to deal with this problem... how to feel in control while the brain and body are hijacked) or trapped in a web of bad alternatives. If free will doesn't exist, we may not *want* to know. But if the knowledge found its way into our minds, we'd have to find some way of making decisions without free will. If we find good ways to do that, ways that don't limit freedom to choose among alternatives and reprogram ourselves as we go along, we may not need the illusion after all. Michael __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 1 21:39:52 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2005 17:39:52 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: (Class) The Five-Bedroom, Six-Figure Rootless Life Message-ID: The Five-Bedroom, Six-Figure Rootless Life New York Times, 5.6.1 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/01/national/class/01ALPHARETTA-FINAL.html [Eighth of a series.] By PETER T. KILBORN ALPHARETTA, Ga. - Kathy Link is 41 with blond-streaked pigtails and, at 5-foot-9, straight as a spear. She is still in the red sun visor and tennis whites she wore leading her fitness class at the Forum Gym and winning at doubles afterward. Tucked by her seat is her color-coded itinerary. Kaleigh, 8, is red. With school over this afternoon in late August, she has already been dropped off at her soccer practice blocks from home. Kristina, 11, is dark green, and Kelsey, 13, is yellow. Kristina must get to her soccer practice four miles to the north, and Kelsey to her practice 14 miles to the south. Ms. Link (blue for work, light green for family and volunteering) surveys the clotted intersection at the mouth of her 636-house Medlock Bridge subdivision. After moving here four years ago and choking on traffic, she made a rule: "Wherever I'm going has to be within one mile of the house," she said. But she breaks the rule two or three times a day, driving 10 and 15 times the one-mile distance. She squeezes the wheel of her white, eight-seat, leather-upholstered 2003 GMC Denali S.U.V. "Go, people," she pleads. Her knuckles go white. Twice she taps the horn. A timid driver in a gray van three cars ahead tiptoes into the Atlanta-bound avalanche along Highway 141. Ms. Link impatiently pulls abreast, saying, "I have to see who she is." A rookie "relo," she decides, someone newly relocated to Alpharetta and to its traffic. She herself is a veteran relo, having moved three times in the past 10 years to help keep her husband's career on track. She admits she is beginning to feel the strain of her vagabond life. "It's like I'm on a hamster wheel," she says. Ms. Link and her husband, Jim, 42, a financial services sales manager for the Wachovia Corporation of Charlotte, N.C., belong to a growing segment of the upper middle class, executive gypsies. The shock troops of companies that continually expand across the country and abroad, they move every few years, from St. Louis to Seattle to Singapore, one satellite suburb to another, hopscotching across islands far from the working class and the urban poor. As a subgroup, relos are economically homogenous, with midcareer incomes starting at $100,000 a year. Most are white. Some find the salaries and perks compensating; the developments that cater to them come with big houses, schools with top SAT scores, parks for youth sports and upscale shopping strips. Others complain of stress and anomie. They have traded a home in one place for a job that could be anyplace. Relo children do not know a hometown; their parents do not know where their funerals will be. There is little in the way of small-town ties or big-city amenities - grandparents and cousins, longtime neighbors, vibrant boulevards, homegrown shops - that let roots sink in deep. "It's as if they're being molded by their companies," said Tina Davis, a top Alpharetta relo agent for the Coldwell Banker real estate firm. "Most of the people will tell you how long they'll be here. It's usually two to four years." The Links bought their first home 15 years ago in what was then the master planned community of Clear Lake City, Tex., now a part of Houston. In 1994, they moved to the old Baltimore suburb of Severna Park and three years later to Pittsford, N.Y., near Rochester. In another three years they bought a five-bedroom, four-bath home here, 25 miles north of Atlanta, where Mr. Link started work at an office of the First Union Corporation, which became part of Wachovia. The Population Sprawls Still inching along, Ms. Link passes strip malls. She goes by the gym, chiropractors, nail shops, colonnaded stucco banks, hair salons, 16-pump gas stations, self-storage lots, Waffle Houses, a tanning place and a salon that tattoos on lipstick and eyeliner so they will not fade in the pool. She dodges the orange barrels of road-widening crews spreading asphalt in a futile effort to keep up with a north Fulton County population that has swelled to 273,000 from 170,000 in the 90's, a decade when the city of Atlanta barely grew, to 416,000 from 394,000. Sidewalks start and stop. No one dares ride a bicycle or walk a dog. She crosses over Georgia 400, the clogged artery that pumps hundreds of thousands of commuters into Alpharetta's glass and brushed-metal office parks and, an hour's drive south, into downtown Atlanta. She passes developments that from the air look like petri dishes of tadpoles, each head a cul-de-sac. In new subdivisions, signs in fancy script trumpet "price points," to show relos where to roost: Brookdale, $300's; Wildwood, $400's; Wolf Creek, $300's to $500's; Quail Hollow, $500's; Inverness, $600's to $800's; White Columns, $700's to $1.5 million; Greystone, $900's to $4 million. The Hispanic landscaping crews are out with old Ford pickups tugging eight-foot flatbed trailers. They trim the edges of spongy Bermuda grass lawns and attack the grubs, fire ants and weeds. Toys and even garden hoses are tucked out of sight lest the subdivision homeowners' association issue warnings and fines. Garage doors, all motorized, must stay shut. After dropping off Kelsey and Kristina, Ms. Link has to double back and pick up Kaleigh and take her to golf. She will wait for Kelsey to finish soccer before picking up Kristina and taking her to cheerleading practice. Another mother will have to retrieve Kristina so that Ms. Link can be home when Kaleigh's math tutor comes. Jim (orange) cannot help. He is gone two to five days a week, to Boston, New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Dallas and most often Charlotte. Monday and Tuesday, the itinerary says, "Jim in meetings, Charlotte." For Wednesday, it says, "Jim in meetings, Philadelphia." A Different Segregation Today's relos are the successors of itinerant white-collar pioneers of the 1960's, like the computer salesmen for whom I.B.M. meant I've Been Moved. They are employees of multinational industry: pharmaceutical salespeople, electronic engineers, information technology managers, accountants, data analysts, plant managers, regional vice presidents, biotechnologists, bankers, manufacturers' representatives and franchise chain managers. They are part of a larger development that researchers are finding: an increasing economic segregation. A Brookings Institution analysis of census data last year reported that the percentage of people living in affluent or poor suburbs in 50 metropolitan areas increased from 1980 to 2000, and the percentage living in middle-income areas declined. Just how many relos there are is hard to determine. The tide rolls with corporate fortunes and the global economy, and relos are not singled out in census statistics. But in a survey from March 2002 to March 2003, the Census Bureau said that about three million people moved to another county, state or country because employers had transferred or recruited them. . With the spread of global industry's new satellite office parks, the relos churn through towns like Alpharetta; Naperville, Ill., west of Chicago; Plano, Tex., outside Dallas; Leawood, Kan., near Kansas City; Sammamish, Wash., outside Seattle; and Cary, N.C., which is outside Raleigh and, its resident nomads maintain, stands for Containment Area for Relocated Yankees. Converging on these towns, relos have segregated themselves, less by the old barriers of race, religion and national origin than by age, family status, education and, especially, income. Families with incomes of $100,000 head for subdivisions built entirely of $300,000 houses; those earning $200,000 trade up to subdivisions of $500,000 houses. Isolated, segmented and stratified, these families are cut off from the single, the gay and the gray and, except for those tending them, anyone from lower classes. Unlike their upper-middle-class kindred - the executives, doctors and lawyers who settle down in one place - relos forgo the old community props of their class: pedigree and family ties; seats on the vestry and the hospital board; and the rituals, like charity balls. Left with the class's emblematic cars, Lily Pulitzer skirts and Ralph Lauren shirts, their golf, tennis and soccer and, most conspicuously, their houses, they have staked out their place and inflated the American dream. "What is the American dream?" said Karen Handel, chairwoman of the Fulton County Commission in Alpharetta. "It's to have a house of your own, the biggest house you can afford, on the biggest lot you can afford, with a great school for your kids, a nice park to spend Saturday afternoon with your kids in, and deep in amenities that get into the trade-offs with traffic." More so than the classes below and above them - the immobilized poor of old cities and rural backwaters, the factory-bound working class and the old- and new-money rich - this is a fluid, unstable group. Those who lose jobs or decline promotions to let the children finish high school where they currently are sometimes relocate in place. They call the midnight movers to haul them to cheaper subdivisions, or seize the equity gains on their homes to move up. The Link house stands on a cul-de-sac, up a slight rise with tall young oaks raining acorns over a small front yard and a curtain of cedar and pine bordering the back. It is three stories tall, with beige stucco walls and wide fieldstone panels flanking a varnished oak front door with leaded glass. The house has a two-story family room hung with folk art, a room for guests that holds the girls' upright piano, a master suite upstairs with a bathroom with a wide white vanity on each side of the door and a Jacuzzi enclosed in pinkish marble tiles. Three blocks away are the tennis courts, the pool, two soccer fields and the two-story community clubhouse. Alpharetta may be deep in Dixie, but its accent is not. Of the 30,000 people who live in the Links' census tract, 75 percent were born outside Georgia. Six percent are black, and 12 percent are Asian. Fewer than 3 percent are over 65; fewer than 2 percent are poor or unemployed. Two-thirds of the adults have had four or more years of college and earn more than $100,000 a year, twice the American family average. Their homes are worth an average of $400,000, twice the national average, and they have nearly twice as many rooms as the average house. "Everybody here is in the top 10 percent of what they do," Steve Beecham, a home mortgage broker, said, "or they desire to be in the top 10 percent." In politics, Republican candidates are shoo-ins. Few Alpharetta lawns sprouted campaign signs in November because the area's four contenders for the state legislature and a new candidate for Congress were all Republicans and ran unopposed. Just Passing Through When the Links began house-hunting in early 2000, Mr. Link said, "school was No. 1." After settling on the best school districts, he said, "we looked within price points." At their $300,000 limit, all they could afford in a good district near Atlanta was a three-bedroom, two-bath ranch-style house. "I wanted four bedrooms, two and a half baths and a basement," Ms. Link said, "and I had to have a yard." The house the Links eventually bought in Medlock Bridge, built in 1987, has 3,900 square feet and 1,100 more in a basement with a wall of windows facing the backyard. There is a recreation room with a bar, and a fifth bedroom. "The basement is approximately the same size as my parents' entire house," Mr. Link said. The Links paid $313,000 and took an 80 percent mortgage. Pleased though they have been with the house, the Links never considered it permanent. At the dishwasher one evening last September, Ms. Link said, "Jimmy has been saying, 'This travel is killing me.' I'm shocked we're still here. Every home we went to, I said, 'Could you sell this house?' I did not think we would be here four years. Early on, I told Jimmy, 'Wherever you choose to work, we will make a life.' "Jimmy's the one making the money. I want him to be happy and successful. Every area you move into, you buy into the lifestyle. Alpharetta is very big on tennis and soccer. We chose to participate in that." Ms. Linka's favorite place was Pittsford, an affluent apple-pie town outside Rochester with a congenial mix of transient families and long-settled ones. "Up there each town has its own little village and one main street where you can walk and ride your bike and get someplace safely," she said. Kelsey and Kristina started school and soccer there. Ms. Link became a certified personal trainer and began volunteering. She joined the Junior League. Creating the Illusion of History The actual city of Alpharetta covers only 23 square miles in the northern half of Fulton County, but many subdivisions in adjoining unincorporated areas, like Medlock Bridge, carry Alpharetta ZIP codes. The city has no real core, although it has a small downtown with a Main Street, City Hall, some restaurants, a Methodist and a Baptist church, two beauty parlors, a variety store, a new gift shop called Everything Posh and a cemetery. Just off Main Street, flanking an alley between two small parking lots, a pair of white wooden arches proclaim "Historic Downtown." But they lead only to the back walls of stores. Nearby is the Alpharetta Historical Society, housed in a 100-year-old Queen Anne house. The house is a relo. A truck brought it up from Roswell in 1993. "Illusionism is something that people have enjoyed for centuries," Diana Wheeler, the director of community development, said. "We're creating new applications. It's a matter of how it's carried out. It's a quality issue. You convert the illusion into something that has value to you. Maybe solid columns held up roofs, and hollow columns create the illusion they do. People will go to great lengths to impress others." Tim Bryan builds illusions, designing million-dollar houses of at least 4,500 square feet. Mr. Bryan said clients "want it to look like a house that's evolved over a century, to appear to have been lived in for 100 years or more, with the look of having been added onto." To achieve the look, a Bryan house may have a section of brick and next to it one of stone, then one of cedar shake. With their price-pointed subdivisions, developers create pecking orders. "We're all busy looking down on each other," said Neal Martineau, 74, a retired advertising man who last summer was getting ready to move from just outside Alpharetta to West Virginia. " 'I'm better than you are and I'm going to show you.' It's a kind of bullying. It's architectural bullying." "I'm faking it here," Mr. Martineau said. "I have property that does not have enough meadow to feed a horse, but I call it a horse farm." "The car may be the most visible sign of status," he said. "My Mercedes is indicative of who I am. I am also a bit of a fraud. I probably shouldn't have a Mercedes, but I'm happy to wear a Mercedes. It's a way I have of making myself feel important, to have someone look at the best car on the road and know I'm in it." One result of Alpharetta's subdivision-dotted terrain is the isolation of families from people unlike themselves. Zoning and planning are partly responsible, and so is the traffic. Except for the commute to work, the orbit of Medlock Bridge residents consists of the schools, the community pool, the tennis courts, the clubhouse, the shops along Medlock Bridge Road and the St. Ives Country Club right across from the subdivision. Atlanta seems so far away. "We haven't been to any cultural events or sporting events as a family because it's an all-night event," Mr. Link said. People shop on the Internet. Rather than go to the car wash, they can call Tony Lancaster, who comes around in his van and brings the water, too. "Anything a shop can do, I can do mobile," Mr. Lancaster said. Their seclusion helps keep the neighborhood safe, which is important to the Links. "We'll get a little rash of golf clubs stolen," Mr. Link said. "Mailboxes have been hit or bent. We'll see where cars have gotten keyed. But that's about it." "The good thing about it is that it is a very comfortable neighborhood to live in," Mr. Link said. "These are very homogenous types of groups. You play tennis with them, you have them over to dinner. You go to the same parties." "But we're never challenged to learn much about other economic groups," he said. "When you talk about tennis, guess what? Everybody you play against looks and acts and generally feels like you. It doesn't give you much of a perspective. At work, diversity is one of the biggest things we work on." Alpharetta employers say that the $250,000 starting point for a detached, single-family house freezes out their secretaries and technicians, janitors and truck drivers, cashiers and data clerks. The prices exclude the city's own teachers and firemen. Of Alpharetta's 365 full-time city employees last fall, 112, or less than a third, lived in the city. Of 74 police officers, just the chief and two sergeants lived here. House cleaners, like Linda Bates, live 30 or 40 miles away. Ms. Bates works for Unlimited Cleaning Services, a company that supplies housekeepers with a checklist of the clients' requirements. A client may never speak to the cleaner or get the same one twice, and that is all right with Ms. Bates. "If I have to be at a house at 8:30, I will leave my house at 7," she said. "We just clean the house and go, like the air-conditioning man. I never bother personal things. I never answer the telephone. I don't like being there when they get there." Adjusting to Differences Kathy Link came from Highland Park, an old planned community of what are now multimillion-dollar homes four miles north of downtown Dallas. Jim Link grew up in a Houston subdivision, Bellaire, in a house where his parents have lived for 34 years. They went to Texas A&M University in College Station, met at a student pub where Mr. Link tended bar and married three years later, in 1988. She found work as an editor for an aerospace company. Mr. Link went into the insurance and mutual fund business, and from there he made the switch to banking. Hardy, trim and darker toned than his wife, in disposition still the affable bartender, Mr. Link mans the beer cooler at holiday parties at the Medlock Bridge clubhouse. Ms. Link is more reserved. Her tennis doubles partner's high-five is a slap. Hers is a tap. Often as she leaves the court one mother or another stops her and, taller than most, she settles an arm over the woman's shoulder as they walk. She pretends to have the time. The Links agree on most things. In November, they voted for President Bush. They splurge on their children's sports and tutoring and piano lessons and deny them computers and televisions in their rooms and cellphones. But her family was better off than his, and every now and then their views diverge on money. When he sees the occasional $140 charge for having her hair highlighted, she said, "he cringes." "Kathy's goal for college for the kids," he said, "is like her mother's was for her, that they not have to work." He worked, and it is fine with him if his children do. Ms. Link is happy in the $45,000 Denali that they financed. He is happy with the 2000 green Ford Taurus he bought used from CarMax for $10,000 in cash. They are clear of the troubles with credit card debt that built up after Kelsey and Kristina were born. Mr. Link earns something over $200,000, with bonuses based on the strength of the economy and his sales staff's success. Ms. Link earns around $4,000 from personal training and fitness instruction and plans to build on that as the children get older. They have about $100,000 equity in the house and about $10,000 in college funds they started for the girls last year. "We do all the basic stuff out of salary," Mr. Link said. "Bonuses are free for everything else, like extra saving, big vacations and major repairs on the house." Bonuses last year bought the family their first ski trip, a week after Christmas in Steamboat Springs, Colo. For all their moving, the Links try to carry on an upper-middle-class tradition of volunteering and knitting community ties. Barely settled in Medlock Bridge, Mr. Link ran for the board of the homeowners association and won. The board then made him president and, in effect, the mayor. He paid the $15,000 initiation fee for the family to join the St. Ives Country Club. Ms. Link joined a neighborhood group to play bunko, a social dice game favored by Alpharetta women, many of whom think of it as an excuse to get together and have a few glasses of wine. She began editing the subdivision's newsletter and set up an e-mail chain that reaches 350 Medlock Bridge homes. She spends two hours on Tuesday mornings at a Bible study meeting. And she has bored into the schools. She became a vice president of the elementary school PTA and took on its newsletter. She is a room parent for Kaleigh's third-grade class and organizes science projects there. At her kitchen computer command post, she tracks the girls' reports and test scores on school Web pages. Kelsey's October report showed a 97 average, but then she got a 78 on a Spanish test. In a week, she had a tutor. "The women are like the rulers," Kelsey said on a drive with her father during a weekend soccer tournament in Columbus, Ga. "They have the big cars. The dads have the little cars and just go to work." She said her mother thought that her father was too relaxed on the road. Mr. Link said, "Kathy becomes impatient with me when I'm going 70 in a 65 zone." "No, Daddy," Kelsey said. "It's when you're going 60." Lately, Ms. Link's frenzied schedule has been grinding her down. Early last summer she gave up bunko. In August she dropped her PTA jobs and the community newsletter. In October, she was asked to lead a fund-raising drive for Kristina's cheerleading squad and said no. "I had never done that," she said. But something else always seems to come up. She resumed editing the community newsletter because her successor gave it up. In November she learned of a school redistricting plan and shook her e-mail chain to mobilize opposition. All her activity began creating tension at home. On the sidelines of one of Kristina's soccer games in October, Mr. Link said: "The single biggest thing to change is, Kathy has to be more judicious about how she volunteers. She would never give up Bible study. But she's now playing in three or four tennis leagues." She agreed. "I volunteer way too much," she said. "It doesn't mean you shouldn't be involved," he told her, "but it doesn't mean you have to be the leader." Unexpected Challenges The Links are the first to say they have not really found a way to make their Alpharetta life work. They found good schools, safe streets, neighbors they like and a big house and a yard. But they did not count on the grueling traffic, on how far away everything seems, on how much is asked of volunteers to sustain the community, or on the stresses of a breadwinner's travels. They have no deep connections here, no old friends, no parents to sit for their children. Ms. Link thinks about Highland Park, with her Presbyterian church and easy access to Dallas. She thinks about Rochester. "In Rochester," she said, "everything fell into place." In Alpharetta what weighs on her is just the daily grind. "We haven't found a church," she said. "We went church shopping. I would find places my children liked and I didn't or that I liked and they didn't. We found one, but it's a half-hour drive away. We don't have that kind of time." "It's all here," she said, "but it's an hour drive away. Here it's like, 'Get the heck out of my way.' It's like go, go, go. We're just going, going, going. I call it drowning. It's when you can't see the top of the water." "In Rochester," she said, "you could go to festivals and street fairs, and museums and farms and pick your own apples and not have a death grip on your child." "In Rochester I had two best friends," she added. "I don't have a girl best friend here in Alpharetta. There's no one person I can call up to confide in. I called up one girl, and I scared her." Exploring a Change In the summer of 2003, Jim Link and Wachovia considered some organizational changes that might have led to a move for the family, but nothing came of them. Last summer the discussions resumed, and in September he was promoted. Starting Nov. 1, he became national sales manager for a broader range of the bank's money management services than he had been selling. "It rounds me out," he said, folding laundry in the family room and watching a Georgia Tech football game on television. Whether to leave Alpharetta was left hanging, he said. But they decided that the moving should stop for a while - nine years, at least, from the time Kelsey starts high school until Kaleigh finishes. With his BlackBerry, laptop and access to the Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, Mr. Link could do his new job from here. Wachovia leaves the choice up to him but tells him that moving to Charlotte should help his career. "I told my boss, 'If you're willing to fund a full relocation package, I'm willing to do it,' " he said. Back home from the family ski trip to Steamboat as the year ended, the Links seemed to be leaning toward one more move. "I will remake myself to be a better mother and a better wife," Ms. Link said. "I've paid my dues." Mr. Link said: "We would try to be closer and more plugged in to the city. Kathy would continue volunteering, because that's how she gets involved. We would require that the kids be involved in something." They were not telling friends, or the girls. Once word got around, they feared, teachers and coaches would start writing the girls off. Kelsey had figured it out. As they packed for Steamboat, Ms. Link said, "she asked, 'Are we moving?' Jimmy couldn't lie. He said, 'It looks like it,' " and told her to keep mum. They worry about Kristina. The shyest of the three girls, she was slow to take to Alpharetta. Then she bloomed. In her special-education reading class, she got 100's all fall and in January moved to a regular class. She won her soccer team's Golden Boot award for scoring the most goals. The Links called in Tina Davis, the real estate agent. Afternoons when the girls were in school, Ms. Link searched the Internet for homes and schools in Charlotte and found that it, too, was a sea of new subdivisions. The average commuting time is 24 minutes, the same as Atlanta. Then she found Myers Park, a prosperous, close-in community of 8,700 where most of the houses are more than 60 years old and 10 minutes from downtown. She found the Myers Park Presbyterian Church. "It's like the one I went to in Highland Park," she said. Mr. Link got home on Feb. 9 after three days in Phoenix. He found a long e-mail message from Wachovia. "We got our paperwork," the relocation package, he said. They told the girls after school. Kelsey took it easily, sad only that she would not be going to Northview High School with her friends. Kaleigh beamed, then frowned about losing friends and teachers. Kristina was in the kitchen with Ms. Link when Mr. Link came in. "Your dad's got something to tell you," Ms. Link said. "We're moving to Charlotte," he said. Kristina paused. She would be leaving Rebecca, a friend of five years "I hate you," she said. "When?" "In June," he said. "What about soccer?" She would keep playing here through May, they told her, and then get onto a team in Charlotte. She brightened a little. That night Mr. and Ms. Link went to dinner at Sia's, their favorite restaurant, just across Medlock Bridge Road. "I'm happy," she said. "It's finally over. For four years, it's been when, when, when." She told Jim: "I'm wired to settle in wherever we move and make a life for you and the family. But I still want a one-mile radius. I'm not going to do another Alpharetta." By Kristina's 12th birthday on April 16, pale green buds had broken out in the oaks in front of the Links' house. A landscaping crew was setting pink and white petunias into the new pine straw mulch around the shrubs. Inside, floors had been sanded and the master bath retiled in beige limestone. "Finished basement," the red headline on Tina Davis's sign out front said. Mr. Link left early that day to take Kelsey to a soccer game 30 miles away. Ms. Link and Kristina watched Kaleigh's Green Gators near home. "Go, Kaleigh!" Ms. Link shouted. "Get in the middle, Kaleigh. Go!" On the sidelines, a father turned to her. "Kathy, what's this I hear you're leaving?" "We are," she said. "Work stuff?" "Wachovia," she said. "Charlotte." "We're going to miss you," he said. "It's kind of bittersweet," she said. "We want to be there nine years, but you never know." In May, the Links sold their house in Alpharetta for $420,000 and bought a Cape Cod in Charlotte for $627,500. It is half the size of the one in Alpharetta, but it is in leafy old Myers Park. The Myers Park Country Club, the Presbyterian church and top-rated public schools are less than a mile away. On a visit last week, the girls got library cards. They tried out for a soccer club and all three made the cut. They will move in July. From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 1 21:40:00 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2005 17:40:00 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Ed Tenner: Rise of the Plagiosphere Message-ID: Ed Tenner: Rise of the Plagiosphere http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/06/issue/megascope.asp 5.6 The 1960s gave us, among other mind-altering ideas, a revolutionary new metaphor for our physical and chemical surroundings: the biosphere. But an even more momentous change is coming. Emerging technologies are causing a shift in our mental ecology, one that will turn our culture into the plagiosphere, a closing frontier of ideas. The Apollo missions' photographs of Earth as a blue sphere helped win millions of people to the environmentalist view of the planet as a fragile and interdependent whole. The Russian geoscientist Vladimir Vernadsky had coined the word "biosphere" as early as 1926, and the Yale University biologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson had expanded on the theme of Earth as a system maintaining its own equilibrium. But as the German environmental scholar Wolfgang Sachs observed, our imaging systems also helped create a vision of the planet's surface as an object of rationalized control and management--a corporate and unromantic conclusion to humanity's voyages of discovery. What NASA did to our conception of the planet, Web-based technologies are beginning to do to our understanding of our written thoughts. We look at our ideas with less wonder, and with a greater sense that others have already noted what we're seeing for the first time. The plagiosphere is arising from three movements: Web indexing, text matching, and paraphrase detection. The first of these movements began with the invention of programs called Web crawlers, or spiders. Since the mid-1990s, they have been perusing the now billions of pages of Web content, indexing every significant word found, and making it possible for Web users to retrieve, free and in fractions of a second, pages with desired words and phrases. The spiders' reach makes searching more efficient than most of technology's wildest prophets imagined, but it can yield unwanted knowledge. The clever phrase a writer coins usually turns out to have been used for years, worldwide--used in good faith, because until recently the only way to investigate priority was in a few books of quotations. And in our accelerated age, even true uniqueness has been limited to 15 minutes. Bons mots that once could have enjoyed a half-life of a season can decay overnight into cliches. Still, the major search engines have their limits. Alone, they can check a phrase, perhaps a sentence, but not an extended document. And at least in their free versions, they generally do not produce results from proprietary databases like LexisNexis, Factiva, ProQuest, and other paid-subscription sites, or from free databases that dynamically generate pages only when a user submits a query. They also don't include most documents circulating as electronic manuscripts with no permanent Web address. Enter text-comparison software. A small handful of entrepreneurs have developed programs that search the open Web and proprietary databases, as well as e-books, for suspicious matches. One of the most popular of these is Turnitin; inspired by journalism scandals such as the New York Times' Jayson Blair case, its creators offer a version aimed at newspaper editors. Teachers can submit student papers electronically for comparison with these databases, including the retained texts of previously submitted papers. Those passages that bear resemblance to each other are noted with color highlighting in a double-pane view. Two years ago I heard a speech by a New Jersey electronic librarian who had become an antiplagiarism specialist and consultant. He observed that comparison programs were so thorough that they often flagged chance similarities between student papers and other documents. Consider, then, that Turnitin's spiders are adding 40 million pages from the public Web, plus 40,000 student papers, each day. Meanwhile Google plans to scan millions of library books--including many still under copyright--for its Print database. The number of coincidental parallelisms between the various things that people write is bound to rise steadily. A third technology will add yet more capacity to find similarities in writing. Artificial-intelligence researchers at MIT and other universities are developing techniques for identifying nonverbatim similarity between documents to make possible the detection of nonverbatim plagiarism. While the investigators may have in mind only cases of brazen paraphrase, a program of this kind can multiply the number of parallel passages severalfold. Some universities are encouraging students to precheck their papers and drafts against the emerging plagiosphere. Perhaps publications will soon routinely screen submissions. The problem here is that while such rigorous and robust policing will no doubt reduce cheating, it may also give writers a sense of futility. The concept of the biosphere exposed our environmental fragility; the emergence of the plagiosphere perhaps represents our textual impasse. Copernicus may have deprived us of our centrality in the cosmos, and Darwin of our uniqueness in the biosphere, but at least they left us the illusion of the originality of our words. Soon that, too, will be gone. From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 1 21:41:27 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2005 17:41:27 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: Whatever happened to the New Industrial State? Message-ID: Whatever happened to the New Industrial State? http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2085192 [Letter to the editor appended.] 11 October 1996 The Good Society, By John Kenneth Galbraith, The humane agenda 152pp. Sinclair-Stevenson. ?12.99. 1 85619 509 0. It is hard to be critical of someone who writes as wittily and pithily as John Kenneth Galbraith. But any temptation to undue leniency on this score should be resisted. An economist's track record is more important than his style, and Galbraith's is not good. Twenty years ago, he was urging on us an economic system close to communism. National economies should be centrally planned to reflect the "public purpose". International planning should co-ordinate national planning policies. The aims of the planners would be enforced by a mixture of public ownership of the commanding heights (as well as the disorganized depths) of the economy, wage and price controls, high minimum wages, selective protectionism, and "the most vigorous use of the progressive income tax . . . for promoting equality". The justification for this enormous extension of state powers was developed over a number of books. The main claim of all of them was that the market system lauded by mainstream eco-nomists was a fiction. In American Capitalism: Concept of countervailing power (1952), Galbraith claimed that the economy was controlled by blocs of balancing powers, represented by big business, big unions and big government. This argument had a big influence on British Labour Party revisionists like Anthony Crosland, as it seemed to deny the case for wholesale nationalization to redress the "balance of power" in economic life. In The Affluent Society (1957), whose theme was "private affluence, public squalor", Galbraith doubted whether the economy was quite as balanced as he had supposed: the consumer was manipulated by advertising, and the public sector was starved of funds. In The New Industrial State (1967), Galbraith dropped the doctrine of countervailing power altogether. Economic life was dominated by a small group of giant private corporations, controlled not by their nominal owners (shareholders) but by a technical-managerial class which he called the "technostructure". The chief aim of the techno-structure was security for itself and the growth of the firm as measured by sales. Giant firms were able to secure their "immortality" (an uninterrupted level of earnings) by controlling the social environment in which they operated. They could set prices, control decisive costs through power of purchase, manage demand through advertising and defence contracts. They were also well placed to suborn the "educational and scientific estate" to their goals. The multinational corporation was simply a device for extending this system of control to international trade - the modern form of imperialism. This thesis was subject to damaging criticism when it appeared. Specifically, Galbraith was held to have exaggerated the power and efficiency, while distorting the motives, of the largest companies; to have played down the importance of markets and the autonomy of consumers and governments; never to have explained how individual company plans added up to a "private planning system"; and to have postulated a linear trend towards business concentration when none existed. Nevertheless, Galbraith pressed on. In Economics and the Public Purpose (1974), he used his model of corporate price setting to explain inflation, and added a new argument for state control. He accepted that there was a "market sector" as well as a planned corporate sector, but asserted that the technostructure was able to manipulate the terms of trade in favour of itself, thus forcing squalor and poverty on the un-organized part of the economy. The "public purpose" required redressing the balance between the corporate sector and the rest of the economy by nationalizing the leading companies in the corporate sector and the weakest industries in the market sector, and extending the planning system to the whole economy, so as to equalize rewards in the two sectors. From today's standpoint, what shines through is Galbraith's belief in the superiority of planning to the market. It was the planning aspect of corporate life - the application of organized or collective intelligence to technical problems - which excited his admiration. The only problem was that the planning was being done for the wrong - or at least too limited - purposes by the wrong people. Galbraith was advancing the claim of an alternative elite - the "intellectual and scientific estate", detached from commerce - to take over the planning system and direct it to higher purposes. He did not doubt that there existed a self-evident public purpose whose achievement could safely be entrusted to the "collective intelligence" of Platonic guardians like himself. Galbraith perfected two argumentative techniques for disarming his critics. The first, already mentioned, was to attribute all counter-arguments to a "belief system" - he called it the "conventional wisdom" - which served the needs of the technostructure. Included in this system were the Soviet threat, used to justify large defence expenditures, and neo-classical economics, which disguised the fact that the market system no longer existed. Thus he could present himself as an isolated, if not persecuted upholder of the "public purpose" against a powerful congeries of self-serving private interests. His second appeal was to historical, particularly technological determinism. The private planning system was driven by the demands of mass-production industry; the "new socialism" was "compelled by circumstance" not by ideology. The trouble is that the first technique is merely diverting; while the second is vulnerable to a change in the facts. It has been Galbraith's fate to survive into an age when practically all his assumptions, projections and remedies have been made obsolete by history with a capital H. History was the one line of attack against which he did not guard himself. In the light of all this, Galbraith could write one book which would be well worth reading: an account of why he believed the things he did, where he was right to believe what he did, and where he went wrong. It need not be a mea culpa; it could even be an apologia, provided he made an attempt to engage honestly with his past. It would contain the kind of mature reflection we have the right to expect, but almost never get, from ancient sages, and would be worth a dozen blueprints for a better world. The slim volume under review is not that kind of book; I doubt whether Galbraith could write it. Its aim is to preach: "to tell what would be right". Indeed, the ratio of preaching to analysis and specifics has gone up. Its skeletal chapters give the game away. They reflect not just the toll which age takes on intellectual energy, but also the fact that the march of events has torn the heart out of his familiar analysis of the capitalist system. The controlling technostructure has vanished (Galbraith no longer uses this word) to be replaced by a "democracy of the fortunate". (This recapitulates the main idea of his last book, The Culture of Contentment, 1992.) "Monopoly power" has "surrendered to international competition and the explosive force of technological change". Modern corporate management is "committed to . . . profit maximisation"; far from being immortal, even the largest firm is subject to the discipline of actual and prospective bankruptcy. In the past a keen advocate of the Indian planning system, Galbraith now condemns autarkic development policies as a "major error". The multinational corporation, far from being an agent of "privately sponsored imperialism", is an almost benign source of inward foreign investment and technology transfer. In fact, Galbraith writes, "for the first time in history . . . there is no tangible manifestation of imperialism . . . ." As the familiar analysis is rejected, so is the remedy. There is no mention of economic planning, public ownership, the "new socialism". Wage-price controls are out too: "the most that can now be urged is a sense of responsibility on wage-price negotiation." In other words, the market system is up and running. All this is said with a straight face. Galbraith has quietly slipped on a new set of clothes, without giving a hint that he had ever worn anything else. So we are left with a modest "humane agenda", which reflects reduced expectation of the benefits of state action. Essentially, the role of the State is to fill the gaps and contain the excesses of the market system. It should sub-sidize scientific research and infrastructure, protect the environment, regulate financial markets and fill the gaps left by parents and families in caring for the young. Because the "good soci-ety" needs "substantial and reliable economic growth", there is a role for counter-cyclical fiscal policy within a "relevant framework" of rules. Equality is not realizable, because people don't want it, "and the good society must accept men and women as they are". But progressive taxation and minimum-wage legislation can be justified as reducing the poverty that conduces to social disorder, and producing a "reliable flow of expenditure". (Galbraith implausibly suggests that a progressive income tax will cause the affluent to work harder to maintain their after-tax incomes.) Shareholder power (previously dismissed as a myth) is also now invoked to minimize excessive managerial rewards. To help the "poor of the planet", Galbraith advocates im-migration into rich countries, and aid programmes channelled into education. In the more distant future, a "transnational authority" will be needed to reconcile the conflict between nationalism and internationalism. Much of this is sensible, social-democratic stuff. I agree with him on the need for stabilization policy. He writes: "A call for better-prepared workers as the remedy for recession-induced unemployment is the last resort of the vacant liberal mind." This is Galbraith at his best. His plea for the "setting aside of sovereignty" by the United Nations when indigenous governments break down, and populations are subject to genocide and famine, is worth serious attention. But there is that awful track record, and some vestiges of it still undermine confidence in our chastened guru. In the years of Communism, Galbraith writes, "it is not clear that one would wisely have exchanged the restraints on freedom of the resident of East Berlin for those imposed by poverty on the poorest citizen of the South Bronx . . . ." Who is that "one"? Is it Galbraith, or the resident of East Berlin, or the poorest citizen of the South Bronx? Galbraith has never accepted that freedom is freedom: there are not different kinds of freedom to be traded off against each other for the sake of some superior "public purpose". He has never faced the issue of government failure or welfare dependency; he simply pulls faces at those who have. He continues to combine a quasi-Marxist faith in economic determinism with a strange belief in the efficacy of his own persuasion. So while there are some wise and perceptive things in The Good Society, there are too many gaps in his understanding to make him a reliable guide to the future. Lord Skidelsky is Professor of Political Eco-nomy at Warwick University. His books include The World after Communism: A polemic for our times, published last year. ------------- http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2085081&window_type=print 'The Good Society' 18 October 1996 Sir, - It's a bit rich for Robert Skidelsky (October 11) to chastise J. K. Galbraith for his "awful track record", when just about the entire political mainstream in Western societies used to think much the same way. The point is well made in the two pieces which sandwich Skidelsky's. David Marquand reminds us that Gaitskell and other right-wing Labour revisionists "believed in state regulation"; while you yourself, Sir, quote Schumpeter's certainty that "capitalists ... will eventually cease to function". Even Lord Skidelsky used to be of some such persuasion. More recently we have all trimmed to other gales, and no doubt much of Galbraith's analysis no longer has the purchase it once did. But at a purely descriptive level, his epithet "Private affluence, public squalor" seems to grow more accurate, not less, as a characterization of our brave new world. Given the discontents spawned by such conditions, it might be premature to write off the likes of Galbraith; just as it turned out to be with Hayek. The wise are wary of all teleologies, whether yesterday's corporatism or today's market anarchy. AIDAN FOSTER-CARTER 17 Birklands Road, Shipley, West Yorkshire. From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 1 21:41:33 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2005 17:41:33 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: Advancing in Age Message-ID: Advancing in Age The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.6.3 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i39/39a00601.htm As the number of old professors at one university increases, so do the challenges By PIPER FOGG Raleigh, N.C. Amid the students scurrying to and from the library here at North Carolina State University, a professor with a shock of white hair shuffles along slowly. When a colleague a few feet away calls out to him, the elderly man doesn't respond. A few blocks away, a silver-haired botany professor who is recovering from knee surgery rests her cane outside her office. In another building, an old-timer in industrial engineering marvels at today's technology, recalling the days when he relied on his trusty slide rule. Older professors have become a familiar sight on this campus. The changing composition of the faculty here and at colleges around the country shows that academe has come to a new age -- literally. That means less room for younger faculty members. While newly minted Ph.D.'s may silently curse older professors for sticking around and holding onto the jobs, colleges themselves have no clear choices. Older professors offer a wealth of scholarly contacts and depth of experience. But colleges with low turnover may miss out on cutting-edge knowledge and novel teaching methods. They may have a less diverse faculty, outdated curricula, and professors who are uncomfortable with the latest technology. Administrators also worry that the number of older faculty members has grown out of proportion to the faculty as a whole. Some of the statistics are startling. In the 16-campus University of North Carolina system, the proportion of tenured and tenure-track faculty members age 50 or older jumped from about a third in 1984 to more than half in 2001. In 1984 there were only two tenured faculty members over the age of 69. By 2001 the system had 90 such professors. Other colleges face a similar demographic shift. A decade ago, at the University of Arizona, less than 17 percent of the tenured and tenure-track faculty members were 60 or older. Now, almost one in four professors is that old. At Wichita State University, 29 percent of the faculty were 55 or older a decade ago, and 41 percent are that old now. Nearly one out of 10 professors there is 65 or older. At private colleges, experts say, the situation is compounded: The type of pension plans that most private institutions offer tend to reward professors for working longer. While the national population is aging as a whole, factors specific to academe magnify the trend. Ten years have passed since Congress ended mandatory retirement, a policy that had allowed colleges to require faculty members to retire at age 70. Many professors hired during the great expansion of academe in the 1960s and 70s are now reaching their golden years. And, because many people are living longer -- and need financial resources to do so comfortably -- more and more professors are delaying retirement, some of them indefinitely. But colleges are not powerless to combat those trends. Ronald G. Ehrenberg, a professor of industrial and labor relations and economics at Cornell University and director of the Higher Education Research Institute there, suggests using a carrot-and-stick approach. That means using incentives to encourage people to retire. And making retired faculty members who are no longer on the payroll feel involved with their institutions by offering them office space or the chance to advise students. He says that some colleges allow officials to approve who can get retirement incentives on a case-by-case basis. That may help them avoid losing star professors, whom administrators want to keep around for their marquee value. Colleges can also take steps to reinvigorate older professors who do want to continue to come to work. And when that doesn't work, tactics like post-tenure review can persuade underperformers to quietly retire. Economic Imbalance On most weekdays a group of professors in the economics department at North Carolina State gets together for lunch, and this Wednesday during spring exams is no exception. Nine professors meet in the department's windowless conference room. They unpack sandwiches and carrot sticks, diet sodas and yogurt. At least half of the professors are balding or graying. Many look like they are pushing 60, if not older. The exception is the department's lone assistant professor, Denis Pelletier, 32, who good-naturedly accepts his place as the department's one member under 40. The department has 22 professors, and about two-thirds of them are over 55, according to the department's chairman, Douglas K. Pearce. Twenty are full professors, generally between about 58 and 64, he says. All are men. "There's a problem looming in the future, I think, if we don't begin hiring young faculty," says Stephen E. Margolis, who stepped down in June after seven years as chairman of the department. But with so few junior professors in the department, he says, it's been difficult to recruit other young people. "New Ph.D.'s we're trying to hire look around and think, Well, who are going to be my colleagues? They look for a community of people their age." The recruiting process also puts some stress on Mr. Pelletier, who had to serve on the search committee for a junior professor last year despite the pressure of being on the tenure track himself. The department did hire a new assistant professor -- its only woman -- who will arrive this summer. Mr. Pelletier, who came to North Carolina State two years ago after receiving his Ph.D. at the University of Montreal, says the toughest part of being the only young person in the department is having few friends his age there. "I'd like to have a beer buddy," he says. "Someone maybe on a Friday to unwind with." During the daily lunches, he says, his colleagues often bring up the subject of colonoscopies or talk about some provost from the 1970s. "In 1976," says Mr. Pelletier, "I think I was potty-trained." Having fresh talent, says Mr. Margolis, would bring in a steady flow of new perspectives and techniques. It would also bring connections to up-and-coming scholars from other institutions. "An academic department doesn't do well in isolation," he says. What's more, the older economics professors are "perhaps not as active as they were in their early 40s and 50s." There are benefits, though, to having so many experienced senior professors. Mr. Margolis points out that they help with advising, and that they have strong connections to alumni, which has aided fund raising. They also have far-reaching institutional knowledge. Edward W. Erickson, a 69-year-old economics professor, has taught at North Carolina State for 40 years. He plans to retire next June -- although, he says, he gets better at teaching every year. But when asked to recount the last time he created and taught a course from scratch, he takes a long pause. Finally, he responds: "1984." Mr. Pelletier, in his first three semesters as an assistant professor, has done the preparatory work required to teach three new courses. Professors like Mr. Erickson say they have stayed so long in academe because it is a great job. A colleague, Michael B. McElroy, says teaching gives him satisfaction and identity in life. "I get disoriented when I'm not teaching and I take summers off," says the 63-year-old associate professor. "I feel this loss of connection with students." Mr. McElroy admits that he's not much of a researcher, and instead teaches three courses a semester, the usual load for faculty members who do not do research. He tried teaching a section of introductory economics two years ago but found he lacked the patience to explain definitions and do the constant drilling that the students in an intro course need. That is another complication with having so few junior professors: It's harder to offer a full range of courses. Late in their careers, many professors become increasingly specialized and sometimes eschew the basic courses that departments have to offer. And some older professors simply start slowing down. While Mr. McElroy says he continues to put in a full day's work, logging more than 40 hours a week, he is scaling back. "I want to open up to other things," he says. This summer he will travel to Paris for three weeks with his wife. He started French lessons in January, has been studying French history, and reads Le Monde each day. Still, he says of his job, "I like what I'm doing and plan to do it indefinitely." The economics department is not the only one at North Carolina State with a surfeit of older professors. Industrial engineering, too, has more than a few graying faculty members, including a 78-year-old who has taught at the university since 1967. Another engineering professor, Richard H. Bernhard, 71, is about to begin his 48th year of teaching. Mr. Bernhard walks with a slight limp, having had hip-replacement surgery two years ago. But he exhibits the energy of someone considerably younger. He credits his verve to the excitement of working on a dynamic campus. People are living longer, he says, because they feel useful. Mr. Bernhard's CV is a testament to his own usefulness: He is a member of the Faculty Senate and the executive committee of the College of Engineering, campus delegate to the Faculty Assembly of the University of North Carolina system, and chairman of the university's parking-and-transportation committee (even though he walks to work every day). He ran for chair of the Faculty Senate last year, losing out to his friend Nina Str?mgren Allen, a professor in the botany department. She is 69. Flexibility is one aspect of academe that keeps Mr. Bernhard on the faculty. "You can work as much as you want or as little," he says. He says he is also in no rush to leave Raleigh, where the weather is mild most of the year. Like many college towns, Raleigh has a strong sense of community and is brimming with culture. He also appreciates having smart colleagues and a department chairman who, he says, values him. "If you're appreciated, ... if you have a pleasant environment," Mr. Bernhard says, "why the hell stop?" Ms. Allen, the botanist who won the Faculty Senate chair election, enjoys what she does but has different reasons for delaying retirement. A mother of five, she started her academic career late and took eight years out to raise her children. After her husband died, she had to put all five through college on his pension. She keeps working now because she needs the money. Ms. Allen's retirement fund, half of which was invested in the stock market, took a nose dive during the recent economic downturn, like those of many other professors. Ms. Allen acknowledges that there are certain things she can't do anymore -- "like walk," she says, half-jokingly. She uses a cane after having surgery to replace one of her knees. But she says she doesn't mind working. "I'm not worn out," she says. "I still find it fascinating." It helps, she says, to have a collegial department in which many of the professors are women. And when boredom strikes, she says, there is always a new subject to explore. New Blood Younger professors can invigorate departments. Several years ago, Christopher R. Gould, chairman of the physics department here, said the faculty was getting along in age. But through seven retirements and the creation of new faculty lines, the department has been able to hire 15 faculty members. The influx of young people has breathed new life into the department. There are seven women on the 38-person faculty, and only two professors over age 65, says Mr. Gould. A creative tension has developed between the young faculty members and those who have been here for years, he says. And having more women has encouraged a stronger focus on diversity issues. Even the curriculum has benefited. When some faculty members tried to establish a new introductory physics program, Mr. Gould says, the older professors were skeptical. So he offered it to the department's newer faculty members, who jumped right on it. That helped him restaff the entire introductory curriculum. "I'm not sure we could have pulled that off without all these younger faculty," the chairman says. While the economics department would love to hire a legion of junior professors during the next few years, financial realities prevent that. State revenue is down, and Ira R. Weiss, dean of North Carolina State's College of Management, which houses the economics department, has committed to giving the department just one new hire a year. "Is the faculty happy with the commitment I've made?" he asks. "No." But his hands are tied, he says, acknowledging that the longer the department goes without hiring new faculty members, the harder attracting top-quality people will become. There is a concern, he concedes, that the department's reputation may be suffering. At Northeastern University, where Mr. Weiss was dean of the business school, he was able to offer buyouts to faculty members on a case-by-case basis. He says he has not ruled that out at North Carolina State. What to Do? What can colleges do to avoid the problems posed by an age imbalance in the faculty? Robert L. Clark, an economist at North Carolina State who studies faculty demographics and retirement, has created models of the faculty both at the university and in the 16-campus system. For starters, he says, colleges should do similar research on their own faculties. By creating models that track retirement rates, faculty age, and changes in hiring trends, colleges would be able to study the effects of different hiring and retirement scenarios and manipulate the models with projected growth patterns to predict the future. Mr. Clark is a proponent of "phased retirement," which provides incentives for professors to move gradually away from full-time work. In North Carolina State's program, for instance, professors give up tenure in exchange for three years of half-pay and full benefits, during which they have to work only half-time. Such policies not only help colleges know when specific retirements will take place, but also smooth faculty members' transition to retirement. Mr. Erickson, the economics professor, is entering his second year of the program; he calls it "practice retirement." Mr. Clark also advises institutions to study various incentives to learn how each one would affect their faculty. Only then can administrators be prepared for what's coming. At the University of California at Berkeley retiring professors who win the approval of their department, dean, and a vice provost can become "professors of the graduate school." Such professors agree to retire but are then reappointed for three years or more. They are not paid a salary but can apply for grants, are often given laboratory or office space, and sometimes advise graduate students. The program helps officials hang on to professors they want to keep around, while still encouraging retirement. Some of the university's star faculty members have signed on, including Charles H. Townes, 89, a physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1964 for his role in the invention of the laser. Mr. Ehrenberg, of Cornell, agrees that phased retirement is an effective strategy: "It allows people to try out doing other things, and often ... they discover they like it." Colleges should also try to make retirement look attractive, he says, by designing programs or centers for emeritus professors, so they won't feel abandoned when they stop working. And if retired professors are willing to teach a course or two, all the better for the institution. Sometimes, though, incentives are not enough. Mr. Ehrenberg suggests that when departments require everyone to pull his or her weight -- for instance, by not excusing older professors from teaching core courses -- some would rather retire than keep up. Eventually the bottleneck of older professors at North Carolina State will give way. "If nothing else," says Mr. Bernhard, "people are just going to die." From checker at panix.com Wed Jun 1 21:41:40 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2005 17:41:40 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NS: Low fat, low protein diet boosts longevity Message-ID: Low fat, low protein diet boosts longevity http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7442&print=true * 10:35 31 May 2005 * Alison Motluk The idea that animals live longer if they eat less has been shown to be not entirely correct - at least in fruit flies. For these insects, it is the type of food and not just the quantity that controls their longevity. It has been known for some time that calorie restriction significantly lengthens the lifespan of many non-primate species - everything from worms to fleas to mice. Linda Partridge at University College London, UK, and colleagues wanted to see if the effect was merely due to a reduction of total calories or of particular nutrients in the diet. So the researchers divided up their Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies into four groups and put them on different diets. The control group got the standard fruit fly lab meal of yeast, which contains protein and fat, and sugar - a meal boasting about 1200 kilocalories per litre. The second group was fed on a calorie-restricted diet, with equal amounts of yeast and sugar - about 521 kilocalories per litre. The third group was given more yeast than sugar, while the fourth group got more sugar than yeast. The latter two diets had about 860 kilocalories per litre each. Choice meal The flies on the calorie restricted diet lived the longest - 82% longer compared to the controls. But the flies on the higher calorie diet with reduced yeast intake did very well too. Lowering the amount of protein and fat in the flies diet helped increase lifespan by nearly 65%. It accounts for nearly all of the effect, says Partridge. It cannot just be calories. Eating less sugar increased longevity only by about 9%. Brian Kennedy, a researcher who works on calorie restriction and ageing at the University of Washington in Seattle, US, says: It's these detailed studies that are going to unlock the secrets [of the effects of calorie restriction]. Journal reference: PLoS Biology (vol 3, p e223) Related Articles * [12]Why humans grow old grungily * [13]http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18624991.400 * 14 May 2005 * [14]Modified mice enjoy one-fifth more life * [15]http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7347 * 05 May 2005 * [16]Welcome to the immortals' club * [17]http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18624941.900 * 09 April 2005 Weblinks * [18]Linda Partridge, University College London * [19]http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucbtcee/flies/Linda_Partridge.html * [20]Brian Kennedy, University of Washington * [21]http://depts.washington.edu/mcb/facultyinfo.php?id=218 * [22]Public Library of Science Biology * [23]http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=index-html&i ssn=1545-7885 References 12. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18624991.400 13. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18624991.400 14. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7347 15. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7347 16. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18624941.900 17. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18624941.900 18. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucbtcee/flies/Linda_Partridge.html 19. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucbtcee/flies/Linda_Partridge.html 20. http://depts.washington.edu/mcb/facultyinfo.php?id=218 21. http://depts.washington.edu/mcb/facultyinfo.php?id=218 22. http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=index-html&issn=1545-7885 23. http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=index-html&issn=1545-7885 From HowlBloom at aol.com Thu Jun 2 05:45:49 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2005 01:45:49 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] Fwd: free will--fr. Ted Coons Message-ID: <74.54f9fbab.2fcff70d@aol.com> In a message dated 6/1/2005 2:47:37 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, eec1 at nyu.edu writes: >Howard, before dealing with the math that a putative "free will" would >require, I feel there is a paradoxical motivational issue regarding "free >will" that first needs at least considering (if not clarifying). One of >the reasons "free will" is an attractive concept is that it liberates us >from a smothering sense of external control with which determinism >tyrannizes us. Who among us wouldn't like to throw off the behavior >chains of causality and "over these prison walls fly"? Yet when asked the >reasons why we do things, we say "because....," thus, admitting to a >justifying influence in vast preference to the insanity of doing something >without reason (the abhorrent equivalent of a motivationless crime, so to >speak). So the issue, at least psychologically, is: Can we choose without >being chosen or, if we must be chosen, can we still choose? Perhaps >entanglement is somehow the answer.....Ted > >At 11:19 PM 5/16/2005 -0400, you wrote: >>This is from a dialog Pavel Kurakin and I are having behind the >>scenes. I wanted to see what you all thought of it. Howard >> >>You know that I'm a quantum skeptic. I believe that our math is >>primitive. The best math we've been able to conceive to get a handle on >>quantum particles is probabilistic. Which means it's cloudy. It's >>filled with multiple choices. But that's the problem of our math, not of >>the cosmos. With more precise math I think we could make more precise >>predictions. >> >>And with far more flexible math, we could model large-scale things like >>bio-molecules, big ones, genomes, proteins and their interactions. With >>a really robust and mature math we could model thought and brains. But >>that math is many centuries and many perceptual breakthroughs away. >> >>As mathematicians, we are still in the early stone age. >> >>But what I've said above has a kink I've hidden from view. It implies >>that there's a math that would model the cosmos in a totally >>deterministic way. And life is not deterministic. We DO have free >>will. Free will means multiple choices, doesn't it? And multiple >>choices are what the Copenhagen School's probabilistic equations are all about? >> >>How could the concept of free will be right and the assumptions behind >>the equations of Quantum Mechanics be wrong? Good question. Yet I'm >>certain that we do have free will. And I'm certain that our current >>quantum concepts are based on the primitive metaphors underlying our >>existing forms of math. Which means there are other metaphors ahead of >>us that will make for a more robust math and that will square free will >>with determinism in some radically new way. >> >>Now the question is, what could those new metaphors be? >> >>Howard ---------- 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 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: Youthactivism.org; 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: -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Ted Coons Subject: HOWARD...for you personally...Ted Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2005 02:49:24 -0400 Size: 7800 URL: From HowlBloom at aol.com Thu Jun 2 05:45:58 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2005 01:45:58 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: free will--fr Ted Coons Message-ID: <82.2943c42c.2fcff716@aol.com> This is devilishly clever, Ted. And it gives a wonderful opportunity to put ten years of thought about will down in one place. See comments below. In a message dated 6/1/2005 2:47:37 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, eec1 at nyu.edu writes: Howard, before dealing with the math that a putative "free will" would require, I feel there is a paradoxical motivational issue regarding "free will" that first needs at least considering (if not clarifying). One of the reasons "free will" is an attractive concept is that it liberates us from a smothering sense of external control with which determinism tyrannizes us. hb: good point, and one I've been pondering a good part of the day. In past years, I've written that the sense of self is a fragile envelope, a perceptual membrane with which we achieve an illusion of control. Self is a membrane we use to differentiate ourselves from our parents and from the other power figures in our lives. And self is a perceptual membrane that lets us say that we're similar enough to others that they should accept us in their company, but different enough that they should pay attention to us. Self is like the O in Joel Isaacson's cellular automata. It is a differentiator...a diversity generator. Gaining a sense of self in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood is allied to the impulse among bacteria to either take a position at a slight distance from their parents and eat an as-yet-untasted part of the nearby landscape or to grow a propeller and leave the ancestral homestead altogether. Self is vital to the itch of biomass to spread, spread, spread, even if that imperialistic impulse takes cell-and-dna-based life two miles beneath the surface of the earth, where lithoautotrophs feed on stone, or to the surface of Mars, where several inanimate probes of biomass are currently adventuring on our behalf. The need for a sense of self is also akin to Val Geist's maintenance and dispersal modes--his two basic phenotypes for all forms of life. Get yourself a sense of self--of separateness--and either inherit the old family patch or niche, use it in a slightly new way, or go off to seek your fortune elsewhere. Meandering even farther, self in the Bloomian view is a billboard of control. Other members of our species cluster around those of us who seem in control of circumstance. They shun those of us who seem clueless, those of us who seem to have lost our grip and to have lost control. That's true whether we are single-celled lymphocytes in the immune system, or human beings. I also suspect it's true among bacteria, slime mold, and most other living things. The tendency of others to avoid us when we are bumbling and to cluster around us when we are confident and have good reason to swagger turns us into parts of a neural-net-like learning machine, modules in a creative mass-computer, or neurons in a collective intelligence. OK, now what does this have to do with free will? Good question. The more perception of branching choices, the further we can spread. And spreading is important to survival. Those who spread into the greatest number of slots have the best chance of survival the next time a mass-die-off happens. And so far we've counted 148 of those mass die-offs. But there may be hundreds or thousands more we haven't yet been able to count. Why so many mass extinctions? Because this planet periodically goes through upheavals whose sources are far beyond the control of biomass--far beyond the control of planetary passengers like busily-spreading single-celled organisms and their newly-arrived relatives, multicellular creatures. We circle our galactic core every 66 million years. On our merry way, we pass through many a patch of "galactic fluff"--schmootz--space dust, that increases our normal yearly accumulation of space grit from 30 million kilograms a year to 90 million or more. That dust changes our climate dramatically, wiping out branches of the tree of life that haven't branched with sufficient bushiness. Periodically the earth belches volcanically and blackens the sky, doing just about the same thing an overload of space dust achieves--chilling the temperature considerably. And we now think that periodically the seas burp vast masses of methane, turning the planet into a hothouse. On a planet of massive change, those branches of the tree of life that bet on permanence and stability die. Those that shift tactics and locations, those that make new niches of what previously seemed to be nothingness, thrive. The mind is a new possibility-prober. The more options it imagines the more options it opens. And more options it opens, the more mind is likely to make it through the next planetary catastrophe. The more imaginings mind turns to reality, the hardier and longer-lived the family of mind is likely to be. But is will simply an illusion? After all, Benjamin Libet says that the impulse that moves our fingers starts its journey from the brain to the muscles nearly a half a second before it announces itself to the conscious mind. Will, Libet implies, is a clever illusion. I suspect Libet is right about timing and wrong about the ultimate power of will. "Anything we conceive and believe we can achieve," said the singer and preacher Al Green while he was driving me slowly past Elvis' mansion in Memphis. (Others attribute the quote to Napoleon. But Napoleon was never kind enough to drive me past a local landmark.) The quote is on the money, in my opinion. But how? You've probably tried to go on diets many, many times and have discovered just how powerless your will is. But think. Roughly one out of every five of us DOES manage to go on that elusive diet. It may take him six tries, but he does get there. How? Well, let's imagine that the desire to toss some change into a vending machine and buy some Reese's Peanut Butter Cups originates in the limbic system. That's just a guess. One of the difficulties with Libet's studies is that he works with encephalographs, not with NMR or fMRI machines. So Libet can't pinpoint quite which part of the brain sends out orders to the muscles before letting us know what it's up to. But let's take a wild guess and blame the errant impulse to eat a forbidden bit of chocolate on that old stooge, the emotional brain, the restless reptile, the limbic system. The limbic system registers the Reeses. Out goes the order to slide a dollar into the machine. By the time our conscious mind gets the message, it's too late. We are on our way to another 500 un-needed calories. How does the limbic system manages to puppeteer us on critical issues like chocaholic indulgence? The number of neurons going from the limbic system to the cerebral cortex is large. The number of neurons headed from the cortex back to the limbic system is small. In other words, the limbic system comes equipped to puppeteer the conscious mind. But the conscious mind has very few strings with which to jerk around the limbic system. Score a neurobiological advantage for impulse over willpower. But the brain is highly plastic. Use it or lose it. As studies of musicians (including some Ted Coons has been involved in) show, the more you exercise something--like your piano-playing or violin-stringing fingers--the more nerves you manage to attract to the project on which you focus your self-discipline. Yes, with enough practice you, too, can play the piano. And in the process you can modestly remake your brain. So the Bloom theory of will goes something like this. Try five times to go on a diet and you may fail. But keep applying willpower, and you may literally resculpt your brain. You may grow more than the normal number of neurons going from the cortex--the thinking part of the brain--to the limbic system--the emotional brain. With enough nerves going from the haughty-but-impotent spokesman of self to the real meat of you and me, our reptilian impulse, you can change the way the reptile makes its impulse-decisions. With new limbic meshes born of steady practice, you can assure that your inner reptile decides to keep your hands in your pocket the next time you pass the vending machine and are tempted by a Reese's Pieces opportunity. Yes, you, too, can exert the power of will. But will you do it to open a new niche for yourself, for your family, for your species, and for the grand schemes of mind and biomass? Will you do it with sufficient vigor and imagination to insure that mind and biomass make it through the next cosmic or planetary catastrophe? If will exists, then that depends on you. And, though will comes only with enormous exertion, I think it DOES exist. But that's just my willful opinion. Who among us wouldn't like to throw off the behavior chains of causality and "over these prison walls fly"? Yet when asked the reasons why we do things, we say "because....," thus, admitting to a justifying influence in vast preference to the insanity of doing something without reason (the abhorrent equivalent of a motivationless crime, so to speak). So the issue, at least psychologically, is: Can we choose without being chosen or, if we must be chosen, can we still choose? Perhaps entanglement is somehow the answer.....Ted > >At 11:19 PM 5/16/2005 -0400, you wrote: >>This is from a dialog Pavel Kurakin and I are having behind the >>scenes. I wanted to see what you all thought of it. Howard >> >>You know that I'm a quantum skeptic. I believe that our math is >>primitive. The best math we've been able to conceive to get a handle on >>quantum particles is probabilistic. Which means it's cloudy. It's >>filled with multiple choices. But that's the problem of our math, not of >>the cosmos. With more precise math I think we could make more precise >>predictions. >> >>And with far more flexible math, we could model large-scale things like >>bio-molecules, big ones, genomes, proteins and their interactions. With >>a really robust and mature math we could model thought and brains. But >>that math is many centuries and many perceptual breakthroughs away. >> >>As mathematicians, we are still in the early stone age. >> >>But what I've said above has a kink I've hidden from view. It implies >>that there's a math that would model the cosmos in a totally >>deterministic way. And life is not deterministic. We DO have free >>will. Free will means multiple choices, doesn't it? And multiple >>choices are what the Copenhagen School's probabilistic equations are all about? >> >>How could the concept of free will be right and the assumptions behind >>the equations of Quantum Mechanics be wrong? Good question. Yet I'm >>certain that we do have free will. And I'm certain that our current >>quantum concepts are based on the primitive metaphors underlying our >>existing forms of math. Which means there are other metaphors ahead of >>us that will make for a more robust math and that will square free will >>with determinism in some radically new way. >> >>Now the question is, what could those new metaphors be? >> >>Howard >> ---------- 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 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: Youthactivism.org; 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: -------------- next part -------------- An embedded message was scrubbed... From: Ted Coons Subject: HOWARD...for you personally...Ted Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2005 02:49:24 -0400 Size: 7800 URL: From checker at panix.com Thu Jun 2 15:16:20 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2005 11:16:20 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Wired: Bioscientists: Gods or Monsters? Message-ID: Bioscientists: Gods or Monsters? http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,67643,00.html By [21]Kristen Philipkoski 02:00 AM May. 27, 2005 PT Scientists working with embryonic stem cells or transgenic organisms are sometimes perceived as evil: modern-day Frankensteins meddling with the building blocks of life. In his new book, The Geneticist Who Played Hoops With My DNA ... and Other Masterminds From the Frontiers of Biotech, journalist and author [23]David Ewing Duncan chats with some of the most prominent and powerful life scientists in the United States about the human motivations behind their God-like endeavors. He finds them to have benevolent intentions -- almost completely convincing us that their experiments won't have unintended negative consequences. Duncan's book profiles seven scientists, including famously cantankerous DNA discoverer James Watson, Human Genome Project leader and born-again Christian [28]Francis Collins and Harvard geneticist [29]Doug Melton, who hopes to advance medical research one day by creating monkeys with human brains. Duncan weaves lay-friendly science through the profiles, making the book fun to read whether you're interested in science, ethics or philosophy, or simply curious about exceptional people. (Feeling curious yourself? Duncan has agreed to answer your questions about biotech research and ethics by e-mail. Send your questions to Asktheauthor at wired.com and we'll pass them along to him, and publish his answers when he responds.) In the book, Duncan plays basketball with Icelandic DNA hero Kari Stefansson (an episode that inspired the title), and sits with Nobel Prize winner Sydney Brenner in his La Jolla, California, apartment as he nurses a cold. He explores how Collins reconciles his fiercely competitive nature and faith in science with his faith in God. And despite many of the scientists' clear disdain for journalists, Duncan holds his own as a non-scientist in his conversations with these masterminds. Their quirky, sometimes cranky, but mostly charitable natures should allay the public's fear of scientists tinkering with DNA and stem cells. Mistrust of scientists stems at least in part from ignorance, not necessarily of the science, but of the people performing the experiments. We don't know them as men and women who have families, catch the flu and play hoops at lunch. It's partly the fault of science reporters, Duncan writes: "Journalists tend to write articles trying to explain the intricacies of proteomics, genetically modified organisms, ribonucleic acid, transgenic animals and therapeutic cloning -- and the ins and outs of startups, initial public offerings and rolling markets." In The Geneticist Who Played Hoops, Duncan assigns each scientist a nickname from mythology. Melton, for example, is Prometheus, the god who gave fire to mortals against Zeus' wishes. Melton's passion for his studies -- using embryonic stem cells to find a cure for Type 1 diabetes -- is motivated by his two children who have been diagnosed with the disease. Melton talks about creating animals with human cells or organs -- specifically monkeys with human brains -- without flinching, the thought of which Duncan admits gives him the heebie-jeebies. In the Greek myths, Prometheus never explains his forbidden gift of fire, but Duncan ventures a guess: "He had mortal children who were cold and tired of eating berries and gnawing on raw meat." Longevity researcher [30]Cynthia Kenyon is Eve -- not because she's a temptress, Duncan writes, but because in the biblical story (Duncan's interpretation of it is great), God says humans who eat the fruit of the tree of life will become immortal like gods. After eating the proverbial apple, Adam and Eve are driven out of Eden before they have the chance to experience everlasting life. The lone female profiled in Duncan's book, Kenyon comes off as a woman deeply in love with her research subjects: worms. She has quadrupled the life span of the slimy creatures and become the hero of a cadre of ambitious individuals who want to live forever. Duncan deserves kudos for devoting significant space to another woman in science, [31]Rosalind Franklin, the late King's College crystallographer who got little thanks for her role in the discovery of the DNA structure, and was treated unfairly by Watson in his 1968 biography, The Double Helix. Incredibly, Watson (Zeus, because he pulls strings controlling both legislators and scientists) still doesn't have a kind word for Franklin. "I thought she was rather dowdy," is all he can muster when Duncan asks him about the woman who produced the crystallographic Image 51 that led to his monumental discovery of the structure of DNA. Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins [32]won a Nobel for the discovery in 1962. Duncan's interviews reveal more magnanimity than evil, which is a strong word even for a world-class grumpypants like Watson. But with all of his knowledge and power, Watson has not performed monstrous experiments that threatened anyone's safety, and Duncan's profile doesn't lead one to believe he wants to do so. The profiles reassure readers that America's top scientists are not looking to engender beasts in their beakers. Whether one will emerge by accident is less certain. I wish Duncan had gotten even more intimate with some of the scientists. What does Kenyon do on weekends? Does Watson ever do anything for fun? What is Craig Venter's (Faustus, because he's been accused of privatizing the human genome) relationship like with his ex-wife, [33]Claire Fraser, president of the Institute for Genomic Research? With that extra insight, maybe we'd be a little more assured of what these scientists will do with their growing knowledge and power. Nathaniel David, a scientist and entrepreneur, tells Duncan in the book's epilogue: "There is simply no incentive to be evil. I'm not going to defend the large drug companies. I'm talking about scientists. I have started two small companies, and I'm not rich. But I want to do good things." In his response, Duncan doesn't sound completely convinced. "I hope there are a few more like you," he says. References 21. http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/feedback/mail/1,2330,0-31-67643,00.html 23. http://literati.net/Duncan/ 24. http://network.realmedia.com/RealMedia/ads/adstream_sx.ads/lycoswired/ron/ron/st/ss/a/193377275 at x08,x10,x24,x15,Position1,Top1!x15 25. http://network.realmedia.com/RealMedia/ads/click_nx.ads/lycoswired/ron/ron/st/ss/a/193377275 at x08,x10,x24,x15,Position1,Top1!x15 26. http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,67643,00.html 27. http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,67643,00.html 28. http://www.genome.gov/10000779 29. http://www.mcb.harvard.edu/melton/ 30. http://www.ucsf.edu/neurosc/faculty/neuro_kenyon.html 31. http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/franklin.html 32. http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1962/index.html 33. http://www.tigr.org/faculty/Claire_Fraser.shtml From checker at panix.com Thu Jun 2 15:16:47 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2005 11:16:47 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: In for a Penny, Buy by the Pound Message-ID: In for a Penny, Buy by the Pound New York Times, 5.6.2 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/02/fashion/thursdaystyles/02online.html By MICHELLE SLATALLA MY family consumes books the way monkeys go through bananas. With five of us devouring them and discarding the depleted skins wherever they might fall, novels litter the house. "The Catcher in the Rye" and "Lord of the Flies," staples for teenagers, are abandoned on the kitchen table. "Little Women" and "Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle" have turned the staircase into an obstacle course. Saul Bellow's early novels? They're filed on a chair in the upstairs hall. If you walked into the house, you might think we have plenty to read. But on a recent Sunday, my three daughters persuaded me to walk out of yet another bookstore with a heavy shopping bag and a lighter bank account. By the following Thursday, we had devoured $70 in new books and my middle daughter, Ella - bemoaning the lack of things to read - had returned to a favorite Harry Potter novel for the 400th time. Given our appetite, we needed a cheaper supply. This is where the Internet comes in. The last couple of years have seen a proliferation online of the cheapest of the cheap, so-called penny books that merchants sell for a cent apiece, as loss leaders to attract shoppers to their sites. For instance, one day earlier this month I could have bought for a penny a copy of Agatha Christie's "Witness for the Prosecution & Other Stories" from usedbookcentral.com. From independent booksellers who list inventory on amazon.com, the vast penny book selection included a paperback copy of "Stuart Little," a "slightly torn" copy of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (with the owner's name written inside in pencil) and a "water damaged" paperback copy of "One Hundred Years of Solitude." So what's the catch? There are two, actually. The first challenge is to find a penny-priced copy of a title you'd like to read. Imagine the world's biggest, mustiest bookstore, where the used books have been shelved as unsystematically as in my house; it took me a good hour of dogged searching to come up with a list of a dozen or so likely penny-book titles I'd consider ordering. The second issue is price. In reality, a penny book costs far more than one cent by the time shipping costs are added. If you buy a penny book from one of Amazon's independent booksellers, for instance, it will cost $3.50 including the shipping charges of $3.49 a book. And Usedbookcentral's penny copy of "Witness for the Prosecution" would cost $3.51 including the $3.50 shipping cost. The trick is to calculate taxes and shipping costs before ordering. Luckily, online tools streamline the process. At specialized search sites - with names like addall.com, cheapestbookprice.com and bibliofind.com - shoppers can sift through databases of millions of titles in seconds. But which search site is the best? The answer, I learned, is that to a certain extent it's a matter of personal choice. "You can drive a Chevy or a Ford or a Honda and each will get you to the same place in the end," said Gary Price, news editor of searchenginewatch.com, a site that analyzes the quality of search engines. "Book searching involves a specialized database and it's always a good idea for a search to have at the ready two or three choices so they can decide which approach works best for them." One of Mr. Price's favorite search sites, for instance, is also one of mine: isbn.nu, a site that searches the databases of disparate online book providers and then merges the results into one continuous list. A nifty feature at isbn.nu enables shoppers to estimate shipping costs based on delivery destination and shipping method. (For instance, when I searched for a copy of the William Boyd novel "Any Human Heart," isbn.nu did not have a penny book but instantly informed me that the least expensive copy ($3.95 from half.com) would cost me $6.40 if I had it sent via standard ground shipping to my home in California.) The feature that makes it so easy for shoppers to find penny books and calculate their true prices ends up costing isbn.nu's owner, Glenn Fleishman, money. "I get a percentage of the sales I refer to Amazon, but when a book sells for a penny? I get zero percent of a penny," Mr. Fleishman said. "I could say I've got a lot against these penny books. But I'll derive some value from anything that brings people to my site, as long as they come back again and again. Eventually they'll buy a book that costs more than a penny." Another book-search site I like is bookfinder.com, with a particularly comprehensive database of new and used inventory from 70,000 booksellers. The site searches a list of 70 million physical books; least expensive copies are listed first. Shoppers can click on the site's advanced search tools to limit searches to specific price ranges, say from 1 to 2 cents. "Books in that price range will be mass-market paperbacks generally, anything that there's not a specialized demand for or anything that you might find being sold or given away at a library book sale," said Anirvan Chatterjee, chief executive of BookFinder. The largest selection of penny books is at Amazon, where independent booksellers list inventory in zShops. To best browse this inventory, scroll down the Amazon homepage and click on zShops, which is near the bottom of the left column. Next click on "Books," then select a specific genre and finally, from the results page, choose to sort by price, low to high. An Amazon penny book may cost nearly as much as, say, a 75-cent book somewhere else. At half.com, for instance, I found a copy of "Anna Karenina" for sale for 75 cents plus $2.79 in shipping, for a total of $3.54 (compared with Amazon's shipping-included price of $3.50). Of course, there's an even cheaper option for classics like "Anna Karenina," which are in the public domain. At bibliomania.com, I could read the novel's full text for free. For readers like me, who yearn to read physical copies, another free option is redlightgreen.com, a search site founded by the nonprofit Research Libraries Group that will locate copies of books at local libraries around the world. It informed me that "Anna Karenina" was on a library shelf three blocks from my house. Even better than the prospect of reading the novel was the prospect of returning it instead of adding the book to the pile on the nightstand. E-mail: slatalla at nytimes.com From checker at panix.com Thu Jun 2 15:17:03 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2005 11:17:03 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] AP: Scientists Experiment With 'Trust' Hormone Message-ID: Scientists Experiment With 'Trust' Hormone http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050602/ap_on_sc/trust_hormone&printer=1 By JOSEPH B. VERRENGIA, AP Science Writer It sounds like the plot for another Batman sequel: The villain sprays Gotham City with a trust hormone and people rush to give him all their money. Banks, the stock market and even governments collapse. Farfetched? Swiss and American scientists demonstrate in new experiments how a squirt of the hormone oxytocin stimulates trusting behavior in humans, and they acknowledge that the possibility of abuse can't be ignored. "Of course, this finding could be misused," said Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich, the senior researcher in the study, which appears in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. "I don't think we currently have such abuses. However, in the future it could happen." Other scientists say the new research raises important questions about oxytocin's potential as a therapy for conditions like autism, in which trust is diminished. Or, perhaps the hormone's activity could be reduced to treat more rare diseases, like Williams syndrome, in which children approach strangers fearlessly. "Might their high level of trust be due to excessive oxytocin release?" asks University of Iowa neurologist Antonio Damasio, who reviewed the experiments for Nature. "Little is known about the neurobiology of trust, although the phenomenon is beginning to attract attention." Oxytocin is secreted in brain tissue and synthesized by the hypothalamus. This small, but crucial feature located deep in the brain controls biological reactions like hunger, thirst and body temperature, as well as visceral fight-or-flight reactions associated with powerful, basic emotions like fear and anger. For years oxytocin was considered to be a straightforward reproductive hormone found in both sexes. In both humans and animals, this chemical messenger stimulates uterine contractions in labor and induces milk production. In both women and men, oxytocin is released during sex, too. Then, elevated concentrations of the hormone also were found in cerebrospinal fluid during and after birth, and experiments showed it was involved in the biochemistry of attachment. It's a sensible conclusion, given that babies require years of care and the body needs to motivate mothers for the demanding task of childrearing. In recent years, scientists have wondered whether oxytocin also is generally involved with other aspects of bonding behavior - and specifically whether it stimulates trust. Trust is the glue of society and human interactions. Erase it, and you compromise everything from love to trade and political order. "I once likened trust to a love potion," Damasio writes in Nature. "Add trust to the mix, for without trust there is no love." In the experiments, the researchers tried to manipulate people's trust by adding more oxytocin to their brains. They used a synthetic version in a nasal spray that was absorbed by mucous membranes and crossed the blood-brain barrier. Researchers say the dose was harmless and altered oxytocin levels only temporarily. A total of 178 male students from universities in Zurich took part in a pair of experiments. All the volunteers were in their 20s. They got the oxytocin or a placebo. In the first experiment, they played a game in which an "investor" could choose to hand over to a "trustee" up to 12 units of money that are each equal to .40 Swiss franc, or about 32 cents. The trustee triples the investor's money, then gets to decide how much of the proceeds to share. Of 29 subjects who got oxytocin, 45 percent invested the maximum amount of 12 monetary units and, in the researchers' words, showed "maximal trust." Only 21 percent had a lower trust level in which they invested less than 8 monetary units. In contrast, the placebo group's trust behavior was reversed. Only 21 percent of the placebo subjects invested the maximum, while 45 percent invested at low levels. Overall, those who got oxytocin invested 17 percent more than investors who received a placebo. In a second experiment, investors faced the same decision. But this time, the trustee was replaced by a computer program in an effort to see whether the hormone promoted social interaction or simply encouraged risk-taking. With the computer, the oxytocin and placebo groups behaved similarly, with both groups investing an average of 7.5 monetary units. "Oxytocin causes a substantial increase in trusting behavior," Fehr and his colleagues reported. Researchers said they are performing a new round of experiments using brain imaging. "Now that we know that oxytocin has behavioral effects," Fehr said, "we want to know the brain circuits behind these effects." From checker at panix.com Thu Jun 2 15:24:28 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2005 11:24:28 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Edmonton Journal: Why China is poised to streak ahead of the West Message-ID: Why China is poised to streak ahead of the West http://www.canada.com/edmonton/edmontonjournal/news/business/story.html?id=f30d1819-c2f2-41fd-a8ca-0bd32671751c Chinese are smart, hard-working and ready to take on the world, futurist says David Finlayson The Edmonton Journal Friday, May 27, 2005 EDMONTON - China's doing things the rest of us don't even know about, and unless we change quickly they will streak past us, futurist Frank Ogden says. "They are speeding ahead in so many areas because they have the ability to get big things done very quickly," the man known as Dr. Tomorrow told the Construction Specifications Canada conference here. "They're very smart, they think differently from us, and they have no restrictions on anything," said Ogden, an 84-year-old world traveller who lives on a high-tech houseboat in Vancouver. In three weeks they relocated the residents of a large city block in Shanghai, bulldozed the buildings and built a 1,000-bed isolation hospital using 10,000 conscripted workers, Ogden said. On the last day of construction, a stream of ambulances was bringing in patients. "They work 15 hours a day, every day, with no union interference, and that's what's going to beat us," Ogden told the gathering of architects, engineers and other construction-related sectors. Their wages have also doubled in the last couple of years to 28 cents an hour, so the workers think they're making big money. And China's not only manufacturing pots and pans any more. It's producing quality, intricate items such as scientific instruments, he said. "The infrastructure stinks, but they're working on that. And when they decide to do something it happens in a hurry." They also have no restrictions on reproductive technology so they could clone people and rent them out to North America, which is facing a shortage of workers, said Ogden, with a wink. North America's future will be vastly different as China's economy grows and the world keeps moving ahead at warp speed, he said. Nine-to-five jobs will become a piece of history as we put in almost full days on the job, he predicted. "We also have to learn much faster or other countries will do it and sell it back to us. The current, inefficient university lecture system will have to replaced, and he sees a day when we're all using new Sony technology that puts information into our brain patterns while we're asleep. "That was in the realm of science fiction for years, but just imagine how quickly you can absorb information that way." Companies will also have to become incredibly creative to compete globally, Ogden said. "Don't even think of a box, never mind outside it. Every company should have a smart 12-year-old who thinks off-the-wall. In China they've just grown a monkey's heart, and if you can do that you can do anything." dfinlayson at thejournal.canwest.com From checker at panix.com Thu Jun 2 15:25:05 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2005 11:25:05 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] MSNBC: Would you have allowed Bill Gates to be born? Message-ID: Would you have allowed Bill Gates to be born? http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7899821/ Advances in prenatal genetic testing pose tough questions By Arthur Caplan, Ph.D. MSNBC contributor Updated: 12:33 p.m. ET May 31, 2005 Who needs Bill Gates? No, I don?t mean who needs a gazillionaire corporate titan, a man whose company, Microsoft, took in billions of dollars last year by controlling nearly all the software used to run nearly every computer on the planet. No, I mean, literally, who needs him? If you could go back in time and stop the birth of the world?s most famous nerd, would you? You probably answered my question with a "no." Whatever Gates? sins may be, he is the father of a computer revolution that has brought much good to many people throughout the world. Add to that achievement his current generous philanthropic activities supporting some very worthy causes, such as vaccine research and a center for autism research in Seattle, and the case for having Bill with us becomes pretty persuasive. But what if I told you it?s possible that Gates has a medical condition that accounts, in part, for both his tremendous achievements and for his "nerdiness?" Gates is widely reported to display many personality traits characteristic of a condition known as Asperger?s syndrome. Asperger?s is a mild version of autism, a more serious condition that renders many children unable to talk, be touched, communicate or socialize. While I certainly do not know if Gates has Asperger?s, his difficulties in social settings are nearly as legendary as his genius, so it's possible. The perils of genetic testing That said, if you had been Gates' potential mom or dad 50 years ago, what would you have done if you knew about his abilities and flaws before he was born? Would you have wanted a child that would go on to do great things but would have a hyper-nerdy personality? What if the decision about whether to have a child like him also carried a risk that he might be born with far more serious disabilities? Would you have decided to carry the baby to term? The reason I ask these questions is that there is a good chance we will soon have a genetic test for detecting the risk of autism in an embryo or fetus. The development of such a screening tool raises the possibility that parents might one day have the option of preventing the birth of a child with even a mild case of the disorder. The thought is very upsetting to many in the autism community, including Aspies For Freedom, an advocacy group for people with Asperger's that is pushing to make June 18 "Autistic Pride Day." In their view, those with autism are no more suffering from a disease than are people who are short or have lighter or darker shades of skin. They want autism treated as merely a difference not a disease. And they are aghast at the thought that anyone would abort a child because they might have any degree of autism. An advantageous disorder? In the past decade, there has been an explosion in the number of U.S. children diagnosed with autism. Less well known is that there has been a parallel autism epidemic in other countries, such as Ireland and Britain. Whatever the reasons for the increase in the number of cases, it is highly likely that autism has a genetic component. Scientists and doctors have not yet nailed down what the genetic contribution to autism is, but the fact that males are far more likely to be affected than females and that autism appears in certain ethnic groups more than others are strong indicators. Like many genetic diseases, there is a broad range of severity associated with autism. And like some genetic diseases, such as sickle cell trait, there can be, in the right environment, an advantage to having a mild form. Asperger?s is the least disabling form of autism and research is beginning to show that it may also account for the presence of some special capabilities in areas like mathematics, computer science and engineering. But the same genes may also create a person who is socially awkward, easily distracted, very introspective and in many ways withdrawn and solitary. Gates was born on Oct. 28, 1955. When he arrived in the world the science of human genetics was truly in its infancy. Newborn babies were only tested for a few rare genetic conditions. Fifty years later, the field of human genetics is thriving. Tests have been established for detecting Tay-Sachs disease, Huntington?s disease, some forms of breast cancer and Alzheimer?s disease, and hundreds of other fatal or disabling conditions. The drive for more genetic tests continues unabated. Undoubtedly the genes for autism and Asperger?s will soon be found. When they are, my question ? would you have stopped Bill Gates from existing? ? will take on a very real meaning. Fewer geniuses? There are many in the autism and Asperger?s community, like the newly formed Aspies for Freedom, who worry that the minute a genetic test appears, it will spell the end for a lot of future geniuses, like Gates. Maybe there will be fewer Thomas Jeffersons or Lewis Carrolls ? remarkable thinkers who also fit the profile for Asperger?s. As genetic testing moves into the world of mental health, we are going to face some very tough questions. Will medicine suggest that any and every variation from absolute normalcy is pathological? How can we draw lines between disabling diseases such as severe autism and more mild differences such as Asperger?s, which may give society some of its greatest achievers? Will parents have complete say over the kind of children they want to bear? And what sorts of messages will doctors and genetic counselors convey when talking about risks, probabilities and choices that involve not life and death but personality and sociability, genius and geekiness? All I can tell you is that neither medicine nor the general public are at all ready to deal with the emerging genetic knowledge about autism, Asperger?s or other aspects of mental health. But the future of our society may well hinge on how we answer these questions. Arthur Caplan is director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. From checker at panix.com Thu Jun 2 15:25:13 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2005 11:25:13 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTDBR: A Bizarre Tale of the Rise and Fall of an Elitist Sperm Bank Message-ID: A Bizarre Tale of the Rise and Fall of an Elitist Sperm Bank New York Times Daily Book Review, 5.6.2 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/02/books/02masl.html [An interview by Marian Van Court of Robert Klark Graham is available at http://www.eugenics.net/papers/eb3.html. Graham's essay, "The Human Situation and its Reparation," is available at http://www.eugenics.net/papers/eb3.html. His book, The Future of Man, can be found at http://www.solargeneral.com/library/futureofman.pdf, and an attack on Raymond B. Cattell by the Institute for the Study of Academic Racism that mentions Graham is at http://www.ferris.edu/isar/bios/cattell/genetica.htm.] THE GENIUS FACTORY The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank By David Plotz Illustrated. 262 pages. Random House. $24.95. By JANET MASLIN "Imagine how picky you are when you shop for a CD player," David Plotz writes in his ebullient new contribution to the realm of weird-science nonfiction. "Now suppose you expected the CD player to last eighty-seven years, occupy its own room in your house, get married, have children, and take care of you in your old age. You'd be pretty choosy, too." Choosiness is all-important to "The Genius Factory," Mr. Plotz's book about the ultimate in consumer elitism, if not in satisfied customers. He ventures into "the fertility-industrial complex" to uncover a tale pregnant with bizarre possibilities. It is about the rise and fall of the Repository for Germinal Choice, the sperm bank that opened in 1980 and purported to offer top-echelon sperm -"dazzling, backflipping, 175 IQ sperm" - courtesy of Nobel Prize winners. The repository's work would eventually yield more than 200 babies, apparently none of them the genetic offspring of a Nobel laureate. That is one of the many oddities described here. ("Forget about Nobel Laureates; the Nobel sperm bank was taking men you wouldn't wish on your ex-girlfriend," Mr. Plotz points out.) The fact that the repository used colors to catalog the supposedly brilliant donors - and disguise their identities from prospective parents - but couldn't even spell correctly (hence "Donor Corral," "Donor Turquois," "Donor Fucshia") is another worrisome anomaly. And the degree of Mr. Plotz's immersion in his material gives the book an additional kink. "The next few minutes passed as you would expect and are none of your business," he writes, about auditioning as a sperm donor for research purposes. "My count was 105 million! What's yours, George Clooney?" The book's history is as circuitous as the repository's. Mr. Plotz, who is the deputy editor of Slate and writes with endearing, rueful humor, was originally drawn to the story of William Shockley, who by inventing the transistor had "midwifed the birth of Silicon Valley and kicked off the greatest commercial revolution in American History." That Shockley was a flagrant racist who also "made himself one of the memorably noxious public figures of the twentieth century" further piqued the author's interest. Shockley had had a role in shaping the repository's master-race ideals. Feb. 29, 1980, was a big day not only for Shockley but also for Robert K. Graham, the 74-year-old eyeglass tycoon who served as the repository's guiding light - and who had initiated work on his dream project in 1963, a more felicitous time for it, when "the United States was enjoying its post-Sputnik scientific renaissance, and the egalitarianism of the late 1960's hadn't yet arrived." The longest chapter in Graham's autobiography is titled "Princes and Princesses I Have Known," which provides some inkling of his attitude toward the general citizenry. "The entrepreneurial vigor; the cockamamie grandeur; the unshakable faith in practical science; the contempt for the pig-ignorant, lazy masses; and the infatuation with finding - and claiming - the world's best men": these were the resources that Mr. Graham would bring to seducing his geniuses. "Sometimes the sperm bank seemed a kind of supercharged autograph collection for Graham," the book observes. But that February 1980 official debut "was the Nobel sperm bank's first great day, and its last one," the author explains. "Disaster struck immediately, in the person of William Shockley." When Shockley was presented as the kind of Nobelist whose genes the place would disperse, the whole idea became controversial, and other brilliant scientists were scared away. This may have been necessary anyway: the idea of Nobel-winning donors threatened to give the place a "little bald professor" reputation. In addition to describing how the repository had to switch gears and alter its original agenda, "The Genius Factory" explores the personal side of this story. Mr. Plotz seeks out the kinds of genetically ambitious parents who chose to use the repository's services (and finds exactly the kind of arrogance one might expect). He looks for genetic connections between separately reared children of the same donor. "Although half siblings have existed for as long as men have been cheating dogs, the sperm bank brother was something new," he writes. And although almost everyone here is given a pseudonym, Mr. Plotz finds Doron Blake, a prodigy whose mother, as the author puts it, "turned her son's life into 'The Truman Show.' " When asked if he had read "Hamlet" in kindergarten, this whiz-kid's widely publicized answer was: "Good gosh. Can't everybody?" Mr. Plotz's position at Slate wound up giving him a pivotal role among repository alumni. When he began an online series of articles about the sperm bank, he became not only a great catch for television producers but also a conduit. With no other way to find their biological fathers (the repository closed in 1999), ersatz-Nobel offspring turned to him for information. Here lay the quicksand: how far would he venture into the personal, messy, desperate yearnings of the real people who owed their very lives to surreal science? Most of "The Genius Factory" is so perfectly pitched - blithe, smart, skeptical, yet entranced by its subject - that the awkward sections stand out. And while it may have suited a running, online soap opera for the author to seek out pedigreed people and report on their troubles, that material is more sordid here. This book manages to avoid voyeurism as long as its story is told in the abstract, with only a couple of nutty, racist tycoons as its targets. But when it churns up the lost souls who have pinned all their hopes on gene-pool fairy tales, he risks exploiting otherwise first-rate material. Mr. Plotz's kindness and sympathy are indisputable. But this story begins and ends with private matters. And it doesn't have a happy ending. From checker at panix.com Thu Jun 2 15:25:37 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2005 11:25:37 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Guardian: Women are still a closed book to men Message-ID: Women are still a closed book to men http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1495060,00.html [This is part of a series on gender issues. http://www.ferris.edu/isar/bios/cattell/genetica.htm. Too many to pick them off one by one.] Research shows men mainly read works by other men David Smith Sunday May 29, 2005 Men have finally realised what they are missing, but they still aren't all that keen to do anything about it. This is the conclusion of a study into sex differences in reading habits, which found that, while women read the works of both sexes, men stick to books written by men. And the boys can no longer use ignorance as an excuse. 'Men clearly now know that there are some great books by women - such as Andrea Levy's Small Island - they really ought to have read and ought to consider "great" (or at least good) writing,' the report said. 'They recognise the titles and they've read the reviews. They may even have bought, or been given the books, and start reading them. But they probably won't finish them.' The research was carried out by academics Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins of Queen Mary College, London, to mark the 10th year of the Orange Prize for Fiction, a literary honour whose women-only rule provoked righteous indignation when the competition was founded. They asked 100 academics, critics and writers and found virtually all now supported the prize. But a gender gap remains in what people choose to read, at least among the cultural elite. Four out of five men said the last novel they read was by a man, whereas women were almost as likely to have read a book by a male author as a female. When asked what novel by a woman they had read most recently, a majority of men found it hard to recall or could not answer. Women, however, often gave several titles. The report said: 'Men who read fiction tend to read fiction by men, while women read fiction by both women and men. 'Consequently, fiction by women remains "special interest", while fiction by men still sets the standard for quality, narrative and style.' In the survey, men were asked to name the 'most important' book by a woman written in the last two years. Brick Lane by Monica Ali and Carol Shields's Unless were frequently among the replies, but many men admitted defeat and confessed they had no idea. At least one who suggested Brick Lane admitted he had not read it. The report added: 'Men's reading habits have altered very little since the Orange Prize burst onto the fiction scene in 1996. Although no one would admit that the gender of the author had any influence on their choice of fictional reading-matter, men were still far less likely to have read a novel by a woman than by a man, whereas women read titles by either. 'Pressed for a preference, many men also found it much more difficult to "like" or "admire" a novel authored by a woman - for them "great" writing was male writing (oh - apart from Jane Austen, of course),' the report said. 'No wonder, then, that each year when the winner of the Orange Prize is announced a chorus of disappointment goes up from "mainstream" critics: how could such an undistinguished book have won?' A decade ago the Orange Prize drew the scorn of many leading writers, including Kingsley Amis ('If I were a woman, I would not want to win this prize. One can hardly take the winner seriously'), and AS Byatt ('I am against anything which ghettoises women. That is my deepest feminist emotion"). The prize is now estab lished just behind the Man Booker and the Whitbread in the literary hierarchy and had huge support among survey respondents, although some still expressed ambivalence. Julie Burchill said: 'I see where it's coming from but totally understand the reasons why women don't want their novels to be entered for it.' Jardine said: 'When pressed, men are likely to say things like: "I believe Monica Ali's Brick Lane is a really important book - I'm afraid I haven't read it." I find it most endearing that in 10 years what male readers of fiction have done is learn to pretend that they've read women's books.' This year's ?30,000 Orange Prize will be awarded on 7 June. From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 3 19:35:09 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 3 Jun 2005 15:35:09 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Editorial: Virtually Unprotected Message-ID: Virtually Unprotected New York Times, 5.6.2 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/02/opinion/opinionspecial/02thu1.html When the East Coast and Midwest were hit by a blackout in 2003, the first fear of many people was that terrorists had attacked the electricity grid. It turned out not to have been terrorism, but the fears were well founded. Experts have long warned that the nation's power, transportation and communications systems are vulnerable to "cyberattacks" that could devastate the economy and cause huge damage to life and property. Now a new government report has concluded that far too little is being done to close these gaps. After Sept. 11, 2001, a group of leading scientists sent a stern warning to President Bush about the danger of a computer-based terrorist attack on the nation's infrastructure. They called for the creation of a major Cyber-Warfare Defense Project, modeled on the Manhattan Project, to prevent, detect and respond to potential attacks. "Fast and resolute mitigating action is needed to avoid national disaster," the scientists warned. Power grids, water treatment and distribution systems, major dams, and oil and chemical refineries are all controlled today by networked computers. Computers make the nation's infrastructure far more efficient, but they also make it more vulnerable. A well-planned cyberattack could black out large parts of the country, cut off water supplies or worse. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission found that in 2003 a malicious, invasive program called the Slammer worm infected the computer network at a nuclear power plant and disabled its safety monitoring system for nearly five hours. Despite the warnings after 9/11 - and again after the 2003 blackout - disturbingly little has been done. The Government Accountability Office did a rigorous review of the Department of Homeland Security's progress on every aspect of computer security, and its findings are not reassuring. It found that the department has not yet developed assessments of the threat of a cyberattack or of how vulnerable major computer systems are to such an attack, nor has it created plans for recovering key Internet functions in case of an attack. The report also expressed concern that many of the department's senior cybersecurity officials have left in the past year. Representative Zoe Lofgren, the California Democrat who was among those who requested the G.A.O. report, said last week that it proved that "a national plan to secure our cybernetworks is virtually nonexistent." Protecting the nation from a potentially devastating cyberattack is not easy. The technological challenges are considerable - even major technology companies have trouble defending themselves against hackers. The number of potential targets is enormous. And because many of the targets are in private hands, the Department of Homeland Security has to work with entities that may be reluctant to follow the government's lead. But overcoming these obstacles should be a high priority. One of the lessons of the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington was how much damage a few men with simple weapons, like box cutters, could do if they targeted a point of maximum vulnerability. In a well-planned cyberattack, a single terrorist with nothing more than a computer and Internet access could do an extraordinary amount of harm from half a world away. An Insecure Nation: Editorials in this series remain online at nytimes.com/insecurenation. From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 3 19:35:16 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 3 Jun 2005 15:35:16 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] AFP: Japan's birth rate hits another all-time low Message-ID: Japan's birth rate hits another all-time low Wed Jun 1,11:32 AM ET [No URL supplied, but plenty of other articles are on http://new.google.com] TOKYO (AFP) - Japan's birth rate dipped to a record low last year as fewer young couples had children, the government said, fueling fears of a shrinking workforce and a growing burden on the troubled pension system. The average number of children a Japanese woman has during her lifetime stood at 1.2888 in 2004, down from 1.2905 in 2003, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare said. It was the fourth straight year that the birth rate has hit a record low. The number of children born last year also stood at a new low, of 1,110,835, the ministry said in an annual demographic report. The government has been alarmed by the dwindling births, which have begun to open the sensitive debate on whether historically homogenous Japan should open the doors to wide-scale immigration. "It is a very low level," Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda told a news conference. "I don't quite see any factor which may help improve the figure." The top government spokesman added that there are "many environmental restrictions" which lead people to remain unmarried, marry late or have a small number of children. "We must strictly enforce measures to deal with the declining birthrate," he said, adding that the trend is "hardly desirable for the pension system". With a growing number of young people saying children are a burden to their lifestyles and careers, the government has been aiming to improve child-care facilities and implementing other measures designed to make child-rearing easier, especially for working women. A social issue forum of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party said in a statement that the country has to deal with the issue "as a top priority task". The birth rate, calculated on children born to women aged between 15 and 49, has been steadily declining since 1973, when it peaked at 2.14 at the height of the country's second post-war baby boom. In early 2002, the government forecast the rate to bottom out at 1.306 in 2007 and recover to 1.39 by 2050. Japan's population is forecast by the government to fall back from a peak of 127.8 million in 2006 due to dwindling births. An official at the ministry's division on demographic statistics said that the rate might bounce back when women from the second baby boom in the early 1970s begin having children in the coming years. "There is a bright factor. We must look at the matter from a long-range view," he said. But the ministry's report showed that the average age of women at the time of their first childbirths has been steadily rising to reach 28.9 years last year. The average age of women's first marriages edged up 0.2 years from 2003 to 27.8 years last year -- up a full year over five years. Last year, despite opposition filibustering, Japan's ruling coalition rammed through legislation to overhaul the pension system, which is creaking under the strain of a graying society. The new law requires the public to pay more in pension premiums and for fewer pension benefits. In an opinion poll, some 70 percent of voters disapproved of the bill. From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 3 19:37:27 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 3 Jun 2005 15:37:27 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Researchers Say Intelligence and Diseases May Be Linked in Ashkenazic Genes Message-ID: Researchers Say Intelligence and Diseases May Be Linked in Ashkenazic Genes New York Times, 5.6.3 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/science/03gene.html?pagewanted=print By [2]NICHOLAS WADE A team of scientists at the University of Utah has proposed that the unusual pattern of genetic diseases seen among Jews of central or northern European origin, or Ashkenazim, is the result of natural selection for enhanced intellectual ability. The selective force was the restriction of Ashkenazim in medieval Europe to occupations that required more than usual mental agility, the researchers say in a paper that has been accepted by the Journal of Biosocial Science, published by Cambridge University Press in England. The hypothesis advanced by the Utah researchers has drawn a mixed reaction among scientists, some of whom dismissed it as extremely implausible, while others said they had made an interesting case, although one liable to raise many hackles. "It would be hard to overstate how politically incorrect this paper is," said Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, noting that it argues for an inherited difference in intelligence between groups. Still, he said, "it's certainly a thorough and well-argued paper, not one that can easily be dismissed outright." "Absolutely anything in human biology that is interesting is going to be controversial," said one of the report's authors, Dr. Henry Harpending, an anthropologist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He and two colleagues at the University of Utah, Gregory Cochran and Jason Hardy, see the pattern of genetic disease among the Ashkenazi Jewish population as reminiscent of blood disorders like sickle cell anemia that occur in populations exposed to malaria, a disease that is only 5,000 years old. In both cases, the Utah researchers argue, evolution has had to counter a sudden threat by favoring any mutation that protected against it, whatever the side effects. Ashkenazic diseases like Tay-Sachs, they say, are a side effect of genes that promote intelligence. The explanation that the Ashkenazic disease genes must have some hidden value has long been accepted by other researchers, but no one could find a convincing infectious disease or other threat to which the Ashkenazic genetic ailments might confer protection. A second suggestion, wrote Dr. Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles, in a 1994 article, "is selection in Jews for the intelligence putatively required to survive recurrent persecution, and also to make a living by commerce, because Jews were barred from the agricultural jobs available to the non-Jewish population." The Utah researchers have built on this idea, arguing that for some 900 years Jews in Europe were restricted to managerial occupations, which were intellectually demanding, that those who were more successful also left more offspring, and that there was time in this period for the intelligence of the Ashkenazi population as a whole to become appreciably enhanced. But the Utah researchers' analysis comes at a time when some geneticists have suggested natural selection is not the reason for the Ashkenazic diseases after all. Two years ago, Dr. Neil Risch, a geneticist now at the University of California, San Francisco, proposed a different genetic mechanism known as a founder effect, which occurs when a population is reduced for a time. He found that all the Ashkenazic diseases had similar properties, including having arisen within the last 1,100 years. Therefore they had all arisen through the same cause, he argued, which must be founder effects, because it was unlikely that all could be due to natural selection. Last year, Dr. Montgomery Slatkin of the University of California, Berkeley, came to much the same conclusion for different reasons. The Utah team agrees with Dr. Risch that the diseases all arose in historical times from the same cause but say natural selection is more likely because none of the non-disease Ashkenazic genes they tested showed any sign of a founder effect. They say the clustering of four of the diseases in the same biochemical pathway could only have arisen under the influence of natural selection, and calculate that the odds of a founder effect producing such a cluster are vanishingly low. The four diseases, all of which are caused by mutations that affect the cell's management of chemicals known as sphingolipids, are Tay-Sachs, Niemann-Pick, Gaucher, and mucolipidosis type IV. A second cluster of diseases affects repair of DNA. Turning to the possibility that some infection was the cause of the selective effect, the Utah researchers noted that Ashkenazim and Europeans lived together in the same cities and were exposed to the same microbes. If disease were the agent of selection, the Utah team argues, the European population would have developed a similar genetic response. Ashkenazi Jews occupied a different social niche from their European hosts, and that is where any selective effect must have operated, the Utah researchers say. From A.D. 800, when the Ashkenazi presence in Europe is first recorded, to about 1700, Ashkenazi Jews held a restricted range of occupations, which required considerable intellectual acumen. In France, most were moneylenders by A.D. 1100. Expelled from France in 1394, and from parts of Germany in the 15th century, they moved eastward and were employed by Polish rulers first as moneylenders and then as agents who paid a large tax to a noble and then tried to collect the amount, at a profit, from the peasantry. After 1700, the occupational restrictions on Jews were eased. As to how the disease mutations might affect intelligence, the Utah researchers cite evidence that the sphingolipid disorders promote the growth and interconnection of brain cells. Mutations in the DNA repair genes, involved in second cluster of Ashkenazic diseases, may also unleash growth of neurons. In describing what they see as the result of the Ashkenazic mutations, the researchers cite the fact that Ashkenazi Jews make up 3 percent of the American population but won 27 percent of its Nobel prizes, and account for more than half of world chess champions. They say that the reason for this unusual record may be that differences in Ashkenazic and northern European I.Q. are not large at the average, where most people fall, but become more noticeable at the extremes; for people with an I.Q. over 140, the proportion is 4 per 1,000 among northern Europeans but 23 per 1,000 with Ashkenazim. The Utah researchers describe their proposal as a hypothesis. Unlike many speculations, it makes a testable prediction: that people who carry one of the sphingolipid or other Ashkenazic disease mutations should do better than average on I.Q. tests. The researchers have identified two reasonably well accepted issues, the puzzling pattern of diseases inherited by the Ashkenazi population and the population's general intellectual achievement. But in trying to draw a link between them they have crossed some fiercely disputed academic territories, including whether I.Q. scores are a true measure of intelligence and the extent to which intelligence can be inherited. The authors "make pretty much all of the classic mistakes in interpreting heritability," said Dr. Andrew Clark, a population geneticist at Cornell University, and the argument that the sphingolipid gene variants are associated with intelligence, he said, is "far-fetched." In addition, the genetic issue of natural selection versus founder effects is far from settled. Dr. Risch, whose research supports founder effects, said he was not persuaded by the Utah team's arguments. Dr. David Goldstein, a geneticist at Duke University who was not connected with either Dr. Risch's or the Utah study, was more open on the issue, saying Dr. Risch had made "quite a strong case" that founder effects could be the cause, but had not ruled out the possibility of selection. Dr. Slatkin, though favoring a founder effect over all, said he agreed with the Utah team that this would not account for the cluster of sphingolipid diseases. As for the Utah researchers' interpretation of Jewish medieval history, Paul Rose, professor of Jewish studies at Pennsylvania State University, said, "I think that some of their conclusions may be right though they still need a lot of work to be persuasive to historians and others." Dr. Gregory Cochran, the first author on the Utah team's paper and a physicist who took up biology, said he became interested in the subject upon learning that patients with a particular Ashkenazic disease known as torsion dystonia were told by their physicians that "the positive thing is that this makes you smart." "When you're in a hurry and have strong selection, you have a lot of genes with bad side effects," he said. The Ashkenazi Jewish population seemed to fit this pattern, he said, since they married only inside the community, making selection possible, and they had an urgent need for greater intelligence. Evolution had therefore selected every possible mutation that worked in this direction, despite their harmful side effects when inherited from both parents. "In a sense, I consider this a very boring paper since it raises no new principles of genetics," Dr. Cochran said. From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 3 19:37:39 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 3 Jun 2005 15:37:39 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Economist: The evolution of intelligence: Natural genius? Message-ID: The evolution of intelligence: Natural genius? http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=4032638 5.6.2 The high intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews may be a result of their persecuted past THE idea that some ethnic groups may, on average, be more intelligent than others is one of those hypotheses that dare not speak its name. But Gregory Cochran, a noted scientific iconoclast, is prepared to say it anyway. He is that rare bird, a scientist who works independently of any institution. He helped popularise the idea that some diseases not previously thought to have a bacterial cause were actually infections, which ruffled many scientific feathers when it was first suggested. And more controversially still, he has suggested that homosexuality is caused by an infection. Even he, however, might tremble at the thought of what he is about to do. Together with Jason Hardy and Henry Harpending, of the University of Utah, he is publishing, in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Biosocial Science, a paper which not only suggests that one group of humanity is more intelligent than the others, but explains the process that has brought this about. The group in question are Ashkenazi Jews. The process is natural selection. History before science Ashkenazim generally do well in IQ tests, scoring 12-15 points above the mean value of 100, and have contributed disproportionately to the intellectual and cultural life of the West, as the careers of Freud, Einstein and Mahler, pictured above, affirm. They also suffer more often than most people from a number of nasty genetic diseases, such as Tay-Sachs and breast cancer. These facts, however, have previously been thought unrelated. The former has been put down to social effects, such as a strong tradition of valuing education. The latter was seen as a consequence of genetic isolation. Even now, Ashkenazim tend to marry among themselves. In the past they did so almost exclusively. Dr Cochran, however, suspects that the intelligence and the diseases are intimately linked. His argument is that the unusual history of the Ashkenazim has subjected them to unique evolutionary pressures that have resulted in this paradoxical state of affairs. Ashkenazi history begins with the Jewish rebellion against Roman rule in the first century AD. When this was crushed, Jewish refugees fled in all directions. The descendants of those who fled to Europe became known as Ashkenazim. In the Middle Ages, European Jews were subjected to legal discrimination, one effect of which was to drive them into money-related professions such as banking and tax farming which were often disdained by, or forbidden to, Christians. This, along with the low level of intermarriage with their gentile neighbours (which modern genetic analysis confirms was the case), is Dr Cochran's starting point. He argues that the professions occupied by European Jews were all ones that put a premium on intelligence. Of course, it is hard to prove that this intelligence premium existed in the Middle Ages, but it is certainly true that it exists in the modern versions of those occupations. Several studies have shown that intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, is highly correlated with income in jobs such as banking. What can, however, be shown from the historical records is that European Jews at the top of their professions in the Middle Ages raised more children to adulthood than those at the bottom. Of course, that was true of successful gentiles as well. But in the Middle Ages, success in Christian society tended to be violently aristocratic (warfare and land), rather than peacefully meritocratic (banking and trade). Put these two things together-a correlation of intelligence and success, and a correlation of success and fecundity-and you have circumstances that favour the spread of genes that enhance intelligence. The questions are, do such genes exist, and what are they if they do? Dr Cochran thinks they do exist, and that they are exactly the genes that cause the inherited diseases which afflict Ashkenazi society. That small, reproductively isolated groups of people are susceptible to genetic disease is well known. Constant mating with even distant relatives reduces genetic diversity, and some disease genes will thus, randomly, become more common. But the very randomness of this process means there should be no discernible pattern about which disease genes increase in frequency. In the case of Ashkenazim, Dr Cochran argues, this is not the case. Most of the dozen or so disease genes that are common in them belong to one of two types: they are involved either in the storage in nerve cells of special fats called sphingolipids, which form part of the insulating outer sheaths that allow nerve cells to transmit electrical signals, or in DNA repair. The former genes cause neurological diseases, such as Tay-Sachs, Gaucher's and Niemann-Pick. The latter cause cancer. That does not look random. And what is even less random is that in several cases the genes for particular diseases come in different varieties, each the result of an independent original mutation. This really does suggest the mutated genes are being preserved by natural selection. But it does not answer the question of how evolution can favour genetic diseases. However, in certain circumstances, evolution can. West Africans, and people of West African descent, are susceptible to a disease called sickle-cell anaemia that is virtually unknown elsewhere. The anaemia develops in those whose red blood cells contain a particular type of haemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen. But the disease occurs only in those who have two copies of the gene for the disease-causing haemoglobin (one copy from each parent). Those who have only one copy have no symptoms. They are, however, protected against malaria, one of the biggest killers in that part of the world. Thus, the theory goes, the pressure to keep the sickle-cell gene in the population because of its malaria-protective effects balances the pressure to drive it out because of its anaemia-causing effects. It therefore persists without becoming ubiquitous. Dr Cochran argues that something similar happened to the Ashkenazim. Genes that promote intelligence in an individual when present as a single copy create disease when present as a double copy. His thesis is not as strong as the sickle-cell/malaria theory, because he has not proved that any of his disease genes do actually affect intelligence. But the area of operation of some of them suggests that they might. The sphingolipid-storage diseases, Tay-Sachs, Gaucher's and Niemann-Pick, all involve extra growth and branching of the protuberances that connect nerve cells together. Too much of this (as caused in those with double copies) is clearly pathological. But it may be that those with single copies experience a more limited, but still enhanced, protuberance growth. That would yield better linkage between brain cells, and might thus lead to increased intelligence. Indeed, in the case of Gaucher's disease, the only one of the three in which people routinely live to adulthood, there is evidence that those with full symptoms are more intelligent than the average. An Israeli clinic devoted to treating people with Gaucher's has vastly more engineers, scientists, accountants and lawyers on its books than would be expected by chance. Why a failure of the DNA-repair system should boost intelligence is unclear-and is, perhaps, the weakest part of the thesis, although evidence is emerging that one of the genes in question is involved in regulating the early growth of the brain. But the thesis also has a strong point: it makes a clear and testable prediction. This is that people with a single copy of the gene for Tay-Sachs, or that for Gaucher's, or that for Niemann-Pick should be more intelligent than average. Dr Cochran and his colleagues predict they will be so by about five IQ points. If that turns out to be the case, it will strengthen the idea that, albeit unwillingly, Ashkenazi Jews have been part of an accidental experiment in eugenics. It has brought them some advantages. But, like the deliberate eugenics experiments of the 20th century, it has also exacted a terrible price. From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 3 19:38:21 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 3 Jun 2005 15:38:21 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: C.D.C. Team Investigates an Outbreak of Obesity Message-ID: C.D.C. Team Investigates an Outbreak of Obesity New York Times, 5.6.3 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/health/03obese.html By [2]GINA KOLATA For the first time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has sent a team of specialists into a state, West Virginia, to study an outbreak of obesity in the same way it studies an outbreak of an infectious disease. Kerri Kennedy, the program manager at the West Virginia Physical Activity and Nutrition Program, said the state had requested the agency's investigation. "We were looking at our data," Ms. Kennedy said, and saw that "we are facing a severe health crisis." The state ranked third in the nation for obesity - 27.6 percent of its adults were obese, compared with 20.4 percent in the country as a whole. And, Ms. Kennedy said, "our rate of obesity appears to be increasing faster than the rest of the nation." Going along with the obesity was a high prevalence of diabetes and high blood pressure, which are associated with extra pounds. West Virginia ranks fourth in the nation for diabetes, with 10.2 percent of the population affected, compared with 6.4 percent nationwide. And it is No. 1 in its prevalence of high blood pressure, with 33.1 percent having the condition, compared with 25.8 percent of people nationwide. So the state asked the agency's disease detectives to tackle its obesity problem, and a three-week investigation began on April 25. It focused, Ms. Kennedy said, on two places that represented towns and cities in the state - Gilmer County, with 7,160 residents, and Clarksburg, a city with 16,743 residents. The investigative teams spent a week and a half in each place, going to schools and asking about physical education programs and about what sort of food was provided. They asked, for example, whether students "were offered at least one or two appealing fruits and vegetables every day," Ms. Kennedy said. And "would you replace regular sour cream with low-fat sour cream?" They went to workplaces, asking whether there were policies to encourage physical activity. For example, Ms. Kennedy said, "if you choose to walk, could you have an extra 15 or 20 minutes added to your lunch break?" And, were there items like 100-percent fruit juices and bottled water in vending machines? They went to random grocery stores and restaurants, asking whether they offered fruits and vegetables and skim or 1 percent milk. And they asked whether it was safe to walk along the roads, whether there were sidewalks and whether they were in good repair, whether there was good lighting for walking at night. "The C.D.C. came up with the questions for us," Ms. Kennedy said. But, she noted, many of the questions, like the ones about sidewalks, were designed for urban areas. She said she was not sure how well they would work in rural West Virginia, and some statisticians said they did not think the study would work at all. Dr. Julie Gerberding, the director of the disease centers, said in a press conference yesterday that this type of investigation was a first for the agency. "This has never happened in the history of the C.D.C," she said. The centers held the news conference to clarify its position on weight and obesity. Agency scientists recently published a study concluding that overweight people had a lower risk of death than normal-weight people and that even obese people did not have much of a risk of early death unless they were extremely obese. A year earlier, different researchers at the agency published a study saying that obesity and extra weight were markedly raising death rates in this country. Obese people were defined as having a body mass index, a measurement of weight in relation to height, of 30 to 34.9; the extremely obese had an index of 35 or higher. Dr. Gerberding said that there were still questions about the best ways to estimate death risks from extra weight but that there was no question about the health impacts of being obese or overweight, which can increase the risk of diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure, arthritis and some cancers. Being obese or overweight, Dr. Gerberding emphasized, are "critically important health threats" and the agency is increasing efforts to understand the causes of the obesity epidemic and how to help people lose weight and keep it off. The West Virginia data are now at the agency, being analyzed. Some preliminary information may be available in August, Ms. Kennedy said. Rudy Philips, a 27-year-old clinical nursing assistant who lives in Clarksburg, said that he was unaware of the study, but that he knew something of the dietary problems in the state. He himself had a good diet, he said, and while "I could stand to lose 5 or 10 pounds, I am not obese." But obesity is a problem in the state, he observed. "We tend to eat a lot of fried foods, we're meat-and potatoes type people," Mr. Philips said. "Most restaurants don't have healthy choices." But some statisticians said it was hard to see what could be learned from the agency's investigations. Daniel McGee, a professor of statistics at Florida State University who has analyzed obesity data, burst out laughing when he heard about it. "My God, what a strange thing to do," he said. "They'll find out what we all know - that the country is no longer set up for physical exercise," Dr. McGee said. And that schoolchildren "don't get a nutritious diet." And that "there is a lot of high-fat food on the shelves of every supermarket." But, he said, "that doesn't tell you much." "I'm sure skinny people go to those same restaurants," Dr. McGee said. "Skinny kids go to those same schools." David DeMets, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Wisconsin, was also extremely skeptical. "We get a lot of false positives from that kind of investigation," Dr. DeMets said. "We get people worried," but there is no way to know whether what is found - a lack of fruits and vegetables in the schools, for example - has anything to do with the obesity epidemic. "Perhaps it is true, perhaps it is not," Dr. De Mets said. From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 3 19:38:34 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 3 Jun 2005 15:38:34 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: For Fruit Flies, Gene Shift Tilts Sex Orientation Message-ID: For Fruit Flies, Gene Shift Tilts Sex Orientation New York Times, 5.6.3 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/science/03cell.html By [2]ELISABETH ROSENTHAL, International Herald Tribune When the genetically altered fruit fly was released into the observation chamber, it did what these breeders par excellence tend to do. It pursued a waiting virgin female. It gently tapped the girl with its leg, played her a song (using wings as instruments) and, only then, dared to lick her - all part of standard fruit fly seduction. The observing scientist looked with disbelief at the show, for the suitor in this case was not a male, but a female that researchers had artificially endowed with a single male-type gene. That one gene, the researchers are announcing today in the journal Cell, is apparently by itself enough to create patterns of sexual behavior - a kind of master sexual gene that normally exists in two distinct male and female variants. In a series of experiments, the researchers found that females given the male variant of the gene acted exactly like males in courtship, madly pursuing other females. Males that were artificially given the female version of the gene became more passive and turned their sexual attention to other males. "We have shown that a single gene in the fruit fly is sufficient to determine all aspects of the flies' sexual orientation and behavior," said the paper's lead author, Dr. Barry Dickson, senior scientist at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. "It's very surprising. "What it tells us is that instinctive behaviors can be specified by genetic programs, just like the morphologic development of an organ or a nose." The results are certain to prove influential in debates about whether genes or environment determine who we are, how we act and, especially, our sexual orientation, although it is not clear now if there is a similar master sexual gene for humans. Still, experts said they were both awed and shocked by the findings. "The results are so clean and compelling, the whole field of the genetic roots of behavior is moved forward tremendously by this work," said Dr. Michael Weiss, chairman of the department of biochemistry at Case Western Reserve University. "Hopefully this will take the discussion about sexual preferences out of the realm of morality and put it in the realm of science." He added: "I never chose to be heterosexual; it just happened. But humans are complicated. With the flies we can see in a simple and elegant way how a gene can influence and determine behavior." The finding supports scientific evidence accumulating over the past decade that sexual orientation may be innately programmed into the brains of men and women. Equally intriguing, the researchers say, is the possibility that a number of behaviors - hitting back when feeling threatened, fleeing when scared or laughing when amused - may also be programmed into human brains, a product of genetic heritage. "This is a first - a superb demonstration that a single gene can serve as a switch for complex behaviors," said Dr. Gero Miesenboeck, a professor of cell biology at Yale. Dr. Dickson, the lead author, said he ran into the laboratory when an assistant called him on a Sunday night with the results. "This really makes you think about how much of our behavior, perhaps especially sexual behaviors, has a strong genetic component," he said. All the researchers cautioned that any of these wired behaviors set by master genes will probably be modified by experience. Though male fruit flies are programmed to pursue females, Dr. Dickson said, those that are frequently rejected over time become less aggressive in their mating behavior. When a normal male fruit fly is introduced to a virgin female, they almost immediately begin foreplay and then copulate for 20 minutes. In fact, Dr. Dickson and his co-author, Dr. Ebru Demir of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology, specifically chose to look for the genetic basis of fly sexual behavior precisely because it seemed so strong and instinctive and, therefore, predictable. Scientists have known for several years that the master sexual gene, known as fru, was central to mating, coordinating a network of neurons that were involved in the male fly's courtship ritual. Last year, Dr. Bruce Baker of Stanford University discovered that the mating circuit controlled by the gene involved 60 nerve cells and that if any of these were damaged or destroyed by the scientists, the animal could not mate properly. Both male and female flies have the same genetic material as well as the neural circuitry required for the mating ritual, but different parts of the genes are turned on in the two sexes. But no one dreamed that simply activating the normally dormant male portion of the gene in a female fly could cause a genetic female to display the whole elaborate panoply of male fruit fly foreplay. From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 3 19:38:52 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 3 Jun 2005 15:38:52 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] John Derbyshire: The Birds and the Bees Message-ID: John Derbyshire: The Birds and the Bees National Review, 5.6.20 http://www.olimu.com/Journalism/Texts/Reviews/MadameBovarysOvaries.htm Madame Bovary's Ovaries By Daniel P. Barash and Nanelle R. Barash Delacorte; 272 pp. $24.00 It is 41 years now since zoologist William D. Hamilton worked out the evolutionary mathematics of kin altruism, demonstrating that even behavior that seems to belong to the moral and educational superstructure of human nature can be explained by natural selection. Sociobiology was on the march. That march did not, of course, go unopposed. The political Left was outraged at the suggestion that our nature might have something to do with our biology, and therefore might not be infinitely malleable. Could there, then, be no "New Soviet Man"? No withering away of all behavioral sex differences? No elimination of all preference for one's own kin or ethny over those more distantly related? Perish the thought! The Left rallied under charismatic generals like the late Stephen Jay Gould, and battle was joined. The current state of the conflict is a sort of wary stalemate. The Left has conceded that the fundamental science behind sociobiology is indisputable, so that unyielding all-points opposition in the style of Gould is no longer tenable. Accredited human-science professionals John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have worked up "evolutionary psychology," a low-tar version of sociobiology omitting all those elements that are obnoxious to the egalitarian Left, so even the most politically correct human scientist can now utter phrases like "assortative mating" and "parental investment" without blushing. In any case, the Left still firmly controls the Humanities, and thereby the commanding heights of Academia. This, they feel, gives them police power over how much may be said aloud about the biological roots of human behavior. It also gives them the right to punish those who say too much - people like the hapless Larry Summers. This carefully policed armistice is the context in which Madame Bovary's Ovaries should be read. David Barash is a professor of psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle; Nanelle Barash is his daughter, an undergraduate studying literature and biology at Swarthmore. In this collaborative effort, father and daughter take us through some well-known works of world literature to point out the basic facts of biology that underlie their stories. The general drift of the book is illustrated by the opening sentences of a paragraph in Chapter 5 ("The Biology of Adultery"): "It isn't just Emma Bovary who is especially likely to be unfaithful when her mate has suffered a decline in status. A recent study of black-capped chickadees, for instance, found that . . ." So it goes. Othello? "It pays males to be sexually jealous and thus highly protective of their reproductive prerogatives." Jane Austen? "Resource-rich males of nearly every species become remarkably attractive at a level that often goes beyond . . . conscious awareness." The Godfather? "Not only is Don Vito the symbol of the family, he is . . . progenitor of (half) of its genes." Little Women? "The Marches are a tightly bound genetic unit." Portnoy's Complaint? "Conflict over weaning, or its equivalent in birds, does not exhaust the potential for parents and offspring to disagree." It's fun, in a mild way, but somewhat wearying to read at book length. Do I really need a 30-page chapter to tell me the biological origins of the traditional double standard on sexual infidelity? It is simply a matter of resource priorities. As a biologist friend of mine likes to point out, if there were only a thousand men and a thousand women on the planet, you could kill off 999 of the men, and the human race would almost certainly survive. However, if you were to kill off 999 of the women, the race would almost certainly not survive. Or, as William James put it: Hogamus higamus, Man is polygamous. Higamus, hogamus, Woman is monogamous. I hoped for more enlightening insights from the chapter on friendship and the kindness of strangers, features of human social life that appear difficult to understand from the point of view of Hamilton's calculating genes. The authors dwell on these matters for much of a chapter, without really placing them in a truly evolutionary context. "Systems of [non-kin] reciprocity are likely to be inherently unstable, relying on a variety of psychological and social mechanisms in order to keep them going." No kidding. But where does non-kin altruism come from? The authors' real problem here is that they are trespassing very close to the boundaries of what may be written about for the general public. Of injunctions like the Golden Rule, they say: "They are especially important since . . . when those others are truly 'other' - that is, unrelated - there is a powerful yet subtle pressure to behave more selfishly." But perhaps our awareness of kinship does not end with our actual known kin, but extends to . . . people who . . . look . . . like ourselves? Eeeek! Here you see the difficulties of explaining a theory when parts of it have been fenced off as unsuitable for public display. The authors' argument is not helped by their unfortunate style. Aware of the somewhat inflammable nature of their material, they have tried to make it more acceptable by writing in a breezy, jokey manner. This doesn't really come off, and in places is positively toe-curling. See if you can identify the parties being referred to here: "True it is that by sacrificing Iphy, Aggy lost a daughter, but he gained immense prestige among his fellow Greeks and, with the ultimately successful war against Troy, his pick of their women." Similarly, there seems to be no simile too tired, no catchphrase too worn, to be admitted to the Barashes' party. If you agree with Milton's idealistic view of married love, they have a can-you-guess-what? in Brooklyn that you might want to purchase. Do you know what three qualities realtors prize above all others in a property? And so on. I am sorry not to have been able to give a better review to Madame Bovary's Ovaries. Half a loaf is better than no bread, and it is a very good thing that popular books setting human nature in its biological, evolutionary context are being published, even if the only approach they may take is the upbeat, Tooby-Cosmidesean one that approaches Mother Nature's red teeth and claws with dentifrice and clippers. And I confess that the evolutionary explanation for Aeneas's desertion of Dido had never occurred to me until I read it here. From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 4 22:55:12 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 4 Jun 2005 18:55:12 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Op-Ed: Is Persuasion Dead? Message-ID: Is Persuasion Dead? New York Times Op-Ed, 5.6/4 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/04/opinion/04miller_oped.html [I don't think the situation was any different in Mr. Mencken's day, or even in the day of Assurbanipal. St. Paul, I'm now reading in The Acts of the Apostles, managed to be persuasive with very few words and little hauling out of independently-verifiable evidence.] By MATT MILLER Speaking just between us - between one who writes columns and those who read them - I've had this nagging question about the whole enterprise we're engaged in. Is persuasion dead? And if so, does it matter? The significance of this query goes beyond the feelings of futility I'll suffer if it turns out I've wasted my life on work that is useless. This is bigger than one writer's insecurities. Is it possible in America today to convince anyone of anything he doesn't already believe? If so, are there enough places where this mingling of minds occurs to sustain a democracy? The signs are not good. Ninety percent of political conversation amounts to dueling "talking points." Best-selling books reinforce what folks thought when they bought them. Talk radio and opinion journals preach to the converted. Let's face it: the purpose of most political speech is not to persuade but to win, be it power, ratings, celebrity or even cash. By contrast, marshaling a case to persuade those who start from a different position is a lost art. Honoring what's right in the other side's argument seems a superfluous thing that can only cause trouble, like an appendix. Politicos huddle with like-minded souls in opinion cocoons that seem impervious to facts. The politicians and the press didn't kill off persuasion intentionally, of course; it's more manslaughter than murder. Persuasion just isn't relevant to delivering elections or eyeballs. Pols have figured out that to get votes you don't need to change minds. Even when they want to, modern media make it hard. They give officials seconds to make their point, ignore their ideas in favor of their poll numbers or showcase a clash of caricatures, believing this is the only way to make "debate" entertaining. Elections may turn on emotions like hope and fear anyway, but with persuasion's passing, there's no alternative. There's only one problem: governing successfully requires influencing how people actually think. Yet when the habits of persuasion have been buried, the possibilities of leadership are interred as well. That's why Bill Clinton's case on health care could be bested by savage "Harry and Louise" ads. And why, even if George Bush's Social Security plan had been well conceived, the odds were always stacked against ambitious reform. I'm not the only one who amid this mess wonders if he shouldn't be looking at another line of work. A top conservative thinker called recently, dejected at the sight of Ann Coulter on the cover of Time. What's the point of being substantive, he cried, when all the attention goes to the shrill? But the embarrassing truth is that we earnest chin-strokers often get it wrong anyway. Take me. I hadn't thought much about Iraq before I read Ken Pollack's book, "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq," a platonic ideal of careful analysis meant to persuade. It worked. I was persuaded! So what should we conclude when a talent like Pollack can convince us - and then the whole thing turns out to be based on a premise (W.M.D.) that is false? If serious efforts to get it right can lead to tragic errors, why care about a culture of persuasion at all? On one level, everyone needs a good rationalization at the core of his professional life; mine holds that the struggle to think things through, even when we fail, is redeeming. But beyond this, the gap between the cartoon of public life that the press and political establishment often serve up and the pragmatic open-mindedness of most Americans explains why so many people tune out - and how we might get them to tune back in. Alienation is the only intelligent response to a political culture that insults our intelligence. The resurrection of persuasion will not be easy. Politicians who've learned to survive in an unforgiving environment may not feel safe with a less scripted style. Mass media outlets where heat has always sold more than light may not believe that creatively engaging on substance can expand their audience. But if you believe that meeting our collective challenges requires greater collective understanding, we've got to persuade these folks to try. I'm guessing Ann Coulter isn't sweating this stuff. God willing, there's something else keeping her up nights. In the meantime, like Sisyphus, those who seek a better public life have to keep rolling the rock uphill. If you've read this far, maybe you're up for the climb, too. E-mail: [2]mattmiller at nytimes.com; Matt Miller writes a monthly column for Fortune. Maureen Dowd is on book leave. [Again, what is book leave?] From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 4 22:55:38 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 4 Jun 2005 18:55:38 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: 'Roadside Religion': Cross Country Message-ID: 'Roadside Religion': Cross Country New York Times Book Review, 5.6.5 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/books/review/05FERR01.html [First chapter appended.] ROADSIDE RELIGION In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith. By Timothy K. Beal. Illustrated. 216 pp. Beacon Press. $24.95. By SARAH FERRELL TIMOTHY K. BEAL and his wife, Clover, share a conservative, evangelical Christian upbringing from which they eventually parted ways, he to become a definitively open-minded professor of religion at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and she to become an ordained Presbyterian minister. In 2002, Beal tells us in ''Roadside Religion,'' they rented a decrepit motor home, and with their children, Seth and Sophie, set out to investigate the largely Protestant pilgrimage sites that dot the landscapes of rural America. Beal is an empathetic tourist. His wife and children cower in their motor home at Cross Garden in Prattville, Ala., trying not to look out at a vista of rough wooden crosses and abandoned household appliances bearing dire admonitions (a rusting refrigerator cautions, ''In Hell From Sex Sex''), but he approaches the modest house at the center of this labyrinth for a little visit with its visionary proprietor, Bill Rice, and his wife, Marzell. Rice sees himself as a new Noah, called by God to build Cross Garden as a warning to a world gone, almost literally, to hell; he and his family, knowing that they are saved, just want to help. It would be easy for most of us to get cynical, or maybe scared, at about this point. Beal, enthralled by this weirdness, responds by going back to the motor home to persuade his wife and still apprehensive children to come along to be introduced. Noah is around a lot. His ark is being rebuilt on a grand scale in Frostburg, Md., by Richard Greene, founder of God's Ark of Safety Ministries and a professed healer who also claims curative power for the land on which the skeleton of the ark stands. His plans, Pastor Greene explains, come to him in dreams. Noah's ark is also the second hole at Golgotha Fun Park, the wonderfully named miniature golf course, now in disrepair, in Cave City, Ky., and the ninth hole at the 54-hole biblical mini-golf course at the Lexington Ice Center and Sports Complex in Lexington, Ky. It is impossible not to be reminded of the motto of the Christian school to which Bart Simpson was briefly sentenced: ''We put the fun in fundamentalism.'' Beal likes the handmade and personal (think of Howard Finster's Paradise Gardens, near Summerville, Ga., with its painted sermons) and loses patience only with the Holy Land Experience, another vast, expensive Orlando, Fla., theme park. This one was developed by the Rev. Marvin J. Rosenthal (reared a Conservative Jew and converted to conservative Christianity) to promote his own End Times ideology. SINCERITY counts for a lot, even in an organization as slick as the Precious Moments Inspiration Park in Carthage, Mo., a garden and chapel built in the 1980's by Sam Butcher, the sculptor of the sentimental, big-headed child figurines that memorialize, well, precious moments. It is touching that Butcher built a chapel in memory of his son, Philip, who was killed in an automobile accident, and it is admirable that he himself was inspired by the Sistine Chapel. But it seems more than somewhat unsettling that, with the exception of Jesus, none of the figures in Butcher's paintings is of mature years, and even the lamented Philip, who died at the age of 27, is shown as a little boy, being welcomed into heaven by baby angels. But let Beal have the last word: ''The place completely disarmed me with its simple, honest, precious expression of childlike suffering, loss and hope for healing.'' In his introduction, Beal notes that his daughter, Sophie, has said that what he likes to do ''is make creepy things interesting.'' Smart girl. Sarah Ferrell is the associate editor of The New York Times's Travel magazine. ------------- First chapter: 'Roadside Religion' http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/books/chapters/0605-1st-beal.html By TIMOTHY K. BEAL Our twenty-nine-foot rented motor home rested precariously on the shoulder of a county road in the low rolling hills of southern Alabama, just outside the town of Prattville. It was midday mid-June, and the sun was beating down through a cloudless sky. The view from the motor home's "family-room" window: thousands of makeshift wooden crosses leaning this way and that. Some were only a couple feet high, hastily slapped together from scrap wood. Others, towering from a crumbling bluff above the road, were taller than telephone poles. Most of them bore messages, brushed on in red or black or white capital letters: YOU WILL DIE HELL IS HOT HOT HOT Among the crosses were scrap wood and rusty metal boxes bearing similar proclamations and warnings: GOD SAID THE WORLD COMING TOO A END RICH MAN IN HELL REPENT In the ditch near our motor home, a rust brown fridge leaned back in the brush as if better to display its message: IN HELL FROM SEX SEX A few yards farther up the road, a makeshift row of old metal housings from air-conditioning window units lined a dirt driveway like junkyard luminarias, each cleverly conveying a message with a refrigeration theme: NO ICE WATER IN HELL! FIRE HOT! TOO LATE IN HELL FIRE WATER These AC luminarias led the way to the tiny ranch-style home of Bill and Marzell Rice, creators and proprietors of this eleven-acre collage of shouting crosses and junked appliances that they call Cross Garden. My wife, Clover, and our two kids, Sophie, eleven, and Seth, seven, had decided to wait in the motor home while I talked with Bill and Marzell about their unusual horticulture. I had been in the house with them for a couple hours, and as Clover told me later, the motor home's air conditioner, powered by a gas generator, had begun to fail in the midday Alabama heat. The propane-operated fridge wasn't staying cold, and the hot dogs and fruit inside were beginning to compost. What's more, the water supply had run out. That was my fault. In our rush to leave Atlanta that morning, I had neglected to refill the water tank. Sophie was relaxing on the bed, her belly full of Cocoa Puffs. Clover sat on the couch, trying to avoid the view of Cross Garden, flipping distractedly through the pages of a picture book she'd been reading with Seth. Seth had taken a break from reading to go to the "bathroom," a tiny toileted closet just big enough to sit down, stand up, and turn around in. Forgetting that the water tank was empty, he pressed the "flush" button. Clover heard the sputtering and whirring of the electric pump as it strained to draw the last drops from the tank. Then she heard Seth's bloodcurdling cry, "Help! Mom! It's spraying at me!" She looked up from the book and out the window. HELL IS HOT HOT HOT. So it is. And there was my family, parked on the shoulder of what appeared to be one of its innermost circles. How did we get there? Although we'd been on the road for less than two weeks at that point, our voyage into the strange and sometimes wonderful religious worlds of roadside America had really begun several months earlier, on another road trip. We were driving from DC to Cleveland through the Appalachian Highlands of northwestern Maryland on Interstate 68. As we crested a rolling hill just outside the quaint old town of Frostburg, we saw what initially looked like a steel girder framework for a four-floor parking garage standing alone in a grassy field about fifty yards from the highway. In front of it was a large blue sign: NOAH'S ARK BEING REBUILT HERE! A multilevel parking garage in such a place as this would have been unusual enough. But Noah's Ark? We whizzed past the Ark-in-progress that day, but I knew I'd be back to learn more about this project and its nowaday Noah. I started keeping a list of roadside religious attractions throughout the country. Soon that list had become an itinerary for a new research project, a roadside approach to discovering religion in America. Six months later, in the summer of 2002, I loaded my family into a rented motor home and hit the rural highways of the Bible Belt on an initial voyage that included visits to places like Golgotha Fun Park, the World's Largest Ten Commandments, Paradise Gardens, Ave Maria Grotto, Holy Land USA and, yes, Cross Garden. Over the next year, I made pilgrimages to many other roadside religious attractions throughout the United States, from the World's Largest Rosary Collection in Skamania County, Washington, to Precious Moments Inspiration Park in Carthage, Missouri, to The Holy Land Experience in Orlando, Florida. I took notes, took pictures, took video, talked with the creators, talked with visitors, talked with Clover and the kids. In the course of these travels in the novel, often strange, sometimes disturbing worlds of roadside religion, I not only discovered new dimensions of the American religious landscape, but I also discovered new religious dimensions of my family and myself. Indeed, what began as a research agenda, albeit a novel one, has become a much more personal, dare I say religious project, as much about my own complex, often ambivalent, relationship to the life of faith as it is about the places and people visited. Outsider Religion If you've logged more than a hundred miles of rural American highway in your life, you've probably seen the signs for religious attractions, beckoning you to get off at the next exit and experience whatever it is for yourself: the world's tallest Jesus or teariest Blessed Virgin Mary, replicas of the Wilderness Tabernacle or empty tomb, re-creations of Jerusalem, Rome, paradise, hell. When you drive by such outrageous religious spectacles, your first reaction is likely to be "What?!?," blurted out in a burst of laughter. But if you let the place linger in your mind a little longer than it takes to disappear in your rearview mirror, other more interesting questions arise. Questions like "Who?" Who did this? Who has the chutzpah in this day and age to do something like that on the side of a road? And why? What drives such a person? What desires? What visions? What spirits or demons, entrepreneurial and otherwise? In other words, you want to understand. You want to know, What's the story? That's what this book is about. Each chapter focuses on one particular attraction, telling the story of my visit there in words and pictures, reflecting on the meaning of the place as an expression of religious imagination and experience. In each case, I want to discover not only what it is, but who is behind it and why they did it. I want to discover what the story is. Although there's much humor and novelty to enjoy in the stories I tell about these places and the people who create them, I take care to avoid the temptation to make fun or condescend. I want to take these places seriously as unique expressions of religious imagination and unique testimonials to the varieties of religious experience in America. Granted, this is not the usual approach to studying religion. The usual approach involves delving into a religious tradition's normative scriptures and doctrines, or focusing on established religious institutions and ritual practices. That's not what I'm doing here. On the contrary, I'm focusing on places that most people-religious people and religion scholars alike-would consider aberrant forms of religious expression. Although many of these places draw inspiration from the Bible, for example, their uses of it are far from normative or illustrative of the ways biblical interpretation functions within any religious mainstream. Few would consider writing the Ten Commandments in five-foot-tall concrete letters on the side of a mountain, or using miniature golf to tell the story of creation, or fabricating Noah's Ark from steel girders, to be exemplary biblical interpretation. These places are not likely to appear as illustrations in the next edition of Huston Smith's bestselling textbook, The World's Religions. And yet, beyond the sheer novelty of such excursions beyond the mainstreams of religious life, I find that these places reveal much about the American religious landscape. Indeed, I believe that religion is often most fascinating, and most revealing, where it's least expected. In the art world, "outsider art" generally refers to the work of artists without formal training who stand outside the cultural norms of "fine art" schools, museums, and galleries. Bearing little or no relation to trends and developments in contemporary artistic techniques and subjects, outsider art, or art brut, was identified by its earliest appreciators especially with children and adults who suffered from mental illnesses that isolated them from mainstream ways of seeing and artistic expression. While the term has expanded to include the works of many who operate outside the formal institutions and values of the professional art world, and while new terms have been coined to indicate important nuances (e.g. "self-taught" and "vernacular"), outsider art continues to be appreciated above all as a form of creativity that finds expression on the social and conceptual fringes of experience. In a similar sense, I suggest we think of these roadside religious spectacles as works of "outsider religion." Just as the highly individual works of outsider art can often powerfully reveal the breadth and depth of human creativity and imagination in very local, particular forms, so the places explored in this book can reveal the breadth and depth of human religious experience and expression. Paradoxically, it is precisely in their marginality that they open avenues for exploring themes and issues that are central to American religious life, such as pilgrimage, the nostalgia for lost origins, the desire to recreate sacred time and space, creativity as religious devotion, apocalypticism, spectacle, exile, and the relation between religious vision and social marginality. So "outsider religion" becomes a way of illuminating "insider religion." Making Space In many respects, the places we visit in this book are as unique as the individuals who have created them. Yet I do believe that there are certain family resemblances among them. Above all, each is fundamentally about creating sacred space. What do I mean by that? In particular, what do I mean by "sacred"? Drawn from the Latin sacer, the most basic meaning of "sacred" is "set apart." But what sets it apart as such? Different theorists of religion give very different answers. For ?mile Durkheim, the answer was sociological: the sacred is that which symbolizes and indeed creates the social and moral coherence of the community. It is, in other words, that which a social group (a clan, a church) sets apart to represent and create unity. For others, the answer is phenomenological, that is, it's a matter of understanding how the sacred is perceived and experienced as such. French philosopher Georges Bataille, for example, described the sacred as that which is experienced as radical otherness, representing a realm (real or imaginary) of animal intimacy that threatens to annihilate the social and symbolic order in a holy conflagration; as such it is both alluring and terrifying, and religion's job is to mediate between it and the established order of things. For historian of religion Mircea Eliade, too, the sacred is wholly other, but he focuses on the religious person's experience of it as an experience of transcendence that serves to orient her within a sacred cosmic order. In the context of this book, we focus on the sacred primarily in the phenomenological sense, as that which is set apart on account of its relation to the transcendent-that is, in most cases we encounter here, God. So, when I say that each of the places we explore in this book is fundamentally about creating sacred space, I mean that each works to create a space that is set apart in a way that orients it toward and opens it to divine transcendence. Founded on, inspired by, and organized around deeply personal religious experiences, each of these places is a very concrete manifestation of the desire to create a place that is set apart from ordinary space, from the homogeneity of everyday life, an otherworldly realm governed by rules "other" than those of normal profane space. The means by which spaces are set apart as sacred vary. Many use boundaries such as walls or wooded areas that give a sense of enclosure, cutting our senses off from the sights and sounds of the world outside. Some play with size, creating miniatures or enlargements that defy perceptual and conceptual normality, giving us the feeling that we are in an "other" fantasy world or dream space in which normal scales don't apply. Similarly, some use artificial nature, creating flowers, plants, and animals out of concrete, metal, marbles, and other cultural discards. Blurring the line between nature and artifice, these elements add to the sense of otherworldliness. Some employ what we might call "religious re-creation," making miniature or full-size replicas of sacred spaces from other parts of the world (the Jerusalem Temple, the Wilderness Tabernacle, the Dome of the Rock, St. Peter's Basilica) or from the mythological worlds of ancient scriptures (Noah's Ark, the Tower of Babel). Some of these go so far as to create whole microcosms of well-known sacred spaces (Rome, Jerusalem, or the entire "land of the Bible"). Some employ all of these strategies. In any case, the aim-which may be more or less conscious -is to set the space apart from its surroundings, making it a holy world unto itself, governed by its own rules, which are "other" than those of profane space. As creations of sacred space, the roadside religious spectacles we explore in this book are in some respects not so different from the more mainstream, "insider" religious spaces of temples, churches, mosques, synagogues, memorials, and monasteries. They too work to create an experience of being set apart, in another world. They too are usually founded on, inspired by, and organized around some revelation or similar original religious experience-a miracle, a vision, or the giving of a new law, for example. And they too are created to host the religious experiences of those who enter, individually and collectively. The differences come into play with regard to the symbolic meanings of the elements themselves. In insider religious spaces, such meanings are held in common, taken for granted as part of a shared communal repertoire of words and images and spatial boundaries. There, the sacred is the social, in the Durkheimian sense we discussed earlier. . . . From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 4 22:56:34 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 4 Jun 2005 18:56:34 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Euroresidentes.com: Spanish scientists use maths to cure terminal liver cancer Message-ID: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 4 Jun 2005 15:47:19 -0400 (EDT) From: Premise Checker To: Premise Checker: ; Subject: Euroresidentes.com: Spanish scientists use maths to cure terminal liver cancer News from Spain: Spanish scientists use maths to cure terminal liver cancer http://www.euroresidentes.com/Blogs/2005/05/spanish-scientists-use-maths-to-cure.htm Tuesday, May 31, 2005 [The report itself appended after the comments. It may be best just to get the PDF. Go to the end for the URL.] By using a mathematical formula formula designed to strengthen the immune system, a team of scientists in Spain have succeeded in curing a patient who was in the last stage of terminal liver cancer. The team of researchers from the [4]Complutense University in Madrid believe that this discovery could open new doors for the treatment of solid cancerous tumours. The new treatment was developed in 1998 by a team led by Antonio Bru, a physicist who bases his theory on the idea that the evolution of solid tumors depends on a mathematical equation which defines their biological growth. An equation is then obtained in the laboratory and used to design a therapy to destroy the tumor. The scientists, who have carried out successful tests on mice over the past few years, announced yesterday that the only human experiment they have carried out so far has been a complete success. Apparantly the patient was suffering from liver cancer which had been diagnosed by his doctors as terminal and in its final stage. The scientists used a mathematical formula to create a treatment based on neutrofiles that strengthened the patient's immune system. The patient responded well to the treatment immediately and has since made a total recovery and has returned to work. The treatment produces no side effects.The Spanish scientists believe that their theory could be applied to treat all kinds of solid tumors although they will need to carry out many more tests on human patients before they can be sure. Update 1/06/2005: Today, the Complutense University (whose switchboards have apparantly been innundated with phone calls from people wanting to find out more about this news item) has published a communication on its website with a brief communication from Prof. Antonio Bru. The full article is [5]here. Below is a translation of Professor Bru's brief note which appears at the end of the article: Given the expectation generated by the news of the publication of the article Regulation of neutrophilia by granulocyte colony-stimulating factor: a new cancer therapy that reversed a case of terminal hepatocarcinoma in the Journal of Clinical Research, I would like to make the following points: 1) The proposed treatment is still at an experimental stage and needs much wider experimentation before it can be validated. 2) For this reason, at this moment there is no treatment protocol which enables it to be applied as a general treatment. 3) Given that it is impossible for the Complutense University of Madrid to answer all the phone calls received, and bearing in mind how they can disrupt normal teaching and research activity, please send any enquiries to the following email address: bru at mat.ucm.es Dr. Antonio Br?, Departamento de Matem?tica Aplicada Facultad de Ciencias Matem?ticas, Universidad Complutense de Madrid Related: [6]The Universal Dynamics of Tumor Growth by Antonio Bru and his team of researchers. posted by Euroresidentes, Spain. @ [7]11:30 AM 34 Comments: * At [8]9:00 AM, Anonymous said... Additionally, they proved that with a sample of one, the variance of their data is zero, therefore irrefutable. * At [9]9:48 AM, cnycompguy said... well anonymous, i'd like to see what you've been doing in the time that these people have been trying, quite successfully, to save lives. I bet if you developed a terminal cancer you'd fucking be extatic. * At [10]9:51 AM, Anonymous said... Oh, how this comment is clever. Have you ever had a relative dying of cancer? * At [11]9:59 AM, Anonymous said... 8 relatives died of cancer (including parents). Forget about zero variance and let them work (another anon just passing by) * At [12]10:08 AM, Anonymous said... nice * At [13]10:21 AM, Anonymous said... Anything that produces these kind of results, even if it is by chance, is worth delving into. Just give them money and time. * At [14]11:17 AM, Anonymous said... Good! Keep up the good work! * At [15]11:21 AM, Jill said... Fantastic news. Wow. I agree with the comment from last-anonymous-but-one. Give them funds and encouragement and see if this proves to be the breakthrough we've been waiting for ever since cancer research began. Well done Spain!! * At [16]11:24 AM, Anonymous said... If my liver cancer ever gets to the stage of being terminal I'll be glad of any work they'd done. * At [17]12:27 PM, [18]Pablo said... Although being optimistic we should also be careful and a bit skeptical. I think more trials are needed and that will take time and money. * At [19]12:49 PM, Laura said... Congratulations Spain!! * At [20]12:58 PM, Anonymous said... These are really good news!!! I hope they can try it on more people to see the outcome. To first anonymous: ANY research done to save lives and improve quality of life souldn't be undervalued. Keep up the good work Spain! * At [21]1:41 PM, Anonymous said... Let's not get over excited here .... anonymous #1 is voicing a concern and it might all be too good to be true. The success rate would more likely not ever be 100% exactly, so lets try to keep it in perspective. Yes, it sounds promising and should be investigated some more and given it's effects on the current clinical thinking on and therapies against tumour growth, this study, even with whatever flaws may come to light, could kick start a whole new direction of attack against cancer. So well done Bru et al, keep up the good work. * At [22]1:49 PM, Anonymous said... what on earth did the equation actually "do" ? Does anybody know this? * At [23]3:06 PM, Greg said... No, sorry, no idea at all. The mind boggles. But I bet it isn't your good old straightforward x+y=z * At [24]3:39 PM, Anonymous said... Anonymous #1 is only partially correct. Yes, there is only one human sample, but they have done extensive lab studies on rats. The mechanics of the study are not species specific. Treatments based on the use of a specific drug are much harder to translate between species. This treatment is based on the fundamental development of tumors. It does not suffer similar limitations. My guess as to why there is only one human guiney pig is that earlier research has probably inspired others to study the effect on humans. As such, time is the essence. The sad reality of learned studies these days is centered on the "publish or perish" mentality. Still, this kind of info SHOULD be out quickly. Even if it was not well grounded, a patient who has already been given up for dead might like to try it. * At [25]3:54 PM, Anonymous said... Irrefutable and anecdotal. Patients sometime get better, sometime diagnoses are incorrect. Without a controlled study this is just dangerous hope inflating hype. * At [26]4:18 PM, Anonymous said... The equation being talked about is actually a generalized growth model that appears to properly describe and predict tumor growth within a host body. This model isn't strictly theoretical or anecdotal, as it is based on a large amount of experimental data on cancer growth. This model predicts the known and documented problems with current cancer therapies (such as chemo), as well as the problem with biospies being unreliable for prediction, another known fact. Furthermore, this model suggests more effective methods for curing cancer based on affecting the growth factors of the tumor. These methods appear to have worked in at least one human subject who was beyond hope of cure by any conventional means. However, these methods aren't really the point to the research. The point is just understanding how cancer works, with the assumption that such an understanding will make curing cancer easier and more reliable. They certainly have enough data to make a good case for why their model of cancer growth is a good one. * At [27]4:37 PM, Anonymous said... One problem is this model is based on solid tumor growth. Not all cancers are solid. Malignant cancers tend to have no well defined boundary because the cancerous cells invade the surrounding tissue rather that pushing it out of the way when they go through mitosis. * At [28]4:44 PM, Lucien Chardon said... I would tend to think that all problems can be solved by math. Algorythms are everywhere and they shape nature and the human body. Like someone renwoned said : if you have aa problem with your interface throw in a algorythm and it keeps the doctor away... * At [29]4:54 PM, Anonymous said... I don't really know that much about malignant cancer growth, but I don't see why oddly-shaped tumors would make them any less solid. Mathematically, they are still volumes, and they still have a surface and an interior. The basic growth model should still apply, it just gets more complicated. * At [30]4:55 PM, Anonymous said... The problem with this kind of news is that cancer sufferers, like myself, know that it probably won't be available for some years, until it's too late. This makes it much harder to stay positive. This kind of news should be repressed until the cure can be available to all. And what about the cost factor? Will it be out of reach to the ordinary person, like so many other treatments? * At [31]5:54 PM, Anonymous said... "An algorithm a day keeps the doctor away." How many cancer patients are lined up outside their University today? Having watched my father-in-law deteriorate over the past two years, even if the cure rate only matches that of chemo- and radiation therapies, if it saves some of the side-effects it's worth more funding and research. * At [32]6:08 PM, Anonymous said... I'm sorry you are suffering from cancer. I feel bad for you. But suppressing news of progress just to avoid giving you hope isn't really the direction to go. If anything, it would slow down funding which would slow down progress. If it bothers you that much to read about it, there IS a simpler solution. * At [33]9:37 PM, [34]Warren Feltmate said... This post has been removed by the author. * At [35]9:41 PM, [36]Warren Feltmate said... Have many of you read the paper they posted? It's a long read, as to be expected, but it's quite informative and looks to be very promising. It's posted at the end of the post, but here's another link if you missed it. Treatment Paper * At [37]10:11 PM, Anonymous said... I'm both hopeful and skeptical. Mathematics is an idealization, an abstraction of reality. A formula can predict what might happen in a double blind study of a larger population but it's not always 100% accurate. I'm sure that the zero side effects may be true in the model, but in group of real patients, that's not any more likely than a 100% cure rate. * At [38]1:07 AM, Anonymous said... Any step forward in correcting the biological data corruption know as Cancer is definitely a step in the right direction. Wish all those people working on this, not only in Spain, but around the world all the best to find a cure for this scurge on society... * At [39]3:27 AM, Anonymous said... There's no information here, at all. I don't get why this is even news. Of course new therapies for serious illness are exciting, but seriously, what a lot of nothing from an information standpoint. * At [40]8:17 AM, Anonymous said... Having accurate (even fractal!) models to predict the weather doesn't make it any easier for us to change tomorrow's weather. Nor does accurate knowledge about how a child's brain grows allow us to necessarily change that growth. The referenced paper proposes that knowing the growth behaviour of the tumour can be used to better time chemotherapy, but I could not see any mention in the paper about the fortunate person whose liver cancer went into ?remission. * At [41]4:30 PM, Anonymous said... Some people said it was impossible to cross the horizon because boats will fall, other people said earth was flat, and some others said "it will be only 4 computers in the whole world". All of them was scientists too. Give Dr. Bru time, be skeptical, but don?t close your mind to hope. Keep going Bru!!!!. * At [42]2:10 AM, Anonymous said... and doesn't the medical profession just talk about your chance of surviving cancer over a 5 year horizon. They don't say cured for all time that I know of. * At [43]8:53 AM, [44]Giu1i0 Pri5c0 said... Well, the first part of your statement is very true. Even if this develops into an operational therapy, it will take years and probably won't be effective in all cases. But I don't agree on repressing news. Science advances by spreading information and making it available to all. If the information is available, another researcher may be able to make further advances. A rich donor may fund the work of Prof. Bru. A patient with early stage cancer may refuse giving up and fight harder to stay alive until an effective therapy is developed... --- In reply to: "The problem with this kind of news is that cancer sufferers, like myself, know that it probably won't be available for some years, until it's too late. This makes it much harder to stay positive. This kind of news should be repressed until the cure can be available to all. And what about the cost factor? Will it be out of reach to the ordinary person, like so many other treatments?" * At [45]5:34 PM, Anonymous said... "dangerous", "hype"... well, some never get it. read: it's not about the clinical results. it's about the math that led to it all. endavant, bru et al! References 1. http://www.euroresidentes.com/Blogs/Spain_News/atom.xml 2. http://www.euroresidentes.com/Blogs/Spain_News.htm 3. http://www.euroresidentes.com/euroresiuk/indexuk.html 4. http://www.ucm.es/ 5. http://www.ucm.es/info/ucmp/pags.php?COOKIE_SET=1&tp=Importante%20logro%20cient%C3%ADfico&a=directorio&d=0003499.php 6. http://www.biophysj.org/cgi/content/abstract/85/5/2948 7. http://www.euroresidentes.com/Blogs/2005/05/spanish-scientists-use-maths-to-cure.htm --------------- The Universal Dynamics of Tumor Growth -- Br? et al. 85 (5): 2948 Biophysical Journal http://www.biophysj.org/cgi/content/full/85/5/2948 Antonio Br?^ *, Sonia Albertos^ {dagger} , Jos? Luis Subiza^ {ddagger} , Jos? L?pez Garc?a-Asenjo^ ? and Isabel Br?^ ? ^* CCMA, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cient?ficas, 28006 Madrid, Spain; ^{dagger} Servicio de Aparato Digestivo, Hospital Cl?nico San Carlos, 28003 Madrid, Spain; ^{ddagger} Servicio de Inmunolog?a, Hospital Cl?nico San Carlos, 28003 Madrid, Spain; ^? Servicio de Anatom?a Patol?gica, Hospital Cl?nico San Carlos, 28003 Madrid, Spain; and ^? Centro de Salud La Estaci?n, 45600 Talavera de La Reina, Toledo, Spain Correspondence: Address reprint requests to Antonio Br?, Serrano 115, 28015 Madrid, Spain. Tel.: 34-91-7452500; E-mail: antonio.bru{at}ccma.csic.es. ABSTRACT Scaling techniques were used to analyze the fractal nature of^ colonies of 15 cell lines growing in vitro as well as of 16^ types of tumor developing in vivo. All cell colonies were found^ to exhibit exactly the same growth dynamics--which correspond^ to the molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) universality class. MBE^ dynamics are characterized by 1), a linear growth rate, 2),^ the constraint of cell proliferation to the colony/tumor border,^ and 3), surface diffusion of cells at the growing edge. These^ characteristics were experimentally verified in the studied^ colonies. That these should show MBE dynamics is in strong contrast^ with the currently established concept of tumor growth: the^ kinetics of this type of proliferation rules out exponential^ or Gompertzian growth. Rather, a clear linear growth regime^ is followed. The importance of new cell movements--cell^ diffusion at the tumor border--lies in the fact that tumor^ growth must be conceived as a competition for space between^ the tumor and the host, and not for nutrients or other factors.^ Strong experimental evidence is presented for 16 types of tumor,^ the growth of which cell surface diffusion may be the main mechanism^ responsible in vivo. These results explain most of the clinical^ and biological features of colonies and tumors, offer new theoretical^ frameworks, and challenge the wisdom of some current clinical^ strategies.^ INTRODUCTION Tumor growth is a complex process ultimately dependent on tumor^ cells proliferating and spreading in host tissues. The search^ for the underlying mechanisms of tumor development and progression^ has been largely focused on the molecular changes accounting^ for the malignant phenotype at the cell level, while our knowledge^ on tumor growth dynamics has remained scarce. In part, this^ has been due to difficulties in developing tools able to describe^ growth processes associated with disordered phenomena. As with^ many natural objects, cell colonies are fractal (Losa et al.,^ 1992[39] [fig-down.gif] ; Cross et al., 1995[40] [fig-down.gif] ; Losa, 1995[41] [fig-down.gif] ), and a description of^ their very complex contours using classical Euclidean geometry^ is very difficult to provide. However, the contours of objects^ can give valuable indications about their dynamic behavior,^ and the fractal nature of the contours of tumors/cell colonies--with^ their scale invariance (self-affine character)--allow scaling^ analysis to be used to determine this.^ A very important implication of the spatial and temporal symmetries^ of tumors is that certain universal quantities (termed critical^ exponents) can be defined which allow the characterization of^ tumor growth dynamics. In turn, this allows the main physical^ mechanisms responsible for their growth processes to be determined.^ The current view of tumor growth kinetics is based on the general^ assumption that tumor cells grow exponentially (Shackney, 1993[42] [fig-down.gif] ).^ Such kinetics agrees with the unlimited proliferative activity^ of tumor cells recorded in early, mainly in vitro, studies.^ However, a number of poorly explained issues remain in disagreement^ with an exponential regime of cell proliferation. For example,^ there is an evident discrepancy between the exponential tumor^ growth theory and experimental data obtained from tumor cells^ growing in vivo: tumor doubling times have been found to greatly^ exceed cell cycle times. Lower-than-expected activity of tumor^ cells and greater-than-expected aneuploidy have also been consistently^ found. These issues are of great importance since both radiotherapy^ and chemotherapy are entirely based on cytokinetics.^ In a previous article (Br? et al., 1998[43] [fig-down.gif] ) we mathematically^ described the growth dynamics of colonies derived from a tumor^ cell line (rat astrocyte glioma C6), which raised reasonable^ doubts about the exponential cell proliferation theory. The^ novel approach used in this study was based on fractality (Mandelbrot,^ 1982[44] [fig-down.gif] ) and scale invariance of the colony contour. These cells^ form colonies that are fractal objects which can be characterized^ by a fractal dimension (a measure of their degree of complexity).^ This allows the use of scaling analysis (Mandelbrot, 1982[45] [fig-down.gif] ; Barab?si^ and Stanley, 1995[46] [fig-down.gif] ; Br? et al., 1998[47] [fig-down.gif] ) for determining^their dynamic behavior, which was found compatible with the^ molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) universality class (Br?^ et al., 1998[48] [fig-down.gif] ).^ In the present study, different cells lines and different types^ of solid tumor were studied to determine whether such growth^ dynamics also apply to them. In the case of cells cultivated^ in vitro, all cells growing as colonies have dynamics compatible^ with the MBE universality. These dynamics are characterized^ by: 1), a linear growth rate, 2), the constraint of growth activity^ to the outer border of the cell colony or tumor, and 3), diffusion^ at the colony surface. In this work, the term "linear" means that^ the colony radius grows linearly with time. With respect to^ tumors growing in vivo, common characteristics were seen in^ all cases, several of which were common to those of tumors growing^ in vitro. In all cases, growth in these in vivo tumors was limited^ to the tumor border ([49]Figs. 6-[50]8), which could indicate^ that the mechanisms at work in vitro are also those at work^ in vivo. The Discussion will provide clinical and biological^ evidence that this is the case.^ FIGURE 6 Spatial distribution of cell proliferation in colonies. (a) A clone of HT-29 cells formed after 260 h of culture and labeled with bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU). (b) Cells scored as BrdU positive. (c) Three different regions can be distinguished: an inner region of radius r[1] = R/2 practically without activity, an intermediate region from r[1] to r[2] = 0.8R with a linear increase in activity, and a third region from r[2] to r[3] = R which has half of the whole colony activity. The outer region has 20% of the whole colony surface and 47% of total activity. (d) Various contours have been traced according to a division of the colony (from the center of its mass) into 10 inner contours of radii R/10, 2R/10, 3R/10, .... 9R/10 and R (where R is the whole colony radius). Taking into account the number of BrdU stained cells, the spatial distribution of active cells is determined as a function of the radius. In the inset, the cumulative activity rate is plotted as a function of the colony surface. To a large extent, cell proliferation is seen to be located at the colony border. It is very important to note that (as seen in [53]Fig. 4) for HT-29 line cells, a growing time of 260 h still corresponds to an exponential regime, in which contact inhibition is still very scarce. Only after 400 h does growth of the colony reach a linear regime with respect to the radius. From this moment, colony activity is constrained more and more to the border, as expected from its dynamics. FIGURE 8 Spatial distribution of cell proliferation in tumors. (a) A human colon adenocarcinoma. (b) Cells scored as Ki-67 positive. (c) Tumor mass has been divided into three regions having 50%, 30%, and 20% of the whole tumor surface (inside to outside). The distribution of cell proliferation in these three regions (having a mean radius of R/2, 8R/10, and R, respectively, R being the mean radius of the tumor) is 6%, 14%, and 80%, respectively. (d) Various contours have been traced according to a division of the tumor (from the center of its mass) into 10 inner contours of radii r/10, 2r/10, 3r/10, .... 9r/10, and r (where r is the whole tumor radius). Taking into account the number of Ki-67 stained cells, the spatial distribution of active cells is determined as a function of the radius. In the inset, the cumulative activity rate is plotted as a function of the colony surface. Spatial activity distribution corresponding to the three regions determined by r[1] = R/2, r[2] = 8R/10, and r[3] = R is shown. Cell proliferation is mainly located at the tumor border, rather than randomly and homogeneously throughout the tumor as might be expected. As shown in this article, any type of tumor developing in vivo^ has most of its cell proliferation constrained to the border.^ This may indicate that cell surface diffusion is the main mechanism^ responsible for growth in any type of tumor.^ MATERIALS AND METHODS Cell lines Cell lines were obtained from the Servicio de Inmunolog?a,^ Hospital Cl?nico San Carlos (Madrid, Spain) and from^ ATCC (American Type Cell Culture, Rockville, MD).^ Cell colonies Cell colonies were formed in 5-cm-diameter petri dishes by shedding^ disaggregated cells at low density (1000 to 5000 cell/ml) in^ a culture medium that completely covered them. The medium employed^ for HT-29, HeLa, 3T3, 3T3 K-ras, and 3T3 V-src cell lines was^ RPMI 1640, 2mM L-glutamine, 80 ?g/ml gentamicin, and 10%^ fetal bovine serum (FBS). For the C6 cell line, a mixture of^ Dulbecco modified Eagle medium (DMEM) and F12 Ham's mixture^ (F12) in a 1:1 ratio supplemented with 10% FBS was used; for^ MCA3D, AT5 and Car B was supplemented with Ham's mixture and^ 10% FBS. For HT-29 M6, C-33 A, Saos-2, VERO C, and Mv1Lu, DMEM^ supplemented with 10% FBS was employed. After 48 h of culture,^ various individual clones containing 4-8 cells were chosen^ for study. Cultures were maintained in a 5% CO[2] atmosphere at^ 37?C, carefully changing half of the culture medium every^ three days.^ Tumor sections All human tumors were spontaneous tumors surgically removed^ from human patients at the Hospital Cl?nico San Carlos^ (Madrid, Spain). Tissue sections (4 ?m thick) were obtained^ from paraffin-embedded material on poly-L-lysine-coated glass^ slides. After deparaffinization and rehydration, the sections^ underwent microwave treatment three times for 5 min. Endogenous^ peroxidase activity was blocked with hydrogen peroxide for 15^ min. Sections were incubated with Ki-67 (MIB-1, diluted 1:50;^ Immunotech, Marseille, France) for 1 h at room temperature;^ they were then incubated with biotinylated secondary antibody^ for 20 min, followed by treatment with streptavidin-biotin-peroxidase^ complex (LSAB kit, Dako, Milan, Italy) for 20 min at room temperature.^ The sections were rinsed with several changes of phosphate-buffered^ saline (PBS) between steps. Color was developed with diaminobenzidine^ tetrahydrochloride. Light counterstaining was performed with^ hematoxylin.^ Bromodeoxyuridine labeling Cell cultures were pulsed with bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU) (10^ ?M) for 1 h at 37?C. After washing with prewarmed^ Hanks' balanced salt solution, cells were fixed (8 min) with^ methanol:acetone (2:1) at -20?C, washed with PBS, and submitted^ to further incubation (1 h) with 1M HCl. BrdU was immunodetected^ by means of anti-BrdU specific antibodies, using a secondary^ antibody coupled with peroxidase and the diaminobenzidine tetrahydrochloride-substrate^ chromogen system.^ Counting procedure Ki-67 positive cells were defined as having brown nuclear staining.^ Ki-67 score was expressed as the percentage of positive cells^ relative to the total number of tumor cells. For each slide,^ the number of positive cells was counted. These evaluations^ were performed without knowledge of clinicopathological data.^ Image processing Colonies were photographed at 24-h intervals during the study^ (for over 1400 h in some cases) using an inverted phase-contrast^ microscope (Diaphot, Nikon, IZASA S.A., Madrid, Spain). Cell^ colonies showing adhering growth were considered as two-dimensional^ systems. Photographs were scanned with a final resolution of^ 1.3 ?m/pixel. Cell colony profiles were hand-traced. Scaling^ analysis and other measurements were then performed on these^ profiles with in-house computer software.^ Determination of the fractal dimension of interfaces To determine the fractal dimension value, data were treated^ using three different methods: the box counting method, the^ yardstick method, and the y-/x-variance relationship. As expected,^ for any given interface, total coincidence between the three^ methods was found.^ Fractals and scaling analysis In a previous article (Br? et al., 1998[64] [fig-down.gif] ), we established^ the fractal nature of the contours of rat astrocyte glioma C6^ colonies and used scaling analysis to show that the colony growth^ dynamics belonged to the MBE class. The analysis of tumor/colony^ contours was based on the fractal geometry established by Mandelbrot^ (1982)[65] [fig-down.gif] , and on the scale invariance of fractal interfaces. The^ same techniques are used in the present paper to show that all^ tumors/colonies have these same dynamics.^ Fractal interfaces--for example, those shown in [66]Fig. 1^ which correspond to different culture times of a HeLa cell colony--show^ temporal and spatial invariances during the process of roughening.^ The increase in irregularity of a front--or roughening^ (roughness is a useful quantitative measurement of the irregularity^ of an interface such as that of a tumor or cell colony contour)--is^ generally analyzed in terms of a time- and position-dependent^ function called the "local width function" or "interface width,"^ w(l,t). This is defined as the root mean square of the deviations^ of an interface about its mean value and is defined by the relationship ^ [fd1_1.gif] (1) as a function of the arc length l and the time^ t, where L is the length of the whole contour, r[i] the distance^ from the center of the tumor mass to the point i of the interface,^ and < r[i] > the average radius of the arc length ([67]Fig. 2). The term^ < . > [l] is the local average of subsets of arc length l, and {.}[L]^ is the overall average of the system (Br? et al., 1998[68] [fig-down.gif] ).^ FIGURE 1 Cell colony contours. Contours of a C6 cell line at different culture times. Morphology of tumor contours determines the dynamic behavior of growth by means of the scale invariances of their complex structures. FIGURE 2 Interface width of a tumor or cell colony border. The interface width is calculated for sectors with an arc length l. For each arc length, the mean value of the interface and the fluctuations around it are calculated to obtain the corresponding interface width. For a given value of the length of a sector, all values of the interface width are averaged to obtain the final value of the arc length l, w(l,t). The power law behavior of w(l,t) versus l provides the local roughness critical exponent. As a result of the fractal nature of the interface--or^ the cell colony contour--the interface width possesses^ a series of both spatial and temporal invariances which provide^ the basis for scaling analysis (see [73]Appendix A). All these invariances^ exhibit power law behavior, and for each type of invariance^ a critical exponent can be defined as the power law exponent.^ The power law behavior arises from the dependence of the interface^ width on the observation length and timescales. Usually, these^ interfaces become more and more rough as time goes by until,^ in some cases, the interfaces are always of the same roughness--they^ reach saturation.^ How this roughening process develops both in time and in space^ is described by five critical exponents. Two of these exponents^ are related to the geometry of the system, quantifying its roughness^ on two scales: at the small scale of the system, i.e., the local^ roughness critical exponent {alpha} [loc], and at system size scale, i.e.,^ the global roughness critical exponent {alpha} [glob]. The third exponent^ is related to the development of the interface width with time:^ ?, the growth exponent. A further exponent is the^ dynamic exponent, z, which is related to the correlation time^ of the interface. The physical meaning of this exponent is related^ to the celerity by which the information about points growing^ on the interface is transmitted across the interface. Finally,^ when the development of the interface is anomalous from a dynamic^ point of view, it is defined by another growth exponent, ?^*,^ which describes this anomaly in time. By determining this set^ of five exponents, which are not independent (see [74]Appendix A),^ the dynamics of the interface can be known, as well as the main^ mechanisms responsible for growth. The dynamics of a process^ is written in its interface, and this information can be extracted^ by determining these critical exponents.^ All known dynamic processes have been classified into just a^ few universality classes, each comprising all those physical^ processes with the same type of dynamics, and each characterized^ by having a different set of values for this series of critical^ exponents. Further, each universality class reflects the main^ conditioning factor responsible for growth, which can be described^ by a continuum stochastic equation.^ RESULTS Fractality of contours The first condition that must be fulfilled to apply scaling^ analysis techniques is that the growth behavior of a process^ lie in the fractal nature of the interface.^ The contours of a series of colonies of different cell lines^ and tumors were morphometrically analyzed to calculate their^ geometric dimensions ([83]Tables 1 and [84]2) (see Materials and Methods).^ In all cases, a noninteger value, i.e., a fractal dimension^ (d[f]), was found. The values lay in the range 1.05-1.30,^ characteristic of any fractal object. These values are in good^ agreement with previous determinations of the fractal dimensions^ in melanomas and skin lesions (Claridge et al., 1992[85] [fig-down.gif] ; Cross^ et al., 1995[86] [fig-down.gif] ). The complexity of the contours of both colonies^ and tumors is due to the complexity of the growth process rather^ than the individual characteristics of the cells that compose^ them. In all the tumors/colonies studied, the dynamics were^ the same, and, therefore, fractal dimensions do not seem to^ depend on the morphological characteristics of the cells but^ rather on the growth process. The differences found in the fractal^ dimensions might be related to the growth medium (in vivo versus^ in vitro) or to specific conditions in the culture or of the^ growth process.^ TABLE 1 In vitro cell lines TABLE 2 Human and animal tumors During colony growth, the value of d[f] remained constant in all^ the cell lines studied. It is remarkable that the cell line^ HT-29 (colon adenocarcinoma) had an in vitro fractal dimension^ of 1.12 and a corresponding in vivo value of 1.30 ([91]Tables 1^ and [92]2). This difference indicates the greater complexity of^ the host tissue wherein tumors grow compared to the culture^ medium in which cell colonies are cultivated (much more homogeneous).^ From these results, the fractality of all the tested cell lines^ and tumors was established, and contour fractality allowed scaling^ techniques to be used to obtain growth dynamics.^ Growth dynamics The dynamics and basic mechanisms of growth processes can be^ fully described by the set of five critical exponents determined^ by scaling analysis. Two of these exponents are directly related^ to the border's shape: local roughness, {alpha} [loc], and global roughness,^ {alpha} [glob]. The other three are related to the development over time^ of the contours: ? and ?^* (the growth exponents),^ and z (the dynamic exponent).^ The 15 cell lines were grown in culture to determine the critical^ exponents of their colony contours by analyzing them at intervals^ of 24 h. In all cases, the following characteristic values were^ obtained ([93]Figs. 3 and [94]4): {alpha} [loc] = 0.9 ? 0.1, {alpha} [glob] = 1.5^ ? 0.15, ? = 0.38 ? 0.07, ?^*^ = 0.15 ? 0.05, and z = 4.0 ? 0.5 ([95]Table 1). These^ values indicate that the growth dynamics of cell colonies correspond^ to the MBE universality class (Das Sarma et al., 1994[96] [fig-down.gif] ) ( {alpha} [loc]^ = 1.0, {alpha} [glob] = 1.5, ? = 3/8, ?^* = 1/8, and^ z = 4.0). This is described by the following linear continuum^ equation (Das Sarma et al., 1994[97] [fig-down.gif] ; Br? et al., 1998[98] [fig-down.gif] ; Kessler^ et al., 1992[99] [fig-down.gif] ): ^ [fd2_2.gif] (2) where h(x,t) is the^ position on the tumor or colony border, K is the surface diffusion^ coefficient (which is independent of critical exponents), F^ is the growth rate, and {eta} (x,t) is random noise where < {eta} (x,t) > =^ 0 and the correlation < {eta} (x,t) {eta} (x',t') > = 2D {delta} (x-x') {delta} (t-t') is seen.^ The first term on the right side of the equation implies that^ the growth process is characterized by the surface diffusion^ of cells (Br? et al., 1998[100] [fig-down.gif] ).^ FIGURE 3 Scaling analysis of the colony interface width. The interface width is shown against window size for the HT-29 (colon adenocarcinoma) cell line at different times (t = 288 h (black), 624 h (green), 986 h (red), 1203 h (blue), and 1348 h (cyan)). From the shape, the value of the local roughness exponent {alpha} [loc] = 0.91 ? 0.10 is obtained. In the inset of this figure, the transformation of w(l,t) into w(l,t)/l^ {alpha} and l into l/t^(1/z)) shows that these curves collapse into a single, universal curve with z = 4.0 and {alpha} [glob] = 1.5. FIGURE 4 Scaling analysis of the colony power spectrum. This figure shows the structure factors of an HT-29 (colon adenocarcinoma) cell line at different times (t = 288 h (black), 624 h (green), 986 h (red), 1203 h (blue), and 1348 h (cyan)). The global roughness exponent is obtained from the shape of these curves (2 {alpha} [glob]+1 = -4.0), which gives a value for this critical exponent of 1.5. Transforming S(k,t) into S(l,t).k^2^ {alpha} +1 and k into k.t^(1/z), these curves collapse into a single universal curve as seen in the inset of this figure, with z = 4.0 and {alpha} [glob] = 1.5. Host-tumor interfaces were used to calculate the values of local^ ( {alpha} [loc]) and global ( {alpha} [glob]) roughness for the 16 tumor types investigated.^ These values were characteristically 0.9 ? 0.1 and 1.5^ ? 0.15, respectively. The time-related critical exponents^ (?, ?^*, and z) could not be calculated for^ obvious reasons.^ These values of the critical exponents of tumor roughness do^ not agree with the theoretical values of the MBE universality^ class in 2+1 dimensions for linear systems and in which the^ system size does not change. However, it must be taken into^ account that, in this case, there are two very important qualitative^ differences that could cause the values of the exponents to^ vary: the symmetry of the system is circular, not linear, and^ the system size varies with time. Presently, the values that^ would be obtained for the critical exponents in the latter case^ are unknown and require investigation in future work. In any^ event, as the following section shows, both experimental and^ clinical evidence indicate that, for tumors in vivo, the dynamics^ behaves as though the main mechanism responsible for growth^ were cell diffusion at the interface. Therefore, in both cases,^ a growth pattern characterized by the following can be foreseen: 1. Cell^ diffusion at the colony or tumor borders;^ 2. Cell proliferation^ mainly restricted to the colony or tumor^ border, i.e., growth^ is greatly inhibited inside the colony^ or tumor;^ 3. A linear^ growth rate for both colonies and tumors.^ Experimental assessment of the features imposed by MBE class dynamics Cell surface diffusion MBE dynamics implies surface diffusion of cells, i.e., their^ movement along the tumor/colony border, not their free movement^ away from it. This should not be entirely surprising since cell^ movement is a well-known phenomenon, as is the increase in motility^ of tumor cells. However, the diffusion associated with MBE dynamics^ is not random, but more frequent toward places where there is^ a large coordination number (in this case derived from the number^ of cells that surround a given cell). Therefore, diffusion to^ zones with greater local curvatures, i.e., with larger coordination^ numbers, should be expected. Preliminary studies recording cell^ colonies by time lapse video suggest that, at least for HT-29^ cells, this is the case ([105]Fig. 5). However, more work is needed^ to address the biomolecular features of this, especially since^ it constitutes the main mechanism of colony and tumor proliferation.^ FIGURE 5 Cell surface diffusion. The dynamic behavior of cells growing in a colony is compatible with the molecular beam epitaxy universality class, of which surface diffusion is characteristic, i.e., cells located at the growing interface tend to migrate along the colony border. To show this movement, a clone of HT-29 cells formed after 300 h of culture was recorded by time lapse video. The figure shows different steps of this movement: (a) the arrow indicates a cell just after division; (b-e) the arrows follow this cell to show how it moves along the colony border; (e) the arrow shows the resting site of this cell at the interface. The local curvature radius is positive at the initial (a) and negative at the final (e) sites, consistent with predictions derived from molecular beam epitaxy dynamics and reflected experimentally for the first time here. Cell proliferation is restricted to the colony or tumor border To experimentally support this second characteristic of MBE^ dynamics, actively proliferating cells within colonies and tumors^ were labeled with bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU) and Ki-67, respectively.^ [108]Fig. 6 shows a representative colony labeled after 260 h of^ culture. The proliferative activity was located mainly within^ the external portion. It must be borne in mind that at this^ time the greater part of the colony is not inhibited. This is^ confirmed by the velocity curve. However, a clear tendency toward^ the restriction of cell proliferation to the edge of the colony^ was seen. Thus, the outer region occupied 20% of the colony's^ surface but included 47% of all proliferating cells. [109]Fig. 7^ shows that cell proliferation is further restricted to the colony^ border in HeLa cells grown over a longer period (380 h). Similar^ results were obtained when analyzing tumor specimens ([110]Figs. 8^ and [111]9). Active Ki-67 cells were clearly concentrated in the^ external portion of tumors. [112]Fig. 8 represents a colon adenocarcinoma.^ In this case, 80% of the active cells were found in the outer^ 20% of tumors; only 6% were found in the innermost 50% of the^ tumor. This constraint of cell proliferation to the border was^ also obtained even for polypous carcinomas. [113]Figs. 6 c; [114]7, bottom,^ [115]8 c; and [116]9 show that, in every case, the number of proliferating^ cells increases as a function of the colony or tumor radius.^ This indicates a relationship between the ability to proliferate^ and spatial distribution within the colony or tumor. As a consequence,^ these data also indicate that proliferation is inhibited in^ the innermost areas.^ FIGURE 7 Spatial distribution of cell proliferation in colonies. As in [119]Fig. 6, a spatial study of cell proliferation was made. This case corresponds to a HeLa cell line after 360 h of culture time. Cells in mitosis are stained brown. The three different regions in the figure contain 50%, 30%, and 20% of total tumor surface, respectively (inside to outside); cell proliferation is therefore mainly restricted to the border. As time progresses, cell proliferation will be more and more restricted to the colony border. FIGURE 9 Colony growth. Development over time of the mean radius of a colony of HT-29 (colon adenocarcinoma) cells. The mean radius shows a linear regime with time (linear fit shown in red), which gives a constant interface speed of 0.29 ?m/h. This result is incompatible with the general assumption that tumors grow exponentially. An exponential regime is observed only at very early times, during which all cells are active. Later, in the linear regime, a very important cell fraction is partially contact-inhibited, and the majority of colony activity is constrained to a very fine band at the border, as suggested by the universal dynamic behavior determined for the growth process of any type of colony. This result supports the impossibility of the division of all cells in the colony, which would give an exponential regime for radius or size at any time. Linear growth rate In all studied cases, tumor radius grows linearly with time.^ The growth rate of colonies was obtained by plotting the variation^ of the mean radius as a function of time.^ Common to all cell lines, colony growth was dominated by a linear^ growth regime throughout the culture period (up to 1400 h).^ This regime is, in most cases, preceded by an exponential transitional^ phase lasting 200 h on average. The slope of the linear regime^ indicates the average growth velocity of the colony, which was^ different depending on the cell line ([122]Table 1) and growth substrate^ (not shown). It is important to note that the mean growth velocity^ of the colonies is characteristic of the process, and not of^the cell line. It probably depends on a variety of external^ factors such as the experimental conditions, the available nutrients,^ type of medium, etc.^ Changing the substrate did not modify the dynamic behavior,^ except for the average growth velocity. [123]Fig. 9 shows the corresponding^ growth rate analysis of the HT-29 cell line. In this case, the^ exponential regime was one of the longest, lasting a little^ less than 400 h. Though exponential phases were shorter, similar^ results were found for all the cell lines studied. The inset^ of [124]Fig. 9 shows the growth rate in semilogarithmic representation.^ It is not an exponential process; if it were, a straight line^ would be obtained.^ In vivo tumor growth rate could not be measured directly as^ explained above. However, the restriction of cell proliferation^ to the tumor contour mathematically implies a linear growth^ rate.^ DISCUSSION Elucidating the basic mechanisms of tumor growth is one of the^ most intricate problems in the field of tumor biology, and one^ of its major challenges. Many attempts have been made in recent^ decades to obtain a mathematical model that would allow us to^ discern these basic features of cell and tumor growth (Shackney,^ 1970[133] [fig-down.gif] ; Durand, 1990[134] [fig-down.gif] ; Gatenby and Gawlinsky, 1996[135] [fig-down.gif] ; Byrne, 1997[136] [fig-down.gif] ;^ Hart et al., 1998[137] [fig-down.gif] ; Scalerandi et al., 1999[138] [fig-down.gif] ; Drasdo, 2000[139] [fig-down.gif] ; Kansal^ et al., 2000[140] [fig-down.gif] ; Sherrat and Chaplain, 2001[141] [fig-down.gif] ; Ferreira et al., 2002[142] [fig-down.gif] ).^ Several different hypotheses have been postulated to describe^ the main conditioning factor of tumor growth, and nutrient competition^ between tumor cells or tumor and host cells is currently the^ most accepted. This concept of tumor growth is a legacy of an^ older problem, that concerning the growth of bacterial colonies.^ In the latter, it has been fully shown that the main mechanism^ is nutrient competition. However, this cannot be extrapolated^ to tumor growth. First, the majority of these models reproduce^ patterns with a roughness exponent of {alpha} [loc] = 0.5, which is in^ good agreement with the Eden model (Eden, 1961[143] [fig-down.gif] ). Second, the^ kinetic behavior that reproduces these models is Gompertzian.^ However, it should be mentioned that there is often no qualitative^ or quantitative comparison made of these models. The roughness^ of simulated patterns obtained from mathematical models that^ consider nutrient competition is largely in good agreement with^ that corresponding to the Eden model, i. e., {alpha} [loc] = 0.5. Other^ types of mathematical models also partially reproduce some features^ of tumor growth. Nevertheless, the majority are very restrictive^ in their hypothesis or use a series of conditions that are insufficient^ to reproduce the main features of tumor growth.^ This work provides a very extensive and detailed study of pattern^ morphology both of tumors and cell colonies. From the behavior^ of the corresponding contours, both in time and with length^ scales, and by applying scaling techniques, the dynamics and^ the main mechanism responsible for tumor growth can be extracted^ without the need of any hypothesis. This is one of the major^ advantages of scaling analysis. Scaling techniques used to analyze^ the fractal nature of cell colonies growing in vitro, and of^ tumors developing in vivo, showed them to exhibit exactly the^ same growth dynamics independent of cell type. These dynamics^ are compatible not with the currently and widely accepted idea^ of Gompertzian growth, but with the MBE universality class,^ which involves a linear growth regime. It should be remembered^that the concept of a Gompertzian growth regime is based on^the exponential growth of cells, and an exponentially decaying^ growth rate is assumed. The Gompertz law is considered a robust^ feature of the nutrient-limited model of cancer growth. However,^ according to the present analysis, the main mechanism responsible^ for tumor progression would be cell diffusion at the tumor border.^ Strikingly, the dynamics obtained for the studied tumors and^ cell colonies are the same for any cell proliferation process,^ independent of cell line or the in vivo or in vitro nature of^ growth. These dynamics, which are also obeyed in other phenomena^ such as crystal growth, possess the property of super-roughness.^ This means that the traditional Eden growth model (Eden, 1961[144] [fig-down.gif] ),^ conceived to satisfy cell proliferation processes, does not^ explain tumor growth. The Eden model is the simplest growth^ model that can be defined based on random particle deposition^ and aggregation. The surface of an Eden cluster obeys scaling^ dynamics with {alpha} [loc] = {alpha} [glob] = 0.5. Far from this behavior, however,^ the present results show that cell proliferation dynamics exhibit^ super-roughness ( {alpha} [glob] >= 1.0) as an effect of surface^ diffusion, a process which tends to smooth the tumor or colony^ borders. The stochastic nature of duplication induces cell colony^ or tumor roughness, but this is generally counterbalanced by^ a smoothing or ordering process due to the mobility of generated^ cells. Cell diffusion on the tumor or colony border tends to^ counterbalance the effect of random duplication. There is, therefore,^ a mean doubling time (the duration of the cell cycle) with some^ dispersion around this value. Physically, this effect is described^ in [145]Eq. 2 by the noise term.^ In addition, as in the case of crystal growth where evaporation^ effects do not alter dynamic behavior in MBE universal dynamics,^ the movement of cells away from the colony/tumor does not influence^ the growth process.^ The widely accepted concept of tumor growth kinetics is based^ on the assumption that tumor cells grow exponentially. However,^ it is generally recognized that this assumption is applicable^ to virtually no solid tumor growing in vivo (Shackney et al.,^ 1978[146] [fig-down.gif] ). Given an exponential-like growth regime, doubling times^ would be similar to the total duration of the cell cycle. Nevertheless,^ tumor doubling times are strikingly longer than cell cycle times,^ e.g., more than 100-fold in breast carcinomas (Shackney, 1993[147] [fig-down.gif] ).^ These differences are even more remarkable in large tumors.^ This is currently explained as a consequence of tumor cell loss^ and/or a low rate of cell production because of nutrient deprivation^ and/or waste product accumulation (Shackney, 1993[148] [fig-down.gif] ).^ Based on the results, it can be stated that tumor growth would^ be well described by a linear regime. It is then needless to^ account for the different incidental processes that might explain^ disagreements between a theoretical basis--the supposed^ exponential regime--and experimental observations which^ appear to show growth to be linear. It is important to again^ point out that, in this paper, a linear process means one in^ which rate changes with time in a completely linear way.^ As already described, this linear regime implies that there^ are less actively proliferating cells, and that these are not^ randomly distributed throughout the whole volume of the tumor,^ but homogeneously constrained to the border. Only when the colony^ is small enough to assume that most cells are located at the^ growing border is the growth regime depicted by an exponential--but^ still transient--phase.^ Other than the growth dynamics of any type of tumor/colony being^ the same, the most important result of this study is perhaps^ that cell movement occurs at their surface. This type of movement^ ([149]Fig. 5) invalidates the hypothesis that the main mechanism^ responsible for tumor growth is nutrient competition between^ cells. As seen in [150]Fig. 10, newly generated cells move to sites^ with a higher coordination number, i.e., with a higher number^ of neighboring cells. This movement is that predicted by MBE^ dynamics and, from a mathematical point of view, is the movement^ originated by the fourth-order derivative in [151]Eq. 2.^ FIGURE 10 Cell surface diffusion. A schematic diagram of surface diffusion at the tumor border. A new cell born in 1 migrates until a neighboring position, 2, in which the local curvature of the interface is higher and the coordination number is greater than at its original position. Tumors are surrounded by a very thin acidic environment as a^ result of cell metabolism (these cells mainly consume glucose^ and secrete lactic acid, increasing the acidity of the environment).^ Following the rules of cell surface diffusion as in MBE dynamics,^ the final position of a diffusing cell will be in a region in^ which the quantity of nutrients or oxygen is lower since it^ becomes surrounded by a greater number of cells. Moreover, as^ a consequence of cell metabolism, the pH of this region will^ be lower than at the cell's initial position. The lack of oxygen^ in the concave regions where new cells deposit does not constitute^ an obstacle to tumor growth since cell proliferation is supported^ by anaerobic respiration (Eskey et al., 1993[154] [fig-down.gif] ). Oxygen is a limiting^ factor only for functions such as differentiation, respiration,^ and mechanical work. This movement determines the mechanism^ responsible for the growth dynamics: as this work has determined^ both theoretically and experimentally, it is not possible to^ conceive tumor growth merely as a process of nutrient competition.^ On the contrary, this movement can be understood as the search^ for space by tumoral cells. In its initial position in [155]Fig. 10,^ the mechanical pressure the new cell undergoes is greater^ than in its final position. This obliges that tumor growth be^ considered a process in which a mass grows and looks for space^ to avoid the mechanical response of both the host tissue and^ the immune response.^ This has a number of consequences with respect to the treatment^ of solid tumors. First, the effectiveness of chemotherapy becomes^ dependent on the specific surface of tumors. Given that the^ proliferating cells sensitive to antiproliferative agents are^ mainly associated with the surface of tumors, then the effectiveness^ of chemotherapy must decrease as tumor size increases. For this^ reason, the current log-kill concept of chemotherapy assumes^ a constant effect at random (Skipper et al., 1970[156] [fig-down.gif] ), but it fails^ experimentally in large tumors (Shackney, 1970[157] [fig-down.gif] ; Skipper et al.,^ 1970[158] [fig-down.gif] ). The concept of log kill rests on the fact that each chemotherapeutic^ cycle kills 90% of all cells in proliferation. But if proliferative^ cells are restricted to the border of the tumor and are not^ randomly distributed, as this work argues, the relative fraction^ of cells in proliferation compared to the total number of cells^ in the whole tumor is clearly much smaller. Chemotherapy would^ certainly kill all the cells on the border--but the inner^ cells, prevented from proliferating by the pressure exerted^ on them through the lack of space, would escape the effect of^ the therapeutic agent. They would therefore survive to become^ the new peripheral, proliferative, layer. However, their number^ would be again small in comparison to the total number of cells^ of the tumor--and so the process repeats itself. The efficacy^ of chemotherapy would be less than expected if all the cells^in the tumor were randomly proliferating. It is important to^ note that both primary tumors and metastases show the same growth^ dynamics ([159]Table 2). It is also well known that hypoxia is associated^ with resistance to radiation therapy and chemotherapy (Harris,^ 2002[160] [fig-down.gif] ). This is also an important point to consider in developing^ therapy strategies if, following MBE dynamics, cells migrate^ to positions where they are more likely to suffer hypoxia ([161]Figs. 5^ and [162]10).^ Second, aneuploidy (Caratero et al., 1990[163] [fig-down.gif] ; Tomita, 1995[164] [fig-down.gif] ), along^ with other genetic abnormalities (Sun et al., 1998[165] [fig-down.gif] ; Ried et^ al., 1999[166] [fig-down.gif] ), is more frequent than expected in advanced solid^ tumors, and less frequent in early stage than in advanced cancer.^ The genetic mutation rates in tumor cells are thought to be^ linked to the number of mitotic cell divisions (Nicholson, 1987[167] [fig-down.gif] ).^ If an exponential growth regime is assumed, each cell must undergo^ 32 divisions to form a 2 cm^3 tumor ( ~ 4 x 10^9 cells). However,^ in a linear growth regime, the number of divisions by cells^ on the surface would be ~ 30 times greater than at the center.^ Naturally, this leads to a higher frequency of genetic abnormalities^ in cells at the growing tumor border. In this way, if we consider^ that metastases are generated from cells from the border of^ the primary tumor (Fukakawa, 1997[168] [fig-down.gif] ), it is completely coherent^ that metastatic cells would be always more aneuploid than those^ of primary tumors. A linear growth regime provides a much better^ explanation of this than does exponential growth.^ Another implication of a linear growth regime is that the most^ malignant cells should be located at the tumor border. This^ is because cells become more malignant as the number of chromosomal^ aberrations increases (Rasnick and Duesberg, 1999[169] [fig-down.gif] ) (i.e., as^ the number of cell divisions increases). Given enough time,^ the accumulation of aberrations would probably lead to cell^ death, but tumors become mortal for the patient before this^ point is reached. Accordingly, the malignancy of cells should^ increase along the tumor radius: the further from the center,^ the more malignant the cell should be. One of the important^ clinical consequences of this is that it explains the discrepancy^ between anatomopathological analysis of biopsies and the diagnosis^ of many cancers. The doctor who performs the biopsy usually^ takes a sample from the center of the tumor to be sure that^ what is taken corresponds to the lesion. But if growth is linear,^ and the malignancy of cells increases along the tumor radius,^ such a biopsy would always take the least malignant cells and^ might lead to diagnostic error (Liberman et al., 2000[170] [fig-down.gif] ).^ A major phenotypic hallmark of tumor cells is thought to be^ the lack of inhibition of the cell proliferation process. However,^ a downregulation of cell proliferation is shown by the present^ BrdU (for in vitro cell colonies) and Ki-67 (for in vivo tumors)^ labeling data ([171]Figs. 7 and [172]8). Some type of inhibition of cell^ proliferation must therefore be operating on cells inside tumors.^ This has been observed experimentally on numerous occasions.^ Traditionally, it has been ascribed to necrosis, probably as^ a result of poor vascularization. In the present experiments,^ the same type of behavior is seen. However, at no time could^ the inhibition of proliferation have been due to central necrosis^ since none of the tumors became necrotic. Further, in the in^ vivo studies, no correlation was found between the presence^ of blood vessels inside tumors and any increase in proliferation.^ However, the proposed model offers a new interpretation for^ the inhibition of cell proliferation inside tumors. The tumor^ contour is super-rough, indicating that tumors adopt the best^ shape for bearing the "pressure" exerted by the host organ and^ the inflammatory response, and it is these "pressure effects"^ that may be inhibiting proliferation of cells. Cells inside^ the tumor can proliferate if they have room to do so, but at^ the moment cell density becomes so high that there is no longer^ any space, inhibition begins. Durand (1990)[173] [fig-down.gif] showed that quiescent^ cells, when extracted from tumors and cultured, recover their^ proliferative capacity and resume their preinhibition cell cycle.^ This inhibition does not exist at the tumor border. The spatial^ distribution of mitotic cells in [174]Figs. 6-[175]8 fit a barometric^ distribution, i.e., an exponential distribution in good agreement^ with the argument derived from surface cell movement and the^ concept of tumor growth as a search for space. A growing tumor^ has therefore to release enough space at the host-tumor interface.^ This requirement is in line with the critical roles assigned^ in cancer invasion to the development of an acidic environment^ destroying parenchymal cells at the host-tumor interface (Gatenby^ and Gawlinsky, 1996[176] [fig-down.gif] ) and/or the presence of tumor metalloproteinases^ cleaving the extracellular matrix (Sato et al., 1994[177] [fig-down.gif] ; Egeblad^ and Werb, 2002[178] [fig-down.gif] ), and also with the notion that tumor cells require^ enough motility to invade--growing cells cannot simply^ be pushed along a solid substratum to which they are adhered^ (Abercrombie, 1979[179] [fig-down.gif] ). Thus, the dynamics, which has been verified^ in all studied cases, predict that tumor growth might be constrained^ by host tissue resistance if no space is released, as suggested^ by the suppression of tumorigenesis when tumor cells lack proper^ matrix metalloproteinases (Wilson et al., 1997[180] [fig-down.gif] ) or when there^ is an increase in matrix proteins at the stroma-stroma border^ (Bleuel et al., 1999[181] [fig-down.gif] ). In addition, a loss of tumorigenicity^ might occur if such a space is refilled with host cells more^ resistant to an acidic microenvironment. The fact that tumor^ cells transduced with certain cytokines lose their tumorigenicity^ by a mechanism involving a strong recruitment of neutrophils^ (Hirose et al., 1995[182] [fig-down.gif] ; Musiani et al., 1996[183] [fig-down.gif] ; Milella et al.,^ 1999[184] [fig-down.gif] ) supports this possibility. These cells are resistant to^ extracellular acidosis (Gukovskaya et al., 1992[185] [fig-down.gif] ; Serrano et^ al., 1996[186] [fig-down.gif] ) and may compete for space at the acidic host-tumor^ interface.^ These pressure effects, as an inhibiting factor of tumor cell^ proliferation, are in good agreement with previous reports on^ solid state stress in tumor spheroids (Haji-Karim and Carlsson,^ 1978[187] [fig-down.gif] ; Mueller-Klieser, 1997[188] [fig-down.gif] ; Acker, 1998[189] [fig-down.gif] ; Hamilton, 1998[190] [fig-down.gif] ; Kunz-Schugart^ et al., 1998[191] [fig-down.gif] ; Santini and Rainaldi, 1999[192] [fig-down.gif] ). These spheroids are^ clusters of cancer cells that have been widely used in the laboratory^ to study the early stages of avascular tumor growth, the response^ to external factors such as supplied nutrients or growth inhibitory^ factors, cellular differentiation, and cell-cell interactions,^ and have even been used in therapeutically oriented studies.^ Helmlinger (1997)[193] [fig-down.gif] showed that solid stress inhibits their growth.^ The pressure exerted by the host over the tumor could explain^ the deviation of the tumor growth rate from a pure linear regime.^ This effect is not present in the two-dimensional in vitro cell^ colonies of our study, and this might be responsible for the^ pure linear regime of the growth rate even after very long periods^ ([194]Fig. 10). Cell colonies in vitro should undergo a pure linear^ regime until they reach whole confluence.^ In summary, this article shows that tumor cells of widely different^ genetic backgrounds share a common behavior. When tumors grow^ in vitro, this behavior is completely compatible with MBE universality^ dynamics. Further, there is sufficiently abundant and clear^ biological and clinical evidence to suggest that this is also^ the case in vivo, although further work is needed to confirm^ this. In any case, a universal tumor growth dynamics is observed^ for any type of tumor in vivo, independently of any other characteristic^ of tumoral cell lines. This dynamics is always governed by processes^ of cell surface diffusion. However, more work is needed to fully^ determine the whole dynamical behavior of tumor growth. The^ fractality of the contour of all the studied cell colonies and^ tumors has been demonstrated. Scaling techniques show that in^ vitro and in vivo cell proliferation would obey the same dynamics,^ independent of cell line or any other characteristic. These^ universal dynamics are compatible with a linear growth regime,^ a result in contrast with the currently accepted exponential^ or Gompertzian models of tumor growth. The main mechanism responsible^ for tumor progression, as for any cell proliferation process,^ is cell diffusion on the tumor border. These results incorporate^ the new concept that the major conditioner of tumor growth is^ space competition between tumor and the host, which is more^ important than nutrient competition or angiogenesis, etc. The^latter must be considered, in some cases, as necessary or as^ a coadjuvant condition of tumor growth, but their effects mainly^ consist of modifying the growth rate--perhaps simply allowing^ it or not. These results invalidate the current concept of cell^ proliferation and offer a unified view of tumor development.^ The dynamics involved provide coherent explanations where the^ traditional model cannot. Despite the importance of characteristics^ common to the dynamics of the in vivo growth of different tumors,^ more work is needed to completely characterize them. It should^ not be forgotten that, independent of interpretations, this^ article shows for the first time that different tumors have^ common characteristics such as the distribution of cell proliferation^ and their characteristic forms (that would imply common basic^ growth processes), determined via the critical exponents of^ local and global roughness.^ As a result, some important features of cancer can be better^ explained. Moreover, some clinical strategies may need to be^ revised.^ APPENDIX A: SCALING ANALYSIS In this procedure, the critical exponents are the so-called^ local roughness of the interface, {alpha} [loc], the interface global^ roughness, {alpha} [glob], the dynamic exponent, z, the growth exponent^ ?, and the critical exponent ?^*. These critical^ exponents originate as a result of the power law behavior of^ the geometry, and the development in time of the interface (tumor-host^ surface) (Br? et al., 1998[203] [fig-down.gif] ). This power law behavior^ is associated with two quantities used in the description of^ tumor cell colonies. The first is the mean radius of the colony^ border: ^ [fd3_3.gif] (3) Its development over time^ gives the growth velocity of the tumor. The second is the rough^ aspect which can be quantified in terms of the standard deviation^ of the mean radius, denominated the width of the interface: ^ [fd4_4.gif] (4) where < . > [l] represents the local average of subsets^ of the arc of length l and {.}[L] the average of the whole system.^ These fluctuations around the average position of the external^ cells of colonies grow in time in a power law fashion, w(l,t)^ ~ t^?, with a characteristic critical exponent ?,^ the growth exponent. In the same manner, if we select small^ windows over the whole tumor, the larger the size of the window,^ the greater the width of the interface. These spatially growing^ fluctuations also follow a power law, w(l,t) ~ l {alpha} [loc], with another^ characteristic exponent, {alpha} [loc,], the local roughness exponent,^ which can also be obtained from the scaling behavior of the^ correlation functions. The behavior described above cannot be^ used at all scales in a finite-size system such as a tumor because^ the fluctuations cannot grow indefinitely. Therefore, there^ must exist a point at which these temporal fluctuations saturate,^ a situation that is not common in systems with circular symmetry.^ This critical time is called the saturation time (t[s]) and its^ dependence with the system size provides a new critical exponent:^the dynamic exponent z. These results for the interface width^ can be summarized as follows (Barab?si and Stanley, 1995[204] [fig-down.gif] ): ^ [fd5_5.gif] (5) The last magnitude used in this analysis was the^ spectrum of the tumor profiles. This quantity measures the characteristic^ length of interface structures formed by solid cell colonies^ in their growth process. Computing the power spectra as the^ Fourier transformation of the interface, h(x,t), a power law^ behavior is established with an exponent referred to as global^ roughness, {alpha} [glob] (Barab?si and Stanley, 1995[205] [fig-down.gif] ; Br?^ et al., 1998[206] [fig-down.gif] ; L?pez et al., 1997[207] [fig-down.gif] ): ^ [fd6_6.gif] (6) where^ k is the momentum and s the structure factor.^ None of these critical exponents are independent, but are related^ by the following: ^ [fd7_7.gif] (7) and ^ [fd8_8.gif] (8) where ?^* is another critical exponent.^ Therefore, the whole set of critical exponents that determine^ the dynamics of a growth process is {alpha} [loc], {alpha} [glob], ?,^ ?^*, and z.^ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We thank Eliezer Shochat, Jos? Antonio Cuesta, and Rodolfo^ Cuerno for fruitful discussions, Jes?s Mart?n^ Tejedor for help, David Casero and Susana Garc?a for^ technical assistance, and Dirk Drasdo for reading the final^ manuscript. 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J., May 1, 2005; 88(5): 3737 - 3738. _________________________________________________________________ [265]Full Text (PDF) References 265. http://www.biophysj.org/cgi/reprint/85/5/2948 From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 4 22:57:18 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 4 Jun 2005 18:57:18 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: John Gray: America's fading religion Message-ID: John Gray: America's fading religion The Times Literary Supplement, 1995.3.21 [Over several days, I'm sending all twenty-two articles and reviews in the TLS written by John Gray, the most thought-provoking philosopher alive. He changes his mind, too, an extreme rarity.] James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense, 313pp. New York:Free Press. ?19.95 (paperback, ?9.99). - 0 02 935405 6. Karl Kraus remarks somewhere that psychoanalysis is a symptom of the disease of which it pretends to be the cure. Much the same might reasonably be said of neo-conservative cultural criticism in the United States. It is common among neo-conservative thinkers and publicists to condemn the excesses of modern individualism, such as the cult of romantic self-expression, and to inveigh against such supposed blemishes of modernity as cultural relativism and multiculturalism. It is notably uncommon to find neo-conservative writers asking why the cultural disorders they diagnose are so peculiarly prominent in the United States, and do not affect in anything like the same degree other modern societies. Why is it, one is tempted to ask, that in France, for example, the phenomenon of multiculturalism is virtually unknown ? And where else, apart from the United States, is there a "cultural war" over the core curricula in schools and universities? That questions such as these are not asked among neo-conservatives, still less answered, may be accounted for merely by their ignorance or parochialism. More plausibly, it is to be explained by a repression, in neo-conservative thinking, of doubts about the Enlightenment project that are as unsettling and uncongenial to neo-conservatives as they are to American liberals. For what all shades of American opinion have in common is a faith in the Enlightenment project shared by no other people at this stage in human history, and a willed blindness about the role this faith plays in generating the disorders of contemporary society, most especially in America. In a wide-ranging and reflective book, James Q. Wilson reveals at the start an Americocentric limitation in his thought that plagues his analysis throughout, when he tells his reader that "We are engaged in a cultural war, a war about values. It is not a new war . . . it has been going on for centuries as part of a continuing struggle at national self-definition. Once the issues were slavery, temperance, religion and prostitution; today they are divorce, illegitimacy, crime and entertainment." It seems not to have occurred to Wilson that the pursuit of national identity via recurrent spasms of moral reform, if it really characterizes much of the American historical experience which is more than doubtful has been a singularity among modern nations, and remains so. Nor does he seem to notice that the recent American conflict over the meaning of its civil religion an Enlightenment religion of world improvement and universalistic individualism has not been replicated in any other country. This preoccupation with the singularities of the recent cultural history of the United States imparts an air of oddity to Wilson's entire project, since its aim is supposed to be entirely universal that of rescuing us from moral scepticism by convincing us of the reality of an innate human disposition to moral judgment and behaviour. Because his argument is dominated by the local and transitory context of recent debates in America, it fails to persuade, even when all that he is doing is to walk again over well-trodden ground in the argument for a moral sense. As Wilson himself notes, this is a very familiar argument of the eighteenth-century Scottish and other British moralists. His aim is to supplement this eighteenth-century argument with supporting evidences from the social sciences that were not available to the original moral-sense theorists. It must be said that Wilson's use of recent empirical work is fair-minded and judicious in the highest degree, never simply partisan, and does go some distance towards his goal of reinforcing the eighteenth-century argument. Yet the telescoping of modern intellectual history that his account involves, together with the lack of any systematic reference to the large twentieth-century literature on scepticism, realism and related issues in moral epistemology, leaves his argument with large and embarrassing lacunae. The incautious reader would be surprised to learn that modern ethical scepticism finds some of its strongest statements in the works of fideist and conservative writers, not liberal humanists: it was Pascal, after all, who observed that it is a queer sort of justice that is different on the other side of the Pyrenees, and Montaigne who deployed Pyrrhonism in the service of obedience to authority. Again, Wilson's neglect of the vast and subtly ramified philosophical literature on questions of ethical realism leads him to crudify the views of some recent writers, such as Richard Rorty, to a point at which they are almost unrecognizable. Most important, he does not confront the hardest problem for moral-sense theories, which is that of accounting for the fact that cardinal points in our current moral sense, such as the wrongness of slavery, are not shared by many deeply reflective and civilized men at other periods, even in the history of Western cultures. In this crucial respect, it cannot be said that Wilson makes any real advance on the wri-tings of the eighteenth-century moral-sense theorists. There is much in Wilson's argument against topical fallacies that is shrewd, commonsensical and illuminating. At the same time, the limitation of his intellectual horizons to the ephemera of current American controversy gives his book a defensive and polemical aspect and disables it as a contribution to moral theory, and even as an exercise in cultural criticism. It is difficult to resist the suspicion that the significance of The Moral Sense will be lapidary, as an apology for a civil religion whose days plainly are now numbered. From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 4 22:57:31 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 4 Jun 2005 18:57:31 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: John Gray: Classic problems Message-ID: John Gray: Classic problems The Times Literary Supplement, 41995.4.28 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2044843&window_type=print Terence Ball. REAPPRAISING POLITICAL THEORY Revisionist studies in the history of political thought 310pp. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ?35 (paperback, ?12.95). - 0 19 827953 1. It is a commonplace that practising politicians find little that is helpful or enlightening in the work of contemporary political theorists. Has this always been so, merely illustrating a familiar contrast between the leisurely pursuit of an illusion of order in the theorist's study and the pell-mell of accidents and emergencies that are the stuff of everyday political life? Or does the manifest marginality of political theory tell us something about recent political theorizing? Terence Ball leans towards the latter view, citing the discipline's "increasing withdrawal from the world and its tendency to turn in on itself and to concern itself with esoterica spawned and nurtured within its own hermetically sealed hothouse". Yet in the course of Ball's wide-ranging, deeply thoughtful, often entertaining and always refreshingly readable book, the reasons for the declining political resonance of political theory are hinted at rather than expounded systematically, and he seems to retreat from a radical critique of the subject as it has latterly been practised. Is it not the hegemony within political theory, over the past generation, of an American liberal project dedicated to supplanting politics by law that most plausibly accounts for the subject's dwindling relevance? In all of its varieties, from the libertarian rights theory of the early Nozick to the egalitarian theory of justice of the later Rawls, this latter-day liberal project is culture-bound and indeed parochial in its innocent dependency on a peculiarly American faith in law. In expressing the deep-seated American illusion that intractable political conflicts can be arbitrated, or domesticated, by recourse to legal procedures and institutions, the species of liberalism that has dominated political philosophy in recent years cuts itself off from the longer history of political thought, and of liberalism, in which this legalist project of neutering political conflict by appeal to law has always been seen to be utopian. This Americocentric liberalism has little, if any, salience in other parts of the world, where the political agenda is governed not by individualist conceptions of law and rights but by the need to work out terms of peaceful coexistence among different communities. Is not the capture of political thought by a shallow and impoverished form of liberal individualism, whose tacit project is the destruction of the political realm as a site for public deliberation on the common good, and which denies the primacy of the craft of politics in achieving and renewing a modus vivendi, the root cause of the apparent political irrelevance of recent political theory? Terence Ball's object in Reappraising Political Theory is to reaffirm the interest and relevance of political thought by advancing a reading of its central canon that is methodologically pluralistic and problem-oriented. It is pluralist in holding that no single interpretative strategy can capture the meanings of any political text, and problem-driven in maintaining that the most productive and illuminating interpretation of a text will depend in part on the nature of our interest in it. According to Ball, neither the radically historicist, "contextualist" readings favoured by Quentin Skinner and others of his school, nor the approach developed in literary theory by the now archaic New Criticism which reads a piece of political theory as a timeless text in regard to which authorial intention and historical context are irrelevancies, can claim unique interpretative validity. Without in any way endorsing the nihilism about meaning expressed in deconstructive critical theory, Ball insists that the task of the interpretation is at once inescapable and inexhaustible, because its goals vary as our interests change. This eminently sensible and pragmatic view sets the tone for much else in the book. Throughout, Ball is concerned to defend a stance of balance and moderation against radical criticism of the Western canon in political thought. So judicious and indeed so successful is he in this project that even a careful and sympathetic reader could finish the book wondering how it is that political theory in recent decades has in Ball's account of it come to be a hermetic discipline, in which political theorists talk principally to each other. For it is plain that, though practising politicians find little of sustenance in it, the public cultures of Western countries are increasingly animated by the anti-political doctrines of American liberalism which have set the agenda in political philosophy for a generation. Ball discusses the "classic texts" of political theory the writings of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, and the two Mills, for example in a way which not only affords a new perspective on them but also provides an arrestingly fresh vantage point from which the enduring dilemmas of political thought can be reconsidered. In part, Ball is concerned to defend these thinkers against the charge of being "dead white males", from whom nothing significant can now be learnt; and, at times, there are in his book faint echoes of Harold Bloom's project of defining a Western canon against "multicultural" criticism. Here, Ball perhaps takes too seriously an intense but ephemeral and fundamentally frivolous local debate. The struggle between curricular multiculturalism and the conservative redefinition of Western intellectual traditions has little relevance outside the American academy, where it expresses local anxieties about "multiculturalism", ethnicity and American cultural identity rather than any more universal issues. More particularly, that debate does not reflect any genuine Western intellectual engagement with non-Occidental cultures, but instead the project of appropriating them for a contemporary Western, or American, discourse of race and gender. It is difficult to see how this debate could be of deep interest to anyone outside the United States. In fact, Ball's main arguments are not directed to this debate, but to the far deeper subject of the continuity and enduring importance of the problems which these writers addressed. He finds in Machiavelli, not the uncompromising exemplar of modernity imagined by followers of Leo Strauss, among others, but a thinker committed to an attempt to revive in the idea of virtu an archaic, possibly Homeric conception of "role-specific excellence", or arete an idea which has little in common with either the Christian or the Ciceronian-humanist conceptions of virtus, or any modern notion of virtue. Machiavelli's anachronistic project of reviving and giving a modern political use to an ancient moral category suggests to Ball some intriguing questions as to why the changeability of ethical ideas has been so inadequately grasped by philosophers, and so much better understood by novelists and playwrights. The mutability of moral notions, and their considerable cultural variations, have subversive implications for the view of philosophical method that underpins the recently dominant "analytical" school of political philosophy, implications which Ball does not systematically explore. The "analytical" school sees itself as engaged in an enterprise of clarification and elucidation; its investigations are based on the products of "our" linguistic and moral intuitions. The result is an "analysis" of such "concepts" as "justice" and "the person" and a casuistic dissection of rival "principles" of equality and liberty. The historical particularity and political formation of the discourses which issue in these "intuitions" and "analyses" along with their uncritical reproduction of the norms of liberal culture, in particular that of the United States, are suppressed by a method that reifies changing discursive practices and treats them as the unhistorical data of reflection. By neglecting conceptual change in this way, analytical political philosophy cannot avoid ending up as a conservative apologia for liberal culture. A subject animated by such a project may not have much of a future. Ball develops interesting speculative analogies between Machiavelli's search for a "political alchemy", in which modern political cultures are reinvigorated by ancient virtues, and Robespierre's cult of Roman civic virtue. He also compares Ayatollah Khomeini's vision of an ideal Islamic order with the Moral Majority's attempt to revive patriarchal family values. On the folly of all these projects, Ball echoes Marx: "if indeed history repeats itself, it does so the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce". The lesson that we learn from Ball's account of Machiavelli is that our current moral vocabulary, and the conceptions of virtue it expresses, may well be confused, or even, as Alasdair MacIntyre argued in After Virtue, incoherent; but we cannot hope to escape our condition by reverting to any earl-ier, and supposedly simpler, form of moral life. There is much else in Ball's rich and profoundly learned book that repays close study and careful thought, notably a fascinating reinterpretation of Hobbes read in somewhat Saussurean terms as a theorist of parole, of language in use, rather than of langue in which the loss or lack of shared meanings is seen as the most fundamental source of political conflict and breakdown. Hobbes sought to restore fixed meanings by conferring on the sovereign the authority to cleanse language of dangerous indeterminacies. Ball sees Hobbes's positivistic project of a sanitized language as a warning to us today, in that we are familiar in a way that Hobbes could not have been with regimes which seek to close the conceptual space within which dissenting thought can occur. This is a reasonable concern. In our current circumstances, however, a different concern seems more urgent that the hegemony within the public culture of an essentially indeterminate and at the same time absolutist discourse of rights will further deplete the resources of common understanding and make the political negotiation of a modus vivendi still more difficult to achieve. The paradox of our present circumstance, which Ball's reappraisal of political philosophy perceives but does not resolve, is that the ruling liberal orthodoxy in political philosophy now provides the only terms in which political practice can be conducted and yet at the same time it destroys the political realm as a public space in which we can come together in a fragile consensus on the life we hold in common. From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 4 22:57:40 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 4 Jun 2005 18:57:40 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: John Gray: Why irony can't be superior Message-ID: John Gray: Why irony can't be superior The Times Literary Supplement, 1995.11.3 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2043273&window_type=print The contradictions of Richard Rorty's postmodernism. Norman Geras, Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind, The ungroundable liberalism of Richard Rorty, 151pp. Verso. ?34.95 (paperback, Pounds 9.95). - 0 86091 453 4. What must be true for irony to be possible? The question is a natural one for any reader of Richard Rorty's writings. The recurring theme in Rorty's work is that liberal cultures whose relationship with their most central and fundamental practices is ironic will be better from a liberal perspective in which cruelty is the worst evil, the reduction of avoidable suffering the overriding imperative than liberal cultures which seek "foundations" for themselves in "universal principles". Rorty's ironists have given up that search, recognizing that liberal cultures are contingent all the way down.They are historical accidents that could easily have been otherwise, for which no justification that is universally compelling can ever be given. Such ironists differ from traditional sceptics in not perceiving this absence of foundations to be in any sense a loss. Instead of seeking the identity of a liberal culture in the requirements of reason, they find it in the sentiment of solidarity, in sympathetic identification with a form of life whose local and contingent character they freely acknowledge. They think of different ways of describing the world, not as more or less accurate representations of reality, but as more or less felicitous ways of serving human purposes. Neither science nor ethics is for them a mirror of nature. In helping rid us of the outworn metaphors that sustain both ethical and scientific realism, ironists make possible a liberal culture that is an improvement on any that has gone before. They enable us to see the descriptions and redescriptions we give of things as expressions of our freedom and imagination. Here irony is the negation of the spirit of seriousness, a playful engagement in world-making that is not haunted by nostalgia for the "one true" world that has been lost. In Rorty's account, the relationship of liberal ironists with their culture expresses a kind of pathos of distance. They remain steadfast partisans of its values, while regarding the universal claims that are integral to its public culture and to its self-image which are laboriously defended by contemporary apologists for Enlightenment projects of various sorts with detachment. The narrower question that Rorty's account naturally suggests is whether a liberal culture could renew itself, and even as Rorty claims improve itself if its self-understanding became ironic. The larger question is what difference internalizing a Rortyish postmodern sensibility into the public culture of modern Western societies would make to them. A significant part of Rorty's work is a sustained polemic against a certain conception of philosophy the conception, roughly, that Wittgenstein attributed to F. P. Ramsay and condemned as "bourgeois", in which philosophers aim to secure foundations for the practices of particular communities. Rorty repudiates philosophy of this kind, partly because he sees no need for the foundations that it seeks, and partly because he has a different conception of the subject, in which it is more closely allied to literature and the humanities than it is to any of the sciences. In this other understanding of philosophy, it does for us what a good novel does it enriches our human understanding by exercizing the imagination. Rorty's own writings such as the marvellous essays on Proust, Nabokov and Orwell, collected in his Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, his writings on Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Davidson, and his book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature are themselves, perhaps, the most compelling contemporary exemplars of this style of philosophizing. Among philosophers, Rorty's conception of the subject has been resisted for a number of reasons, some more compelling than others. His across-the-board dismissal of traditional ideals of truth has been found unpersuasive by those and there are many who wish to reject realism in ethics but hold on to it in the philosophy of science. Others, whose model for philosophy is the practice of the cognitive sciences, are reluctant to relinquish a conception of the subject in which it yields insights but nothing akin to cumulative knowledge. In so far as these are merely debates within philosophy about the proper purposes of the subject, or the varieties of realism they are of little general interest, since they concern a discipline that has long been, and seems likely to remain, about as central in the larger culture it inhabits as heraldry. They are, of course, a good deal more than debates within philosophy. All contemporary Western societies are afflicted in varying degrees by a pervasive cultural self-doubt to which Rorty's conception of liberal irony is directly relevant. The historic sources of the cultural confidence of Western societies, in Christianity and in variations on the Enlightenment project, are fast depleting everywhere. What Christianity and the dwindling cultural legacy of the Enlightenment did was to confer on the most central practices of Western societies the imprimatur of universal authority. It should not surprise anyone that Rorty's spirited and resourceful attacks on the central foundationalist and realist traditions of Western philosophy, together with his subtle and provocative defence of an ironic postmodern liberalism, have evoked the hostility at once of American neoconservative culture-warriors and latter-day partisans of the Enlightenment project. For both of them fear that, if Rorty's seeming insouciant relativism is accepted, then anything goes. Though these critics may be political opponents, they are at one in their stalwart defence of the central Western intellectual traditions that Rorty incessantly, and on the whole tellingly, attacks. In Norman Geras's Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind: The ungroundable liberalism of Richard Rorty, we have something we cannot expect from Rorty's neoconservative critics a critique of Rorty's postmodern liberalism that is consistently challenging and morally serious. Geras's argument against Rorty has four distinct strands, which are developed separately in the book's four chapters. A major strand that recurs throughout is Geras's argument that Rorty's account of the behaviour of rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust as being motivated by sympathy for the fate of "other Milanese" or "fellow Jutlanders", rather than by universalistic concern for other human beings goes against the evidence and the testimony of the rescuers themselves. A second argument aims to dis-entangle the different claims that are being made when Rorty tries to dispense with any idea of a common human nature. A third strand of reasoning attacks Rorty's claim that concern for the lot of the weak and oppressed has, and needs, no other basis than the traditions of specific (liberal) communities; it maintains that this radically particularistic communitarian interpretation of morality is incompatible with Rorty's assertion (in his 1993 Oxford Amnesty lecture) that "the culture of human rights" is "morally superior to other cultures". A fourth line of criticism aims to confront head-on the moral and political implications of Rorty's anti-realism, and argues that, if there is no truth, there is no justice and, perhaps more importantly, no injustice either. A recurrent theme in Geras's book is an immanent criticism of Rorty's postmodern stance, which suggests that it coheres awkwardly, if at all, with the liberal political causes to which he like Geras is committed. The subtext of the entire book, in fact, its real message, is the claim that Rorty's postmodern view that there is no truth of the matter in ethics necessarily undermines the universalist political moralities that the Enlightenment project expressed. How these four lines of criticism are meant to support one another is not very clear. Consider Geras's criticism of Rorty's account of rescuers' motives during the Holocaust. It may be true that Rorty's admittedly impressionistic account does not square with much of the available evidence and testimony; but the heroic behaviour of the rescuers tells against Rorty's account of morality only if the universalist beliefs which apparently inspired them are not themselves interpreted as well they might be by Rorty as expressing moral sentiments instilled by particular cultures or traditions. (And, in any case, why must we suppose that such uncalculated acts of heroic solidarity depend upon the moral beliefs of those who make them?) Geras is on stronger ground in his criticism of Rorty's attempt to do without any conception of a common human nature. It is hyperbolic to maintain, as Rorty sometimes does, that human beings are so completely malleable by socialization that there is no sense in talk of their having a nature in common. Perhaps talk of human nature might legitimately be dropped, as being lumbered with too much essentialist baggage; but that there are enduring human needs that are species-wide and largely resistant to socialization will not be disputed by anyone who accepts a Darwinian account of our origins and kinship with other animal species. There is a tension in Rorty's thought at just this point, between the thoroughgoing naturalism he shares with Dewey and the Idealist conception of human beings as being constituted by their beliefs about themselves which he adapts from the later Wittgenstein. It is an implication of any coherent naturalist view, and a central insight of Freud's, that human beings have needs and desires which demand expression and satisfaction regardless of their beliefs and socialization. What Geras's defence of a common human nature cannot do is to ground any universal political morality. It is an oddity of Geras's book that he seems to take the political morality of Enlightenment humanism so much for granted that he can write as if an argument against unrestricted cultural relativism is somehow an argument for the Enlightenment project of universal human emancipation. And there is no doubt that the justice he thinks Rorty's particularistic account of morality makes impossible is liberal justice, rendered in a somewhat Marxian idiom. But, of course, history abounds with universalist moralities that are in no sense liberal; and, as we all know, the content of liberal universalism can itself vary abruptly and radically. Affirmative action is defended, and attacked, as being demanded, or prohibited, by universal principles of liberal justice; but it is a funny sort of justice whose limits are marked by different meetings of the APA true at the Boston meeting, false in Los Angeles. The inexorable implication of Rorty's work is that liberal cultures are only one sort of human culture among many, and can claim no privileged rational authority for themselves. Rorty cannot take a full-bloodedly particularist and historicist view of liberal culture and at the same time make the standard liberal-imperialist claim that Western "cultures of rights" are superior to all others. His affirmation of the contingency and irreducible diversity of the forms of moral life must surely be as tolerant of the extraordinary experiment under way in Singapore as it is of the liberal utopia he favours himself. Rorty's candid ethnocentrism is an advance on the dominant American school of Kantian liberal political philosophy, whose tacit agenda seems to be to come up with a transcendental deduction of themselves; but it shares with that school an unironic acceptance of the claims of Western liberal cultures to moral superiority over all others. In its most universal sense, an ironic consciousness is one which perceives that what is most essential in each of us is what is most accidental. Our parents, the first language we speak, our memories these are not only unchosen by us, they create the very selves that do all our later choosing. The central Western traditions which, following Nietzsche, Rorty so bracingly chastises the traditions not only of Christianity and the Enlightenment but also of Socratic inquiry are deeply uncomfortable with the acceptance of final contingency which this ironic consciousness betokens. Much philosophy done in these traditions is best understood as a project of exorcizing the perception of contingency which irony expresses. In its more historically particular sense, irony is the recognition that practices and institutions that claim a universal authority in reason have no such justification. This the sense in which Rorty speaks of liberal ironists is a highly specific cultural phenomenon, distinctive of and perhaps peculiar to contemporary Western liberal societies. This kind of irony presupposes a public culture whose self-image incorporates universalist principles with us, an enlightenment culture. Can we reasonably expect Western liberal institutions to survive unchanged a cultural mutation in which their universal claims are abandoned? It may well be that Rorty's postmodern liberalism, like other varieties of liberal theory, expresses one of the illusions of the age in which the future of liberal institutions is underwritten by the imperatives of modernity. That, after all, is the gist of all Enlightenment liberalisms the expectation that, unless it is derailed by war or fundamentalism, modernization is bound to carry liberal culture in its wake. What else can account for Rorty's confidence that liberal societies will emerge stronger from the spread of an ironic consciousness? If the recent history of East Asia is any guide, however, the expectation that modernization entails the global spread of Western liberal institutions is groundless, a deceptive shadow cast by a few centuries of European hegemony. For those who will not renounce the claim of Western liberal cultures to moral superiority, the dependency of Rorty's postmodern liberalism on an illusion of modernity must seem darkly ironic. For those who can achieve a post-ironic view of liberal culture as merely one form of life among others, it will be an opportunity to go further along the path that Rorty has opened up, and think afresh about the conditions for a modus vivendi in a world in which diverse communities, cultures and regimes can coexist in peace. John Gray's most recent book, Enlightenment's Wake:Politics and culture at the close of the modern age, was published last month. From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 4 22:58:32 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 4 Jun 2005 18:58:32 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYTBR: Star Wars: Episodes 1 and 2 Message-ID: Star Wars: Episodes 1 and 2 New York Times Book Review, 5.6.5 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/books/review/05JOHN01.html EMPIRE OF THE STARS Obsession, Friendship, and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes. By Arthur I. Miller. Illustrated. 364 pp. Houghton Mifflin Company. $26. CONFLICT IN THE COSMOS Fred Hoyle's Life in Science. By Simon Mitton. Illustrated. 401 pp. Joseph Henry Press. $27.95. By GEORGE JOHNSON The object of the game is to figure out how the universe works by watching tiny lights move across the sky. The answers must be expressed in numbers -- that is the cardinal rule -- but sometimes passions take over, leaving the history of astrophysics bloodied from clashes among some of the smartest people in the world. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar -- associates always called him Chandra -- was 19 when, on a boat from India to Britain, he had an idea whose consequences seemed absurd. Scientists suspected that when a star finally gave out, it would be squashed by its own gravity, growing smaller and denser until it died. But what if a star was so massive it was unable to stop collapsing? As it contracted its gravity would keep increasing until, Chandra concluded, it swallowed itself and disappeared -- a black hole. In the next few years, at Cambridge University, he showed mathematically how this would happen, and in 1935 (he was 24) presented his case at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society. The proof was in the equations, but the fight had barely begun. In ''Empire of the Stars: Obsession, Friendship, and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes,'' Arthur I. Miller, a British philosopher of science, describes the scene as Chandra's older colleague Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington rises to the podium and savages the black hole theory. To Eddington, as brash and overbearing as Chandra was reserved and polite, the theory was ''stellar buffoonery,'' and so great was his prestige that five decades passed before Chandra, then at the University of Chicago, was vindicated by a Nobel Prize. Cosmological politics makes for spellbinding dramas. But the stories are hard to tell. By combining clear explanations of the physics with page-turning accounts of two of astronomy's great feuds, ''Empire of the Stars'' and Simon Mitton's new book, ''Conflict in the Cosmos: Fred Hoyle's Life in Science,'' bring back a time when Cambridge was one of the most intellectually stimulating snake pits in the world. Chandra and Eddington were born with different kinds of brains. A caricature of the eccentric Cambridge don, Eddington thought in grand sweeps. Not content with explaining life cycles of stars, he pursued a theory that would account for everything from atoms' insides to the arrangement of galaxies. He didn't worry much about specifics; he went with hunches and let details sort themselves out. As adept with a pen as with a slide rule, he wrote elegant popularizations of science that sold all over the world. Eddington had anticipated the problem of black holes and all but willed it away: ''I think there should be a law of nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way,'' he said in that fateful encounter with Chandrasekhar. That wasn't simply bluster. His Cambridge colleague Ralph Fowler thought he had proved that quantum mechanics set a limit on how small a star could be. Eddington seized on those calculations as verification of what he hoped in his heart was true. More comfortable with mathematics than wordplay, Chandra took a more dogged approach, miring himself in the details and climbing his way out. His papers, dense with equations, told him his superiors were mistaken: Fowler had left something important out of his analysis of the death throes of stars -- the effects of relativity. Take those into account and it was clear that some stars would become infinitesimally small. It is risky to start a book with its climax, as Miller has done, opening with the confrontation at the Astronomical Society meeting. But the strategy works. Immediately the reader is set to wondering why Eddington, usually a fearless thinker, would so vehemently reject black holes. Even more exasperating is the obsequiousness of his colleagues, who dared not say publicly what they confided to friends, that Eddington was wrong. By the time the story is over, Miller reveals the reasons, which have as much to do with psychology as with the abstractions of modern physics. SADLY, Chandra too becomes adept at the game. Guessing that the society would send one of his papers to James Jeans, a prominent Eddington rival, for review, he made sure to include a reference to Jeans's research. ''The trick worked!'' Chandra gloated in a letter to a friend. ''It is all really sickening -- these underhand methods, but what can one do?'' Though hurt and disillusioned by his Cambridge experiences, he didn't hold a grudge. After he moved to the United States, he and Eddington exchanged cordial letters. When food was rationed in England during World War II, Chandra sent his old adversary, who would soon die of cancer, care packages of rice. Eddington was a hard act to follow, but along came Fred Hoyle. In ''Conflict in the Cosmos,'' Mitton, a Cambridge astronomer who knew many of the people in his story, describes how Hoyle arrived at the university from rural Yorkshire in 1933, shortly after Chandra did, and steeped himself in astrophysical skulduggery. Hoyle too was an outspoken expert on stellar evolution, and when an endless talk by the immovable Eddington prevented him from delivering a controversial paper, he was certain it was a plot. Maybe -- Eddington opposed his theory -- but Cambridge had a way of breeding paranoia. Hoyle stayed at Cambridge for life, eventually assuming Eddington's professorial chair. He was a deft literary stylist and popularizer -- he and Eddington were the Carl Sagans of their times -- and was possessed of a first-magnitude ego that led him into his own intellectual swamp. While Eddington abhorred black holes, Hoyle recoiled at the notion that the universe began with what he mockingly called a ''big bang.'' (The name stuck, embraced by friends and foes of the theory.) Just as the universe was infinite in extent, Hoyle was certain, it must also be infinite in time. In this ''steady state'' cosmology, there was no abrupt beginning; matter is constantly generated everywhere. As he put it on a popular BBC radio show, ''This means that in a volume equal to a one-pint milk bottle about one atom is created in a thousand million years.'' It was a minority view, but he and a few like-minded theorists were able to keep the plate spinning for years. Another Cambridge luminary, Martin Ryle, finally brought it crashing down. An irascible, hardheaded experimenter, Ryle thought theorists like Hoyle were daffy. In a colloquium on sunspots, Mitton reports, Ryle became so incensed by Hoyle's speculations that he dashed to the blackboard and angrily erased the equations. Ryle, an expert at measuring stellar radio waves, was determined to disprove the steady-state theory. Continuous creation of matter would mean that galaxies everywhere are about the same age. But if the universe began with an explosion, more distant objects would appear younger, for their light has been traveling toward Earth since the beginning of time. When Ryle's numbers were plotted on a graph, the outcome of the great debate came down to the slope of a single line. For years it seesawed, as the first Cambridge Survey of Radio Sources was followed by a second and a third. In 1961 Hoyle and his wife were invited to attend a press conference in which Ryle would present the fourth survey's results. That turned out to be a setup. Hoyle squirmed onstage while Ryle unfurled his data. ''Would Professor Hoyle care to comment?'' In a bizarre twist, The Evening Standard of London headlined the outcome: ''Universe -- Bible Is Correct.'' In the beginning was the Big Bang. Not that Hoyle was persuaded. He was as overly impressed with his sense of cosmological aesthetics as Eddington had been with his. Big bangs popping out of nowhere, stars disappearing into gravitational holes -- call it ugly, if you like, but don't expect the universe to care. George Johnson's most recent book is ''Miss Leavitt's Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe.'' From checker at panix.com Sun Jun 5 16:01:16 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 5 Jun 2005 12:01:16 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: (Class) Richest Are Leaving Even the Rich Far Behind Message-ID: Richest Are Leaving Even the Rich Far Behind http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/national/class/HYPER-FINAL.html By [44]DAVID CAY JOHNSTON When F. Scott Fitzgerald pronounced that the very rich "are different from you and me," Ernest Hemingway's famously dismissive response was: "Yes, they have more money." Today he might well add: much, much, much more money. The people at the top of America's money pyramid have so prospered in recent years that they have pulled far ahead of the rest of the population, an analysis of tax records and other government data by The New York Times shows. They have even left behind people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Call them the hyper-rich. They are not just a few Croesus-like rarities. Draw a line under the top 0.1 percent of income earners - the top one-thousandth. Above that line are about 145,000 taxpayers, each with at least $1.6 million in income and often much more. The average income for the top 0.1 percent was $3 million in 2002, the latest year for which averages are available. That number is two and a half times the $1.2 million, adjusted for inflation, that group reported in 1980. No other income group rose nearly as fast. The share of the nation's income earned by those in this uppermost category has more than doubled since 1980, to 7.4 percent in 2002. The share of income earned by the rest of the top 10 percent rose far less, and the share earned by the bottom 90 percent fell. Next, examine the net worth of American households. The group with homes, investments and other assets worth more than $10 million comprised 338,400 households in 2001, the last year for which data are available. The number has grown more than 400 percent since 1980, after adjusting for inflation, while the total number of households has grown only 27 percent. The Bush administration tax cuts stand to widen the gap between the hyper-rich and the rest of America. The merely rich, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, will shoulder a disproportionate share of the tax burden. President Bush said during the third election debate last October that most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans. In fact, most - 53 percent - will go to people with incomes in the top 10 percent over the first 15 years of the cuts, which began in 2001 and would have to be reauthorized in 2010. And more than 15 percent will go just to the top 0.1 percent, those 145,000 taxpayers. The Times set out to create a financial portrait of the very richest Americans, how their incomes have changed over the decades and how the tax cuts will affect them. It is no secret that the gap between the rich and the poor has grown, but the extent to which the richest are leaving everyone else behind is not widely known. The Treasury Department uses a computer model to examine the effects of tax cuts on various income groups but does not look in detail fine enough to differentiate among those within the top 1 percent. To determine those differences, The Times relied on a computer model based on the Treasury's. Experts at organizations representing a range of views, including the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and Citizens for Tax Justice, reviewed the projections and said they were reasonable, and the Treasury Department said through a spokesman that the model was reliable. The analysis also found the following: ?Under the Bush tax cuts, the 400 taxpayers with the highest incomes - a minimum of $87 million in 2000, the last year for which the government will release such data - now pay income, Medicare and Social Security taxes amounting to virtually the same percentage of their incomes as people making $50,000 to $75,000. ?Those earning more than $10 million a year now pay a lesser share of their income in these taxes than those making $100,000 to $200,000. ?The alternative minimum tax, created 36 years ago to make sure the very richest paid taxes, takes back a growing share of the tax cuts over time from the majority of families earning $75,000 to $1 million - thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars annually. Far fewer of the very wealthiest will be affected by this tax. The analysis examined only income reported on tax returns. The Treasury Department says that the very wealthiest find ways, legal and illegal, to shelter a lot of income from taxes. So the gap between the very richest and everyone else is almost certainly much larger. The hyper-rich have emerged in the last three decades as the biggest winners in a remarkable transformation of the American economy characterized by, among other things, the creation of a more global marketplace, new technology and investment spurred partly by tax cuts. The stock market soared; so did pay in the highest ranks of business. One way to understand the growing gap is to compare earnings increases over time by the vast majority of taxpayers - say, everyone in the lower 90 percent - with those at the top, say, in the uppermost 0.01 percent (now about 14,000 households, each with $5.5 million or more in income last year). From 1950 to 1970, for example, for every additional dollar earned by the bottom 90 percent, those in the top 0.01 percent earned an additional $162, according to the Times analysis. From 1990 to 2002, for every extra dollar earned by those in the bottom 90 percent, each taxpayer at the top brought in an extra $18,000. President Ronald Reagan signed tax bills that benefited the wealthiest Americans and also gave tax breaks to the working poor. President Bill Clinton raised income taxes for the wealthiest, cut taxes on investment gains, and expanded breaks for the working poor. Mr. Bush eliminated income taxes for families making under $40,000, but his tax cuts have also benefited the wealthiest Americans far more than his predecessors' did. The Bush administration says that the tax cuts have actually made the income tax system more progressive, shifting the burden slightly more to those with higher incomes. Still, an Internal Revenue Service study found that the only taxpayers whose share of taxes declined in 2001 and 2002 were those in the top 0.1 percent. But a Treasury spokesman, Taylor Griffin, said the income tax system is more progressive if the measurement is the share borne by the top 40 percent of Americans rather than the top 0.1 percent. The Times analysis also shows that over the next decade, the tax cuts Mr. Bush wants to extend indefinitely would shift the burden further from the richest Americans. With incomes of more than $1 million or so, they would get the biggest share of the breaks, in total amounts and in the drop in their share of federal taxes paid. One reason the merely rich will fare much less well than the very richest is the alternative minimum tax. This tax, the successor to one enacted in 1969 to make sure the wealthiest Americans could not use legal loopholes to live tax-free, has never been adjusted for inflation. As a result, it stings Americans whose incomes have crept above $75,000. The Times analysis shows that by 2010 the tax will affect more than four-fifths of the people making $100,000 to $500,000 and will take away from them nearly one-half to more than two-thirds of the recent tax cuts. For example, the group making $200,000 to $500,000 a year will lose 70 percent of their tax cut to the alternative minimum tax in 2010, an average of $9,177 for those affected. But because of the way it is devised, the tax affects far fewer of the very richest: about a third of the taxpayers reporting more than $1 million in income. One big reason is that dividends and investment gains, which go mostly to the richest, are not subject to the tax. Another reason that the wealthiest will fare much better is that the tax cuts over the past decade have sharply lowered rates on income from investments. While most economists recognize that the richest are pulling away, they disagree on what this means. Those who contend that the extraordinary accumulation of wealth is a good thing say that while the rich are indeed getting richer, so are most people who work hard and save. They say that the tax cuts encourage the investment and the innovation that will make everyone better off. "In this income data I see a snapshot of a very innovative society," said Tim Kane, an economist at the Heritage Foundation. "Lower taxes and lower marginal tax rates are leading to more growth. There's an explosion of wealth. We are so wealthy in a world that is profoundly poor." But some of the wealthiest Americans, including Warren E. Buffett, George Soros and Ted Turner, have warned that such a concentration of wealth can turn a meritocracy into an aristocracy and ultimately stifle economic growth by putting too much of the nation's capital in the hands of inheritors rather than strivers and innovators. Speaking of the increasing concentration of incomes, Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, warned in Congressional testimony a year ago: "For the democratic society, that is not a very desirable thing to allow it to happen." Others say most Americans have no problem with this trend. The central question is mobility, said Bruce R. Bartlett, an advocate of lower taxes who served in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations. "As long as people think they have a chance of getting to the top, they just don't care how rich the rich are." But in fact, economic mobility - moving from one income group to another over a lifetime - has actually stopped rising in the United States, researchers say. Some recent studies suggest it has even declined over the last generation. From checker at panix.com Sun Jun 5 16:01:27 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 5 Jun 2005 12:01:27 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: (Class) Old Nantucket Warily Meets the New Message-ID: Old Nantucket Warily Meets the New New York Times, 5.6.5 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/national/class/NANTUCKET-FINAL.html By [2]GERALDINE FABRIKANT NANTUCKET, Mass. - In spring, along with the daffodils, crowds on the ferry and workers raking the beaches, comes the ritual of real estate gossip. What properties changed hands over the winter? And who could possibly be paying those out-of-sight prices? That 15-acre waterfront parcel for sale for $15 million? It was snatched up after only one day on the market. Turns out the purchaser was Steven Rales, the billionaire entrepreneur who owns at least 61 acres next door and bought the parcel to protect his privacy and waterfront views, said Dalton Frazier, a local real estate agent. Have any other palatial estates expanded? Not so long ago H. Wayne Huizenga, the billionaire founder of Blockbuster and owner of the Miami Dolphins, wanted more elbow room and bought a neighboring house for $2.5 million. Richard Mellon Scaife, the publisher and heir to a banking fortune, bought an extra house too; he needed it for the staff. The real estate frenzy, even in the dead of winter, is only the most visible reminder that over the past decade or so this 50-square-mile, fishhook-shaped island off the Cape Cod coast has come to be dominated by a new class: the hyper-rich. They emerged in the 1980's and 1990's, when tectonic shifts in the economy created mountains of wealth. They resemble the arrivistes of the Gilded Age, which began in the 1880's when industrial capitalists amassed staggering fortunes, except that there are so many of them and they seem to be relatively anonymous. Like their precursors, they tend to be brash, confident and unapologetic. They feel they have earned their money, and they are not shy about spending it. They construct huge mansions, outdo one another in buying high-end status symbols like mega-yachts (100 years ago it was private railroad cars) and not infrequently turn to philanthropy. Their wealth is washing over the upper reaches of society as it did a century ago, bringing cultural and political clout as they take up positions on museum boards and organize presidential campaign fund-raising dinners. And they seem unconcerned about being accepted by the old money. If the blue bloods want to mix with them, fine. But if not, the hyper-rich are content to stick with their kind. If they cannot join an exclusive country club, they form their own. They are very good at creating a self-enclosed world where the criterion for admission is not the Social Register, but money. Once a low-key summer resort, Nantucket is rapidly turning into their private preserve, joining the ranks of other enclaves like Palm Beach, Aspen, the Hamptons and Sun Valley. Now that the hyper-rich have achieved a critical mass, property values have zoomed so high that the less-well-off are being forced to leave and the island is becoming nature's ultimate gated community. "It's a castle with a moat around it," said Michael J. Kittredge, a 53-year-old entrepreneur who realized a fortune when he sold his Yankee Candle Company seven years ago for about $500 million. He was relaxing in the living room of his 10,000-square-foot house, which has a basement movie theater and a 2,000-bottle wine cellar. A separate residence a quarter-mile away houses staff members and a gym. "Successful people want to be with other successful people," Mr. Kittredge said. "Birds of a feather," he added. "On Nantucket you don't feel bad because you want a nice bottle of wine. If you order a $300 bottle in a restaurant, the guy at the next table is ordering a $400 bottle." Dressed in blue jeans and a pink button-down shirt, he looked across the breadth of his swimming pool at a spectacular water view. The island, he said, is rapidly dividing into two types of people: "the haves and the have-mores." New-Fashioned Values Nantucket, with its vistas overlooking cranberry bogs and more than 80 miles of beaches, has always had its share of rich people. In the first half of the 19th century, owners of whaling ships amassed fortunes from oil and built the still well-preserved Federalist and Greek Revival mansions on upper Main Street. During the last century, Vanderbilts, Mellons, duPonts and other wealthy families built residences here. Over time, as inherited wealth smoothed the rough edges, their descendants morphed into American high society and evolved a signature style of living based on understatement and old-fashioned patrician values. Some of the scions of these older families are still here. They spend their time sailing, playing tennis and sometimes recalling the halcyon days of crossing the moors behind packs of beagles to hunt down rabbits. The mix of the old aristocratic families and the hyper-rich often plays out as a none-too-subtle tug of war between class and money. Nina Chandler Murray, an 85-year-old relative of the Poor family from Standard & Poor's, the investment credit rating firm, is convinced that the world of the elite was more genteel in the old days. "Coming from a New England background, you had a honed discipline of what was expected," Dr. Murray, a psychologist, said over iced tea and chocolate chip cookies on the porch of her hillside home above the harbor. "Showing off money was a sin. It was not that status was not important, but marriage was very closely controlled and predetermined, and everyone knew where everyone else fit." A family name alone was enough to place someone in the pecking order. Wealthy people dressed down. Women eschewed heavy jewelry. The uniform for a man was a plain shirt, faded "Nantucket red" Bermuda shorts and Topsiders. Now, Dr. Murray suggested, the rule is: If you've got it, flaunt it. "What has happened in America is that achievement is so important that everyone wants everyone else to know what they have done," she continued. "And in case you don't know, they want to tell you with a lethal combination of houses, cars and diamonds." Dr. Murray was appalled at a recent dinner party when a woman leaned over to her and said, "My husband paid $250,000 to join the golf club, and he doesn't even play golf." Work Hard, Spend Hard Mr. Kittredge, who began his candle-making business at age 16 in his mother's kitchen and says he was raised in a "lower-class to lower-middle-class" home, holds attitudes typical of many of the newcomers. When prodded he will say that he worked hard for his money and that others can do the same. He is unapologetic about spending it lavishly and says that he has paid his dues in the form of taxes, which he estimates at $500 million so far. He also says that the chasm between the old-timers and the newcomers is inevitable. "Money makes a lifestyle," he said. "It creates a division between the old money and the new. It is a little bit of class jealousy. We go to a cocktail party and a guy is telling my wife about his airplane. So finally the question comes up: 'How do you get over to the island?' and she says, 'We come by plane.' And he says, 'What kind of plane?' and she says, 'A G-IV.' And so the wind comes out of the guy's sails." "The old money guy has a twin-prop airplane and that is pretty incredible," Mr. Kittredge continued. "For his time, that is pretty great. Now he is talking to a guy who is half his age who has a transcontinental jet. That is the end of the conversation. "Or you meet someone and they start telling you about their boat. He has a 45-foot boat and he is very happy with it. Then he'll say, 'Do you have a boat?' And you say, 'Yes.' 'Well, what kind of boat do you have?' And you say, 'A Fed Ship.' And he says, 'How big is it?' That's how people rank them. So I have to say, 'It's 200 feet.' It's the end of the conversation. Is there envy? Yes, could be. Was he a wealthy guy in his day? Absolutely, but relative to today - no. The two worlds can mix as long as they don't talk too much." The accouterments of wealth play a different role for the old-money clans than they do for the new wealthy, says Nelson W. Aldrich Jr., author of "Old Money." "For many self-made men," Mr. Aldrich said, "homes, boats and even membership in expensive clubs are trophy signs of wealth. But for the older money, a boat may well be part of a tableau that has to do with family, with his grandparents and his children. It is part of his identity. If he walked away from the conversation, it was because he thought he was talking about his boat as part of his life. Instead he found he was talking about money, and he doesn't like being reminded that he lives in a competitive world." Over time, some say, the new money will not prove much different. "Ultimately, the new money becomes as insular as the old money because it gains the power to exclude," said Michael Thomas, a novelist who, like his father, was a partner at Lehman Brothers and whose mother came from an old New England family. "Once you have the power to exclude, you have what people have been seeking in old money." The single greatest change brought by the hyper-rich is in the cost of housing. The average Nantucket house price last year jumped 26 percent, to $1.672 million, said H. Flint Ranney, a veteran real estate broker. Last fall one waterfront residence, with its own elevator, wine cellar, theaters and separate guesthouse, sold for $16 million, the year's record. "Shame has somehow gone out the window," Mr. Thomas said. "There is no incentive to exercise control." A handful of the new affluent indulge their fantasies with gusto. Michael S. Egan, the founder of Alamo Rent-a-Car, built his own baseball field, complete with a batting cage and stands. Roger Penske, the automotive tycoon and former race car driver, tussled for months with the Historic District Commission until he finally won permission to build a faux lighthouse that joins the two wings of his multimillion-dollar home. The investment banker Robert Greenhill likes to fly his Cessna jet to the Nantucket airport or his Cessna seaplane to his waterfront dock. The rise in real estate values has, of course, benefited many of the old-timers. With some of their fortunes eroding, they find they are sitting on an extremely valuable asset, a realization that adds a touch of ambivalence to their protests against changes that are all too obvious. One such change is at the airport. On high summer weekends, more than 250 Challengers, Gulfstreams and Citations a day might land there, vying for parking spaces. Some jets drop off passengers for a round of golf and whisk them away after. In easternmost Siasconset, the gray-shingled fishermen's cottages that occupied the corners of plots of sea grass and wildflowers are giving way to mansions in private cul-de-sacs. Here and there hedges have sprouted up, tall as windsurfers, to partition the property parcels. They separate the community, contributing to the ineffable sense that something familiar and precious about the ethos of the island is disappearing. "At least one new family has built a hedge to avoid people seeing them as they pass by," said Wade Green, 72, who has summered here for years. "Those open paths had an old-fashioned elegance to them. It is part of an old and fading spirit of community. Blocking them off is an unfriendly and antipublic thing to do." Not all the changes here are striking. Downtown, with its cobblestone streets and absence of traffic lights, could still pass as a quaint New England fishing village. But some harbingers horrify the old-timers: upscale restaurants, boutique windows displaying expensive designer jewelry and the arrival of the first ever chain store, a Ralph Lauren shop. On the sidewalks, class speaks through clothes. "The old money wears Lily Pulitzer, J. McLaughlin and C K Bradley," said one saleswoman, who wanted her name withheld to avoid offending customers. "They wear gold hoops, and if they buy new jewelry it is pearls or they upgrade their diamond rings. The new money wears Juicy Couture, Calypso and big necklaces. They even go to different restaurants. The old people go to 21 Federal and the new people go to the Pearl. They don't want to mix. They want to show off for each other." But the lines cross. A handful of the hyper-rich gravitate toward Lily Pulitzer to give themselves a blue-blood look. And some pedigreed teenagers lust for Juicy Couture. Daisy Soros, wife of the harbor designer Paul Soros and sister-in-law of the financier George Soros, has been coming to Nantucket since the 1960's, an era when few women, new money or old, dressed up. She thinks that the newcomers are beginning to influence the culture. "Everybody is building monster houses now, and they are all dressing up," Mrs. Soros said. "Now even I wear Manolos," she added with a laugh. Some say that too much is being made of all these distinctions. "The only people who are truly class conscious," said Roger Horchow, who realized his fortune when he sold his catalog business to Neiman Marcus in 1988 for $117 million, "are the second tootsie wives of men with big bankrolls." Why Wait? Build a New One When there is a division between the old and the new, it is apt to express itself on the most time-honored of battlefields: the putting green, the tennis court or the marine berth. The existing clubs are still the preserves of the old wealth, but new clubs are springing up to welcome newcomers, as well as some longtime residents who grew impatient with waiting lists. For years the Sankaty Head Golf Club had a waiting list that seemed to extend for decades. So in 1995, Edmund A. Hajim, an investment banker in Manhattan, and others created the Nantucket Golf Club, assiduously designed to look as if it had been around forever. It became such a hit that its list is now full, too, even at a cost of $325,000 (80 percent reimbursable upon departure), as opposed to the $30,000 it costs to join Sankaty Head. In the same way, the old Nantucket Yacht Club has spawned a rival, the Great Harbor Yacht Club. About 300 families have already bought memberships, which now cost $300,000. Some Nantucketers applaud the new clubs. "Why shouldn't they start a club if they can't get into the old ones," said Letitia Lundeen, who was raised in the social whirl of New York and Washington and now runs an antiques store here. The resentment of new money riles Liz Petkevich, whose husband, J. Misha Petkevich, an investment banker and former Olympic figure skater, helped found the new yacht club. Her husband worked hard for what he achieved, she said. "Does that mean we are better than anyone else? No. But we should not be penalized because we cannot get into the old yacht club." In the old days, the clubs were homogenous and dominated by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant families. "When I first came here it was the tail end of the 'grande dame' era," said David L. Hostetler, a sculptor, who arrived in 1971. "The place was dominated by WASP women in Bermuda shorts. There were hardly any Jews." Today the island's elite is diversified enough to support a synagogue where membership has reached 250 families and where the yarmulke worn during services is Nantucket red and decorated with miniature whales. One place where the old and the new do mix is charity events. As in cultural and philanthropic institutions from San Francisco to New York City, the old money has made room at the table for the new money to replenish the coffers. There are more and more fund-raising events, and they are no longer the low-key affairs they once were. Last year the annual cocktail party and auction for the Nantucket Historical Association instituted valet parking and a classical quartet in black tie. Some appreciate the infusion of money and energy that the newcomers have brought. "The old money doesn't like to spend money because they worry about whether they can make it again," Ms. Lundeen said. "Even when they can spend it, they often think it's vulgar and unnecessary. The newcomers have brought the island up to par with their demands." Everything New Is Old Old-time Nantucketers are given to trading what one of them called "barbarian stories." Did you hear that Rick Sherlund, a Goldman Sachs partner, annoyed some of his neighbors when he hired Jackson Browne to entertain at his anniversary party? Or that Jon Winkelried, another Goldman Sachs partner, had the nerve to close off a small road that people had been using for as long as anyone can remember? Or that Louis V. Gerstner, the former I.B.M. chief executive, hired a Boston litigator to help him push through a plan for a large new house on his $11 million waterfront plot? Aggressive behavior, Dr. Murray said, is natural to the species. "And after all, why should they give it up?" she said. "Look where it has gotten them. That is exactly how they made their money." One Nantucketer was L. Dennis Kozlowski, the former chief executive of Tyco International, on trial a second time on charges of criminal larceny, accused of looting the company of tens of millions of dollars. His lavish New York apartment, with its $6,000 shower curtain, became a symbol of the over-the-top corporate lifestyle. To some, the multimillion-dollar party that Mr. Kozlowski gave on Sardinia to celebrate his wife's birthday - replete with a vodka-spewing ice sculpture fashioned after Michelangelo's "David" - was a modern echo of the lavish celebrations of the Gilded Age. Subtler distinctions between old and new money lie in the attitude toward work. The financier David Rubinstein bought a 15-acre waterfront property, tore down the existing house, as many wealthy buyers have done, and put up an 8,000-square-foot home. The stunning view lets him watch the sun rise and set, and yet he has boasted to friends that he spends only 12 days a year here; a rock on his front lawn reads: "I'd rather be working." Robert E. Torray, who is a co-manager of a mutual fund family and has been flying here on his company's Gulfstream since the 1980's, is either on the golf course or working the phone in his cranberry red library. He likes it here because there are Wall Street moguls everywhere and wherever he goes he can talk business. That is hardly the attitude of some veteran summer residents, who find comfort in the thought that they can occasionally be fogged in without worrying about the office. For them, being rich means a license to break schedules and to play. "If you are working," said Nicki Gamble, whose husband, Richard, is an heir to the Proctor & Gamble fortune, "it is very nerve-racking. The way to be here is not to be working." Caught by a Boom The high cost of housing is squeezing middle-class people off the island. The former principal of Nantucket High School, Paul Richards, and his wife, Martina, a nurse, moved last year to Needham, Mass., after renting here for five years. "The expense of that together with having two little children made a home beyond reach," Mr. Richards said. "It was frustrating to be driven away from two jobs that we very much enjoyed, but a starter home for our family would have cost over $600,000." Linda Finney Williams, administrator of the Nantucket Zoning Board of Appeals, who has a 19-year-old son in college and an older daughter in law school, said, "I'm hanging on by my fingernails." "The cost of living has risen so much that it's very hard on us." The demand for labor is so great that every weekday roughly 400 workers fly in from the mainland for construction, gardening, plumbing and other services. The commute may be a nuisance, but the money makes it worthwhile. It also explains why building is so expensive; the additional costs are passed along to customers. John Sheehan, a 65-year-old construction worker who rises every day at 4:30 a.m. to catch a plane from Hyannis, does not complain. "I have always been in the lower-middle-class area," Mr. Sheehan said. "But the times are good for me now. I'm making more money than I ever did and I'm living more comfortably." To try to stem the outflow of workers the Nantucket Housing Office, a private nonprofit group, has proposed a one-time "McMansion" tax of $8 per square foot on any construction space exceeding 3,000 square feet. The bill has several more hurdles, but if it is approved, the proceeds would be used to build housing for families making $120,825 a year or less. Some real estate agents worry that the hyper-rich will resent the tax, but so far wealthy homebuilders seem to regard it as a pittance compared with the other costs they incur. Despite the money to be made, some shop owners and other locals miss the way the island used to be. Though she applauds their self-confidence, Ms. Lundeen, the antiques dealer, says she is sometimes appalled by what she considers the cavalier ignorance of some women who are suddenly rich. "They don't want to learn," she said. "I had a monogrammed tray and when I proposed it to a customer, she said, 'Why would I want other people's monograms?' These women have never inherited anything." Robin Bergland, a young florist who moved here from Manhattan, has stopped providing flowers for weddings. "The final straw was a wedding where a Wall Street executive tried to bill me for the wedding gown and medical expenses," she said. "He charged that the roses I used to decorate their party tent ruined the hem of the bride's dress and caused her aunt to trip and break her leg. "I got threatening phone calls daily. I was terrified until I gave the case to my lawyer and they went away. There's no question it was unlikely to have happened five years ago." The old summer people "used to try and fit in," said Arlene Briard, a taxi driver who has lived here 35 years. "They didn't want to differentiate themselves by class or by a look that said how much money I have. When I sold TV Guides to people, I'd walk into a house, sit down and have a lemonade with people or play tennis with them at the yacht club. Now they get in my taxi and find a way to tell me that they belong to the Nantucket Golf Club. "Class has a certain grace," Ms. Briard said. "Just because you can go to Chanel and buy a dress does not mean you have class. A person who just pays their bills on time can have class." From checker at panix.com Sun Jun 5 16:01:36 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 5 Jun 2005 12:01:36 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: (Class) About the Data Message-ID: About the Data http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/national/class/05class_graphic_source.html Following are links to data that were the source of the graphics "Not Since the 20's Roared" and "The Wealthiest Benefit More From the Recent Tax Cuts." Also included are links to groups that will provide other sources and views on tax policy. The calculations come from four sources. The [2]data on income growth come from government tax return records was analyzed by [3]Emmanuel Saez, economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and Thomas Piketty, economics professor at the ?cole des Hautes ?tudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. The chart data is from Table A6. The [4]data on wealth come from the [5]Federal Reserve's Consumer Finance Survey, analyzed by [6]Edward Wolff, a professor of economics at New York University. The [7]estimates of taxes come from a computer model of the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the [8]Urban Institute and [9]Brookings Institution, and include income, corporate and estate taxes and proposals in the President's 2006 budget to make temporary cuts permanent. [10]2001 Income Data and Tax Share [11]2015 Tax Share [12]Share of Tax Cut Over 15 Years [13]Percentage of income paid in income, Social Security and Medicare taxes in 2004 Information on the Alternative Minimum Tax: [14]Percent paying A.M.T in 2004 and 2010 [15]How much of groups cuts taken [16]Average take back for those affected The [17]data on the 400 highest-income taxpayers come from an Internal Revenue Service report, with 2004 tax rules applied. In separate analyses The New York Times and Citizens for Tax Justice calculated the data under new tax rules and came up with nearly identical findings. The tax rates paid by such taxpayers are highly influenced by how much of their income derives from salaries, which are taxed at up to 35 percent, and from dividends and long-term capital gains, which are taxed at 15 percent and are exempt from the Alternative Minimum Tax. The administration will not allow the Internal Revenue Service to release its data on the top 400 taxpayers for 2001 and 2002. Other sources and views on tax policy: [18]Internal Revenue Service Extensive data on who pays which taxes. [19]Tax Foundation For data on the share of income and income taxes paid by income classes since 1980. [20]Citizens for Tax Justice Liberal analysis of tax policies. [21]Heritage Foundation Conservative analysis of tax policy. [22]Cato Institute Libertarian analysis of tax policy. [23]Tax Analysts Nonprofit's publications report in detail on tax policy. [24]Treasury Department Fact sheets on taxes. References 2. http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/saez/TabFigOUPvolume2.xls 3. http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/saez 4. http://www.levy.org/default.asp?view=publications_view&pubID=fca3a440ee 5. http://www.federalreserve.gov/ 6. http://www.nyu.edu/econ/dept/vitae/wolff.htm 7. http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/ 8. http://www.urban.org/ 9. http://www.brook.edu/ 10. http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/TaxModel/tmdb/TMTemplate.cfm?Docid=826 11. http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/TaxModel/tmdb/TMTemplate.cfm?Docid=827 12. http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/TaxModel/tmdb/TMTemplate.cfm?Docid=828 13. http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/TaxModel/tmdb/TMTemplate.cfm?Docid=829 14. http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/TaxModel/tmdb/TMTemplate.cfm?DocID=688 15. http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/TaxModel/tmdb/TMTemplate.cfm?DocID=692 16. http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/TaxModel/tmdb/TMTemplate.cfm?DocID=689 17. http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/00in400h.pdf 18. http://www.irs.gov/taxstats/index.html 19. http://taxfoundation.org/publications/show/250.html 20. http://ctj.org/ 21. http://www.heritage.org/Research/Taxes 22. http://www.cato.org/pubs/tbb/index.html 23. http://www.taxanalysts.com/ 24. http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/js2289.htm From checker at panix.com Sun Jun 5 16:01:50 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 5 Jun 2005 12:01:50 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Class Staircase: Up, Down, Sideways (7 Letters) Message-ID: Class Staircase: Up, Down, Sideways (7 Letters) New York Times, 5.6.5 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/opinion/l05class.html To the Editor: Re "The Five-Bedroom, Six-Figure Rootless Life" ("Class Matters" series, front page, June 1): I just left the "relo," or relocation, class, having lived in Alpharetta, Ga.-like variations with absent fathers and overscheduled kids. A place where a second grader with a few rough Little League outings gets a personal trainer to play catch and help his self-esteem. Like the Links described in the article, we decided that for our children's high school years, we needed roots. As a family, we had tried to opt out of the hyperparenting, but unstructured kid time is no fun if everyone else in the cul-de-sac is fully booked. We moved one last time to a rooted place. We have family dinners now where we argue for our ideas. We play town-level sports with neighbors. We see poets at our awesome library. This feels like a better childhood for our kids where we can ignore overscheduling. But there are two small glitches: high school sports and college applications. Both seem to require a childhood enclosed in S.U.V. armor, driving the mean streets to daily practice-tutors-lessons in order to make the cut. I have my fingers crossed for the underscheduled slackers. Lisa Braden-Harder Ridgefield, Conn., June 1, 2005 To the Editor: It's as if I knew what the next line of your June 1 article about class would be - from the anomie and rootlessness to the conspicuous consumption of country clubs, cars and clothes, to the furtive moving to a cheaper neighborhood in the middle of the night after the breadwinner was downsized. That's why this 1980's child of Plano, Tex., another of the suburbs mentioned in the article, opted out of corporate life and the possibility of relocation and into living and working first in Washington and now New York. These are cities with abundant mass transit and bountiful opportunities for community, where I can't help but interact with people of different races, religions and classes. Lisa Magnino Brooklyn, June 1, 2005 To the Editor: Kathy Link, the mother of three girls in the article's upper-middle-class family, has a goal for their college education: that, like her, they not have to work to attend school. But her life is ruled by a color-coded planner, too much volunteering, three or four tennis leagues and endless soccer commuting. In fact, she is working very hard, albeit not at a paid job and on a schedule that is grinding her down. Helen Feit Villanova, Pa., June 1, 2005 To the Editor: Some people think that Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" is the best rock song ever written. "How does it feel to be on your own, with no direction home?" No one in America understands that song better than the "relos" of the new exurban diaspora. That's why megachurches are growing. That's why Kathy Link is in a Bible study group. At its best, religion offers two things that the relos desperately need: community and meaning. (Rabbi) Jeffrey K. Salkin Atlanta, June 1, 2005 To the Editor: Re "Class and the American Dream" (editorial, May 30): You asked if the American dream of people rising from rags to riches with a little grit and imagination is mostly a myth. You suggest that "there is a full-fire way to mitigate the deep-seated, multifaceted impact of class," offering remedies like stronger affirmative action, anti-poverty and early-education programs. But national programs in health, child care and college tuition would certainly help level the playing field. Such programs are routine in every economically advanced country throughout the world except here. Cyril D. Robinson Carbondale, Ill., May 30, 2005 To the Editor: Your May 30 editorial "Class and the American Dream" falls into the "meritocracy" trap. A free country is one where everyone has the opportunity for success. As used to be true in this country, a man could be a success without graduating from high school, and a man could fail having graduated with honors from an Ivy League school. Freedom is freedom, not a guarantee of success for the high achievers. I would hate to live in a country where some measure of achievement whose standards are never really stated (but the government usually administers the test) determines my course of action. The cure you suggest - more government programs aimed at the middle and lower classes - simply cements the class concept into the American mind by way of government enforcement. How about getting the government out of the way so that each individual can try to live a fulfilling life by whatever nonviolent means he or she chooses? William J. Decker San Diego, May 30, 2005 To the Editor: I appreciate your "Class Matters" series, highlighting the pervasive effects of social class on individual lives - whether through poverty, stunted aspirations, poor education, lack of access to health care or inadequate housing. It is a stain on our society - and a mockery of the American Dream - that class origin has come to function more and more as caste, as a fixed and unequal condition, with less and less contact and flow between the worlds of the haves and the have-nots. More than 40 years ago, I was the child of poor and uneducated parents. But I was lucky - and I had help from, and formed social ties with, others who were more fortunate than I was. But as the worlds of the rich and the poor grow more remote from one another, such help and ties are less in evidence. More to the point, class is an artifact of society and not of nature. We owe our fellow citizens something better than an institutional structure that allows their fates to depend so deeply on the brute luck of class origin. Debra Satz Stanford, Calif., May 26, 2005 The writer is the chairwoman of the philosophy department at Stanford University. From checker at panix.com Sun Jun 5 16:02:51 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 5 Jun 2005 12:02:51 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Another Drink? Sure. China Is Paying. Message-ID: Another Drink? Sure. China Is Paying. New York Times, 5.6.5 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/business/yourmoney/05view.html By EDUARDO PORTER GUESS who's paying for America's spending binge - for the ballooning credit card bills, the scramble for homes, the country's gaping budgetary hole? Poor countries have become the financiers of the United States, fueling one of the most extravagant consumption drives in world history. From 1996 to 2004, the American current account deficit - which includes the trade deficit as well as net interest and dividend payments - grew to $666 billion from $120 billion, swelling the nation's demand for foreign financing by $546 billion. The cash has come mostly from what the International Monetary Fund defines as emerging markets or developing countries - nations that have piled up mountains of cash even though most of their citizens are poor. High on the list is China, whose per-capita gross domestic product of $1,300 last year was a thirtieth that of the United States. Others are Russia, where G.D.P. per head was $4,100, and India, where it barely topped $600. The current accounts of developing countries swung from a deficit of $88 billion in 1996 to a surplus of $336 billion last year - a $424 billion change that has covered some four-fifths of the increase in the deficit of the United States. This pattern troubles some policy makers in the United States. In speeches in March and April, Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve governor nominated by President Bush to be chief economic adviser, argued that a main reason for America's swelling external deficit is "the very substantial shift in the current accounts of developing and emerging-market nations, a shift that has transformed these countries from net borrowers on international capital markets to large net lenders." The poor-country money, Mr. Bernanke said, pushed the current account of the United States deeper into the red. As the money arrived, it first lifted stock prices, encouraging both consumption and investment. When stocks tanked, it moved to the bond market, fueling the housing boom and yet more spending. There's nothing inherently wrong with taking money from poor places - it's not as if the United States is stealing it. Developing countries are providing the funds willingly. But it is rather odd. Conventional economic thought suggests that funds should flow the other way. Capital-rich industrial nations like the United States, where workers already have a large stock of capital goods to work with - like high-tech factories and advanced information technology networks - should be sending money to places rich in labor but with a meager capital stock. Developing countries, of course, use this money to grow out of poverty, investing in their own factories and schools. And precisely because capital is scarce and labor abundant, money invested in these countries should achieve a higher return. "For the developing world to be lending large sums on net to the mature industrial economies is quite undesirable as a long-run proposition," Mr. Bernanke said. So what's going on? The efforts of China and other developing countries to keep their currencies from rising against the dollar help explain why the flow of global money is trumping conventional wisdom. Yet other forces are at play. The climb in oil prices, for one, has produced big gains for countries like Nigeria, Russia and Saudi Arabia, which have put much of the cash in dollar assets. Most important, running a current-account surplus has become a matter of self-defense throughout the developing world. Many of the poor countries that are now lending money to richer ones previously were big borrowers and spenders themselves. Then they were hit by a series of financial crises. Starting with the currency collapse in Mexico in 1994, and continuing with the Asian currency crisis of 1997, the Russian debt crisis of 1998, the Brazilian currency devaluation of 1999 and the Argentine default of 2002, developing countries experienced large-scale capital flight, which forced painful devaluations and sharp economic contractions. Naturally enough, they took measures to reduce the chance of further jolts. Countries stricken by crisis or just trying to avoid it tightened their belts. They stimulated exports and inhibited imports - working to keep their exchange rates low. They reduced domestic investment and paid down foreign debt. And they amassed vast foreign reserve war chests to protect themselves in case investors ever decided to bolt again and take their capital with them. Russia's international reserves, for instance, mushroomed to $124 billion at the end of 2004 from $18 billion at the end of 1997. India's jumped to $126 billion from $24 billion over that period. Last year alone, according to the Institute of International Finance, a lobby group of big banks, international reserves of developing countries grew nearly $400 billion. The good news for the United States is that these forces are unlikely to change direction imminently. In an interconnected world, where investors can move billions across oceans at the touch of a button, these countries have little reason to shift strategies. Guillermo Calvo, the chief economist of the Inter-American Development Bank, who has seen his share of financial crises in Latin America, put it succinctly: "Every country seeks more security. The only thing they can do is build up their war chest." The United States gets to spend it. From checker at panix.com Sun Jun 5 16:03:06 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 5 Jun 2005 12:03:06 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: John Gray: The derelict utopia Message-ID: John Gray: The derelict utopia The Times Literary Supplement, 1996.5.24 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2086441&window_type=print LIBERALISM WITHOUT ILLUSIONS. Bernard Yack, editor. Essays on liberal theory and the political vision of Judith N. Shklar 292pp. University of Chicago Press; distributed in the UK by Wiley. ?33.50 (paperback, ?13.50). 0 226 94469 7 Recent liberal thought is littered with utopias. Among liberals of the Right, the utopian imagination has attached itself to the vision of a minimal state presiding over an unfettered market, while liberals of the Left have envisaged an egalitarian state in which basic liberties and the claims of the worst off are respected as rights. What is striking about the standard varieties of liberal theory over the past generation is their extraordinary optimism about the institution of law. Liberals as different as F. A. Hayek and John Rawls share the common project of limiting the scope of political life. They seek to insulate the demands of justice - as they very differently understand them - from political deliberation and negotiation. This is a species of utopian legalism that liberals of an older school ,Tocqueville, Constant or John Stuart Mill, say could hardly have entertained seriously. Perhaps predictably, its results in practice have been mostly dystopian. Twentieth-century history suggests that law is a blunt and fragile defence against injustice. The recent history of the United States, in which an atavistic and irresolvable dispute about abortion and rights has convulsed political life, does not support the utopian ambition of liberal legalism of entrenching rights beyond the reach of political conflict. The ongoing American experiment in mass incarceration, which, without appreciably reducing levels of crime, has already left a higher proportion of the population behind bars than in any country apart from post-Communist Russia, should caution anyone who thinks deep-seated social and economic problems respond to the procedures and sanctions of the criminal law. History teaches scepticism about any "theory of justice" that claims neutrality , as standard liberal theorists of all political persuasions over the past twenty of thirty years have routinely done in conflicts between world-views and conceptions of the good. It should instil modesty about what the institution of law can hope to achieve. Yet the mainstream of liberal thought is still a wasteland of derelict legalist utopias. Judith Shklar was an uncompromising liberal who never subscribed to the orthodoxies of liberal legalism. She was not interested in theories of justice, because she thought injustice too protean to be captured in any theory. She was not hostile to the American culture of rights, but she believed the distinction between misfortune and injustice marked a political choice, not a legal judgment. She knew too much about ordinary human cruelty ever to allow herself or others to become romantic about life in strong communities. She was not afraid to defend a "liberalism of fear". Rightly, she understood liberalism to be as much a remedy against life in communities as a prescription for communities of a certain type. Coming from a family of German-speaking Jews from Riga, who had fled Latvia at the last moment, in 1939, her own life had immunized her against any variety of political romanticism. Like Isaiah Berlin's, her liberalism affirmed conflict and loss as ineradicable elements in even the best human lives and the fairest societies. For those who had known her, Shklar's death in 1992 was a tragic cutting off in its prime of a rare capacity for thought. Liberalism Without Illusions is a collection of sixteen essays, all of interest and some of considerable power, exploring and assessing Shklar's intellectual legacy, together with a charming and inimitable autobiographical essay by Shklar herself. Most of the pieces address Shklar's conviction that liberalism is a negative and strictly political doctrine, arising not from any comprehensive view of the human good but from the attempt to build bulwarks against the worst ordinary vices. For Shklar, the task of liberal institutions was the negative one of removing, or at least mitigating, the principal obstacles to a tolerable human life; but, though avowedly negative, this task was not circumscribed, as it has been in many forms of classical liberalism, by any theory of the limits of state action. In Shklar's view, as in Berlin's, liberal institutions must be as resourceful and inventive as the evils they resist. The liberalism of fear encompasses many strategies of positive state action. It mandates policies to expand opportunities as well as to protect the weak against oppression. In a penetrating essay, Amy Gutman argues convincingly that the implication of Shklar's liberalism of fear is not negative liberalism but a version of active democracy an implication she traces in the evolution of Shklar's thought from her article "The Liberalism of Fear" (1989) through her books The Faces of Injustice (1990) and American Citizenship (1991). A similar conclusion is reached by Michael Walzer in a subtle and far-reaching consideration of negative liberalism. Walzer suggests that what distinguishes Shklar's liberalism of fear is not just its stress on the positive engagements of the state but also its particularism. The task of liberal institutions is not only to erect bulwarks against the universal evils of arbitrary power torture, unjust imprisonment and so forth. It is to enable people to stand up against the insults to dignity and independence that go with a particular culture and its history the history, for example, of black chattel slavery in America. The moral of Walzer's argument is that liberalism can never be only the application of remedies against universal evils. It is always also the defence, and reform, of particular ways of life. Some of the essays are notable contributions to discussion of particular questions within liberalism. In a characteristically spirited and thoughtful piece, George Kateb argues that the right of free expression protects even speech that is worthless or harmful. This protection includes, Kateb makes clear, those forms of speech such as racist and sexist speech that are the targets of the speech codes common in American universities. Implicit in Kateb's essay is the belief that this conclusion applies universally, in all liberal societies everywhere. Now it is true that issues to do with offensive speech arise in all cultures, as is shown by British law which makes racist speech a criminal offence. Yet it is clear that the controversies Kateb's essay addresses derive their peculiar intensity from features of American society that are not found in other liberal cultures. Of these, the history of black slavery is perhaps only the most obvious; the cultural propensity to represent all serious issues of public policy as questions about the interpretation of fundamental rights is undoubtedly another. Kateb's argument against speech codes is highly persuasive; but its method, which is that of appealing to first prin-ciples the contents of which are hopelessly in-determinate, guarantees that speech codes will persist, as intractably contested practices, in American universities. In a useful and fair-minded contribution, Rogers M. Smith argues that the re-emergence in many parts of the world of ethnic enmities, religious fundamentalism and other illiberal developments does not show that the liberal project must now be relinquished along with other forms of the Enlightenment project. For Smith, liberal thought and practice may be flawed, incomplete and even in some ways contradictory; but they are not so defective as to warrant the large and dangerous step of abandoning liberalism's universal claims. Here we note a pervasive feature of liberal thought in our time, which is its apologetic character. Political philosophy today is often an exercise in finding bad reasons for what liberals believe by instinct. Nothing in the real world of history is allowed to threaten the certainty that liberal institutions are the best for all humankind. This is, in effect, another kind of liberalism of fear, one devoted to securing the liberal conception of progress against any possibility of historical falsification. What this liberalism of fear neglects is the wholly genuine possibility that fear may sustain allegiance to illiberal institutions. If, in China, it is reasonable to fear a collapse into anarchy, with its attendant colossal sufferings; if, in Singapore, a somewhat authoritarian regime can deliver not only civil peace but standards of healthcare and education for ordinary people that surpass those achieved in many liberal societies; by what leap of faith can it be asserted that liberal institutions ought to be adopted in such circumstances? A similar subversive question was put, around the time of the birth of the modern state, in the writings of Thomas Hobbes, a proto-liberal and as Quentin Skinner shows in one of the most interesting contributions to Bernard Yack's admirable collection at the same time one of liberalism's greatest critics. It remains unanswered by liberal theory to this day. In our time, human well-being is most threatened not by state power but by the disabling weakness of state institutions. Nearly everywhere, states are suffering a leakage of power to globalized markets and organized crime, among other forces as a result of which they are decreasingly able to provide their citizens with even the rudiments of security. In this new historical context, Shklar's dystopic liberalism of fear may itself prove to be utopian. Shklar's legacy is nevertheless an inspiring example of liberal thought at its arresting best, unflinchingly courageous and unmoved by the dreary and unmeaning harmonies conjured up by theories of justice and rights. From checker at panix.com Sun Jun 5 16:03:17 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sun, 5 Jun 2005 12:03:17 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: John Gray: Understanding the present Message-ID: John Gray: Understanding the present The Times Literary Supplement, 1996.12.13 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2084619&window_type=print POLITICS, SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL THEORY: ENCOUNTERS WITH CLASSICAL CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL THOUGHT By Anthony Giddens 304pp. Oxford: Polity. ?45 (paperback, ?13.95). - 0 7456 1539 2 As Anthony Giddens aptly observes, in a penetrating introduction to his valuable collection of papers, "All disciplines have their fictive histories, all are imagined communities which invoke myths of the past as a means of both charting their own internal development and unity, and also drawing boundaries between themselves and other neighbouring disciplines." Politics, Sociology and Social Theory may be read as an exercise in revisionist intellectual history. The critical perspectives that Giddens advances here on sociology's "classics" - the writings of Marx, Weber and Durkheim - are further developments of the arguments presented in his Capitalism and Social Theory. This book proposes new contexts of use for the re-affirmation (against the excesses of structuralist and post-structuralist theorists) of the indispensable role of the human subject in social and historical explanation. In these respects, this volume is clearly continuous with Giddens's earlier work. But it is also a vehicle for new reflections on capitalism, avowedly occasioned by the historical transformations of the past decade. Giddens comments on the anomalous fact that "capitalism" as a theoretical category has all but vanished from social-scientific discourse at the precise historic moment at which capitalist institutions have extended their reach so as to remove any functioning alternative to themselves. In our present historical context, in which systemic alternatives to "capitalism" have disappeared, the Marxian talk of antagonistic economic systems has been largely replaced by a vague terminology of "industrial (or post-industrial) society". What explains this anomaly, he suggests, is "either that it (capitalism) is so ubiquitous that it barely needs mentioning, or that it was mainly applied in the past as part of a critical discourse of socialists". This explanation seems to me a little over-generous. After all, what distinguished social theory over the past generation was not so much its use of "capitalism" as a critical category but the remoteness from any historical reality of its accounts of actually existing capitalisms - or indeed, of socialisms. One would never have suspected, reading Habermas, say, that our century's crisis of legitimation would occur not in any advanced capitalist society but in the centrally planned economies of the former Soviet bloc. This is not to say that evidence for the legitimation crisis of Soviet institutions was lacking. Such evidence was plentiful; but it was found in the writings of obscure and doomed dissidents, without academic credentials, such as Andrei Amalrik, whose contributions - such as his Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? published in 1970 - figure in the fictive history of no academic discipline (least of all in mainstream Sovietology). Nor could one have guessed that the most apocalyptic forms of environmental degradation in our time have arisen as side-effects of central planning institutions. Recent social theory was predicated on the supposition that systemic alternatives to capitalism were real historical options for advanced capitalist societies. Once this premiss was defeated on the terrain of history, social theorists found themselves with next to nothing to say about how the varieties of capitalism that we are left with work in practice, or how they might be modified so that the threats which globalized market forces undoubtedly pose to human wellbeing might be moderated. Neither the explanatory nor the meliorist interest of "classical" social theory has been prominent in its most recent exemplars. Giddens's own work is a striking exception to the sterility of post-socialist social thought. The present volume shows Giddens at his refreshingly iconoclastic best, interpreting Herbert Marcuse as a latter-day exponent of the archaic political philosophy of Saint-Simon, showing the many similarities between Karl Popper's philosophy and the positivism of the Vienna School, tracing the ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel's debts to Alfred Schutz and the hermeneutic tradition, and producing many other illuminating examples of revisionist intellectual history as applied to social thought. Giddens is especially, and happily, sharp in his criticisms of the Foucaldian inflation of the category of "power", citing Michael Ignatieff's work on the origins of prisons as an antidote to Foucault's wilder theorizings about "disciplinary regimes", and commenting on the frivolity of Foucault's dismissal of "bourgeois freedoms". These are all profoundly instructive contributions, which confirm Giddens's standing as the pre-eminent social theorist of his generation. Yet, one is still left with the uncomfortable suspicion that current social theory has little to offer us in our attempt to understand the present. From shovland at mindspring.com Sun Jun 5 16:17:24 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sun, 5 Jun 2005 09:17:24 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] This changes the content of the mass mind Message-ID: <01C569AF.63544EB0.shovland@mindspring.com> Fox News in Ratings Free Fall Here's something you won't hear on Fox News -- ratings for the cable news channel have been plummeting since before the November election. According to TV Newser , the number of people watching Fox during prime time in the 25 to 54 age bracket dropped in April for the sixth straight month. TV Newser cited a CNN press release which gave these totals for Fox's primetime audience in the 25 to 54 age bracket: Oct. 04: 1,074,000; Nov. 04: 891,000; Dec. 04: 568,000; Jan. 05: 564,000; Feb. 05: 520,000; March 05: 498,000; April 05: 445,000. That amounts to a decline of 58 percent, with no sign of leveling off. Other cable stations' ratings were also down since the election, but CNN's, for example, appeared to have stabilized last month while Fox's continued to drop. From checker at panix.com Mon Jun 6 17:59:05 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2005 13:59:05 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: On Early Emigrations from Africa Message-ID: Anthropology: On Early Emigrations from Africa http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050610-1.htm The following points are made by P. Forster and S. Matsumura (Science 2005 308:965): 1) By analyzing the DNA of living humans from different locations, geneticists are able to assemble a detailed reconstruction of prehistoric human colonization of the world. This research endeavor was championed by the late Allan Wilson and his colleagues [1,2], who led the way with their studies of maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). Their work led to the proposal of a recent African origin for modern humans some 5000 generations ago. Anthropologists and geneticists have since joined forces to create a broad framework of possible prehistoric human migration routes and time scales [3-5]. 2) Our current understanding is that modern humans arose ~150,000 years ago, possibly in East Africa, where human genetic diversity is particularly high. Subsequent early colonization within Africa is supported by old genetic mtDNA and Y chromosome branches (often called "haplogroups" in the Bushmen or Khoisan of the Kalahari Desert, and in certain pygmy tribes in the central African rainforest. Early humans even ventured out of Africa briefly, as indicated by the 90,000-year-old Skhul and Qafzeh fossils found in Israel. The next event clearly visible in the mitochondrial evolutionary tree is an expansion signature of so-called L2 and L3 mtDNA types in Africa about 85,000 years ago, which now represent more than two-thirds of female lineages throughout most of Africa. The reason for this remarkable expansion is unclear, but it led directly to the only successful migration out of Africa, and is genetically dated by mtDNA to have occurred some time between 55,000 and 85,000 years ago. Studies of the paternally inherited Y chromosome yield time estimates for the African exodus that are in broad agreement with those derived from mtDNA. 3) It is at this point in the narrative that studies by Thangaraj et al (2005) and Macaulay et al (2005) come into the picture. Which route did the first Eurasians take out of Africa? Most obvious, perhaps, is the route along the Nile and across the Sinai Peninsula leading into the rest of the world. But if that were so, why was adjacent Europe settled thousands of years later than distant Australia? In Europe, Neanderthals were replaced by modern humans only about 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, whereas southern Australia was definitely inhabited 46,000 years ago and northern Australia and Southeast Asia necessarily even earlier. Or did our ancestors instead depart from East Africa, crossing the Red Sea and then following the coast of the Indian Ocean? A purely coastal "express train" would conveniently explain the early dates for human presence in Australia, but would require that humans were capable of crossing the mouth of the Red Sea some 60,000 years ago. Why, then, was this feat not repeated by any later African emigrants, particularly when the Red Sea level dropped to a minimum about 20,000 years ago? 4) Ideally, these questions would be answered by investigating ancient fossils and DNA from the Arabian Peninsula. But because this option is currently not available, Thangaraj et al (2005) and Macaulay et al (2005) have centered their investigation on the other side of the Indian Ocean, in the Andaman Islands and Malaysian Peninsula. Both groups used genetic studies of relict populations known to differ substantially from their Asian neighbors to estimate the arrival time of the first humans in these locations. Thangaraj and colleagues sampled the Andamanese, who were decimated in the 19th century by diseases imported by the British and then suffered displacement by modern Indian immigration. Macaulay and co-workers sampled the native tribal people of Malaysia, called the Orang Asli ("original people"). 5) The two teams arrived at compatible conclusions. In the Andaman Islands, Thangaraj et al identified the M31 and M32 mtDNA types among indigenous Andamanese. These two mtDNA types branched directly from M mtDNA, which arose as a founder 65,000 years ago. This time estimate for the arrival of M founder mtDNA is matched by that of Macaulay and co-workers. These investigators found mtDNA types M21 and M22 in their Malaysian data set. These M types are geographically specific branches of M that branched off from other Asian mtDNA lineages around 60,000 years ago. Thus, the first Eurasians appear to have reached the coast of the Indian Ocean soon after leaving Africa, regardless of whether they took the northern or the southern route. References (abridged): 1. R. L. Cann, M. Stoneking, A. C. Wilson, Nature 325, 31 (1987) 2. L. Vigilant, M. Stoneking, H. Harpending, K. Hawkes, A. C. Wilson, Science 253, 1503 (1991) 3. P. Endicott et al., Am. J. Hum. Genet. 72, 178 (2003) 4. R. Cordaux, M. Stoneking, Am. J. Hum. Genet. 72, 1586 (2003) 5. P. A. Underhill, Cold Spring Harbor Symp. Quant. Biol. 68, 487 (2003) Science http://www.sciencemag.org -------------------------------- Related Material: ANTHROPOLOGY: NEW EVIDENCE FOR OUT OF AFRICA MODEL The following points are made by Chris Stringer (Nature 2003 423:692): 1) The idea that modern humans originated in Africa, with populations subsequently spreading outwards from there, has continued to gain support lately. But much of that support has come from analyses of genetic variation in people today, and from fossil and archaeological discoveries dated to within the past 120,000 years -- after our species evolved. Hard evidence for the inferred African origin of modern humans has remained somewhat elusive, with relevant material being fragmentary, morphologically ambiguous, or uncertainly dated. Thus the fossilized partial skulls from Ethiopia recently described by White et al (Nature 2003 423:742) are probably some of the most significant discoveries of early Homo sapiens so far, owing to their completeness and well-established antiquity of approximately 160,000 years. 2) There are two broad theories about the origins of H. sapiens. A few researchers still support a version of the "multiregional" hypothesis, arguing that the anatomical features of modern humans arose in geographically widespread hominid populations throughout the Pleistocene epoch (which lasted from around 1.8 million to some 12,000 years ago). But most researchers now espouse a version of the "out of Africa" model, although there are differences of opinion over the complexity of the processes of origin and dispersal, and over the amount of mixing that might subsequently have occurred with archaic (non-modern) humans outside of Africa. Within Africa, uncertainties still surround the mode of modern human evolution -- whether it proceeded in a gradual and steady manner or in fits and starts (punctuational evolution). Other questions concern the relationship between genetic, morphological and behavioral changes, and the precise region, or regions, of origin. 3) For instance, possible early H. sapiens fossils, dating from about 260,000 to 130,000 years ago, are scattered across Africa at sites such as Florisbad (South Africa), Ngaloba (Tanzania), Eliye Springs and Guomde (Kenya), Omo Kibish (Ethiopia), Singa (Sudan) and Jebel Irhoud (Morocco). But the best dated of these finds, from Florisbad and Singa, are problematic because of incompleteness and, in the latter case, evidence of disease. Meanwhile, the more complete or diagnostically modern specimens suffer from chronological uncertainties. So the most securely dated and complete early fossils that unequivocally share an anatomical pattern with today's H. sapiens are actually from Israel, rather than Africa. These are the partial skeletons from Skhul and Qafzeh, dating from around 115,000 years ago. Their presence in the Levant is usually explained by a range expansion from ancestral African populations, such as those sampled at Omo Kibish or Jebel Irhoud around 125,000 years ago. 4) The new cranial material from Herto, Ethiopia -- described by White et al -- adds significantly to our understanding of early H. sapiens evolution in Africa. The fossils are complete enough to show a suite of modern human characters, and are well constrained by argon-isotope dating to about 160,000 years ago. Three individuals are represented by separate fossils: a nearly complete adult cranium (skull parts excluding the lower jaw), a less complete juvenile cranium, and some robust cranial fragments from another adult. All display evidence of human modification, such as cut marks, considered to represent mortuary practices rather than cannibalism. Associated layers of sediment produced evidence of the butchery of large mammals such as hippopotamuses and bovines, as well as assemblages of artefacts showing an interesting combination of Middle Stone Age and late Acheulean technology. Nature http://www.nature.com/nature -------------------------------- Related Material: ANTHROPOLOGY: ANCIENT DNA AND THE ORIGIN OF MODERN HUMANS Notes by ScienceWeek: Mitochondria are double-membrane enclosed organelles of cells, the mitochondria involved with several important biochemical pathways, including electron transport and oxidative metabolism. Various types of cells containing internal membrane-bound organelles (eukaryotic cells) may contain from a few to several thousand mitochondria in each cell type. The mitochondria are relatively large cylindrical structures up to 10 microns long and up to 2 microns in diameter, and most biologists believe mitochondria are cell organelles that may have originated as separate organisms that became resident in eukaryotic cells. Mitochondrial DNA is independent of nuclear DNA, consisting of a circular molecule, 16,569 base pairs long in humans, with a known nucleotide sequence. Investigations of human mitochondrial DNA have revealed two facts relevant to questions of human origins: a) the variation among modern human populations is small compared, for example, to that between apes and monkeys, which has been interpreted to indicate the recency of human origins; b) there is a distinction between African and other human mitochondrial types, which has been interpreted to indicate the relative antiquity of the African peoples and the relative recency of other human populations. Interpretations of mitochondrial DNA evidence have been much debated in anthropology. Such evidence is a crucial part of the "single origin" model of human origins, which proposes that one early population of modern humans spread out of Africa approximately 60,000 to 100,000 years ago and eventually replaced all less modern populations of the genus Homo worldwide. Thus, the difference between "African" and "non-African" mitochondrial DNA is explained by the idea that small "founder" populations left Africa, carrying with them only a small sample of the genetic variation found in Africa as a whole, and that such founder populations then expanded as they occupied Eurasia, growing into a large population with a distinctly non-African mitochondrial DNA structure. This idea became popular in the late 1980s, when it was called the "Mitochondrial Eve" or "Out of Africa" hypothesis. Although since then this hypothesis has lost some support, it is still one of the major ideas concerning human origins. Support for the opposing "regional-continuity" model is based primarily on evidence of gradual morphological change, mainly of the skull, from ancient to modern inhabitants in different parts of the world. In this scenario, modern humans developed almost simultaneously in various geographical regions around the world, replacing less evolved Homo species beginning approximately 1.5 million years ago. These are only the general outlines of a hotly debated complex area of research in human evolution. The following points are made by G.J. Adcock et al (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 2001 98:537): 1) The authors point out that since its beginning more than 25 years ago, the debate over recent human origins has focused on two models. The regional-continuity hypothesis postulates that ever since humans began to migrate out of Africa more than 1.5 million years ago, there has been a single evolving species, Homo sapiens, distributed throughout the Old World, with all regional populations connected, as they are today, by gene flow. Some skeletal features developed and persisted for varying periods in the different regions, so that recognizable regional morphologies have developed in Africa, Europe, and Asia. 2) The other view, the "recent out of Africa" model, argues that over the period since humans began to leave Africa, there have been several species of Homo. In this model, H. sapiens emerged in Africa approximately 100,000 years ago and then spread globally, replacing other species of Homo that it encountered during the expansion. This model proposes that all current regional morphologies, especially those outside Africa, developed within the last 100,000 years. 3) These alternative models arose from interpretations of morphological evidence. During the last 15 years, molecular data, particularly nucleotide sequences drawn from populations of living humans, have made an increasing contribution to the debate. Analysis has demonstrated that humans have remarkably little mitochondrial DNA sequence variation, and that the earliest branching lineages are found in East Africa. These findings were interpreted as strongly supporting the "recent out of Africa" model. The authors suggest, however, that this interpretation fails to recognize that the demographic history of a species cannot be inferred from the pattern of variation of a single nucleotide segment. Patterns of variation in different regions of the genome must be considered and interpreted in the context of paleontological and archeological evidence. 4) The authors report mitochondrial DNA sequence evidence from 10 fossils, all agreed to be anatomically modern, rather than archaic, Homo sapiens (4 "*gracile" and 6 "*robust" specimens). The 10 fossils range in age from less than 10,000 years ago to approximately 60,000 years ago. The authors report that in one fossil (Lake Mungo 3, dated at 60,000 years ago), the mitochondrial DNA sequence is the most divergent of all of the Australian fossils analyzed, and this is evidently an example of a mitochondrial DNA lineage that existed in an ancient modern human but is absent in living human mitochondria. The authors state: "Our data present a serious challenge to interpretation of contemporary human mitochondrial DNA variation as supporting the 'recent out of Africa' model. A separate mitochondrial DNA lineage in an individual whose morphology is within the contemporary range and who lived in Australia would imply [from the out of Africa model and its usage of mitochondrial DNA data] both that anatomically modern humans were among those that were replaced and that part of the replacement occurred in Australia." In a commentary on this work, John H. Relethford (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. US 16 Jan 01 98:390) states: "If the mitochondrial DNA present in a modern human (Lake Mungo 3) can become extinct, then perhaps something similar happened to the mitochondrial DNA of Neanderthals. If so, then the absence of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA in living humans does not reject the possibility of _some_ genetic continuity with modern humans... The modern human origins debate can be informed by genetic data, both living and ancient, but can only be resolved by also considering the fossil and archeological evidence. The picture presented by Adcock et al suggests that modern human origins were more complicated than once envisioned." Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. http://www.pnas.org -------------------------------- Notes by ScienceWeek: gracile: In general, a Homo fossil with a lightly built skull. The Lake Mungo 3 fossil is a gracile specimen. robust: In general, a Homo fossil with a heavily built skull. -------------------------------- Related Material: ANTHROPOLOGY: RECOMBINATION IN HOMINID MITOCHONDRIAL DNA Notes by ScienceWeek: The origin of modern humans is an ongoing major focus of research in anthropology and paleontology, and also a research area that has seen its share of contentious disputes. There are two conflicting views concerning the geographic aspects of human origins: 1) in one view, the geographic origins of modern man are multiple, with modern man (Homo sapiens) appearing more or less at the same time on various continents; while in the second view b) modern man originated in Africa approximately 200,000 years ago, with modern humans migrating from Africa to the rest of the globe. The major evidence for the "Out of Africa" hypothesis was published in the late 1980s by R.L. Cann et al (1987), the evidence based primarily on analysis of mitochondrial DNA in diverse existing human groups... In the late 1980s, most anthropologists and paleontologists believed that the mitochondria of sperm cells do not enter the egg cell (or if they do, are quickly destroyed upon entry), so that male sperm mitochondrial DNA does not mix (*recombine) with female egg mitochondrial DNA. The idea, therefore, was that mitochondrial DNA is of pure maternal lineage, and since analysis of human mitochondrial DNA suggested a single origin of Homo sapiens in Africa, the notion of an "African Eve" was quickly publicized by the popular media [*Note #1] In recent years, however, the notion that mitochondria are of pure maternal lineage has been challenged, and the dispute among anthropologists and paleontologists concerning multiple-origins vs. a single-origin for Homo sapiens has flared up again. The following points are made by P. Awadalla et al (Science 1999 286:2524): 1) For many years it has been accepted that mitochondria are inherited exclusively from the mother in mammals, and that the inheritance of mitochondrial DNA is therefore "clonal". This assumption has been used extensively to date events in human prehistory, including the age of our last common female ancestor, called "Eve", and to date the spread of Homo sapiens in Asia and Europe. However, mitochondria do contain the enzymes necessary for *homologous recombination, and there are at least two routes by which the rule of strict maternal inheritance of mitochondrial DNA could be broken: a) the entrance of paternal mitochondria into the egg cell at fertilization [*Note #2]; and b) the transfer of nuclear genome copies of mitochondrial DNA sequences back to mitochondrial DNA. 2) The assumption that human mitochondrial DNA is inherited from one parent only and therefore does not recombine is questionable. The work of the authors indicates that *linkage disequilibrium in human and chimpanzee mitochondrial DNA declines as a function of the distance between genome sites, and this pattern can be attributed to one mechanism only: recombination. 3) The authors conclude: "Many inferences about the pattern and tempo of human evolution and mtDNA evolution have been based on the assumption of clonal inheritance. These inferences will now have to be reconsidered." Science http://www.sciencemag.org -------------------------------- Notes by ScienceWeek: recombine: In this context, the term "recombination" refers to a genome with a combination of genes other than those that occurred in the precursor genome(s), the recombination, in this context, produced naturally. Thus, if mitochondrial DNA has naturally spliced into it one or more sequences of nuclear DNA or DNA from another line of mitochondria, the mix is called "recombination". (See note below on "homologous recombination".) Note #1: Apart from its proposed exclusive maternal lineage (which has now been challenged), mitochondrial DNA has a number of research advantages: a) The complete nucleotide sequence of human mitochondrial DNA is known, the genome identified as a circular DNA molecule of 16,569 base pairs. b) Since there are as much as thousands of copies of mitochondrial DNA per cell, mitochondrial DNA can be more easily isolated from human tissues than nuclear DNA, which has only two copies per cell. c) It is believed that mutations occur in mitochondria 10 times more frequently than in nuclear DNA, and the consequent rapid evolution of the mitochondrial genome enables comparisons between groups that would be more difficult to differentiate using slower and more complex nuclear DNA sequences. homologous recombination: In general, the term "homologous recombination" refers to genetic recombination that occurs between DNAs with long stretches of homology, and which is mediated by certain enzymes involved in DNA repair and replication. In this context, the terms "homologous" and "homology" refer to sequences having fundamental similarities due to the same evolutionary origin, even if the functions of the two sequences are quite different. Note #2: See relevant background material below. linkage disequilibrium: In this context, the term "linkage" refers to gene sequences (genetic loci) that tend to be inherited together more often than would be expected by chance. Genetic linkage is a reflection of the physical location of the loci on the same chromosome segment or DNA molecule. Loci which are close together are less likely to be separated by recombination and are therefore more likely to be inherited together. The distance between linked loci is measured in terms of the frequency of recombination events occurring between them. The term "linkage disequilibrium" refers to a situation in which a particular combination of gene variants (alleles) at two closely linked loci appears more frequently than would be expected by chance. The essential idea of the authors in this report is that recombination can be detected by considering the relation between linkage disequilibrium and gene loci distance (genetic distance). As the distance between loci increases, the effect of recombination should increase, and recombination should therefore manifest itself as a significant decline in linkage disequilibrium with distance. The study of the authors consisted of analysis of previously published data concerning mtDNA sequences in humans and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). -------------------------------- Related Material: IN FOCUS: ON MITOCHONDRIA, DNA, AND SPERM CELLS Notes by ScienceWeek: During the maturation of sperm cells in the human testes (spermiogenesis), the mitochondria of sperm cells are relocated: the mature sperm cell consists of 3 parts, the head, midpiece, and tail (flagellum), and all the mitochondria are densely packed into the midpiece of the mature sperm cell. One of the major techniques used to investigate ancient human lineages involves the genetic analysis of mitochondrial DNA, with such DNA considered to be primarily of maternal origin. However, there is apparently some confusion about the reasons for the primarily maternal origin of mitochondrial DNA. For example, the 1998 textbook _Principles of Human Evolution_ by Roger Lewin (Harvard University, US) [*Note #1] contains on page 414 an illustrative drawing depicting the fate of sperm mitochondria, the drawing showing the midpiece and tail of the sperm cell "discarded" upon fertilization of the egg cell. The drawing has the following caption: "Unlike nuclear DNA, for which we inherit half from our mother and half from our father, mitochondrial DNA is passed on only by females. When the sperm fertilizes the egg, it leaves behind all of its mitochondria: the developing fetus therefore inherits mitochondria only from the mother's egg." The above presentation by Lewin contradicts current information in cell biology. The idea that sperm lose their mitochondria at fertilization as a result of extracellular "discard" of the midpiece and tail is not correct. The current view in cell biology is that the entire human sperm cell (head, midpiece, and tail) penetrates the egg cell during the fertilization process. Sperm mitochondria are apparently lost (destroyed) shortly after penetration of the egg by specific enzymatic reactions, but the destruction of sperm mitochondria inside the egg cell is believed to be not always complete. The current view in cell biology is that since the sperm mitochondria and the sperm flagellum disintegrate inside the egg, very few, if any, sperm-derived mitochondria are found in developing or adult organisms. In mice it is estimated that only 1 out of every 10,000 mitochondria are sperm-derived. Nevertheless, the significance of contaminating paternal mitochondria in the use of mitochondrial DNA to establish genetic lineages is in controversy in the literature, and the issue is not yet resolved [*Note #2]. [The Editors wish to thank James M. Cummins, Murdoch University (AU) for calling our attention to the question of the fate of sperm cell mitochondria.] -------------------------------- Notes by ScienceWeek: Note #1: Roger Lewin: Principles of Human Evolution, Blackwell Science, 1998, p.414. Note #2: For additional material, cf. F. Ankel-Simons and J.M. Cummins (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. US 1996 93:13859) and Jim Cummins (Rev. of Reproduction 1998 3:172). From checker at panix.com Mon Jun 6 17:59:19 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2005 13:59:19 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: Children and False Belief Message-ID: Cognitive Science: Children and False Belief http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050610-2.htm The following points are made by J. Perner and T. Ruffman (Science 2005 308:214): 1) Although primates and other animals seem to have some understanding of mind (that is, an understanding of the behavior of others), the concept of belief seems to be a specifically human ability. Comprehending false belief is the clearest sign of understanding a critical aspect of the mind: its subjectivity and its susceptibility to manipulation by information. It is thought that children develop an understanding of false belief around 4 years of age. However, Onishi and Baillargeon [1] report that infants as young as 15 months have insight into whether a person acts on the basis of a mistaken view (false belief) about the world. This discrepancy touches on important issues. An understanding of false belief at 4 years of age suggests that this ability may be constructed in a cultural process tied to language acquisition. In contrast, competence at 15 months suggests that this ability is part of our purely biological inheritance. What could account for the discrepant findings? 2) Children's understanding of false belief has hitherto been assessed using a verbal false-belief task in which the experimenter enacts stories. An example of such a story is as follows: A protagonist (let's call him Max) puts a toy or doll (object) in one location and then doesn't see it moved to a second location [2]. When asked by the experimenter, most 3-year-olds wrongly claim that Max will look for the object in the second location (where they know it is). This finding with 3-year-olds has been confirmed despite many attempts to improve the potential shortcomings of the verbal false-belief task [3]. These results contrast with those from Onishi and Baillargeon's study in which 15-month-old infants were tested with a nonverbal false-belief test. 3) In this test, infants were familiarized with an adult actor hiding and then retrieving a toy (a plastic slice of water melon) in either a yellow or a green box. The looking times of the infant subjects were then computed in a series of trials that tested whether the actor held a true or false belief about the location of the toy. Onishi and Baillargeon found that the infants "expected" the actor to search for the toy based on the actor's belief about its location, regardless of whether the location was actually correct. So, why would 3-year-olds fail to provide the correct answer in a verbal false-belief test, when 15-month-old infants can correctly anticipate erroneous actions in the nonverbal false-belief test? 4) Part of the explanation might come from previous studies that used eye gaze as a measure of understanding in 3-year-olds. Three-year-olds look to the correct (initial) location when anticipating Max's return there, even when they explicitly make the incorrect claim that Max will go to the second location. This early indication of understanding Max's mistake has been dubbed implicit, because many of these children show no awareness of the knowledge implicitly conveyed in their correct eye gaze (4). Nonetheless, children at the age of 2.5 years show absolutely no sign of this earlier, implicit understanding (5). Converging evidence comes from children's word learning, which also shows sensitivity to false belief around 3 years and not before. In sum, the evidence of an earlier, implicit understanding does not solve but rather exacerbates the puzzle about Onishi and Baillargeon's finding with infants: Where would the implicit understanding be hiding between 15 months and 3 years? 5) By adopting particular assumptions about how infants encode events and behavior, the authors (Perner and Ruffman) propose two explanations for the apparent early competence of infants that imply an evolutionary, innate bias for understanding the mind. Infants encode events and behavior the way they do because this encoding captures something useful about how people tend to act only because people are endowed with minds. Yet there is no need to assume an understanding on the infant's part that a mind mediates a particular behavior. References (abridged): 1. K. H. Onishi, R. Baillargeon, Science 308, 255 (2005) 2. H. Wimmer, J. Perner, Cognition 13, 103 (1983) 3. H. M. Wellman, D. Cross, J. Watson, Child Dev. 72, 655 (2001) 4. T. Ruffman, W. Garnham, A. Import, D. J. Connolly, J. Exp. Child Psychol. 80, 201 (2001) 5. W. A. Clements, J. Perner, Cognit. Dev. 9, 377 (1994) Science http://www.sciencemag.org From checker at panix.com Mon Jun 6 17:59:39 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2005 13:59:39 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] SW: On the Domains of Life Message-ID: Evolutionary Biology: On the Domains of Life http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050610-3.htm The following points are made by D.A. Walsh and W.F. Doolittle (Current Biology 2005 15:R237): 1) The key molecular player in microbial classification has been the RNA component of the small subunit of ribosomes (SSU rRNA, or 16S/18S rRNA), which Carl Woese picked in the early 1970s as a convenient and reliable "universal molecular chronometer". His goal was nothing less than a global Tree of Life, relating all living things, but most immediately his purpose was to sort out the prokaryotes. In 1977, he and his postdoc George Fox were ready to announce to the world that these could be unequivocally divided into two very distinct groups, on the basis of SSU rRNA sequence. The first group comprised mostly well-studied organisms, such as E coli, cyanobacteria and anthrax, which they called "eubacteria". The second was made up of less well-known types, such as methanogens and (as they soon discovered) extreme halophiles and some thermophilic acidophiles, which they named collectively "archaebacteria". 2) That prokaryotes are diverse was no surprise, but that they could be so neatly divided into two, and only two, groups certainly was a surprise, and so the division was not widely accepted until other characteristics that distinguished the domain Archaea from the domain Bacteria (as they are now called) were described. By the early 1980s, such traits were known to include: the possession of RNA polymerases more like their eukaryotic than their bacterial counterparts in subunit composition and sequence; some features of translation shared specifically with eukaryotes; insensitivity to most antibacterial antibiotics; and unique membrane glycerolipids composed of isoprenols ether-linked to glycerol-1-phosphate, those of bacteria and eukaryotes being fatty acids ester-linked to glycerol-3-phosphate. Ether-linked lipids have, however, now been found in several thermophilic bacteria, and fatty acids were recently detected in an archaeon, leaving only the stereoisomeric form of the glycerol phosphate backbone as a diagnostic tool to differentiate absolutely between archaeal and bacterial membranes. 3) In the early 1970s, only partial sequence information (catalogs of oligonucleotides generated by nucleases) could be obtained. Now, of course near complete genes are easily PCR-amplified, cloned and sequenced. The SSU rRNA database as of February 2005 included more than 125,000 entries. These continue to support the division of prokaryotes into two domains, each with subdivisions most commonly called "phyla". Archaea show so far only two or three major constituent groups (perhaps they should be "kingdoms"): the Euryarchaeota, the Crenarchaeota and (possibly) the Korarchaeota. 4) Among Bacteria there are at least 52 phyla; some of these turn out to correspond closely to divisions of bacteria recognized in pre-molecular sequence days by molecular and cellular phenotype alone, such as cyanobacteria and spirochaetes. Some unexpected groupings that could not be easily unified by phenotypic similarities include the Chloroflexi assemblage and the Proteobacteria subdivisions. Even for previously recognized phyla, SSU rRNA sequencing provides the advantage of quick identification and the ability to define within-phylum phylogenetic relationships down to the level of 'species' in a uniform way.[1-5] References (abridged): 1. Allers, T. and Mevarech, M. (2005). Archaeal genetics - the third way. Nat. Rev. Genet. 6, 58-73 2. Charlebois, R.L. and Doolittle, W.F. (2004). Computing prokaryotic gene ubiquity: rescuing the core from extinction. Genome Res. 14, 2469-2477 3. DeLong, E.F. and Pace, N.R. (2001). Environmental diversity of bacteria and archaea. Syst. Biol. 50, 470-478 4. Esser, C., Ahmadinejad, N., Wiegand, C., Rotte, C., Sebastiani, F., et al. (2004). A genome phylogeny for mitochondria among alpha-proteobacteria and a predominantly eubacterial ancestry of yeast nuclear genes. Mol. Biol. Evol. 21, 1643-1660 5. Forterre, P., Brochier, C., and Philippe, H. (2002). Evolution of the Archaea. Theor. Popul. Biol. 61, 409-422 Current Biology http://www.current-biology.com -------------------------------- Related Material: EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY: PHYLOGENETIC TREES AND MICROBES The following points are made by W. Martin and T. M. Embley (Nature 2004 431:134): 1) Charles Darwin (1809-1882) described the evolutionary process in terms of trees, with natural variation producing diversity among progeny and natural selection shaping that diversity along a series of branches over time. But in the microbial world things are different, and various schemes have been devised to take both traditional and molecular approaches to microbial evolution into account. For example, Rivera and Lake(1), based on analysis of whole-genome sequences, call for a radical departure from conventional thinking. 2) Unknown to Darwin, microbes use two mechanisms of natural variation that disobey the rules of tree-like evolution: lateral gene transfer and endosymbiosis. Lateral gene transfer involves the passage of genes among distantly related groups, causing branches in the tree of life to exchange bits of their fabric. Endosymbiosis -- one cell living within another -- gave rise to the double-membrane-bounded organelles of eukaryotic cells: mitochondria (the powerhouses of the cell) and chloroplasts. At the endosymbiotic origin of mitochondria, a free-living proteobacterium came to reside within an archaebacterially related host. This event involved the genetic union of two highly divergent cell lineages, causing two deep branches in the tree of life to merge outright. To this day, biologists cannot agree on how often lateral gene transfer and endosymbiosis have occurred in life's history; how significant either is for genome evolution; or how to deal with them mathematically in the process of reconstructing evolutionary trees. The report by Rivera and Lake(1) bears on all three issues: Instead of a tree linking life's three deepest branches (eubacteria, archaebacteria and eukaryotes), they uncover a ring. 3) The ring comes to rest on evolution's sorest spot -- the origin of eukaryotes. Biologists fiercely debate the relationships between eukaryotes (complex cells that have a nucleus and organelles) and prokaryotes (cells that lack both). For a decade, the dominant approach has involved another intracellular structure called the ribosome, which consists of complexes of RNA and protein, and is present in all living organisms. The genes encoding an organism's ribosomal RNA (rRNA) are sequenced, and the results compared with those for rRNAs from other organisms. The ensuing tree(2) divides life into three groups called "domains". The usefulness of rRNA in exploring biodiversity within the three domains is unparalleled, but the proposal for a natural system of all life based on rRNA alone has come increasingly under fire. 4) Ernst Mayr(3), for example, argued forcefully that the rRNA tree errs by showing eukaryotes as sisters to archaebacteria, thereby obscuring the obvious natural division between eukaryotes and prokaryotes at the level of cell organization. A central concept here is that of a tree's "root", which defines its most ancient branch and hence the relationships among the deepest-diverging lineages. The eukaryote-archaebacteria sister-grouping in the rRNA tree hinges on the position of the root. The root was placed on the eubacterial branch of the rRNA tree based on phylogenetic studies of genes that were duplicated in the common ancestor of all life(2). But the studies that advocated this placement of the root on the rRNA tree used, by today's standards, overly simple mathematical models and lacked rigorous tests for alternative positions(4). 5) One discrepancy is already apparent in analyses of a key data set used to place the root, an ancient pair of related proteins, called elongation factors, that are essential for protein synthesis(5). Although this data set places the root on the eubacterial branch, it also places eukaryotes within the archaebacteria, not as their sisters(5). Given the uncertainties of deep phylogenetic trees based on single genes(4), a more realistic view is that we still don't know where the root on the rRNA tree lies and how its deeper branches should be connected. References (abridged): 1. Rivera, M. C. & Lake, J. A. Nature 431, 152-155 (2004) 2. Woese, C., Kandler, O. & Wheelis, M. L. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 87, 4576-4579 (1990) 3. Mayr, E. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 95, 9720-9723 (1998) 4. Penny, D., Hendy, M. D. & Steel, M. A. in Phylogenetic Analysis of DNA Sequences (eds Miyamoto, M. M. & Cracraft, J.) 155-183 (Oxford Univ. Press, 1991) 5. Baldauf, S., Palmer, J. D. & Doolittle, W. F. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 93, 7749-7754 (1996) Nature http://www.nature.com/nature ScienceWeek http://scienceweek.com -------------------------------- Related Material: EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY: ON THE PRIMEVAL KINGDOMS Notes by ScienceWeek: During most of the past 100 years, the consensus view among biologists was that all life on Earth evolved from a universal common ancestor, a primitive cellular form that lived approximately 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago. This view capped centuries of detailed classifications of living systems, with relationships between organisms deduced and revised and revised again as new discoveries were made. Detailed analysis of many traits indicated, for example, that primates in the human family (hominids) shared a common ancestor with apes, that this common ancestor shared an earlier common ancestor with monkeys, and that that common ancestor, in turn, shared an even earlier common ancestor with primitive primates (prosimians; e.g., lemurs), and so on. The view was thus of a "tree of life", with discrete branches rising ever higher, but with all branches deriving from a single primeval trunk. The known organisms that might have comprised the primeval trunk and its lowest branches, however, did not provide enough organismic information to define detailed relationships, so that biologists were left with apparent mysteries concerning radical evolutionary innovations between primitive cells and more complex cells, between the first biological cells and the appearance of multicellular fungi, plants, and animals. The following points are made by W. Ford Doolittle (Scientific American February 2000): 1) In the mid-1960s, Zuckerkandl and Pauling proposed a revolutionary strategy that might supply the missing information concerning evolutionary branching. The essential idea was that instead of investigating anatomy and physiology, family trees of living organisms should be based on differences in the monomer sequences in selected genes or proteins. This approach became known as "molecular phylogeny", and its essential basis was that as a result of changes in genes caused by mutations, as two species diverge from an ancestor, the gene sequences they share will also diverge, and as time passes, the genetic divergence will increase. Researchers could thus reconstruct the evolutionary past of living species by assessing the apparent history of divergence of genes or proteins isolated from those species. Protein studies completed in the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated the general utility of molecular phylogeny by confirming and then extending the already established family trees of well-studied groups such as the vertebrates. 2) A new research development occurred in the late 1970s, when Carl Woese proposed that the two-domain view of life that divided living organisms into a) bacteria and b) cells with internal membrane-bound organelles (eukaryotes) was no longer tenable on the basis of molecular analysis. Woese suggested that certain so-called "bacteria" formed a distinct third primary group -- the archaea -- and that members of this group were as different from other bacteria as bacteria were different from eukaryotes. Woese suggested that although certain cells without internal membrane-bound organelles (prokaryotes) classified as bacteria might look like bacteria, they were genetically much different, and their *ribosomal RNA (rRNA) supported an early evolutionary divergence. 3) Once the idea of three rather than two primeval domains was accepted by researchers, an important question was which of the two structurally primitive groups -- bacteria or archaea --gave rise to the first eukaryotes? Because of evidence indicating an apparent kinship between the gene expression/protein synthesis machinery of archaea and eukaryotes, the consensus was that eukaryotes diverged from the archaea. 4) One important result of research in molecular phylogeny during the past 15 years has been the production of strong evidence supporting the "endosymbiont hypothesis". In biology, the term "symbiosis" refers in general to an intimate and protracted association of individuals of different species, and "endosymbiosis" refers to a symbiotic association between cells of two or more different species in which a smaller cell inhabits a larger host cell. The endosymbiont hypothesis in evolutionary biology, now a consensus view, proposes that the mitochondria components of eukaryotes, so essential for eukaryote metabolism, formed when an early eukaryote engulfed and then retained one or more primitive bacteria of a certain type (alpha-proteobacteria). Eventually, these bacteria relinquished their ability to live on their own and transferred some of their genes to the nucleus of the host cell, and these bacteria then evolved into the extant mitochondria. In addition, and similarly, the hypothesis proposes that some mitochondria-bearing eukaryotes ingested bacteria capable of producing oxygen during photosynthesis (cyanobacteria), and these resident symbiotic bacteria subsequently evolved into the chloroplasts, the present internal structures that drive photosynthesis in certain eukaryotes (e.g., in plant cells). 5) Until very recently, therefore, the consensus view in biology could be summarized as follows: The early descendants of the last universal common ancestor -- a small prokaryote cell --divided into two prokaryotic groups: the bacteria and the archaea. Later, the archaea gave rise to the eukaryotes. Subsequently, the eukaryotes gained valuable energy-generating organelles --mitochondria and (in the case of plants, for example) chloroplasts -- by taking up and retaining certain symbiotic bacteria. 6) Several years ago, however, the consensus view stated above became complicated by a large amount of evidence concerning the phenomenon of "lateral gene transfer" (horizontal gene transfer). Biologists recognize two types of gene transfer from one organism to another: vertical and horizontal. Vertical gene transfer occurs between parents and offspring, and horizontal gene transfer is the transfer that may occur between organisms otherwise. It is in bacteria that horizontal gene transfer has been studied most extensively, particularly in the last decade. Three types of horizontal gene transfer are known: conjugation, transduction, and transformation. Conjugation is a type of sexual reproduction exhibited by some bacteria, the process involving the exchange of genetic material by means of a tube or bridge, the transfer of DNA occurring either in one direction or in both directions. 7) Transduction involves the transfer of genetic material from one bacterium to another with the intermediation of a virus. Essentially, when the virus infects one bacterium, it often carries away pieces of that bacterium's genome, and those pieces, upon the infection of a new bacterium, become incorporated into the second bacterial genome. Finally, transformation is the process involving the uptake or incorporation of DNA fragments (plasmids) by a bacterium, first observed in 1944 by Oswald Avery. In this context, the important aspect of horizontal gene transfer is that in primitive cells such as prokaryotes it is now apparent that horizontal gene transfer readily occurs across species. As a consequence of the new evidence, the consensus view of the interrelations between the primeval three kingdoms has now been seriously destabilized. 8) In general, the current situation concerning the evolutionary "tree of life" is as follows: The conceptual tree-like structure with discrete branches is retained at the top of the eukaryote domain, and also retained is the idea that eukaryotes obtained mitochondria and chloroplasts from bacteria. But the lower parts of the tree are now seen to involve an extensive anastomosis of branches -- branches joining other branches in a complex network of intersecting links -- resulting from extensive horizontal gene transfer of single or multiple genes, the horizontal gene transfer known to be common in unicellular organisms. Thus, the author (Doolittle) suggests that the "tree of life" lacks a single organism at its base, and that "the three major domains of life probably arose from a population of primitive cells that differed in their genes." Scientific American http://www.sciam.com From checker at panix.com Mon Jun 6 18:00:38 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2005 14:00:38 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Mechanical Engineering Magazine: The End of the M.E.? Message-ID: The End of the M.E.? http://www.memagazine.org/contents/current/features/endofme/endofme.html They call this "convergence." Old lines are changing, or disappearing altogether. What it's doing under the hood is downright electrifying. by Peter W. Huber and Mark P. Mills The turf still divides up quite neatly. The electrical engineers move the light stuff--electrons, power, bits, and logic. The mechanical engineers do the heavy lifting; they move atoms. And, like it or not, the MEs still control most of the real estate. Look at our cars. They're made of big heavy things that shake, bounce, and sway; they're propelled by pistons, shafts, gears, and belts; controlled by shafts, gears, valves, and hydraulic fluids. All the really important parts go click-click, bang-bang. The car is a 100 kW (peak) machine. The stuff that hums instead of clanking, the electric load, peaks at 2 kW. Mechanical engineers control most of the rest of our energy economy, too. The United States consumes 100 quadrillion Btus, or quads, of raw thermal energy every year, in three broad sectors--electric power, transportation, and heat--with consumption split (roughly) 40-30-30 among the three. But electric power plants themselves are mainly thermomechanical: The furnaces, boilers, and turbines themselves consume over half of the fuel; only about 16 quads worth of mechanical energy actually get to the shafts that spin the generators that dispatch the gigawatt-hours. Komatsu's 930E is a 2,000 kW truck. A 16-cylinder diesel engine drives a generator that powers electric motors on the wheels. It doesn't have to be that way, and pretty soon it won't be. General Electric's 4,400-horsepower, diesel-electric GEVO-12 locomotive is powered by an enormous, diesel-fueled engine-driven generator; everything beyond is electric. Komatsu's 930E--a monster mining truck with 320-ton capacity--is propelled by a 2-megawatt Detroit diesel-electric generator. Everything else, right down to the 12-foot wheels, is driven electrically. Submarines have been largely all-electric for decades, and the surface ships now on the Navy's drawing boards are all-electric, from the propeller to the guns. Thermomechanical engines are still the prime movers on all of these platforms, but what they move is electricity. An on-board generator powers an all-electric drivetrain; an electric motor drives the propeller or wheels. Electric drives are taking over because an electrical bus can convey far more power in much smaller, lighter conduits, and do it far more precisely and reliably, than even the best designed mechanical drivetrain. Indeed, on the key metrics of speed and power density, the electrical powertrain is about five orders of magnitude better. Electricity moves at close to the speed of light; all thermal and mechanical systems move at the speed of sound, or slower. It takes 10,000 driveshafts in 10,000 redlining Pontiacs to convey about as much power (1 gigawatt) as a single power plant dispatches down a few dozen high-voltage cables. By a very wide margin, electricity is indeed the fastest and densest form of power that has been tamed for ubiquitous use. But precisely because it is so fast and dense, electricity is inherently difficult to control. Direct-drive electrical systems are fast all right, but they tend to jitter, overshoot, jerk out of control, and fall off the edge. The solution, historically, has been to get mechanical again--wrap the electric coils and magnets around heavy, inertial, and frictional components to get back to a simple and steady source of mechanical power--rotating a shaft, say--which can then be channeled through gears, belts, hydraulic fluids, and other arrays of click-click, bang-bang logic well before it reaches the final payload. Until recently, direct-drive electrical movers--systems in which the power stays electric right down to the very threshold of payload--have remained the exception, not the rule. Power in Control But big motors and their electric power supplies can now be built compact and precise enough to mimic the small muscles of a hand. A key breakthrough occurred in 1982, when Hans Becke and Carl Wheatley (both at RCA) were granted a patent for what is now called the insulated gate bipolar transistor. IGBTs are high-power semiconductor gates. They control kilowatts almost as efficiently as logic semiconductors control the picowatts that we call bits. Sensors have also become sufficiently small, fast, and accurate to provide real-time feedback of what's happening at the payload. And cheap microprocessors are now readily available to make sense of it all, and to constantly recalculate how much power to dispatch to the drive to make it do exactly what's needed. Supplied with a suitably shaped and amplified stream of power, a loudspeaker vibrates a diaphragm through a Beethoven symphony; do the same with a hundred kilowatts, and you can run a Pontiac. What's new now is that inexpensive semiconductors are available to provide the extraordinarily precise control of very large amounts of electric power, at very low cost, in very compact controllers. The sidestick, being tested by Mercedes-Benz, is part of a fully computer-controlled car handling system of the possibly near future. Because they move less material in the middle, direct-drive powertrains have far less inertia and friction; and because they are informed by very fast sensors controlled by computers they can react much faster to the outside world. Direct-drive motors can thus reach levels of precision that are completely unattainable with any conventional technology. With less weight in the powertrain, and fewer moving parts, direct-drives are also more robust. Pneumatic and hydraulic fluids leak, turn into molasses when they get cold, and are easily contaminated. Shafts, belts, and pulleys need lubricants, and get bent out of shape when they expand or contract. They corrode and need periodic maintenance. Electric wires don't. The transformation is already well under way in the car's peripheral systems. The belts and pulleys that drive water and oil pumps, and radiator cooling fans, are giving way to electric motors. The best brakes are already electrohydraulic; all-electric brakes will follow. With electronic throttles, the gas pedal sends electrical instructions to a microprocessor that controls the fuel injection system electronically. Drive-by-wire electric power steering began appearing in production vehicles in 2001. Passive, reactive, energy-dissipating springs and shock absorbers are being displaced by an active array of powerful linear motors that move wheels vertically as needed to maintain traction beneath and a smooth ride above. And electric actuators will displace the steel camshaft on every valved engine. Put each valve under precise, direct, digital-electric control, actuated independently by its own compact electric motor--open and close each valve as dictated by current engine temperature, terrain, load, and countless other variables--and, in effect, you continuously retune the engine for peak performance. Belts, shafts, and chains melt away. Everything shrinks, everything gets lighter, and every aspect of performance improves--dramatically. To meet this steadily rising demand for electric power, car manufacturers are making the transition to a 42-volt grid to replace the existing 14-volt grid. Lower-voltage wires just can't convey large amounts of power efficiently. A new 42-volt industry standard emerged recently, and half of global automobile production will be on a 42-volt platform within the next decade or so. Next-generation integrated high-power alternator/starter motors have already been incorporated in BMWs and Benzes, and in Ford and GM trucks; about half of all new cars will have them by 2010. These units will supply the car with abundant, efficiently generated electric power, in a much lighter package, that will provide a virtually instant engine start as well. Cheap in the Gearbox This will set the stage for the last big step--the one already taken in monster trucks: Silicon and electric power will knock out the entire gearbox, driveshaft, differential, and related hardware; electric drives power the motors that turn the wheels. Power chips now make it possible to build high-power motors the size of a coffee can, and prices are dropping fast. When such motors finally begin driving the wheels, the entire output of the engine will have to be converted immediately into electricity before it is distributed, used, or stored throughout the car. It will take heavy-duty wiring and substantial silicon drives and electric motors to propel a hybrid-electric sport utility vehicle down a highway at 70 mph--but they'll be far smaller than the steel structures in today's powertrain. Cars will shed many hundreds of pounds, and every key aspect of performance will improve considerably. As this process unfolds, the engineering focus will shift inexorably toward finding the most efficient means of generating electricity on-board. Trains and monster trucks both use big diesel generators. Hybrid cars on the road today burn gasoline, but it's the fuel cell that attracts the most attention from visionaries and critics of the internal combustion engine. Remarkably elegant in its basic operation, the fuel cell transforms fuel into electricity in a single step, completely bypassing the furnace, turbine, and generator. In this scenario, mechanical engineering ultimately surrenders its last major under-the-hood citadel to chemical engineers. Much the same transformation is well under way in the factory. The 19th-century factory was powered by a single driveshaft spanning the length of the building; belts and chains delivered power to each individual work bay. That primary mechanical driveshaft gave way to electric power long ago, with motors powering the lathe, drill, or milling machine in each workstation. But, by and large, the motors still connect to shafts and belts and compressors. As in the car, mechanical systems still control the last few meters of the powertrain. I, Sensitive Robot The new industrial robots, however, are complex configurations of electric servo motors; the electric power now runs right to the final threshold of where the power is needed. Packed with sensors, the robots are now precise, sensitive, and far more compact than any mechanical alternative. They are also far more flexible--they now can be instantly reconfigured to perform new tasks through software alone, a dramatic advance over previous systems that required hours of manual rewiring. At the same time, high-power lasers--built around another family of recently developed semiconductors--are rapidly taking over functions previously viewed as mechanical. At kilowatt and megawatt power levels, lasers don't move bits, they move material. They fuse powdered metals into finished parts, without any machining, cutting, or joining. They supply ultra-fine heating, soldering, drilling, cutting, and materials processing, with fantastic improvements in speed, precision, and efficiency. They create thermal pulses that can blast metals and other materials off a source and deposit them on a target to create entire new classes of material coatings. They move ink in printers--not just desktop devices, but also the mammoth machines used to produce newspapers. They solder optoelectronic chips without destroying the silicon real estate around them, and they supply unequaled precision in the bulk processing of workaday materials--heat treating, welding, polymer bonding, sintering, soldering, epoxy curing, and the hardening, abrading, and milling of surfaces. [eom3.jpg] Delphi has sold millions of its electric power steering units, which eliminate hoses, pump, and hydraulic fluid. Mechanical systems can be remarkably clever--just look at how a high-end mechanical watch powers and times the movement of hands around the watch face. In engines and machines of every description, much of the mechanical engineering is still devoted to imposing a desired logic on the flow of power. Until quite recently, EEs themselves relied on at least semi-mechanical systems to choreograph and order the flow of electricity. The huge electromechanical switches that phone companies used to route calls until the 1960s set up circuits by reconfiguring tapestry-like arrays of small, electromechanical switches--thousands and thousands of them, clicking away, day and night. But the advent of the transistor--invented by Bell Labs--changed all that. Semiconductors now choreograph the flow of all-electric (or photonic) power through our watches and our phone lines. Pushing semiconductors up the power curve took 20 years longer than it did to push them down. But it has now been done. And these fundamentally new technologies of "digital power" make possible an extraordinary new variety of compact, affordable, product-assembling, platform-moving, people- moving, and power-projecting systems that seem to be all but magical. They will inevitably infiltrate, capture, and transform the capital infrastructure of our entire energy economy--the trillions of dollars of hardware that convert heat into motion, motion into electricity, and ordinary electricity into highly ordered electron and photon power. One might say that the age of mechanical engineering was launched by James Watt's steam engine in 1763, and propelled through its second century by Nikolaus Otto's 1876 invention of the spark-ignited petroleum engine. We are now at the dawn of the age of electrical engineering, not because we recently learned how to generate light-speed electrical power, but because we have now finally learned how to control it. Peter W. Huber, a former mechanical engineering instructor at MIT, is a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute. Mark P. Mills, a physicist, is a founding partner of a venture fund, Digital Power Capital. They are co-authors of The Bottomless Well (Basic Books, 2005) . From checker at panix.com Mon Jun 6 18:01:37 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2005 14:01:37 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: John Gray: Free thinkers? Message-ID: John Gray: Free thinkers? The Times Literary Supplement, 1997.1.24 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2091217&window_type=print THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY John Henry Newman By Frank M. Turner 366pp. Yale University Press. ?25 (paperback, ?12.50). - 0 300 06404 7 The University in Ruins By Bill Readings 238pp. Harvard University Press. ?18.95. - 0 674 92952 7 THE FUTURE OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM By Louis Menand, editor 230pp. University of Chicago Press; distributed in the UK by Wiley. ?19.95. - 0 226 52004 8 According to Jose Ortega y Gasset, in The Mission of the University (1944), "When a nation is great, so will be its schools." Is the obverse true of universities? In the English-speaking world, at least since Matthew Arnold and John Henry Newman, universities have commonly represented themselves as institutions devoted to the transmission of culture. Neither Arnold nor Newman imagined that universities could create the culture they existed to express and renew. They took for granted that culture lay around them, at times inchoate or dormant, but pervasively present in a common national life. They differed widely in their view of the place of Christian belief in that culture and, correspondingly, in the role they attached to universities as vehicles of the secular traditions of the humanities. Newman conceived the task of universities as that of nurturing civilized people ("gentlemen") who embodied "intellectual culture". He did not suppose that such culture could transform an irredeemably fallen world. By contrast, Arnold had high hopes of culture as a transformative influence on industrial civilization. Despite these differences, Newman and Arnold had in common a very definite idea of the intellectual culture that it was the task of universities to propagate. It was not practical or vocational knowledge, it had nothing to do with amassing information and it served no external - economic or commercial, say - purposes. In their view, to defend universities on the ground that the pure research that goes on in them ultimately confers practical benefits on the societies that support them is to neglect and even to spurn the distinctive good that universities foster. It is to make of universities utilitarian institutions, whose goals are set outside them, and thereby to compromise their distinctive ethos. To defend universities in these terms is to sell the pass. In Frank M. Turner's useful new edition of Newman's The Idea of a University, university education has a decidedly anachronistic, even quixotic, aspect. What is strangest in Newman's idea of a university are not its Christian commitments. It is what it more generally presupposes - a common national (and supra-national) culture. This is a contrast with the situation of universities nowadays that recurs repeatedly in the essays by contemporary educationalists and philosophers that accompany Newman's text. In Newman's time, Christian faith might not have been universal in Britain, but it had not yet become marginal. In our time, in European countries at any rate, the idea that a national culture should or could rest on any single world- view, religious or secular, is suspect; but national cultures are not for that reason becoming weaker. Bill Readings tells us that the withering of the nation-state "is not the same thing as claiming that nationalism is no longer an issue". The issue is rather, he suggests, the depoliticization of society and culture generated by the rise of the modern bureaucratic state. Yet one of the most striking features of recent history is the disruption of bureaucratic rationality - in the European Union, for example - by the return of the national question to the very centre of political life. Here, like many academics, Readings mistakes the bureaucratization that is going on in universities for a wider social trend, when the dominant tendency in most late modern societies is precisely the reverse. Indeed, one of the reasons for the increased marginality of universities is that, not for the first time, they are adopting a model of administration and management that has long been abandoned in the larger economies and societies they are meant to serve. A central theme in Readings's The University in Ruins is that the development of universities has occurred in tandem with that of the nation-state. The culture that universities reproduced was the national culture constructed along with the institutions of the modern state. Now that the nation-state is (according to Readings) in decline, we must accept that the modern university has become a ruined institution. Those ruins must not be the object of a romantic nostalgia for a lost wholeness but the site of an attempt to transvalue the fact that the university no longer inhabits a continuous history of progress, of the progressive revelation of a unifying idea. In the context of English-speaking countries, and especially of the United States, Readings's provocative formulation captures one source of the increasing marginality of universities as cultural institutions. The loss of confidence in themselves in this role must be due partly to the break-up in the wider society of tradition. To this extent Ortega must be right: universities cannot manufacture a culture where none exists. Yet this is surely only a rather small part of the explanation for the dwindling cultural leverage of universities on the societies they serve. As he himself recognizes, Readings's account of the condition of contemporary universities is not far removed from that of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987) - a book whose rapturous public reception provided a better argument for its gloomy diagnoses than any advanced by Bloom himself. Cultural warfare over "the Western canon" and formulaic controversies about "relativism" are far from being universal features of contemporary university life throughout the world. They are episodes in a local debate about American identity. In that debate it is the stance of "multiculturalism", rather than the neo-conservative defence of a banal version of "the western tradition", that best reflects the realities of American life today. Moreover, although the sectarian rancour with which multiculturalism is debated seems peculiarly American, the historical context of multiculturalism is far wider than the United States. All western societies are having to adjust to a new global context in which their intellectual traditions increasingly form only one strand in cultural life. In finding this adjustment to the loss of western hegemony difficult, universities are no different from many other social institutions in late modern western societies. Readings's asserstion that we are witnessing the emergence of an "essentially unipolar society" is, once again, nearly the opposite of the truth. The globalization of economic and cultural life that is under way today is a "de-centring" movement. Its effect is to diminish the leverage of western societies in many parts of the world, and at the same time to make western societies more culturally plural. This is a world-historical development whose profound implications academic multiculturalism - itself a protypically western phenomenon - has scarcely begun to grasp. Several of the contributors to Louis Menand's collection of essays on higher education, The Future of Academic Freedom, address the question of whether universities can be justified as expressing a distinctive ethical and intellectual culture, and, if so, how that culture might itself be defended. Ronald Dworkin argues that, although academic freedom is not a simple derivation from the right to free speech, nevertheless it expresses the ideal of ethical individualism that animates liberal political morality. In this view, the local practices of American universities are embodiments (no doubt imperfect) of political first principles. Richard Rorty takes his stand on local practice and forgoes any appeal to first principles. His essay is an elegant and forceful restatement of the pragmatist view that institutions do not need "foundations". Elaborating on a famous remark of Eisenhower's, he declares that "any religion that is dubious about American democratic institutions must have something wrong with it. I should claim that any philosophy that is dubious about the folkways that we call 'acad-emic freedom' must have something wrong with it." Despite their divergent philosophical standpoints, Dworkin and Rorty both take for granted the principle that the ideal of the university can be realized only in a liberal political culture that is much like their own. They share this common presupposition, in part, because their context of discussion is single-mindedly American. In this they differ sharply from Edward Said, who in the collection's most wide-ranging essay defends the ideal of freedom of inquiry by reference to the historical experience of universities in many parts of the world, including the countries of the Middle East. For Said, there is no single paradigm of the university as a social institution. Universities are as diverse as the societies that harbour them. Yet this does not mean that universities are obliged to articulate the cultures in which they find themselves. On the contrary, as Said argues, intellectual freedom demands that people in the academy be ready to risk their identities as practitioners of particular cultures in order to understand the cultures of others. A free thinker in the academy is bound to be a nomad, not a celebrant of any one cultural identity - that of American liberal individualism, say. Interestingly, he finds hints of this understanding of intellectual freedom in the writings of Newman, whose prejudices are otherwise so manifest. Said quotes Newman's "incomparably eloquent statements" affirming the necessity, in a university education, of knowing "the relative disposition of things" and avoiding the partial views that express the narrow identities "of slaves or children". As Said observes, that he was speaking only of English Catholic males only slightly deflates the profound truth of what Newman is saying. If I understand him rightly, Said's moral is that the project of intellectual inquiry to which universities are devoted cannot be confined - or seek to confine itself - within the limits of any one particular cultural identity, howsoever liberal it may be. What is refreshing and salutary in Said's essay is its recognition that no amount of institutional or legal protection for academic freedom can secure it where the spirit of free inquiry is lacking. Intellectual freedom cannot flourish when universities themselves are battlefields of culture-warriors. The danger of multiculturalism in academic life is the hardening of oppositional identities into self-enclosed intellectual communities. But this is a mirror-image of a liberal hegemony in which the experience and histories of people from other cultures are recognized only in so far as they validate the superiority of "our", liberal forms of ethical life. The domination of political philosophy over the past generation by a school of liberalism that takes all its reference points from recent North American experience, interpreted from a standpoint of legalism and individualist rights theory, is a species of solipsism in intellectual and academic life. Of course, it cannot be said that the heg-emony of this peculiar and parochial variant of liberal theory in the academy is a violation of academic freedom, as that is presently understood. But it is an example of a widespread self-insulation of academic institutions from the larger and more diverse political and cultural realities of the time. It is the self-referential character of much academic discourse which claims to address issues in the real world that accounts for the continuing leakage of intellectual energy from universities to other spheres of society - think-tanks, the media, even politics - which is such an ominous sign for the future of the academy. There are many reasons why universities risk becoming culturally and intellectually marginal. In Britain, their increasing subordination to economic and vocational objectives is a danger to the autonomy and ethos of universities more immediate and urgent than intellectual sectarianism. But in Britain, as elsewhere, universities will be able to renew themselves only if they contain people for whom intellectual freedom matters. From checker at panix.com Mon Jun 6 18:01:49 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2005 14:01:49 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: John Gray: The tasks ahead . . . Message-ID: John Gray: The tasks ahead . . . The Times Literary Supplement, 97.5.9 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2090351&window_type=print A new social and political settlement, the historic successor of post-war social democracy, is under construction in Britain. On May 1, the British electorate dismissed the Conservatives as a party unfit to govern the United Kingdom. By inflicting on the Tories their worst humiliation since the Great Reform Act of 1832, the electorate has made Tony Blair's modernization of the Labour Party an unalterable fact of British political life. After such a vindication there can be no question of Blair's modernizing strategy being derailed in government by any reversion to old Labour thinking. Instead the question is what modernization means for the country that Blair's government has inherited. Which modernity is Britain now embarked upon? One vision of British modernity has been rejected irrevocably. The project of refashioning Britain on the model of the American free market has suffered a final political defeat. In its earlier phases, Thatcherite policy was indispensable in building an internationally competitive market economy in Britain. The triangular collusion of government, trade unions and employers worked not as a pace-maker for wealth creation but as an engine of industrial conflict. Mrs Thatcher succeeded, where Labour could not, in dismantling the jerry-built structures of British corporatism. The later administrations of Thatcher and John Major sought to inject market mechanisms into virtually every British institution. They became vehicles of a modernizing project guided by the primitive ideology of market liberalism. Thatcher's project was programmed to fail. It was imposed on a country whose attitudes to the market and to the social responsibilities of government are, at bottom, not transatlantic but European. It was bound to be repudiated when the social fracturing it produced appeared to threaten the security of the middle classes. On May 1, Europhobic nationalism suffered an electoral rout from which it will not recover. As a result the Conservatives have been left rudderless. It no longer matters much what Tories think or say. Conservatism has been undone by its embrace of an ideology alien to the British political tradition. Unless the Conservatives opt for a generation in the political wilderness by electing a radically Eurosceptic leader to replace John Major, we will hear no more of the Thatcherite project of making over British society into a replica of American individualism. Yet no error could be more radical than that which is made by those who imagine that Thatcherism's demise will enable the social democratic ancien regime of pre-Thatcher times to be re-established in Britain. The world has changed too fundamentally for any such restoration to be a possibility. Europe's social democratic regimes were established during an era of closed economies. They rested on the capacity of sovereign states to limit the free movement of capital and production through exchange controls and tariffs. They cannot survive in an en-vironment in which capital and production exercise unfettered global mobility. The banalization of new technologies, which spread swiftly and are turned to profitable uses throughout the world; the intensification of global competition by the industrialization of the highly literate and numerate societies of East Asia; the enormous expansion of world markets consequent on the Soviet collapse and economic reform in China; the power of the world bond markets over national governments - this irresistible movement of economic globalization has effectively destroyed the environment that enabled social democracy to be established and maintained in Britain and other European countries. With the partial exception of Holland, the social democracies of continental Europe today do not represent a modernity that is applicable in Britain. They are mired in policies that belong to an irrecoverable past. A labour market in which job security is institutionalized is not sustainable when technological innovation is wiping out entire occupations; pension schemes that tie benefits to a single employer make little sense when no one can be sure of having the same vocation across a working lifetime; welfare institutions that are geared primarily to compensating people for failure are supremely unfitted for an age of globalization. Unless Europe's social democratic regimes reform themselves deeply and speedily they will be blown away by the gale of global competition. There is no prospect of a Blair government reshaping Britain's institutions on a semi-defunct European model. The logic of his repeated endorsements of flexible labour markets points in the opposite direction. In this, Blair is unquestionably right. The historic role of Britain's new government must be to take the lead in modernizing European social democracy. In so doing, it will unavoidably confront the chief dilemma of the age, which is how to reconcile the necessities of global markets with the needs of social cohesion. Old-style social democratic thinking is of little help here. It is disabled by its preoccupation with issues of distribution. It focuses more on redistributing income to people trapped in lives without hope than on improving the primary distribution of skills and opportunities in society. In this it has been deformed by the influence of egalitarian theories such as that of John Rawls. Recent political philosophy mirrors the thinking of the social democrats of a generation ago in conceiving of social justice as securing a pattern of outcomes across the whole of society. It has in common with ideologies of the New Right (such as Hayek's) an insensitivity to the diverse judgments of fairness we make in different areas of social life. The Conservative regime was not toppled on May 1 because it failed to conform to Rawls's difference principle. It was overturned because it appeared indifferent to vital human needs and seemed oblivious to the link that ought to exist between large rewards in public utilities and some claim to meritorious performance. It is already evident that the new social and economic settlement that is emerging in Britain will not be embodied in redistributional policies that pursue equality of outcome. Gordon Brown had made clear that it will embody a conception of equal opportunity that is maximal, com-prehensive and lifelong. It will promote merito-cracy and inclusion rather than equal outcomes. The new realities of economic globalization preclude traditional social democratic strategies of redistribution through taxation. If the spread of opportunities and skills is to be made fairer it will have to be achieved through changes in priorities in public spending and by reforms of the welfare state. This involves a marked shift from the liberal egalitarianism that informed the work of a social democrat such as Anthony Crosland. Rawlsian social democracy and the Hayekian free market are different versions of the same liberal individualist philosophy, and they have the same limitations. For both egalitarian and libertarian liberals, the basic unit of society is an abstraction - the individual chooser. Liberal individualists understand human beings as bundles of preferences, ciphers without histories or enduring attachments. They neglect the deep ways in which we are all embedded in common forms of life. They pass over the truth, which has been well articulated in communitarian theory, that personal well-being cannot be realized fully in a fragmented society. Yet communitarian thought can easily fail to track the complex conflicts of modern plural societies. Contemporary Britain harbours a variety of ways of life. Many Britons belong not to one but several cultural traditions. If Britain's welfare state is to be radically reformed, as man-ifestly it must, it cannot be by policies which aim to return to an imaginary past of organic communities and seamless families. Labour's social policies will work well in so far as they respect diversity - sexual, familial, ethnic and cultural. There is no one way in which the good life has to be lived now. A communitarian vision of late modern Britain cannot be other than pluralist. Labour's commitment to constitutional reform is an index of its commitment to pluralism. Its proposals for devolution have their final justification in the manifest fact that Britain is no longer unified by a single, homogeneous national culture. Its commitment to incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights into British law is the first stage in a long and delicate search for a stable balance between the sovereign statehood of the United Kingdom and the institutions of the European Union. It is in education, more perhaps than in any other area of policy, that Britain will benefit from a closer relationship with Europe. Can a programme of educational reform succeed so long as Britain, unlike any other European country, discourages selection in state schools? Can economic renewal be sustained when Britain's schools are vehicles for the transmission of an atavistic class culture? How can Britain become one nation so long as it has a two-nation schooling system? How can we pretend to any kind of modernity so long as we are schooled into belonging to tribes and castes? The peculiar deformations of Britain's class culture are only one of many reasons why it cannot import its understanding of modernity from any other country. Blair's government is right to look eclectically to countries as diverse as Holland, Singapore and New Zealand for lessons in modernization. Yet a successor to social democracy in Britain will be enduring only if - unlike Thatcherism - it is home-grown. There is in the end no model for Britain's passage to modernity. None of the old ideologies of Right or Left can be of much guidance. No country has yet reconciled the demands of global markets with the maintenance of social stability. No British government has ever achieved a sustainable balance between the disciplines of wealth-creation and the claims of social justice. How Blair's government negotiates these conflicting imperatives will determine the shape and fate of the new British settlement. From checker at panix.com Mon Jun 6 18:03:01 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2005 14:03:01 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: Jagdish Bhagwati: The same the whole world over Message-ID: Jagdish Bhagwati: The same the whole world over The Times Literary Supplement, 2002.11.8 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2076513&window_type=print GLOBALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS. By Joseph Stiglitz. 282pp. Allen Lane The Penguin Press. ?16.99. - 0 713 99664 1 UP THE DOWN ESCALATOR. Why the global pessimists are wrong. By Charles Leadbeater. 371pp. Viking. ?20. - 0 670 91322 7 Globalization is the topic of the day: countless books and articles attest to that. Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, with an undisputed reputation as a theorist. Yet his Globalization and Its Discontents has attracted several of the worst reviews that I have ever seen. In addition, the personal attacks in the book have aroused a firestorm of condemnation that has obscured even the few good questions Stiglitz raises and tries to answer. Charles Leadbeater, though not yet familiar on the world stage, is a familiar voice in Britain. Tony Blair, to whose Third Way circle of intellectuals he belongs, endorsed his earlier book, Living on Thin Air (2000), with a flattering blurb that called him "an extraordinarily interesting thinker". This book indeed shows that he is. Unknown across the Atlantic, he seems destined to be discovered there some day; and this book may well be the occasion. The contrast between the two books is not merely in the inverse relationship between what they promise and what they perform. It is also in the intellectual interests that the two authors bring to the complex subject of globalization. Where Leadbeater's writing draws brilliantly on half a dozen intriguing books in virtually all of his dozen chapters, Stiglitz seems to have read almost nothing: neither the texts nor the endnotes betray familiarity with the writings of, for example, Thomas Friedman or John Gray. So, unlike Leadbeater who penetrates interestingly to globalization's discontents, seeking out the many factors that have led in his judgement to a profound "global pessimism" and countering it effectively, Stiglitz's book does not even attempt to document, let alone diagnose these discontents. In fact, one looks in vain through Stiglitz for an analysis of the principal issues that the anti-globalizers, and their critics, have been concerned with. These relate only marginally to the question of whether economic globalization produces economic prosperity, increasing the size of the pie. Stiglitz wants to fight this battle, but it is really a sideshow. The serious debate today is not over whether economic liberalization is economically benign; it is instead over whether it is socially malign. Indeed, the agitation among the more thoughtful critics is over whether, for example, globalization is detrimental to the aims of gender equality, weakens the fight against poverty in the poor countries, reduces hard-won labour standards in the rich countries (because trade and multinational investments in poor countries with lower standards will produce a "race to the bottom"), destroys indigenous and mainstream cultures, and produces a "democratic deficit". Leadbeater is splendid on some of these questions, particularly on the impact of globalization on democracy and on culture, challenging the pessimists with penetrating counter-arguments. In fact, one can argue more fully that, by and large, economic globalization is socially benign. To take one example: think about gender pay equality. We know now that trade is something that feminists should embrace. The economists Sandra Black and Elizabeth Brainerd have shown that, in US experience over two decades, the pay differential has shrunk faster in internationally competitive industries. This is because prejudice tends to be crowded out by price; the pressure on profits means that firms will not be able to indulge their prejudice and pay more to men whose work is no better than women's. Again, while Japanese women have seriously lagged behind in their rights, globalization has been a powerful force for change. When Japanese men went abroad in the 1980s and 90s as the executives, their wives and children came too. They saw how women were treated in the West today; and many went back as silent, sometimes active, revolutionaries. Among those of us who share a concern for social agendas, the pessimists see globalization as part of the problem; the optimists such as myself see globalization as part of the solution. And the governance we need to explore and work for as economic globalization proceeds apace will depend critically on whether we are pessimists or optimists. The former will want to throw sand into the gears of globalization; they will want to challenge, inhibit, constrain it. The latter will want to complement and accelerate the achievement of the social agendas that globalization produces. The stakes in this debate are immense. Leadbeater is on the side of the angels. But why is Stiglitz not in this battle of the century? Because he is largely preoccupied with a piffling personal battle with the IMF (especially Stanley Fischer) and the US Treasury (in particular Secretary Robert Rubin and his deputy Larry Summers, who later succeeded Rubin and is now President of Harvard) over their approach to macrostabilization, and with his predecessor at the World Bank (Anne Krueger) over trade liberalization. Thrown into the arena also is his wrath over privatization, which seems to extend beyond Russia; here his chief villains remain Rubin and Summers. Condemning these individuals and institutions (though exempting the World Bank under his own enlightened direction) as "market fundamentalists", Stiglitz castigates the "stale and repugnant ideology" they subscribe to as consisting of "privatization, liberalization (in particular, trade liberalization) and macrostabilization". In short, he is not really addressing globalization per se: after all, privatization can be an issue even when an economy is autarkic but has been wedded to the Marxist prescription of state ownership of the means of production: a description that is not entirely inappropriate, say, to India from the 1950s to the late 1970s. Nor is macro-instability, requiring macrostabilization, exclusively an attribute of globalization. Of his obsessions, only trade liberalization is intrinsically a globalization issue. But he is not even right to complain about "market fundamentalism". Lacking long-standing familiarity with development economics, he seems ignorant of the fact that the early development strategies which failed in many countries were characterized by neglect of markets and knee-jerk interventionism. I used to remark, based on my and other development economists' research, that the problem in many poor countries was that Adam Smith's Invisible Hand was nowhere to be seen. Policy-makers in many developing countries, having worked with "planning without prices", where markets were regarded with deep suspicion, began to flee from such policies. Few thought, however, that the best government was one that self- destructed. The debate was not about whether government, but what kind. The use of tradable permits to pursue environmental objectives exactly illustrates what the reformers were doing: using markets to improve environmental policy, not to eliminate it. The same was true of autarkic policies in regard to the world economy. The developing countries had generally been fearful of globalization. Many saw trade and investment interactions between the poor and the rich countries as, not the economist's "benign-impact", but as what I have called "malign impact" phenomena. The Chilean sociologist Osvaldo Sunkel famously remarked that in the developing countries "integration into the international economy leads to disintegration of the national economy". But, as post-war experience accumulated, both in terms of the shortfalls in the autarkic countries and the dazzling success of the outward-oriented economies in the Far East, countries began to move away from these inward-looking policies and to open up. Stiglitz fails to note this, attributing greater openness in trade to pressures from the "ideologues" of trade liberalization, via the IMF and also the World Bank -before he came to the rescue. This is nonsense; as I and my co-authors have documented elsewhere, governments often reduced high trade barriers simply because they recognized that it was good for them. Nor will the facts support his implied view that Bretton Woods (IMF and World Bank) conditionality in favour of trade liberalization, when applied, has necessarily been effective. The IMF has often favoured going easy on tariff reductions because, typically, countries come to it when they have a stabilization crisis which requires that revenues not be compromised, while the Bank has favoured taking advantage of a crisis to push tariff reforms through. Occasionally, tariff reductions undertaken as part of reforms required by Bretton Woods donors have been reversed. After all, there is no obligation to stick to them once the crisis is behind you. There are also several studies which show that trade liberalization is associated with greater growth, and greater growth in turn pulls more people out of poverty. In particular, both India and China, which specialize in poverty and account for the bulk of it worldwide, have shown greater growth and great reductions in poverty once they embraced economic reforms including greater outward integration. Yet Stiglitz baldly asserts: "Not only in trade liberalization but in every other aspect of globalization even seemingly well-intentioned efforts have often backfired." I sympathize with Stiglitz's strictures on the role of the US Treasury, Wall Street and the IMF in pushing for a far too hasty and imprudent capital account liberalization in the developing countries and then, when the Asian financial crisis erupted, imposing wrong conditionality that compounded it at the outset. But Stiglitz should know that it is impossible to fine-tune the economy: too much depends on expectations, and the order in which effects kick in. Alas, no one has a crystal ball. What one needs is for the IMF to monitor for errors and adjust its position accordingly, as it indeed did after a year. He is similarly unconvincing when he raises alarms about the trade policy reforms and increased resort to markets and privatizations that poor countries have been attempting, in varying degrees, in recent years. If anything, his criticisms will add to populist pressure in those countries to dump all such pragmatic reforms back in the wasteland of - to borrow Stiglitz's words - "the stale and repugnant ideology" of autarky, public sector expansion and intervention-as-first-resort from which they were emerging after decades of misdirection. Stiglitz brings to our attention a number of serious problems - especially in regard to the functioning of the IMF. But he often allows himself to be distracted by somewhat shallow solutions. Thus, for example, he wants "ownership" of programmes by the crisis-afflicted countries receiving assistance. But this is no answer. Was Argentina's collapse caused by IMF conditionality? Surely not; it was a home-made crisis. Again, he has the notion that non-governmental organizations know more than the IMF economists do about macro-economics; the IMF, he has famously said, hires "third-rate economists from first-rate universities", while presumably the NGOs hire a better class of professional. Having seen Oxfam's recent report on trade, which is long on virtue and short on competence, I suggest that Stiglitz cannot be serious; and if he is serious, he should not be taken seriously. The task he has set himself in this book is an important one; but he has not given it the time or thought it deserves, nor the talent that he possesses in abundance. From shovland at mindspring.com Tue Jun 7 02:27:09 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2005 19:27:09 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Conscious Acts of Creation: The Emergence of a New Physics Message-ID: <01C56ACD.BC57AE70.shovland@mindspring.com> http://www.tiller.org/ by William A Tiller (Professor Emeritus, Stanford University), Walter Dibble Jr., Michael Kohane This book is an "eye-opener" for both non-scientists and scientists, metaphysicians and physicians, students and teachers and all people with a real interest in how science moves our world. It concerns unactualized human capabilities, opportunities and adventures for all of us in the years ahead. For the first time, a rigorous experimental protocol is available to allow human qualities to meaningfully alter the properties of physical materials via specific human intentions! The experimental data portion of this book shows, via the use of IIEDs (Intention Imprinted Electrical Devices), how human intention can robustly influence physical reality with measurement amplitude changes by as much as 100 times the instrument measurement accuracy. The described experiments deal with inorganic materials like water, in vitro organic materials like enzymes and in vitro living systems like fruit fly larvae. This experimental data shows how after ~3 months of continued use of the IIEDs in a particular laboratory space, that space becomes "conditioned" to a higher state of physics Gauge symmetry than present in normal locales. In a "conditioned" space, human intention acts as a true thermodynamic potential to significantly influence the many chemical, electrical and biological processes of nature. This book also provides a "work in progress" - type of theoretical model that allows us to explain how this experimental procedure works to produce such striking changes in measurement amplitudes. "Reviews" "This book by Tiller, Dibble and Kohane is at once a 'magnum opus' and a 'tour de force'. The 'whole person healing' community will be in deep debt to these authors for many years." XXXX- Professor Rustum Roy (Director, Materials Research Laboratory, Pennsylvania State University) "?Tiller makes a claim that would not only revolutionize medicine but our perception and approach to all reality. If there are prophets in our extraordinary times he is likely one of them. His claim is a bold one indeed: human consciousness contributes to the creation and direction of the universe." XXXX- Wayne Jonas, M.D. (Former Director of both the Office of Alternative medicine at the National Institutes of Health and the Medical Research Fellowship at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research; currently founding Director of the Samueli Institute) "Your (Tiller's) new book, I am sure, may long be remembered as the book that started out the scientific work in a new area and thus created a new era in science." XXXX- Professor George Sudarshan (Physics Department, University of Texas, Austin) "?this book combines a brilliant theoretical model with several experiments that test and convincingly demonstrate mechanisms for intention to influence physical reality? Conscious Acts of Creation will take the reader beyond the realm of the five senses and expand one's view of himself or herself as a co-creator of reality. It is for this reason that this book is recommended not only for scientists, engineers, and health care practitioners?but also for everyone who seeks to maximize his or her human experience." XXXX- Dave Stein, reviewer. "The Center for Frontier Sciences" " This reviewer suggests that this book is destined to be a classic that may someday rank with the early publications on the theory of relativity." XXXX- Hal Fox, editor. "Journal of New Energy" Science and Human Transformation: Subtle Energies, Intentionality and Consciousness by William A Tiller, PhD. Excerpts from "Science and Human Transformation" Description of "Science and Human Transformation" "Reviews" Tiller has written a very special story about becoming! I know that anyone who is exposed to this book in any depth will come away with a different mindset, one that will provide tremendous enthusiasm for life and just how to use this new understanding to develop a more effective set of values and attitudes. XXXX- Jack Holland, PhD., D.S.D. "This book sets in motion a profound and satisfying new paradigm for medicine and medical science for the coming centuries. It integrates a multitude of previously disconnected pieces of the human health puzzle into an internally self-consistent framework for understanding both physical nature and the solid foundation upon which to build." XXXX- C. Normal Shealy, M.D. "The wondrous but clear evidence cogently presented in this book is extremely compelling, and Tiller's insights and logical envisionings are equally compelling. Science and Human Transformation is one of the most important bridges into the advancing sciences of the next century, and many will walk across it." XXXX- Ingo Swann "This book postulates a model for the structure of the physical and non-physical Universe. In terms of this model, it addresses longstanding issues in physics, parapsychology, homeopathy, magnetic healing, and related disciplines?from physics to biochemistry, from dowsing to QiGong, from acupuncture to remote viewing, from radionics to Feng Shui, from Chi flow to chakras, from manifestation to Consciousness itself. The myriad of topics?make this book essential reading for scientists, practitioners of the healing and subtle energy arts, and people consciously committed to a spiritual growth path?" XXXX- Dave Stein, "Frontier Perspectives" "It is a brilliant work in the tradition of such other great works of synthesis as Kepler's Mysterium Cosmographicum?Tiller, a leading scientist, now retired, taught and studied the structure of matter at Stanford?presents us with no less than his grand unified Theory of Everything. Unlike most other Theories of Everything?Dr. Tiller actually delivers the goods." XXXX-David Joffee, "ISSSEEM Magazine" From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 7 21:16:35 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 17:16:35 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Web Sites Celebrate a Deadly Thinness Message-ID: Web Sites Celebrate a Deadly Thinness New York Times, 5.6.7 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/07/health/nutrition/07eat.html [The article lists no sites, but googling pro-ana brings up a great many, the first of which is http://www.plagueangel.net/grotto/id5.html and is called "Pro-Ana Links." Likewise, articles descrying hate sites don't give you a sample, but googling <"hate sites"> links to a lot of lists. I have not looked for child pornography sites, though, and wonder if I could be proscecuted for visiting sites using a text-only browser.] By [3]ERIC NAGOURNEY Before the Web site's pages begin to load, a box pops up the screen. "Caution," it reads. "This site contains pro-eating disorder images and information. If you do not have an eating disorder or are in recovery, do not enter this site." Click O.K., and a new box appears. "Seriously. You enter this site of your own volition, and I am not responsible for the decisions you make based on the information you see here." Click. A third box. "So don't send me hate mail. It's your fault if you don't like what you see." However sincerely intended, the warnings, posted on one of a growing number of Web sites that promote eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, may serve more as a lure, especially for curious teenagers. And a recent study by researchers from the Stanford School of Medicine has found that the Web sites are commonly visited by adolescents who have eating disorders. Such sites are the public face of a movement that goes beyond the denial that often accompanies addictive behaviors like alcoholism and gambling, into something more like defiance. Many of the sites dispute that anorexia and bulimia are diseases, portraying them instead as philosophies of life. They offer tips on how to lose weight - by purging, among other methods - and how to hide eating disorders from family members or friends. In the new study, presented at a meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies, the researchers said it was unclear whether the Web sites played a role in drawing people into eating disorders or in making recovery more difficult, in part because the study sample was fairly small. A larger study is planned. But the researchers found that adolescents who reported visiting so-called pro-ana, for anorexia nervosa, or pro-mia, for bulimia nervosa, Web sites spent more time in hospitals and less time on school work than those who said they did not visit the sites. For reasons that are unclear, the study also found that even when adolescents visited pro-eating-disorder and pro-recovery sites, they still fared worse than those who visited neither kind of site. Pro-eating-disorder Web sites can be very attractive, experts say. Many are well designed and well written, and they appeal to an adolescent sense of rebellion. "The belief that centers the pro-ana movement is the belief that eating disorders are a lifestyle choice and not a disease," said one of the study's authors, Dr. Rebecka Peebles, a specialist in adolescent medicine at Stanford's Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. Consider the page that greets visitors when they finally get past the warning boxes. "Quod me nutrit, me destruit," it declares. What nourishes me destroys me. The site goes on to give tips on how to conceal an eating disorder, including wearing baggy clothes, pretending to eat and hiding the health problems the disorders can bring on. The author of the site, in a "disclaimer," says she is not promoting eating disorders. "These sites," she writes "do not exist to say: 'I'm anorexic! Aren't I cool? Don't you want to be like me?' " The goal, she says, is to offer support: "This is a place where people can come to say, 'This is part of who I am. These are people who understand.' " Jenny Wilson, a Stanford medical student and the author of the study, is skeptical of efforts to attach a philosophy to eating disorders. Instead, she sees the Web sites as efforts by people with eating disorders to convince themselves that they have control over their lives. "I think it's an expression of the disease more than anything," Ms. Wilson said. Many of the Web sites show a kind of ambivalence, the researchers said. They defend people's right to be anorexic or bulimic, but they spend a lot of time talking about the difficulties of having eating disorders. Dr. Peebles of Stanford said that for some people, the sites might serve as no more than a support community, and not as a source of encouragement to continue destructive behavior. "They can express their innermost eating-disordered thoughts in a sortof anonymous way where they won't be judged," she said. Still, when the researchers spoke to adolescents who had visited the sites, more than 60 percent reported trying weight-loss techniques they had learned there. (About a quarter of the adolescents who visited Web sites intended to help people with eating disorders recover also said they had found tips on ways to keep their weight down.) For the study, the researchers sent surveys to the parents of 678 people, ages 10 to 22, who had been treated for eating disorders at Stanford. They also asked the parents to give separate surveys to their children. In all, 64 patients and 92 parents responded. And while the forms were anonymous, the researchers were able to link the responses of the patients with those of their families, to compare answers. The study found that 39 percent of the patients had visited pro-eating-disorder Web sites, 38 percent pro-recovery sites and 27 percent both types of sites. Despite the differences in reported hospital stays, the researchers found that those who spent time on the pro-eating-disorder sites provided basically the same information when asked about health changes as those who did not. Their weight was not much different from their ideal body weight, the researchers said, and they were no more likely to have changes in their menstrual cycles or to have symptoms of osteoporosis. When the researchers tried to see how familiar parents were with the Web sites, they found that the parents whose children visited the sites were more likely to know about them and to be concerned about what their children were learning on the Web. But 39 percent of those parents said they did not know whether their children visited pro-eating-disorder sites. And 15 percent wrongly reported that their children did not use them. Some large Web servers like Yahoo, responding to complaints, have removed sites that promote eating disorders. But the sites remain easy to find. And some experts wonder whether they are doing a better job of getting their message out than do the sites intended to promote recovery from eating problems. Dr. Richard Kreipe, chief of adolescent medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center, said he was struck by how attractive the pro-eating-disorder sites tended to be. Still, he said, it is hard to prove whether the sites actually make the problem worse. The issue, Dr. Kreipe said, is probably not whether the sites can draw the average teenager into an eating disorder but whether they may influence someone with an inherited predisposition to develop the disease - especially an adolescent who is feeling isolated. "The kid who's probably most vulnerable to this is the kid who's least connected to other people," he said. From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 7 21:16:49 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 17:16:49 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: Research Dispels Myth of the Old and Grumpy Message-ID: Research Dispels Myth of the Old and Grumpy New York Times, 5.6.7 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/07/health/07grum.html By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Grumpy old men and women may not be so grumpy after all. Two new studies report that older people are better at getting along with others than younger people are, and much more content in their interpersonal relationships. In one study, the researchers conducted lengthy interviews with 184 people ages 13 to 99 to determine how they solved interpersonal problems. Even after controlling for factors like sex and health, they found that the adults who were older than 80 were more likely to avoid conflict by waiting until things improved, while the younger people more often chose to leave in anger or engage in yelling and name-calling. The older people, the researchers found, had fewer interpersonal difficulties to begin with, and when problems arose, they experienced less negative emotion and behaved less aggressively. The study appears in the May issue of The Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences. The second study, scheduled for publication in the June issue of Psychology and Aging, involved more than 1,000 people ages 25 to 74 who completed eight successive days of phone interviews, a technique that the authors believe produces more reliable recollections. The results were similar: people 60 and older were better at regulating their reactions to interpersonal tension than younger adults, even with similar intensity and frequency of stressful situations. "Although people often think of older adults as ornery, they're actually nicer when they have problems in their relationships," said Dr. Kira S. Birditt, a research fellow at the University of Michigan and the lead author on the two studies. "When they do feel upset, they're more likely to wait to see if things improve than to yell or argue." It is widely believed that men and women often respond differently to interpersonal stress - men by withdrawing and women by insisting on a solution. And some research confirms this premise. But the two studies found no such variation between the sexes. Moreover, Dr. Birditt pointed out that older adults of both sexes appeared to be better at handling conflict not only with family but with co-workers, neighbors and acquaintances. "The type of relationship didn't matter," she said. "Older people are just better at it." And while confronting issues openly is often viewed as the best way to handle interpersonal problems, older adults often avoid this approach. "It may be that avoiding problems is good for relationships," Dr. Birditt said. "Particularly if it's a personality issue, something unlikely to change, it may be helpful to just ignore it." The researchers point to several limitations of their study. They concede that having people report on their actions or feelings can bias the findings because people may only report what is socially acceptable. They also mention that older adults may remember the past more favorably than younger people. In addition, the results may be influenced by the fact that constructive strategies may have survival value, and that people who use destructive strategies either do not stay together or do not live as long as those who find ways to get along. "Over all," Dr. Birditt concluded, "older people are experiencing less anger and less stress, and using less aggressive strategies when they have problems in their relationships. "It might be that relationships get better as we age." From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 7 21:17:03 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 17:17:03 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: (Class) Letters: The Island of the Really, Really Rich Message-ID: Letters: The Island of the Really, Really Rich New York Times, 5.6.7 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/07/opinion/l07class.html To the Editor: Re "Richest Are Leaving Even the Rich Far Behind" and "Old Nantucket Warily Meets the New" (front page, "Class Matters" series, June 5): I am not proud at the flush of envy that rose in my secure, middle-class body while reading your ninth installment on class. I tried to interpret my rising indignation as directed solely at the decadence and destruction of the super-rich. I shook my head at their shallow and selfish behavior and at a society that allows such disparity to flourish. Yet somehow I managed to read the earlier installments of the series with nothing more than a calm concern and benign sympathy. The empathy I felt toward those less fortunate, although sincere, did not generate this palpable excitement. I did not rush off a letter to the editor expressing my outrage. It is certainly tempting to locate our own humble position on the wealth charts and to stare upward with envy. Rather than denying this natural human weakness, I suggest that we direct the passion kindled toward the vast numbers of the truly needy. This is an opportunity that I do not want to miss. Jonathan Spitz Westfield, N.J., June 5, 2005 To the Editor: Your chart about the percentage of income earned by the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers was fascinating, but "Richest Are Leaving Even the Rich Far Behind" failed to draw the obvious conclusions from it. The data show that the rich take a rising share of income when the economy is booming, such as during the 1920's and 1990's. Their share declines when the economy hits hard times, such as during the Great Depression and the most recent recession. The rich took their smallest slice of the economic pie during the 1970's - a period when productivity growth was low and unemployment and inflation were rising. Here's the lesson: If policy makers' primary goal is to reduce income inequality, they should put the economy through the wringer. But if they want economic prosperity for all, they should avoid focusing on the politics of envy. N. Gregory Mankiw Cambridge, Mass., June 5, 2005 The writer, a professor of economics at Harvard University, was chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, 2003-2005. To the Editor: For many who have known the island, "Old Nantucket Warily Meets the New" hits home. Nantucket used to be a state of mind: the delicious, tangy aroma of privet hedges and wildflowers; ambling down winding, ancient lanes in bare feet; tooling around, when you had to, via a rusty Volkswagen or Jeep. The moors, now pocked by McMansions, have lost their timeless isolation. No matter how much money one had, it was about the simple pleasures. Ambassadors or writers made the scene not in Armani and Hummers, but in torn shorts and rickety, circa-World War I bicycles. They were not out to impress, but off to explore, to be boys again. Nantucket was about leaving conspicuous consumption behind. Most of all, the old Nantucket was about respecting the island. No one who loved what this island once was would dream of despoiling it with steroidal, 10,000-square-foot palaces, private ball fields and Olympic-size swimming pools. Ironically, those who find charm in pretentious shops, restaurants and outsize houses miss the entire point of what they have destroyed. Call someplace paradise, you really can kiss it goodbye. Susan Russell Little Silver, N.J., June 5, 2005 To the Editor: There are indeed rich folks who do not want to be isolated with other rich folks - they still travel the 20 miles out to sea to visit the "old Nantucket" and most decidedly do not flaunt their wealth. These are among the very richest, and they can be seen in their old jeans driving their battered old trucks - please God they do not abandon us! Robert Williams Nantucket, Mass., June 6, 2005 To the Editor: I discovered today that my wife and I are wealthy. A combined 60 years as teachers nudges us into the top 20 percent of American income earners. We also happen to love the island of Nantucket, but we could never afford to live there, and we cringe at the hit our bank account takes every time we rent there for a week. We first became aware of the island while renting on Cape Cod with our young daughter some 20 years ago. We made our first visit to the island on a day trip. We got up before the sun came up and made the two-hour ferry ride early in the morning. We spent the day touring the island, going to the pristine ocean beaches, walking around the charming town and enjoying some terrific local seafood. We took the ferry back to the Cape on a clear night when the moon was full - we were hooked. In the years that followed, we began to add overnight stays and debated whether we could afford to stay for a whole week. Eventually, we made the plunge and never regretted it. After reading how the hyper-wealthy are drawn to the island, I hope that on their first visits it was the beauty of this special place, and not other wealthy people, that made them return. Paul Azrak Queens Village, June 5, 2005 To the Editor: Re Nantucket exclusivity: The rich do have more money, and it buys the isolation they desire from those whose labor provides them with the ability to live in their chosen, isolated manner, or manor, as the case may often be. Michael J. Kittredge boasts about his material possessions and ascribes his own success to hard work. John Sheehan, the construction worker who rises at 4:30 a.m. to catch a plane in order to build homes for the super-rich, considers himself to be doing well. The fact that neither he nor the local school principal and his wife, a nurse, will ever be able to live in closer proximity to the community that provides their livelihood says a lot about what we really think about the values of hard work (which include labor), community, education and opportunity, and about "being" versus "having." Lelde Gilman Portland, Ore., June 5, 2005 To the Editor: To those who believe that to die with the most toys is life's ultimate goal: Let them have their jets, their mega-yachts and their isolated castles, but not at public expense in the form of labor exploitation, destruction of the environment, the taking of public airways, tax loopholes and corporate welfare. Tom Miller Oakland, Calif., June 5, 2005 From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 7 21:17:37 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 17:17:37 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Wilson Quarterly: Os Guinness: On Faith Message-ID: Os Guinness: On Faith Wilson Quarterly, 2005 Spring http://wwics.si.edu/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.print&essay_id=121180&stoplayout=true SACRED AND SECULAR: Religion and Politics Worldwide. By Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart. Cambridge Univ. Press. 329 pp. $24.99 Reviewed by Os Guinness Religion is the key to history, Lord Acton wrote. In today's intellectual circles, however, it's more like the skunk at the garden party. To many intellectuals, religion is a private matter at best, and most appropriately considered in terms of its functions rather than the significance of its beliefs, let alone its truth claims. At worst, it's the main source of the world's conflicts and violence--what Gore Vidal, in his Lowell Lecture at Harvard University in 1992, called "the great unmentionable evil" at the heart of our culture. Such grim assessments are certainly debatable. It's a simple fact, for example, that, contrary to the current scapegoating of religion, more people were slaughtered during the 20th century under secularist regimes, led by secularist intellectuals, and in the name of secularist ideologies, than in all the religious persecutions in Western history. But there is little point in bandying about charges and countercharges. If we hope to transcend the seemingly endless culture-warring over religion, we need detailed, objective data about the state of religion in today's world, and wise, dispassionate discussion of what this evidence means for our common life. Is religion central or peripheral? Is it disappearing, as Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, ?mile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, and other proponents of the strong secularization thesis have claimed? Or is religion actually resurgent, as more recent observers such as Peter Berger, David Martin, Rodney Stark, and Philip Jenkins have claimed? Is it a positive force, as some have argued from the evidence of the "South African miracle," the peaceful transition from apartheid to equality? Or is it pathological, as much of the post-9/11 commentary has assumed without argument? In their new book, political scientists Pippa Norris, of Harvard, and Ronald Inglehart, of the University of Michigan, contribute three things to the old debate: first, a summary of the present state of academic analysis of religion; second, new evidence on the state of religion in the modern world; and third, a new theoretical framework that they claim makes better sense of the evidence than previous theories. The massive and detailed evidence of religion's significance worldwide is unquestionably the chief benefit of the book, helpful even for those who will disagree with the authors' conclusions. The data come from World Values Surveys, an international cooperative overseen by Inglehart, for which social scientists polled residents of more than 80 countries between 1981 and 2001. The findings cover a comprehensive sweep of topics, ranging from the personal importance of religion to the electoral strength of religious parties in national elections. The weight of all the data, interestingly, points somewhere between the extremes of the debate. Religion is far from dead, and it certainly hasn't disappeared--even in Europe, where the evidence for its demise is most powerful. But there is strong evidence that it has lost its decisive authority over the lives of adherents in the developed world--even in the United States, where American exceptionalism has long defied European trends toward secularization. There was certainly too much of an unacknowledged secularist bias in secularization theory, but at the same time much of the talk of the unabashed resurgence of religion is premature. For those who take faith seriously, the general trends in the modern world are sobering; the still-potent role of religion in the global south offers only false comfort, as most of the region is still premodern and has yet to go through the "fiery brook" of modernity. Norris and Inglehart's theoretical explanation of religion's current condition will be more controversial: a revised version of the secularization thesis, which they base on the "existential security" offered by religion. In contrast to Weber's view of modernization as "rationalization," or Durkheim's as "differentiation," they trace the growing irrelevance of religion in the modern world to the fact that people can take security for granted. The more secure people become in the developed world, the more they loosen their hold on religion; religion, meanwhile, retains its authority among the less secure but faster-growing populations of the less developed world. "The result of these combined trends," the authors conclude, "is that rich societies are becoming more secular but the world as a whole is becoming more religious." The main response to this theory will properly come from Norris and Inglehart's fellow scholars, and is likely to focus on three aspects: the authors' interpretation of the data they offer, their critiques of some of the currently flourishing theories, and their view of secularization as driven by the accrual of "existential security." Their articulation of the last seems to me particularly disappointing, little more than a restatement of Lucretius's "Fear made the gods," and a crude explanation for the crisis of religion, which could be explained as easily by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's simple observation, "Men have forgotten God." What really ought to be addressed, however, are the implications of Norris and Inglehart's findings for the Western democracies. They nowhere discuss religion as having more than a generic, functional role in assuring existential security. Such a view is inadequate for those who take the specific content of faith seriously, and who argue that faiths of a certain shape produce citizens of a certain shape, who in turn produce societies of a certain shape--in other words, that faith must be considered as a set of beliefs with particular consequences and not others. Weber's magisterial work led the way in this direction, and Baylor University sociologist Rodney Stark's important work on monotheism adds to it currently. The condition of religion in the modern world is especially crucial to a society that links religion and public life in any way--and nowhere more crucial than in the United States. Religion in America has flourished not so much in spite of the separation of church and state as because of it. Far from setting up "Christian America," or establishing any orthodoxy, religious or secular, the Framers envisioned the relationship of faith and freedom in what might be called a golden triangle: Freedom requires virtue, virtue requires faith (of some sort), and faith requires freedom. If the Framers were right, then as faiths go, so goes freedom--and so goes the Republic. America has yet to experience the discussion of religion in 21st-century national life that "the great experiment" requires and deserves, not just from scholars but from a host of Americans--schoolteachers and political leaders alike. Norris and Inglehart provide data and arguments that will be an invaluable part of that discussion. Os Guinness is a writer and speaker living in Virginia. His books include The American Hour (1993), Time for Truth (2000), and the newly published Unspeakable: Facing Up to Evil in an Age of Genocide and Terror. From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 7 21:17:51 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 17:17:51 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Forbes: Peter Brimelow and Leslie Spencer: When quotas replace merit, everybody suffers Message-ID: Peter Brimelow and Leslie Spencer: When quotas replace merit, everybody suffers Forbes, 1993.2.15 [Note the date on this. Has there been any attempt to update it?] ???"Quota games . . . math games . . . bean counters!" ???President-elect Bill Clinton had every reason to lash out at feminist groups at his Dec. 21 news conference. In fact, he had been bean-counting busily himself: According to widespread reports, some of his original Cabinet picks were bumped because they were the wrong sex or race, key constituencies like urban Catholics and supporters of Israel have been crowded out, and his entire appointment process has been seriously slowed. But now mindless feminist pressure was forcing him to admit the ultimate contradiction of all such affirmative action policies: "Diversity" can conflict with merit. ???Above all, the President must know the issue is death for the Democrats: His own pollster, Stanley Greenberg, conducted the post-1984 focus group interviews that found opposition to quotas was key to the defection of white working-class voters. (The party promptly suppressed Greenberg's report and now uses only happy-talk such as "looking like America." But a quota by any other name is still a quota.) ???If quotas are clogging the Clinton transition, what are they doing to the economy? The subject went unmentioned, needless to say, at Clinton's two-day economic summit in Little Rock. In fact, it has gone virtually undiscussed throughout the quarter-century of bureaucratic and judicial decrees that have effectively transformed the color-blind 1964 Civil Rights Act into a pervasive quota system. ???Ironically, just as socialism has collapsed across the globe, the leading capitalist power has adopted a peculiarly American neosocialism, putting politics (and lawyers) in command of its workplace, albeit on the pretext of equity rather than efficiency. Says Edward Potter of the Washington, D.C.-based Employment Policy Foundation: "We have, without doubt, the most far-reaching equal employment laws found anywhere in the world." ???Before applauding Potter's sweeping statement, stop for a minute and ponder this question: What does the replacement of merit with quotas cost the American people? The answer is: plenty. The impact may easily have already depressed GNP by a staggering four percentage points -- about as much as we spend on the entire public school system. ???Quotas are not the law of the land, exactly. They are explicitly banned in both the 1964 and 1991 Civil Rights Act. Nevertheless, corporate America has been terrorized by the legal legerdemain whereby any statistical disparity between work force and population is equated with intentional discrimination. Throughout American business, newly entrenched affirmative action bureaucrats are enforcing discrimination by race and sex -- in favor of the "protected classes" (women, minorities and, most recently, the disabled) -- as decreed by Washington. ???One such bureaucrat, Xerox Manager of Corporate Employment Theodore Payne, puts it bluntly: "We have a process that we call 'balanced work force' in Xerox, everybody understands that, and it's measurable, it's goals. . . . Relative numbers. Relative numbers. That's the hard business, that's what most people don't like to deal with, but we do that all the time." ???"Balanced work force" is, of course, yet another euphemism for quotas. Payne is apparently saying that Xerox discriminates against white males in favor of the "protected classes." He says it without apology. But, if anyone cares, white males have feelings (and families to support), too. ???"To cut whites out of the entire process is racism pure and simple," laments a white male reporter for the San Antonio Light, which is due to close down any day. He says Gannett and other major news organizations are showing interest in his Hispanic colleagues exclusively. But he adds: "I don't want to be quoted. I'll never find another job if I am." ???In a blistering 1987 article in Society magazine, the late Professor William Beer of Brooklyn College described his fellow social scientists' attitude to affirmative action as one of "resolute ignorance." FORBES' search of academic journals and Ph.D. theses confirms that ignorance has remained resolute. What little work has been done tends to focus only on whether affirmative action policies have benefited the "protected classes." (Have they? For an answer, see below.) ???Corporate America contributes to this resolute ignorance by declining to disclose its costs. "Our members would never say," the National Association of Manufacturers' Diane Generous predicted (rightly). "They would be concerned they might be accused of complaining about how much money they had to spend on this." ???Another big business lobby, the Business Roundtable, did publish a study by accountants Arthur Andersen more than a decade ago on how much its members spent to comply with federal regulation, including specifically the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). But today a Roundtable spokeswoman says the organization has no plans to update the study -- and that it no longer even possesses any copies. ???Sure, measuring the costs of regulation is difficult. But it can be done. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency is required by executive order to make regular estimates of its economic impact. ???So here is a rough but reasonable try at figuring the cost of quotas. That funny noise you hear from now on is economists gritting their teeth. Our response to them: Go make your own estimates. And remember -- the truth shall set you free. ???Two points about quotas emerge immediately: ???Quotas are a very big deal. All employers with more than 15 staff, public, private or nonprofit, come under the EEOC's Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures. All can be sued by the EEOC for "discrimination" if the racial, ethnic and sex mix of new hires diverges sufficiently from that of all other qualified applicants -- for example, if the percentage of blacks hired is lower than the percentage of blacks applying. That covers 86% of the entire nonfarm private-sector work force. ???Additionally, more than 400,000 corporations doing business with the federal government, covering about 42% of the private sector work force, have to file with the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP). This process is so onerous that the OFCCP's explanatory manual is about 700 pages long. Corporations with contracts of $ 50,000 or more must develop an "affirmative action plan" aimed at achieving staffing at all levels that is proportionate to the composition of the qualified work force. ???Many colleges and universities are subject to no fewer than three federal agencies: EEOC, OFCCP and the Department of Education's Civil Rights Office. And finally, there are federal, state and local governments. Here a racial and gender spoils system has effectively subverted the merit hiring rules so painfully established by Progressive Era reformers at the beginning of the century. ???All of which means that the 1984 poll that found one in ten white males reporting they had lost a promotion because of work quotas was quite possibly accurate. Indeed, it could be an underestimate. Quotas have been implemented with extraordinary secrecy and deceptiveness, in part because of their dubious legal status. ???"Word comes down, but it does not go out," says Claremont McKenna College sociologist Frederick Lynch, author of the only study on the impact of quotas on white males, Invisible Victims. He cites a Los Angeles manufacturer whose receptionist was instructed to accept but quietly shelve employment applications from whites and Hispanics -- after they had left the room -- because the plant did not have "enough" blacks. ???Typical of the secrecy and scale of quotas: the "race-norming" saga. EEOC Vice Chairman R. Gaull Silberman -- a Reagan appointee -- says that until she read it in a newspaper in 1990, she and EEOC Chairman Evan Kemp had "absolutely no idea" that their own agency was pressing for aptitude tests to be race-normed. This bit of bureaucrat-speak refers to the practice of radically adjusting scores to compensate for minorities' systematically lower results. Yet race-norming had been going on throughout the 1980s. It reportedly subjected at least 16 million test-takers to a quota system they knew nothing about. ???After public outcry, race-norming was banned in the 1991 Civil Rights Act. But quotas, like vampires, have proved virtually impossible to kill. Now they seem to be rising from the grave in the shape of a new test-twisting technique called "banding" -- concealing differences in performance by lumping ranges of scores together. ???The second point about quotas: ???Quotas are very expensive. There's surprising denial about this. University of Chicago free market economist Gary Becker, a 1992 Nobel laureate, wrote the standard analysis, The Economics of Discrimination (1957). But Becker recently shrugged off affirmative action in a Business Week column. He argued that although affirmative action "does hurt some individuals, as it caters to minorities with political clout," it "probably causes less harm than many other programs" such as farm supports. ???Strangely, however, Becker tells FORBES that in fact he has no idea what quotas cost ("I think it's an important subject for research"). But we do know what farm supports cost: about $ 9.7 billion in 1992, which is substantially lower than our estimate of $ 16 billion to $ 19 billion for private-sector and education compliance costs alone (see p. 82). ???Nevertheless, Becker's analysis of discrimination remains the best framework for assessing the economic impact of quotas: ???In a free market, Becker argued, there is an inexorable tendency for everyone to receive the marginal value of his or her labor. This means that ultimately, you are likely to be paid something like what your work is worth. If you belong to an unpopular group, employers may pay you less. But that means that they will make more money off you. Because you are such a profitable hire, you will come into demand, and your labor will be bid up. This process can only be prevented by monopoly or government intervention -- both of which happened, for example, in South Africa under apartheid. And now in the U.S. under affirmative action. ???Talking to FORBES, Becker is very anxious to stress that he is not saying discrimination will be completely competed away. But there is a tendency for it to be competed away. "Competition forces people to face the costs, and therefore reduces the amount of discrimination, when compared with a monopolistic or noncompetitive situation," Becker says. ???If you believe that racism stalks America like the Angel of Death and that only federal force can keep it in check, you won't like what Becker is saying. But the evidence clearly supports him. ???"Once adjustments are made for factors like age, education and experience, 70% to 85% of the observed differences in income and employment between the various groups in America disappears," says economist Howard R. Bloch of George Mason University. "That's been shown by studies dating back to the mid-1960s. And you can't even be sure that the residual gap is due to discrimination. It could be due to factors we haven't controlled for." ???Indeed, Harvard economist Richard Freeman fund blacks and whites with the same backgrounds and education had achieved wage parity by 1969, well before quotas had America in their grip. ???Even the recent much-touted Federal Reserve Bank of Boston study claiming to prove the existence of racial discrimination in mortgage lending turns out to have made a basic methodological error in its handling of default rates (FORBES, Jan. 4). Perhaps, significantly, its coauthor, Boston Fed Research Director Alicia H. Munnell, was a featured speaker at the Clinton economic summit. ???All of which shows the fallacy of two common arguments for government-imposed quotas: that they are necessary to force corporations to tap new pools of labor, and that corporations need a diverse work force to service an increasingly diverse population. Both simply assume that markets don't operate -- that corporations couldn't figure this out themselves. ???In fact, it's hard to see any benefits contributed by quotas to the overall economy -- as opposed to the benefits they channel to the "protected classes." "Affirmative action is a fairly pure form of rent-seeking," says the University of Arizona's Gordon Tullock, using the concept he developed for special interests' use of political power to extract subsidies for themselves from the economy. "There simply isn't any other economic rationale." "In 1987 EEOC's local field office wrote me a letter saying they had reason to believe I didn't have enough women 'food servers' and 'busers.' No woman had complained against me. So the EEOC advertised in the local paper to tell women whose job applications we had rejected -- or even women who had just thought of applying -- that they could be entitled to damages. Twenty-seven women became plaintiffs in a lawsuit against me. The EEOC interviewed me for hours to find out what kind of person I was. I told them in Sicily where I came from I learned to respect women. I supplied them with hundreds of pounds of paper. I had to hire someone full time for a year just to respond to EEOC demands. Six months ago I finally settled. I agreed to pay $ 150,000 damages, and as jobs open up, to hire the women on the EEOC's list. Even if they don't know what spaghetti looks like! I have to advertise twice a year even if I have no openings, just to add possible female employees to my files. I also had to hire an EEOC-approved person to teach my staff how not to discriminate. I employ 12 food servers in these two restaurants. Gross sales, around $ 2 million. How much did it all cost me? Cash outlay, about $ 400,000. ???What the government's done to me -- devastating. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy." -- Thomas Maggiore, Owner of Tomaso's and Chianti restaurants, Phoenix, Ariz. ???Economists break the cost of regulation into three parts: ???Direct Costs: the EEOC's outlay of taxpayers' money in regulating and suing Thomas Maggiore, and the money he spends in fines, damages, filling in forms, advertising and otherwise complying with EEOC demands. ???Indirect Costs: the time and overhead Maggiore has to divert from other activities to argue with the EEOC, do the continuing paperwork, sit through sensitivity training, reorganize his workplace and his methods of operating. ???Opportunity Costs: what Maggiore might have achieved if he had been allowed to invest his time and money as he wanted; the loss to the Phoenix-area economy if he gives up and goes back to Sicily. ???Remember: Thomas Maggiore is precisely the kind of small business person the politicians claim they want so badly to help. ???Let's look at some numbers. ???Direct costs: One guess of private sector compliance costs for affirmative action: In 1977 Business Roundtable members spent $ 217 million complying with equal opportunity regulations. They employed 5% of the nonfarm work force; OFCCP regulations cover 42% of the private workforce, implying total costs of $ 1.8 billion. Adjusted for inflation, that's a current $ 4.2 billion. ???Second guess: In 1981 a study by the Senate Labor & Human Resources Committee suggested compliance costs for the largest 500 companies of about $ 1 billion. That's $ 1.8 billion extrapolated over the OFCCP universe. Adjusted for inflation: $ 2.8 billion. ???Neither of these figures includes the EEOC's impact, although it is by far the larger bureaucracy. But the guesstimates are in line with the rule of thumb developed by regulation-watchers from the Center for the Study of American Business at Washington University in St. Louis: Every dollar spent on regulatory enforcement inflicts about $ 20 in compliance costs. By FORBES' count, the federal government spent some $ 425 million on civil rights oversight in 1991, of which about $ 303 million appears to be directed at the private sector. Implied private-sector compliance cost: $ 6 billion. ???To get an estimate of compliance costs in colleges and universities, FORBES turned to John Attarian, a writer and economics Ph.D. who has analyzed the budget of his alma mater, the University of Michigan. Under its "Michigan Mandate," the university is devoting much effort to the recruitment and retention of the "protected classes." ???Attarian says about 2.5% of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor's general budget appears to be devoted to this cause. This does not capture costs buried in department budgets, such as for recruitment. (Minor example: Advertising faculty posts in special minority-oriented publications costs over twice the usual rate.) Still, extrapolated across the estimated $ 164 billion spent on U.S. higher education in 1992, this suggests total compliance costs of $ 4.1 billion. ???If the same relationship holds true for the $ 261 billion spent on public and private schools in 1992, their compliance costs would be $ 6.5 billion. Of course, the problems of schools are different from those of colleges. They may be worse. Busing for racial balance has reportedly caused some school districts to spend over a quarter of their budgets on transportation. ???Quotas are just another excuse for the American academic establishment to eschew scholarship for social engineering. Thus, a long survey of "minorities in science" in the Nov. 13 issue of Science magazine reported that the National Science Foundation, which is supposed to be funding research, has spent a staggering $ 1.5 billion in the last 20 years on fostering black scientists. The magazine describes the results as "dismal." ???State and local governments also face compliance costs -- and they also inflict them on the private sector. New York State, for example, spent $ 10.5 million complying with its own and federal laws last year, and $ 7.5 million on "civil rights" enforcement. In 1990 state and local governments spent some $ 835 billion. Implied total expended on quota compliance and coercion, given New York's rate: $ 287 million. Additional private sector compliance costs, given New York's enforcement costs and applying CSAB's 20-to-1 rule of thumb: $ 2.4 billion. ???Note that we include no estimate of what it costs the federal government to comply with its own regulations. ???We like to be moderate. ???Private-sector compliance costs are apparently much exacerbated by the federal enforcers' arbitrary and erratic behavior. Some rare case studies appeared in the September 1992 issue of the American Academy of Political & Social Science's journal Annals. One victim reported supplying documents nine times because the OFCCP kept losing them. Another, the National Bank of Greenwood, Ind. -- $ 117 million assets, 138 staff, full- and part-time -- was subject to a grueling and chaotic two-year audit, costing more than $ 100,000 and 4,000 staff hours, although no complaint had apparently been lodged against it. Later the bank was audited twice more, again apparently without any complaints being lodged. Typically, the Indianapolis-based Merchants National Corp., which has meanwhile taken over the National Bank of Greenwood, refused to allow its officers to talk about the experience. ???Total direct costs: $ 16.5 billion to $ 19.7 billion. Or about $ 300 per family of four. Compare it with the $ 20 billion of "infrastructure spending" Clinton has promised to kick-start the economy. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. ???Indirect Costs are the part of the iceberg just under the water -- easily-seen but involving no direct cash outlay. ???"It takes me 50 extra hours to make every faculty hire because of the need to comply with affirmative action rules," says Professor Herbert London, formerly Dean of New York University's Gallatin Division, "even when I end up hiring the person I wanted to hire in the first place." ???Naturally, this cost does not appear as a cash item in NYU's operating budget of $ 627 million, excluding the medical school. (The two-person affirmative action office costs just $ 172,000 -- or about $ 6.50 per full-time student -- although a spokesman tells FORBES that over a hundred people deal with minority recruitment every day.) Nevertheless, the cost is real. ???A measure of these indirect costs is provided by the single Ph.D. thesis FORBES found that investigated costs, by Peter Griffin, now assistant professor at California State University at Long Beach. Griffin's rarefied econometric analysis concluded that by 1980, OFCCP regulation had increased federal contractors' labor and capital costs by an average of 6.5%. (As compared with noncontractors -- although actually their costs would also have been increased by EEOC requirements.) ???The implications of this are substantial. OFCCP regulation covers about 42% of the civilian work force. The contractors' cost of labor alone exceeded $ 1.4 trillion. The minimum cost of quotas to them, based on Griffin's methodology: about $ 95 billion -- 1.7% of GNP. ???And the cost to the federal taxpayer is heavy. In 1991, $ 211 billion was expended on federal contracts with non-government entities. The additional costs inflicted by affirmative action regulation that Griffin's work suggests this sum incorporates: some $ 13 billion. ???Which is on top of the damage inflicted on the taxpayer by "set-asides," the reserving of some portion of federal work entirely for contractors from the "protected classes." About $ 10 billion of federal contract monies were channeled in this way last year. The premium paid is not supposed to go over 10% (although FORBES has heard of premiums as high as 25%). Additional quota tax: perhaps $ 1 billion. ???Ironic set-aside fact: The law is confused about this type of quota too. In Richmond v. Croson (1989), the Supreme Court ruled that many of the 234 state and local government set-aside programs were unconstitutional, unless actual discrimination could be proved. Local politicians, anxious to continue handing out the pork, instantly created a minor "disparity studies" industry to make the case that discrimination against minorities was widespread. In a detailed account in the January1993 issue of Public Interest magazine, University of Maryland at Baltimore Professor George La Noue estimates that at least $ 13 million taxpayers' money had been fed into this young industry by June 1992, with another $ 14 million commissioned by the federal Urban Mass Transit Authority alone. Atlanta spent $ 532,000 for a 1,034-page report coauthored by Ray Marshall, the Carter Administration's Secretary of Labor. ???Expensive? Well, proving discrimination is hard work. Most localities have long been legally required to accept the lowest bid -- a Progressive-era reform aimed precisely at patronage-hungry politicians. And, significantly, cities like Atlanta, which now want to claim they discriminated, have actually been under black political control for years. ???Even more ironic set-aside fact: This type of quota has created another industry -- corruption. A prime contractor can set up his black electrician, for instance, in "business" as a purchaser. The electrician needn't have credit or contacts with suppliers. He just takes 5% off the top. One "native American " contractor in Tulsa reportedly had blue eyes and an Irish name but had managed to join the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma on the strength of an alleged great-great-great-great grandparent. ???These abuses can only be checked by more supervision. But minority contractors have been quoted complaining the program is too bureaucratic already. ???Astoundingly ironic set-aside fact: According to Professor La Noue, over one-half of the Small Business Administration's set-asides go to groups that are composed largely of first- or second-generation immigrants. He suspects the same is likely to be true for all set-asides. In Washington, D.C. -- where an amazing 90% of the city's road construction contracts have been set aside -- one of the largest beneficiaries has been the Fort Myer Construction Corp., owned by a family of Portuguese origin who qualify as Hispanics because they emigrated from Argentina. ???Absurdly, all immigrants who fall into the "protected classes" qualify for all U.S. quota programs. Which is a pretty clear indication that quotas are not about righting past wrongs at all, but about asserting political power over the economy. ???A further indirect cost of the affirmative action system: litigation. (You thought massive regulation would preclude litigation? This is America!) ???The number of discrimination suits in federal courts is rising astronomically -- by 2,166% between 1970 and 1989, when some 7,500 were filed, versus an increase of only about 125% in the general federal caseload. ???Significantly, suits about discrimination in hiring used to outnumber suits about firing. Today it's the reverse, by a factor of three or more. It's obviously absurd to suppose the same employer discriminates in firing but not in hiring. The civil rights frenzy has simply led to a more litigious, as well as politicized, workplace. ???Example: Alabama state law required the Lamar County Board of Education to fire a black teacher after she failed a mandatory competency test five times during the three years allowed. She alleged discrimination because the test failed a disproportionate number of blacks. A judge reinstated her with three years' back salary. ???And it's going to get much worse. Preliminary reports are that since the 1991 Civil Rights Act and the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act (which few people yet realize is also a quota bill) filings have jumped some 30%. Both acts for the first time allow punitive damages, an explicit incentive to contingency-fee trial lawyers. ???Opportunity Costs are the base of the quota iceberg, down in the murkiest depths. Unlike the direct and indirect costs of regulation, they don't show up in GNP statistics. They represent what GNP could have been if these more tangible costs have been spent differently -- for job-creating investment, say, or for education. But these indirect costs are the most massive of all. For example: ???Having the wrong people in the wrong jobs. Corporate America seems to have resigned itself to quotas as yet another tax. But they are a peculiarly debilitating sort of tax, levied not on the bottom line but on every phase of the corporation's activities, increasing inefficiency throughout. Most taxes are a burden to be shouldered. This is an enfeebling drug. ???That affirmative action quotas lead to lowered standards is all but guaranteed by the fact that all standards are suspect to Equal Employment enforcers. "Many of these people believe there really is no such thing as job performance or productivity objectively defined, that it's really just a matter of one's cultural definition or cultural orientation," says Frank Schmidt, a University of Iowa industrial psychologist. Increasingly, they have been able to impose this view on American business. ???The civil rights revolution has also virtually aborted the use of tests devised by industrial psychologists, which in the 1950s promised to make employee selection a science. Tests came under attack because minorities typically scored lower on them. Today they are only used, it at all, after work-related validation studies that can cost millions of dollars. ???Industrial psychologists, however, have gone on believing in their work. Schmidt and John Hunter of Michigan State University have produced numerous studies showing that hiring the able results in enormous productivity increases. Today, Hunter estimates that total U.S. output would be about $ 150 billion higher if every employer in the country were free to use tests and select on merit. That's about 2.5% of GNP. ???Effect on morale. Poor hiring shows up not merely in poor decisions but also in poor morale. Quotas, like income tax (and unlike farm supports), have an immediate and dramatic impact on incentives. ???Frank Schmidt put it like this: "When the less competent employees reach a critical mass, their lower performance standards become the standards of the organization." The longer-established employees who are quipped for the job abandon their old high standards and conform to the new, lower ones. ???Schmidt and Hunter made no estimate of the impact of this phenomenon. But they have speculated that it lay behind the U.S. productivity stall of the 1970s, as the first effects of the war against testing were being felt. ???Misallocation of resources. Monies expended to meet the costs of affirmative action cannot be spent on research and development and plant-modernization. The effect of this is cumulative: The growth path of the economy diverges, permanently and increasingly, from its potential. Thus we estimate that an extra $ 113 billion in direct and indirect costs have been inflicted on the economy annually since 1980. A standard calculation converts this into an estimate of GNP shortfall because of affirmative action: about 1.5 percentage points by 1992. ???GNP in 1991 was about $ 5.7 trillion. The total shortfall quotas may already have caused comes to some 4%. That's well over $ 225 billion, money that could buy a lot of social programs. Or finance a good deal of job-creating investment. ???So quotas cost a lot. But do they do any good at all? ???Quotas have obviously failed to prevent continuing catastrophe in much of black America. Prevailing taboos make this subject difficult to discuss. But the distressing facts are powerfully summarized in a remarkable new book, Jared Taylor's Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America (Carrol & Graf). In 1950 only 9% of the black families were headed by a single parent; in 1965, 28%; now, fully half. In 1959 only 15% of black births were illegitimate; in 1992, 66%. One in four black men in their 20s is either in jail, on probation or on parole. Clearly, affirmative action has done nothing to reverse the dismal trends. ???Quotas have not decisively improved overall black employment. "Despite all the controversies surrounding affirmative action," says Queens College Professor Andrew Hacker, a supporter of quotas, in his bestselling Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, "fewer blacks now have steady jobs of any kind and their unemployment rates have been growing progressively worse relative to those recorded for whites." ???Quotas' effect on black incomes appears at best mixed. Between 1970 and 1990 black median family income, adjusted for inflation, crept snail-like from $ 21,151 to $ 21,423. But the proportion of black families earning above $ 50,000 jumped sharply, from about 10% to nearly 15%. Dragging down the median: the increase in black families receiving below $ 15,000, now nearly 40%. So quotas may have helped create a black middle class (although educated blacks might have done well anyway; after all, the proportion of white high income families also rose in this period). But the black poor have not benefited. ???Quotas in colleges have not prevented the gap between black and white college participation from widening in the 1980s. By 1976 some 22.6% of black 18-to-24-year-olds enrolled in college, compared with 27.1% of whites. Thereafter black participation declined, then recovered. In 1990, 25.4% blacks enrolled, but meanwhile white participation had grown to 32.5%. ???And although crude enrollment numbers are dear to the hearts of college admissions officers, they conceal tragic differences in attrition. For example, only 37.5% of blacks enrolling at Berkeley in 1983 had graduated five years later, compared with 72% of whites. Critics argue that top colleges burn out black students by irresponsibly recruiting them to fill quotas, when they could be successful at less high-pressure schools. ???Quotas may have improved the status of women -- or they may not. It's easiest to show that women have gained in the last decades -- ironic, because their plight was hardly as serious as that of blacks, with whom they are now competing. Women's share of professional degrees grew from 2.7% in 1960 to 36% in 1990, and their average earnings as a percentage of men's has increased from 61% to 72% over the same period. ???But quotas may not be responsible. Female participation in the work force has fluctuated widely for generations, correlated with demographic factors like marriage and fertility rates. For example, the Hoover Institution economist (and FORBES's columnist) Thomas Sowell has noted that woman earned 17% of Ph.D. 's in 1921 but only 10% in the early 1960s. Amazingly, as long ago as 1879 women constituted 40% of all college faculty and administrators. Many of these colleges were women-only, but they could still be highly competitive: In 1902 the proportion of women listed in Who's Who was more than double that in 1958. ???This problem of apportioning credit bedevils the whole quota debate and, indeed, the entire subject of government-mandated social change. Looking back on the 1964 Civil Rights Act and its controversial enforcement, the American Enterprise Institute's Charles Murray, author of Losing Ground and In Pursuit, offers this startling thought: "There's hardly a single outcome -- black voting rights, access to public accommodation, employment, particularly in white-collar jobs -- that couldn't have been predicted on the basis of pre-1964 trend-lines." That's pretty devastating. It suggests that we have spent trillions of dollars to create an outcome that would have happened even if the government had done nothing. ???From an economic standpoint, quotas work rather like an older form of American neosocialism: price and wage controls. They may seem to produce the desired result. But they could equally well just be simulating it, or even smothering it. ???Meanwhile, of course, the economy suffers. ???It may be that before America can talk rationally about race, the generation that remembers segregation will have to die off. And we're not talking about liberals. FORBES asked Gary Becker, 62, what he thought would be the ideal public policy in this area. ???Becker: I prefer to pass on that one. I have views on it, but I don't want to talk about it at this moment. ???Oh. Why not? ???Becker: Well, let me just make that judgment. I prefer not to. ???Becker's University of Chicago colleague Richard A. Epstein, 49, seems to be less nervous about his popularity in the Faculty Club. His book Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws argues that the modern civil rights laws are flawed to their heart because in negating freedom of association they have inexorably led to government coercion that threatens markets and, ultimately, liberty. ???"At bottom are only two pure forms of legislation -- productive and redistributive," Professor Epstein argues. "Antidiscrimination legislation is always of the second kind. The form of redistribution is covert; it is capricious, it is expensive and it is wasteful." ???And Epstein makes the key economic point: If we want to subsidize a "protected class," he writes, it can be done more efficiently by just giving grants. ???"I have a dream," Martin Luther King Jr. said 30 years ago, "that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." ???As bean-counting has displaced merit in America, that day is further off than ever. From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 7 21:18:16 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 17:18:16 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: John Gray: Autonomy is not the only good Message-ID: John Gray: Autonomy is not the only good The Times Literary Supplement, 97.6.13 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2090042&window_type=print LIBERAL MODERNISM AND DEMOCRATIC INDIVIDUALITY. George Kateb and the practices of politics By Austin Sarat and Dana R. Villa, editors 345pp. Princeton University Press; distributed in the UK by Wiley. Paperback, ?14.95. - 0 691 02596 7 REQUIEM FOR MODERN POLITICS. The political tragedy of the Enlightenment William Ophuls 320pp. Westview, 12 Hid's Copse Road, Cumnor Hill, Oxford OX2 9JJ. ?21.50. - 0 8133 3142 0 AGAINST LIBERALISM John Kekes 244pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; distributed in the UK by Plymbridge. ?23.50. - 0 8014 8400 6 A particular liberal hegemony in political philosophy is nearly over. For more than twenty years after the publication of John Rawls's Theory of Justice in 1970, English-speaking political philosophy was dominated by a single variety of liberalism. This American liberal doctrine understood political philosophy to be a branch of legal theory. Its goal was to state the principles of an ideal liberal constitution. As it was practised by Rawls, Dworkin, Ackerman, Nozick and their unnumbered followers in this school, the subject-matter of political philosophy was not politics. It was law. Its final product was a theory of justice and rights which specified the basic liberties held by citizens in a liberal state. The voluminous literature spawned by this school consisted of protracted discussions of a small range of themes. These were dictated by the legalist agenda of Rawlsian theory rather than by the historical experience of liberal states. They had to do with the neutrality of a liberal state regarding specific ideals of the good life, the fair distribution of social goods that were owed to exponents of all acceptable ideals, and the derivation of principles of social justice from the rational choices of individuals. The exchanges that surrounded these themes had two noteworthy features. Firstly, the possibility that political philosophy might have other, non-liberal agendas was rarely entertained. It was almost as if there could not be a coherent political philosophy that was not a variety of liberalism. If Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes or Hume had anything of interest to say, it was as unwitting precursors of a late twentieth-century American liberal consensus. In the second place, the liberal theory that Aristotle and others had laboured, unknowing, to make possible was liberalism of a singular kind. Its continuities with liberal thought in the past were few. No liberal philosopher before Rawls made moral neutrality a desideratum of a liberal state. Liberal thinkers from John Locke to Isaiah Berlin have advocated toleration, not neutrality, as the central practice of liberal institutions. Equally, few thinkers in the history of liberal thought have ever understood political philosophy to be a branch of legal theory. John Stuart Mill did not see himself in On Liberty as drafting an ideal constitution, in which basic liberties were fixed once and for all. He understood himself to be giving guidance to an ideal legislature. The principles stated in his essay do not specify basic liberties. They protect different freedoms in different times and places. Mill's main principle about the restraint of individual liberty, allows such liberty to be exercised fully only where there is no question of harm to others. Otherwise it requires legislators to make a reasonable, on-balance judgment about which mixture of freedom and restraint will best promote general well-being. Mill recognized that this judgment will vary according to circumstances. Today, Mill's principles would plausibly mandate far-reaching decriminalization of drug use in the United States; in Britain, probably, they still do not. This open-endedness remains a central feature of liberal thinking in a Millian tradition, as we find it today in the work of philosophers such as Joseph Raz. It is striking that, because many of its practitioners were innocent of the longer and larger history of liberal thought, the recently dominant Rawlsian school failed to notice how novel and how local its view of the agenda of liberal philosophy was. Yet its conclusions were meant to be authoritative for all liberal regimes. George Kateb is a liberal thinker; but in his writings even the most familiar liberal themes are thought anew. In Liberal Modernism and Democratic Individuality, sixteen friends, colleagues and critics of Kateb's consider the highly distinctive variant of liberal theory that he has spent a lifetime developing. It is one that is no less indigenously and peculiarly American than Rawls's, but it articulates a far more deeply deliberated understanding of American traditions. For Kateb, the American constitutionalist tradition is not - as some might suppose - a flaking monument to legalism. It embodies a particular, modernist understanding of the individuality of human subjects. Kateb finds this understanding in writers hitherto neglected by contemporary liberal thinkers - notably Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau. In these American scholars and poets, the relationship of individuality with the finitude of human life, stated canonically by Augustine and reformulated by Kierkegaard and Heidegger, is denied. Kateb follows these American thinkers in refusing to identify the human subject with its limits. Instead, he advocates an estrangement from all fixed identities as the understanding of individuality that best supports the practice of rights. He is an unrelenting critic of those - notably anti-modernist republicans such as Hannah Arendt and some recent communitarian theorists - whose nostalgia for a condition in which human beings are at home in the world has led them to become enemies of the modern culture of individuality. In Kateb's thought, a Nietzschean ideal of individuality is wedded to an American understanding of democratic equality. The marriage is inevitably problematic. In one of the most memorable contributions in a very rich collection assembled in Liberal Modernism and Democratic Individuality, the late Judith Shklar comments on the sentimentality and religiosity which mars Emerson's The American Scholar. Her criticism might be put more sharply. When reading Emerson, one cannot help being reminded of T. E. Hulme's observation that the romantic sensibility is infallibly revealed by the repeated use of the epithet "infinite". But a romantic rejection of the finitude of human lives is not the best departure point for thinking about politics. Emerson's advocacy of a culture of untrammelled individuality lacks a sober sense of the social hazards of any such ideal. It may be true that Americans, more than most other peoples, are ready to trade off security for individuality. The self-realization they seek may well be an illusion; but that does not render the exchange they have made any less real. Nor does it lessen the costs of a culture of self-realization for the losers in American society. The trouble with the Emersonian freedom of unencumbered self-creation that Kateb celebrates is that it must be exercised in a world cluttered with other human beings. As Tracy Strong notes in his intriguing contribution on "Politics and Transparency", Emerson's account of the self-defined, "transparent" individual can be usefully contrasted with Hawthorne's view of human beings as opaque creatures whose identities are always partly accidental. The contrast tells in favour of Hawthorne and against Emerson and Kateb. In his contribution, William Connolly argues in similar terms that the self-confident assertion of democratic individuality must unavoidably be played out against a background of repressed cultural differences, while Benjamin Barber defends multiculturalism against Kateb's charge that identity-defining communities are inherently repressive. For American liberals, the final lesson suggested by these criticisms must be deeply discomforting. It is that unabridged individuality inescapably involves serious losses of democratic equality. This conflict of goods is endemic and universal. It has not been overcome in American constitutionalism, but instead embodied in it. Like classical Marxism and its Leninist posterity, liberal theory has largely denied the reality of environmental limits on the achievement of its hopes. In both cases, this is due partly to the continuing power of the Enlightenment. Nearly all Enlightenment thinkers have followed Christianity in thinking of the earth as a resource to be used in the service of human purposes. In this anthropocentric perspective, the other animals and forms of life with which humans share the earth have no value in themselves, but only as instruments of a project of human emancipation. If the natural world proves obstructive to this ambition, then human resourcefulness is invoked to subjugate it. In Requiem for Modern Politics, William Ophuls indicts this Enlightenment project as the source of the twin modern evils of statism and environmental degradation. He finds in the thought of Hobbes the starkest expression of the modern-ist, Enlightenment world-view - individualist, rationalist, instrumentalist and radically subjectivist in its understanding of values - to which he ascribes our unbalanced relationship with the natural world and each another. Ophuls's book is refreshingly unconventional in recalling the limits imposed by natural scarcity on modern political ideals and in its critique of standard conceptions of economic development. Ophuls's conclusion - a call for a shift in world-view, a transmutation of human consciousness, as the only viable response to ecological danger - is nevertheless unconvincing. A people that converted to a new, environmentalist world-view would still have somehow to survive in a dirty and dangerous world. Moreover, the chief threat to the human and natural environments does not come today - as perhaps it did during the totalitarian period, earlier this century - from the hubristic ambitions of states. It comes from anarchic market forces and from the absence in much of the world of anything resembling a modern state that might control them. In these circumstances, Hobbes's thought is a repository of a vital truth. For us, an effective modern state is a precondition not only of commodious living but also of environmental conservation. There is an instructive paradox here. Cultures shaped by the Enlightenment cannot hope to escape ecological catastrophe through a re-enchantment of the world. The cure for their ills - if there is one - can only be homoeopathic. Moderating the dangers to the environment that modern institutions and technologies have created will demand all the resources of rationality of contemporary societies. There is no way back from modernity. An oddity of much recent liberal thought is its fetishization of individual autonomy. It is elevated beyond every other good as being in some way the precondition of all moral and political virtues. One of the many merits of John Kekes's Against Liberalism is its careful argument that the priority attached to individual autonomy in such liberal philosophies is unreasonable. On any sensibly pluralistic view, autonomy is only one among the necessary conditions and ingredients of human well-being. Others - such as peace, social cohesion and a healthy environment - are just as important. Further - and here Kekes rehearses and develops the argument of his seminal book, The Morality of Pluralism - these other components of the human good cannot always be made compatible with autonomy. On the contrary, often their demands conflict with those of autonomy, and sometimes there is no one resolution of such conflicts that can command the support of all reasonable people. Kekes's central, unanswerable argument is that in unreasonably emphasizing the good of autonomy, recent liberalism evades the reality of such conflicts of values. This argument is fatal to the Kantian liberal project of a pure philosophy of right, and its corollary, the notion that political philosophy is the attempt to specify an ideal constitution. Kekes's other arguments against liberalism are not nearly so demonstrative. His critique of liberal benevolence follows a path in conservative discourse that has lately been trodden pretty heavily. In truth, value-pluralism has no essential affinity with conservative political thought or practice. Like Isaiah Berlin's, Kekes's value-pluralism destroys the spurious harmonies of doctrinal liberalism, because it entails that where freedoms conflict, there is no one set of basic liberties that all liberal states are bound to respect. Yet it does not thereby support any kind of conservatism. A pluralist affirmation of the irreducible diversity and rational incommensurability of human goods can as well inspire an ambitious programme of reform as buttress a stoical defence of present imperfections. Kekes's imaginative and provocative book is only one of many unmistakable evidences of the passing of the Rawlsian regime in political philosophy. The ongoing dissolution of that liberal hegemony is a sign that pluralism is at last reaching into intellectual life. As a result, political philosophy may be able to reconnect with the world that it was once supposed to be about. With the passing of the singular and aberrant liberalism that has dominated the subject over the past quarter-century political thought may once again be free to engage with political practice. Such a development would be a hopeful augury, not least for liberalism. From checker at panix.com Tue Jun 7 21:18:25 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 17:18:25 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: John Gray: The tragic view Message-ID: John Gray: The tragic view The Times Literary Supplement, 97.9.26 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2089093&window_type=print MAX WEBER. Politics and the spirit of tragedy. By John Patrick Diggins. 334pp. HarperCollins. ?20. - 0 465 01750 9. Max Weber could scarcely fail to have a formative influence on the development of social thought in the United States. As one of sociology's founding thinkers, he set the intellectual agenda for social scientists everywhere. Yet Weber's view of politics and society has had few echoes in American intellectual life. It is too disenchanted a vision to be accepted in a society begotten in the faith that it is exempt from the tragic conflicts that have marked political life throughout history. For Weber, conflicts of values are the engine of history and politics. The task of politics is not to achieve an ideal harmony among social goods. It is to sustain a precarious coexistence between irreconcilable ideals and interests. Skilful leadership can mediate conflicts of values; but they can never be finally resolved. The vocation of politics is tragic, because no such balance is ever achieved without irreparable loss. Political life will always remain a realm of warring gods. Weber's view that the intractable conflicts and murky settlements of politics are not marks of a phase of historical development that may soon be transcended, but permanent features of human experience, has never been accepted in the United States; it has proved even less digestible there than the stoical doctrines of Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis was assimilated into American culture by being made to serve self-realization rather than - as Freud surely intended - resignation. Weber's thought has proved resistant to such a denaturing. In Max Weber: Politics and the spirit of tragedy, John Patrick Diggins contrasts Weber's understanding of politics with "an American political culture almost innocent of irony and tragedy". At the same time, he suggests that Weber's thought has analogues in American literature, and in the thinking of Abraham Lincoln about the choices engendered by the Civil War. Though it encompasses an illuminating account of Weber's life, Diggins's book is not a biography of Weber, nor is it an analysis of his sociological writings. It is an extended meditation on the bearings of Weber's thought on American life, using as its primary evidences Weber's responses to the historical circumstances of his time. Together with other interpreters, Diggins maintains that Weber's view of the conflicts of modern society was shaped by the understanding of tragedy which he appropriated from the work of Nietzsche and Simmel and by the account of the limits of moral responsibility he derived from his studies of Calvinism. Weber's recurrent theme, of the disenchantment of human experience in modern societies, expressed a conception of the inherent limitations of the rational and moral exercise of power that Diggins plausibly argues is Calvinist and Nietzschean in origin. For Weber, the spread of rational calculation throughout society is an undoubted good, in that it enables human wants to be satisfied more effectively; but it is also a cultural and moral hazard, since it drains social life of significance and subjects human beings to the meaningless demands of efficient administration. Weber thought this an antinomy that no new political dispensation could hope to elude. Like his disciple Joseph Schumpeter, he had no hopes of Soviet Communism, and reacted with incredulous contempt to suggestions that American capitalism could escape the ironies all modern societies are fated to endure. Throughout Diggins's carefully crafted account of Weber's life and thought, he compares and contrasts Weber's views with those of the principal interpreters of the American condition, particularly Tocqueville. He records Weber's cool comment on Tocqueville's thesis of the danger of a democratic tyranny of the majority in the United States - that it presupposes that the fiction of popular government will some day become a fact of American political life: which is an impossibility. Weber shared Tocqueville's belief that the intensity of commercial competition in the United States owes much to the pervasive American illusion of equality; but he had no fear that egalitarian levelling would ever become a reality in the United States. Wiser and more prescient than Tocqueville, Weber expected that new inequalities would arise in the United States that were immune from accountability and control by democratic institutions. He anticipated that these new inequalities would be legitimated as inevitable by-products of the rational allocation of resources in free markets. It is surprising that Diggins fails to note how strikingly Weber's expectations have been corroborated by the growth of economic inequality in the United States over the past twenty years. Average incomes have fallen in the United States during a period of virtually uninterrupted growth in productivity and national wealth. Yet the realities of growing economic inequality have been effectively removed from the agenda of American politics. The issues of economic justice and social cohesion raised by widening inequalities have been addressed only by maverick politicians, such as Ralph Nader and Patrick Buchanan, who have been swiftly marginalized. Diggins follows the course of recent American politics by side stepping these issues and focusing on the multicultural politics of identity and entitlement. As a result, the eminently Weberian conjunction in contemporary America of enhanced economic inequalities with a political culture of rational management goes unexamined. Diggins rails against "the contemporary cult of multiculturalism", which practises "a politics of institutional infiltration on the part of minorities that have nothing to lose but their grievances", resulting in a "return to a pseudo-aristocratic politics of privilege based on inherited rights by reason of birth". Yet the most distinctive trend of late twentieth-century America is not the separation of social groups by race promoted by some advocates of multiculturalism. It is the segregation of racial groups by economic class. In this, the United States resembles some Latin American countries, especially Brazil, more than it does any European country. Diggins refers to racial and ethnic conflicts in America today as if they were the results of mistaken multicultural doctrines rather than a consequence of the confluence of ethnic and racial with economic divisions. In neglecting this ominous prospect for the trifling commotions of multiculturalism, Diggins passes over one of the most arresting applications of Weber's thought. In a more consistently Weberian perspective, ethnic and racial conflicts can be understood as expressing divisions in American society in which economic inequalities and cultural identities have become fatefully interlocked. One of the most interesting aspects of Diggins's book is his exploration of the political sensibility he finds in Abraham Lincoln, and the contrast he identifies between Lincoln's outlook and that of Woodrow Wilson. He interprets Lincoln's ethical and political outlook as being, like Weber's, tragic and antinomic. It was concerned with achieving a provisional settlement among equally legitimate but inherently opposed moral claims, rather than with the attainment of an ideal condition in which their incompatibility was somehow overcome. Diggins finds parallels between Lincoln's admission during the Civil War that he was willing to tolerate slavery in order to preserve the Union and Weber's defence of a morality of responsibility in his famous address, "Politics as a Vocation". (In an interesting footnote, Diggins compares Weber's view of morality with the account of rationally incommensurable values developed in the writings of Isaiah Berlin.) In Woodrow Wilson, Diggins recognizes an unthinking moral absolutism that could scarcely be further removed from the acceptance of insoluble ethical dilemmas that characterized Lincoln and Weber. He observes that the principle of national self-determination which Wilson invoked to determine the terms of peace after the First World War articulated a states-rights tradition that derived from Wilson's Virginia roots. It had not laid the basis for peace in the United States, but instead led to the Civil War. This is an irony worth pondering, but notably subdued in American reflection. The paradox whereby a principle commonly believed to be progressive and liberating had its origin in the defence of slavery is occluded in the dominant tradition of American political thought - the liberal progressive tradition of Jefferson, Wilson and Dewey. Diggins tells us that there is another tradition of American thought, beginning with Calvinism and articulated in the speeches of Abraham Lincoln and the writings of Herman Melville and Reinhold Niebuhr, that is more receptive to these ironies. He is ingenious in detecting affinities between Weber's Nietzschean affirmation of antinomies in politics and the insights of Lincoln, Melville and Niebuhr into the contradictions of ethical life. The argument that these disparate figures constitute an American tradition of tragic political thought remains deeply unpersuasive. There are worlds of difference between Melville's experimental nihilism, Lincoln's pragmatic recognition of the political limits of ethical reasoning, and Niebuhr's Calvinist conviction of original sin. Diggins's thoughtful and pioneering book is weakened by the claim that these fascinating but ill-assorted figures exemplify an American tradition of antinomic thinking about ethics and politics akin to that which he rightly discerns in Weber. Such a far-fetched claim can only confirm the truth of Diggins's belief that the thought of Max Weber has yet to find a proper hearing in the United States. From ljohnson at solution-consulting.com Wed Jun 8 10:46:37 2005 From: ljohnson at solution-consulting.com (Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.) Date: Wed, 08 Jun 2005 04:46:37 -0600 Subject: [Paleopsych] socialized medicine discussion Message-ID: <42A6CC8D.3090109@solution-consulting.com> We have occasionally discussed the problems with American health care. I have spent 30 years in that system, and know both the shortcomings and the dangers of change. While we have lost market incentives in health care (too much first-dollar coverage and entitlement attitudes on the part of consumers), the alternative is very ugly. Here is an interesting first-person account of the competitive system, government-run, bureaucracy-planned socialism in health care. Lynn http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006785 ACROSS THE POND There's No Place Like Home What I learned from my wife's month in the British medical system. BY DAVID ASMAN Wednesday, June 8, 2005 12:00 a.m. "Mr. Asman, could you come down to the gym? Your wife appears to be having a small problem." In typical British understatement, this was the first word I received of my wife's stroke. We had arrived in London the night before for a two-week vacation. We spent the day sightseeing and were planning to go to the theater. I decided to take a nap, but my wife wanted to get in a workout in the hotel's gym before theater. Little did either of us know that a tiny blood clot had developed in her leg on the flight to London and was quietly working its way up to her heart. Her workout on the Stairmaster pumped the clot right through a too-porous wall in the heart on a direct path to the right side of her brain. Hurrying down to the gym, I suspected that whatever the "small" problem was, we might still have time to make the play. Instead, our lives were about to change fundamentally, and we were both about to experience firsthand the inner workings of British health care. We spent almost a full month in a British public hospital. We also arranged for a complex medical procedure to be done in one of the few remaining private hospitals in Britain. My wife then spent about three weeks recuperating in a New York City hospital as an inpatient and has since used another city hospital for physical therapy as an outpatient. We thus have had a chance to sample the health diet available under two very different systems of health care. Neither system is without its faults and advantages. To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, there are no solutions to modern health care problems, only trade-offs. What follows is a sampling of those tradeoffs as we viewed them firsthand. As I saw my wife collapsed on the hotel's gym floor, my concern about making the curtain was replaced by a bone-chilling recognition that she was in mortal danger. Despite her protestations that everything was fine, her left side was paralyzed and her eyes were rolling around unfocused. She was making sense, but her words were slurred. Right away I suspected a stroke, even though she is a young, healthy nonsmoker. Over her continuing protests, I knew we had to get her to a hospital right away. The emergency workers who came within five minutes were wonderful. The two young East Enders looked and sounded for all the world like a couple of skinhead soccer fans, cockney accents and all. But their professionalism in immediately stabilizing my wife and taking her vitals was matched with exceptional kindness. I was moved to tears to see how comforting they were both to my wife and to me. As I was to discover time and again in the British health system, despite the often deplorable conditions of a bankrupt infrastructure, British caregivers--whether nurses, doctors, or ambulance drivers--are extraordinarily kind and hardworking. Since there's no real money to be made in the system, those who get into public medicine do so as a pure vocation. And they show it. In the case of these EMTs, I kick myself for not having noticed their names to later thank them, for almost as soon as they dropped us off at the emergency room of the University College of London Hospital, they disappeared. Suddenly we were in the hands of British Health Service, and after a battery of tests we were being pressured into officially admitting my wife to UCL. As we discovered later, emergency care is free for everyone in Britain; it's only when one is officially admitted to a hospital that a foreigner begins to pay. I didn't know that. But I did know that I was not about to admit my wife to a hospital that could not diagnose an obviously life-threatening affliction. And even after having given her an MRI, the doctors could not tell if she had a stroke. Now, the smartest thing I did before we left the hotel was to delay the ambulance driver long enough to run back to my room and grab my wife's cell phone. With that phone I began making about a thousand dollars worth of trans-Atlantic calls, the first of which was to the world-renowned cardiologist Dr. Isadore Rosenfeld, who I'm lucky enough to have as my GP. As it turned out, not only did Izzy diagnose the problem correctly, he even suggested a cause for the stroke, which later turned out to be correct. "There's no reason for her to have a stroke except if it's a PFO." I didn't know what Izzy meant, but I wrote down the initials and later found out that a PFO (a patent foramen ovale) is a flap-like opening in the heart through which we get our oxygen in utero. For most of us, the opening closes shortly after birth. But in as many as 30% of us, the flap doesn't seal tight, and that can allow a blood clot to travel through the heart up to the brain. Izzy agreed that I should not admit my wife to UCL but hold out for a hospital that specialized in neurology. As it happened, the best such hospital in England, Queen's Square Hospital for Neurology, was a short distance away, but it had no beds available. That's when I started dialing furiously again, tracking down contacts and calling in chits with any influential contact around the world for whom I'd ever done a favor. I also got my employer, News Corp., involved, and a team of extremely helpful folks I'd never met worked overtime helping me out. Suddenly, a bed was found in Queen's Square, and by 2 a.m. my wife was officially admitted to a British public hospital. The neurologist on call that night looked at the same MRI where the emergency doctors had seen nothing and immediately saw that my wife had suffered a severe stroke. It was awful news, but I realized we were finally in the right place. That first night (or what was left of it) my wife was sent off to intensive care, and the nurses convinced me that I should get a few hours sleep. We found a supply closet, in which there was a small examination table, and the nurses helped me fashion fake pillows and blankets from old supplies. The loving attention of these nurses was touching. But the conditions of the hospital were rather shockingly apparent even then. The acute brain injury ward to which my wife was assigned the next day consisted of four sections, each having six beds. Whether it was dumb luck or some unseen connection, we ended up with a bed next to a window, through which we could catch a glimpse of the sky. Better yet, the window actually opened, which was also a blessing since the smells wafting through the ward were often overwhelming. When I covered Latin America for The Wall Street Journal, I'd visit hospitals, prisons and schools as barometers of public services in the country. Based on my Latin American scale, Queen's Square would rate somewhere in the middle. It certainly wasn't as bad as public hospitals in El Salvador, where patients often share beds. But it wasn't as nice as some of the hospitals I've seen in Buenos Aires or southern Brazil. And compared with virtually any hospital ward in the U.S., Queen's Square would fall short by a mile. The equipment wasn't ancient, but it was often quite old. On occasion my wife and I would giggle at heart and blood-pressure monitors that were literally taped together and would come apart as they were being moved into place. The nurses and hospital technicians had become expert at jerry-rigging temporary fixes for a lot of the damaged equipment. I pitched in as best as I could with simple things, like fixing the wiring for the one TV in the ward. And I'd make frequent trips to the local pharmacies to buy extra tissues and cleaning wipes, which were always in short supply. In fact, cleaning was my main occupation for the month we were at Queen's Square. Infections in hospitals are, of course, a problem everywhere. But in Britain, hospital-borne infections are getting out of control. At least 100,000 British patients a year are hit by hospital-acquired infections, including the penicillin-resistant "superbug" MRSA. A new study carried out by the British Health Protection Agency says that MRSA plays a part in the deaths of up to 32,000 patients every year. But even at lower numbers, Britain has the worst MRSA infection rates in Europe. It's not hard to see why. As far as we could tell in our month at Queen's Square, the only method of keeping the floors clean was an industrious worker from the Philippines named Marcello, equipped with a mop and pail. Marcello did the best that he could. But there's only so much a single worker can do with a mop and pail against a ward full of germ-laden filth. Only a constant cleaning by me kept our little corner of the ward relatively germ-free. When my wife and I walked into Cornell University Hospital in New York after a month in England, the first thing we noticed was the floors. They were not only clean. They were shining! We were giddy with the prospect of not constantly engaging in germ warfare. As for the caliber of medicine practiced at Queen's Square, we were quite impressed at the collegiality of the doctors and the tendency to make medical judgments based on group consultations. There is much better teamwork among doctors, nurses and physical therapists in Britain. In fact, once a week at Queen's Square, all the hospital's health workers--from high to low--would assemble for an open forum on each patient in the ward. That way each level knows what the other level is up to, something glaringly absent from U.S. hospital management. Also, British nurses have far more direct managerial control over how the hospital wards are run. This may somewhat compensate for their meager wages--which averaged about ?20,000 ($36,000) a year (in a city where almost everything costs twice as much as it does in Manhattan!). There is also much less of a tendency in British medicine to make decisions on the basis of whether one will be sued for that decision. This can lead to a much healthier period of recuperation. For example, as soon as my wife was ambulatory, I was determined to get her out of the hospital as much as possible. Since a stroke is all about the brain, I wanted to clear her head of as much sickness as I could. We'd take off in a wheelchair for two-hour lunches in the lovely little park outside, and three-hour dinners at a nice Japanese restaurant located at a hotel down the street. I swear those long, leisurely dinners, after which we'd sit in the lobby where I'd smoke a cigar and we'd talk for another hour or so, actually helped in my wife's recovery. It made both of us feel, well, normal. It also helped restore a bit of fun in our relationship, which too often slips away when you just see your loved one in a hospital setting. Now try leaving a hospital as an inpatient in the U.S. In fact, we did try and were frustrated at every step. You'd have better luck breaking out of prison. Forms, permission slips and guards at the gate all conspire to keep you in bounds. It was clear that what prevented us from getting out was the pressing fear on everyone's part of getting sued. Anything happens on the outside and folks naturally sue the hospital for not doing their job as the patient's nanny. Why are the Brits so less concerned about being sued? I can only guess that Britain's practice of forcing losers in civil cases to pay for court costs has lessened the number of lawsuits, and thus the paranoia about lawsuits from which American medical services suffer. British doctors, nurses and physical therapists also seem to put much more stock in the spiritual side of healing. Not to say that they bring religion into the ward. (In fact, they passed right over my wife's insistence that prayer played a part in what they had to admit was a miraculously quick return of movement to her left side.) Put simply, they invest a lot of effort at keeping one's spirits up. Sometimes it's a bit over the top, such as when the physical or occupational therapists compliment any tiny achievement with a "Brilliant!" or "Fantastic!" But better that than taking a chance of planting a negative suggestion that can grow quickly and dampen spirits for a long time. Since we returned, we've actually had two American physical therapists who did just that--one who told my wife that she'd never use her hand again and another who said she'd never bend her ankle again. Both of these therapists were wrong, but they succeeded in depressing my wife's spirits and delaying her recovery for a considerable period. For the life of me, I can't understand how they could have been so insensitive, unless this again was an attempt to forestall a lawsuit: I never claimed you would walk again. Having praised the caregivers, I'm forced to return to the inefficiencies of a health system devoid of incentives. One can tell that the edge has disappeared in treatment in Britain. For example, when we returned to the U.S. we discovered that treatment exists for thwarting the effects of blood clots in the brain if administered shortly after a stroke. Such treatment was never mentioned, even after we were admitted to the neurology hospital. Indeed, the only medication my wife was given for a severe stroke was a daily dose of aspirin. Now, treating stroke victims is tricky business. My wife had a low hemoglobin count, so with all the medications in the world, she still might have been better off with just aspirin. But consultations with doctors never brought up the possibilities of alternative drug therapies. (Of course, U.S. doctors tend to be pill pushers, but that's a different discussion.) Then there was the condition of Queen's Square compared with the physical plant of the New York hospitals. As I mentioned, the cleanliness of U.S. hospitals is immediately apparent to all the senses. But Cornell and New York University hospitals (both of which my wife has been using since we returned) have ready access to technical equipment that is either hard to find or nonexistent in Britain. This includes both diagnostic equipment and state-of-the-art equipment used for physical therapy. We did have one brief encounter with a more comprehensive type of British medical treatment--a day trip to one of the few remaining private hospitals in London. Before she could travel back home, my wife needed to have the weak wall in her heart fortified with a metal clamp. The procedure is minimally invasive (a catheter is passed up to the heart from a small incision made in the groin), but it requires enormous skill. The cardiologist responsible for the procedure, Seamus Cullen, worked in both the public system and as a private clinician. He informed us that the waiting line to perform the procedure in a public hospital would take days if not weeks, but we could have the procedure done in a private hospital almost immediately. Since we'd already been separated from our 12-year-old daughter for almost a month, we opted to have the procedure done (with enormous assistance from my employer) at a private hospital. Checking into the private hospital was like going from a rickety Third World hovel into a five-star hotel. There was clean carpeting, more than enough help, a private room (and a private bath!) in which to recover from the procedure, even a choice of wines offered with a wide variety of entrees. As we were feasting on our fancy new digs, Dr. Cullen came by, took my wife's hand, and quietly told us in detail about the procedure. He actually paused to ask us whether we understood him completely and had any questions. Only one, we both thought to ask: Is this a dream? It wasn't long before the dream was over and we were back at Queen's Square. But on our return, one of the ever-accommodating nurses had found us a single room in the back of the ward where they usually throw rowdy patients. For the last five days, my wife and I prayed for well-behaved patients, and we managed to last out our days at Queen's Square basking in a private room. But what of the bottom line? When I received the bill for my wife's one-month stay at Queen's Square, I thought there was a mistake. The bill included all doctors' costs, two MRI scans, more than a dozen physical therapy sessions, numerous blood and pathology tests, and of course room and board in the hospital for a month. And perhaps most important, it included the loving care of the finest nurses we'd encountered anywhere. The total cost: $25,752. That ain't chump change. But to put this in context, the cost of just 10 physical therapy sessions at New York's Cornell University Hospital came to $27,000--greater than the entire bill from British Health Service! There is something seriously out of whack about 10 therapy sessions that cost more than a month's worth of hospital bills in England. Still, while costs in U.S. hospitals might well have become exorbitant because of too few incentives to keep costs down, the British system has simply lost sight of costs and incentives altogether. (The exception would appear to be the few remaining private clinics in Britain. The heart procedure done in the private clinic in London cost about $20,000.) "Free health care" is a mantra that one hears all the time from advocates of the British system. But British health care is not "free." I mentioned the cost of living in London, which is twice as high for almost any good or service as prices in Manhattan. Folks like to blame an overvalued pound (or undervalued dollar). But that only explains about 30% of the extra cost. A far larger part of those extra costs come in the hidden value-added taxes--which can add up to 40% when you combine costs to consumers and producers. And with salaries tending to be about 20% lower in England than they are here, the purchasing power of Brits must be close to what we would define as the poverty level. The enormous costs of socialized medicine explain at least some of this disparity in the standard of living. As for the quality of British health care, advocates of socialized medicine point out that while the British system may not be as rich as U.S. heath care, no patient is turned away. To which I would respond that my wife's one roommate at Cornell University Hospital in New York was an uninsured homeless woman, who shared the same spectacular view of the East River and was receiving about the same quality of health care as my wife. Uninsured Americans are not left on the street to die. Something is clearly wrong with medical pricing over here. Ten therapy sessions aren't worth $27,000, no matter how shiny the floors are. On the other hand my wife was wheeled into Cornell and managed to partially walk out after a relatively pleasant stay in a relatively clean environment. Can one really put a price on that? Mr. Asman is an anchor at the Fox News Channel and host of "Forbes on Fox." This article appears in the May issue of The American Spectator . -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: storyend_dingbat.gif Type: image/gif Size: 155 bytes Desc: not available URL: From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Jun 8 14:03:02 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 07:03:02 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] socialized medicine discussion Message-ID: <01C56BF8.1CA676A0.shovland@mindspring.com> Misdiagnosis is not uncommon in America either. An old high school teacher of mine had a neuroma in the knee which was improperly diagnosed as arthritis. They did a knee replacement which didn't work very well. Eventually they amputated the leg below the knee. A lot of what this article describes could be blamed on process and priority issues. If the hospital was dirty that was because there was no process to ensure cleanliness. If the equipment was old it was because the system is being starved for the money needed to buy updated equipment. Our system is filled with medications that are no better than placebos and which often kill the people they are supposed to help. Surgeries such as bypasses, which are very risky and have only temporary results, are common. If fact, most of what our system does for degenerative conditions doesn't work very well. All they do is manage your decline. I remember when most hospitals were non-profits. We didn't have the sense of crisis then that we have now. What we have now is monopoly power that is mainly concerned with sucking up as much money as it can. Neither markets nor socialism are magic. Both require vigilance against wrong-doing and a dedication to doing things right. Steve Hovland www.stevehovland.net -----Original Message----- From: Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D. [SMTP:ljohnson at solution-consulting.com] Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2005 3:47 AM To: The new improved paleopsych list Subject: [Paleopsych] socialized medicine discussion We have occasionally discussed the problems with American health care. I have spent 30 years in that system, and know both the shortcomings and the dangers of change. While we have lost market incentives in health care (too much first-dollar coverage and entitlement attitudes on the part of consumers), the alternative is very ugly. Here is an interesting first-person account of the competitive system, government-run, bureaucracy-planned socialism in health care. Lynn http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006785 ACROSS THE POND There's No Place Like Home What I learned from my wife's month in the British medical system. BY DAVID ASMAN Wednesday, June 8, 2005 12:00 a.m. "Mr. Asman, could you come down to the gym? Your wife appears to be having a small problem." In typical British understatement, this was the first word I received of my wife's stroke. We had arrived in London the night before for a two-week vacation. We spent the day sightseeing and were planning to go to the theater. I decided to take a nap, but my wife wanted to get in a workout in the hotel's gym before theater. Little did either of us know that a tiny blood clot had developed in her leg on the flight to London and was quietly working its way up to her heart. Her workout on the Stairmaster pumped the clot right through a too-porous wall in the heart on a direct path to the right side of her brain. Hurrying down to the gym, I suspected that whatever the "small" problem was, we might still have time to make the play. Instead, our lives were about to change fundamentally, and we were both about to experience firsthand the inner workings of British health care. We spent almost a full month in a British public hospital. We also arranged for a complex medical procedure to be done in one of the few remaining private hospitals in Britain. My wife then spent about three weeks recuperating in a New York City hospital as an inpatient and has since used another city hospital for physical therapy as an outpatient. We thus have had a chance to sample the health diet available under two very different systems of health care. Neither system is without its faults and advantages. To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, there are no solutions to modern health care problems, only trade-offs. What follows is a sampling of those tradeoffs as we viewed them firsthand. As I saw my wife collapsed on the hotel's gym floor, my concern about making the curtain was replaced by a bone-chilling recognition that she was in mortal danger. Despite her protestations that everything was fine, her left side was paralyzed and her eyes were rolling around unfocused. She was making sense, but her words were slurred. Right away I suspected a stroke, even though she is a young, healthy nonsmoker. Over her continuing protests, I knew we had to get her to a hospital right away. The emergency workers who came within five minutes were wonderful. The two young East Enders looked and sounded for all the world like a couple of skinhead soccer fans, cockney accents and all. But their professionalism in immediately stabilizing my wife and taking her vitals was matched with exceptional kindness. I was moved to tears to see how comforting they were both to my wife and to me. As I was to discover time and again in the British health system, despite the often deplorable conditions of a bankrupt infrastructure, British caregivers--whether nurses, doctors, or ambulance drivers--are extraordinarily kind and hardworking. Since there's no real money to be made in the system, those who get into public medicine do so as a pure vocation. And they show it. In the case of these EMTs, I kick myself for not having noticed their names to later thank them, for almost as soon as they dropped us off at the emergency room of the University College of London Hospital, they disappeared. Suddenly we were in the hands of British Health Service, and after a battery of tests we were being pressured into officially admitting my wife to UCL. As we discovered later, emergency care is free for everyone in Britain; it's only when one is officially admitted to a hospital that a foreigner begins to pay. I didn't know that. But I did know that I was not about to admit my wife to a hospital that could not diagnose an obviously life-threatening affliction. And even after having given her an MRI, the doctors could not tell if she had a stroke. Now, the smartest thing I did before we left the hotel was to delay the ambulance driver long enough to run back to my room and grab my wife's cell phone. With that phone I began making about a thousand dollars worth of trans-Atlantic calls, the first of which was to the world-renowned cardiologist Dr. Isadore Rosenfeld, who I'm lucky enough to have as my GP. As it turned out, not only did Izzy diagnose the problem correctly, he even suggested a cause for the stroke, which later turned out to be correct. "There's no reason for her to have a stroke except if it's a PFO." I didn't know what Izzy meant, but I wrote down the initials and later found out that a PFO (a patent foramen ovale) is a flap-like opening in the heart through which we get our oxygen in utero. For most of us, the opening closes shortly after birth. But in as many as 30% of us, the flap doesn't seal tight, and that can allow a blood clot to travel through the heart up to the brain. Izzy agreed that I should not admit my wife to UCL but hold out for a hospital that specialized in neurology. As it happened, the best such hospital in England, Queen's Square Hospital for Neurology, was a short distance away, but it had no beds available. That's when I started dialing furiously again, tracking down contacts and calling in chits with any influential contact around the world for whom I'd ever done a favor. I also got my employer, News Corp., involved, and a team of extremely helpful folks I'd never met worked overtime helping me out. Suddenly, a bed was found in Queen's Square, and by 2 a.m. my wife was officially admitted to a British public hospital. The neurologist on call that night looked at the same MRI where the emergency doctors had seen nothing and immediately saw that my wife had suffered a severe stroke. It was awful news, but I realized we were finally in the right place. That first night (or what was left of it) my wife was sent off to intensive care, and the nurses convinced me that I should get a few hours sleep. We found a supply closet, in which there was a small examination table, and the nurses helped me fashion fake pillows and blankets from old supplies. The loving attention of these nurses was touching. But the conditions of the hospital were rather shockingly apparent even then. The acute brain injury ward to which my wife was assigned the next day consisted of four sections, each having six beds. Whether it was dumb luck or some unseen connection, we ended up with a bed next to a window, through which we could catch a glimpse of the sky. Better yet, the window actually opened, which was also a blessing since the smells wafting through the ward were often overwhelming. When I covered Latin America for The Wall Street Journal, I'd visit hospitals, prisons and schools as barometers of public services in the country. Based on my Latin American scale, Queen's Square would rate somewhere in the middle. It certainly wasn't as bad as public hospitals in El Salvador, where patients often share beds. But it wasn't as nice as some of the hospitals I've seen in Buenos Aires or southern Brazil. And compared with virtually any hospital ward in the U.S., Queen's Square would fall short by a mile. The equipment wasn't ancient, but it was often quite old. On occasion my wife and I would giggle at heart and blood-pressure monitors that were literally taped together and would come apart as they were being moved into place. The nurses and hospital technicians had become expert at jerry-rigging temporary fixes for a lot of the damaged equipment. I pitched in as best as I could with simple things, like fixing the wiring for the one TV in the ward. And I'd make frequent trips to the local pharmacies to buy extra tissues and cleaning wipes, which were always in short supply. In fact, cleaning was my main occupation for the month we were at Queen's Square. Infections in hospitals are, of course, a problem everywhere. But in Britain, hospital-borne infections are getting out of control. At least 100,000 British patients a year are hit by hospital-acquired infections, including the penicillin-resistant "superbug" MRSA. A new study carried out by the British Health Protection Agency says that MRSA plays a part in the deaths of up to 32,000 patients every year. But even at lower numbers, Britain has the worst MRSA infection rates in Europe. It's not hard to see why. As far as we could tell in our month at Queen's Square, the only method of keeping the floors clean was an industrious worker from the Philippines named Marcello, equipped with a mop and pail. Marcello did the best that he could. But there's only so much a single worker can do with a mop and pail against a ward full of germ-laden filth. Only a constant cleaning by me kept our little corner of the ward relatively germ-free. When my wife and I walked into Cornell University Hospital in New York after a month in England, the first thing we noticed was the floors. They were not only clean. They were shining! We were giddy with the prospect of not constantly engaging in germ warfare. As for the caliber of medicine practiced at Queen's Square, we were quite impressed at the collegiality of the doctors and the tendency to make medical judgments based on group consultations. There is much better teamwork among doctors, nurses and physical therapists in Britain. In fact, once a week at Queen's Square, all the hospital's health workers--from high to low--would assemble for an open forum on each patient in the ward. That way each level knows what the other level is up to, something glaringly absent from U.S. hospital management. Also, British nurses have far more direct managerial control over how the hospital wards are run. This may somewhat compensate for their meager wages--which averaged about ?20,000 ($36,000) a year (in a city where almost everything costs twice as much as it does in Manhattan!). There is also much less of a tendency in British medicine to make decisions on the basis of whether one will be sued for that decision. This can lead to a much healthier period of recuperation. For example, as soon as my wife was ambulatory, I was determined to get her out of the hospital as much as possible. Since a stroke is all about the brain, I wanted to clear her head of as much sickness as I could. We'd take off in a wheelchair for two-hour lunches in the lovely little park outside, and three-hour dinners at a nice Japanese restaurant located at a hotel down the street. I swear those long, leisurely dinners, after which we'd sit in the lobby where I'd smoke a cigar and we'd talk for another hour or so, actually helped in my wife's recovery. It made both of us feel, well, normal. It also helped restore a bit of fun in our relationship, which too often slips away when you just see your loved one in a hospital setting. Now try leaving a hospital as an inpatient in the U.S. In fact, we did try and were frustrated at every step. You'd have better luck breaking out of prison. Forms, permission slips and guards at the gate all conspire to keep you in bounds. It was clear that what prevented us from getting out was the pressing fear on everyone's part of getting sued. Anything happens on the outside and folks naturally sue the hospital for not doing their job as the patient's nanny. Why are the Brits so less concerned about being sued? I can only guess that Britain's practice of forcing losers in civil cases to pay for court costs has lessened the number of lawsuits, and thus the paranoia about lawsuits from which American medical services suffer. British doctors, nurses and physical therapists also seem to put much more stock in the spiritual side of healing. Not to say that they bring religion into the ward. (In fact, they passed right over my wife's insistence that prayer played a part in what they had to admit was a miraculously quick return of movement to her left side.) Put simply, they invest a lot of effort at keeping one's spirits up. Sometimes it's a bit over the top, such as when the physical or occupational therapists compliment any tiny achievement with a "Brilliant!" or "Fantastic!" But better that than taking a chance of planting a negative suggestion that can grow quickly and dampen spirits for a long time. Since we returned, we've actually had two American physical therapists who did just that--one who told my wife that she'd never use her hand again and another who said she'd never bend her ankle again. Both of these therapists were wrong, but they succeeded in depressing my wife's spirits and delaying her recovery for a considerable period. For the life of me, I can't understand how they could have been so insensitive, unless this again was an attempt to forestall a lawsuit: I never claimed you would walk again. Having praised the caregivers, I'm forced to return to the inefficiencies of a health system devoid of incentives. One can tell that the edge has disappeared in treatment in Britain. For example, when we returned to the U.S. we discovered that treatment exists for thwarting the effects of blood clots in the brain if administered shortly after a stroke. Such treatment was never mentioned, even after we were admitted to the neurology hospital. Indeed, the only medication my wife was given for a severe stroke was a daily dose of aspirin. Now, treating stroke victims is tricky business. My wife had a low hemoglobin count, so with all the medications in the world, she still might have been better off with just aspirin. But consultations with doctors never brought up the possibilities of alternative drug therapies. (Of course, U.S. doctors tend to be pill pushers, but that's a different discussion.) Then there was the condition of Queen's Square compared with the physical plant of the New York hospitals. As I mentioned, the cleanliness of U.S. hospitals is immediately apparent to all the senses. But Cornell and New York University hospitals (both of which my wife has been using since we returned) have ready access to technical equipment that is either hard to find or nonexistent in Britain. This includes both diagnostic equipment and state-of-the-art equipment used for physical therapy. We did have one brief encounter with a more comprehensive type of British medical treatment--a day trip to one of the few remaining private hospitals in London. Before she could travel back home, my wife needed to have the weak wall in her heart fortified with a metal clamp. The procedure is minimally invasive (a catheter is passed up to the heart from a small incision made in the groin), but it requires enormous skill. The cardiologist responsible for the procedure, Seamus Cullen, worked in both the public system and as a private clinician. He informed us that the waiting line to perform the procedure in a public hospital would take days if not weeks, but we could have the procedure done in a private hospital almost immediately. Since we'd already been separated from our 12-year-old daughter for almost a month, we opted to have the procedure done (with enormous assistance from my employer) at a private hospital. Checking into the private hospital was like going from a rickety Third World hovel into a five-star hotel. There was clean carpeting, more than enough help, a private room (and a private bath!) in which to recover from the procedure, even a choice of wines offered with a wide variety of entrees. As we were feasting on our fancy new digs, Dr. Cullen came by, took my wife's hand, and quietly told us in detail about the procedure. He actually paused to ask us whether we understood him completely and had any questions. Only one, we both thought to ask: Is this a dream? It wasn't long before the dream was over and we were back at Queen's Square. But on our return, one of the ever-accommodating nurses had found us a single room in the back of the ward where they usually throw rowdy patients. For the last five days, my wife and I prayed for well-behaved patients, and we managed to last out our days at Queen's Square basking in a private room. But what of the bottom line? When I received the bill for my wife's one-month stay at Queen's Square, I thought there was a mistake. The bill included all doctors' costs, two MRI scans, more than a dozen physical therapy sessions, numerous blood and pathology tests, and of course room and board in the hospital for a month. And perhaps most important, it included the loving care of the finest nurses we'd encountered anywhere. The total cost: $25,752. That ain't chump change. But to put this in context, the cost of just 10 physical therapy sessions at New York's Cornell University Hospital came to $27,000--greater than the entire bill from British Health Service! There is something seriously out of whack about 10 therapy sessions that cost more than a month's worth of hospital bills in England. Still, while costs in U.S. hospitals might well have become exorbitant because of too few incentives to keep costs down, the British system has simply lost sight of costs and incentives altogether. (The exception would appear to be the few remaining private clinics in Britain. The heart procedure done in the private clinic in London cost about $20,000.) "Free health care" is a mantra that one hears all the time from advocates of the British system. But British health care is not "free." I mentioned the cost of living in London, which is twice as high for almost any good or service as prices in Manhattan. Folks like to blame an overvalued pound (or undervalued dollar). But that only explains about 30% of the extra cost. A far larger part of those extra costs come in the hidden value-added taxes--which can add up to 40% when you combine costs to consumers and producers. And with salaries tending to be about 20% lower in England than they are here, the purchasing power of Brits must be close to what we would define as the poverty level. The enormous costs of socialized medicine explain at least some of this disparity in the standard of living. As for the quality of British health care, advocates of socialized medicine point out that while the British system may not be as rich as U.S. heath care, no patient is turned away. To which I would respond that my wife's one roommate at Cornell University Hospital in New York was an uninsured homeless woman, who shared the same spectacular view of the East River and was receiving about the same quality of health care as my wife. Uninsured Americans are not left on the street to die. Something is clearly wrong with medical pricing over here. Ten therapy sessions aren't worth $27,000, no matter how shiny the floors are. On the other hand my wife was wheeled into Cornell and managed to partially walk out after a relatively pleasant stay in a relatively clean environment. Can one really put a price on that? Mr. Asman is an anchor at the Fox News Channel and host of "Forbes on Fox." This article appears in the May issue of The American Spectator . << File: ATT00014.html >> << File: storyend_dingbat.gif >> << File: ATT00015.txt >> From shovland at mindspring.com Wed Jun 8 14:12:02 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 07:12:02 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Deaths in US due to iatrogenesis Message-ID: <01C56BF9.5F0551A0.shovland@mindspring.com> Based on a seminal research paper of the same title authored by Null, Carolyn Dean, MD, Martin Feldman, MD,and others (2003), all of the statistics regarding deaths caused by medicine have been collected for the first time in a single research report. And the results are shocking. According to the report, the most conservative reading of statistics culled from government and peer reviewed journals shows that 751,936 Americans die every year as a result of medical error, also known as iatrogenesis. This is the equivalent of over six jumbo jets filled with passengers falling out of the sky every day. Never before have all the death rates from adverse drug reactions, unnecessary surgeries, medical errors, infections, malnutrition, bedsores, and nursing home errors been collected into a single research report. Yet, here they are, and it is nothing less than a scathing indictment of medicine and how it is practiced in the United States today. Guaranteed to stimulate a national debate on the current efficacy of our health care delivery system, you will not want to miss the vital data presented by Null in this groundbreaking report. From anonymous_animus at yahoo.com Wed Jun 8 18:34:49 2005 From: anonymous_animus at yahoo.com (Michael Christopher) Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 11:34:49 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] individuality In-Reply-To: <200506081800.j58I0ZR27073@tick.javien.com> Message-ID: <20050608183449.7333.qmail@web30806.mail.mud.yahoo.com> >>In his contribution, William Connolly argues in similar terms that the self-confident assertion of democratic individuality must unavoidably be played out against a background of repressed cultural differences, while Benjamin Barber defends multiculturalism against Kateb's charge that identity-defining communities are inherently repressive.<< --I suspect those who are able to work well with a variety of others will have more economic opportunities in the near and long term future. Repressed cultural differences can play out in very different ways, depending on whether the indivuduals involved view differences as a threat (common in children raised in repressive families) or as an opportunity to cross-pollinate, gather ideas and capitalize on differences in a mutually beneficial way. Music depends on this cross-fertilization of subcultures, and those who view cultural differences as a kind of evolving musical interplay may find life a great deal more fruitful than those who react to differences by withdrawing into like-minded groups that have less interaction with others. Snobbery may be effective as a personality defense, for a while, but it leads to social impoverishment and isolation. >>For American liberals, the final lesson suggested by these criticisms must be deeply discomforting. It is that unabridged individuality inescapably involves serious losses of democratic equality.<< --Depends on what you mean by "unabridged". It's quite possible, and very rewarding, to maintain one's individuality without forgetting that there is a larger context and culture. It is when individuality is taken to extremes, as in some children of fundamentalist parents who rebel in dramatic ways, that it becomes a problem. In that case, it is an outward manifestation of an inner polarity that corresponds to family roles of authoritarian, "good child" and black sheep. Families with less dramatic rifts between roles are likely to produce people who are better at handling difference and benefiting from the interplay of subcultures. Michael __________________________________ Discover Yahoo! Have fun online with music videos, cool games, IM and more. Check it out! http://discover.yahoo.com/online.html From checker at panix.com Thu Jun 9 01:04:58 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 21:04:58 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: (Class) In Fiction, a Long History of Fixation on the Social Gap Message-ID: In Fiction, a Long History of Fixation on the Social Gap New York Times, 5.6.8 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/08/national/class/08fict-FINAL.html [11th in a series.] By CHARLES McGRATH On television and in the movies now, and even in the pages of novels, people tend to dwell in a classless, homogenized American Never-Never Land. This place is an upgrade, but not a drastic one, from the old neighborhood where Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, and Donna Reed used to live; it's those yuppified city blocks where the friends on "Friends" and the "Seinfeld" gang had their apartments, or in the now more fashionable version, it's part of the same exurb as One Tree Hill and Wisteria Lane - those airbrushed suburbs where all the cool young people hang out and where the pecking order of sex and looks has replaced the old hierarchy of jobs and money. This is progress of a sort, but it's also repression, since it means that pop culture has succeeded to a considerable extent in burying something that used to be right out in the open. In the old days, when we were more consumed by social class, we were also more honest about it. There is an un-American secret at the heart of American culture: for a long time, it was preoccupied by class. That preoccupation has diminished somewhat - or been sublimated - in recent years as we have subscribed to an all-purpose, mass-market version of the American dream, but it hasn't entirely disappeared. The subject is a little like a ne'er-do-well relative; it's sometimes a shameful reminder, sometimes openly acknowledged, but always there, even, or especially, when it's never mentioned. This was particularly true in the years before World War II, when you couldn't go to the movies or get very far in a novel without being reminded that ours was a society where some were much better off than others, and where the class divide - especially the gap separating middle from upper - was an inescapable fact of life. The yearning to bridge this gap is most persistently and most romantically evoked in Fitzgerald, of course, in characters like the former Jay Gatz of Nowhere, N.D., staring across Long Island Sound at that distant green light, and all those moony young men standing in the stag line at the country club, hoping to be noticed by the rich girls. But there is also a darker version, the one that turns up in Dreiser's [3]"American Tragedy" (1925), for example, where class envy - a wish to live like his rich tycoon uncle - causes Clyde Griffiths to drown his hopelessly proletarian sweetheart, and where the impossibility of transcending his lot leads him inevitably to the electric chair. (In the upstate New York town of Lycurgus, where the story takes place, Dreiser reminds us that "the line of demarcation and stratification between the rich and the poor ... was as sharp as though cut by a knife or divided by a high wall." ) Some novels trade on class anxiety to evoke not the dream of betterment but the great American nightmare: the dread of waking up one day and finding yourself at the bottom. This fear gets an earnest and moralizing expression in early books like P. H. Skinner's 1853 novel, "The Little Ragged Ten Thousand, or, Scenes of Actual Life Among the Lowly in New York," which is pretty much summed up by its title. By the turn of the century, though, in works like Stephen Crane's "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets" and Frank Norris's [4]"McTeague," about a San Francisco dentist who, unmasked as a fraud, sinks to a life of crime and degradation, the treatment had turned grim and unflinching. These books were frankly meant to shock their middle-class readers - to scare the daylights out of them - even as they played on their sympathies. They suggested that the worst thing that could possibly happen to an American was to topple from his perch on the class ladder, as happens to poor Hurstwood in Dreiser's "Sister Carrie." In his besotted pursuit of Carrie (who meanwhile trades on her beauty and charm to move up from her Chicago boarding house to the bright lights of Broadway), he loses everything and crashes all the way from restaurant-owning prosperity to scabbing for work as a trolley car driver. The poor are noticeably absent, however, in the great artistic flowering of the American novel at the turn of the 19th century, in the work of writers like Henry James, William Dean Howells and Edith Wharton, who are almost exclusively concerned with the rich or the aspiring middle classes: their marriages, their houses, their money and their stuff. Not accidentally, these novels coincided with America's Gilded Age, the era of overnight fortunes and conspicuous spending that followed in the wake of the Civil War. To a certain extent James, Wharton, et al. were merely writing about the world around them, though in James there is sometimes a hint of aesthetic snobbery, a sense that refined writing required a refined subject matter. (In [5]"The Ambassadors," for example, he explains that the Newsomes made their fortune in manufacturing, but can't quite bring himself to be so vulgar as to tell us exactly what they made.) In Wharton and Howells, on the other hand, there is frequently an edge of satire, and sometimes a hint of seismic rumble. Wharton's most vivid characters are not the aristos, the sons and daughters of the great New York families, who are all a little bloodless and sexually underpowered, but people like Lily Bart, whose lifestyle outstrips her pocketbook and who winds up in economic freefall. And then there are the climbers and the nouveaus, people like Undine Spragg in [6]"The Custom of the Country," who arrives in New York from provincial Apex City, Kan., determined to rise up in society the old-fashioned way - by marrying, which she does not just once but three times, if you count the one that was supposed to be a secret. One of the messages of the novel is that in America new money very quickly, in a generation or less, takes on the patina of old; another is that the class structure is necessarily propped up by deceit and double standards. But to a generation of writers after Wharton that structure - the lives and mores of the rich, the well born and the climbers - proved endlessly diverting. Young men and women on the make, and older ones trying anxiously to cling to their perch, throng an entire bookcase full of American fiction. John O'Hara, for example, made a whole career of chronicling the upper and upper middle classes from before the First World War until after the Second, and no one ever observed more astutely the little clues that indicated precisely where one stood on the class ladder: the clubs and fraternity pins, the shoes, the shirt collars. J. P. Marquand pored over much the same territory and, like O'Hara, became both a popular and a critical success. Every now and then a racy book about lowlife - [7]"Tobacco Road" for example - would catch the public fancy, but for a surprisingly long time middle-brow fiction in America was about upper-middle-class life. What was the appeal? Vouyerism, in part. (It didn't hurt O'Hara's sales one bit that he saw it as part of his mission to inform us that upper-class people had very busy sex lives.) Fiction back then had a kind of documentary function; it was one of the places Americans went to learn about how other Americans lived. In time novels ceased to be so reportorial, and after World War II, moreover, as the middle class in America swelled in numbers and importance, the world of the upper crust lost some of its glamour and importance. The old kind of class novel - about striving and trying to move up by learning the upper-class code - is still being written. [8]"Prep," a first novel by Curtis Sittenfeld, about an ambitious scholarship girl who finds herself in over her head, smoldering with class resentment, at a school that closely resembles Groton, recently became a surprise best seller. But more often the upper class is portrayed these days as a little beleaguered and merely trying to hang on, like the members of the New England family in Nancy Clark's 2003 novel [9]"The Hills at Home," all failures in one way or another, who have retreated back to the ancestral manor, or like Louis Auchincloss's WASPy lawyers and businessmen, who have a sense of themselves as the last of a breed. Elsewhere in the fictional landscape, a number of young writers - short-story writers especially - are still working in the afterglow of our once very hot literary romance with the world of Wal-Marts and trailer parks, so vividly evoked in the writing of Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason and Frederick Barthelme, among others. But to a considerable extent novels these days take place in a kind of all-purpose middle-class America, in neighborhoods that could be almost anyplace, and where the burdens are more psychic than economic, with people too busy tending to their faltering relationships to pay much attention to keeping up with the neighbors. It's a place where everyone fits in, more or less, but where, if you look hard enough, nobody feels really at home. Our last great middle-class hero, someone who really enjoyed his vacations and his country club, was John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, and he died a premature death. Nowadays when a writer like Richard Russo, Russell Banks or Richard Price comes along, with an old-fashioned, almost Dickensian vision of life among the poor and working classes, it's a little startling; they seem like explorers who have returned from some distant land. Novel reading is a middle-class pastime, which is another reason that novels have so often focused on the middle and upper classes. Mass entertainment is another matter, and when Hollywood took up the class theme, which it did in the 1930's, it made a crucial adjustment. During the Depression, the studios, which were mostly run by immigrant Jews, turned out a string of formulaic fantasies about life among the Gentile upper crust. These movies were essentially twin variations on a single theme: either a rich young man falls for a working girl, as happens in, say, [10]"Easy Living" to take one of many examples, or an heiress takes up with a young man who has to work for a living (in a number of cases he's a newspaperman, which was Hollywood's idea of a truly disreputable profession back then). [11]Joan Crawford made a specialty of the working girl role, in movies like [12]"Sadie McKee" and [13]"Dancing Lady" and also did the heiress in [14]"Love on the Run" and [15]"I Live My Life" But the great example of this genre is [16]"It Happened One Night" with Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable, who famously dispensed with wearing an undershirt. "It Happened One Night" implicitly answered the question of what an upper-class woman got in return for trading down: great sex. In other versions of the story the upper-class person is merely thawed and humanized by the poorer one, but in every case the exchange is seen as fair and equitable, with the lower-class character giving as much as he or she gets in return. Unlike the novels of class, with their anxieties and sense of unbridgeable gaps, these are stories of harmony and inclusion, and they added what proved to be an enduring twist on the American view of class: the notion that wealth and privilege are somewhat crippling conditions: if they don't make you an out-and-out twit, they leave you stiff, self-conscious and emotionally vacant until you are blessed with a little lower-class warmth and heart. The formula persisted right up through movies like [17]"Love Story" and [18]"Pretty Woman" though it seems to be in disuse now that films, like novels, are increasingly set in an upscale, well-scrubbed America where WASP's are an endangered, pitiable species. Like the in-laws in [19]"Meet the Fockers" and [20]"My Big Fat Greek Wedding" they are still hopelessly uptight but not that wealthy anymore. Television used to be fascinated with blue-collar life, in shows like "The Honeymooners," "All in the Family," "Sanford and Son" and "Roseanne," but lately it too has turned its attention elsewhere. The only people who work on televison now are cops, doctors and lawyers, and they're so busy they seldom get to go home. The one vestige of the old curiosity about how other people live is in so-called reality television, when Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie drop in on rubes in "The Simple Life," or when upper- and middle-class families trade moms on "Wife Swap" and experience a week of culture shock. But most reality television trades in a fantasy of sorts, based on the old game-show formula: the idea that you can be plucked out of ordinary life and anointed the new supermodel, the new diva, the new survivor, the new assistant to Donald Trump. You get an instant infusion of wealth and are simultaneously vested with something far more valuable: celebrity, which has become a kind of super-class in America, and one that renders all the old categories irrelevant. Celebrities, in fact, have inherited much of the glamour and sexiness that used to attach itself to the aristocracy. If Gatsby were to come back today, he would come back as Donald Trump and would want a date not with Daisy but with Britney. And if Edith Wharton were still writing, how could she not include a heavily blinged hip-hop mogul? But if the margins have shifted, and if fame, for example, now counts for more than breeding, what persists is the great American theme of longing, of wanting something more, or other, than what you were born with - the wish not to rise in class so much as merely to become classy. If you believe the novels of Dickens or Thackeray, say, the people who feel most at home in Britain are those who know their place, and that has seldom been the case in this country, where the boundaries of class seem just elusive and permeable enough to sustain both the fear of falling and the dream of escape. References 3. http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/dreiser-tragedy.pdf 4. http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/norris-mcteague.pdf 5. http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/james-ambassadors.pdf 6. http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/wharton-custom.pdf 7. http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/caldwell-tobacco.pdf 8. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/16/books/review/16SCHAPPE.html 9. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/books/review/009ROBINT.html 10. http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=90257 11. http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/filmography.html?p_id=15681 12. http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=42544 13. http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=12101 14. http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=30358 15. http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=24070 16. http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=25509 17. http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=30317 18. http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=39093 19. http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=295804 20. http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=261239 From checker at panix.com Thu Jun 9 01:05:07 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 21:05:07 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Espenshade and Chung: The Opportunity Cost of Admission Preferences at Elite Universities Message-ID: The Opportunity Cost of Admission Preferences at Elite Universities* Thomas J. Espenshade1 and Chang Y. Chung11Princeton University Social Science Quarterly Volume 86 Issue 2 Pages 293-305 - June 2005 ------------- [First, the summary from CHE: Dropping Affirmative Action Would Harm Black and Hispanic Applicants but Help Asian Applicants, Study Finds News bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.6.8 http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/06/2005060802n.htm Disregarding race in college admissions would cause sharp drops in the number of black and Hispanic students enrolled at elite institutions, according to a new study by two researchers at Princeton University. The study, described in an article published in the June issue of Social Science Quarterly, also found that eliminating affirmative action would significantly raise the number of Asian-American students, while having little effect on white students. If affirmative action were eliminated, the acceptance rates for black applicants would fall to 12.2 percent from 33.7 percent, while the acceptance rates for Hispanic applicants would drop to 12.9 percent from 26.8 percent, according to the study. Asian-American students would fill nearly 80 percent of the spaces not taken by black and Hispanic students, the researchers found, while the acceptance rate for white students would increase by less than 1 percent. The researchers who conducted the study -- Thomas J. Espenshade, a professor of sociology, and Chang Y. Chung, a statistical programmer at Princeton's Office of Population Research -- looked at the race, sex, SAT scores, and legacy status, among other characteristics, of more than 124,000 applicants to elite colleges and universities. "We're trying to put these admissions preferences in context so people understand that lots of students, including those with SAT scores above 1500, are getting a boost," Mr. Espenshade said in a written statement. "The most important conclusion is the negative impact on African-American and Hispanic students if affirmative-action practices were eliminated." Stephen H. Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars, which opposes racial preferences in admissions, said the study's findings revealed that affirmative-action policies are "about discrimination." "That it's Asian students who bear the brunt of affirmative-action policies at elite institutions strikes me as an interesting finding in and of itself," Mr. Balch said on Tuesday. "One of the dirty little secrets in all of this is that one of the chief losers is a minority group." The article, "The Opportunity Cost of Admission Preferences at Elite Universities," is online for subscribers and can be purchased by nonsubscribers on the journal's [67]Web site. Social Science Quarterly is published by the [68]Southwestern Social Science Association _________________________________________________________________ Background articles from The Chronicle: * [69]U. of California Admitted Fewer Students With Low SAT Scores, a Recent Target of Critics, in 2004, Report Says (4/5/2005) * [70]Michigan: Who Really Won? (1/14/2005) * [71]Federal Court Declines to Set New Limits on Affirmative Action (1/7/2005) * [72]Affirmative Action Survives, and So Does the Debate (7/4/2003) * [73]For Asians, Affirmative Action Cuts Both Ways (6/6/2003) Opinion: * [74]From 'Bastions of Privilege' to 'Engines of Opportunity' (2/25/2005) * [75]Putting the Michigan Rulings Into Practice (2/25/2005) * [76]In California, a Misguided Battle Over Race (5/21/2004) References 68. http://www.sssaonline.org/ 69. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/04/2005040502n.htm 70. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i19/19a02101.htm 71. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i18/18a03401.htm 72. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i43/43s00101.htm 73. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i39/39a02401.htm 74. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i25/25b01801.htm 75. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i25/25b02801.htm 76. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i37/37b01601.htm E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles. --------------------- The Opportunity Cost of Admission Preferences at Elite Universities* Thomas J. Espenshade1 and Chang Y. Chung11Princeton University Social Science Quarterly Volume 86 Issue 2 Page 293 - June 2005 doi:10.1111/j.0038-4941.2005.00303.x http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/templates/jsp/_synergy/images/print_PDF_icon.gif Objective. This study examines how preferences for different types of applicants for admission to elite universities influence the number and composition of admitted students. Methods. Previous research with these NSCE data employed logistic regression analysis to link information on the admission decision for 124,374 applications to applicants' SAT scores, race, athletic ability, and legacy status, among other variables. Here we use micro simulations to illustrate what the effects might be if one were to withdraw preferences for different student groups. Results. Eliminating affirmative action would substantially reduce the share of African Americans and Hispanics among admitted students. Preferences for athletes and legacies, however, only mildly displace members of minority groups. Conclusions. Elite colleges and universities extend preferences to many types of students, yet affirmative action is the one most surrounded by controversy. In an earlier article in this journal, Espenshade, Chung, and Walling (2004) examined the strength of admission preferences for underrepresented minority students, athletes, and alumni children at three highly selective private research universities in the United States. Using data from the National Study of College Experience on 124,374 applications for admission during the 1980s and the fall semesters of 1993 and 1997, they found that elite universities give extra weight in admissions to candidates whose SAT scores are above 1500, who are African American, and who are student athletes. A smaller, but nevertheless important, preference is extended to Hispanic and legacy applicants. African-American applicants receive the equivalent of 230 extra SAT points (on a 1600-point scale), and being Hispanic is worth an additional 185 SAT points. Other things equal, recruited athletes gain an admission bonus worth 200 points, while the preference for legacy candidates is worth 160 points. Asian-American applicants face a loss equivalent to 50 SAT points. The underrepresented minority advantage is greatest for African-American and Hispanic applicants whose SAT scores are in the 1200 [-] 1300 range, and not for applicants near the lower end of the SAT distribution as some have suggested (cf. Dugan et al., 1996 ). Finally, the advantage that athletes have over nonathletes in elite university admissions has been growing, whereas the strength of the minority student advantage, especially for Hispanic candidates, has been waning. An important but unanswered question has to do with the opportunity cost of these admission preferences. Who are the beneficiaries and, by extension, who loses a seat at academically selective universities because some students are favored over others in the admission process? The admission process at academically selective colleges and universities inevitably entails opportunity costs (Bowen and Levin, 2003; Shulman and Bowen, 2001 ). A decision to admit one student involves a choice not to admit someone else. When preferences enter into the mix, applicants who are denied admission often feel that they would have been next in line to be accepted had preferences not played a part (Kane, 2003). In this article, using the same data, we extend the work of Espenshade, Chung, and Walling (2004) and ask two questions. First, what is the impact of affirmative action on the profile of students admitted to elite universities? In other words, who gains and who loses as a result of admission preferences for underrepresented minority students? And, second, to what extent do preferences for athletes and legacies, both of whom are disproportionately white, offset the effects of affirmative action? Answering these questions is inherently difficult. One reason is that the selection process at elite private institutions is typically more nuanced and subjective than the explicit point systems formerly relied on by undergraduate admission officers at the University of Michigan and other large public universities (University of Michigan, 2002; Zwick, 2002:39 ). With a more numerical approach, it would be relatively straightforward to see how applicants' comparative rankings would be reordered as points were removed for being a minority applicant, an athlete, or a legacy (Kane, 2003). More importantly, many of the factors affecting the makeup of the first-year class are themselves endogenous to the choice of a particular preference regime.1 Eliminating racial and ethnic preferences, for example, could discourage applications from members of minority student groups (Bowen and Bok, 1998; Conrad, 1999; Klitgaard, 1985).2 The proportion of admitted students who eventually enroll (the so-called yield rate) might also be adversely affected if minority students would be less likely to matriculate at campuses where there are relatively few members of their own group (Bowen and Bok, 1998; Conrad, 1999 ) or if financial aid is more restricted at less academically selective schools to which minority students might be more likely to apply in the absence of affirmative action (Dugan et al., 1996 ). Finally, institutions that are no longer able to consider an applicant's race or ethnicity may still try to meet representational goals by altering the weights assigned to other factors in the selection process. Fryer, Loury, and Yuret (2003) predict that schools will "flatten" the function that relates test scores and other measures of academic performance to the probability of admission and give greater emphasis to socioeconomic background and other personal factors. Indeed, in response to the Board of Regents' 1995 decision to end affirmative action at the University of California, the Berkeley law school faculty voted to reduce the importance of LSAT scores and other numerical indicators from "greatest" to "substantial" weight (Guerrero, 2002:91 [-] 92). One way to gauge the effect of admission preferences on the composition of entering classes is to consult expert opinion. In 1976 [-] 1977 all U.S. law schools were asked how many minority students they had in their first-year classes and how many of these would have been admitted if it had been impossible to detect the racial background of applicants. Respondents believed the number of African-American students would have declined by 82 percent. Only 27 percent as many Chicano students would have been accepted. Just 28 percent of all minority students, including Asians, would have been admitted under a race-blind procedure (Klitgaard, 1985:155). A more satisfactory approach is to rely on a quantitative analysis of how individual applicants' probabilities of being admitted change depending on which preferences are in effect. In the remainder of this article we present the results of several micro-simulation exercises aimed at illustrating how the profile of students admitted to our three elite universities would differ depending on whether a candidate's racial background was considered in the admission decision and whether preferences were granted to athletes and to legacies. We combine athlete and legacy preferences because athletes and legacies comprise a relatively small proportion of the applicant pool and because both student groups are largely white. Our analysis is based on the 1997 cohort of applicants to reflect recent conditions, and we assume that satisfactory answers to who loses and who gains under different preference structures can be obtained by turning selected preferences on and off and ignoring second-round effects. More specifically, our simulations are based on the logistic regression model for the 1997 cohort in Table 7 in Espenshade, Chung, and Walling (2004) . This equation is used to predict a probability of admission (at the institution to which the application was sent) for each of the 45,549 applicants in the 1997 cohort. Predictor variables include sex, citizenship status, SAT score, race/ethnicity, recruited athlete, and legacy status. Following a procedure suggested by Kohn, Manski, and Mundel (1976) , we also generated a random proportion on the uniform distribution between 0 and 1 for each applicant. An applicant was assumed to be accepted if the random proportion was less than or equal to the predicted probability of admission; otherwise they were put in the rejected category. The effect of removing race from consideration was captured by setting all regression coefficients on racial background to zero or, equivalently, by assuming that all applicants are white (the reference category). We eliminate preferences for athletes and legacies by setting the athlete and legacy coefficients to zero.3 Before examining the effects of withdrawing preferences for selected groups of students, we first want to ask how well our simulation methodology reproduces the actual distribution of students admitted in 1997. The results are shown in Table 1 . There is remarkably good agreement between the number and distribution of students actually admitted and those in the simulation. For example, 899 African-American candidates were accepted from the 2,671 who applied, in contrast to 910 who were expected to be admitted in the simulation. The overall acceptance rate for African-American applicants was simulated to be 34.1 percent in contrast to an actual rate of 33.7 percent. This high degree of correspondence between the actual and expected profiles of admitted students adds credibility to the simulations we discuss next. Table 2 shows the actual profile of admitted students in 1997 and the micro-simulation results of removing racial/ethnic admission preferences while keeping those for athletes and legacies (Simulation 1), retaining preferences for underrepresented minority students but eliminating them for athletes and legacies (Simulation 2), and removing preferences for both minority students and for athletes/legacies (Simulation 3).4 To understand the impact of affirmative action, we compare the actual distribution of students with Simulation 1, which ignores applicants' race or ethnicity. The result of eliminating admission bonuses for African-American and Hispanic applicants would be dramatic. Acceptance rates for African-American candidates would fall from 33.7 percent to 12.2 percent, a decline of almost two-thirds, and the proportion of African-American students in the admitted class would drop from 9.0 to 3.3 percent. The acceptance rate for Hispanic applicants would be cut in half [-] from 26.8 percent to 12.9 percent, and Hispanics would comprise just 3.8 of all admitted students versus an actual proportion of 7.9 percent. If admitting such small numbers of qualified African-American and Hispanic students reduced applications and the yield from minority candidates in subsequent years, the effect of eliminating affirmative action at elite universities on the racial and ethnic composition of enrolled students would be magnified beyond the results presented here. White plaintiffs in Gratz v. Bollinger (2003) and Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) argued that they were unfairly denied admission while some less qualified minority students were accepted. Our results show that removing consideration of race would have a minimal effect on white applicants to elite universities. The number of accepted white students would increase by 2.4 percent, and the white acceptance rate would rise by just 0.5 percentage points [-] from 23.8 to 24.3 percent. Many rejected white applicants may feel they would have been accepted had it not been for affirmative action, but such perceptions probably exaggerate the reality. It would be difficult to tell from the share of white students on campus whether or not the admission office was engaged in affirmative action. Asian applicants are the biggest winners if race is no longer considered in admissions. Nearly four out of every five places in the admitted class not taken by African-American and Hispanic students would be filled by Asians. We noted earlier that Asian candidates are at a disadvantage in admission compared to their white, African-American, and Hispanic counterparts. Removing this disadvantage at the same time preferences for African Americans and Hispanics are eliminated results in a significant gain in the acceptance rate for Asian students [-] from 17.6 percent to 23.4 percent. Asians, who comprised 29.5 percent of total applicants in 1997, would make up 31.5 percent of accepted students in the simulation, compared with an actual proportion of 23.7 percent. Other aspects of admitted students, including the distribution of SAT scores and, especially, the proportions of students who are athletes or legacies, are hardly affected by affirmative action. The remaining question is the extent to which athlete and legacy preferences offset preferences for underrepresented minority applicants. White students comprise fewer than half of all applicants in 1997, yet they account for three-quarters of athletes (73.3 percent) and a similar proportion of legacies (75.6 percent). This fact alone suggests that preferences for athletes and legacies are likely to boost the proportion of whites among admitted students. We return to the simulation results to see the magnitude of these effects. Suppose we begin with a situation where admission officers give no extra consideration to minority applicants, athletes, or legacies (see Simulation 3). Now introduce race consciousness into the decision making (Simulation 2). The effect of affirmative action for African Americans and Hispanics and of what some might term "disaffirmative action" for Asians is a substantial increase in the African-American and Hispanic shares of admitted students and a sharp decline in the Asian proportion. The combined African-American and Hispanic proportion increases from just over 7 percent to 17.5 percent, while the Asian share falls from one-third to one-quarter. Acceptance rates for these groups move in the same direction. Next, comparing Simulation 2 with the actual distribution of accepted students is equivalent to adding athlete-legacy bonuses on top of those for underrepresented minority applicants. With the inclusion of preferences for athletes and legacies, the proportion of admitted students who are white rises somewhat (from 49.5 to 51.4 percent) as does the acceptance rate for white applicants. Minority student effects go in the opposite direction, but they are not large. The African-American share among admitted students declines modestly from 9.2 to 9.0 percent, the Hispanic share falls from 8.3 to 7.9 percent, and Asians now account for 23.7 percent of all admitted students instead of 25.1 percent. Acceptance rates for each minority student group also decline, but the changes here are mostly small as well. The impacts would be greater either if the athlete and legacy bonuses were larger or if athletes and legacies accounted for more than a small share of all applicants. If the time trends detected earlier in Espenshade, Chung, and Walling (2004) persist, there may come a time when the rising preference for athletes in combination with a relatively stable bonus for legacies is sufficient to fully offset the weakening preferences for underrepresented minority applicants. Not surprisingly, the proportions of athletes and legacies among admitted students increase when admission officers give these characteristics more weight in admission decisions.5 No other research of which we are aware has examined the potential for athlete and legacy preferences to counteract admission bonuses for underrepresented minority applicants. Our findings on the effects of affirmative action are consistent with results reported elsewhere. For example, Kane (1998:432) contends that: "The proportion of minority students at [elite colleges and universities] would be extremely low if admissions committees ignored the race or ethnicity of applicants."Bowen and Bok (1998:31) estimate the effect of "race-neutral" admissions policies in the 1989 entering student cohort by assuming that "black applicants, grouped by SAT ranges, would have the same probability of being admitted as white applicants in those same ranges." At the five academically selective schools for which they have admission data, acceptance rates for African-American applicants would fall from 42 to 13 percent if the race of applicants were ignored, while the proportion of white applicants admitted would only increase from 25 to 26.5 percent (assuming that whites filled all the seats created by accepting fewer African-American applicants). The impact on African-American enrollment would be equally dramatic. The share of African-American students in the first-year class would be expected to fall from 7.1 to 2.1 percent. Using a nationwide sample from the National Education Longitudinal Study, Long (2004b) finds that eliminating affirmative action at all colleges and universities would reduce the underrepresented minority share of students accepted from 16.1 to 15.5 percent across all four-year institutions and from 10.6 to 7.8 percent at the highest quality 10 percent of schools. Dugan et al. (1996) estimate the effect of eliminating affirmative action on graduate management education programs. Using data on a sample of all applicants in the early 1990s, they find that failing to consider a candidate's minority status in admission would reduce the probability of acceptance for African Americans from 70 percent (the actual figure) to 52 percent. The rate for Hispanics would decline from 78 to 60 percent. However, the acceptance rate for Asians, who experience a disadvantage in admission, would increase slightly from 53 to 57 percent. Similar results are obtained from an analysis of more than 90,000 applications to law school in the 1990 [-] 1991 application year. Wightman (1997:15 [-] 16) shows that of 3,435 African-American applicants who were accepted by at least one law school, just 687 or one-fifth as many would have been accepted if admission decisions were based solely on LSAT scores and undergraduate GPAs. If instead admission determinations were based exclusively on undergraduate GPAs, more than 60 percent of African-American candidates who were originally accepted by at least one law school would still be completely shut out. Wightman finds similar patterns for other racial and ethnic minority groups, but the impacts are most severe for African-American students. A final test comes from a real-world "natural experiment." The Board of Regents for the University of California system voted in 1995 to eliminate affirmative action in higher education. This decision was reinforced in November 1996 by a statewide vote in favor of Proposition 209. Impacts on graduate programs took effect with the fall of 1997 entering classes. Effects on admission to undergraduate programs were delayed until the fall of 1998. The impacts are striking. Compared to the fall of 1996, the number of underrepresented minority students admitted to the University of California [-] Berkeley Boalt Hall Law School for the fall of 1997 dropped 66 percent from 162 to 55 (Guerrero, 2002 ). African-American applicants were particularly affected as their admission numbers declined by 81 percent from 75 to 14, but acceptances of Hispanics also fell by 50 percent. None of the 14 admitted African-American students chose to enroll. Of the 55 minority students admitted, only seven enrolled in the fall of 1997, a falloff that had the effect of reducing the underrepresented minority share in the first-year class to 5 percent in 1997 compared with 26 percent in 1994 (Guerrero, 2002:159). Similar impacts were felt at law schools at UCLA and UC [-] Davis. Numbers at the undergraduate level mirrored those in graduate programs. At UC [-] Berkeley, just 10 percent of all undergraduate students admitted for the fall of 1998 were underrepresented minority students compared with 23 percent admitted in the previous year (Guerrero, 2002:146 ). The largest declines occurred among African Americans, whose admission numbers fell by 66 percent between 1997 and 1998. Admission to the undergraduate College of Letters and Science at UCLA was similarly affected (Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Relations with Schools, 1999 ). Acceptance rates for African Americans fell from 57 percent in 1997 to 31 percent in 1998. Those for Hispanics (including Latino Americans and Chicanos/Mexican Americans) declined from 51 to 30 percent. These declines were offset by small increases in admission rates for Asian Americans. In general, our simulation results are in very good agreement with the California experience.6 Critics of affirmative action in American higher education often overlook the fact that elite universities give added weight in the admissions process to many different types of student characteristics. In this article, we use micro-simulation analysis to investigate the effect on the profile of admitted students of eliminating preferences for one or more categories of students. Data for the 1997 entering class indicate that eliminating affirmative action would reduce acceptance rates for African-American and Hispanic applicants by as much as one-half to two-thirds and have an equivalent impact on the proportion of underrepresented minority students in the admitted class. White applicants would benefit very little by removing racial and ethnic preferences; the white acceptance rate would increase by roughly 0.5 percentage points. Asian applicants would gain the most. They would occupy four out of every five seats created by accepting fewer African-American and Hispanic students. The acceptance rate for Asian applicants would rise by one-third from nearly 18 percent to more than 23 percent. We also show that, even though athlete and legacy applicants are disproportionately white and despite the fact that athlete and alumni children admission bonuses are substantial, preferences for athletes and legacies do little to displace minority applicants, largely because athletes and legacies make up a small share of all applicants to highly selective universities. References ? Arenson, Karen W. 2003. "Change on Early Admission Produces Application Shifts."New York Times November 13. ? Bowen, William G., and Derek Bok. 1998. The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ? Bowen, William G., and Sarah A. Levin. 2003. Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ? Card, David, and Alan B. Krueger. 2004. Would the Elimination of Affirmative Action Affect Highly Qualified Minority Applicants? Evidence from California and Texas. NBER Working Paper 10366, March. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. ? Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Relations with Schools (CUARS). 1999. 1998 [-] 1999 Report to the Academic Senate at UCLA. Los Angeles, CA: CUARS. ? Conrad, Cecilia A. 1999. "Affirmative Action and Admission to the University of California."Pp. 171 [-] 96 in Paul Ong, ed., Impacts of Affirmative Action: Policies and Consequences in California. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. ? Dugan, Mary Kay, Nazli Baydar, William R. Grady, and Terry R. Johnson. 1996. "Affirmative Action: Does it Exist in Graduate Business Schools?"Selections Winter: 11 [-] 18. ? Espenshade, Thomas J., Chang Y. Chung, and Joan L. Walling. 2004. "Admission Preferences for Minority Students, Athletes, and Legacies at Elite Universities."Social Science Quarterly 85(5): 1422 [-] 46. [Synergy Abstract] [ISI Abstract] ? Fryer Jr., Roland G., Glenn C. Loury, and Tolga Yuret. 2003. Color-Blind Affirmative Action. Unpublished manuscript, Harvard Society of Fellows and NBER. ? Gratz v. Bollinger (decided June 23, 2003). 123 S. Ct. 2411. ? Grutterv. Bollinger (decided June 23, 2003). 123 S. Ct. 2325. ? Guerrero, Andrea. 2002. Silence at Boalt Hall: The Dismantling of Affirmative Action. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ? Kane, Thomas J. 1998. "Racial and Ethnic Preferences in College Admissions."Pp. 431 [-] 56 in Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips, eds., The Black-White Test Score Gap. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. ? Kane, Thomas J.. 2003. "The Long Road to Race-Blindness."Science 302: 571 [-] 73. [CrossRef Abstract] [ISI Abstract] ? Klitgaard, Robert E. 1985. Choosing Elites. New York: Basic Books, Inc. ? Kohn, Meir G., Charles F. Manski, and David S. Mundel. 1976. "An Empirical Investigation of Factors Which Influence College-Going Behavior."Annals of Economic and Social Measurement 5(4): 391 [-] 419. ? Long, Mark C. 2004a. "College Applications and the Effect of Affirmative Action."Journal of Econometrics 121(1 [-] 2): 319 [-] 42. [CrossRef Abstract] [ISI Abstract] ? Long, Mark C.. 2004b. "Race and College Admissions: An Alternative to Affirmative Action?"Review of Economics and Statistics 86(4): 1020 [-] 33. [CrossRef Abstract] [ISI Abstract] ? Shulman, James L., and William G. Bowen. 2001. The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ? Sullivan, John. 2003. "At Rutgers, Weathering an Ordeal."New York Times November 30: Section 14, p. 1. ? University of Michigan. 2002. Description of University of Michigan Undergraduate Admissions Policy. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan. ? Wightman, Linda F. 1997. "The Threat to Diversity in Legal Education: An Empirical Analysis of the Consequences of Abandoning Race as a Factor in Law School Admission Decisions."New York University Law Review 72(1): 1 [-] 53. ? Zwick, Rebecca. 2002. Fair Game? The Use of Standardized Admissions Tests in Higher Education. New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Footnotes * Support for this research has been provided by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Center Core Grant P30 HD32030. We are grateful to Elana Broch, James Snow, Kristen Turner, and Chengzhi Wang for bibliographic assistance. Kalena Cortes, Sara Curran, Bonnie Ghosh-Dastidar, Lauren Hale, Stephen LeMenager, Germ?n Rodr?guez, Christopher Weiss, Charles Westoff, and, especially, Joyce Jacobsen and Mark Long contributed many useful suggestions. 1The interdependent nature of the decision-making process was observed by economist Robert Klitgaard (1985:78) nearly two decades ago: "The existence of incentive effects transforms the selection problem from a static to a dynamic framework. The classic selection problem is static [-] given an applicant pool with certain characteristics, choose those most likely to succeed along certain criteria of later performance. The dynamic problem is richer. The choice of this particular class of students must take account of the effects of the choice on applicant pools in the future [...] ." Further evidence that today's students respond quickly to altered incentives is provided by the effect of changes in admission policies at several elite universities. Yale and Stanford, both of which changed last year from a binding early decision admission program to nonbinding "single-choice" early action, saw applications for the 2004 entering class increase by 42 and 62 percent, respectively. Early applications to Harvard fell 47 percent in response to a switch from nonbinding early action, where students could apply early to several institutions, to single-choice early action [-] a plan that prohibits students from applying early to any other institution. Princeton, which made no changes in its admission policies, saw a 23 percent decline in its early applications (Arenson, 2003). 2The magnitude of this effect has been estimated separately by Long (2004a) and Card and Krueger (2004) , with somewhat different results. Long finds that underrepresented minority students in California and Texas are predicted to send fewer SAT-score reports to top-tier in-state public colleges and universities after the elimination of affirmative action, while white and Asian-American students are predicted to send more. Card and Krueger find no change in the propensity of highly qualified African-American and Hispanic students to send their SAT scores to the most selective public institutions in either California or Texas. Eliminating affirmative action also left other features of the application process unaffected, including the number of schools to which scores were sent and the lower bound on the quality of such institutions. 3Long (2004b) uses a comparable micro simulation to evaluate the effect of eliminating affirmative action. 4In the simulation reported in Table 1 , the average of the predicted admission probabilities for the 45,549 applicants was 0.219280, exactly the same as the actual proportion of applicants accepted (9,988/45,549). In the simulations described in Table 2, removing preferences for particular student groups has the effect of lowering the average predicted admission probability below 0.219280. In these cases, the intercept of the logistic regression for the 1997 cohort in Table 7 in Espenshade, Chung, and Walling (2004) was adjusted upward by enough in each simulation so that the average of the predicted admission probabilities equaled 0.219280. 5 We prepared an alternate simulation by ranking applicants on the basis of their SAT scores and admitting students having the top 9,988 scores (the actual number of students accepted). This is the closest that any of our simulations comes to choosing a class solely on the basis of academic merit. Applicants in this simulation average 1512 on their SATs. Compared to students who were actually admitted, the shares of most student groups decline in the simulation [-] from 51.4 percent to 47.7 for whites, from 9.0 to 0.9 for African Americans, from 7.9 to 2.2 for Hispanics, from 10.2 to 1.9 for athletes, and from 6.5 to 3.2 for legacies. Only the share of Asians increases when SAT scores dominate [-] from 23.7 to 38.7 percent. These results are qualitatively similar to effects reported by Klitgaard (1985:29) had Harvard's Class of 1975 been chosen on the basis of SAT verbal scores alone. The percentage of admitted students who were alumni sons would have declined from 13.6 to 6.1, of athletes from 23.6 to 4.5, and of African Americans from 7.1 to 1.1. The proportion of scholarship students would have remained unchanged at 55 percent. 6The effects of rescinding affirmative action were not limited to California. Voters in the State of Washington passed a referendum forbidding affirmative action at the state university. In 1998 at the University of Washington, 1 in 11 students in the first-year class was a member of a minority group. By the fall of 1999, when the new law had taken effect, the ratio fell to 1 out of 18 students (Sullivan, 2003). Social Science Quarterly Volume 86 Issue 2 Page 293 - June 2005 Affiliations 1Princeton University Correspondence Direct correspondence to Thomas J. Espenshade, Office of Population Research, 249 Wallace Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544-2091tje at Princeton.Edu [>] . * Support for this research has been provided by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Center Core Grant P30 HD32030. We are grateful to Elana Broch, James Snow, Kristen Turner, and Chengzhi Wang for bibliographic assistance. Kalena Cortes, Sara Curran, Bonnie Ghosh-Dastidar, Lauren Hale, Stephen LeMenager, Germ?n Rodr?guez, Christopher Weiss, Charles Westoff, and, especially, Joyce Jacobsen and Mark Long contributed many useful suggestions. Image Previews TABLE 1 Number of Applicants in the 1997 Entering Cohort, Number Admitted, and Simulated Number Admit... TABLE 2 Number and Characteristics of Admitted Students Simulated Under Alternative Preference Scenar... From checker at panix.com Thu Jun 9 01:05:38 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 21:05:38 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] The Scotsman: Glasgow's diet was healthier in 1405 Message-ID: Glasgow's diet was healthier in 1405 http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/print.cfm?id=610862005&referringtemplate=http%3A%2F%2Fthescotsman%2Escotsman%2Ecom%2Fscotland%2Ecfm&referringquerystring=id%3D610862005 5.6.4 JIM MCBETH GLASWEGIANS in 1405 had a better diet than the citizens of 2005, eating their "five-a-day" 600 years ahead of its time. Even their light beer was healthier than sugar-laden fizzy concoctions that are today's favourite, according to new archaeological evidence. It reveals a diet of porridge and small amounts of pork and fish made medieval mealtime more nutritious than a visit to the chippy, the pizza parlour or the ubiquitous American fast food joints. And an absence of sugar in the diet meant medieval Glaswegians had better teeth. In addition, they could not smoke, a major cause of diseases that killed 119 out of every 100,000 men in the city last year. Experts agreed yesterday we could learn from our predecessors' eating habits as revealed by the council's new history and archaeology strategy. Glasgow is developing a mapped medieval trail from Glasgow Cathedral to the Clyde, the medieval hub of the city. By analysing cesspit material, archaeologists discovered medieval citizens ate a healthy diet of fruit, vegetables, cereals and fish. It is a long way in time and culture from modern Glasgow, where obesity is so commonplace because of a junk food diet of pizza, burgers and fish suppers that the Scottish Executive is considering opening an NHS-funded stomach-stapling clinic in the city. Professor Stephen Driscoll of Glasgow University's archaeology department, said: "Around 100 bodies examined showed good health and the teeth were worn rather than decayed. "The diet was healthier than today, with porridge, a little meat, fish, milk, cottage cheese and vegetables and fruits." At one excavation, in Bell Street, cesspit material revealed large quantities of seeds and fish remains. Councillor Catherine McMaster, on the working group for the medieval project, said: "It seems they were into 'five-a-day', 600 years before the rest of us. We modern Glaswegians could learn from it. "We hope to reveal more of the city's rich tapestry of history by the medieval trail, and it is ironic that it is already revealing that they probably ate better then." The "Glesca diet" is notoriously unhealthy, provoking the joke that whole generations were brought up on "chips and lemonade". In some areas, 80 per cent of children develop tooth decay by the age of five because of a high consumption of fizzy drinks. Recent research also showed that 63 per cent of schoolchildren in some areas were "less healthy eaters". Dr Frankie Phillips, of the British Dietetics Association, said: "There wouldn't have been too many obese people in medieval times. "We could certainly learn from some aspects of the diet that was uncovered." From checker at panix.com Thu Jun 9 01:06:10 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 21:06:10 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Reason: Darwinian Markets Message-ID: Darwinian Markets http://www.reason.com/links/links051705.shtml 5.5.17 Economist Paul Seabright on how homo sapiens evolved into homo economicus Interviewed by [25]Julian Sanchez After spending millennia as one more smart hunter-gatherer primate, human beings developed an unprecedented, fantastically complex system of cooperation and specialization between unrelated individuals unknown elsewhere in nature. In [26]The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life (Princeton), University of Toulouse economist [27]Paul Seabright examines how biological dispositions and social institutions together enabled the "great experiment" of civilization. Seabright spoke with Assistant Editor Julian Sanchez in March. REASON: How did evolution and institutions in tandem allow hunter gatherers to become cosmopolitan participants in market economies? Paul Seabright: The important part of the story is to emphasize that this is an opportunistic experiment. It's quite common when you look at animal behavior, for example, to say that their behavior must have proved adaptive for them, that it fits their environment. Implicitly when we do that, we're saying that the environment today is the same as the environment in which the species evolved. So we use a kind of functionalist explanation that accounts for the evolution of the behavior in terms of its adaptiveness in that environment. The key thing about human beings is that our environment is as much each other as it is a particular natural ecology, and that component of our environment, the social component, has changed spectacularly in the last ten millennia. Therefore, the things we do can't possibly be explained in a very simple way as having evolved through ordinary natural selection for the environment in which we find ourselves today. So we have to patch together an argument consisting of two parts. The first part is to say: What do we think human beings were like, physically and psychologically, as a result of their evolution in the African woodland savannah until about 10 millennia ago? Then we have to ask: How can we imagine that you launch that set of capacities out on the open sea of human social interactions where suddenly things get fantastically complicated, we start dealing with situations we never had to deal with before, with modern society as the result. You can still use selective explanations, though they're much more likely to be cultural as opposed to natural selection explanations, but at the same time they have to be compatible with what we think the psychology was that survived through the African woodland savannah. So, for example, if we want to think that human beings are inherently pacifist in nature, we have to explain how a pacifist nature could've survived on the woodland savannah, and that's not very plausible. REASON: Are there general differences that account for some countries' having institutions and conventions that promote trust and market exchange, whereas others seem stuck? PS: I think you need to distinguish relatively superficial sorts of conventions like "How do people behave at traffic lights" from more fundamental ones like "how do they interact with their neighbors, with their business associates, with their communities?" It's true that you can sometimes look in a sort of pop-sociology way at the fact that people don't stop at traffic lights in Brazil even when there are policemen there, whereas in Sweden they frequently do even when there are no policemen there, and say something about the tendency of the society for social order. On the other hand, whether people stop at traffic lights is not really a fundamental determinant of their prosperity. What's much more important is the kinds of associative habits they have and, crudely put, who they're prepared to trust. If you read Tocqueville on America in the 19th century, he was very struck by the fact that the US was characterized by enormous efflorescence of voluntary organizations. Even at that point he was struck by something that still characterizes the US today. If you look at membership in churches, community groups, and so on the United States, it's very much higher than in most European countries. We don't know exactly the causes of that, but we can speculate. We can speculate, for example, that feudalism was rather bad for these things, because feudalism encouraged vertical ties, where essentially you got your place in society from your ties to your feudal lord, and therefore it didn't help you very much to set about creating ties to your horizontal equals. The United States is really the only country in the world founded as a commercial republic, where right from the start, whether they were settlers clearing the back wood or whether they were traders or so on, they had to forge some way of living with people who were in some sense their equals--might not be their economic equals, but were at least in status their equals. So there's something about settling virgin territory where you don't have all the feudal baggage to contend with that almost certainly encouraged that. But as very interesting recent work by Stan Engerman and Ken Sokoloff has shown, it wasn't just a matter of settling virgin territory, because South America was among the richest continents in the world at the beginning of the 18th century and has been massively overtaken by North America. That seems to have a lot to do with the fact that Latin American agriculture was characterized much more by large estates and a smaller proportion of independent farmers, who elsewhere provided a bedrock of citizenry, who demanded a vote, and having gotten the vote demanded education. So Latin American societies were much more hierarchical. REASON: So what would you recommend to someone who wanted to improve institutional performance in the developing world? PS: It sounds banal, but I actually believe in education quite a lot. Effective education in the developing world takes place at all levels. Some of the most useful money that's been spent in Russia and Eastern Europe in the past decade has been training judges in how to apply civil law, particularly the Russian empire bit of eastern Europe, the part that never really enjoyed a bourgeois period between feudalism and socialism. They never really had proper civil law, and if you're an entrepreneur trying to do creative things with all this property that's been privatized, you don't have a tradition of law that ensures your contracts will be respected. Those countries badly needed to establish the institutions that would make people depend on the law and not have to go to the Mafia for enforcement. That's still very fragile in Russia, but the money that's been put into training judges is very useful. So that's at the top end. Right at the bottom, it's really striking how education is not just about teaching people to handle the information superhighway or whatever, it's also about teaching them what kinds of institutions work and what don't. I've been very struck by this in my research in India, and in fact I have a student now who's doing research in Tunisia on simple things like: What makes people respect allocations of water? My student's been doing this work understanding how water cooperatives handle this and make sure people don't steal water. You might think this is a simple matter, but it's not a simple matter. You can't get the secret police to watch over people; what you need is a community consensus that people who steal water are harming the community. It's very clear that the smaller the communities are, the better they police stealing, but communities with higher levels of education police stealing better too. That's partly because education teaches them about what kinds of institutional incentives work and what don't, gives them some experience in terms of comparing with elsewhere in the world what the options are. REASON: Which evolved traits of our hunter-gatherer brains turned out to be conducive to market society? PS: The two key characteristics are the ability to calculate and to reflect on what's prudent for you and the ability to respond with reciprocity to others--to respond warmly and generously to others' warmth and generosity. I suggested you can't reduce one to the other: We don't respond generously to generous people just because we calculate that it's in our interest to do so. Modern life is so complex and full of opportunities for cheating--if you're really determined--that if everyone had an eye to the main chance 100 percent of the time, we probably couldn't get any social cooperation going. It's precisely because most people will cooperate reasonably decently if it doesn't cost them too much, because they generally quite like the company of their fellows and respond warmly to people who are decent to them, that we can get by with a feasible level of mutual policing. We need surveillance mechanisms and rational calculation about our interests to get us to cooperate, but we also need some reciprocity, some instinctive emotional need to respond cooperatively to others who are cooperative with us. The advantage of the capacity for calculation is that it can make a relatively small amount of reciprocity go a long way, once other people's tendency for reciprocity is factored into your calculations, just as a little bit of yeast can raise a lot of dough. REASON: How about the other side; what are the atavistic, obstructive holdovers? PS: It's pretty clear that a lot of characteristics were adaptive for us as hunter gatherers, and in a lot of contexts may even be adaptive for us individually, but collectively may be very damaging--most obviously a tendency for violence. We can strongly conjecture from our own pre-history, with corroborative evidence from the behavior of other species and non-state societies today, that a capacity for physical violence and a tendency to engage in it to pursue your ends would've been strongly adaptive for individuals. People who were peacefully inclined and only ever sorted out disputes in a reasonable and peaceful manner would've got blown over by people who took a tough and violent approach. That has to be nuanced, because communities where people only ever sorted out conflicts violently lacked the cohesion that would've made them more prosperous and, having become prosperous, capable of buying more sophisticated forms of defense. So we know that some ability to moderate our violent passions by rational cooperation has been better for us than a crude tendency to resort to violence for every dispute. But that ability to cooperate is put into the most deadly effect in group warfare, when we join armies and make military alliances against other groups, often for reasons that are very poorly founded in an assessment of our direct interest in doing so. REASON: You emphasize the importance of trust and cooperation. What about the importance for societies as a whole of dissent, even when its not in someone's immediate self interest to pipe up? PS: We deal with problems very different from what existed on the woodland savannah. One difference is that the ability to spot a low probability but high cost risk may be particularly valuable. If you're one of a group of tough young males wondering which alpha male to follow, on the woodland savannah it probably does some good to follow the male who shouts loudest and beats his chest most. It may not suit you very much to follow the sensitive philosopher type who can see three sides to every question. That's because on the woodland savannah your fundamental challenges are of a relatively restricted kind. You need to go hunting, you need to make sure you don't starve, and you need to see off predators. The guy who thumps his chest the loudest is probably going to be best at all those things, and the sensitive philosopher isn't going to have an edge on very much except possibly adjudicating family disputes. Modern challenges, including modern warfare, the guy who thumps his chest loudest isn't going to be very good at the challenges beyond attacking the next machine gun post. He won't necessarily be best at deciding the right balance between "shock and awe" tactics and a "hearts and minds" operation. What we have is a series of emotional responses to who we find convincing as a leader that were shaped by the emotional responses that were adaptive for hunter gatherers. What we've realized is that those are frequently rather dangerous for us in modern contexts. What we want is modern contexts is someone whose thinking isn't determined by a wish, conscious or unconscious, to side with the powerful guy in the group, but the person whose eyes are really out there looking for hazards and spotting dangers well in advance. That's going to require a capacity for independent and critical thinking that's very valuable to us now but was not that valuable to us then. What we should be doing is set up incentive systems that make that attractive to somebody, and I don't think we should underestimate the extent to which we do this. Think of the humble world of accounting. What are accountants but people who in some sense, with many flaws and mistakes as we've seen recently, we try to incentivize to tell the truth about what's going on inside a company when the board of directors would rather send a much more rosy picture. Sometimes they collude with the management, but most of the time we set up countervailing powers inside the companies to make sure that what's adaptive for the individual inside the company isn't just to follow whatever the CEO says. We do that all the time, even if not as effectively, especially in the political sphere, as we might like. REASON: You have an interesting aside noting that the alienating "anonymity" and "impersonality" of modern markets is also a source of their vibrancy. PS: It's been a refrain of romantic conservatives down the ages that modern market society doesn't give us the kind of hum they think people of former ages felt. The feudal lord would go and observe his happy subjects tugging their forelocks at him and allowing him to hold their babies on his knee and enjoy the harmony of the community in which there was "a place for everyone and everyone in his place." I don't want to caricature that too much, because I know there are people who regret the anonymity of modern society but don't buy the fantasy of a lost age. But the key point is precisely that in order to be able to engage someone--the guy who sells me bread or installs my telephone or whatever--I actually don't need to know much about the guy's character. That's a really important strength, because if I had to know something about his character before I could let him into my house, most of the time I just wouldn't dare. It's exactly because I can be indifferent to the guy that we can function at all. If you trust somebody's personality, you need to know a lot about them. That links in with the evidence we have about our fundamentally fairly violent nature. If you think human beings are by nature generally placid, sociable, trustworthy people who can be trusted into each other's homes without killing their children and stealing their worldly goods, then you don't really see why this feeling of indifference to other people can possibly be a strength of modern society. You're bound to bemoan it. If you think that, in the absence of a set of institutions that allow us to trust the postman just because he's the postman, we wouldn't be able to have a modern society at all because we'd be too scared of the guy, then you start to see why this anonymity is a good thing, or a symptom of a good thing. REASON: Economists focus on how markets respond to people's interests; you argue that narratives have a great but underappreciated importance. PS: Things like professional ethics, though sometimes thought of as being antithetical to market economies and market logic, are actually pretty central to them. Even if you are only doing the decent thing because of fear of the consequences, you must be conjecturing that somebody, somewhere down the line, is going to be behaving as they do just because it's the right thing to do. So the policeman inquiring into who cheated who mustn't just be motivated by who's giving him the biggest bribe, the judge looking at the case mustn't be deciding on that basis, but saying: "No, no, I'm looking at the case on its merits as I am professionally required to do." The professional narratives are really important for all of us. It's not just people in the "higher" professions; someone working at a supermarket checkout is partly internalizing a picture of how they do things well. I go to the supermarket and think, you know, five minutes into the job I'd be grumpy and miserable, yet people who do it hour after hour and day after day are smiling at me and taking care that I haven't dropped anything. Even people doing pretty humdrum jobs tend to want to project a sense that they do it well. That's what I mean by professional ethics, not just what a Supreme Court judge does. REASON: You talk a bit about "tunnel vision," the way phenomenally complex market processes work without producers or consumers paying any mind to the big picture, but only knowing their immediate wants and price constraints. What about the growth in what we might call "symbolic consumption," fair trade coffee or no-sweatshop apparel? PS: It's precisely because tunnel vision can have dangerous consequences--environmental degradation, spiraling military expenditures--that it's clearly desirable that people should be thinking out of the box a bit, or at least out of the tunnel. It doesn't follow from this that all kinds of non-tunnel thinking are constructive. I'm struck by the work of some of the anti-globalization protesters, which I think has been admirably out-of-the-tunnel in terms of motivation, but naively ill-informed about how the world economy works in many other respects. You get people campaigning against investment by multinational companies in some poor countries on the gorunds that they're only paying $5 a day, when the people they're employing would otherwise be working at between $1 and $2 a day. Now, you may say "we wish the multinationals paid them $10 a day," but to say that the multinationals have no business to be there unless they're paying people $10 a day is a spectacularly stupid and self-defeating campaign platform. You really damage an awful lot of people. There has been evidence that some NGO campaigns against child labor, for instance, have led to children being laid off and left in much worse situations. The upside of modern communications is that people are thinking conscientiously and intellignently about the wider impact of the way they live, and that's clearly desirable. But a little bit of thinking outside the tunnel can be a dangerous thing. You can wind up, in a fury of moral fervor, harming the very people whose cause you purport to advance. REASON: Is there something in our evolved background that makes us susceptible to this? PS: One problem is cognitive: It's just difficult to master all the information about how the world actually does work. The other is emotional. Realistically, if you're trying to think "should I buy trainers from Nike, or do I think Nike's employment practices suck?" it's difficult to get all the information, for one thing, but for another you're surrounded by other people, many of whom you admire, who are sending you strong emotional messages: "These are disgusting capitalists; these are the enemy." So you may be motivated as much by hatred of Nike as by love for the people employed in their factories. If you're motivated by that, it's going to be quite difficult to evaluate information coming from different sources about what's actually a desirable policy in different circumstances. I'm not, incidentally, saying there shouldn't be regulation of employment practices by multinationals. But a simple stance that says it's outrageous that they're employing people at some wage that seems low to you and me may have very bad consequences. So the problem, I think, is at least as much emotional. I have friends in the anti-globalization movement who get thrilled when a big demonstration imposes humiliation on some multinational or Starbucks windows get smashed. It's the thrill of the chase, the thrill of the battle. They'd be completely incapable of explaining why this particular result advances the interests of anybody that they care about. Yes, the fact that it's hard for us to engage in political activism without the emotional highs and lows of the tribal experience is a big problem. REASON: You say we should think of liberalism as a tradition that goes back far further than, say, the aftermath of the wars of religion in Europe. PS: I think you can view philosophers, particularly political philosophers, as doing two kinds of jobs. On the whole, academics tend to think one of these jobs is more high status than the other. You can view them as acting as sages and mediators to societies wracked with problems, offering advice about how to resolve these various difficulties. Or you can view them as more like psychotherapists, helping societies to articulate things they probably already know about themselves. I tend to view political philosophers, the good ones, as more in the psychotherapist mold. What the great philosophers of liberalism did was appeal to stuff about ourselves that we sort of knew that had gotten obscured or overlaid. What they said was that thinking about other people in a certain way does come more naturally to us than you might think. You can see why they needed to say this after the wars of religion, which were exceptionally bloody. It took very clear heads among the political philosophers of the age to say: Look, toleration of people who don't share your religion is not something completely foreign to human nature. Sometimes they did it in a combative spirit, like Voltaire, who took on in a very polemical way some of the forces of religious intolerance. But actually he was preaching a message that was less confrontational than it seemed. It was not: You guys are prejudiced religious bigots who have to be faced down. It's more: All of us have some capacity for hatred and bigotry in us, but all of us have a capacity to overcome that and to treat other people without being upset that their religion is different from ours. Most of the conventional stories of the origins of liberalism imply that it's something we discovered in response to these horrific events, a new way of living that nobody had ever thought of before. But if you go back to the Athens of Pericles, you find that a lot of the ingredients were there. Only some of them, of course: The Athens of Pericles practiced slavery. Nobody was arguing that slaves should have a say; nobody in their right mind then thought women should get a say. But in terms of a frame of mind in which you don't automatically think you can kill somebody just because they bow down in front of a different altar from yours, the elements were there. REASON: How fragile or robust is our "great experiment" of extended social order today? PS: One aspect of that is: How should we react to the view that the whole edifice of modern social life just rests on convention? Convention is just what people have decided to do; maybe tomorrow they could decide to do something completely different. Maybe the conventions that underpin your ability to call me from across the Atlantic with both of us sitting reasonably securely in our respective offices having this conversation could disappear tomorrow. It may look, in a general sense, almost vertiginously contingent. But on the other hand it's also remarkable how robust some of the conventions are. That's partly because the conventions aren't masterminded in any one place. Most of the conventions that underpin modern society are extremely decentralized: Nobody's actually enforcing the fact that we all behave in a certain way. We reinforce it ourselves through billions of everyday decisions about how we treat our colleagues and our friends. There's that general question of the fragility of the system. What the sophisticated modern terrorist organizations are trying to do is find a symbolic point of weakness that can threaten the whole edifice, even though the edifice itself doesn't have any kind of central pillar. You could knock out the White House or many other places and society wouldn't collapse. It would be bad news, but in terms of how I respond to my neighbor in daily life, I'm not doing it because it's been politically commanded; I'm doing it because it's an equilibrium of my interactions. You can think of terrorist organizations as saying: This doesn't seem to have a genuine central pillar, but could we find a symbolic pillar we can knock out such that people will be so scared that they begin to modify their behavior to each other in other ways, even though strictly speaking they don't have to? That's why they chose the Twin Towers, and why a lot of modern terrorist organizations are very media savvy. Religious conflicts come to the fore in this because religious ideologies are so heavily symbolically weighted toward objects of veneration. If you're trying to launch a terrorist attack on some boringly secular bourgeois republic, it's pretty hard to know where to hit. Whereas if you're launching it on a society that has a collective religious allegiance, you've got the Pope or you've got symbolic sources authority that don't seem as easily replaceable. It's always more attractive to attack a king than some Scandinavian style president whose name nobody can remember. The exception that proves the rule is when the Swedish foreign minister was stabbed by a loony in Stockholm a few years ago, and people realized that senior Swedish politicians had been walking around for ages in the streets without any kind of bodyguard, because they're too boring for anyone to want to attack on symbolic grounds. And that's how they should be; it's great. I'm a fan of that kind of boring, secular, bourgeois society. But to the extent that modern conflicts take a religious tone, they kind of up the stakes because they create more symbolic hostages. ------------------------------------- [28]Julian Sanchez is Reason's Assistant Editor. He lives in Washington, D.C. References 25. mailto:jsanchez at reason.com 26. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0691118213/reasonmagazineA/ 27. http://idei.fr/vitae.php?i=53 28. mailto:jsanchez at reason.com From checker at panix.com Thu Jun 9 01:06:17 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 21:06:17 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Boston Phoenix: All classed up and nowhere to go Message-ID: All classed up and nowhere to go http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/multi_3/documents/04731992.asp 5.6.5 Issue Date: June 3 - 9, 2005 [Part 2 appended.] The New York Times goes slumming: How the papers allegiance to the ruling elite distorts its look at class in America BY CHRIS LEHMANN _________________________________________________________________ AT FIRST GLANCE, "Class Matters" the New York Times epic inquiry into the widening economic divisions of the new millennium appears to be what its editors solemnly claim: a well-intentioned effort to reckon with a serious social condition, one that notoriously eludes clear understanding in America, so long hymned as the planets pre-eminent land of opportunity. Alas, however, the New York Times is in no position to deliver. In contrast to, say, the papers conscientious reporting on the 60s-era civil-rights movement in the South, its foray into class consciousness suffers from a fatal flaw. Social class is at the core of the Times institutional identity, which prevents the paper from offering the sort of dispassionate, critically searching discussion the subject demands. Even as the paper takes hits for its alleged liberal bias, it retains a supremely undeviating affinity for the cultural habits of the rich and celebrated most obviously in its Sunday Vows section, which features short celebratory biographies of newly consummated mateships from the overclass. The Sunday Styles section along with the Home and Dining sections, the T: Style magazine, and the recently added Thursday Styles delivers breathless dispatches on the mores, tastes, status worries, and modes of pecuniary display favored by the coming generation of anxious downtown arrivistes. So the many installments of "Class Matters" a now nearly completed work in progress come across less like an authoritative exercise in social criticism than like an oddly anxious series of Tourettes-style asides, desperately sidestepping the core economic inequities that the Times can never quite afford to mention outright. Getting the New York Times to explain the real operation of social class in America is, at the end of the day, a lot like granting your parents exclusive license to explain sex to you: there are simply far too many conflicts that run far too deep to result in any reliable account of how the thing works. YOU CAN SEE the trouble early on, in what serves as the seriess mission statement: the pledge, in the May 15 first-installment "Overview" piece by Janny Scott and David Leonhardt, that they will chart the way "class influences destiny in America." For most people on the receiving end of class prerogatives in this country unskilled service workers who find it all but illegal to form unions, say, or poor black voters in Ohio and Florida theres no "influences" about it: class is destiny in America, delimiting access to basic social benefits like health care, education, job training, and affordable housing. Yet for all sorts of painfully self-evident institutional reasons, the New York Times cant afford to approach a subject this potent in a straightforward fashion. Instead Scott and Leonhardt marshal their readers through a leisurely tour of hoary American social mythology. America, they purr, "has gone a long way toward the appearance of classlessness" meaning, one supposes, that the downwardly mobile middle classes are actually thriving on the appearance of being in possession of wealth and disposable income, as though, by analogy, it would have been perfectly acceptable to report design upgrades in segregated Southern drinking fountains as a meaningful advance for black civil rights. "Social diversity," they explain, "has erased many of the markers" separating the countrys haves from the have-nots. Yet they fail to recognize that a more socially diverse ruling class remains a ruling class, after all an uncomfortable truth easily overlooked when one is writing for an influential organ of said ruling class. Not surprisingly, then, the closer Scott and Leonhardt circle toward the heart of the matter how some Americans leverage social advantage into greater wealth and privilege, and how many, many more have seen wealth, educational opportunity, disposable income, and job security stagnate or decline while household debt and health-care costs soar the more ungainly and vague everything becomes. Still, Scott and Leonhardt are forced to concede a stubborn social fact: "Americans are arguably more likely than they were 30 years ago to end up in the same class into which they were born." Here the dogged reader is at last primed to reckon with a sharp point of analytical departure: the storied American Dream of social mobility across generations appears to be stalled. Instead, however, the authors lurch into more bootless mythmaking: "Merit has replaced the old system of inherited privilege.... But merit, it turns out, is at least partly class-based. Parents with money, education, and connections cultivate in their children the habits the meritocracy rewards." Well, no. Parents with connections, education, and money place their considerable resources directly at their offsprings disposal. What results has everything to do with openly legible lines of power, and very nearly nothing to do with the cultivation of meritocracy-pleasing behavioral "habits" as any cursory glance at the Oval Offices present occupant or the cast of The Simple Life will instantly confirm. Meritocracy is an especially obtrusive and unstable term here, since neither Scott nor Leonhardt nor scarcely any uncritical champion of meritocracy in our time pauses to note the original meaning of the term. The concept of meritocracy first surfaced in a 1958 satirical political novel, The Rise of the Meritocracy, by old-line British socialist Michael Young. Youngs coinage was not intended to describe a system of impartial upward advancement, but rather the diametric opposite: a dystopian social order wherein bureaucratic rank outstripped wealth and title as the measure of human advancement. The irony in Youngs book, of course, was that the egalitarian nomenclature of this brave new order of which the word meritocracy was itself a prime example masked a system of spoils and rewards that was fast becoming much less fair and balanced than the old British class society it was thought to have supplanted. Only in America or more precisely, only in the A section of the New York Times could a bitter term of Old World satire gain traction as a straight-faced descriptor of a sunny status quo. NOT SURPRISINGLY, the twinned notions of Right Conduct and Meritocratic Worth have shaped every subsequent installment of "Class Matters." The first reported piece, by the redoubtable Janny Scott, explores the consequences of unequal access to quality health care, by reconstructing three heart-attack cases affecting, in socially descending order, a well-heeled architect, an electric-company office worker, and an immigrant Polish maid. This comparative exercise does a pretty good job how could it not? of showing what happens when the basic right to critical health care is submitted to the markets less-than-tender mercies. Until, that is, Scott joins the hapless maid on a grocery-shopping junket and loses all patience: "Cruising the 99 Cent Wonder store in [Brooklyns] Williamsburg, where the freezers were filled with products like Budget Gourmet Rigatoni with Cream Sauce, [the maid, Ms. Gora] pulled down a small package of pistachios: two and a half servings, 13 grams of fat per serving. I can eat five of these, she confessed, ignoring the nutrition label. Not servings. Bags." Not servings, people! Bags! When Times scribes are reduced to sentence fragments, you know their patrician forbearance is running dangerously low. And how can you blame them, considering that the pistachio episode follows a sobering litany of other trespasses? When first stricken with her heart attack, Gora dismissed her husbands suggestion that she was seriously ill and needed an ambulance, and instead tried to collect herself with a glass of vodka; against explicit doctors advice, she sneaks cigarettes and doughnuts, and even clips a cockamamie diet from a Polish magazine that permits her to eat generous portions of fried food and steak. And so Scotts telltale moment of exasperation carries an unmistakable subtext: Theres just nothing to be done with these people. Never mind that Goras behavior suggests that she is also suffering an extended, and completely understandable, bout of depression an all-too-common health affliction among the working poor. Why extend anything like universally available health care to a group of people so willfully perverse? All classed up and nowhere to go (continued) http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/multi_3/documents/04731991.asp Likewise, the next series installment, on marriage and class, completely neglects the subjects most historically significant recent development: how more affluent mates postpone marriage and childrearing through whats known euphemistically as "assortative mating" (i.e., the sort of closely vetted, intraclass pairings of the privileged featured every week in the Vows section of the Times), versus the considerable pressures within poor communities to marry early and procreate often. Instead, the main dispatch by Times reporter Tamar Lewin sets up elaborate social quandaries better suited to a Victorian novel than to 21st-century American life. It describes the course of a second marriage for both partners thats taken them beyond the reach of their familiar social stations: wife Cate Woolner is a rich heiress, husband Dan Croteau is a working-class car salesman. Its hard to suss out just what the social lesson of such a plainly atypical union is supposed to be. Apart, that is, from the manifest truth that, left to their own devices, the rich will always raise the most irritating children on earth ("[Woolners son] Isaac fantasizes about opening a brewery-cum-performance space, traveling through South America, or operating a sunset massage cruise on the Caribbean"). By Sunday, May 22s entry, a piece by Laurie Goodstein and David Kirkpatrick on the evangelical mission called the Christian Union, which is targeting the Ivy League elite, the Times reverts to full-on barbarians-at-the-gates-style culture alarmism. The piece is not even, in any clear way, about social class (at least not the destiny-inhibiting type adumbrated in the seriess mission statement), since Matt Bennett, the principal force behind the Christian Union, is heir to a Dallas-based hotel empire, and the one quasi-needy case in the piece, a sophomore missionary at Brown named Tim Havens, rather inconveniently declares himself pre-med by the storys end. And what is clearly meant to be a spit-take moment for Sunday-morning Times coffee drinkers Bennetts claim that God came to him in a vision and "was speaking to me very strongly that he wanted to see an increasing and dramatic spiritual revival in a place like Princeton" actually makes a good deal of sense when one recalls (as Kirkpatrick and Goodstein apparently do not) that Princeton was the intellectual capital of American fundamentalist theology in the early part of the last century. The reporters do mention briefly that most Ivy League schools in fact began life as "expressly Christian," but dwelling too long on such facts would clearly contradict the pieces half-baked social premise: that newer, and traditionally down-market, evangelical faiths are now storming the citadels of American intellectual privilege. For May 24s installment the midpoint entry in the series Leonhardt offers a predictably baffled piece on the most perverse of working-class mores: the refusal to attend college for full four-year terms. Leonhardt telescopes this chilling trend through the saga of Andy Blevins, a 29-year-old produce buyer for a big-box retail warehouse in small-town rural Virginia. Blevins dropped out after his freshman year at Radford University; he plans to return to school part-time, though, in order to earn a degree and teaching credentials in elementary education, even though the vast majority of returning college dropouts never complete their degrees. The overall high failure and dropout rates among Americas poor and working class admit to no "simple answer," Leonhardt writes. There is, to be sure, the vulgar question of money, he notes. Tuitions that routinely outstrip the rate of inflation, and the specter of contracting long-term five- or six-figure loans, are strong, sobering deterrents. For Leonhardt, however, economic inequality can provide only a glancing explanation of class inequities culture has to be where the real action is. After ticking off the formidable financial obstacles posed by higher education, Leonhardt primly announces that "the deterrents to a [college] degree can also be homegrown. Many low-income teenagers know few people who have made it through college. A majority of the non-graduates are young men, and some come from towns where the factory work ethic, to get working as soon as possible, remains strong, even if the factories themselves are vanishing. Whatever the reason, college just does not feel normal." Its worth noting that such cultural delicacy did not seem to prevent FDR from signing the GI Bill into law, thereby dispatching the largest-ever contingent of working-class American men to elite university campuses. There was little apparent fuss about how these entering students processed their unfamiliar cultural surroundings, once the federal government brought tuition costs into reasonable alignment with their living standards. Nonetheless, the paper of record, with its condescending cultural exoticism, once again dwells lovingly on behavior and culture rather than on cold economic facts. Leonhardt mentions the gruesome inequity that, thanks to the Bush administrations recent cuts to the Pell-grant program, "high-income students, on average, actually get slightly more financial aid than low-income students." But apart from some vague discussion of the emerging vogue for need-conscious class-based affirmative action, he cant connect the obvious dots here: that without universal, federally funded support, the prospect of a full tour in the world of higher education ranks somewhere alongside winning the lottery in the pantheon of plausible working-class life outcomes. Instead, Leonhardt frets on and on about the boneheaded call the 19-year-old Blevins made when he dropped out, and the extreme unlikelihood, despite the guys professed best intentions, that any good will come of his pitiful bid to reinvent himself. And should the wall-eyed voyeurism of the piece leave any doubt, the front-page photo speaks volumes: it shows Blevins indolently sprawled on his living-room sofa, gaping at a football game on TV, while keeping a bottle shoved in the gullet of his three-year-old son, Luke, whose head dangles perilously over the edge of the couch. This, the casual reader is urged to conclude, is just the sort of layabout behavioral pathology that keeps working-class families from achieving serious upward mobility. Yet the text makes clear that Blevins doesnt have a great deal of time to devote to semiconscious gridiron gawking, since he routinely works six-day weeks, at shifts of 10 hours or more. This image, like most feature subjects in "Class Matters," seems clearly intended to trigger a quiet shudder of patrician thanksgiving that Times readers really do not go there but for the grace of God. SUBSEQUENT SERIES installments perform the same reassuring alchemy, transmuting the raw stuff of material deprivation into judiciously arms-length cultural perplexity. A May 25 dispatch on immigrant-laborer tensions at Uma Thurmans favorite diner trails off into puzzlement over how immigrant managers resist unionization of other immigrant workers in their employ. (Dont they know that social diversity abolishes class distinction? That a Greek restaurant owner is supposed to embrace his Latino busboys and waitstaff in a gorgeous mosaic of service-economy unity?) Another blowout Sunday entry, on May 29, found the Times returning with palpable relief to a subject on which it wields genuine authority: how and why luxury shopping is failing to perfectly mirror hard-core American socioeconomic divisions. Jennifer Steinhauer registers the perfect ruffled tone of disbelief as she reports on the decline of true luxury consumption in America, as more middle-class people get into deeper debt to make high-end purchases like cruises and designer chocolates. For a paper that routinely lavishes acres of adoring prose on the shopping preferences of the fabulously well-to-do, this sort of news has roughly the same effect that Andres Serranos Piss Christ photograph exercised on the Catholic League: "Rising incomes, flattening prices, and easily available credit have given so many Americans access to such a wide array of high-end goods that traditional markers of status have lost much of their meanings." For devout Times scribes, this, truly, is the world turned upside down. An unintentionally hilarious graphic accompanying the main body of the piece "Swells and Neer-Do-Wells: A Class Timeline" echoes the same clear longing for the snappy, superficial navigation of social distinction. Here is one of its final bullet points: "1989: The Berlin Wall falls. Marxisms vision of a classless society is out; global capitalism is in." There you have it: a watershed moment in modern democratic revolution worded in the style of an America Idol ballot. Dont dare remind our glib Times editors that Marx himself foresaw the triumph of global capitalism as the precursor to his vision of a classless society. Theyre telling you whats in, and there could be no more fitting final word on the subject from a journalistic oracle of the Times stature except, that is, to turn from all this messy, unresolved class nastiness to the crisp and clean business-as-usual digests in the Sundays Vows column. Chris Lehman is a writer based in Washington, DC, and author of Revolt of the Masscult (Prickly Paradigm, 2003). He can be reached at [47]lehmannchris at mac.com From checker at panix.com Thu Jun 9 01:07:11 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 21:07:11 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] JTA: Study on Ashkenazi genes sparks intrigue, debate and reflection Message-ID: Study on Ashkenazi genes sparks intrigue, debate and reflection http://www.jta.org/page_view_story.asp?intarticleid=15509&intcategoryid=5 By Chanan Tigay http://www.jta.org/page_bio.asp#Chanan Tigay NEW YORK, June 7 (JTA) A reported link between Ashkenazi intelligence genes and susceptibility to genetic disorders is clearly mixed news for the descendants of Eastern European Jews. It may come as little surprise, then, that reactions to a new study linking the two are a mixed bag as well. After all, if what the University of Utah researchers say is true, some Jewish mothers may just have had their dreams for brilliant children turned to nightmares. Beyond that, it may also mean that Ashkenazim have, albeit unwillingly, been part of an accidental experiment in eugenics, as The Economist magazine put it in a recent article. It has brought them some advantages. But, like the deliberate eugenics experiments of the 20th century, it also has exacted a terrible price. The mere mention of eugenics which refers to a movement to improve humankind by controlling genetic factors through mating is enough to ring bells that many Jews would rather not hear 60 years after the Allied defeat of the Nazis. According to the study, slated to appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Biosocial Science, Ashkenazim do better than average on IQ tests, scoring some 12-15 points above the tests mean value. But they also are more likely than any other ethnic groups to suffer from diseases such as Tay-Sachs, Gauchers disease and Niemann-Pick related conditions that can be debilitating and deadly. The new study hypothesizes that the genetic disorders could be the unfortunate side effects of genes that facilitate intelligence. But for some people, ascribing collective traits to entire ethnic groups especially to European Jews reminds them that the Nazis heaped a pile of supposed genetic characteristics on that continents Jews and used the characteristics as a basis to exterminate them. Indeed, the researchers say they had difficulty finding a journal that would publish their findings. For other people, criticizing such research on this basis reeks of political correctness. This is real science, they say, with real potential to help save Jewish and other lives. When you study genetics in order to cure diseases, thats great, said James Young, a Jewish studies professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the author of Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation. But when genetics are studied as a way to characterize or essentialize a whole ethnic group or nation of people, then I think its very problematic. Still, he said, I was kind of intrigued by this connection, and the dark irony of what it means to have your intelligence gene linked to a so-called genetic disease gene. Its kind of striking. For Dr. Guinter Kahn, a Miami physician who lectures internationally on German doctors during the Holocaust, studies like this have real scientific merit. This stuff is being done with genes, and theyre actually finding true results, he said. The stuff they did in World War II was pure baloney motivated by the greatest geneticists of that time in Germany but they all fell into the Hitler trap. Although no one is questioning the researchers motivations, some observers worry that their findings may be misused. Will bigots use this? Bigots will use anything, said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation league. However, he said, their abuses should not block research that could benefit the Jewish community. Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt agrees. When it became clear that fewer Jews were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau than had originally been thought, some Jews worried that this information would be manipulated by Holocaust deniers to back their claims, said Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University. I had people say to me, We shouldnt talk about these things, Lipstadt recalls, I said, No, no, no. Its always good to talk about the truth. We should never be afraid of the truth. As to concerns about what it means to say that one group of people is genetically smarter than others, Henry Harpending, a professor of anthropology at the University of Utah and one of the studys three authors, told JTA that such complaints boil down to political correctness. Its no secret, he said of the Ashkenazi IQ numbers. Your grandmother told you this. Indeed, the study notes that although Ashkenazi Jews made up just 3 percent of the U.S. population during the last century, they won 27 percent of the countrys Nobel Prizes in science and account for more than half of the worlds chess champions. However, Harpending added, this is the kind of thing that youre not supposed to say these days. We regard this as an interesting hypothesis and are a little surprised at the attention. On the other hand, geneticists kind of know that variation between populations is almost certainly in the DNA and they kind of dont talk about that for fear of losing federal funding for their research, Harpending said. What weve done is started out with an idea and followed it, so what we have is a pretty interesting and pretty good-looking hypothesis and it ought to be tested. But could this research actually end up helping anybody? Gregory Cochran, one of the studys authors, hopes so. I dont have the cure to any disease in my pocket. I wish I did, he said. But if this all pans out, you learn something about how the brain works. Who knows? Maybe you can do something to help some people one day. The study says that because European Jews in medieval times were restricted to jobs in finance, money lending and long-distance trade occupations that required greater mental gymnastics than fields such as farming, dominated by non-Jews their genetic codes over the course of some generations selected genes for enhanced intellectual ability. This process allowed these Jews to thrive in the limited scope of professions they were allowed to pursue. Further, in contrast to today, those who attained financial success in that period often tended to have more children than those who were less financially stable, and those children tended to live longer. It is for this reason, the researchers said, that many Ashkenazi Jews today have high IQs and it may also be the reason they suffer from the slew of genetic diseases. According to the researchers, many individuals carrying the gene for one of these diseases also receive an IQ boost. Rabbi Moses Tendler, who holds a doctorate in biology and teaches biology at Yeshiva University, said there is no doubt that genetic makeup determines intelligence and, indeed, predisposes as well as offers resistance to genetic diseases. But he took issue with the studys findings. The fact that Jews did not intermarry until relatively recently, Tendler said, led to a concentration of various genes among their numbers, some good and some bad. Wherever they were, Jews lived on an island, he said. In scientific terms, arguments similar to Tendlers are known as a founders effect. Rabbi Arthur Green, dean of the Rabbinical School at Bostons Hebrew College, wondered whether the findings took into account all relevant factors in the development of Jewish intelligence. He noted that during the period in which the researchers believe the Jewish intelligence gene began to be selected, the majority Christian world was, in a sense, selecting against such a gene. In that same period of 1,600 to 1,800 years, Christian Europe was systematically destroying its best genetic stock through celibacy of priests and monks, he said. The Christian devotion to celibacy, particularly for the most learned and highest intellectual achievers, diminished the quality of genetic output and created a greater contrast with the Jewish minority, he said. The Jewish devotion to study and learning, meanwhile, also probably worked in tandem with economic factors in the development of intelligence, Green surmised. In some of the Ashkenazi disorders, individuals experience extra growth and branching of connectors linking their nerve cells. Too much of this growth may lead to disease; increased but limited growth, though, could breed heightened intelligence. In an effort to determine the effect of Gauchers on IQ, for example, the researchers contacted the Gauchers Clinic at Shaare Zedek Hospital in Jerusalem. Although the center did not have specific IQ numbers on patients at the clinic, the jobs they held were high-IQ professions: physicists, engineers, lawyers, physicians and scientists. Its obviously a population with enriched IQs big time, Harpending said. From checker at panix.com Thu Jun 9 01:07:21 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 21:07:21 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: John Gray: Hollow triumph Message-ID: John Gray: Hollow triumph The Times Literary Supplement, 98.5.8 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2093567&window_type=print THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. A modern edition. By Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. 87pp. Verso. ?8. - 1 85984 898 2. THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. New interpretations. By Mark Cowling, editor. 209pp. Edinburgh University Press. ?40 (paperback, ?14.95). - 0 7486 1140 1 THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO NOW. Socialist Register 1998. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, editors. 268pp. Rendlesham: Merlin Press. Paperback, ?12.95. - 0 85036 473 6 Why Marx still provides a potent critique of the contradictions of late modern capitalism In his introduction to the Verso anniversary edition of The Communist Manifesto, Eric Hobsbawm comments: "The world described by Marx and Engels in 1848 . . . is recognisably that in which we live 150 years later." Of many passages that support Hobsbawm's assessment, one is particularly arresting. Marx and Engels write: All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. If this seems a striking anticipation of the world in which we live, it is because unexpected political events have reinforced and accelerated the long-established economic developments that Marx and Engels describe. Two large political facts that, for most of this century, seemed to embody a refutation of Marx's view of capitalism have over the past decade melted away. The first was Communism. Less than ten years ago, there were two economic systems in the world. Now there are only varieties of capitalism. The Soviet collapse was a final demonstration that in modern economies there is no overall alternative to market competition. The fall of Communism destroyed Marxian socialism as a political project. At the same time, it gave Marx's analysis of capitalism a new lease on life. By removing from the world any alternative economic system, the Soviet debacle allowed a truly global capitalism to develop, the destructive consequences of which for social cohesion are prefigured in Marx's thought. The workings of this new global capitalism have been partly responsible for a second large political event - the retreat of social democracy. In nearly all the countries in which social-democratic regimes still survive, they are on the defensive, struggling in vain with problems that, less than a generation ago, they believed that they had solved. It is not only that post-war strategies for full employment can no longer be made effective; even people in regular work are perceptibly less secure than they were. The managed capitalism of the post-war period has given way to a more volatile and predatory variety. As a result, what long seemed most anachronistic in The Communist Manifesto now looks prophetic. As we near the end of the century, we cannot escape the paradox that, partly as a consequence of the implosion of Marxian socialism, Marx's view of capitalism has been in some crucial respects vindicated. We must not forget why Marxian socialism collapsed. It could not survive the historical experience of central economic planning. Centrally planned economies lack institutions for ensuring that resources are used prudently. The absence of a properly functioning price mechanism and of clear, enforceable property rights means that planners have few means of assessing relative scarcities and little incentive to do so. The incalculable waste and spectacular indifference to human needs that marked "actually existing socialism" from start to finish, its inability to match the technical innovations produced by market economies, and the catastrophic devastation it wrought on the natural environment in all the countries in which it was imposed, were not incidental defects. They were unavoidable by-products of a political project - the replacement of market processes by central planning - that was in the strictest sense utopian. In late modern economies, central planning is impossible. Any regime that attempts it chokes off the stream of new technologies on which the creation of wealth now heavily depends. Even the virtually unlimited resources of the Soviet military-industrial complex were unequal to the task of keeping up with continuous technical innovation in Western market economies. No command economy can achieve the steadily rising living standards demanded by people in late modern societies. For that reason alone, no centrally planned economy can be democratically legitimate. It is a mistake to think that Soviet planning failed because it was not implemented by a democratic government. The truth is nearer the opposite. The Soviet system lacked working democratic institutions, because the failings of central planning necessitated tyranny. The chronic shortages, endemic corruption and grubby nomenclatural hierarchies of Soviet life could be perpetuated only by a comprehensive denial of personal and political liberty. By the same token, the depth of popular illegitimacy of the Soviet system rendered it unreformable. Western observers who endorsed Gorbachev's proposals for restructuring the Soviet economy showed that they were unable to distinguish feasible reforms from impending collapse. As late as 1989, most had not perceived that the Soviet Union, unable to cope with economic chaos which Gorbachev's reforms had only worsened and threatened with mounting secessionist demands from the nationalities, had entered a pre-revolutionary phase. Dissidents such as Andrei Amalrik and Vladimir Bukovsky, whose accounts of the fragility of Soviet power Western opinion had dismissed as apocalyptic, proved in the event to be realistic and reliable guides. Had Gorbachev not launched his unworkable reforms, it is conceivable that the Soviet Union would still be with us. But it would have been surviving on borrowed time. Soviet history is scored over with contingencies, but it cannot be read as other than a tragedy in which the utopian elements in Marx's thought played a pivotal role. In its capacity as a prescription for a new kind of society, classical Marxism was a fusion of the Romantic yearning for social unity with a Jacobin denial of the need for institutions. Marx's vision of a socialist society did not provide for procedures whereby conflicting interests and values could be mediated. Nor did it contain institutions for mitigating the effect of inequality. As a result, it neglected the most important task of representative democracy, which is to limit the damage that the powerful can inflict on the powerless. Marx's disregard for the damage-limiting functions of democracy was inherited by Lenin, who compounded it. Except in his own manoeuvres, Lenin was not a political realist. He looked forward to a society in which political conflict had withered away. In this, he faithfully reflected Marx's utopian outlook. As the late Wal Suchting notes in his admirable contribution to The Communist Manifesto: New interpretations, edited by Mark Cowling, "What Is Living and What Is Dead in The Communist Manifesto?", Marx's writings are riddled with ideas that are utopian "in the sense of the programmatic entertaining of possibilities in no serious sense justifiable by reference to empirical evidence". I would go further. The hazy vision of workers' governance inherited by Lenin from Marx is utopian in the stronger sense that it contradicts much that we know to be true. It is not only that central planning cannot be squared with the requirements of a modern economy. More, Marx's sketchy remarks on how a socialist economy would be governed say nothing about how the conflicting interests and objectives of workers are to be negotiated. Marxian socialism is a utopian project, because it runs flatly against these enduring realities. In the Soviet context, its human costs were beyond measure. The millions who died in its famines and terrors died for nothing. The lives of the rest were experiments in patience. Western Marxists who resist the lessons of the Soviet experience do Marx no favours. By defending his thought where it is least defensible, they obscure its most powerful insights. This is true of most of the contributors to The Communist Manifesto Now: Socialist Register 1998, edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, who are so concerned to defend Marx's thought against criticism that they fail to bring out how it can be used to understand the present. It is in this vein that John Bellamy Foster, writing on "The Communist Manifesto and the Environment", seeks to rebut criticism of Marx as an anti-ecological thinker. Foster ransacks Marx's writings for quotations that can be interpreted as showing an awareness of the environmental context of economic life, claiming to find in them anticipations of late-twentieth-century concerns about sustainable development. He is anxious to show that Marx did not share the insensitivity to the social costs of economic progress of most of his contemporaries. In this connection, Foster maintains that Marx's contempt for peasant life has been misinterpreted. It is true, as Foster and Hobsbawm maintain, that Marx must be read against the background of his time, using what we know of his life and beliefs. If we do this, it becomes arguable that when Marx condemned "the idiocy of rural life", he was using the classical Greek term idiotes to denote the narrow horizons and isolation from wider society that he found and deplored in rural life. But this hardly demonstrates that Marx did not view peasant life as an obstacle to progress. It suggests that this is how he did see it. In fact, along with many other nineteenth-century thinkers, Marx despised the social and technological immobility of peasant societies. He viewed the abolition of peasant farming as an indispensable prerequisite of economic progress and regarded the capitalist factory as the model on which farming should in future be based. In believing that agricultural collectivization was a necessary step in building socialism, the Bolsheviks were only following Marx. Peasant farming had to be abolished, because the development of industry was a precondition of socialism. Aside from anything else, peasants could not be relied on to support a socialist regime. In acting on these beliefs - shared by Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin and Stalin, whose views on collectivization differed only in matters of tactics and timing - the Soviet leaders were authentic practitioners of Marxian socialism. To represent Marx as a proto-Green thinker in the way that Foster tries to do is absurd. Nowhere in Marx's writings is the natural environment seen as other than a resource to be exploited for the satisfaction of human wants. Marx thought of technology as an instrument whereby humans exercise power over the earth. As his frequent dismissals of Malthus testify, Marx was scornful of the idea that the natural environment of the human species could set limits to its ambitions. He envisaged a future in which nature had been "humanized" - which is to say, thoroughly subordinated to human purposes. To be sure, Marx was little different from other nineteenth-century European thinkers (John Stuart Mill being an admirable exception) in this combination of anthropocentric ethics with technological Prometheanism. But his attitudes had vastly greater practical influence than those of any of his contemporaries. They informed the Soviet Union's disastrous environmental policies to the very end, when widespread resistance to a megalomaniac engineering project that would have flooded vast tracts of Russia and altered the global climate was one of the forces that triggered the regime's breakdown. While the passing of Communism killed off Marxism as a political project, the retreat of social democracy has revived Marx's analysis of capitalism. Conventional opinion in all parties viewed the disintegration of central planning as a triumph for the capitalism they knew, and believed that it augured business as usual, conducted henceforth on a global scale. It seems not to have occurred to these observers that a world-historical event of this magnitude was bound to transform many aspects of economic and political life throughout the world. Few perceived that its larger impact would be to accelerate changes in Western capitalism that had been maturing for decades. Even fewer anticipated that the free-market economies that emerged would have many features in common with the anarchic, contradiction-ridden capitalism that Marx foresaw, and which social democrats imagined they had long since tamed. The most delusive views of global capitalism were to be found on the neo-liberal Right. Like classical Marxism, neo-liberal thought embodied the Promethean attitude to nature and the contempt for the casualties of economic progress typical of late-nineteenth-century European thinkers. Neo-liberal thought was (the past tense is necessary here, since so little remains of that ephemeral movement) a type of quasi-Marxian economic determinism from which the sense of tragic historical conflict that distinguishes Marx's best writings had somehow been removed. It is impossible to imagine Marx sharing the callow faith of neo-liberals that post-Communist Russia would rapidly acquire a Western-style market economy and polity. Neo-liberals forgot (if they ever knew) the recurring dilemmas about its relations with Europe and Asia that have shaped Russian politics and culture. Marx would not have been surprised that what has emerged in Russia is a sort of criminal syndicalism, presided over by a crypto-Tsarist elective autocrat. Possessed by a chiliastic certainty that the end of history had arrived, neo-liberals imagined that the disappearance of central planning meant the universal spread of a particular, Western type of market economy, when in Russia and China it has produced varieties of capitalism that express the traditions and recent histories of those countries. Neo-liberal thought misperceived the most fundamental economic trend of the late twentieth century, which is not the spread of free markets but the banalization of new technologies throughout the world. At the same time, it repressed the contradictions which beset free-market economies. It celebrated the death of socialism, without pausing to ask what that event implied for the political parties that had helped to bring it about. In Britain, the Conservative Party derived its rationale during much of this century from opposition to socialism. When socialism disappeared as a political force - partly as a result of Conservative policies - the Conservative Party lost a large part of its identity and began its drift into disoriented marginality. A similar fate has befallen the American Right. The disintegration of Conservatism in Britain and the United States had many contingent causes; but it was not a historical accident. It expressed a central contradiction of late modern capitalism. Conservative parties seek to promote free markets, while at the same time defending "traditional values". It is hard to think of a more quixotic enterprise. Free markets are the most potent solvent of tradition at work in the world today. As they continuously revolutionize production, they throw all social relationships into flux. Conservatives glorify the incessant change demanded by free markets and at the same time believe that nothing - in family life or the incidence of crime, for example - will be changed by it. The reality is more like that described by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto: Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face, with sober senses, his real condition of life, and his relations with his kind. In a lecture which he gave in Mexico City in 1948, Joseph Schumpeter pursued a line of thought parallel with that of Marx and Engels, when he speculated that the development of capitalism might be incompatible with the existence of what he called an "intact civilization". In such a civilization, there is a rough coherence of ideals and interests. The parts fit together to form some kind of whole. Of course, such civilizations always contain conflicts. But their ruling classes manage them by drawing on a fund of commonly accepted values that run in tandem with prevailing social structures. Using Schumpeter's notion, one may say that the high bourgeois society that existed in some parts of Europe before 1914 possessed an intact civilization, whereas Britain and the United States today do not. Free markets undermine some of the central institutions of bourgeois societies. Among these is the institution of the career. For many people, work was once oriented around a lifelong vocation, the phases of which matched those of the normal life cycle. One of the less celebrated achievements of free-market capitalism is to have done away with this bourgeois relic. Few people today can plan their future in the expectation that they will remain in a single occupation throughout an entire working lifetime. Downsizing and delayering, in which firms strip out whole categories of employment and employees find established career structures suddenly vanishing before their eyes, have become commonplace experiences. For an increasing number, working life no longer means having a job. Free markets are producing fewer old-fashioned, tenured jobs, and ever more varieties of temporary work. Though most of those who still have jobs are not much more likely to lose them than they were in the recent past, these tendencies illustrate Schumpeter's - and Marx's - chief insight. There can be little doubt that the kinds of security in employment that are necessary for bourgeois careers will in future be available to a dwindling minority. In some real measure, workers are being re-proletarianized, even as sections of the middle classes are being thrust into the rackety lifestyles of the ex-bourgeois. Marx's expectations of socialism have been disappointed everywhere; but his glimpses of how capitalism hollows out bourgeois societies are proving prophetic. Nothing in the development of capitalism ensures that it is compatible with an intact bourgeois civilization. The combination of slash-and-burn Anglo-American capitalism with unprecedented rates of technical innovation is particularly inimical to bourgeois life. When a stream of new technologies floods through deregulated markets, the result is not social - or economic - equilibrium. It is to throw the social division of labour into flux. The upshot is a parodic capitalist version of the Marxian utopia, in which fixed economic roles no longer govern the working lives of the majority. Liberal societies have not come to terms with the tendency of free markets to exclude the working majority from the bourgeois life that is promised to all. This contradiction - between liberal values and real life in market societies - is the enduring truth contained in The Communist Manifesto. One need not be a nostalgist for high bourgeois cultures, as Schumpeter was, to be concerned about these developments. I know of no country in which liberal institutions have renewed themselves over several generations where the underlying society has not been predominantly bourgeois. Yet the overall impact of the least regulated types of capitalism is to break down the occupational and social structures on which bourgeois civilizations have in the past rested. Whether other varieties of capitalism - in Germany, Japan, or elsewhere - can avoid these effects is, at present, an open question. We know that, apart from one or two instances such as Norway, Europe's social democracies have failed to cope with contemporary capitalism's most palpable defect, which is large-scale unemployment. In some European countries, most notably France, mass unemployment is currently reproducing the classically flawed political responses of the inter-war period, with centre-right parties fragmenting and sections of them joining forces with racist parties of the anti-liberal Right. The lesson of the volatile capitalism of the inter-war years is that avoidance of large economic instabilities is a precondition of liberal democracy. Today global capitalism is less stable than it has been since the 1920s. Marx's achievement was to identify a contradiction in liberal civilization. His economic theories went hopelessly astray. His doctrine of classes is thoroughly inadequate as an account of social stratification. His Promethean attitudes towards nature led to environmental catastrophes. His political prescriptions were a recipe for tragedy. But in illuminating, a century and a half ago, a widening gap between the imperatives of capitalism and the prerequisites of a stable liberal society, Marx identified a problem to which a solution has yet to be found. John Gray is Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. His most recent book, False Dawn:The delusions of global capitalism, was published in March. From shovland at mindspring.com Thu Jun 9 13:27:51 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 06:27:51 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] 40 could be the new 30 as scientists redefine age Message-ID: <01C56CBC.5CB7D490.shovland@mindspring.com> By Patricia Reaney Wed Jun 8, 1:07 PM ET LONDON (Reuters) - Is 40 really the new 30? ADVERTISEMENT Everyone is getting older but in many ways people today act younger than their parents did at the same age. Scientists have defined a new age concept and believe it could explain why populations are aging, but at the same time seem to be getting younger. Instead of measuring aging by how long people have lived so far, the scientists have factored in how many more years people can still look forward to. "Using that measure, the average person can get younger in the sense that he or she can have even more years to live as time goes on," said Warren Sanderson, of the University of New York in Stony Brook. He and Sergei Scherbov, of the Vienna Institute of Demography at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, have used their method to estimate how the proportion of elderly people in Germany, Japan and the United States will change in the future. The average German was 39.9 years old in 2000 and could plan to live for another 39.2 years, according to research reported in the science journal Nature on Wednesday. However, by 2050 the average German would be 51.9 years old and could expect another 37.1 years of life. So middle age in 2050 would come around 52 instead of 40 as in 2000. "As people have more and more years to live they have to save more and plan more and they effectively are behaving as if they were younger," said Sanderson. Five years ago, the average American was 35.3 years old and could plan for 43.5 more years of life. By 2050, the researchers estimate it would increase to 41.7 years and 45.8 future years. "A lot of our skills, our education, our savings and the way we deal with our health care depend a great deal on how many years we have to live," said Sanderson. "This dimension of how many years we have to live has been completely ignored in the discussion of aging so far." From HowlBloom at aol.com Fri Jun 10 05:03:14 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 01:03:14 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: Big bang in mm sizes Message-ID: <99.60297347.2fda7912@aol.com> As always, we are on the same wavelength, Joel. This article has Ur Patterns written all over it--patterns that show up on multiple level of emergence, patterns that metaphors can capture. Why are these patterns so easily graspable by metaphor? Because metaphor is one concrete example of an Ur Pattern that repeats itself on multiple levels. Meaning that metaphor is not just a literary trick. It is a way of capturing something deep and repetitive in this cosmos--a deep structure if you prefer to use Noam Chomsky's vocabulary. Not all metaphors are valid. But when you find the right one for the phenomenon you're watching, you've hit gold. And never forget, math is metaphor in disguise. Onward--Howard In a message dated 6/9/2005 2:23:17 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, isaacsonj at hotmail.com writes: Plasma in reactors echoes distribution of galaxies 11 June 2005 NewScientist.com news service Mark Anderson NUCLEAR fusion reactors could be used to study what the universe was like just after the big bang. So claims a physicist who noticed that the plasma created inside these reactors is distributed in a strikingly similar way to galaxies in today's universe. Nils Basse of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology does not normally concern himself with events in the early universe. Instead, he studies turbulence in the plasma created in fusion reactors. But when he chanced upon the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) - which is mapping a quarter of the sky in detail - he noticed something uncanny. The mathematical equation governing the distribution of voids and galaxies looks remarkably like the one describing the millimetre-sized knots and clots of plasma in the Wendelstein 7-AS "stellarator" fusion reactor in Garching, Germany (Physics Letters A, vol 340, p 456). Basse argues that the distribution of galaxies today could be the result of variations in the density of plasma after the big bang. "I think it all comes from turbulence in the very early universe," he says. "[The galaxy distribution today] is just a blow-up of what was going on at that point." This suggests that stellarator reactors could serve as models of the early universe. But cosmologist Daniel Eisenstein of the University of Arizona in Tucson, who works on the SDSS project, disagrees. He points out that the kind of plasma that Basse describes existed only for the first millisecond after the big bang, and that epoch ended too soon to influence the large scale structure of today's universe. Eisenstein calculates that the largest structure that could have arisen because of any such primordial density variations would only stretch a few light years across today. ?The plasma created inside fusion reactors is distributed in a strikingly similar way to galaxies in today's universe?Eisenstein also says that Basse's claim is difficult to reconcile with the results of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which has mapped the distribution of the oldest light in the universe dating back to some 380,000 years after the big bang. This "baby picture" of the cosmos yields markedly different density fluctuations to the SDSS map. "I don't see any way to get turbulence into this mix without throwing out all the [WMAP] data," Eisenstein says. "And that's very powerful data." >From issue 2503 of New Scientist magazine, 11 June 2005, page 8 ---------- 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: Youthactivism.org; 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 shovland at mindspring.com Fri Jun 10 14:00:38 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 07:00:38 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Stanford: New global wind map may lead to cheaper power supply Message-ID: <01C56D8A.1C263E70.shovland@mindspring.com> Stanford researchers have produced a new map that pinpoints where the world's winds are fast enough to produce power. The map may help planners place turbines in locations that maximize power harnessed from winds and provide widely available low-cost energy. After analyzing more than 8,000 wind-speed measurements to identify the world's wind-power potential for the first time, Cristina Archer, a former postdoctoral fellow, and Mark Z. Jacobson, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, suggest that wind captured at specific locations, if even partially harnessed, can generate more than enough power to satisfy the world's energy demands. Their report appears in the May Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. "The main implication of this study is that wind, for low-cost wind energy, is more widely available than was previously recognized," said Archer, now a researcher at the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. The researchers collected wind-speed measurements from approximately 7,500 surface stations and 500 balloon-launch stations to determine global wind speeds at 80 meters (300 feet) above the ground surface, which is the hub height of modern wind turbines. Using a new interpolation technique to estimate the wind speed at hub height, the authors reported that nearly 13 percent of the stations had average annual wind speeds strong enough for power generation. Wind speeds of 6.9 meters per second (15 miles per hour) at hub height, referred to as wind power Class 3, were found in every region of the world. Some of the strongest winds were observed in Northern Europe, along the North Sea, while the southern tip of South America and the Australian island of Tasmania also featured sustained strong winds. North America had the greatest wind-power potential, however, with the most consistent winds found in the Great Lakes region and from ocean breezes along coasts. Ove rall, the researchers calculated hub-height winds traveled over the ocean at approximately 8.6 meters per second and at nearly 4.5 meters per second over land (20 and 10 miles per hour, respectively). The authors found that the locations with sustainable Class 3 winds could produce approximately 72 terawatts. A terawatt is 1 trillion watts, the power generated by more than 500 nuclear reactors or thousands of coal-burning plants. Capturing even a fraction of those 72 terawatts could provide the 1.6 to 1.8 terawatts that made up the world's electricity usage in 2000. Converting as little as 20 percent of potential wind energy to electricity could satisfy the entirety of the world's energy demands. The study, supported by NASA and Stanford's Global Climate and Energy Project, may assist in locating wind farms in regions known for strong and consistent breezes. In addition, the researchers suggest that the inland locations of many existing wind farms may explain their inefficiency. "It is our hope that this study will foster more research in areas that were not covered by our data, or economic analyses of the barriers to the implementation of a wind-based global energy scenario," Archer said. From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 10 23:42:58 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 19:42:58 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Boston Phoenix: All classed up and nowhere to go Message-ID: All classed up and nowhere to go http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/multi_3/documents/04731992.asp 5.6.5 Issue Date: June 3 - 9, 2005 [Part 2 appended.] The New York Times goes slumming: How the papers allegiance to the ruling elite distorts its look at class in America BY CHRIS LEHMANN _________________________________________________________________ AT FIRST GLANCE, "Class Matters" the New York Times epic inquiry into the widening economic divisions of the new millennium appears to be what its editors solemnly claim: a well-intentioned effort to reckon with a serious social condition, one that notoriously eludes clear understanding in America, so long hymned as the planets pre-eminent land of opportunity. Alas, however, the New York Times is in no position to deliver. In contrast to, say, the papers conscientious reporting on the 60s-era civil-rights movement in the South, its foray into class consciousness suffers from a fatal flaw. Social class is at the core of the Times institutional identity, which prevents the paper from offering the sort of dispassionate, critically searching discussion the subject demands. Even as the paper takes hits for its alleged liberal bias, it retains a supremely undeviating affinity for the cultural habits of the rich and celebrated most obviously in its Sunday Vows section, which features short celebratory biographies of newly consummated mateships from the overclass. The Sunday Styles section along with the Home and Dining sections, the T: Style magazine, and the recently added Thursday Styles delivers breathless dispatches on the mores, tastes, status worries, and modes of pecuniary display favored by the coming generation of anxious downtown arrivistes. So the many installments of "Class Matters" a now nearly completed work in progress come across less like an authoritative exercise in social criticism than like an oddly anxious series of Tourettes-style asides, desperately sidestepping the core economic inequities that the Times can never quite afford to mention outright. Getting the New York Times to explain the real operation of social class in America is, at the end of the day, a lot like granting your parents exclusive license to explain sex to you: there are simply far too many conflicts that run far too deep to result in any reliable account of how the thing works. YOU CAN SEE the trouble early on, in what serves as the seriess mission statement: the pledge, in the May 15 first-installment "Overview" piece by Janny Scott and David Leonhardt, that they will chart the way "class influences destiny in America." For most people on the receiving end of class prerogatives in this country unskilled service workers who find it all but illegal to form unions, say, or poor black voters in Ohio and Florida theres no "influences" about it: class is destiny in America, delimiting access to basic social benefits like health care, education, job training, and affordable housing. Yet for all sorts of painfully self-evident institutional reasons, the New York Times cant afford to approach a subject this potent in a straightforward fashion. Instead Scott and Leonhardt marshal their readers through a leisurely tour of hoary American social mythology. America, they purr, "has gone a long way toward the appearance of classlessness" meaning, one supposes, that the downwardly mobile middle classes are actually thriving on the appearance of being in possession of wealth and disposable income, as though, by analogy, it would have been perfectly acceptable to report design upgrades in segregated Southern drinking fountains as a meaningful advance for black civil rights. "Social diversity," they explain, "has erased many of the markers" separating the countrys haves from the have-nots. Yet they fail to recognize that a more socially diverse ruling class remains a ruling class, after all an uncomfortable truth easily overlooked when one is writing for an influential organ of said ruling class. Not surprisingly, then, the closer Scott and Leonhardt circle toward the heart of the matter how some Americans leverage social advantage into greater wealth and privilege, and how many, many more have seen wealth, educational opportunity, disposable income, and job security stagnate or decline while household debt and health-care costs soar the more ungainly and vague everything becomes. Still, Scott and Leonhardt are forced to concede a stubborn social fact: "Americans are arguably more likely than they were 30 years ago to end up in the same class into which they were born." Here the dogged reader is at last primed to reckon with a sharp point of analytical departure: the storied American Dream of social mobility across generations appears to be stalled. Instead, however, the authors lurch into more bootless mythmaking: "Merit has replaced the old system of inherited privilege.... But merit, it turns out, is at least partly class-based. Parents with money, education, and connections cultivate in their children the habits the meritocracy rewards." Well, no. Parents with connections, education, and money place their considerable resources directly at their offsprings disposal. What results has everything to do with openly legible lines of power, and very nearly nothing to do with the cultivation of meritocracy-pleasing behavioral "habits" as any cursory glance at the Oval Offices present occupant or the cast of The Simple Life will instantly confirm. Meritocracy is an especially obtrusive and unstable term here, since neither Scott nor Leonhardt nor scarcely any uncritical champion of meritocracy in our time pauses to note the original meaning of the term. The concept of meritocracy first surfaced in a 1958 satirical political novel, The Rise of the Meritocracy, by old-line British socialist Michael Young. Youngs coinage was not intended to describe a system of impartial upward advancement, but rather the diametric opposite: a dystopian social order wherein bureaucratic rank outstripped wealth and title as the measure of human advancement. The irony in Youngs book, of course, was that the egalitarian nomenclature of this brave new order of which the word meritocracy was itself a prime example masked a system of spoils and rewards that was fast becoming much less fair and balanced than the old British class society it was thought to have supplanted. Only in America or more precisely, only in the A section of the New York Times could a bitter term of Old World satire gain traction as a straight-faced descriptor of a sunny status quo. NOT SURPRISINGLY, the twinned notions of Right Conduct and Meritocratic Worth have shaped every subsequent installment of "Class Matters." The first reported piece, by the redoubtable Janny Scott, explores the consequences of unequal access to quality health care, by reconstructing three heart-attack cases affecting, in socially descending order, a well-heeled architect, an electric-company office worker, and an immigrant Polish maid. This comparative exercise does a pretty good job how could it not? of showing what happens when the basic right to critical health care is submitted to the markets less-than-tender mercies. Until, that is, Scott joins the hapless maid on a grocery-shopping junket and loses all patience: "Cruising the 99 Cent Wonder store in [Brooklyns] Williamsburg, where the freezers were filled with products like Budget Gourmet Rigatoni with Cream Sauce, [the maid, Ms. Gora] pulled down a small package of pistachios: two and a half servings, 13 grams of fat per serving. I can eat five of these, she confessed, ignoring the nutrition label. Not servings. Bags." Not servings, people! Bags! When Times scribes are reduced to sentence fragments, you know their patrician forbearance is running dangerously low. And how can you blame them, considering that the pistachio episode follows a sobering litany of other trespasses? When first stricken with her heart attack, Gora dismissed her husbands suggestion that she was seriously ill and needed an ambulance, and instead tried to collect herself with a glass of vodka; against explicit doctors advice, she sneaks cigarettes and doughnuts, and even clips a cockamamie diet from a Polish magazine that permits her to eat generous portions of fried food and steak. And so Scotts telltale moment of exasperation carries an unmistakable subtext: Theres just nothing to be done with these people. Never mind that Goras behavior suggests that she is also suffering an extended, and completely understandable, bout of depression an all-too-common health affliction among the working poor. Why extend anything like universally available health care to a group of people so willfully perverse? All classed up and nowhere to go (continued) http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/multi_3/documents/04731991.asp Likewise, the next series installment, on marriage and class, completely neglects the subjects most historically significant recent development: how more affluent mates postpone marriage and childrearing through whats known euphemistically as "assortative mating" (i.e., the sort of closely vetted, intraclass pairings of the privileged featured every week in the Vows section of the Times), versus the considerable pressures within poor communities to marry early and procreate often. Instead, the main dispatch by Times reporter Tamar Lewin sets up elaborate social quandaries better suited to a Victorian novel than to 21st-century American life. It describes the course of a second marriage for both partners thats taken them beyond the reach of their familiar social stations: wife Cate Woolner is a rich heiress, husband Dan Croteau is a working-class car salesman. Its hard to suss out just what the social lesson of such a plainly atypical union is supposed to be. Apart, that is, from the manifest truth that, left to their own devices, the rich will always raise the most irritating children on earth ("[Woolners son] Isaac fantasizes about opening a brewery-cum-performance space, traveling through South America, or operating a sunset massage cruise on the Caribbean"). By Sunday, May 22s entry, a piece by Laurie Goodstein and David Kirkpatrick on the evangelical mission called the Christian Union, which is targeting the Ivy League elite, the Times reverts to full-on barbarians-at-the-gates-style culture alarmism. The piece is not even, in any clear way, about social class (at least not the destiny-inhibiting type adumbrated in the seriess mission statement), since Matt Bennett, the principal force behind the Christian Union, is heir to a Dallas-based hotel empire, and the one quasi-needy case in the piece, a sophomore missionary at Brown named Tim Havens, rather inconveniently declares himself pre-med by the storys end. And what is clearly meant to be a spit-take moment for Sunday-morning Times coffee drinkers Bennetts claim that God came to him in a vision and "was speaking to me very strongly that he wanted to see an increasing and dramatic spiritual revival in a place like Princeton" actually makes a good deal of sense when one recalls (as Kirkpatrick and Goodstein apparently do not) that Princeton was the intellectual capital of American fundamentalist theology in the early part of the last century. The reporters do mention briefly that most Ivy League schools in fact began life as "expressly Christian," but dwelling too long on such facts would clearly contradict the pieces half-baked social premise: that newer, and traditionally down-market, evangelical faiths are now storming the citadels of American intellectual privilege. For May 24s installment the midpoint entry in the series Leonhardt offers a predictably baffled piece on the most perverse of working-class mores: the refusal to attend college for full four-year terms. Leonhardt telescopes this chilling trend through the saga of Andy Blevins, a 29-year-old produce buyer for a big-box retail warehouse in small-town rural Virginia. Blevins dropped out after his freshman year at Radford University; he plans to return to school part-time, though, in order to earn a degree and teaching credentials in elementary education, even though the vast majority of returning college dropouts never complete their degrees. The overall high failure and dropout rates among Americas poor and working class admit to no "simple answer," Leonhardt writes. There is, to be sure, the vulgar question of money, he notes. Tuitions that routinely outstrip the rate of inflation, and the specter of contracting long-term five- or six-figure loans, are strong, sobering deterrents. For Leonhardt, however, economic inequality can provide only a glancing explanation of class inequities culture has to be where the real action is. After ticking off the formidable financial obstacles posed by higher education, Leonhardt primly announces that "the deterrents to a [college] degree can also be homegrown. Many low-income teenagers know few people who have made it through college. A majority of the non-graduates are young men, and some come from towns where the factory work ethic, to get working as soon as possible, remains strong, even if the factories themselves are vanishing. Whatever the reason, college just does not feel normal." Its worth noting that such cultural delicacy did not seem to prevent FDR from signing the GI Bill into law, thereby dispatching the largest-ever contingent of working-class American men to elite university campuses. There was little apparent fuss about how these entering students processed their unfamiliar cultural surroundings, once the federal government brought tuition costs into reasonable alignment with their living standards. Nonetheless, the paper of record, with its condescending cultural exoticism, once again dwells lovingly on behavior and culture rather than on cold economic facts. Leonhardt mentions the gruesome inequity that, thanks to the Bush administrations recent cuts to the Pell-grant program, "high-income students, on average, actually get slightly more financial aid than low-income students." But apart from some vague discussion of the emerging vogue for need-conscious class-based affirmative action, he cant connect the obvious dots here: that without universal, federally funded support, the prospect of a full tour in the world of higher education ranks somewhere alongside winning the lottery in the pantheon of plausible working-class life outcomes. Instead, Leonhardt frets on and on about the boneheaded call the 19-year-old Blevins made when he dropped out, and the extreme unlikelihood, despite the guys professed best intentions, that any good will come of his pitiful bid to reinvent himself. And should the wall-eyed voyeurism of the piece leave any doubt, the front-page photo speaks volumes: it shows Blevins indolently sprawled on his living-room sofa, gaping at a football game on TV, while keeping a bottle shoved in the gullet of his three-year-old son, Luke, whose head dangles perilously over the edge of the couch. This, the casual reader is urged to conclude, is just the sort of layabout behavioral pathology that keeps working-class families from achieving serious upward mobility. Yet the text makes clear that Blevins doesnt have a great deal of time to devote to semiconscious gridiron gawking, since he routinely works six-day weeks, at shifts of 10 hours or more. This image, like most feature subjects in "Class Matters," seems clearly intended to trigger a quiet shudder of patrician thanksgiving that Times readers really do not go there but for the grace of God. SUBSEQUENT SERIES installments perform the same reassuring alchemy, transmuting the raw stuff of material deprivation into judiciously arms-length cultural perplexity. A May 25 dispatch on immigrant-laborer tensions at Uma Thurmans favorite diner trails off into puzzlement over how immigrant managers resist unionization of other immigrant workers in their employ. (Dont they know that social diversity abolishes class distinction? That a Greek restaurant owner is supposed to embrace his Latino busboys and waitstaff in a gorgeous mosaic of service-economy unity?) Another blowout Sunday entry, on May 29, found the Times returning with palpable relief to a subject on which it wields genuine authority: how and why luxury shopping is failing to perfectly mirror hard-core American socioeconomic divisions. Jennifer Steinhauer registers the perfect ruffled tone of disbelief as she reports on the decline of true luxury consumption in America, as more middle-class people get into deeper debt to make high-end purchases like cruises and designer chocolates. For a paper that routinely lavishes acres of adoring prose on the shopping preferences of the fabulously well-to-do, this sort of news has roughly the same effect that Andres Serranos Piss Christ photograph exercised on the Catholic League: "Rising incomes, flattening prices, and easily available credit have given so many Americans access to such a wide array of high-end goods that traditional markers of status have lost much of their meanings." For devout Times scribes, this, truly, is the world turned upside down. An unintentionally hilarious graphic accompanying the main body of the piece "Swells and Neer-Do-Wells: A Class Timeline" echoes the same clear longing for the snappy, superficial navigation of social distinction. Here is one of its final bullet points: "1989: The Berlin Wall falls. Marxisms vision of a classless society is out; global capitalism is in." There you have it: a watershed moment in modern democratic revolution worded in the style of an America Idol ballot. Dont dare remind our glib Times editors that Marx himself foresaw the triumph of global capitalism as the precursor to his vision of a classless society. Theyre telling you whats in, and there could be no more fitting final word on the subject from a journalistic oracle of the Times stature except, that is, to turn from all this messy, unresolved class nastiness to the crisp and clean business-as-usual digests in the Sundays Vows column. Chris Lehman is a writer based in Washington, DC, and author of Revolt of the Masscult (Prickly Paradigm, 2003). He can be reached at [47]lehmannchris at mac.com From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 10 23:43:15 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 19:43:15 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] American Enterprise: Conformity on Campus Message-ID: Conformity on Campus American Enterprise, 2005 June http://www.theamericanenterprise.org/issues/articleID.18528/article_detail.asp First, the summary from CHE: News bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.6.9 http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/06/2005060901j.htm Magazine & Journal Reader A glance at the June issue of The American Enterprise: The bully pulpit in academe Not only do an increasing number of professors at colleges around the country have liberal political affiliations, they are bringing their politics into the classroom, to the detriment of their students, three authors argue. Anne D. Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a national group that advocates a traditional curriculum, describes a study that her organization commissioned of undergraduates from 50 of the top-ranked colleges in the country. She reports that almost a third of the respondents said that they felt that they had to agree with their professor's political stance to get a good grade. Forty-six percent said that professors used the classroom to present their political views. Such responses came not only from conservatives, she writes, adding that a majority were from students who identified themselves as liberal. "One simply cannot deny, after these findings, that faculty are importing politics into their teaching in a way that affects a student's ability to learn," she writes. David A. French, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, says that his organization "received more than 500 credible complaints of deprivation of civil liberties" on campuses last year, and that most of the complaints concerned suppression of speech by those on the "left." "We're reaching a tipping point," he writes. "The higher-education establishment will either open itself back up to the full marketplace of ideas, or it will see its ivy-covered walls battered down by force -- whether class-action litigation or extreme legislation." The article also includes an excerpt from an essay written for The New York Observer by Fred Siegel, a professor of history at the Cooper Union in New York City. "Far from teaching the mechanics of knowledge," Mr. Siegel writes, college professors "are in fact preachers of sorts, spreading a gospel akin to that of Howard Dean." The article, "Conformity on Campus," is online at [53]http://www.theamericanenterprise.org/issues/articleID.18528/articl e_detail.asp --Eric Wills _________________________________________________________________ Background articles from The Chronicle: * [54]Left-Wing Bias in Education Schools Is Overstated by Conservative Critics, 2 Reports Suggest (5/26/2005) * [55]Conservative Professors Are Less Likely to Advance in Academe, Study Finds (3/31/2005) * [56]This Just In: Democrats Outnumber Republicans on American Faculties, Studies Find (11/19/2004) * [57]Conservatives in a Liberal Landscape (9/24/2004) * [58]Patrolling Professors' Politics (2/13/2004) Opinion: * [59]When Students Complain About Professors, Who Gets to Define the Controversy? (5/13/2005) * [60]Conservatives, Too, Are Politicizing Campuses (3/18/2005) * [61]Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual (11/12/2004) References 53. http://www.theamericanenterprise.org/issues/articleID.18528/article_detail.asp 54. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/05/2005052605n.htm 55. http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/03/2005033102n.htm 56. http://chronicle.com/daily/2004/11/2004111905n.htm 57. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i05/05a00801.htm 58. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i23/23a01801.htm 59. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i36/36b01201.htm 60. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i28/28b02001.htm 61. http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i12/12b00601.htm E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles. ----------------- Conformity on Campus By Anne Neal, David French, Fred Siegel We hear a lot these days about the importance of diversity in ensuring that ideas are heard fairly. But the individuals who are most insistent about this are interested only in racial and sex diversity. Intellectual and ideological diversity is not what the enforcers of political correctness on campuses and other sectors have in mind. This magazine has helped pioneer evidence of how politically unbalanced most college campuses have become. Most recently (see our January/February 2005 issue) we presented the findings of University of California economist Daniel Klein, who found that the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in social sciences and humanities faculty nationwide is at least 8:1. At universities like Stanford and Berkeley it is 16:1 in favor of Democrats. Twenty-five years ago, the ratio was less skewed, at 4:1. In the future it is going to be even more skewed. Among the young junior faculty at Stanford and Berkeley, there are now 183 Democrats, and just six Republicans--a 30:1 tilt. As today's older professors retire, political lopsidedness will grow even more extreme. After years of denying the ideological uniformity of colleges, this accumulated evidence has now caused many academics to shift to claiming that the lack of political diversity on campus doesn't matter. It doesn't affect what gets taught, they say. But in a recent panel discussion at the American Enterprise Institute, two experts warned that academic one-sidedness matters very much indeed, and is clearly having harmful results. We present their statements below, along with an extract from one professor's recent pointed analysis of this subject. Anne Neal President of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni There are now countless stories (and large volumes of hard data) about political pressure in college classrooms, and faculty hostility to non-liberal viewpoints. When confronted with this evidence, what did the higher education establishment do? Did it conduct its own surveys to see if the claims were valid? Did it try to determine whether the education of students was being impaired? Did it affirm its commitment to the robust exchange of ideas? No. It offered the classic institutional dodge: Deny the facts and attack the accuser. Roger Bowen, president of the American Association of University Professors, stated that political affiliations are of little consequence in the classroom. Professor of political science David Kimball asserted that "any concerns about indoctrination are overblown." John Millsaps, a spokesman for the University of Georgia, insisted "we have no evidence to suggest that students are being intimidated by professors as regards students' freedom to express their opinions and beliefs." My organization, which represents college trustees and alumni, wanted to move beyond anecdotes and test the claim that politics was not affecting the classroom. So we commissioned the Center for Survey Research and Analysis at the University of Connecticut to undertake a scientific survey of undergraduates in the top 50 colleges and universities, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. We went right to the student population who are directly affected, who have no reason to misrepresent what is happening there, and asked them about their experiences. What did we find? Forty-nine percent of students stated that professors frequently inject political comments into their courses even if they have nothing to do with the subject. When we asked students if they felt free to question their professors' assumptions, almost one third said they felt they had to agree with their professor's political view to get a good grade. We also explored whether students were being exposed to competing arguments on today's issues. Forty-eight percent of all students reported that presentations on political issues seemed completely one-sided, and 46 percent said professors used the classroom to present their personal political views. Forty-two percent said reading assignments represented only one side of a controversial issue. The students voicing concerns are not a small minority--nearly half reported abuses of one kind or another. And they are not just conservatives: a majority of the respondents consider themselves liberals or radicals. Moreover, the majority of the students we surveyed are studying subjects like biology, engineering, and psychology--where there is no reason for politics to enter the classroom in the first place. It does anyway: Fully 68 percent of all students heard their professors make negative classroom comments about George Bush, versus 17 percent who were exposed to criticisms of John Kerry. One simply cannot deny, after these findings, that faculty are importing politics into their teaching in a way that affects a student's ability to learn. This should trouble us all. Responsible academic freedom involves not only the professors' prerogatives, but also the freedom of students to learn free of political indoctrination. David French President of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education Faced with clear evidence that colleges lack ideological diversity, many campus apologists say "So what?" At FIRE, which represents students in academic freedom battles, we face the question "so what?" every day. And I can assure you the problem of ideological uniformity on campus goes far beyond the fact that many red-state suburban kids now get their views attacked in the classroom. Ideological uniformity in higher education has led to daily, systematic deprivation of the civil liberties of students and professors. First, ideological uniformity has led to the suppression of dissenting speech. I'm not talking about extreme expressions of dissent; I'm talking about things such as an "affirmative action" bake sale sponsored by that notorious radical organization, the College Republicans. I'm talking about students who question whether an academic department should show Fahrenheit 9/11 in all classes before the election to persuade students to vote for Kerry. These aren't isolated cases. In 2004, FIRE received more than 500 credible complaints of deprivation of civil liberties on campus. We surveyed the speech policies of the 200 leading universities and found freedom-squelching speech codes at 70 percent of those schools. In the last four years, as many as 50 universities have made attempts to eject evangelical student organizations, or to restrict them so thoroughly as to effectively rob them of their distinct religious voices. At many campuses, students are subjected from the moment they arrive to mandatory "orientations" and diversity training designed to shock many of them out of the views they bring from home. At FIRE, we have people from across the ideological spectrum on our staff and on our board. And even the most dyed-in-the-wool liberal on our staff will acknowledge that 80-85 percent of our cases involve suppression of speech by the Left. We're reaching a tipping point. The higher education establishment will either open itself back up to the full marketplace of ideas, or it will see its ivy-covered walls battered down by force--whether class action litigation or extreme legislation. We have reached the point where the self-regulation of higher education is no longer credible. Universities say it's people like me, red staters who grew up in middle-class suburbs, who need their views challenged. In my experience, the exact reverse is true. I went to a Christian undergraduate school and then went to law school at Harvard, and I can tell you that the professors at my Christian college were more open to challenges to campus orthodoxy than my professors at Harvard Law School. When I applied to teach at Cornell Law School, an interviewer noticed my evangelical background and asked, "How is it possible for you to effectively teach gay students?" If I had not given what I consider to be, in all modesty, an absolutely brilliant answer to the question, I don't think I would have gotten the job. I sat in admissions committee meetings at Cornell in which African-American students who expressed conservative points of view were disfavored because "they had not taken ownership of their racial identity." An evangelical student was almost rejected before I pointed out that the reviewer's statement that "they did not want Bible-thumping or God-squading on campus" was illegal and immoral. Academics who say "so what?" need to realize that ideological uniformity leads to restrictive speech codes and the suppression of Constitutionally protected speech on campus. It leads to the exclusion of people of faith from campuses. It twists hiring and admissions and classroom discussion. No campus official should define what is orthodox in politics, religion, or law. Yet that happens every day to thousands of students. It is a deprivation of their civil liberties, and it will stop sooner or later, one way or another. The real question is: Will the academy wake up and begin to put its own house in order, or will it act like Dan Rather--delaying reform until an entire culture has revolted, then shuffling off into oblivion muttering about a right-wing conspiracy? Fred Siegel Professor of history at New York City's Cooper Union Academia, taken as a whole, has become dominated by freeze-dried 1960s radicals and their intellectual progeny, who have turned much of the humanities and social sciences into a backwater. In 1989, when Eastern Europeans were reclaiming the ideals of human rights and political freedom, students and faculty on the Stanford campus were marching with 1988 Presidential candidate Jesse Jackson shouting "Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture's got to go." Up the road, Berkeley--dominated by its university--announced it was adopting Jena in communist East Germany as a sister city, this just a few months before the wall fell. Academics have been getting it wrong over and over again. Criminologists were convinced that crime couldn't be cut; sociologists were sure that welfare reform couldn't work because it didn't go to the root causes of poverty; and Sovietologists were certain that the USSR of the 1980s had matured into a successful, even pluralistic society. As for radical Islam, the consensus view of the Middle Eastern Studies Association was that the danger to America came from a "terror industry" conjuring up imagined threats in order to justify American aggression. But even as academia's batting average has declined, its claim to superior knowledge has expanded. The old ideal of disinterested scholarship, or at least the importance of attempting to be objective, has been displaced. In 2003 the University of California's Academic Assembly did away with the distinction between "interested" and "disinterested" scholarship by a 45-3 vote. As Berkeley law professor Robert Post explained, "the old statement of principles was so outlandishly disconnected to what university teaching is now that it made no sense to think about it that way." The reality, as Post recognized, is that many professors now literally profess. Far from teaching the mechanics of knowledge, they are in fact preachers of sorts, spreading a gospel akin to that of Howard Dean. For professors part of grievance studies departments, like "Indian" poseur Ward Churchill, there was never any expectation of objectivity. They were knowingly hired as activists and are now puzzled as to why this has become a problem for some of their students and the larger public. After all, what they preach is built into the very orientation students are given when they arrive on campus. New students at many schools are quite literally given a new faith. In the absence of intellectual competition (other than the disputes between left and lefter), academia will continue to get it wrong. This might be of limited concern if not for the fact that the sheltered students who emerge from this one-party state are left bereft of any means of negotiating with reality once they engage in politics as adults. Instead of being given the background knowledge of American institutions they need to make judgments as citizens, they are fed attitudes. Credulous undergraduates fall prey to priestly performers who claim to be initiating them into the subterranean mysteries. Those who buy into this worldview are left both insufferably pretentious and substantively silly. This is condensed from an essay Siegel wrote for the New York Observer. From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 10 23:44:56 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 19:44:56 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NYT: DNA of Deadbeat Voles May Hint at Why Some Fathers Turn Out to Be Rats Message-ID: DNA of Deadbeat Voles May Hint at Why Some Fathers Turn Out to Be Rats http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/10/science/10behave.html By [3]NICHOLAS WADE Some male prairie voles are devoted fathers and faithful partners, while others are less satisfactory on both counts. The spectrum of behavior is shaped by a genetic mechanism that allows for quick evolutionary changes, two researchers from Emory University report in today's issue of Science. The mechanism depends on a highly variable section of DNA involved in controlling a gene. The Emory researchers who found it, Elizabeth A. D. Hammock and Larry J. Young, say they have detected the same mechanism embedded in the sequence of human DNA but do not yet know how it may influence people's behavior. Voles, not to be confused with the burrowing, hill-making mole, are mouselike rodents with darker coats and fatter tails. The control section of their DNA expands and contracts in the course of evolution so that members of a wild population of voles, the Emory researchers have found, will carry sections of many different lengths. Male voles with a long version of the control section are monogamous and devoted to their pups, whereas those with shorter versions are less so. People have the same variability in their DNA, with a control section that comes in at least 17 lengths detected so far, Dr. Young said. So should women seek men with the longest possible DNA control region in the hope that, like the researchers' voles, they will display "increased probability of preferences for a familiar-partner female over a novel-stranger female"? Dr. Young said he expected that any such genetic effect in men would be influenced by culture, and thus hard to predict on an individual basis. The control mechanism is also present in humans' two closest cousins, the chimpanzee and the bonobo, and bears on a controversy as to which of the two species humans more closely resemble. Chimpanzees operate territorially based societies controlled by males who conduct often-lethal raids on neighboring groups. Bonobos, which look much like chimps, are governed by female hierarchies and facilitate almost every social interaction with copious sex. The DNA sequence of humans, chimps and bonobos is generally very similar, but in the section that controls response to the hormone vasopressin, the Emory researchers have found the human and bonobo versions differ significantly from that of the chimp. Though not too much can be deduced from a single gene, the result shows that bonobos should be taken very seriously as a guide to human behavior and that the chimp is not the only model, said Dr. Frans de Waal of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta. Dr. de Waal, who is writing a book, "The Inner Ape," said the last common ancestor of all three species presumably possessed the elements of both chimp and bonobo behavior, and that humans also "unite all these aspects." The effects of vasopressin on the behavior of the three higher primates is not well understood, but has been studied in voles for many years. The hormone, generated by the pituitary gland at the base of the brain, makes male prairie voles form monogamous pair bonds, but has no similar effect in the determinedly polygamous montane vole. The Emory researchers recently noticed that in their prairie vole colony, some fathers spent more time with their pups and some less. They traced the source of this variability to its molecular roots, a variation in the length of the DNA region that controls a certain gene. This is the gene for the vasopressin receptor, the device used by neurons to respond to vasopressin. Voles with long and short DNA segments had different patterns of vasopressin receptors in their brains, which presumably changed their response to the hormone. The long and short DNA segments differ by only 19 DNA units, mostly the same two units repeated over and over. The repeats are notorious for confusing the DNA copying apparatus, which every few generations or so may insert an extra repeat or delete one. The random changes have generated a spectrum of lengths in the voles that in turn underlies the variability in behavior, the Emory researchers say. They proved the point by separating voles with the shortest length and longest length of DNA and showing that their progeny differed in behavior. Dr. Young said he suspected that many other genes that influenced behavior, in voles and other species, might have fallen under similar control systems. Because the DNA repeats are so variable, they generate diversity more quickly than most other types of mutation. And a population whose individuals show a range of behavior is more likely to include some who can better adapt to a new situation. Dr. Gene Robinson, an expert in social behavior at the University of Illinois, said the new finding was "a significant advance in sociogenomics," the attempt to explain social life in terms of DNA, because it showed how easily behavior could be changed just by altering a gene's activity, not the gene itself. For a long time, researchers have assumed the genetic control of behavior would be too complex a problem to address. "The nice thing about this story is that it tells you it's not complex," Dr. Young said. From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 10 23:45:05 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 19:45:05 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Philapa Inquirer: Moral minefields Message-ID: Moral minefields Philapa Inquirer, 5.6.8 http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/magazine/daily/11839018.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp Ethical landmines are everywhere - business, politics, the grocery store. Why is dodging them so tough these days? By Jeff Gammage Inquirer Staff Writer Even before Mark Felt provoked a gale of accusation and retort by identifying himself as Watergate's secretive Deep Throat, the issue at the heart of his role had taken on a new and pressing prominence: Ethics. Today the question of ethics - who has them, who doesn't, and the ramifications for both - is generating news and disagreement from boardroom to bedroom to jury room. "It's become like a national pastime, commenting on it, and talking about it," says Buie Seawell, former Senate chief of staff to Gary Hart, a man who knows something about ethical puzzles. Thirty years ago, when Deep Throat was spilling secrets to Bob Woodward, not much was known or made of his motivations. But when Felt stepped forward last week - he'd been deputy director of the FBI during the scandal - everyone from casual Watergate followers to convicted Watergate felons had an opinion on whether he was a saint or a villain. Today everybody's behavior - even that of the self-proclaimed hero of Watergate - is fair game. What's changed? Everything. Unprecedented amounts of information have moved as close as the computer keyboard, from there zapped across the country and around the world. The Web has given a platform to everyone from the bank president to the blogger. Round-the-clock news networks like CNN and Fox turn an unblinking eye on America's leaders and celebrities. And when something goes wrong, people hear about it almost instantly - and continuously. Today the event that precipitated the Watergate scandal - a break-in at Democratic headquarters - would lead the headlines on CNN every 15 minutes. "Dirty laundry is not as easy to hide," says David Steingard, assistant director of the Pedro Arrupe Center for Business Ethics at St. Joseph's University. Something else is different too, one expert argues, and it's not good: Today, cheaters do prosper. Kirk Hanson, a Santa Clara University ethicist, believes we've created a winner-take-all society, a place where infinitely greater reward flows from being just a little bit better than the rest. By, say, hitting a few more home runs, or being first with a scientific breakthrough. Back in 1988, Hanson writes in the San Jose Mercury News, the best-paid baseball player earned $2.3 million. Last year the top pay was $20 million. In 1980, CEOs earned 40 times the salary of the average worker, but by 2000 they were earning 400 times more. That's powerful incentive to get to the top, even if it means cutting corners. Others - including the convicted - argue that media saturation has muddied the ethical terrain: It's wrong to copy your term paper from the Internet, but no big deal to skip the book and read the Cliff Notes. Shoplifting is a crime, but nibbling from the bulk-food bin is just tasting. It's fine to take home a company pen in your pocket, but don't walk out with a ream of paper. In an interview after his conviction in the pay-to-play investigation, former Philadelphia treasurer Corey Kemp said no one ever told him what gifts he could and couldn't accept. The jury found the evidence overwhelming, and today Kemp faces prison for trading access to his office for money and trips to the Super Bowl and NBA finals. Kemp isn't the only one hurt by his malfeasance, ethicists say. Citizens paid - in failed government, in damaged reputation. Commerce Bank paid. The price of its stock immediately fell 6 percent when two of its executives were convicted in the same case. Investors paid, too: The drop in stock cost them $276 million in share value. Since then the stock has largely recovered, although it hasn't regained the momentum that once made it a favorite of brokers and investors. These days, experts say, it's clear that the stakes are enormous, that ethical breaches can generate cascades of repercussions, not just for corrupt public officials but for hard-working, everyday people who don't know they're going along for the ride. o Suppose you're rushing through the line at Wawa and the clerk mistakenly hands you an extra $20 in change. It might seem harmless to pocket the bill. But it's not, ethicists say. The first harm is to ourselves: You have to help create the society you want to live in. "The daily things," Steingard says, "that's where you're made or broken." That's not just a nice sentiment. Lagging ethics incur costs for society - for surveillance cameras, computer monitoring, drug tests, security guards. There's evidence that poor ethics weakens productivity, that output declines when workers don't trust one another. Such real-world expense helps explain why many agencies, organizations and companies are stepping up efforts to enforce ethical standards. In government, scores of codes have been enacted since the Watergate crimes of the 1970s, and more are being written today. In Philadelphia, City Council has passed a package of bills that, if approved by voters this fall, would impose more stringent ethical standards on local government. Does that proliferation mean we've become a less ethical society? It's hard to know. One man's blatant violation can be another's technicality. To Democrats, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is the embodiment of seamy behavior, wrongly accepting overseas trips from lobbyists. To Republicans, he's the victim of a partisan witch hunt. Ethical questions that seem clear-cut in theory - I would never lie - can become complicated in reality. Sometimes the ethical thing is to lie. "There are certain situations," says Filipino activist Baltazar Pinguel, of the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia, "where you decide in favor of life." As a political prisoner of the Marcos regime, Pinguel was presented with a false confession and a choice: Sign it or die. He signed. Most of us never face such stark alternatives. But we do face dozens of small ethical questions every day, and we answer most without even knowing we've been asked. o The next time you belly up to the counter, deciding between a Big Mac and a Quarter Pounder, consider this: Is it ethical to eat a cow? Hindus believe it a holy violation. And groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals insist animals are not ours to use, even for food. If you can't swallow that argument, think about the bun on your burger, and the buns at McDonald's everywhere: All that grain. All those needy relief agencies. In a world of finite resources, which is the greater good, their supplies or your lunch? It doesn't stop there. How does the company treat the counter clerk? Does she get fair pay, medical coverage, sick time? It's a lot to consider when all you want is a Number Four Value Meal. "I had a steak the other night at TGI Friday's, and I didn't think a whirl about it," says Jack Hill. And he's an ethicist. But seriously, says Hill, who teaches at Texas Christian University, living an ethical life is becoming increasingly complex. New sciences such as cloning challenge the very nature of what it means to be human. We maintain strong ethical traditions - stealing is wrong - but ideals, like "truth," have come to mean different things to different people. "The boundaries," Hill says, "are up for grabs." o When you heard that American Idol judge Paula Abdul had been accused of sleeping with a contestant, you probably had the same reaction as other fans: Who cares whom she dates? It's just a dopey TV show. But here's the problem, experts say: Ethics is ethics. And a judge - even one on TV - is presumed to be impartial. Theoretically, if the better talent was axed by tainted judging, that singer lost an entire career - record contract, riches, fame. He might even sue the network. "If you can't reason your way out of the Paula Abdul thing," says Steingard, the St. Joseph's professor, "how are you going to deal with it when the guy hands you back too much change at the store?" TEST YOUR ETHICS A variety of quizzes are online at [2]http://go.philly.com/ethicsquiz Quiz answers Question 1: If you answered no, you are correct. N.J.S.A. 52:13D-24.1 now prohibits legislators and members of their immediate family from accepting anything of value from a governmental affairs agent totaling more than $250 in a calendar year. The value of a week at the Shore house would exceed this amount for the assemblywoman and her husband. A pre-existing friendship between a legislator and a governmental affairs agent is not an exception to the ethics prohibition. Note: Such relationships are relevant in a criminal prosecution. Question 2: The answer is B. Sure, it might not solve the problem immediately, but then again, no one knows for certain if there even is a problem. Developing a policy with input from all will raise everyone's awareness of the issue and serve as an implicit warning to some to change their Internet-related behavior. Contact staff writer Jeff Gammage at [3]jgammage at phillynews.com or 215-854-2810. From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 10 23:47:48 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 19:47:48 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Science Daily: The Constitution Of A New Model Army: Genome Basis Of Working Together For A Common Good Message-ID: The Constitution Of A New Model Army: Genome Basis Of Working Together For A Common Good http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/06/050608102931.htm 5.6.9 Democratic elections are the times when the actions of the majority form the basis for the future of the whole; individual citizens gather together to take part in deciding how they all will live. On Thursday 5 May 2005, the biological constitution of a remarkable organism that votes with its feet was published in Nature by a team of scientists from the UK, USA, Germany, Japan and France. Dictyostelium discoideum, known as Dicty to researchers, spends most of its time living alone in the soil as a single-celled amoeba. However, in a food shortage the individual cells 'talk' to each other, aggregate and then develop into a multicellular organism that produces spores, the only survivors of the time of hunger. This unique and seemingly simple development has helped biologists understand how, for example, cells in the human immune system communicate and how that process can go wrong in disease. It is even being used to try to understand the treatment of bipolar disorder. Paul Dear, a lead scientist from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK, said, "Were it not for its tiny size and unwieldly name, Dictyostelium would be familiar to us all as one of the more bizarre forms of life on Earth. It represents a branch of life that we now know parted company from animals shortly after plants and animals went their separate ways. Its DNA sequence, now an open book for researchers worldwide, shares genes with plants, animals and fungi, and promises to shed light on many fundamental aspects of biology." As a single cell, Dicty is ideal for mutation - the first choice from the geneticists' toolbox - and many of its biochemical processes have been modified, revealing the underlying chemistry of life. But its development from single cell to true multicellular organism makes it more valuable as a model, allowing biologists to define the ways in which cells in complex organisms such as ourselves talk to each other. Cell communication is an absolute requirement for multicellular life. The genome sequence consists of 34 million base-pairs - letters of genetic code - that contain the instructions for 12,500 proteins - about half as many as the human genome and more than twice as many as simple yeasts. Among these are genes involved in complex processes characteristic of multicellular life - communication, adhesion, movement - that cannot be modelled in simpler species. However, Dicty is not a pared down human or a complex fungus. It shows a unique combination of conserved and lost functions that span the kingdoms of bacteria, plants and animals in a compact genome. "The genome of Dictyostelium discoideum is one of the most distinctive analysed so far, reflecting the intriguing biology of this organism," commented Marie-Adele Rajandream, leader of the sequencing component at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. "The chromosomes have an unusual structure, the genome is nearly 80% A and T residues, whereas our genome is 40% As and Ts, and it makes special use of ribosomal genes that is unique to known biology." More than one-tenth of the genome is composed of simple repeated sequences, 2-6 bases repeated over and over again. Expansion of the number of copies of simple repetitive sequences are characteristic of some human diseases, such as myotonic dystrophy and Huntington's disease, and understanding why and how these repeats are tolerated in Dicty will help to understand human disease development. A search for versions of genes in Dicty that resembled genes involved in human disease found that between 10 and 20% are conserved. These include nine cancer genes as well as genes similar to those implicated in human Parkinson's, Tay-Sachs and cystic fibrosis. For several decades, Dictyostelium has been studied in laboratories around the world as a perfect test-bed in which to study processes such as how cells move and how individual cells specialize and coordinate to form complex organisms. The solitary amoeba shares many features with our own cells, particularly those which patrol our bodies and engulf harmful bacteria. Just as important have been the insights into developmental biology - how all complex life forms develop from a single cell to a multicellular organism in which cells share duties and differentiate into specialized functions. When Dicty is starved, each cell sends a pulse of a chemical called cyclic AMP and, gradually, these pulses become synchronized and the cells 'swim' in waves towards the highest concentration of cAMP. The result is an aggregate of cells, which form a mobile 'slug' and then a delicate spore- bearing fruiting body. Many of the molecules identified in Dicty that underlie the processes of differentiation in other species. Model organisms play an essential role in biology and medicine: our understanding of human diseases has, in many cases, been derived from studies in other organisms. From yeasts came genes involved in cell division and cancer in humans; from worms came genes involved in development, cell death and cancer; and from Dicty have come new details of cell communication and cell movement. The genome sequence has been used to identify 'novel' proteins that will fill gaps in pathways in Dicty biology. The sequence will enrich our understanding of this remarkable organism and our understanding of our own biology. Editor's Note: The original news release can be found here. This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 10 23:48:01 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 19:48:01 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: John Gray: The trusting self Message-ID: John Gray: The trusting self The Times Literary Supplement, 98.3.27 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2093928&window_type=print THE PROBLEM OF TRUST. Adam B. Seligman. 231pp. Princeton University Press; distributed in the UK by Wiley. ?20.95. - 0 691 01242 3 Is moral agency on the wane? When trust becomes a central category in social theory and political discourse it is a sign that something has been lost. But what? As talk of trust has become commonplace, the very idea of trust has become problematic. Sociologists have tried to explain trust in terms of the notion of social capital - the fund of conventions, expectations and shared values that enables societies to renew themselves across the generations. But theorizing trust in these terms is not very enlightening. It does not tell us how trust waxes and wanes, or even what it consists in. If people trust one another more in some societies than they do in others, what accounts for such differences? How can degrees of trust be measured or compared? Can we even be sure that, when we talk of trust, we mean the same thing? It is far from easy to identify relationships of trust. Societies understand what it is for people to trust one another in different ways, and social theorists have not always grasped how strange the view of trust accepted by their own societies may seem in others. In his lengthy treatise, Trust: Social virtues and the creation of prosperity (1995), Francis Fukuyama linked the different ways in which societies understand and practise trust with different varieties of capitalism. He performed a valuable service by observing that economic life in societies in which extending trust beyond kin is rare and difficult, such as Italy and China, tends to be organized around family businesses rather than around the large corporations that are found in Japan and the United States. Among economists who are not also historians or sociologists, economic life is often understood in terms of the operation of a handful of universal laws. Fukuyama showed that, even if we grant the existence of such universal laws, particular cultural traditions - of religious belief, family relations and so forth - have a no less important role in economic life. Yet Fukuyama's account of the role of trust in the contemporary world was itself strikingly parochial. When he identified Japan and the US as high-trust societies, he articulated an American understanding of trust that looks strange from the perspectives of the other cultures he discusses. For most Europeans and Asians, America's sky-high levels of incarceration and litigation set it apart from all other advanced countries, most especially Japan. They see the recourse to mass imprisonment in the US as evidence that American life is lacking in some of the kinds of trust that are taken for granted in many other countries. Similarly, most observers will see the American propensity to regulate personal life by legal controls as evidence of a peculiar paucity of trust. Consider marriage. Prenuptial agreements may be a useful device for managing the financial risks of American marriages; but they do not betoken trust between those who sign up to them. In fact, outside America, few see prenuptial agreements as anything other than surrogates for trust, developed in a culture in which it has largely collapsed between men and women. Fukuyama appears not to have noticed how bizarre such American efforts to control intimate life by legal procedures look from the standpoints of other societies. His analysis tells us more about the singularities of American culture than it does about the varieties of trust. Adam B. Seligman's notable study, The Idea of Civil Society (1992), was an inquiry into the history and contemporary uses of the category of civil society. It was primarily an exercise in the history of ideas, which Seligman deployed to probe the ways in which the language of civil society has been appropriated by politicians and social thinkers today. Seligman's new book, The Problem of Trust, has a more radical and controversial objective. It aims to show that trust is not a timeless, universal prerequisite of social life but a distinctively, perhaps even uniquely modern, social phenomenon. Seligman recognizes that trust is indispensable in modern societies, but contends that it is being increasingly eroded. For Seligman, trust is not a solution to a generically human problem of maintaining order in society. It is a bond between people that develops in modern societies, in which individuals have acquired the ability to move between roles. In traditional cultures, Seligman tells us, individual behaviour is governed by heavily ascriptive roles. Trust is unnecessary in such premodern societies, he maintains, because the human agents to whose uncertainties trust is a response have not yet fully emerged. It is only where there are modern subjects, released from the constraints of traditional roles, that trust arises, for only then is it needed. For Seligman, the emergence of the modern individual and the development of trust go together. They also decline together. Seligman's diagnosis of trust in contemporary societies is markedly pessimistic. He maintains that, as the practice of ascribing responsibility for their actions to individuals weakens, the power of social sanctions over personal behaviour increases. He sees this danger at its most threatening in "postmodern" societies, in which the idea of personal responsibility has been delegitimated. Postmodernists hold that the human subject is not something given by nature; it is a cultural construction. Human beings are not au fond individuals who opt in and out of social relationships and groups; they are constituted by those relationships and groups. Postmodernists believe that viewing ourselves in this way will advance human freedom - that if people understand that neither society nor they themselves are unalterable facts of nature, they will be freer to alter their lives to suit their needs. Seligman argues forcefully that this postmodern "deconstruction of the subject" does not work to emancipate the individual from the power of society. Indeed, he claims that the postmodernist project of dissolving individual agency into a social construction has the effect of leaving people less capable of trusting one another - and thereby more helpless than ever before to the power of social groups. Trust depends on people seeing themselves and others as individual agents having responsibility for their actions. In so far as that moral self-understanding wanes, so does trust. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that, for Seligman, trust is an episode in the career of the modern subject, which is no longer possible when the moral beliefs which underpinned individualism have ceased to be generally accepted. Seligman's argument is suggestive rather than demonstrative. It proceeds by way of examples, analogies and metaphors rather than through the rigorous marshalling and analysis of evidence. At times, he appears to suggest a cause-and-effect connection between the currency of postmodern ideas and the decline of trust as a contemporary social phenomenon. Any such simple causality is inherently implausible. Postmodernism is an academic and literary ideology; its leverage on any social institution other than the academy is slight. Its influence may have made the choice of curricula on American campuses more intractably disputed than it would otherwise have been. But who can bring themselves to believe that the hermetic discourse of postmodern writers has had much of an impact beyond universities? It may be true that at the end of the twentieth century we find ourselves in a postmodern condition in which no way of life can credibly claim universal authority. Perhaps the values of Western democracies are not universally authoritative but mark only one way in which contemporary societies can achieve a tolerable modus vivendi among different ways of life. I think that this is indeed the case. But if it is so, it is not because postmodernist ideas have become fashionable. It is a consequence of the practical relativization of Western values by the growing power of non-Occidental societies, by mass media that give access to an unprecedented diversity of cultures, world views and lifestyles, and similar changes in the world. Postmodernist thinking is not a good guide to these changes. Seligman's account of the decline in trust is often highly speculative and it is surely not the last word. If relations of trust have become less common, the explanation may well be found in such mundane factors as the mobility of labour and the impact of new technologies more than in changing cultural attitudes to personal responsibility. In that case, Seligman is guilty of attaching too great a causal role to cultural factors and too little to changes in material conditions. Nevertheless, his discursive reflections add up to a deeply interesting line of thought. In effect, what he has attempted is a transcendental deduction of trust - that is to say, he has asked what must be true for it to be possible and concluded that the necessary conditions of trust are disappearing in contemporary societies. He has gone on to speculate that it is precisely a hypertrophy of the sense of individuality which made trust possible that, over time, has made trust increasingly difficult to achieve. Seligman may have captured a dialectical turn in the ethical life of modern individuality, in which the very beliefs that made it possible are contributing to its dissolution. If this is anywhere near the truth of the matter, there is an irony in the modern development of individual agency. The modern individual emerged as traditional social roles became less constraining. Ideas of personal responsibility strengthened individual agency. In so far as people came to believe they were responsible to themselves as individuals, the authority of social groups over them was diminished. In this way, a form of ethical life which hinged on personal responsibility had the effect of emancipating individuals from dependency on others. With the further growth of individuality, this species of ethical life came to be perceived as repressive. Internal norms and sanctions of conscience were experienced as curbs on personal freedom. Any fixed moral norm was resented as a constraint on autonomy. But it was the internalization of such norms that constituted the modern subject. When they were repudiated, the necessary conditions of personal autonomy were undermined. And, as Seligman rightly notes, when personal autonomy becomes impossible, so does trust. Is Seligman also right that as inner, moral sanctions on personal conduct lose legitimacy, the external forces that maintained social order in a more distant past are making a comeback? Certainly many people today classify themselves and others - as they did in traditional societies - primarily as members of social groups rather than as individual subjects. It does not matter much whether the criteria of group membership refer to lifestyle, religious belief, economic status, or ethnic lineages. What matters is that the predominant relationship between human beings in late modern societies is often not that of individuals who trust (or fail to trust) one another. Often it is a relation of status and bargaining in which trust has little place. Perhaps, like the novel, trust may belong to a "bourgeois" sense of self, to which the late modern world is inhospitable. But if we are entering a world without individual subjects who can trust or mistrust one another, it may not be a world of playful, freely floating selves like that dreamt of in postmodernist utopias. Instead it could turn out to be a world of tribes and gangs, where membership is not chosen but fated, and the dominant mode of interaction is not trust among individuals but the making of alliances among groups. Post-Yugoslav Bosnia and the ethnically riven areas of Los Angeles may be examples of how human beings interact in the wake of trust. Adam Seligman's impressively thoughtful book suggests that the logic of waning trust in the late modern period may be to return the human subject to a premodern condition. John Gray's new book, False Dawn, is reviewed on page 11. From checker at panix.com Fri Jun 10 23:48:10 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 19:48:10 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: John Gray: Medicine or symptom Message-ID: John Gray: Medicine or symptom The Times Literary Supplement, 98.7.10 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2093042&window_type=print THE POLITICS OF CULTURE IN THE SHADOW OF CAPITAL. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, editors. 593pp. Durham, NC: Duke University Press; distributed in Europe by AUPG. ?66.50 (paperback, ?19.95). - 0 8223 2033 9. In 1943, a Harlem street hustler called Malcolm Little came up with an ingenious strategy to beat the draft. Believing that Harlem was then under surveillance by military intelligence, Little let it be known around the neighbourhood that he was "frantic to join . . . the Japanese Army". The ruse worked. After being interviewed by a psychiatrist at his pre-induction physical examination, Little was judged mentally disqualified for military service. The evidence suggests that Little - who was to reappear after the Second World War as the black nationalist leader Malcolm X - was in fact neither a psychologically disturbed person nor an admirer of Imperial Japan. He merely impersonated those roles. Still, real admiration for Japan did exist among African Americans. Few can have been as hyperbolic as Mittie Maud Lena Gordon, the leader of the Peace Movement of Ethiopia, who had petitioned President Franklin Roosevelt for funds to promote black repatriation to Africa, and who described the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as the day when "one billion black people struck for freedom". Nevertheless, Booker T. Washington invoked Japanese nationalism as a model for African Americans shortly after the Russo-Japanese War, and W. E. B. Du Bois wrote a novel, Dark Princess: A romance, in which an Asian Indian princess, a Japanese aristocrat and an African American intellectual are portrayed in alliance against "white Europe". African American sympathy for Japan and the Japanese found some echoes in grassroots political life when, partly no doubt as a response to their own experience of segregation, black community groups opposed sending Japanese children to segregated schools in San Francisco. These incidents in African American history are recounted by George Lipsitz in "'Frantic to Join': The Asia-Pacific War in the lives of African American soldiers and civilians", one of several arresting and illuminating essays in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, edited by Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd. The book is one in a series of Post-Contemporary Interventions, whose general editors, Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson, are well known as leading figures in American postmodernism. Yet one of the many striking features of this collection is the critique of postmodernist thinking that it contains. At times, the criticism is explicit, as when Lowe and Lloyd state in the introduction that the book has been made necessary by the inadequacies both of the liberal assumption of the congruence of capitalism, democracy and freedom and of "the postmodern conception of the transnational". But mostly the critique of postmodern thought is conducted more obliquely - sometimes, indeed, apparently unwittingly. Lowe and Lloyd tell us that the book aims to show how the contradictions of transnational capitalism are expressed in cultural conflicts. They, and most of the authors they bring together, deploy a neo-Marxian perspective in which the cultural differences of the modern world are viewed as manifestations of the economic and political contradictions of capitalism. They repudiate any narrowly class-based analysis of contemporary capitalism and attack the theory that it is producing a thoroughly homogenized and commodified global culture. In their view, that dystopian vision fails to perceive the many local struggles over power and identity, some of them tending to escalate into larger conflicts, which the contradictory imperatives of global capitalism are engendering throughout the world. The purpose of The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital is to assemble evidences of these struggles and show how they embody singular responses to common dilemmas. Unfortunately, the account of the contemporary scene that emerges is not always notably clear or coherent. The post-postmodern perspective that is articulated in most of the contributions oscillates unstably between something like Frankfurt School Marxism and Foucaldian variations on familiar liberal concerns with power and oppression. All the contributors distance themselves from the classical Marxist ambition of developing a total theory of history, arguing that local struggles should be understood from within, as particular experiences, rather than as mere specimens of a universal project of emancipation. Dipesh Chakrabarty's contribution, "The Time of History and the Time of Gods", excavates nonmodern, nonsecular understandings of labour in India. Homa Hoodfar's "Veiling Practices and Muslim Women" criticizes the Western feminist assumption that "veiling is solely a static practice symbolising the oppressive nature of patriarchy in Muslim societies" and theorizes veiling as a "complex, dynamic and changing cultural practice". The emphasis of these contributors on the singularities of social life expresses an authentically postmodern scepticism - in my view well-founded - about large social theories which presuppose Enlightenment views of history and human nature. Even so, they and other contributors frame their historical accounts in extremely abstract Marxian categories the provenance of which is unmistakably that of the Enlightenment. Papers by Maria Josefina Saldana-Portillo on the Sandinista agricultural policy, by Jacqueline Urla on the Basque Free Radio, and Jose Rabasa on the Zapatistas abound in fascinating details, but - notwithstanding their claim to be developing non-linear accounts of history and development - they presuppose a narrowly neo-Marxian understanding of contemporary capitalism at nearly every point. The account of human interests and of the goals of political struggle that informs these essays belongs with an Enlightenment world-view which their authors believe they have discarded. Equally, the view of historical inquiry evident in many of the essays is closer to that of classical and humanist Marxism than it is to postmodern thought. Indeed, Lipsitz's account of the impact of the Asia-Pacific War in the lives of African Americans deploys an understanding of historical truth that even a liberal historian would have no difficulty in accepting. It is not denied that there are historical facts - indeed, some curious examples are retrieved and documented - and the idea that history should (or could) consist of a plurality of equally valid narratives is nowhere entertained. On the contrary, perfectly ordinary understandings of truth, falsity and evidence are invoked throughout Lipsitz's account of Malcolm Little's dealings with the American military authorities. Little is described as "feigning a desire to join the Japanese Army"; the precise date and category of his deferment from military service is given; and the differing motives, circumstances and limits of some African Americans' sympathetic identification with Japan around the time of the Pacific War are carefully sifted and weighed. Moreover, there is nothing in Lipsitz's account of Malcolm Little's stratagems that smacks of the postmodern fetish of the fragmented self that cannot be distinguished from (but only deconstructed into) its many roles. On the contrary, Lipsitz's is an account in which persistent human agency is central, demonstrating that Malcolm Little was an agent quite distinct from the roles he played. Indeed, the intentions and projects that Little pursued through his numerous personae are shown to be one human subject's responses to American racism at that time. Clearly, Lipsitz understands history in terms of the projects and struggles of human subjects. In this, he is at one with the editors and other contributors. The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital is history written in postmodernism's wake. That postmodern relativism and the deconstruction of the human subject should have been left behind in this book is not altogether surprising. Any thinker who is critical of existing social arrangements and modes of thinking must eventually part company with such positions. Postmodernists who have tried to recover the historical experiences of occluded and marginalized people are among these thinkers. They sought to write alternatives to official histories which are written as if the present had always been inevitable. To retrieve in historical memory lives that would otherwise have been forgotten is an admirable project. But it presupposes that the submerged histories that can thereby be recovered are not our own constructions. The postmodernist dogma that there are no facts, only interpretations, so that society and even human nature are no more than cultural constructions, is not ultimately distinguishable from the old-fashioned Idealist doctrine that nothing exists apart from minds and their contents. But, because it aborts the distinction between appearance and reality in society, any such doctrine is fatal to critical thought. For all its faults, the classical Marxian conception of false consciousness acted as a deterrent against social theorists taking society's self-understanding at its face value. By introducing the idea of unconscious conflicts into the theory of society, Freud's conception of repression performed a similar critical function. Like Idealism, postmodern relativism is an impediment to critical thinking. True, it allows indefinitely many narrative accounts of the same historical events; but by the same token it disallows any assessment of them in terms of how they reflect or distort historical realities. It thereby renders impossible or pointless the unofficial "histories from below" that belong among postmodern thought's genuine achievements. The editors and most of the contributors to this book are fairly unambiguous in their rejection of postmodern understandings of contemporary capitalism. Rightly, they are sceptical of Marxian theories, in which all or most societies are fated to recapitulate the historical development of a few Western countries. "While Marxism arises as the critique of capitalist exploitation", Lowe and Lloyd observe, "it has not critiqued the theory of historical development that underlies liberal philosophies." But acknowledging this default poses a fundamental problem for their own perspective. Marxian interpretations of history are defective partly because they have so much in common with liberal interpretations. Both liberals and Marxists view history as a teleological process whose end point is Western modernity. For liberals and Marxists alike, modernity comes heavily laden with Enlightenment values. Though they have dismantled much of Marxism's theoretical framework, the contributors to this book continue to be animated by Marxism's Enlightenment hopes. Late modern history belies those hopes. There is no general, systematic connection between becoming a modern society and accepting Enlightenment values. Fundamentalism is as deep a feature of the late modern world as the movements by workers, gays and women which the contributors chronicle. No theory of modernization captures its messy, sometimes contradictory realities. There will doubtless be many more people like Malcolm Little. But they are markers for the recurring conflicts of the contemporary world, not portents of its transformation. Postmodern thinking is best understood as a symptom of the modernity whose ailments it affected to diagnose. Written in the aftermath of postmodernism, this volume is a pastiche of Marxian and Foucaldian themes, in which some usefully unconventional history is wrapped in a welter of abstractions. In this, it is not too different from the postmodernist theorizing it seeks to surpass. John Gray's books include False Dawn: The delusions of global capitalism, 1998. From isaacsonj at hotmail.com Sat Jun 11 01:49:29 2005 From: isaacsonj at hotmail.com (Joel Isaacson) Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 21:49:29 -0400 Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: Big bang in mm sizes Message-ID: Yes, Howard, we are talking about same/similar stuff. I was surprised to see Nils Basse's suggestion of mini-big-bangs... especially since I have been talking about that possibility for some time now... albeit from a different perspective. My perspective is tied to CA-like processes that are anchored in perception. The self-similarity at all scales of those Ur-Patterns is a reflection of the self-similarity of the underlying processes, effected recursively. Those underlying processes are CA-like and their basic rule is local distinction-making. The scheme is not quite mathematical in the ordinary sense, although it is processually well-defined and readily representable by ordinary computational processes. Many of the usual CA rules have some mathematical flavor. However, here we have the rule of distinction-making that is a natural process common in the biology of perception -- not necessarily thru formal mathematical means. I do agree that mathematics serves via metaphors vis-a-vis natural processes described by same, and that all we could expect is finding/adopting the best mathematical metaphor that may fit a particular natural phenomenon. My CA-like processes, while not strictly mathematical, serve the same purpose; i.e., are metaphors aimed at a sweeping capture of natural phenomena, from visual perception (and perception in general) to processes generating elementary particles, and big bang-like scenarios, and many things in between... Btw, I corresponded with Noam Chomsky in 1972 about those CA... but it has been obviously premature... he has been very polite but professed to not "understand the import" of these things. Nevertheless, I did adopt his notions of surface and deep structures and incorporated those into the patent application in 1975. -- Joel >From: HowlBloom at aol.com >To: isaacsonj at hotmail.com >CC: paleopsych at paleopsych.org >Subject: Re: Big bang in mm sizes >Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 01:03:14 EDT > > > >As always, we are on the same wavelength, Joel. This article has Ur >Patterns written all over it--patterns that show up on multiple level of >emergence, >patterns that metaphors can capture. > >Why are these patterns so easily graspable by metaphor? Because metaphor >is >one concrete example of an Ur Pattern that repeats itself on multiple >levels. Meaning that metaphor is not just a literary trick. It is a way >of >capturing something deep and repetitive in this cosmos--a deep structure >if you >prefer to use Noam Chomsky's vocabulary. > >Not all metaphors are valid. But when you find the right one for the >phenomenon you're watching, you've hit gold. > >And never forget, math is metaphor in disguise. Onward--Howard > >In a message dated 6/9/2005 2:23:17 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, >isaacsonj at hotmail.com writes: > > > >Plasma in reactors echoes distribution of galaxies >11 June 2005 >NewScientist.com news service >Mark Anderson > >NUCLEAR fusion reactors could be used to study what the universe was like >just after the big bang. So claims a physicist who noticed that the plasma >created inside these reactors is distributed in a strikingly similar way >to >galaxies in today's universe. > >Nils Basse of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology does not normally >concern himself with events in the early universe. Instead, he studies >turbulence in the plasma created in fusion reactors. But when he chanced >upon the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) - which is mapping a quarter of >the >sky in detail - he noticed something uncanny. The mathematical equation >governing the distribution of voids and galaxies looks remarkably like the >one describing the millimetre-sized knots and clots of plasma in the >Wendelstein 7-AS "stellarator" fusion reactor in Garching, Germany >(Physics >Letters A, vol 340, p 456). > >Basse argues that the distribution of galaxies today could be the result >of >variations in the density of plasma after the big bang. "I think it all >comes from turbulence in the very early universe," he says. "[The galaxy >distribution today] is just a blow-up of what was going on at that point." >This suggests that stellarator reactors could serve as models of the early >universe. > > >But cosmologist Daniel Eisenstein of the University of Arizona in Tucson, >who works on the SDSS project, disagrees. He points out that the kind of >plasma that Basse describes existed only for the first millisecond after >the >big bang, and that epoch ended too soon to influence the large scale >structure of today's universe. Eisenstein calculates that the largest >structure that could have arisen because of any such primordial density >variations would only stretch a few light years across today. > >???The plasma created inside fusion reactors is distributed in a >strikingly >similar way to galaxies in today's universe???Eisenstein also says that >Basse's claim is difficult to reconcile with the results of the Wilkinson >Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which has mapped the distribution of >the >oldest light in the universe dating back to some 380,000 years after the >big >bang. This "baby picture" of the cosmos yields markedly different density >fluctuations to the SDSS map. "I don't see any way to get turbulence into >this mix without throwing out all the [WMAP] data," Eisenstein says. "And >that's very powerful data." > >From issue 2503 of New Scientist magazine, 11 June 2005, page 8 > > > > > > > >---------- >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: Youthactivism.org; >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 HowlBloom at aol.com Sat Jun 11 03:23:05 2005 From: HowlBloom at aol.com (HowlBloom at aol.com) Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 23:23:05 EDT Subject: [Paleopsych] Re: Big bang in mm sizes Message-ID: <1d8.3eaa2a1b.2fdbb319@aol.com> Joel-- Your CA approach, based on the building of barriers, distinctions, boundaries,membranes, and other separators is extremely helpful. The CA approach in general has been a useful tool for understanding self-organization of extraordinary complexity based on very, very simple rules. But I have a question. The whorls Basse talks about in his mini-big-bangs are apparently similar to the irregular whorls that Smoot claims rumpled the first burst of time/space in the big bang. Those creases and rumples led to the irregular distribution of galaxies, galaxies spread in irregular bubble-like interlaces. How do CA models and math generate these irregularities? Or, to put this in Bloomian terms, what, aside from your CA separators, are the diversity generators that make things ragged? Is there a rule underlying what would seem at first glance to be messy, mussed, and irregular? Wolfram's CA systems can generate what looks like chaos from simple rules. Meaning that simple CA-style rules may underlie even the seemingly random. But does your CA system do this, too? And does the math of Basse do it? One last question. CA systems are the gift of a technological tool--the computer. What new metaphoric systems, what new forms of understanding, may emerge from technologies that do not yet exist? Howard In a message dated 6/10/2005 9:50:59 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, isaacsonj at hotmail.com writes: Yes, Howard, we are talking about same/similar stuff. I was surprised to see Nils Basse's suggestion of mini-big-bangs... especially since I have been talking about that possibility for some time now... albeit from a different perspective. My perspective is tied to CA-like processes that are anchored in perception. The self-similarity at all scales of those Ur-Patterns is a reflection of the self-similarity of the underlying processes, effected recursively. Those underlying processes are CA-like and their basic rule is local distinction-making. The scheme is not quite mathematical in the ordinary sense, although it is processually well-defined and readily representable by ordinary computational processes. Many of the usual CA rules have some mathematical flavor. However, here we have the rule of distinction-making that is a natural process common in the biology of perception -- not necessarily thru formal mathematical means. I do agree that mathematics serves via metaphors vis-a-vis natural processes described by same, and that all we could expect is finding/adopting the best mathematical metaphor that may fit a particular natural phenomenon. My CA-like processes, while not strictly mathematical, serve the same purpose; i.e., are metaphors aimed at a sweeping capture of natural phenomena, from visual perception (and perception in general) to processes generating elementary particles, and big bang-like scenarios, and many things in between... Btw, I corresponded with Noam Chomsky in 1972 about those CA... but it has been obviously premature... he has been very polite but professed to not "understand the import" of these things. Nevertheless, I did adopt his notions of surface and deep structures and incorporated those into the patent application in 1975. -- Joel >From: HowlBloom at aol.com >To: isaacsonj at hotmail.com >CC: paleopsych at paleopsych.org >Subject: Re: Big bang in mm sizes >Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 01:03:14 EDT > > > >As always, we are on the same wavelength, Joel. This article has Ur >Patterns written all over it--patterns that show up on multiple level of >emergence, >patterns that metaphors can capture. > >Why are these patterns so easily graspable by metaphor? Because metaphor >is >one concrete example of an Ur Pattern that repeats itself on multiple >levels. Meaning that metaphor is not just a literary trick. It is a way >of >capturing something deep and repetitive in this cosmos--a deep structure >if you >prefer to use Noam Chomsky's vocabulary. > >Not all metaphors are valid. But when you find the right one for the >phenomenon you're watching, you've hit gold. > >And never forget, math is metaphor in disguise. Onward--Howard > >In a message dated 6/9/2005 2:23:17 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, >isaacsonj at hotmail.com writes: > > > >Plasma in reactors echoes distribution of galaxies >11 June 2005 >NewScientist.com news service >Mark Anderson > >NUCLEAR fusion reactors could be used to study what the universe was like >just after the big bang. So claims a physicist who noticed that the plasma >created inside these reactors is distributed in a strikingly similar way >to >galaxies in today's universe. > >Nils Basse of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology does not normally >concern himself with events in the early universe. Instead, he studies >turbulence in the plasma created in fusion reactors. But when he chanced >upon the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) - which is mapping a quarter of >the >sky in detail - he noticed something uncanny. The mathematical equation >governing the distribution of voids and galaxies looks remarkably like the >one describing the millimetre-sized knots and clots of plasma in the >Wendelstein 7-AS "stellarator" fusion reactor in Garching, Germany >(Physics >Letters A, vol 340, p 456). > >Basse argues that the distribution of galaxies today could be the result >of >variations in the density of plasma after the big bang. "I think it all >comes from turbulence in the very early universe," he says. "[The galaxy >distribution today] is just a blow-up of what was going on at that point." >This suggests that stellarator reactors could serve as models of the early >universe. > > >But cosmologist Daniel Eisenstein of the University of Arizona in Tucson, >who works on the SDSS project, disagrees. He points out that the kind of >plasma that Basse describes existed only for the first millisecond after >the >big bang, and that epoch ended too soon to influence the large scale >structure of today's universe. Eisenstein calculates that the largest >structure that could have arisen because of any such primordial density >variations would only stretch a few light years across today. > >?The plasma created inside fusion reactors is distributed in a >strikingly >similar way to galaxies in today's universe?Eisenstein also says that >Basse's claim is difficult to reconcile with the results of the Wilkinson >Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which has mapped the distribution of >the >oldest light in the universe dating back to some 380,000 years after the >big >bang. This "baby picture" of the cosmos yields markedly different density >fluctuations to the SDSS map. "I don't see any way to get turbulence into >this mix without throwing out all the [WMAP] data," Eisenstein says. "And >that's very powerful data." > >From issue 2503 of New Scientist magazine, 11 June 2005, page 8 > > > > > > > >---------- >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: Youthactivism.org; >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 > _______________________________________________ paleopsych mailing list paleopsych at paleopsych.org http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych ---------- 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: Youthactivism.org; 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 shovland at mindspring.com Sat Jun 11 16:21:07 2005 From: shovland at mindspring.com (Steve Hovland) Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 09:21:07 -0700 Subject: [Paleopsych] Misdiagnosed, woman dies from chemotherapy Message-ID: <01C56E66.E706A8A0.shovland@mindspring.com> Fort Lauderdale jury awards $8 million in malpractice suit FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - A jury awarded $8 million to the husband of a woman who died after chemotherapy that wasn't necessary, lawyers said Thursday. The jury ruled against Coral Springs Medical Center, University Hospital in Tamarac and two doctors. Pending expected appeals, they will each have to pay Charles Pandrea of Coconut Creek a percentage of the award, said Pandrea's Attorney Michael Ryan. A private autopsy showed Janet Pandrea did not have the cancer she was treated for, Ryan said. Ryan said Pandrea had a benign tumor in one lung, which could have been operated on. He said she developed side effects from her chemotherapy that ultimately led to her death. "Mr. Pandrea had no idea why she died ... What he found was that she never had cancer," Ryan said. The lawyers for the defendants and University Hospital did not immediately return phone calls for comment. But the North Broward Hospital District, which governs the Coral Springs hospital, said in a statement that an investigation was conducted and an employee "acknowledged his responsibility." "We believe it was this honest and forthright admission that resulted in the verdict returned by the jury," said the statement. "We acknowledge the tragedy befalling the Pandrea family and our thoughts remain with them." The jury found that oncologist Abraham Rosenberg must pay 50 percent of the money, Martin Stone, the Pandrea family doctor must pay 12 percent, Coral Springs Medical Center 10 percent, and University Hospital must pay 28 percent, Ryan said. Ryan said Janet Pandrea was hospitalized for breathing problems connected to the chemotherapy. At University Hospital, Stone allegedly misdiagnosed stomach ulcers and she was operated on. Pandrea died of severe infection after the operation, Ryan said. http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/gen/ap/FL_Medical_Malpractice. html From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 11 20:38:26 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 16:38:26 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: Gaden S. Robinson: Ant matters Message-ID: Gaden S. Robinson: Ant matters The Times Literary Supplement, 4.7.30 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2108310&window_type=print Size, possessiveness and other essentials for an exuberant evolutionary PHEIDOLE IN THE NEW WORLD. A dominant, hyperdiverse ant genus. By Edward O. Wilson. 794pp + CD. Harvard University Press. ?85.95 (US $125). - 0 674 00293 8 FOR LOVE OF INSECTS. By Thomas Eisner. 448pp. Harvard University Press. Pounds 19.95 (US $29.95). - 0 674 01181 3 Man has three close relatives - the chimpanzee, gorilla and orang-utan. Our ethnocentricity as systematists and our unease at contradicting the concept of man as a special creation are just two of the reasons behind our considering ourselves not just a separate species or even genus, but a family separate from our cousins. Had the classification of the living world been written by an ant, we would, all four of us, be lumped together in a single genus. The mammals and the birds each contain about as many species as a typical insect family - around five thousand. Most bugs have a host of close biological relatives; we have decided that we don't. And we find it for the most part very hard to visualize and explain the entirely different scale of species diversity that is encountered in the invertebrate world. Faced with an illustration and explanation such as Edward O. Wilson's Pheidole in the New World, we can only be stunned. "Pheidole is among the largest of all genera of plants and animals", says Ed Wilson, and he is right. There are very few genera with more than 750 species and even fewer with upwards of 1,000. Wilson introduces the term "hyperdiverse" in this monograph to describe such groups. These small ants are just a few millimetres long; they are predominantly soil-and litter-dwelling, but a significant number of species are arboreal. Most are scavengers and predators, but some are seed-collectors, and a few species have adopted highly specialized biologies, such as Pheidole titanis, a specialized predator of termites. The genus ranges from New England southwards into temperate Argentina, and from Southern Europe south to the Cape, east to the Pacific and through Australia and Melanesia as far as Samoa. Including those in the present contribution, 900 different species have been recognized, and Wilson suggests that a worldwide total of 1,500 is not an unreasonable prediction, making Pheidole the planet's most diverse ant genus (a distinction currently held by Camponotus with about 930 species). Among the 624 species that are described in Pheidole in the New World, more than half, 337, are new to science. This is one-fifth of the ant species of the Americas, more than 6 per cent of the world's ant fauna. In the rainforest of Central America, a few square kilometres can be home to more than fifty species. Pheidole is not just diverse - it is numerically abundant in a wide range of habitats across the world. The sweet smell of biological success must be included somewhere among Pheidole's pheromones. Some biologists are chary of hyperdiverse genera. To monograph such groups is an enormous challenge. Many see them as unwieldy, and some insist that they should be divided into groups of a "convenient" size. The history of the "splitting" of hyperdiverse genera to make their components more "manageable" has been a history of disasters resulting in taxonomic mayhem. In the early 1970s, attempts were made to divide up the moth genus Coleophora (with about 1,200 species) and some eighty new genera were proposed. It took ten years to restore sanity and the status quo, and to repack the species of Coleophora back into their monogeneric box. Wilson, rightly, will have none of this. We should not expect the man who invented the word "biodiversity" to be awed by large genera. His arrangement of Pheidole, divided into informal species groups, is a pragmatic solution that will be applauded by both fellow taxonomists and the fieldworkers who will use his monograph. The species of Pheidole are too "tightly packed", morphologically, with too many sequential evolutionary radiations, and with too much "convergence in character traits between species groups" to be carved up. "Pheidole today is like a large diamond set on the bench mount of a gem cutter. To cleave it before seeing into its interior could be disastrous." Pheidole is the product of "an exuberance of evolution". Wilson's monograph is the product of a master craftsman. It reeks of authority. Opening sections explain anatomy, terminology and abbreviations. There are 100 pages of keys. Each one page species treatment includes line drawings of the major and minor workers in lateral view, frontal views of the heads, and details of the thorax and petiole; the location of the type-specimens; the derivation of the name; diagnosis, measurements, colour, geographical range and biology. Here are 624 treatments - a gigantic undertaking. And there is more. The CD is a searchable database that can be used as an identification tool supplementary to the keys. Possible inputs are measurements, colour and country of origin. Or the user can scroll between closely related species and compare high-resolution colour images of the lateral views of major and minor workers and frontal views of heads. Why is this book so heavy? Why are there so many species of Pheidole? Wilson devotes an introductory chapter to discussing the origins of hyperdiversity. It is an important essay. If the numbers of species within, say, the genera of a family are rank-ordered as a histogram, its shape will be a hollow curve and this signature is a characteristic of the living world as a whole. A large number of genera contain a single species while only very few contain large numbers of species. Hyperdiversity is a rare extreme of one end of the hollow curve. A succession of scientists (for more than eighty years) have tried to pin down both the how -the precise mathematical form of the curve, and the why - the underlying model or evolutionary mechanism that generates this elegant mathematical generality among groups of organisms. The hollow curve approximates to a logarithmic series and belongs among the family of curves that derive from the negative binomial; but the model that generates this curve is obscure. However, empirical models that assume sequential origin of groups through time and a cyclical peaking and subsidence of diversity can, says Wilson, approximate the observed distribution. Factors that have been demonstrated to contribute to high species diversity are "small size, right demographic factors, preemption during colonization and subsequent incumbency, and a suite of key adaptations potent in opening new niches or excluding competitors". So nothing new there then. Small organisms are suggested to be more adaptable to change and the pressure of environmental stress, while large organisms do better in stable environments. Oscillation between environmental stability and instability will cull the size extremes. The diversity of organisms in the small-to-medium-size classes is boosted by higher speciation rates and a better fit to the fine fractal topography of environments. The most diverse groups have other common features too - short generation times and a brief average lifespan, superior dispersal ability and high resource availability. Sewall Wright's 1931 theory still holds, that species that are divided into demes (demonstrably discrete populations) speciate more rapidly than species with amorphous populations. But speciation may be offset by extinction. And the Pheidole story is complicated by these being atypical organisms - they are social. Two competing hypotheses may apply here: one says that social organization is primitive but successful and drives diversity, the other that sociality preadapts organisms to coping with new environmental challenges, aka speciation opportunities. Speculation is rife and there is little here to hang one's hat upon. Wilson returns to his original thesis of pre-emption and incumbency. The former involves possibly two key factors - dispersal ability and breakthrough; the latter is the ability to create and use new niches or to elbow one's way into and take over existing niches. Incumbency is simply holding the fort - possession is nine-tenths of the evolutionary game. Wilson likens pre-emption and incumbency to industrial development. And in terms of growth, success in both industry and the natural world breeds success. Whether the analogy extends to long-term sustainable diversity is another matter. In the end, Wilson admits that the "hypotheses, correlative analyses and speculations . . . have been very broad, even abstract . . .". He focuses on the big question "What are the adaptations that promote ecological dominance within a clade (the complete group of taxa derived from a single common ancestor)?". It is a deceptively simple question but one that is fiendishly difficult to answer, or even to plan how to answer. And answering that cannot of itself take us to conquer the Santa Rosalia question of why there are so many species of Pheidole. What is so special about Pheidole? The hypothesis that Wilson eventually tenders is that the breakthrough novelty in Pheidole is the existence of the large-headed major-worker caste with reduced sting and increased abilities in defensive secretions produced by exocrine glands. As a group, Pheidole places extreme reliance on these majors for colony defence and they form "a highly mobile strike force" while the minor workers are the drudges. The minors "have the appearance of a 'throwaway' caste, that is, small, light, cheaply manufactured and short-lived". Pheidole is "an unusually resilient superorganism able to expend and replace minor workers readily while utilizing the major subcaste both for defense and as an emergency labor force in the event of severe depletion of the minors". We are left admiring the elegance of his summation but still very conscious that the precise "why" of hyperdiversity has not been satisfactorily answered. There are moments in history when one wishes one could have been a fly on the wall or, in this case, a fly on the windshield. In the summer of 1952, Wilson was a graduate student at Harvard and joined forces with another student, Tom Eisner, to "undertake a major exploratory venture". With a $200 grant and an old Chevrolet, they travelled 12,000 miles through forty-eight states to "get acquainted with the American landscape and its insects". It was both an entomological and an intellectual odyssey, and the two became and remain great friends as well as two of the most influential and powerful forces in entomology. Wilson's generous foreword to Thomas Eisner's For Love of Insects sets the stage for a remarkable memoir by a remarkable man. Opening with Martin Rees's opinion that "what makes things baffling is their degree of complexity, not their sheer size . . . . a star is simpler than an insect", Eisner's raison d'etre for his science is deceptively simple. "Insects survive because they have special strategies for doing so . . . . How it is that one goes about deciphering these strategies, and how serendipity, group effort and sheer good luck combine to provide momentum in such research, are what I have attempted to convey . . .". Eisner is a chemical ecologist, and his career has been spent unravelling some of the most bizarre stories of how insects use a combination of chemicals, sometimes simple and sometimes complex, and sophisticated morphological structures to defend themselves, their colonies, their mates and even their offspring. And it is not just the use of chemicals in defence - insects communicate using scent or pheromones, sound, and visual signals, or a combination of these. When defensive chemistry is involved also in reproduction and the protection of offspring the story can become quite extraordinary, and the investigation of the extraordinary calls for extraordinary methods. Eisner's book compels and fascinates at a variety of levels. It probes the ways in which insects use chemicals, and documents the ways in which an investigator poses the questions and teases out the answers. Eisner has covered an immense territory in his career - he has been an unashamed opportunist, observing a phenomenon that others may have taken for granted, asking why and how and being richly rewarded for his curiosity. He tells his stories in the most accessible way. His experiments are simple - he approaches problems using a logical technique he calls "biorationality" - the formulation of a sequence of linked questions which, if answered, explain the function and adaptive significance of a structure or behaviour, compare parallels or homologies in other organisms, and explain the origin or evolution of the feature. The sheer elegance of his approach is spellbinding. And the photographs that document his explorations are remarkable - every experimental tale here is beautifully illustrated. A single example from the many will give a little of the flavour of his stories. Utetheisa moths have a wingspan of a little more than an inch, and are speckled black, white and bright rose; the English vernacular name of the African species that is an occasional migrant to British shores is the Crimson Speckled. They are diurnal, and that behaviour, combined with their bright coloration, makes them prime suspects to be distasteful to predators. In 1966, Eisner observed a Utetheisa ornatrix, the Florida species, fly into a spider's web. Instead of struggling, the moth froze and waited. The spider inspected it and then cut it free. "Being witness to that act of rejection . . . was a compelling experience", says Eisner. Spiders consistently rejected Utetheisa. Eisner noticed that when disturbed, the moths emitted a foam from the back of the neck. The foam proved to be haemolymph, insect "blood", mixed with air. But spiders rejected moths whether or not they foamed. Tests with separated wings and bodies showed that all parts of Utetheisa were rejected by spiders. The foam seemed to be an added deterrent, suggesting Utetheisa was thoroughly nasty on the inside as well as the outside. Utetheisa ornatrix caterpillars feed on Crotalaria, the rattlepod. This wild bean is toxic and has an unpleasant reputation as a cattle poison, for its seeds and leaves contain pyrrolizidine alkaloids (PAs). Other species of Utetheisa feed on plants of the borage family which are known also to contain PAs. Could adult Utetheisa carry poisons sequestered during larval feeding, as does the Monarch butterfly? Eisner's lifelong collaborator, Jerry Meinwald, and his research group took up the challenge and showed that the moths indeed harboured a high concentration of PAs. But did PAs confer protection from predators? Eisner's group were able to rear Utetheisa on an artificial diet made either from pinto beans (PA-free) or Crotalaria beans (PA-rich). Adults reared on pinto beans did not contain PAs and were eaten by spiders. Adults reared on the Crotalaria diet were armed with PAs and rejected by spiders. The final test was to taint mealworms (usually eaten with gusto by spiders) with PAs and offer them to spiders; they were rejected. Female Utetheisa passed PAs into their eggs and these protected the eggs from predation by Leptothorax ants. Eggs laid by PA-free females were not protected. Ants actually developed a long-term aversion to PA-tainted eggs, and were able to remember the experience and avoid Utetheisa eggs for at least a month after being exposed. Larvae of lacewings were also able to discriminate between eggs with and without PAs - they sampled eggs by piercing them and sucking out the contents with their hollow jaws. PA-laden batches, each of ten eggs, were avoided after sampling of just two or three eggs. Caterpillars deficient in protective PAs were clearly "aware" of this deficiency and would attack and eat eggs and larvae of their own species that contained PAs. Clearly PAs played an enormous part in the life of Utetheisa. Eisner's team began to tease apart the secrets of courtship, mating and reproduction. They found that, unsurprisingly, Utetheisa females "called" males using an airborne pheromone, as do most Lepidoptera species. But what was remarkably different was that the pheromone was emitted in precisely timed pulses and they were able to show how the glands operated to achieve this. The reason for pulsing is still unclear, but it seems to save on chemical resources as well as provide a way of refining the male's search strategy at close range. At this point the lazy researcher might have just assumed "female attracts male and Bob's your uncle". Eisner instead became interested "in the behavior that comes into play once the male encounters the female . . . . Utetheisa, before mating, engages in 'pillow talk'. We decided that it might be worth listening in . . .". Videotape of mating encounters showed how the male flew upwind to the female, hovering beside her and making contact with antennae and legs; the male then abruptly flexed his abdomen, thrusting the tip towards the female; she raised her wings, exposing her abdomen, and the male landed beside her, made genital contact and copulated. The abdominal action lasted barely a third of a second. More refined high-speed photography and some careful dissection showed that two balloon-like structures set with specialized scales that formed brushes in the male abdominal tip were extruded and presented to the female in that one-third of a second. These brushes had been shown to be pheromone-carriers in other moth species and Jerry Meinwald's team quickly showed that the coremata (the correct term for the brushes) were loaded with hydroxydanaidal (HD), a derivative of PAs. Moths that were PA-free did not carry HD. Male moths with no HD, or which had had their coremata surgically removed, were frequently rejected by females. What was the message carried to the female in the HD? Eisner's team showed that the HD concentration in the coremata of the adult male was proportional to the quantity of PAs it had ingested and stored as a larva. And then it became clear. They found that eggs laid by a PA-free female could contain PAs and be protected against predation; all the female had to do was to mate with a PA-loaded male (PA-free males and females produced PA-free eggs). Males transmit protection to their offspring by giving the female a gift of PA during copulation (as a component within the liquid of the spermatophore, the sperm "packet"); about one-third of the egg's PA is derived from the father. The male's wafting of his HD-loaded scent brushes in front of the female proclaims his PA loading quantitatively - he offers a nuptial gift with, as it were, the value marked on the box. His gift, added to her PA loading (for in nature all females have at least a trace of PA), protects their eggs and also protects her while she lays them - she mobilizes his PA gift immediately; a PA-free female becomes distasteful to spiders within five minutes of insemination. Mating provides female Utetheisa not just with PAs but also with nutrients, notably proteins, and minerals in the spermatophore. Females mate more than once, and one final twist in the extraordinary story of this moth is that the female can choose which spermatophore to use to fertilize her eggs; she chooses the largest. And spermatophore size is correlated positively with the physical size of the male and his level of PA loading. Eisner's team were able to demonstrate that body mass is a heritable feature, and thus close the circle. The female selects a mate that will give her larger sons with potentially increased fitness and larger daughters with greater fecundity. And she makes that choice using the male's pheromone his HD level - as a chemical yardstick. She does not or cannot discriminate between males of different sizes or with different PA concentrations. She bases her genetic future on a one-third-of-a-second flash of the male's coremata. The dustjacket portrait of Thomas Eisner sums up this book. He is riding a bicycle backwards, no hands. As the author, so the subjects: who dares, wins. From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 11 20:43:47 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 16:43:47 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] TLS: Thomas Dixon: Why I am angry Message-ID: Thomas Dixon: Why I am angry The Times Literary Supplement, 4.10.1 http://the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2108912&window_type=print The return to ancient links between reason and emotion NOT PASSION'S SLAVE. Emotions and choice. Robert C. Solomon. 259pp. Oxford University Press. ?25 (US $35). 0 19 514549 6 THINKING ABOUT FEELING. Contemporary philosophers on emotions. Robert C. Solomon, editor. 297pp. Oxford University Press. ?34.50. (US $49.95). 0 19 515317 0 PHILOSOPHY AND THE EMOTIONS. Anthony Hatzimoysis, editor. 252pp. Cambridge University Press. Paperback, ?15.99 (US $26). 0 521 53734 7. The twelve essays by Robert C. Solomon that comprise Not Passion's Slave serve as a kind of intellectual memoir of their author, who has, for the last thirty years, been at the heart of a revival of philosophical interest in the emotions. The two views that have been central to his work throughout, accumulating caveats and qualifications over the years, are that emotions are judgements and that they are actions rather than passions. Taken together, this amounts to saying that emotions are active, cognitive states for which we are responsible, rather than irrational, physiological feelings that overcome us against our will. Solomon's energetic and provocative contributions to the field have thus combined the Aristotelian and Stoic idea that passions are evaluative judgements with the Sartrean suspicion that emotions are things we use to manipulate ourselves and others. The two other collections under review, Philosophy and the Emotions, edited by Anthony Hatzimoysis, and Thinking about Feeling, edited by Solomon, together include contributions by twenty-six different authors, six of whom contribute to both. They reveal that contemporary philosophers of emotion divide very roughly into two groups: the cognitivists (including Solomon, Susan James, Jon Elster, Peter Goldie, Jerome Neu, Martha Nussbaum and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty) and the physiologists (including Paul Griffiths, Jesse Prinz, Jenefer Robinson, Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson). The cognitivists, who represent the mainstream, echo ideas found in the writings of Aristotle, Seneca, Spinoza and Hume. The experience and expression of the more complex and interesting human emotions, the cognitivists say, are intellectually and culturally conditioned. As such, there is a limit to how much can be learned about human emotion from neurophysiology alone. The physiologically minded critics of the cognitivist mainstream, taking their lead from the nineteenth-century theories of Charles Darwin and William James, from Paul Ekman's work on pancultural facial expressions and from contemporary brain scientists such as Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux, argue that emotions are first and foremost embodied and neurophysiological phenomena. There are four central questions that the essays in these fascinating collections attempt to answer: whether emotions are cognitive; whether they are rational; whether we are responsible for them; whether they form a natural kind. Like beliefs and desires, most emotions are intentional (they are about some aspect of the world) and can be expressed as what philosophers call "propositional attitudes": "I am angry that you spilt my drink"; "I am afraid that my trousers are ruined"; "I am embarrassed that everyone saw". Mere feelings, such as toothaches or pangs of hunger, on the other hand, are not intentional in this way and cannot be expressed as propositional attitudes. Most agree, therefore, that emotions, unlike sensations, qualify as candidates for rationality: they can be right or wrong; appropriate or inappropriate. To say that emotions are rational in this sense is basically to say that they are cognitive. Cognitivists note that there is a particularly close link between emotions and beliefs. I cannot be afraid without believing myself to be in danger; I cannot grieve without believing I have lost someone or something I care for. Also, a change in beliefs can often result in a change in emotions. If what I believe to be a snake turns out to be a garden hose, my fear will rapidly dissipate. But what is the best way to understand this link between emotions on the one hand and beliefs, thoughts, or judgements on the other? Are judgements the causes of emotions? Are they components of emotions? Or are they simply the emotions themselves? The last of these views, although prima facie the least plausible, has attracted philosophers from Aristotle and the Stoics to Solomon and Nussbaum. Anger, for instance, Aristotle argued, is the judgement that I have been unjustly wronged. Jenefer Robinson's essay in Thinking about Feeling is one of several to argue that the "introspection" and "armchair psychology" of some defenders of the judgement theory are not enough. They need to be supplemented with a more rigorously scientific, physiological account of the emotions. Robinson offers a concise summary of the two main problems with the judgement theory: it seems that you can make a judgement without experiencing the corresponding emotion (I can judge that the person who cut me up in traffic wronged me, without actually getting angry about it - I may just be amused), and that you can have an emotion without the corresponding judgement (all you need is an automatic appraisal of the environment as threatening, for instance, to trigger a basic emotional reaction, such as fear). Solomon's response to the first problem is that emotions are a special sort of judgement - they are urgent, intense, hasty, embodied, evaluative judgements. Nussbaum's answer would be that they are evaluative judgements relating to questions of particular personal importance. On the second question, of whether you can have an emotion without the corresponding judgement, it all depends on what you mean by judgement. Some critics of the judgement theory think that emotions are caused by precognitive, unconscious, automatic "appraisals" that do not deserve the name "judgement", which sounds like something more conscious and considered. A third problem for judgement theorists is posed by what are variously discussed in these collections as "outlaw emotions" or "recalcitrant emotions" -emotions that seem to be based on judgements I do not hold. Examples include feeling terrified of spiders while judging them to be harmless, or feeling guilty while not believing I have done anything wrong. One quite straightforward way to account for these cases is to allow that humans are capable of holding conflicting beliefs. Recalcitrant emotions could be thought of, then, as indicators of internal cognitive conflict. Indeed, seeing troubling passions and emotions this way is central to many kinds of cognitive therapy. Other thinkers deal with the problem of recalcitrant emotions by claiming that emotions are based on something less than full beliefs; for instance they might be based on more tentative "construals" of the world rather than fully fledged beliefs about it. Whatever words one chooses (beliefs, judgements, thoughts, construals, appraisals, cognitions, representations), however, it is hard to get away from cognitivism of some kind about the emotions. The trigger for even the most basic of emotions must be some sort of recognition of a salient feature of the environment. And, as Solomon puts it, it is simply stating the obvious to note that recognition is a form of cognition. Arguing that emotions are cognitive and arguing that they are rational, however, are not the same thing. One could hold - as the Stoics did - that they are cognitive but irrational; that they are mistaken judgements. Contemporary philosophers have looked at two ways that emotions might be considered rational (essays by Ronald de Sousa in Thinking about Feeling, and by Patricia Greenspan in both Solomon's collections, explore the question particularly well). These two sorts of emotional rationality correspond to the senses in which beliefs, on the one hand, and actions and desires, on the other, might be considered rational. An emotion is "cognitively rational" if it is based on a well-supported belief (I clearly saw that it was you and not Susan who knocked over my glass of red wine), and "strategically rational" if it leads to actions that will achieve a desirable goal (the urgency of my anxiety encourages me to rush across the room and immediately throw salt on the stain). A key part of Solomon's argument, since his 1973 manifesto "Emotions and Choice" (reproduced in Not Passion's Slave), has been that if emotions are judgements, then they are things that we choose - perhaps in order to manipulate others and for which we can be held responsible. However, as Jerome Neu notes, in a perceptive essay, "Emotions and Freedom" in Thinking about Feeling, it is not clear that judgements, any more than feelings, are generally things that we choose. Many of our judgements, emotional or otherwise, are no more the product of rational deliberation than are such things as the colour of our hair, the career we follow, or the place we live. A second problem with the idea that we are responsible for our emotions is that, at the more primitive end of the spectrum, emotions are physical reactions that seem virtually impossible to control. If I am to be held responsible for my emotions, am I also to be held to account for other physiological reactions, from shivers, sneezes and allergies to mental illnesses? The difficulties philosophers have encountered in trying to decide whether or not emotions are cognitive, or rational, or voluntary, lends support to the view that emotions do not constitute a natural kind and so cannot be the subjects of plausible generalizations. Several of the key problems discussed above do seem to be mitigated once it is admitted that "emotions" is an unhelpfully broad category. Some emotions are as automatic and involuntary as animal instincts, others are indicative of our deepest and most complex cognitive states, others are knowing and manipulative strategies. As Griffiths's essay in Philosophy and the Emotions nicely summarizes it, there are basic emotions, complex emotions and Machiavellian emotions. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty agrees that the category "emotion" does not cut mental nature at its joints. Examining the histories of philosophy and psychology reveals that nobody thought that it did until the nineteenth century. The Stoics, for instance, distinguished between three things: physical "first movements", the passions proper, and more refined feelings, which they classed as eupatheiai rather than pathe. Medieval and Enlightenment moralists differentiated between lower appetites and passions on the one hand, and more cognitive affections and moral sentiments on the other. In recent years, Griffiths has led the way in arguing, on the basis of neuroscientific studies, that "emotions" should be broken down into at least two different subcategories: primitive, hard-wired "affect programs"; and complex, cognitively elaborate states, mediated through relatively recently evolved structures in the neocortex. Contemporary neuroscience, then, has rediscovered something that philosophers already knew (until recently): that a distinction needs to be made between primitive passions and more complex affections, between pathe and eupatheiai. Although Nussbaum is alone in going so far as to identify herself as a "neo-Stoic", these three volumes taken together constitute something bordering on a revival of Stoicism. The Stoics' idea that passions and emotions are (or are somehow constituted by) thoughts or judgements is now widely and sympathetically discussed. Their idea that the passions are not to be trusted has generally received a less sympathetic hearing in recent decades. As Goldie notes, in his contribution to Thinking about Feeling, recent cognitivists have tended to see emotions as a Good Thing. There are signs, however, in Goldie's essay and in several other contributions to these three books, that this is changing. Philosophers are once more learning to recognize, as the Stoics did, the ways in which passions can be cognitive and moral mistakes. As philosophers continue to move away from an over-general celebration of the emotions, to differentiate between primitive passions and cognitive sentiments, and to illuminate the ways in which each can be implicated in failures as well as successes of reason and virtue, they will no doubt continue to find the history of their own discipline to be as valuable a resource as contemporary neuroscience. From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 11 20:43:24 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 16:43:24 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] Human Events: Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries Message-ID: Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?print=yes&id=7591 5.5.31 [Absent from this list are books promoting racial equality, such as Franz Boaz, The Mind of Primitive Man, Ashley Montagu, Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, and Gunnar Myrdall, The American Dilemma. Conservatives now are committed racial egalitarians. Some of these books would have been included thirty years ago. [Also absent are any books of Biblical "higher criticism" that attacked the historical basis of Christianity. Perhaps the presence of so many non-Christians on the panel had something to do with this lack of concern. [Placing Mein Kampff as no. 2 is odd, as the book hardly changed anyone's mind and very few of the 10^7 copies were actually read, even though it required as a gift to wedding couples in Germany during the National Socialist period. The basic message of the book is that democracy had failed and that Germany should get the territories back that were taken from it by the victors after the Great War. Toward the end, Hitler went on to add restoration of territory held by the Germans back in the days of the Teutonic Knights. I read the whole dreary thing, as mercifully cut down in half by Rudolf Hess. Jews took up surprisingly few pages in the book. The book itself was not among the top ten in being harmful. [It is appalling that Darwin's two greatest books got dishonorable mentions. So also with Nietzsche on the full list and Foucault in the supplement. Conservatives simply do not understand these two and are scarcly better with Dewey. [On the other hand, I'm glad that Mead, Adorno, and Freud made it. I'd have put Freud on the main list, nearly forgotten as he is today. [Why not put Einstein, as espouser of relativism, on the list? Paul Johnson opened Modern Times by citing the verification of general relativity theory in predicting Mercury's deviation from the Newtonian orbit in 1915. [I've actually read the Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampff, Kinsey, Friedan, and Nietzsche, in the main list, and Skinner, The Origin of Species, and Reich in the supplement.] HUMAN EVENTS asked a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders to help us compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Each panelist nominated a number of titles and then voted on a ballot including all books nominated. A title received a score of 10 points for being listed No. 1 by one of our panelists, 9 points for being listed No. 2, etc. Appropriately, The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, earned the highest aggregate score and the No. 1 listing. 1. The Communist Manifesto Authors: Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels Publication date: 1848 Score: 74 Summary: Marx and Engels, born in Germany in 1818 and 1820, respectively, were the intellectual godfathers of communism. Engels was the original limousine leftist: A wealthy textile heir, he financed Marx for much of his life. In 1848, the two co-authored [1]The Communist Manifesto as a platform for a group they belonged to called the Communist League. The Manifesto envisions history as a class struggle between oppressed workers and oppressive owners, calling for a workers' revolution so property, family and nation-states can be abolished and a proletarian Utopia established. The Evil Empire of the Soviet Union put the Manifesto into practice. _________________________________________________________________ 2. Mein Kampf Author: Adolf Hitler Publication date: 1925-26 Score: 41 Summary: [2]Mein Kampf (My Struggle) was initially published in two parts in 1925 and 1926 after Hitler was imprisoned for leading Nazi Brown Shirts in the so-called "Beer Hall Putsch" that tried to overthrow the Bavarian government. Here Hitler explained his racist, anti-Semitic vision for Germany, laying out a Nazi program pointing directly to World War II and the Holocaust. He envisioned the mass murder of Jews, and a war against France to precede a war against Russia to carve out "lebensraum" ("living room") for Germans in Eastern Europe. The book was originally ignored. But not after Hitler rose to power. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, there were 10 million copies in circulation by 1945. _________________________________________________________________ 3. Quotations from Chairman Mao Author: Mao Zedong Publication date: 1966 Score: 38 Summary: Mao, who died in 1976, was the leader of the Red Army in the fight for control of China against the anti-Communist forces of Chiang Kai-shek before, during and after World War II. Victorious, in 1949, he founded the People's Republic of China, enslaving the world's most populous nation in communism. In 1966, he published [3]Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, otherwise known as The Little Red Book, as a tool in the "Cultural Revolution" he launched to push the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese society back in his ideological direction. Aided by compulsory distribution in China, billions were printed. Western leftists were enamored with its Marxist anti-Americanism. "It is the task of the people of the whole world to put an end to the aggression and oppression perpetrated by imperialism, and chiefly by U.S. imperialism," wrote Mao. _________________________________________________________________ 4. The Kinsey Report Author: Alfred Kinsey Publication date: 1948 Score: 37 Summary: Alfred Kinsey was a zoologist at Indiana University who, in 1948, published a study called [4]Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, commonly known as [5]The Kinsey Report. Five years later, he published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. The reports were designed to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy. "Kinsey's initial report, released in 1948 . . . stunned the nation by saying that American men were so sexually wild that 95% of them could be accused of some kind of sexual offense under 1940s laws," the Washington Times reported last year when a movie on Kinsey was released. "The report included reports of sexual activity by boys--even babies--and said that 37% of adult males had had at least one homosexual experience. . . . The 1953 book also included reports of sexual activity involving girls younger than age 4, and suggested that sex between adults and children could be beneficial." _________________________________________________________________ 5. Democracy and Education Author: John Dewey Publication date: 1916 Score: 36 Summary: John Dewey, who lived from 1859 until 1952, was a "progressive" philosopher and leading advocate for secular humanism in American life, who taught at the University of Chicago and at Columbia. He signed the Humanist Manifesto and rejected traditional religion and moral absolutes. In [6]Democracy and Education, in pompous and opaque prose, he disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking "skills" instead. His views had great influence on the direction of American education--particularly in public schools--and helped nurture the Clinton generation. _________________________________________________________________ 6. Das Kapital Author: Karl Marx Publication date: 1867-1894 Score: 31 Summary: Marx died after publishing a first volume of this massive book, after which his benefactor Engels edited and published two additional volumes that Marx had drafted. [7]Das Kapital forces the round peg of capitalism into the square hole of Marx's materialistic theory of history, portraying capitalism as an ugly phase in the development of human society in which capitalists inevitably and amorally exploit labor by paying the cheapest possible wages to earn the greatest possible profits. Marx theorized that the inevitable eventual outcome would be global proletarian revolution. He could not have predicted 21st Century America: a free, affluent society based on capitalism and representative government that people the world over envy and seek to emulate. _________________________________________________________________ 7. The Feminine Mystique Author: Betty Friedan Publication date: 1963 Score: 30 Summary: In [8]The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, born in 1921, disparaged traditional stay-at-home motherhood as life in "a comfortable concentration camp"--a role that degraded women and denied them true fulfillment in life. She later became founding president of the National Organization for Women. Her original vocation, tellingly, was not stay-at-home motherhood but left-wing journalism. As David Horowitz wrote in a review for Salon.com of Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique by Daniel Horowitz (no relation to David): The author documents that "Friedan was from her college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist, the political intimate of the leaders of America's Cold War fifth column and for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects in Berkeley's radiation lab with J. Robert Oppenheimer." _________________________________________________________________ 8. The Course of Positive Philosophy Author: Auguste Comte Publication date: 1830-1842 Score: 28 Summary: Comte, the product of a royalist Catholic family that survived the French Revolution, turned his back on his political and cultural heritage, announcing as a teenager, "I have naturally ceased to believe in God." Later, in the six volumes of [9]The Course of Positive Philosophy, he coined the term "sociology." He did so while theorizing that the human mind had developed beyond "theology" (a belief that there is a God who governs the universe), through "metaphysics" (in this case defined as the French revolutionaries' reliance on abstract assertions of "rights" without a God), to "positivism," in which man alone, through scientific observation, could determine the way things ought to be. _________________________________________________________________ 9. Beyond Good and Evil Author: Freidrich Nietzsche Publication date: 1886 Score: 28 Summary: An oft-scribbled bit of college-campus graffiti says: "`God is dead'--Nietzsche" followed by "`Nietzsche is dead'--God." Nietzsche's profession that "God is dead" appeared in his 1882 book, The Gay Science, but under-girded the basic theme of [10]Beyond Good and Evil, which was published four years later. Here Nietzsche argued that men are driven by an amoral "Will to Power," and that superior men will sweep aside religiously inspired moral rules, which he deemed as artificial as any other moral rules, to craft whatever rules would help them dominate the world around them. "Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation," he wrote. The Nazis loved Nietzsche. _________________________________________________________________ 10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money Author: John Maynard Keynes Publication date: 1936 Score: 23 Summary: Keynes was a member of the British elite--educated at Eton and Cambridge--who as a liberal Cambridge economics professor wrote [11]General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in the midst of the Great Depression. The book is a recipe for ever-expanding government. When the business cycle threatens a contraction of industry, and thus of jobs, he argued, the government should run up deficits, borrowing and spending money to spur economic activity. FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt. _________________________________________________________________ Honorable Mention These books won votes from two or more judges: The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich Score: 22 What Is To Be Done by V.I. Lenin Score: 20 Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno Score: 19 On Liberty by John Stuart Mill Score: 18 Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner Score: 18 Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorel Score: 18 The Promise of American Life by Herbert Croly Score: 17 Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin Score: 17 Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault Score: 12 Soviet Communism: A New Civilization by Sidney and Beatrice Webb Score: 12 Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead Score: 11 Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader Score: 11 Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir Score: 10 Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci Score: 10 Silent Spring by Rachel Carson Score: 9 Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon Score: 9 Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud Score: 9 The Greening of America by Charles Reich Score: 9 The Limits to Growth by Club of Rome Score: 4 Descent of Man by Charles Darwin Score: 2 _________________________________________________________________ The Judges These 15 scholars and public policy leaders served as judges in selecting the Ten Most Harmful Books. Arnold Beichman Research Fellow Hoover Institution Prof. Brad Birzer Hillsdale College Harry Crocker Vice President & Executive Editor Regnery Publishing, Inc. Prof. Marshall DeRosa Florida Atlantic University Dr. Don Devine Second Vice Chairman American Conservative Union Prof. Robert George Princeton University Prof. Paul Gottfried Elizabethtown College Prof. William Anthony Hay Mississippi State University Herb London President Hudson Institute Prof. Mark Malvasi Randolph-Macon College Douglas Minson Associate Rector The Witherspoon Fellowships Prof. Mark Molesky Seton Hall University Prof. Stephen Presser Northwestern University Phyllis Schlafly President Eagle Forum Fred Smith President Competitive Enterprise Institute References 1. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&camp=1789&tag=humaneventson-20&creative=9325&path=tg/detail/-/0451527100/qid=1117547503/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1?v=glance%26s=books 2. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&camp=1789&tag=humaneventson-20&creative=9325&path=tg/detail/-/1410102033/qid=1117547652/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2?v=glance%26s=books 3. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&camp=1789&tag=humaneventson-20&creative=9325&path=tg/detail/-/B0007AFWEW/qid=1117547854/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1?v=glance%26s=books 4. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&camp=1789&tag=humaneventson-20&creative=9325&path=tg/detail/-/0253334128/qid=1117547966/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2?v=glance%26s=books 5. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&camp=1789&tag=humaneventson-20&creative=9325&path=tg/detail/-/0253334128/qid=1117547966/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2?v=glance%26s=books 6. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&camp=1789&tag=humaneventson-20&creative=9325&path=tg/detail/-/0684836319/qid=1117548361/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1?v=glance%26s=books 7. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&camp=1789&tag=humaneventson-20&creative=9325&path=tg/detail/-/089526711X/qid=1117548592/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1?v=glance%26s=books 8. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&camp=1789&tag=humaneventson-20&creative=9325&path=tg/detail/-/0393322572/qid=1117548774/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1?v=glance%26s=books 9. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&camp=1789&tag=humaneventson-20&creative=9325&path=tg/detail/-/0404082092/qid=1117549502/sr=1-7/ref=sr_1_7?v=glance%26s=books 10. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&camp=1789&tag=humaneventson-20&creative=9325&path=tg/detail/-/0679724656/qid=1117549960/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1?v=glance%26s=books 11. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&camp=1789&tag=humaneventson-20&creative=9325&path=tg/detail/-/1573921394/qid=1117550218/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1?v=glance%26s=books From checker at panix.com Sat Jun 11 20:43:35 2005 From: checker at panix.com (Premise Checker) Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 16:43:35 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Paleopsych] NR's List of the 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the Century Message-ID: NR's List of the 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the Century http://www.bigeye.com/100books.htm [Another strange list. It's far from clear what the panel means by "best"! I've actually read about a quarter of them. [3 means I read it over thirty years ago, when I first started reading free market economics books and wandered into the writings of conservatives. [c means books I read at the urging of Christian friends. If there is a Hell, I may be going there, for none of these books caused me to repent my sins. [s means some. No one reads the entire 11th edition, which is now online. I got a copy around 1972. And hardly anyone goes through all of Max Weber's Economy and Society. [x means I read it once, within the last 30 years, and x2 means I read it once a long time ago and reread it more recently. Earlier this year, Random House announced that it would release a list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the century. The publisher had enjoyed success (and controversy) with its 100 best novels; now it would do this. Here at National Review, we decided to get a jump on them by forming our own panel and offering our own list. Under the leadership of our reporter John J. Miller, we have done so. We have used a methodology that approaches the scientific. But-certainly beyond, say, the first 40 books-the fact of the books' presence on the list is far more important than their rankings. We offer a comment from a panelist after many of the books; but the panel overall, not the individual quoted, is responsible for the ranking. So, here is our list, for your enjoyment, mortification, and stimulation. THE PANEL: Richard Brookhiser, NR senior editor David Brooks, senior editor of The Weekly Standard Christopher Caldwell, senior writer at The Weekly Standard Robert Conquest, historian David Gelernter, writer and computer scientist George Gilder, writer Mary Ann Glendon, professor at Harvard Law School Jeffrey Hart, NR senior editor Mark Helprin, novelist Arthur Herman, author of The Idea of Decline in Western History John Keegan, military historian Michael Kelly, editor of National Journal Florence King, author of Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady Michael Lind, journalist and novelist John Lukacs, historian Adam Meyerson, vice president at the Heritage Foundation Richard John Neuhaus, editor-in-chief of First Things John O'Sullivan, NR editor-at-large Richard Pipes, historian Abigail Thernstrom, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute Stephan Thernstrom, historian James Q. Wilson, author of The Moral Sense. ______________________________________________________________ If you would like to purchase one of these classic books, simply click on the title and you'll be taken to Amazon.com. ______________________________________________________________ THE LIST: 1. The Second World War, Winston S. Churchill Brookhiser: "The big story of the century, told by its major hero." Vol. 1, The Gathering Storm Vol. 2, Their Finest Hour Vol. 3, The Grand Alliance Vol. 4, The Hinge of Fate Vol. 5, Closing the Ring Vol. 6, Triumph and Tragedy 2. The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn Neuhaus: "Marked the absolute final turning point beyond which nobody could deny the evil of the Evil Empire." 3. Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell Herman: "Orwell's masterpiece-far superior to Animal Farm and 1984. No education in the meaning of the 20th century is complete without it." x2 4. The Road to Serfdom, F. A. von Hayek Helprin: "Shatters the myth that the totalitarianisms 'of the Left' and 'of the Right' stem from differing impulses." 5. Collected Essays, George Orwell King: "Every conservative's favorite liberal and every liberal's favorite conservative. This book has no enemies." 6. The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper Herman: "The best work on political philosophy in the 20th century. Exposes totalitarianism's roots in Plato, Hegel, and Marx." c 7. The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis Brookhiser: "How modern philosophies drain meaning and the sacred from our lives." x2 8. Revolt of the Masses, Jos? Ortega y Gasset Gilder: "Prophesied the 20th century's debauchery of democracy and science, the barbarism of the specialist, and the inevitable fatuity of public opinion. Explained the genius of capitalist elites." 3 9. The Constitution of Liberty, F. A. von Hayek O'Sullivan: "A great re-statement for this century of classical liberalism by its greatest modern exponent." 3 10. Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman x 11. Modern Times, Paul Johnson Herman: "Huge impact outside the academy, dreaded and ignored inside it." 12. Rationalism in Politics, Michael Oakeshott Herman: "Oakeshott is the 20th century's Edmund Burke." x 13. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Joseph A. Schumpeter Caldwell: "Locus classicus for the observation that democratic capitalism undermines itself through its very success." s 14. Economy and Society, Max Weber Lind: "Weber made permanent contributions to the understanding of society with his discussions of comparative religion, bureaucracy, charisma, and the distinctions among status, class, and party." 15. The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt Caldwell: "Through Nazism and Stalinism, looks at almost every pernicious trend in the last century's politics with stunning subtlety." 16. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West Kelly: "For its writing, not for its historical accuracy." s 17. Sociobiology, Edward O. Wilson Lind: "Darwin put humanity in its proper place in the animal kingdom. Wilson put human society there, too." 18. Centissimus Annus, Pope John Paul II 19. The Pursuit of the Millennium, Norman Cohn Neuhaus: "The authoritative refutation of utopianism of the left, right, and points undetermined." 3 20. The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank Helprin: "An innocent's account of the greatest evil imaginable. The most powerful book of the century. Others may not agree. No matter, I cast my lot with this child." Caldwell: "If one didn't know her fate, one might read it as the reflections of any girl. That one does know her fate makes this as close to a holy book as the century produced." 21. The Great Terror, Robert Conquest Herman: "Documented for the first time the real record of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. A genuine monument of historical research and reconstruction, a true epic of evil." 22. Chronicles of Wasted Time, Malcolm Muggeridge Gilder: "The best autobiography, Christian confession, and historic meditation of the century." 23. Relativity, Albert Einstein Lind: "The most important physicist since Newton." 24. Witness, Whittaker Chambers Caldwell: "Confession, history, potboiler-by a man who writes like the literary giant we would know him as, had not Communism got him first." 25. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn c 26. Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis Neuhaus: "The most influential book of the most influential Christian apologist of the century." x 27. The Quest for Community, Robert Nisbet s 28. Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed. Helprin: "The infinite riches of the world, presented with elegance, confidence, and economy." 29. Up in the Old Hotel, Joseph Mitchell 30. The Everlasting Man, G. K. Chesterton Lukacs: "A great carillonade of Christian verities." c 31. Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton O'Sullivan: "How to look at the Christian tradition with fresh eyes." 32. The Liberal Imagination, Lionel Trilling Hart: "The popular form of liberalism tends to simplify and caricature when it attempts moral aspiration-that is, it tends to 'Stalinism.'" 33. The Double Helix, James D. Watson Herman: "Deeply hated by feminists because Watson dares to suggest that the male-female distinction originated in nature, in the DNA code itself." 34. The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Richard Phillips Feynman Gelernter: "Outside of art (or maybe not), physics is mankind's most beautiful achievement; these three volumes are probably the most beautiful ever written about physics." 3 35. Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, Tom Wolfe O'Sullivan: "Wolfe is our Juvenal." 36. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Albert Camus 3 37. The Unheavenly City, Edward C. Banfield Neuhaus: "The volume that began the debunking of New Deal socialism and its public-policy consequences." 3 38. The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud 3 39. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs x 40. The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama 41. Joy of Cooking, Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, and Ethan Becker 42. The Age of Reform, Richard Hofstadter Herman: "The single best book on American history in this century, bar none." 43. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes Hart: "Influential in suggesting that the business cycle can be modified by government investment and manipulation of tax rates." 3 44. God & Man at Yale, William F. Buckley Jr. Gilder: "Still correct and prophetic. It defines the conservative revolt against socialism and atheism on campus and in the culture, and reconciles the alleged conflict between capitalist and religious conservatives." 45. Selected Essays, T. S. Eliot Hart: "Shaped the literary taste of the mid-century." 3 46. Ideas Have Consequences, Richard M. Weaver 3 47. The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs x 48. The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom 49. Ethnic America, Thomas Sowell 50. An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal An American Dilemma, Vol. 1 An American Dilemma, Vol. 2 51. Three Case Histories, Sigmund Freud Gelernter: "Beyond question Freud is history's most important philosopher of the mind, and he ranks alongside Eliot as the century's greatest literary critic. Modern intellectual life (left, right, and in-between) would be unthinkable without him." 52. The Struggle for Europe, Chester Wilmot 53. Main Currents in American Thought, Vernon Louis Parrington King: "An immensely readable history of ideas and men. (Skip the fragmentary third volume-he died before finishing it.)" x 54. The Waning of the Middle Ages, Johann Huzinga Lukacs: "Probably the finest historian who lived in this century. " 55. Systematic Theology, Wolfhart Pannenberg Neuhaus: "The best summary and reflection on Christianity's encounter with the Enlightenment project." Systematic Theology, Vol. 1 Systematic Theology, Vol. 2 Systematic Theology, Vol. 3 56. The Campaign of the Marne, Sewell Tyng Keegan: "A forgotten American's masterly account of the First World War in the West." 3 57. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein Hart: "A terse summation of the analytic method of the analytic school in philosophy, and a heroic leap beyond it." 58. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Bernard Lonergan Glendon: "The Thomas Aquinas of the 20th century." 59. Being and Time, Martin Heidegger Hart: "A seminal thinker, notwithstanding his disgraceful error of equating National Socialism with the experience of 'Being.'" 60. Disraeli, Robert Blake Keegan: "Political biography as it should be written." 61. Democracy and Leadership, Irving Babbitt King: "A conservative literary critic describes what happens when humanitarianism over takes humanism." 3 62. The Elements of Style, William Strunk & E. B. White A. Thernstrom: "If only every writer would remember just one of Strunk & White's wonderful injunctions: 'Omit needless words.' Omit needless words." 63. The Machiavellians, James Burnham O'Sullivan: "Burnham is the greatest political analyst of our century and this is his best book." 64. Reflections of a Russian Statesman, Konstantin P. Pobedonostsev King: "The 'culture war' as seen by the tutor to the last two czars. A Russian Pat Buchanan." 65. The Hedgehog and the Fox, Isaiah Berlin 66. Roll, Jordan, Roll, Eugene D. Genovese Neuhaus: "The best account of American slavery and the moral and cultural forces that undid it." 67. The ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound Brookhiser: "An epitome of the aging aesthetic movement that will be forever known as modernism." 68. The Second World War, John Keegan Hart: "A masterly history in a single volume." 69. The Making of Homeric Verse, Milman Parry Lind: "Genuine discoveries in literary study are rare. Parry's discovery of the oral formulaic basis of the Homeric epics, the founding texts of Western literature, was one of them." 70. The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling, Angus Wilson Keegan: "A life of a great author told through the transmutation of his experience into fictional form." 71. Scrutiny, F. R. Leavis Hart: "Enormously important in education, especially in England. Leavis understood what one kind of 'living English' is." 72. The Edge of the Sword, Charles de Gaulle Brookhiser: "A lesser figure than Churchill, but more philosophical (and hence, more problematic)." 73. R. E. Lee, Douglas Southall Freeman Conquest: "The finest work on the Civil War." 3 74. Bureaucracy, Ludwig von Mises 75. The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton Neuhaus: "A classic conversion story of a modern urban sophisticate." 76. Balzac, Stefan Zweig King: "On the joys of working one's self to death. The chapter 'Black Coffee' is a masterpiece of imaginative reconstruction." 77. The Good Society, Walter Lippmann Gilder: "Written during the Great Depression. A corruscating defense of the morality of capitalism." 78. Silent Spring, Rachel Carson Lind: "For all the excesses of the environmental movement, the realization that human technology can permanently damage the earth's environment marked a great advance in civilization. Carson's book, more than any other, publicized this message." 79. The Christian Tradition, Jaroslav Pelikan Neuhaus: "The century's most comprehensive account of Christian teaching from the second century on." 80. Strange Defeat, Marc Bloch Herman: "A great historian's personal account of the fall of France in 1940." 81. Looking Back, Norman Douglas Conquest: "Fascinating memoirs of a remarkable writer." 82. Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, Henry Adams 83. Poetry and the Age, Randall Jarrell Caldwell: "The book for showing how 20th- century poets think, what their poetry does, and why it matters." 84. Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont